These two women may be the most disgusting thing I have seen this year. Out of a long line of events that could otherwise have taken the prize.
Let me run through it with you.
Two women are sitting in a podcast studio in Oklahoma, laughing.
Not a little laugh. They lean forward, they wipe their eyes, they cannot stop. It goes on for more than twenty seconds, and what sets it off is a sentence one of them has just read aloud from her phone.
And let me say this straight away, so nobody thinks this is two random people with a microphone. Jennifer Welch is a successful businesswoman from Oklahoma City. The podcast "I've Had It" is one of the biggest in the US, with millions of listeners, and the hosts get invited into the big TV studios to explain to the rest of the country what is decent.
They are not the bottom of the pyramid. They are the top. And that is exactly what makes it vile. Because when they laugh, they give millions of people permission to laugh along. They are not just two women who have fallen flat. They are the door the others walk in through. Here at home too.
Here is the sentence that has them splitting their sides -
"We're digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again."
Charlie Kirk was 31. He founded a movement for young conservatives and spent his years travelling around American universities debating students who disagreed with him. Anyone could get in the queue for the microphone, say what he or she thought and debate it - stand behind it, as far as their abilities reached. Test themselves and be exposed to a qualified perspective that their educational institutions no longer thought they were allowed to teach. The classic Western thing.
On 10 September 2025 he was standing on a stage at Utah Valley University answering a question when he was shot in the neck in front of thousands of people.
He left a wife and two small children.
That is who they are digging up.
Who they want to shoot down again.
That is what they are laughing at.
And then comes the half second that is the most important in the whole clip. Jennifer Welch straightens up, looks into the camera and says: "I'm zooming in for Fox. No comment."
She knows.
Somewhere inside her there is still something that says stop. It just manages to knock. And then the herd laughs on over the top of it.
What you are witnessing is a Human Being who has lost all decency, self-control and the view of Man we knew in the Western world.
....
How does a Human Being get there?
Not in one day. Nobody wakes up one morning and thinks it is funny to dig up a murdered father and shoot him again in front of his wife and children and the rest of the world.
You walk there. Step by step, over fifteen years, and every step feels reasonable while you are standing on it.
It all begins with one word that changes address. It is that undermining of words and language that I consistently write has taken place.
In this context the Word is "harm".
Around 2010 the universities began saying that "disagreement could hurt". Not figuratively. Really hurt. A wrong opinion in a room was no longer a wrong opinion, it was harm, and whoever was exposed to it needed protection. So they got a room. A so-called safe space. In the very institutions that were supposed to produce the most robust among us. Those who could take the most opposition on the battlefield of ideas.
It sounded caring, and perhaps it was.
But notice what happened to the word. Until then, harm had lived in the body. A blow was harm. A word was a word. Now harm moved into "the opinion", and from there everything that follows is not a series of new decisions.
It is consequences.
Because if an opinion and a position are harm, then the one who holds them is a perpetrator. And perpetrators are not to be debated. They are to be removed.
That was step two, and we called it cancel culture, and it was not the state that did it, it was ourselves. The firing, the exclusion, the phone that stopped ringing. You know the examples yourself. The herd learned that it could punish, and that it even felt like goodness.
Then came the years around covid, when the platforms and the state took over the work. And here I do not need to have an opinion, because it has been admitted.
In December 2022 Elon Musk opened Twitter's internal archives to a handful of journalists, and what came out was not a theory but emails and screenshots - lists of accounts to be held down without the owner knowing, regular meetings with the FBI, and a Stanford professor of medicine who had been put on a blacklist for having a view on lockdowns, and the same with some of the world's most cited and relied-upon authorities on cardiovascular disease who dared to ask questions.
Then in August 2024 Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the US Congress in which he acknowledged that the Biden administration had for months pressured Facebook to remove content about covid, and that Facebook had suppressed the story about Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 presidential election because the FBI had warned about Russian disinformation.
He wrote that he regretted it. What for three years had been called "conspiracy theory" now lay partly in Twitter's own emails, partly in a letter bearing Zuckerberg's signature. People with "dangerous" views were systematically shut down, and those who did it believed they were protecting someone.
There are still intellectually anaemic and dim politicians here at home who believe that.
After that, harm moved into the law. In February 2022 the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of truckers demonstrating against vaccine mandates, and of people who had donated to them.
Ordinary citizens, no verdict, no trial, just an account that no longer worked. In England, Lucy Connolly, a mother and childminder, was sentenced to 31 months in prison for one tweet during the riots in the summer of 2024. She deleted it herself after a few hours.
She was inside for over a year. No. This is not happening in Russia. It is happening in the country that invented free speech.
And so here we stand. Step five.
When opinions and positions are harm, when those who hold them are perpetrators, when the state and the banks and the courts have confirmed it for ten years, then there is only one step left, and it is the one nobody says out loud until it has happened.
If for fifteen years you have called a man a "fascist", a man whose entire work consisted of setting up a microphone and talking with those who disagreed with him, and if at the same time you have learned that fascism is harm itself, then his death is not a loss. It is a removal. The label did the work long before the bullet did. And what has been removed, you are allowed to laugh at.
This is not two evil women in a studio. Even though evil runs freely through them.
It is two women who have been given a word that thinks for them.
....
We are not the US. But steps one, two and three we have had here at home for ten years, and we called it the offence debate, and we laughed a little at it, because it looked so innocent.
Step four is already in England and Canada.
Step five we saw in a podcast studio last Thursday.
Here is the pattern, if you want it completely bare.
First they learned that words were violence.
Then they learned that violence was just words.
And now comes what I actually want to say, because everything above can be worked out by anyone with an internet connection and a little grey matter between the ears.
What happened in those fifteen years is that a religion was born.
It has sin, and the sin is called harm.
It has excommunication, and it is called cancel.
It has an inquisition, and it is called fact-checking.
It has secular punishment, and it is called frozen accounts and prison.
And every religion that has all that, but lacks one thing, always ends up in the same place.
At the stake.
Because without that one thing there is no way back from being guilty. There is only a way upward in the punishment.
The one thing is - forgiveness.
And here you should notice something, because it was in the same news feed, just in smaller print. When Charlie Kirk's widow, Erika, stood on the stage at the memorial in September last year, in front of tens of thousands, with her husband's blood still fresh in memory, she said of the man who shot him - "I forgive him."
She said it because she is a Christian, and because that is what her Master said on the cross about those who killed him.
These are not two opinions facing each other. They are two orders.
In one, guilt can be lifted off a Human Being, and so one can stop. In the other it cannot, and so one cannot.
The widow forgives.
The podcast hags laugh.
And that half second, when Jennifer Welch looked into the camera and said "no comment", was the last thing left of the first order inside her.
Conscience knocked.
The herd laughed on.
She knows.
That is the most disgusting thing about it.
We all know it, too.
And we have to start saying it out loud, before steps four and five reach our own front door here.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Saturday, friends ☀️
