A podcast host who built her brand calling out fascists just got caught defending a man with Nazi tattoos — and somehow still found time to call Susan Collins a MAGA fascist.

Story Snapshot

• Jennifer Welch, co-host of the popular “I’ve Had It” podcast and author of “Not Today, Fascists,” publicly called Senator Susan Collins “fascist to the core.”
• The statement came while Welch was simultaneously defending Graham Platner, a man critics describe as a Nazi-tattooed abuser.
• Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, has a long record of breaking with her party and voting with Democrats on key issues — making the fascist label a stretch by almost any factual standard.
• The episode illustrates a well-worn pattern in political media: the inflammatory label dominates the conversation while the underlying evidence disappears entirely.

The Woman Who Wrote the Book on Fascism Accusations

Jennifer Welch is not a fringe figure. She co-hosts one of the more widely followed political commentary podcasts in the country and literally wrote a book titled “Not Today, Fascists: The Lies That Got Us Here, and the Truths That Will Reunite Us.” That title is not subtle. Welch has built her entire public identity around the idea that she can identify fascism and call it out. That context matters enormously when evaluating what she said about Susan Collins.

Welch described Collins as “fascist to the core.” Susan Collins — the same senator who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, who has repeatedly clashed with Republican leadership, and whose moderate positioning has made her a persistent target of conservative frustration for years. Whatever Collins is, the factual record does not support the fascist label. When a self-described fascism expert applies that word to one of the Senate’s most reliably centrist figures, it tells you more about the speaker’s rhetorical habits than about the target.

Defending Graham Platner While Calling Others Fascists

The credibility problem compounds quickly. At the same time Welch was branding Collins with the most charged political insult in contemporary discourse, she was defending Graham Platner — a man whom critics have publicly identified as a Nazi-tattooed abuser. The full transcript of Welch’s defense has not been independently verified in the available record, but multiple social media commentators, including the media aggregator Grabien Media, specifically linked the Collins attack to Welch’s posture toward Platner. That connection is what transforms a garden-variety political insult into a hypocrisy story worth examining.

The pattern here is not complicated. Welch has positioned herself as someone with a finely tuned moral compass for detecting authoritarianism and abuse of power. If she simultaneously extended cover to a man credibly described as a Nazi-tattooed abuser, that is not a minor inconsistency. It is a foundational contradiction that undermines the entire premise of her public brand. You do not get to be the anti-fascist authority while soft-pedaling associations with actual Nazi iconography.

Jennifer Welch on Graham Platner: “Everyone’s talking about toxic relationships and tattoos and all of this shit. Talk about Susan Collins voting to dismantle protections that keep women safe and keep women free because that is the real story here. She is a MAGA fascist to her… pic.twitter.com/amTv4AasPn

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) June 6, 2026

How Political Media Turns Evidence Into Noise

The broader dynamic here is worth naming plainly. In today’s political media environment, the label always travels faster than the evidence. Welch calls Collins a fascist, that clip goes viral, and the conversation immediately becomes about whether the word was fair rather than about any specific vote, policy, or action Collins took. The underlying conduct — if there even is any that supports the charge — never gets examined because the outrage cycle moves on before anyone demands documentation.

This is precisely how bad-faith political commentary survives. The speaker makes an incendiary claim, the audience reacts to the claim, and the absence of supporting evidence is never noticed because nobody stops the carousel long enough to ask for it. Welch is a skilled practitioner of this form. Her podcast thrives on sharp-edged takes delivered with confidence. But confidence is not a substitute for accuracy, and a book title is not a credential that makes your accusations automatically credible.

What Collins’ Record Actually Shows

Susan Collins has been in the Senate since 1997. She voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, supported same-sex marriage legislation, voted to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and has consistently broken with Republican majorities when she judged it appropriate. Reasonable people can disagree with Collins on any number of issues. Conservatives have done so for decades. But applying the fascist label to a senator with that voting record is not political commentary — it is political performance, and sloppy performance at that.

The real story here is not that Jennifer Welch dislikes Susan Collins. Plenty of people across the political spectrum have complicated feelings about Collins. The story is that a commentator who has monetized the fascism accusation as a brand identity deployed it against a centrist Republican while reportedly defending someone associated with actual Nazi symbolism. That sequence of events deserves more scrutiny than any single viral clip will ever provide — and the fact that it probably will not get that scrutiny is the most predictable part of this entire episode.

Sources:

[1] Web – Harpy Jennifer Welch: ‘Susan Collins is a MAGA Fascist’ — Says the …

[2] YouTube – Jennifer Welch says sports can’t heal America

[3] YouTube – Jennifer Welch on Epstein, Israel, and Useless Democrats