The loudest voices on the left keep selling themselves as the party of empathy, but the clips and comments that surface tell a different story. When violent jokes and ugly lines about political opponents make the rounds, the silence from major outlets says plenty too. The double standard is hard to miss, especially when the targets are conservatives and the people doing the laughing are treated like cool kids instead of reckless adults.
What kicked this latest round of outrage into gear was a podcast moment that landed with a thud. Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, the hosts of I’ve Had It, were heard laughing after a listener joke about Charlie Kirk being dug up and killed again. The reaction on social media was immediate because it was not a slip of the tongue or a bad edit. It was laughter, and it went on long enough to leave no doubt about what they thought was funny.
That kind of reaction would have produced wall-to-wall handwringing if the target had been anyone on the left. Instead, the clip spread online while the usual media gatekeepers looked the other way. The networks love to preach about decency, then act shocked when people notice how selective that decency becomes. If the wrong side makes a crude joke, it is treated like evidence of moral collapse. If the left does it, the story somehow vanishes into the background noise.
Welch and Sullivan did not just laugh and move on either. They added their own remarks, repeating a false claim that Charlie Kirk was killed by a MAGA supporter. That line has already been echoed enough times in other corners of media to show how fast a lie can harden into a talking point. Once that happens, the laughs come easier, and the people spreading it behave as if they are just being edgy instead of dishonest.
The same pattern showed up again days later when Dave Chappelle took the stage in New York and leaned into a joke about Kirk’s murder. Chappelle is a huge name, which means the line got treated like clever provocation by people who would call it hateful if a conservative comic said the same thing about a liberal activist. He even doubled down with a grim punchline about Kirk looking down from hell and laughing. That is the kind of material that gets applause from the crowd and a pass from the press.
Then there is the wider ecosystem around these figures, where a little nastiness is treated like social currency. Don Lemon framed a Welch appearance as some kind of “political detox,” which is a pretty wild way to describe a guest known for angry, abrasive commentary. The message is clear enough: if the rhetoric is aimed at conservatives, the media class often calls it honest, fresh, or fearless instead of cruel.
Erika Kirk answered that nonsense in plain language, saying it was “beyond disgusting” to laugh about political assassination as if human death were a punchline. That response cut through the noise because it said what a lot of people were thinking. There is nothing brave about mocking a murdered man, and there is nothing enlightened about pretending that violence becomes acceptable when your political tribe is doing the talking.
The problem is bigger than one podcast or one comedian. The same crowd that rushes to condemn harsh words from the right tends to shrug when the left gets vicious, whether the target is Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk, or anyone else who irritates the blue-check class. Scott Galloway’s talk about Musk being executed as a “traitor to the West” is a good example of how far the language can go before anyone bothers to blink. That is not debate. It is dehumanization with better branding.
And that is why the silence matters as much as the comments themselves. If the media only notices outrage when it fits a preferred narrative, then it is not really covering the culture at all. It is curating it, polishing the friendly parts and burying the rest. The result is a public conversation where the ugliest voices on one side get amplified, excused, and repackaged as courage, while everyone else is expected to pretend they never heard a thing.
