The 60% in the Middle

/ Jim
Photo: Myotus, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

If you’ve seen any of this story, you’ve seen about fifteen seconds of it. A clip, cut out of a podcast, bouncing around X and YouTube: two podcast hosts laughing at a joke about Charlie Kirk. The clip is real. But fifteen seconds is not the story, and the story being built on top of those fifteen seconds isn’t entirely real either. So here is the whole of it, assembled in one place — because what actually happened is both worse than the clip in some ways and different from the clip in others, and nobody’s fifteen seconds will tell you that.

The show is I’ve Had It, hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, and the episode was called “Drinking MAGA Tears,” released Thursday, November 5 — a victory lap after the midterms, built out of listeners’ posts celebrating the results. Partway through, Welch read one of those posts aloud: “We’re digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again.”

Then both of them laughed. Not a chuckle — twenty seconds and more of it, caught and stifled and caught again, before Welch got out a “No comment,” and Sullivan added the only commentary they offered: “No comment — other than he was shot by somebody that was super MAGA family.” Do with that what you will, she said.

Here is a fact the clips don’t carry: that segment has since been edited out of the episode. If you go to the show now to judge for yourself, the part everybody is arguing about isn’t there.

The pushback came fast, and it was organized. Andrew Kolvet — Turning Point USA’s spokesman, and Kirk’s close associate — posted the show’s full sponsor list and began publicly tracking which advertisers left. Law professor Jonathan Turley amplified the call. Erika Kirk weighed in on Sunday, saying a culture that laughs at assassination shows profound moral decay.

And sponsors did leave. Here is where the numbers need care, because the numbers are part of the story. Confirmed, with the companies’ own statements or direct reporting behind them: at least nine — Cash App, Chewy, Casper, Honeylove, and Zenni Optical among them. The broadest credible count runs to over a dozen. Kolvet’s own tracker claims twenty-one — but his tally counts brands that “cut ties or distanced themselves,” which is not the same thing, and he is not a neutral scorekeeper; he is the campaign. Nine is verified. Twenty-one is claimed. Those two numbers should never be averaged into one, and the gap between them tells you something about how these fights get fought.

On Saturday, the hosts apologized — a written statement on the podcast’s Instagram, and it deserves to be read whole, because it’s short and because what it actually says has gotten lost:

“On Thursday’s show, we laughed at a joke about Charlie Kirk. It was an insensitive joke, and we should not have laughed. We regret it, and we apologize. Whatever our political differences, there is nothing funny about gun violence. We’ve long supported common-sense gun safety reform. To that end, we’ve made a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in America. We’ll keep using our platforms to fight for the safety of all Americans.”

On paper, that is an apology. It says the words. Which is why what happened Sunday matters more than what happened Saturday.

On Sunday, the hosts posted a video. The apology, Welch explained, was not for Turning Point or for Kolvet — it was for themselves. She said that someone she loves died from gun violence two years ago, and that she had not felt good about the joke, and that part of it should be taken straight, because it’s her reason and it’s a human one. But the video wasn’t a clarification so much as a counterattack: Turning Point, they said, is “spearheading” an online campaign to cancel the podcast, picking the fight to prove to its donors that it can cancel liberals. “I don’t expect you to understand this,” Welch said, “because at Turning Point, you all laugh at violence all the time. You talk about how empathy is toxic and a worthless feeling.” Sullivan closed it by telling Turning Point to, in her words, “F*** off. F*** all the way off.” They also urged their viewers to subscribe and grow the show.

To be precise about it — because precision is the whole point of putting this together — the hosts never took back the apology’s words. They re-aimed them. The apology stands, addressed to themselves; the people who demanded it got told off instead. Whether that counts as walking it back is a judgment call, but it isn’t a hard one to make when you watch the two days side by side.

Now the other side, stated as strongly as it can be, because it deserves stating. The hosts’ defenders — including voices on their own side of the aisle — say this was a coordinated cancellation campaign, and they’re not wrong that it was coordinated: a spokesman published a target list and kept score in public, and Kolvet’s stated terms were an apology on his terms or else. Some on the left went further and called the backlash a right-wing cancel effort that centrist Democrats were helping along. And the “empathy is toxic” line points at something Kirk himself actually said about empathy in his lifetime. All of that is real, and all of it belongs in the record.

So does this: the condemnation did not come only from the right. Glenn Greenwald, no friend of Turning Point, condemned the clip and predicted, bitterly, that very few on his own side would object to it on basic decency grounds. Stefanie Feldman, a former Biden White House policy director, wrote that “Jennifer Welch represents the very worst of the online left influencers” and that she cannot take seriously anyone who doesn’t see it. Kolvet’s own open letter, stripped of everything else, contained one clean sentence: “It’s not that hard. Just don’t legitimize political violence.”

Years ago I wrote a post called “The 60% Solution,” and the arithmetic in it hasn’t changed. Roughly twenty percent of this country sits on one end of the spectrum and twenty percent on the other, and the other sixty percent — leaning a little one way or the other, or dead center — are everyday people working, raising families, believing or not believing, just living their lives. Those sixty percent are not who any of the performers in this story are talking to. The hosts were performing for their twenty. Kolvet was performing for his. And the sixty sit where they always sit, watching fifteen seconds at a time, asking who these people are.

Because here’s the thing nobody in the story seems willing to say plainly: a joke about digging up a murdered man and shooting him again is not a left position or a right position. It’s just awful. It lowers the whole discourse another notch, and then everybody stands around wondering why the discourse is so coarse and crass. It’s coarse because this is what gets tolerated. We allow this to go on, we shrug, we scroll past — and the shrug is the permission.

Which is why the most hopeful fact in this entire file is a mundane one. The sponsors did not move because of a network segment or a celebrity. They moved because ordinary customers — people in nobody’s twenty percent — wrote ordinary emails and made ordinary phone calls, and in about forty-eight hours a show with millions of listeners was apologizing in writing. That is the sixty percent, making a little noise, and it worked faster than any of the performers on either end expected.

That’s my belief, and I’ll own it as a belief: if people did that more often — not mobs, not campaigns with scorekeepers, just people saying no, this stinks and we’re not cheering for it — you would see less of this. Not none. Less. And less would be a start.

Update — Monday evening, November 9: The episode itself is longer than the clip, and part of what the clip left out is worse than the clip. A few minutes after the listener-post run, the hosts played a Sean Hannity clip calling hatred of Trump “unprecedented” — and Welch answered it at length, in her own words: the hate is unprecedented, “but we just started”; she has “so much more hate to give”; of her capacity for hating him she is “only 10 to 15% there,” with “85% more to realize”; and to Trump voters directly: “I want you to have healthcare. I want you to have all that stuff. But if you voted for Trump, I hate you… because you contributed to the worst of humanity and the worst in our country.” That is not a listener’s joke read off a screen; it is the host’s own statement, in the same episode, and no honest assembly of this story can leave it out. Two smaller additions from the segment: Welch’s aside that she was “zooming in for Fox,” and the tail of the shooter exchange — “White person, white MAGA family.” And for the record: the Kirk post itself no longer appears in the episode as now posted; it survives in the clip that circulated before the edit.

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