Advice for Men From Jennifer Welch, the Profane ‘Mother’ of the Dirtbag Left

It’s been 10 years since Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high,” and about nine and half since America’s dirtbag left emerged saying, Fuck that. Now, Democrats from progressive upstart Abdul El-Sayed to establishment prince Gavin Newsom have tried to match the insult-comic tone of the second Trump administration. But the person who comes closest is not a politician or a brocialist streamer: It is Jennifer Welch, the Oklahoma interior designer turned Bravo star and cohost of the progressive-liberal political-interview-and-commentary podcasts I’ve Had It and IHIP News.A few days after Lindsey Graham died, Welch drew listeners’ attention to one of the Republican senator’s last known photographs: Graham holding an upright model of a Ukrainian SkyFall drone interceptor and grinning. “He liked cock, as we all know,” Welch said. “The worst-kept secret in Washington, DC. And he liked killing, you know, the biggest war hawk on the planet. And there he is with a black cock that kills, right before he dies.” There is no way that any political PR person lets their candidate talk to her now, I thought when I heard it. And yet the interviews kept coming.“I guess that’s the superpower of being a white woman,” says Hasan Piker, who has broadcast with Welch. “I don’t think women of color get the same bandwidth, which I’m sure Jennifer would agree with, and I have a lot more liberties in the way that I speak on issues than women do. I mean, she’s doing it. She’s very good.”“Don Lemon and Mehdi Hasan say that to me a lot,” Welch says, with no apparent satisfaction, when we meet at a coffee shop in Manhattan. We sit at a sidewalk table, and she keeps her voice down. “They say, ‘You can get away with saying more stuff than we can.’ ”Zohar LazarWelch moved to New York from Oklahoma last year, and she’s still adjusting to the number of I’ve Had It fans around her. One guy made hand-hearts at her through the door of a nail salon. Another came out from behind the wheel of an Amazon delivery truck and expressed his admiration. In Piker’s livestream and subreddit, she is the “leader of the wine mom vanguard” or, simply, “mother.” “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, this white lady’s fighting for us,’ ” she explains. “But it also makes me sad that they don’t see more of us, that I’m novel.”Welch and her former Bravo costar and now cohost, Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, have been podcasting since 2022. Listeners liked their apolitical rants, their taunts about President Trump (whom they call “Canks,” short for Cankles), and that it all came from two middle-aged blonde women with Southern accents. The podcast gained left-wing political cred over the past two years, as it channeled disillusionment over the defeat of Kamala Harris into criticism of the Democratic Party, including remarkably challenging interviews with Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel.“That open-mindedness has made her this iconic figure now with even young men,” Piker says. Today, the podcast has over a million YouTube subscribers and is a Democratic campaign “must-stop,” as a Fox News article put it.The 2024 presidential election has been called the “testosterone election” (Hulk Hogan’s RNC shirt-ripping, “childless cat ladies,” gender-voting gap), which makes the 2026 midterms a referendum on the testosterone administration. Welch has a very specific take on the role of masculinity in today’s politics, which she touches on in her new book, Not Today, Fascists.The book lays out, in non-grad-school English, Welch’s case for why today’s Republican-controlled government is Christo-fascist. Drawing from her life as an atheist in the Bible Belt, her close-reading of the news, and her discussions with NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, it concludes with a plea for Democrats and their supporters to abandon the corporate-donor model of politics in order to restore democratic credibility and take positions that will improve the lives of the largest number of people. Along the way, she argues that Trump 2’s emphasis on manliness is a feature of its authoritarian leanings. In a chapter on terminology, she writes, “Fascist regimes are led by a strongman, an authoritarian leader marked by displays of hypermasculinity and demands for obedience and loyalty. (Ours happens to wear a full face of orange makeup each and every day.)”“You have this juxtaposition of ‘We’re such big strong men,’ but meanwhile Trump’s groping a UFC fighter, saying, ‘You’re a good-looking guy,’ ” Welch tells me. (To be fair: It was more of an extended handshake into thigh pat than a grope.) “And listen, I don’t give a shit about that stuff.” LGBTQ+ rights are a through line of Welch’s political commentary, and her new book argues that trans people have been scapegoated by the Republican Party. In her world, “drag queen” is not an insult. (“Failed drag queen,” as she has called JD Vance, definitely is.) “But I’m not a religious hypocrite.”It’s no longer unusual to see a left-leaning political figure dabble in gay jokes at the expense of Republicans, and it’s bizarrely familiar to those who remember the commentary about 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry’s cheesesteak order. One difference between then and now, says Josh Helfgott, the LGBTQ+ activist behind TikTok’s Gay News, is how the right has shifted rhetorical focus from gay people to trans people, a smaller marginalized group. “Generally what I see Democrats going after, when they tend to critique Republicans, is how they’re performing being a man,” Helfgott says. But “if your punchline is that a man seems feminine and that thus feminine is shameful, you can be perpetuating the same narrative.” Even if liberals talk about closeted conservatives from a position of support for LGBTQ+ rights, he says, “When I hear these things, I think about a gay kid in middle school hearing it. I worry they will see it as another reason why it’s bad to be who they are.”Still, Welch differs from the archetypal #Resistance-era lib in many ways, one of which is that, when she calls Republicans “DL demon queens,” it doesn’t sound like an off-color joke. It sounds, I tell her, like she truly believes repressed or clandestine homosexuality is rampant in Washington, DC.Zohar Lazar“Yeah,” Welch says, nodding. “Not only do I think that, Hunter Biden thinks that. Steve Schmidt, who was John McCain’s campaign adviser, thinks that.” Her belief that politicians who espouse anti-LGBTQ+ views are projecting internal conflict has origins in her Oklahoma upbringing. “The most religious people I knew, the ones that wanted to convert you the most, their families were the most dysfunctional,” she says. “If you look at this brand of Christian nationalism that Republicans are promoting, it’s to mask a lot of problems that they have.”I ask Welch what she thinks a Democrat man should do if Trump or one of his surrogates calls him “effeminate” (Tim Walz), “transgender” (James Talarico), or “Pinky [sic] Herman” (Jon Ossoff). “Be very aggressive in defending masculinity and defending sexuality,” she says. “Say it with your full chest.”Welch starts offering up free talking points. “Why are Republican men so obsessed with gay sex? Why are they constantly talking about trans people?” I get the feeling she could keep riffing in this vein for a long time. As long as it takes for civility to come back in style. Or maybe it’ll just be like this forever? “Why does Mike Johnson monitor his son’s use of porn? Why does Josh Hawley look really disturbed when he’s kissing his own wife? Because the call is coming from inside your own house.” ★