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.”
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.
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.
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.