Fox News Channel host Brian Kilmeade apologized on Sunday for advocating for the execution of mentally ill homeless people in a discussion on the network last week, saying his remark was “extremely callous.”
Kilmeade’s initial comment came on a “Fox & Friends” episode Wednesday and began getting widespread circulation online over the weekend. Kilmeade, a host of the morning show, was talking with co-hosts Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt about the Aug. 22 stabbing murder of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A homeless and mentally ill man, Decarlos Brown Jr., was arrested for murder, and the case received extensive attention on Fox following the release of a security video of the stabbing.
Jones was talking on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday about public money spent on trying to help homeless people and suggested that those who didn’t accept services offered to them should be jailed.
“Or involuntary lethal injection, or something,” Kilmeade said. “Just kill ‘em.”
Earhardt interjected, “Why did it have to get to this point?” Kilmeade replied, “I will say this, we’re not voting for the right people.”
Just like JD Vance and his techbros have said.
Oh and charlie kirk. Lovable, sweet, truly good guy, charlie kirk. Had this to say:
There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Charlie Kirk, but that quote is kinda reasonable?
We should take better care of people with severe mental illnesses. Sometimes that means they should be compelled into treatment. It’s not a good thing that someone struggling with severe mental illness is just left out on the street, and many will not seek help due to those self-same illnesses. A person with schizophrenia is extremely likely to flee from help due to the intense paranoia.
It is the humane thing to do to get them off the streets and into a place where they can be taken care of. And while asylums have a pretty grotesque history, it’s one of the worst legacies of the Reagan administration that they were done away with. Massive reform was needed, and a better structure for making sure people weren’t just locked away indefinitely. More oversight and regulation, no question. But the solution we went with of just turning them all out on the street to live in tents is a huge injustice to them.
He calls them filth.
Whatever he said, that’s how he thought of them.
Filthy people with mental disorders.
That’s how morally narrow minded he was.
Did I say anywhere in that that I liked Charlie Kirk? No.
But I don’t hate dogs just because Hitler liked them. Just because someone was bad doesn’t mean they are 100% wrong on every single thing and you must always disagree with them on every single issue.
In fact, you can even come to the same end solution using completely different reasoning. It doesn’t mean the final conclusion is wrong, even if the other person had evil motivations for how they got there.
Its not reasonable by any stretch. It is coming from a place of intense selfishness: “These pointless creatures are in my way.” vs “Lets lift these fellow humans who have fallen by the wayside.”
I mean, where something is coming from isn’t necessarily tied to its reasonableness.
If I was a huge advocate for government funding for health initiatives, that’s still reasonable, even if it’s driven from a place of hating fat people.
It might make me a bad person if I believed that, but it doesn’t mean I’m pushing for bad policy.
Ending asylums began long before Regan
Regan ramped up funneling them into prisons, which is basically why the Kirk quote is disingenuous bullshit. Can supportive rehabilitative programs be the answer, even if they’re involuntary and potentially lifelong? Maybe. But that’s not what happens a lot of the time. American politicians, especially republicans, continually push to either limit funding as much as possible, end, or privatize (which only works for the more lucrative things like drug and alcohol and disability services and even those are widely considered to suffer under private equity). Of course, their solution for “end” is throw them to the wolves, which in practice means homelessness, crime, increasing drug use, etc and eventually prison when those things disrupt communities. Kirk wasn’t an idiot. He’s like Newsom, he knew the most likely place these people end up is prison and he didn’t care bc he saw them as subhuman scum
The fact of the matter is treating serious and persistent mental illness is not lucrative. In fact it is a financial sink if you choose a rehabilitative model, and even an asylum model, which is generally more cost efficient (but can be done with some dignity) is still quite expensive.
The fucked up part is that prisons are quite expensive too but less so and as a result are quite lucrative to their owners. They also are culturally built into this sense of redemptive justice, as if punishment of the offender actually does something to bring peace to the offended besides deluding them that the chaotic and violent world won’t wrong them again because one unjust act has been forcibly atoned without creating any sense of remorse before returning the person back to society (just exposing them to one of the most traumatizing and violent environments for years or decades with no support, what could go wrong?).
So we ignore mountains of evidence that rehabilitation oriented programming is overall more successful because it’s not perfect, someone will still get murdered and assaulted! And they won’t get horribly punished! And we stick with our terrible system that objectively results in much more people getting murdered and assaulted
Just to add, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act repealed Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act - effectively defunding community based health organizations that would support those tossed out of institutions and onto the street. Reagan and Republicans more generally just didn’t give a shit what happened to these people as long as it didn’t cost them any money and that is largely why the homeless situation is where it is today.
It also should not be forgotten that shortly after this, Rush Limbaugh began a decades-long campaign against the homeless on his radio show, constantly demonizing them and attempting to paint homelessness as a choice made exclusively by addicts and the societally worthless.
Very good point, I wasn’t aware of how that prisons are more profitable than asylums. It makes it seem like the prison companies and republicans might have had some motives in common to push for ending asylums. Prison companies obviously would want more
slavesprisoners to increase profit. Republicans would see it as a built in source of voter suppression in certain urban generally left leaning areas since prisoners either can’t vote or vote in different more generally rural areas. This goes to show that economic and political interests can have a big effect on issues like this that seem like more social issues at first glance.Yes such a tragedy we will be without kirk’s contributions to society, he was such a uh, uh, something something.
This kilmeade guy is a real pos, these are just the first others they want to Target, there is a very strong backlash against the homeless in blue and red States so they want to set the precedent on this.
There is no bottom or end to this though. The ones supporting such things will be subjected to it themselves in time. And not as much time as one might think.
Straight into the abyss, without strong opposition leadership we are going full Nazi here you better believe it.
Just a reminder that Reagan closed all the mental institutions.
This not only put the mentally ill on the street with no treatment available, but it made it so that clearly narcissistic, sociopathic rich people would never, ever see the inside of a mental facility. You know, for planning and advocating mass murder openly on air. Stuff like that.