Self-Abasement for Fun and Profit

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

Jennifer Welch, the one-time Bravo reality television star who has set out to prove what cheap dates progressive podcast listeners really are (and has so far succeeded), is at it again. As Jim recently highlighted, the left-wing provocateur has been the recipient of glowing treatments in legacy media venues, one of which praised her ability to engineer paradigmatic shifts in how the country thinks about politics. But as is so often the case among the alt-talker set, the podcaster might have mistaken the crowd she draws while making a spectacle of herself for impassioned supporters.

 

In a recent diatribe alongside former CNN host Don Lemon, the reliably manic Welsh became visibly perturbed by the late Charlie Kirk’s widow’s media tour in her effort to promote her husband’s final book, which hit the shelves on December 9. In a reaction to CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s contention that some of Kirk’s critics excused his murder, Welch indignantly claimed that she didn’t know “anyone who justified his death” before she did just that.

 

“The person that I heard that justified his death was him,” the podcaster continued. “He’s the one that said on tape that if school kids die, but it means he gets to have a Second Amendment, then that’s – that’s what it’s gonna be. He’s the one that justified it.”

 

Welch went further than that: “I believe at the time of shooting,” she mused, “he was talking about gun violence at the time.”

 

Indeed, he was. The very last question Kirk was asked was posed by a student interlocutor who asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Within seconds of that question being asked, Kirk was struck by a 30.06-caliber bullet allegedly fired by a far-left progressive in a relationship with a trans-identifying male – one of several recent acts of political violence committed by figures who are themselves trans or adjacent to the movement.

 

Perhaps Welch is so genuinely ignorant of the current events on which she regularly opines that she is authentically unaware of the dozens of left-wing figures who either welcomed Kirk’s killing as a righteous comeuppance or excused it as the fruits of his own labors. Maybe she thought pretending to be ignorant of that phenomenon would help her make a point about gun violence that inadvertently cast Kirk as better informed on the subject of modern acts of mass violence. Either way, Welch made a fool of herself.

 

Not that faceplants like these are bad for her personal brand. Even if you’re wrong – even if you’re knowingly wrong – the incentives in the alternative podcast landscape reward bombast and braggadocio as much as they discourage humility and circumspection. This episode is worthy of study only as it relates to what progressive audiences want. And despite the best efforts of the Democratic political class to gently nudge activists away from the performative self-righteousness of the resistance-era left, what they want is the fight for fight’s sake.

 

There will be those who insist that Welch is unworthy of scrutiny – that she only generates the attention she’s getting now because her critics provide it, even if theirs is the negative sort. I disagree. If you think that phenomenon will not influence how the Democratic Party picks its nominees in 2026 and 2028, get ready to be surprised.