Working for Fox News comes with a lot of assumptions.
Just ask Kat Timpf. The whip-smart co-host of “Gutfeld!” and Fox News analyst is a one-woman wrecking ball when it comes to shattering those expectations. She’s not MAGA. (“Trump? My guy who I’ve never even voted for?”) Nor is she one of those Never Trumpers longing for a next-gen Bush-Cheney ticket. (“The Department of Defense — more like the ‘Department of War Makes Money.’”) And she can’t be labeled heterosexual. In fact, she opens her latest book, “I Used to Like You Until …: (How Binary Thinking Divides Us),” with a hilarious reveal about a budding romance with a woman that was thwarted by the woman’s mother. Plot twist: The mom wasn’t a Bible-thumping Evangelical Christian but “a very, very, very feminist gender studies professor” who was horrified that her daughter was holed up in the apartment of a popular Fox News on-air personality.
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“I don’t want to be graphic, but, umm, I wasn’t being anti-woman,” Timpf says wryly of what went down between the sheets.
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Still, on this hot late August afternoon, the pundit and comedian rolls her eyes when asked how her “coming out” (our words) as sexually fluid will play inside and outside the “We Report, You Decide” crowd.
“That seems dramatic to me,” she says with a laugh. “I actually cringe at the thought of there being like headlines about it. Everyone in my life is like, ‘Yeah, we know that. We remember when you were dating that girl, etc., etc.’ But I never talked about it publicly because I didn’t want the public to make a bigger deal out of it than it was to me.”
Timpf has two due dates looming. Her book — a follow-up to her 2023 New York Times best seller “You Can’t Joke About That” — publishes on Sept. 10. And she’s 17 weeks pregnant with her first child with husband Cameron Friscia. In the meantime, she wants to offer a sobering analysis of our siloed and dysfunctional society, a paradigm more heightened in an election year.
In the book, she delves into her pariah status. Take her (unnamed) rapper ex-boyfriend, who posted on Instagram a picture of her wearing his sweats in his hotel room and then quickly removed it, lest anyone associate him with a Fox News figure.
“It’s happened even when I try to book theaters for my [comedy] tour. Like ‘We don’t welcome a Fox person at this theater,’” she says. “It really doesn’t make sense to me. If you think I’m disgusting for who I am, then that’s one thing. But if it’s just because of where I work and whatever your preconceived notions are about where I work, which — what does that even mean? Fox is not an idea. It’s a platform on which to share ideas.”
Besides, the self-described libertarian has a lot of friends there. And at MSNBC too.
“Greg [Gutfeld] and I have been close for about a decade,” she says. “Actually I have a lot of friends, kind of all over the political spectrum. So I think it’s really sad that we live in this culture where it’s so common to just write off a person because of a single viewpoint or even an association, without getting to know the person and what else you could have in common.”
Perhaps because Timpf doesn’t fit neatly into the algorithm, she gets a lot of hate mail. She’s even found a use for it. “I Used to Like You Until…:” features a photo of a nude Timpf covered in hate letters.
“The idea is being willing to be vulnerable, even in the face of overwhelming hatred, because I think that is such a huge tool in terms of getting us out of this mess,” she says. “That’s why I say binary thinking is the enemy of critical thinking. Because once we have a side that we’ve chosen, then you don’t have to think — the thinking has already been done for you.”
As for those ride-or-die “sides” come November, Timpf says she’s on Team Neither. She isn’t casting a vote for Donald Trump. Nor will she pull the lever for Kamala Harris. She’ll vote third party.
“I just know that no matter who wins,” she adds, “the other side is going to blame me for the loss because I didn’t vote for either one.”
