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 man charged with killing Zarutska at random in Charlotte had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had 14 prior criminal arrests. Surveillance video of the Zarutska’s killing went viral online.
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.”
Kilmeade faced widespread backlash for his comments. Among those to respond was California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who on social media posted a biblical verse reading: “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.”
On Sunday morning, during an appearance with Jones on Fox & Friends Weekends, Kilmeade apologized for his idea of killing those who are unhoused and mentally ill.
“I wrongly said they should get lethal injections” on Wednesday, Kilmeade said. “I apologize for that extremely callous remark. I am obviously aware that not all mentally ill, homeless people act as the perpetrator did in North Carolina – and that so many homeless people deserve our empathy and compassion.”
Unlike others who were deemed to have made offensive comments about Kirk’s death, Kilmeade remained employed by Fox News.
His professional fate struck a sharp contrast with Dowd, a veteran political analyst fired by MSNBC for suggesting on air that Kirk’s far-right rhetoric may have contributed to the violence that killed him.
“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said. “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thats you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”
The network and Dowd each separately issued apologies. But in a Substack article published on Friday, Dowd said he had been victimized by a “rightwing media mob” and that words he spoke before knowing Kirk had been the target of a shooting were misconstrued.
“Kilmeade is advocating for extrajudicial killings on FOX, yet Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC [for] pointing out Charlie Kirk’s dangerous rhetoric,” author Shannon Watts said on X. “This moral asymmetry in the media and online is destroying democracy.”
Zarutska’s killing has become an inflection point for Republicans, who are blaming Democratic policies in certain US cities for such crimes.
Studies show that people experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators. And other studies have shown that mental illness is not a predictor of future violence.
