Ashley Tisdale's Group Chat Call-out Had Nothing to Do With Her Politics

Although she's best known for being a former Disney star, Ashley Tisdale is still famous, and she still has plenty of famous friends. In a recent essay for The Cut, Ashley discussed being part of a "toxic" mom group, and many assumed that she was talking specifically about a group that included other celebrities like Meghan Trainor, Mandy Moore, and Hilary Duff.

Ashley further said that she didn't feel "cool enough" for this mom group and that she had been excluded from certain hangouts as a result. Now, many are wondering whether this fissure has anything to do with politics. Here's what we know.

Although speculation began almost immediately that Ashley was isolated from the friend group because of her conservative views, her representation has shot that down. In speaking with TMZ, Ashley's rep said that she wasn't even referring to the friend group that included the other celebrities and that the rumors that the rifts were because of her politics were completely false because Ashley is a registered Democrat.

It seems, then, that a lot of the speculation that this essay was a shot at other celebrity moms and that she was calling them out because of political divisions is incorrect. Or, at the very least, Ashley is denying that's the case. Instead, it seems like Ashley was trying to write about how cliquey mom groups can be and how difficult that can be, especially while you're also trying to make sure your child is included.

As she explains in the essay, Ashley ultimately found herself wondering what she was doing to be "left out," and that's when she decided to leave the group behind.

"This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore," she texted the group. She also said that she didn't think most of the women in the group were bad people, with one possible exception.

This isn't the first time that Ashley has written about the group. In a blog post, she discussed the dynamics inside the friend group, saying that they brought her to tears.

“I realized that there were group text chains that didn’t include everyone, which led to cliques forming within the larger group,” she wrote. “And after the third or fourth time of seeing social media photos of everyone else at a hangout that I didn’t get invited to, it felt like I wasn’t really part of the group after all.”

It's unclear who exactly is in the group that Ashley was referring to, especially given that she has taken photos with Hilary, Meghan, and Mandy on multiple occasions. What seems clear regardless, though, is that Ashley was upset much more about interpersonal dynamics, and doesn't seem to have been thinking much at all about the politics of the other members of the group, at least not explicitly.