I used to like you until.., p.1
I Used to Like You Until..., page 1
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To my dad, who taught me to think for myself, and my husband, who accepts the market risk of me doing so
“…hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn’t have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”
—JOHN UPDIKE, RABBIT RUN
Introduction
As the meet and greet started wrapping up at the Montgomery, Alabama, stop on my tour, I found myself overwhelmed with guilt. One person toward the end of the line was so out of place, I just knew that she didn’t want to be there.
Why was I so sure? Because she was young, covered in tattoos—including on her neck—and, quite clearly, a lesbian. Her family, all of whom were much older, had definitely forced her to come, probably because they needed a ride or something, and I felt a strong urge to shout out: “Hey, sorry I exist because if I didn’t, then you wouldn’t have to be here right now.”
Her family started asking me lots of questions about Gutfeld!, the Fox News show I co-host every day, while she, as I’d expected, hung far, far back. Once her family walked away, however, she did something that I didn’t expect: come up to get a photo with me and tell me she had a question of her own.
“Sure, what is it!” I said, smiling on the outside but internally preparing myself for her to ask me what it felt like to be ruining the country.
“You’ve dated a girl before, right?”
I was stunned. I had been so, so wrong. Well, except about the lesbian part, but you get what I mean.
Not only that this person was there on purpose because she liked me, but also because, you know, yeah, I have dated a girl, and apparently, she somehow knew that, or at least strongly suspected it, because if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have asked me that. She especially wouldn’t have waited until the very, very end, making sure no one was listening but her, if she thought I wouldn’t answer the way that I did. Which was, “Yeah,” and then some muttering about how almost everyone in my life knew that, but there was nothing about it on the internet, because I always worried that if I were to talk about it publicly, then The Public might turn it into a bigger deal than it was to me, which is that it’s no bigger deal than the fact that I’ve dated men.
She also offered me her number. Although I declined, I didn’t mind that she’d offered. A woman flirting just doesn’t feel as uncomfortable or offensive or alarming as it does when it’s coming from a man. It might not be fair, but there’s plenty of unfairness regarding the sexes that tilts in men’s favor, stuff like them generally being able to physically overpower most women. Which I am sure is, like, a total coincidence in terms of their advances feeling less comfortable.
Anyway! I am sorry, Montgomery Lesbian in the Red-and-White Air Jordans, that I doubted you… but you taught me something about myself. I had just been up onstage preaching about how messed up it is that so many people will notice a single thing about a person and then assume that it tells you everything that you need to know about that person. It’s the thesis of this book, which I’d already been writing, and yet, I’d still gone and done it myself. I thought that her being a neck-tatted lesbian meant she didn’t want to be here in this room full of old white straights, and was so certain that I’d actually wasted mental energy feeling embarrassed to be in front of her.
Unfortunately, the impulse to allow a single facet of a person to form your overall opinion of them can lead to far worse outcomes than unnecessary embarrassment. All too often, we will let a single difference in viewpoint or association be enough to write off another person entirely, even if we know nothing else about them.
A lot of people have used some variation of the phrase “I used to like you until…” on me throughout my life: “I used to like you until you told me how you voted” or “I used to like you until you told that joke” or “I used to like you until you got food coloring all over our apartment from Popsicles that were mine in the first place. I know you apologized, but you posted a YouTube video you made dancing around with them called ‘It’s Popsicle time, bitch!’ just minutes later, which made the apology mean a lot less.” (Okay, that last one might have been fair. Sorry, Emilia. I really am.)
There are, of course, many legitimate reasons to write people off. What is never a good reason, though, is on behalf of a partisan-political-power scheme that cares nothing for you, other than as a pawn for its own ends. This scheme has, unfortunately, been increasingly successful—blinded by outrage, we’re missing the reality that it’s rarely if ever as simple as one team versus another. Issues are often nuanced and complex, and people always are.
By the end of this book, you’ll be reminded of this reality, and also see how, the more divided and tribal and polarized we become, the more we’ll lose. We miss out on opportunities to connect, or even collaborate, all while people in power over us turn us against each other for their own gain.
I begin this book by calling myself out not because it’s fun, but because it’s important. Throughout this book, in fact, you’ll see me be far more vulnerable than an admission that I misjudged a stranger—which is terrifying, but will hopefully show you how vulnerability might be a huge help getting us out of this mess.
LFG.
1 I Work in Pornography
In the past, I’ve told random people at parties (you know, the kind of people you’ll literally never see again, but are stuck talking to for three to seven minutes until you can think of some reason you have to go) that I work in porn instead of telling them I work at Fox News… because it’s less controversial.
I’ve shared this trick several times, including with New York Times reporters who were doing a piece on Gutfeld! And do you know what they did? They wrote: “Ms. Timpf—a libertarian commentator who tells friends in New York that she does pornography because, she said, it is ‘far less controversial’ than naming her employer,” which made me sound psychotic and didn’t even make sense logistically. I have friends who think I fuck on camera for a living? How would that even work? They come to my birthday parties and are like, “Headed to that porn girl’s birthday!” and I’ve managed to keep this ruse up despite being on literal (non-fuck-related) television for a decade?
Other times, I simply say I work “in television” and follow it up immediately with a question about their job, or I just say I’m “a writer.” One of my favorite answers to the “What do you do for work?” question is a simple “No thank you!,” which usually weirds people out enough to move on to something else.
Dropping the Fox News bomb at a party changes the vibe of the entire thing. People will look around, like, Who let her in? She’s complicit in hatred! And then pull out their child-labor-built phones to text shit about me to each other. Sometimes someone will say something like: “How can you handle working at a place that’s devoid of compassion for the marginalized?” Like, bro, don’t you work at a bank? (Oddly enough, the announcement of bank employment never leads to “How can you handle working at a place that takes away people’s homes?” questions!)
Once I bring up my employment at Fox News, the interaction ceases to be a conversation and instead becomes some kind of weird hybrid between a job interview and a police interrogation, except I’m not constitutionally entitled to a lawyer.
But when I say I work in porn, I’m met with, “Oh, really? That’s cool!” Because they don’t want to seem judgmental.
As for me, I’m also not judgmental about porn careers. In fact, a whole career in porn is objectively impressive statistically speaking; most can’t make an entire career out of it. According to a CNBC interview with Steven Hirsch, owner of Vivid Entertainment, the average female porn actress makes only between $800 and $1,000 per sex scene, and someone with “bad representation” might make as little as $300. Although I’ve never worked in porn, or any kind of sex-related industry, I don’t consider it, OnlyFans, or even boots-on-the-ground sex work to be anything other than another person’s decision to make, which, of course, is none of my business. I don’t even find it scandalizing. Politically, I think it should be decriminalized, because rightfully, in a free society, you own your own body and the government does not. Of course, it’s also not something I’ve been able to bring myself to do, Fox News employee notwithstanding, especially as my dad is still alive. I’ve put the poor guy through enough already. For example, most dads wouldn’t have to know that their son-in-law had sex with their daughter while she had an ileostomy, let alone sit next to him while she talks about it onstage during her live show. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable with a video of me having sex living online forever, but I also don’t see my lack of comfort with it as a moral high ground. It’s just a personal preference that actually comes with a pretty big downside: not making as much money as I would make if I did leave my current life behind to start an OnlyFans instead. Sure, the average creator on that platform may make between only $150 and $180 per month, but I am (unfortunately) the star of enough perverted, pornographic deep-fake photos and videos to make it disgustingly clear that there ab
Anyway! I know what the Public Perception of Fox News is by many of the people who have never walked through the doors of 1211 Avenue of the Americas: It’s the channel For Old White Men by Old White Men, a haven of heartless Republican lunatics. I also know, as someone who has worked there for nearly ten years now, just how much that perception differs from the reality of my own experience. Fox News isn’t a monolith. Sure, the prime-time lineup is stacked with hard-core conservatives like Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Laura Ingraham. The host of the show I co-host, Greg Gutfeld—although definitely outside of the typical conservative mold as a pro-legalization agnostic with perhaps the most homoerotic sense of humor I’ve ever encountered—is conservative. But Fox also employs talking heads who are Democrats, like Jessica Tarlov and Harold Ford Jr. It employs meteorologists, makeup artists, camera operators, floor directors, and many others, all of various political persuasions. It employs apolitical anchors, unafraid to ask the tough questions relating to Donald Trump and his administration, like Neil Cavuto and Bret Baier. It employs straight-news reporters like Trey Yingst, whom I’ve seen countless times calmly reporting from the Middle East as rocket fire rages above him.
Back to Gutfeld for a second: Unlike me, or the people I just mentioned, Gutfeld is a Trump guy. We disagree, including on his show, about several issues, such as stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing (he’s pro; I’m anti). And guess what else? We’re close friends! Throughout my time at Fox, I’ve also gotten close with Dana Perino, turning to her for advice regarding both my personal and professional life, although there are certainly areas (Edward Snowden, to name one!) where we’ve strongly disagreed politically.
There are lots of ideologically different friendships at Fox. Democrat Jessica Tarlov is a friend not only of mine but also of Greg’s. The three of us have gotten dinner together after work. We’ve hung out at his apartment. We’ve celebrated his birthday. (Notice that I said “his” and not “ours.” Despite my near decade of close friendship with Gutfeld, the guy has never made it to a single one of my parties.)
The liberals who somehow see my position on Fox News as a tacit endorsement of every single statement that’s ever been uttered on the channel—as if that would be possible, given the fact that there is debate on our air—don’t get it, and the conservative viewers who comment trash about Tarlov with Greg and me tagged in it, as if we would agree with calls for her firing because we disagree on economic policy, don’t get it either.
By the way: When it comes to Trump himself, I’m low-key proud of my ability to thoughtfully consider news related to him on a per-issue basis. I have a set of core principles, and my view of any situation depends on those principles instead of a predetermined allegiance. The partisan lens is so powerful, people from opposing groups can look at the exact same subject and see something completely different. Like Trump’s mug shot! A Trump supporter would say it’s evidence that we’ve become a banana republic, and that Trump’s arrest threatens the very existence of our nation. But a Democrat looking at the same photo would say it proves that Trump himself threatens our nation’s existence, and that democracy will not survive if he regains power.
A tender balance, I’m aware, not everyone is capable of. But Ice Cube was! In October 2020, he announced he’d been working with Trump to help create a plan that would create jobs for black Americans, which both sides interpreted as “Ice Cube Goes MAGA,” pissing off the Left and elating the Right. This, even though Ice Cube had posted on then-Twitter, now-X in August 2016 that he would “never endorse a mothafucka like Donald Trump! EVER!!!” and released a song in 2018 called “Arrest the President.” Ice Cube was clear in his reasoning for the collaboration, saying he saw it as “a totally bipartisan issue that the country wants to solve.” He later explained he’d been speaking with both campaigns, but that Trump’s was the only one that wanted to delve into the issue with him before the election. I’ve always been a fan of Ice Cube. “Once Upon a Time in the Projects” has been one of my favorite songs since childhood (damn, I really have always been a libertarian, haven’t I?), and I became an even bigger fan once he declared his defiance of blind partisan loyalty. Sure, he later said he would vote whichever side implemented his agenda, even if it were Trump, but made it clear that this was not because he was taking Trump’s side, but because “[e]very side is the Darkside for us here in America. They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie and they all cheat but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan.”
Ice Cube wasn’t declaring a new partisan alliance, he was rejecting the tyranny of partisan alliance, refusing to allow the demands of partisan purity to stop him from helping find solutions to a problem that he cared about.
Unfortunately, Trump was such a lightning rod that you had to unequivocally shun him—even if you thought working with him on something might make the world a better place—to avoid the Blue Team declaring you an irredeemable pariah.
Just as many on the Left will demand that you unequivocally shun Trump for them to consider you an acceptable human being, many on Team MAGA have demanded that you unequivocally support him. Believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end of just how not well some Trump supporters can take it when someone speaks anything but glowingly about him.
As frustrated as I’ve felt at times, I’ve also seen plenty of reasons for hope. Throughout my nearly forty-city tour of “You Can’t Joke About That LIVE,” I saw so many different places in the country, from Portland, Ore., to Jackson, Miss., meeting so many different people along the way. Since this was a show about humanity and connection as opposed to politics and division, I found that, as different as all of us were, we all had even more in common. Another thing I found? How shocked the theater staff was to see my performance, often turning wide-eyed to members of my team and exclaiming: “She works at Fox News?!”
It’s not that I don’t have anything in common with conservatives; that’s not the point! I’m a small-l libertarian, which means I’m a registered independent who uses the common noun “libertarian” to represent her political philosophy, which is that the government should be limited and questioned and individual rights respected. There are many misconceptions about what this means. For example: Contrary to what many people may think, believing that government power isn’t the best way to solve a problem does not equal not caring about the problem. Similarly, focusing on people as individuals doesn’t deny the importance of working together. Actually, it demands it! If each of us is a unique individual with unique strengths and weaknesses, then we will need to work together if we want to achieve the best outcomes. But I’ll get more into all that later.
In any case, Fox News is the place that’s given me a platform to share my own views as a nonpartisan thinker, including the importance of not hating people based on a differing political view or alliance. When I guest-hosted Gutfeld! in August 2023, I did a whole monologue about how we must remember that thinking a person’s view on a political issue is bad should not equal you thinking that the entire person is. I’ve talked about the dangers of blind partisan allegiance repeatedly, actually, including on an episode of Gutfeld! in March 2023, saying:
I’m way more interested in conversations at this point about the people versus the system than partisan conversations of Republican versus Democrat… I’m not a Republican or a Democrat; I never have been, but… it’s just become so clear to me that it’s more about party than principles, and the one thing that’s made that so clear to me lately is the views on the military. I’ve always been really antiwar; I’ve always been a huge critic of the military-industrial complex, I think the Department of Defense is more like the “Department of War Makes Money”… you can see how many times they’ve lied to us for… [ambition] and money reasons, but that’s something in the past that people on the Right would scream at me about…
