Two podcast hosts used their platform to brand homeschooling "trickle-down stupidity" and liken religious instruction to child abuse, drawing a pointed response from one of the country's most prominent school-choice advocates.
Jennifer Welch and co-host Angie Sullivan devoted a segment of their "I've Had It" podcast to tearing into parents who educate their children at home, as Fox News Digital reported. The exchange, prompted by a caller who complained about "morons attempting to homeschool their children," escalated quickly from personal distaste into sweeping accusations against millions of American families.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a leading education policy advocate, told Fox News Digital the comments revealed "more about the hosts' contempt for family and parental authority than they do about homeschooling."
Sullivan opened the attack with a blanket dismissal. As she told listeners:
"I just think homeschooling is a bad idea, from soup to nuts. I don't care if you're a nuclear physicist. I think it's just f---ing weird as f--- that you want your kids around you all day, every day and all night. And just the socialization."
She went further, questioning the motives of any parent who chooses to keep children home.
"For me personally, it was that I would have gotten up on my hands and knees and strapped them to my back and crawled to get them to school every day just to get them where I wasn't. So, I don't trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it's just easier. And that's a concern."
That last line is worth reading twice. Sullivan's stated reason for sending her own children to school was to get away from them, and she finds it suspicious that other parents feel differently.
Welch then layered on the political framing. She tied homeschooling to a grab bag of cultural targets, as if choosing to teach your child at home is itself a partisan act:
"This is trickle-down stupidity. This is MAGA on steroids. This is MAHA. This is tradwife. This is unvaxxed and unjacked and all that s---. This is the worst, worst, worst."
She wasn't finished. Welch described homeschooled people as walking red flags and called the practice selfish, then pivoted to religion.
"I honestly... I'm just gonna say this. I think it's selfish for parents to push a religion on a child and make them believe just one before they're old enough to hear about all of them or none of them and decide for themselves. I think it's all child abuse, honestly."
So in the space of a few minutes, homeschooling went from "weird" to "selfish" to "child abuse." That escalation tells you everything about where the argument was headed from the start.
Welch also told listeners she views homeschooling as a "huge problem" and said she "cannot stand these people." She described a scenario in which someone seems "kind of awful" and the explanation turns out to be that they were homeschooled, as if that settles the matter.
"I think it's a huge problem. I cannot stand these people, but, again, it's a pretty big red flag when somebody tells you, when you're like, 'What's their deal? They seem kind of awful,' [and they say] 'I was homeschooled.' You're like, 'Yeah.' I just think it's such a selfish thing for parents to do."
The remarks are casual, even flippant. But the underlying argument is serious, and it tracks with a broader progressive impulse to treat parental authority over education as inherently suspect. When Welch calls religious upbringing "child abuse," she is not joking. She is articulating a position that, if taken to its policy conclusion, would justify state intervention into how families raise and teach their children.
DeAngelis, who has spent years advocating for school choice and parental rights in education, did not hold back in his response to Fox News Digital. He challenged both the hosts' framing and their assumptions about government-run schools.
"It's not weird to love your children and want them around. It's weird to outsource them to strangers employed by the government while pretending it's for their own good. The government [school system] is filled with documented abuse, bullying, fights, drugs, gangs, violence and relentless socialist indoctrination. That's the 'socialization' these hosts are defending."
He also pushed back on the idea that homeschooling is some fringe modern experiment.
"Homeschooling isn't some radical new experiment. Parents teaching their own children at home is how human beings learned for thousands of years. The real experiment is the factory-model government schooling system that only exists because of 19th-century Prussian militarism and 20th-century progressive social engineering."
DeAngelis added that the government schooling experiment "has failed millions of kids" and said the podcast hosts' comments say far more about their own worldview than about the families they attacked.
"Parents choosing to raise and educate their own children isn't 'MAGA on steroids' or 'trickle-down stupidity.' It's the most natural thing in the world."
Strip away the podcast banter and the profanity, and the argument Welch and Sullivan are making is straightforward: parents should not be trusted to educate their own children. Sullivan said she doesn't "trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7." Welch called it selfish, linked it to political movements she despises, and labeled religious instruction abusive.
That position has consequences beyond a podcast segment. Across the country, homeschooling has surged in popularity, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when parents got an unfiltered look at what government schools were actually teaching. The growth of homeschooling represents families voting with their feet, choosing to take direct responsibility for their children's education rather than delegate it to institutions they no longer trust.
For some on the left, that loss of institutional control is the real problem. When Welch ties homeschooling to "MAGA on steroids" and "tradwife" culture, she is not making an educational argument. She is making a political one. The objection is not that homeschooled children perform poorly, she offers no data on that point. The objection is that homeschooling families are outside the system, beyond the reach of the approved curriculum and the credentialed class.
Sullivan's admission is the most revealing moment in the exchange. She said she would have crawled on her hands and knees to get her children to school, not because the school was excellent, but because she wanted distance from her own kids. She then projected that preference onto every other parent, declaring that anyone who feels differently must be suspect.
That is not an argument about education. It is an argument about who gets to decide what children learn and how they spend their days. And for millions of American families, the answer is clear: parents do.
DeAngelis framed the choice bluntly. The hosts, he said, are defending a government system plagued by well-documented problems while attacking families who chose a different path. Whether or not one agrees with every claim DeAngelis makes about public schools, his core point stands: calling parental involvement "weird" and "abusive" says more about the accusers than the accused.
Neither Welch nor Sullivan offered any data, research, or specific examples to support their characterization of homeschooling as harmful. The segment relied entirely on personal anecdote, cultural stereotyping, and political labeling. No homeschooling families were given a chance to respond on the show. No academic outcomes were cited. No comparison to public school performance was attempted.
It is also unclear whether Welch or Sullivan responded to DeAngelis's comments or to Fox News Digital's inquiry. The exchange, as it stands, is one-sided in that respect, the hosts made their case on their own platform, and the rebuttal came afterward through a different channel.
But the one-sidedness of the podcast segment itself is the point. Welch and Sullivan felt comfortable calling homeschooling parents selfish, suspicious, and abusive without bothering to engage a single one of them. That kind of confidence usually comes from living inside a bubble where everyone already agrees with you.
Comments like these do not exist in a vacuum. Legislative efforts to restrict or regulate homeschooling have surfaced in multiple states. The rhetoric Welch and Sullivan deployed, equating parental education choices with abuse, linking them to disfavored political movements, is exactly the kind of language that lays the groundwork for those efforts.
When public figures casually describe a lawful, constitutionally protected parenting choice as "child abuse," they are not just venting. They are normalizing the idea that the state should step in. And when they tie that choice to specific political identities, they are signaling that the real offense is not educational, it is ideological.
Millions of families homeschool for reasons that have nothing to do with politics: special needs, safety concerns, academic rigor, religious conviction, or simply the belief that they know their children better than a bureaucracy does. Dismissing all of them as "weird" and "selfish" is not commentary. It is contempt dressed up as a hot take.
Parents who take on the full-time work of teaching their own children don't need approval from a podcast. But they deserve better than being called abusers for doing the job.
