OPINION:
“Hate has no home here” — or so the self-righteous, sanctimonious left would have you believe.
That virtue-signaling slogan is frequently found on lawn signs in the front yards of liberals, but far-left “I’ve Had It” podcast co-hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan have proved that hate does, indeed, have a home on the left.
That was evidenced by their poisonous, tasteless “joke” last week about the late conservative Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.
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Mses. Welch and Sullivan shared a third party’s social media post suggesting that the body of Kirk, who was assassinated at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, 14 months ago, be exhumed and shot again.
The post on X read: “We’re digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again.”
The podcasters then laughed lustily about it.
In what universe does anyone with a scintilla of human decency post such a despicable thing, much less laugh uncontrollably about it for the next 20 seconds, as the podcast pair did?
It was hateful beyond the pale, and it would be just as hateful if a deranged person on the right were to fatally shoot, say, foul-mouthed far-left podcaster Hasan Piker — or Ms. Welch or Ms. Sullivan, for that matter — and prominent conservatives were then to make light of it.
Yet karma can be a b——, and the two are now paying a steep financial and reputational price for it — deservedly so.
According to a tally posted Monday night by the conservative activist site Libs of TikTok, “30 companies have now confirmed they will not advertise” on the “I’ve Had It” podcast.
The list: Cash App, Chewy, Boll & Branch, Zenni Optical, Momentous, Honeylove, Casper, HexClad, Ethos, Branch Basics, Ladder, Nutrafol, Jones Road Beauty, ZipRecruiter, PAKA, Ember, BetterHelp, Primal Queen, Monarchy Money, iRestore, HomeServe, Ridge Wallet, Lola Blankets, NOBL Travel, Dupe, One Skin, IQBar, Quince, Cozy Earth and the ASPCA.
You could say those advertisers have “had it” with the daily doses of left-wing extremism spewed by Mses. Welch and Sullivan and rightly want no further association with them.
Initially, the pair made a halfhearted effort at damage control, characterizing the Kirk episode as just “an insensitive joke.”
That could well be the proverbial “understatement of the year,” but it was a “sorry, not sorry” moment.
We know it was insincere because their feeble attempt at making amends was to donate an undisclosed amount of money to liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s anti-Second Amendment gun-grabbing group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Now the podcast pair have the chutzpah to whine that they are the real victims here as advertisers rush to the exits because they do not want to be associated with their vile and vituperative “joke.”
Ms. Welch — a former interior designer, of all things — then immediately returned to attacking Turning Point USA and its leaders, complaining that they were attempting to get the podcast “canceled.” That is laughable, given that it was leftists like her who invented cancel culture and are its foremost practitioners.
The deafening silence from others on the left who have failed to unequivocally condemn the joke is deeply disturbing in its own right.
An understandable impulse now would be to call for Ms. Welch and Ms. Sullivan not only to be demonetized but also to have their “I’ve Had It” podcast deplatformed by Big Tech — the way the left prodded a complicit Big Tech to deplatform and shadow-ban many conservative podcasters during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet the First Amendment protects free speech, even when hate finds a warm and welcoming home on a leftist podcast.
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