By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter
Liberal podcast host Jennifer Welch doubled down on her recent criticism of Christian homeschooling after fielding intense backlash last week for calling it a “crazy Christian problem” that leads to “trickle-down stupidity.”
Welch, who hosts the “I’ve Had It” podcast, prompted outrage when she and co-host Angie Sullivan accused homeschoolers of being like the Duggar family, using creationist materials and being “incapable of deduction skills.”
“And what pisses me off about this the most is how many parents project a script onto their kids. ‘I’m a dumb—, so therefore I’m going to make sure you’re a dumb—. I’m a f—ing idiot,'” Welch said at the time.
Following pushback from Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the U.S. Department of Education and others for her remarks, Welch reiterated her opinion during a video posted to her YouTube channel on Monday.
“The homeschooling that I was referring to is the crazy Christian homeschooling. It is trickle-down stupidity. You have to be dumber than a box of hot rocks to sit down with your kids and teach them that dinosaurs and man lived on the planet at the same time, that the Earth is 5,000 years old, and on and on,” she said.
Welch went on to claim that homeschooling is an attempt to promote fascism and demean women by forcing them to stay with their secretly homosexual husbands.
“But more than anything, the reason they’re melting down so much about this is because homeschooling is inherently patriarchal, and it is a huge push of the fascist project because it keeps women at home,” she said. “And over 90 percent of all homeschooling parents are the mother.”
“You know they don’t want women to be out in the workforce to make their own money and have independence so they can divorce their piece of s—, closet-case husbands when they find out. No, they want the women at home, dead-ass broke, homeschooling the kids. This is a patriarchal step of the fascist project.”
Welch also specifically addressed criticism from Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade and Tomi Lahren, both of whom weighed in on the controversy Welch stoked last week. She accused the two of hypocrisy, noting that Kilmeade once called for mentally ill homeless people to be euthanized.
“And I will just say to Brian Kilmeade and Tomi Lahren, do you homeschool your kids? Do you do that with a full-time job? What do you do? Do you do it at night? Do you start at 8 p.m. and end at 1, 2 a.m.? Is that how your family values go? So, if you don’t homeschool your kids, shut the f— up, you two,” she said.
“And to the Fox News producers, have fun watching my show; it’s pathetic. You should be covering this fascist regime in this fascist takeover and not some podcaster, as per Tomi, that people just watch for entertainment,” she added.
Welch also touched on the backlash during a July 17 conversation with former CNN host Don Lemon.
Lemon claimed adults he has interacted with who have been homeschooled are “so sheltered that they have no idea of what the real world is like,” offering the example of an unidentified homeschooled man he knew who was unaware of a famous seafood restaurant in his hometown.
“He thought — he happens to be a gay man — that he was an abomination. His parents took him out of school, because they thought that the public schools were teaching them … about integration, and racism and all of that. His parents did not want him to learn about that. And they were Evangelical Christians in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
“And he said he feels like he was so unprepared to be an adult, and so afraid to be himself. He wishes his parents had made a different choice. He knew nothing,” added Lemon, who also appeared on Welch’s program earlier this year after accosting Christians at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Welch called Lemon’s anecdote “very telling,” adding that she knows people who have expressed similar sentiments about their homeschool experience, which she described as “part of the fascist playbook.”
