Well, it looks like Katharine McPhee is a Republican—not all that shocking, considering how she, uhhhh, literally looks like a Republican. (I mean, we’re looking at the same photo, right?) But, still. A moment of silence for the Smash gays.
I first got wind of this disappointing, though not entirely surprising, possibility while scrolling through Twitter last night right before I went to bed. In a tweet I saw that I can’t seem to find again this morning, someone had posted what appear to be screenshots of a person named Katharine McPhee making two separate donations in 2020 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, a committee focused on electing Republican senators and maintaining the GOP’s majority in the Senate.
Thankfully, I was able to independently verify the information contained in that tweet on Sunday through the Federal Election Commission’s online database of individual contributions. According to FEC public records, a self-employed singer named Katharine McPhee who lives in Los Angeles donated a total of $500 to the NRSC earlier this year.
Fans of McPhee would probably be crushed to learn that she supports the more overtly and consistently racist, homophobic, misogynistic, imperialist, and transphobic of the United States’ two major political parties—particularly all of the gay fans that she has actively courted for years now on social media, calling them “my gay boys” and doing her best to stay fluent in the online gay parlance du jour, or at least hiring someone who is.
Of course, this all depends on whether the Katharine McPhee listed in the FEC’s database is the same Katharine McPhee who nearly won season five of American Idol and went on to star in the short-lived though much-beloved NBC musical series, Smash. I reached out to her publicist to confirm if she is. I have yet to hear back, but I’ll update the post if I do.
If this is the same McPhee, though, should we be all that surprised? She’s a wealthy white woman in America! Why wouldn’t she vote to protect her class interests? Put another way, why in the world would we ever assume she wouldn’t?
With that in mind, I guess it actually is somewhat surprising that Rob Reiner, who is, famously, a very wealthy white man, would speak out against the Republican Party’s ongoing power grab.
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body isn’t even cold, and Mitch McConnell is dancing on her grave,” the filmmaker tweeted on Saturday. “This is war. Dems have powerful weapons. Now is the time to use them.”
Kudos! Although I guess what would really be surprising is if he and every other rich celebrity pooled all their wealth to fund an anti-capitalist revolution that not only abolished their class position but destroyed the entire hierarchical system that makes a handful of individuals super wealthy while letting millions of people starve, which is bad. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, Rob Reiner! Surprise me!
In other news, Tina Knowles Lawson finally convinced her daughters, Beyoncé and Solange, to get in on corny joke time, a regular feature on her Instagram account in which she tells (you guessed it) a corny joke, Bossip reports. Former Destiny’s Child members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams even joined in! The jokes? They are extremely corny!!
If you think you can handle this much corn at once, go ahead and watch them all in rapid succession.
- Wendy Williams is back! Almost. The TV host is gonna start shooting new episodes of her daytime talk show this week—with a bunch of new pandemic-related protocol like virtual interviews, socially distant cooking tutorials, and regular temperature checks for staff, of course. [Page Six]
- Vanessa Bryant’s mom claims that her daughter kicked her out of the house and repossessed her car following Kobe Bryant’s death. [Bossip]
- In the caption to this Instagram post, Diplo asks us to rate his and Miley Cyrus’ mullets. On a scale of 1 to 10, what do you give ‘em?