A climate
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade apologized on Sunday for saying days earlier that people who are experiencing homelessness and mental illnesses should be executed – remarks that prompted calls for him to be fired.
The host said his comments on Wednesday were “extremely callous”.
Kilmeade’s about-face came amid a climate in which people across the US are either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on commentary that is critical about Turning Point USA’s executive director, Charlie Kirk, who was shot to death at an event in Utah on Wednesday.
Mere hours before the conservative political activist was killed, while on the rightwing Fox News program Fox & Friends, Kilmeade and two other hosts were discussing the killing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was fatally stabbed on a commuter train in North Carolina in August.
The guy who killed her is said to have schizophrenia as well as a long history of criminal arrests.
During the Fox and Friends appearance on Wednesday discussing Zarutska’s death, co-host Lawrence Jones said unhoused people with mental illness should either accept the publicly funded programs to help in their situation or be jailed. “Involuntary lethal injection or something,” Kilmeade responded to Jones. “Just kill ’em.”
Well, that’s where chatting on Fox News gets you. They compete to be Most Offensive, so once in a blue moon it catches up with them.
Meanwhile, it’s hate speech to quote Charlie Kirk’s own words with no comment.
But the foxes don’t get fired, alas. Unlike people who publish remarks critical of Charles Kirk. Where’s Samson? (If that question is obscure, see Judges 15.4.) Virtually the whole crew at Fox should have their pants set afire. I have often wondered whether they ever reflect on the fact they lie for a living, and what it is doing to them. But I doubt that they do. After all, they are being “professional” and making large amounts of money, and are therefore “successful”, and being “successful” is the only important thing in the contemporary world.