When Parasocial Relationships Go Bad Or Learning That Rob Lowe Loves Megyn Kelly Turned Me Into a Casual Non-Fan
I forget the context, but I was perambulating about the internet one day, as I am wont to do, and I saw a clickbait article about Megyn Kelly excitedly reporting that a celebrity recently told her he was a huge fan, and loved her honesty, but she worried that revealing his identity would hurt his career.
I am, if anything, excessively, messily human, so I was easily baited.
Who could it be? Jaleel White, who won our hearts as lovable nerd Steve Urkel? Or maybe it’s Sam Elliott, who is a reactionary Republican forever mocking those silly libs in memes and a solid Democrat in real life. Alternately, could it be a famous nerd like Curtis Armstrong or Eddie Deezen?
I was intrigued, so I clicked on the link and discovered that the mystery fan was Rob Lowe.
I can’t say I was surprised. Hollywood is famously a hive of liberalism and Wokeness, but older folks with millions of dollars tend to be Republicans for the tax cuts and incandescent rage towards young people, with their unbearable demands for respect and dignity.
Rob Lowe is a sixty-year-old millionaire who has been famous for two/thirds of his very eventful life. He was lefty enough to get busted for taping a threesome involving a 16-year-old at the 1988 Democratic Convention.
Googling reveals that Lowe has moved steadily right since that time. In 2011, he answered a question on Twitter about whether he’s a Democrat or Republican, saying, “(I) have supported both in the past; am a registered independent. A centrist.”
As I have argued repeatedly on this blog, if you publicly profess to be neither a democrat nor a republican but rather an independent, you are almost invariably a Republican who isn’t ready to go public with your conservative beliefs.
Lowe told The Guardian, “‘If you're young and you're not a liberal, you have no heart. If you're older and not a conservative, you have no brain.”
Lowe is older and obviously thinks of himself as someone with a brain, so it makes sense that he’s fundamentally conservative.
In 2015, Lowe told The New York Times that he identified as a libertarian, stating, “My thing is personal freedoms, freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything.”
There’s a word for people who talk loftily about personal freedom as an ultimate ideal and want the government out of everything. That word is “Republican.”
In case there’s any doubt, here’s a weird clip from 2011 of Lowe asking Donald Trump to run for president, and the future Commaner-in-Chief ranting about how all of the other countries fuck us over.
I would say that there’s no great shame in being a Republican, but in 2025, that’s not true. It’s deeply shameful to support the party of Trump. It’s immoral. It’s unethical. It’s something that should be neither forgotten nor forgiven.
We should never forget that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos hopped on board the Trump train when it became advantageous to do so. It should follow them until their dying day and afterward. “Trump supporter” should have a place of prominence in their eulogies.
They signed on for it, all of it. They could have resisted and held onto their fortune and influence, but they chose the Vichy route.
Learning that Lowe is a Megyn Kelly superfan has changed how I view him. I now have less respect for him.
I was a casual fan. He’s a solid dramatic actor with good comic timing and a sense of humor about himself and his surreal life. However, when I see him in something, my brain annoyingly reminds me that he praised Megyn Kelly.
I’m not going to boycott his films or TV shows, but when I think about him now, something I do infrequently, it’ll be within the context of his Megyn Kelly fandom.
A few years back, I learned that Mary Tyler Moore, despite being a preeminent feminist icon, was a regular listener to Bill O’Reilly.
I was disappointed, but it made more sense because Mary Tyler Moore was an old woman. She came of age long ago, when the world was much different.
Supporting Trump, or, by extension, Kelly, is different from backing McCain and Romney. They were regular politicians. I disagreed with their views, but I also don’t think they’re horrible people who appeal cynically and directly to the worst in us and single-handedly make the world an uglier, worse place the way Trump has.
Of course, I do not need to know whether Lowe voted for Trump in 2024 (or 2016 or 2020) because his fandom for Kelly tells me everything I need to know about how he sees the world.
Lowe’s affection for Kelly transformed me from a casual fan to a casual non-fan, though not to the point that I can’t still enjoy his performances in Wayne’s World and Parks & Recreation.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his non-existent dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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