Among the many areas of American life democratized by the internet, few have been more transformed than political commentary. Instead of being restricted to an old boys’ club of op-ed writers and Sunday-talk-show guests, punditry is now open to anyone with an internet connection. This shift has created abundant opportunities for once-neglected voices and broadened public discourse beyond a narrow establishment-media consensus. But lowering the barrier to entry has also had its downsides, mainly in the rise of political influencers. Like talk-radio hosts of yore, charismatic social-media commentators are skilled at forming a personal relationship with their listeners. Many of the most successful, however, pay next to zero attention to the details of policy or governance and gain followers mostly by calling the other side names. Consider the case of Jennifer Welch, author of the new book Not Today, Fascists.
A co-host of the left-wing podcast I’ve Had It, Welch commands millions of followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms. Multiple times a week, she delights her legions of fans by mocking Donald Trump, whom she calls “America’s dumbass dictator,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom she derides as “Chuckles,” for his insufficiently ardent resistance to the “fascist” GOP. She has called Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an “absolute grifter,” and the MAGA movement an “anti-family, pro-pedophilia death cult.” Her response to Lindsey Graham’s death was to say, “He liked cock, as we all know.” (No, we don’t. No evidence that the bachelor senator was gay has ever surfaced.)
To people who do not already share her politics, Welch’s coarseness can be off-putting. But it clearly has a cathartic appeal for many disillusioned liberals. Ironically, a major component of Welch’s appeal is inspired by the man she so despises. “I disagree with everything he says, I think he’s a compulsive liar, et cetera,” Welch told National Public Radio last year, “but the way we talk is really the way Trump has been doing it the last 10 years.”
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As a rule, when a book of political commentary has a big picture of the author on the front cover, readers should expect little substance and a lot of righteous certainty. Not Today, Fascists is no exception. But Welch’s rise as a progressive influencer, the growing popularity of her rhetorical style, and the leftward pressure she and her followers are putting on the Democratic Party exemplify a larger current: The American left has decided to mimic the right by cocooning itself in its own echo chamber.
“The Democratic base has abandoned traditional media,” Welch writes, “just like the Republican base did ten years ago, and they are desperate for something that goes against the status quo.” This “hunger for something different” among progressives, she observes, has been “so immense that a 51-year-old interior designer and her divorce lawyer started a podcast in Oklahoma a little over three years ago, and it’s now one of the top left-leaning podcasts in the country.”
During Trump’s first term, Welch, a successful interior decorator, starred in the Bravo reality-television series Sweet Home Oklahoma. Inspired by the voyeurism of the Real Housewives franchise, the show followed the exploits of Welch and her wealthy friends through the physical and mental landscape of Nichols Hills, her fashionable Oklahoma City neighborhood. Typical plotlines involved Welch’s design business, her husband’s recovery from drug addiction, and a character going on her first blind date in many years. After two seasons, the show was canceled in 2018.
Four years later, Welch started I’ve Had It with one of her former co-stars, Angie Sullivan, as a sidekick. According to The New York Times, the podcast initially consisted of “banter about petty grievances.” Gradually, the grievances became political and “grew to world-historical proportions.” Today, I’ve Had It is a go-to stop for Democratic presidential aspirants and other stars of the progressive firmament. Welch has appeared on The View, The New Yorker Radio Hour (interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick), and the livestream of fellow leftist shock-jock Hasan Piker, who refers to her as “one of the leaders of the radical wine-mom brigade.” Today, the Times reports, Welch “releases a podcast episode approximately once every seven hours.”
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Welch has become the quintessential #resistance influencer—someone animated by righteous indignation over Donald Trump’s misogyny and other character defects. She is Howard Beale crossed with Martha Stewart. Reading her is like being subjected to MS NOW on full volume, but with F-bombs. Indeed, the progressive cable-news network, formerly known as MSNBC, isn’t left-wing enough for Welch, who writes that “I’ve moved left and weaned myself off corporate news in recent years.”
To the extent that Not Today, Fascists has a thesis, it’s that Republicans are an assemblage of fascists, pedophiles, and idiots—and that progressives must sink to their level in order to win. “The only way forward is to fight fair,” Welch writes, “which in this case means dirty as hell.” What Democrats need is a “fuck you politics,” she believes. Practically, this means using meaner, cruder language. “If any chickenshit pearl-clutchers gets their panties in a wad because we call Trump a fascist or a Nazi, step aside and let the grown-ups fight,” Welch writes. “Fuck the seniority system. Fuck compromise.”
Never in Not Today, Fascists does Welch express the slightest scintilla of a doubt about anything she believes. She cannot contemplate the possibility that others might disagree with her in good faith, without racist, venal, or otherwise malign motives. Like many partisans before her, she implies that voters’ failure to adopt her side’s preferred policies is because the other side has brainwashed them. “We have an uphill battle when it comes to the economy—not because the Democrats’ policies are weaker, but because the propaganda has been so successful,” she writes.
The argument that Republican voters foolishly vote against their own economic interests was most famously elucidated in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas, the thesis of which is that the GOP wages the culture war to distract working-class white voters from its plundering of the economy. “Democratic politicians and candidates should be on TV every single day, beating the drum against corporate America’s exploitations, its billionaire CEOs, and the system that has enabled them to steal from America—and they should do so using clear, aggressive language,” Welch writes, as if such points haven’t been a staple of Democratic rhetoric for decades.
As an example of Democratic fecklessness, Welch points to the failure of the Biden administration to have Trump convicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection. She ridicules former Attorney General Merrick Garland for proceeding “as though he’d overdone it on the Xanax.” That Garland might have been at least partly justified in wanting to avoid the appearance of partisanship, a caution he demonstrated by first bringing cases against hundreds of rioters, is lost on Welch. The Biden administration’s attorney general “should have been vetted to make sure he or she understood the assignment,” which, apparently, was not conducting a fair and thorough investigation, but prosecuting Trump and his allies.
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This disregard for due process—for the idea that Garland’s long service in the American judicial system might have informed his prosecutorial restraint—is especially startling for someone flinging accusations of “fascism” onto anyone and anything she doesn’t like. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “no different, in my eyes, from Hitler’s Gestapo,” she writes. A message from the State Department announcing a pause in the issuance of immigrant visas to citizens of 75 countries “isn’t language reminiscent of fascism—it’s obviously and explicitly fascist.”
Not Today, Fascists is a sloppy book. It’s riddled with malapropisms (Adolf Hitler sought to “coalesce momentum for World War II”), clichés (“it takes a village”), mixed metaphors (the establishment’s supposed belief that the rich are “the smartest people on God’s green Earth,” when in reality “they are not, uniformly, the brightest of bulbs”), and non sequiturs (“Note that to the MAGA cult, gay sex includes simply existing as a trans person.”) “Books are not known for coming together quickly,” Welch writes. This one certainly seems like it did.
But the bigger problem with the book is her uncritical recitation of left-wing talking points. Welch employs one of the most tiresome progressive rhetorical tics, referring frequently to the Trump administration as “the regime.” She calls the extensively documented scandal involving Somali immigrants running fake day-care centers in Minnesota “an utterly fraudulent accusation.” Welch repeats a laundry list of progressive shibboleths from the past decade: that Trump referred to the Nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville as “very fine people,” that Trump labeled immigrants generally—not just participants in criminal activity—as “animals.”
She brings no more reflection or nuance to her discussion of the war in Gaza. “I will not go to great lengths to argue that a genocide is in place, because the reality is clear,” she writes. (In other words, she barely bothers to justify the grave claim she makes.) Welch admits that she “didn’t know much about” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until well into the current war. She begins the first of her two chapters about the conflict, entitled “Taxpayer-Funded Genocide,” with a memory of her visit to Dachau at the age of 16. The message seems to be that Jews have forgotten what the Nazis did to them and are callously inflicting the same horrors upon Palestinians.
Welch claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has made Jewish people less safe worldwide,” and favorably cites a writer who claims that Israel is “the world’s most powerful cause of antisemitism.” The implication that Jews everywhere are a natural target for opponents of Israeli policy rationalizes bigotry and absolves the actual anti-Semites of their crimes. At one point in Not Today, Fascists, Welch begins to rant about the evils of “Zionist American billionaires” and the “growing Zionist cooperation and Zionist power in the American government.” A commentator more steeped in the history of real-life fascism might be warier of tropes about Jews manipulating the levers of power.
Welch’s political consciousness was heavily shaped by her experience growing up in a proudly atheist household surrounded by conservative evangelical Christians. (Not Today, Fascists is dedicated “To all the blue dots in red states: You’re not crazy—they are.”) Her feelings about the American religious right—which overwhelmingly supports Israel—and her domestic political commitments more broadly seem to color her feelings about the Jewish state. “One striking fact” about the Trump era, she writes, is that “Netanyahu was delighted by Trump. I found it repulsive that he went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring.” One can find Netanyahu’s obsequiousness toward Trump unseemly while simultaneously accepting that foreign leaders, just to do their job, must constantly flatter the most powerful man in the world. One can also abhor the actions of the Israeli government without writing off the entire country as an illegitimate enterprise.
By their nature, “heterodox” voices are an acquired taste. In the part of the political universe Welch inhabits, the battle lines are clear: Protect your friends and villainize your opponents, regardless of the details. Discussing the murder of the health-care executive Brian Thompson, she writes that his death “illuminated a harsh reality about American life: The unconscionable cruelty of the American healthcare system has driven some people so far into desperation and despair that they couldn’t find any empathy for the CEO.” That may be true for a radical fringe, but 82 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health-care coverage. In a paean to Tim Walz, Welch describes the Minnesota governor and failed vice-presidential candidate as “the hard-ass you could go to for counsel, who stood up for the underdog like the great American film heroes we grew up watching.” There are many things one can say about Tim Walz; that he is the latter-day incarnation of Paul Newman or Harrison Ford is not one of them.
There is a place for the Jennifer Welches of the world, just as there is a place for the Tucker Carlsons and Hasan Pikers and Sean Hannitys. Unabashed partisanship helps motivate some people to win elections. What makes sharply partisan media figures so useful to political movements, however, is precisely what renders them so uninteresting as thinkers. In an earlier era of political commentary, William F. Buckley Jr. earned cachet with his friendships across the political aisle; part of what made him interesting was his interest in other people and their ideas. A typical episode of Firing Line—his current-affairs debate show, which aired on public television for 33 years—would feature Buckley in spirited, respectful conversation with a guest such as Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, or John Kenneth Galbraith. Welch and her listeners, by contrast, have no interest in anyone outside their ideological bubble, other than as targets of invective.
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In encouraging her fellow progressives to follow MAGA into the gutter, Welch resembles that which she hates. At one point, she writes that “the feeling of being united against a common enemy, with total absolution from racism, sexism, or accountability, can be intoxicating.” But Welch and her followers too are in desperate need of an intervention.
Like her adversaries, Welch long ago gave up trying to convince those who don’t see things her way. “I don’t imagine a world where MAGA voters will wake up one morning and simply switch sides,” she writes. Democrats must therefore move left; on this, “there is no compromise” to be had. The Democratic Party is up for grabs, and Jennifer Welch may very well represent its future.
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