Fox News host apologises for saying mentally ill homeless people should be killed

4 hours ago 3

Washington: A Fox News anchor has apologised for saying mentally ill homeless people should be killed by lethal injection amid growing concerns about hatred and violence in public discourse on both mainstream media and social media in the US.

Brian Kilmeade, a host of the morning show Fox & Friends on the top-rated cable news network, made the remarks while discussing the stabbing murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina last month. A 34-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness and criminality, Decarlos Brown, has been charged.

In the on-air exchange, Kilmeade’s co-host Lawrence Jones argued that governments had spent billions of dollars on mental health programs, but many homeless and mentally ill people did not want to avail themselves of help.

“You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources we’re going to give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail,” Jones said.

Kilmeade added: “Or involuntary lethal injection, or something, just kill them.”

The comments were made on Wednesday by the same hosts who would interview President Donald Trump on Friday, following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. On Sunday, Kilmeade apologised on air for what he described as an extremely callous remark.

“In the morning, we were discussing the murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, and how to stop these kinds of attacks by homeless mentally ill assailants – including institutionalising or jailing such people so they cannot attack again,” he said.

“Now, during that discussion, I wrongly said they should get lethal injections. I apologise for that extremely callous remark. I’m 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.”

Kilmeade made his comments as social and mainstream media come under the spotlight for their contributions to toxic public discourse in the US, following Kirk’s assassination at a university in Utah.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Trump blamed the left for escalating violence and said radicals on the right were often justified in their cause because they simply opposed crime.

‘I couldn’t care less’

Asked what could be done to fix the problem of radicalisation and bring people together, Trump said: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.

“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in, we don’t want you burning our shopping centres, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street’.

“The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy – although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”

Last week, cable news network MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd for saying about the Kirk assassination that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which ultimately lead to hateful actions”.

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