Fox & Friends Hosts: If They Refuse Psychiatric Treatment, "Just kill 'em" "Yeah"

Jones, Earhardt, and many others should apologize besides Kilmeade, as the underlying misinformation continues on

On September 12, a number of readers sent me a September 10 clip of the popular cable news show “Fox & Friends”, wherein hosts Brian Kilmeade, Lawrence Jones, and Ainsley Earhardt talked about homeless people and people with mental illness. Kilmeade proposed giving “involuntary lethal injection” to those who refused other involuntary treatments. “Just kill ‘em,” Kilmeade said. Jones and Earhardt each responded, “Yeah.”

Fox News cut that section of the conversation out of the official online Fox & Friends video clip feed. At that time, I found only a Media Matters for America clip of the exchange in question, a YouTube post of the clip with about 250 views, and a few critical articles from relatively little-known sources.

I lost sleep that night. I didn’t know how to comment. I decided to wait for a day or two.

By Sunday, September 14, the video clip had gone viral and many major news outlets had reported on it admonishingly, such as this piece from The Guardian. Fox posted an apology from Kilmeade.

I breathed a sigh of relief—a lot of people had noticed, and cared.

But my sense of relief was brief, and shallow.

After all, it’s a now-familiar sequence, isn’t it? Outrageous, horrific comments in a public venue. Viral social media anger. Righteous, reprimanding news coverage. A sincere or fatuous apology. Maybe a firing, maybe not. But does anything really get learned, does anything truly change? Or is all of this just becoming some sort of ritualized misinformation-age, short-term, collective self-purging?

As I pondered this particular situation more, I started to see all too clearly what was still going largely uncriticized, and largely unnoticed: The mountain of false beliefs that underlay and pushed up such comments from Kilmeade and coaxed Jones and Earhardt to blithely go along with them.

The whole segment from Fox & Friends, which Salon’s article included a link to, was a discussion about the killing of Iryna Zarutska on a subway train—stabbed apparently by Decarlos Brown, a man with fourteen prior criminal convictions who’d spent at least five years in jail, who’d recently become homeless and, according to family members, had also recently been incarcerated in a psychiatric ward and labeled with schizophrenia.

Co-host Lawrence Jones then went on a tirade about homeless people more generally, and this is the exchange that resulted:

[view this clip here]

LAWRENCE JONES: We don't have to — we feel so compassionate because you see the mental health crisis happening.

AINSLEY EARHARDT: You just get — exactly.

JONES: But it's not our job — we shouldn't have to live in fear while they figure out what is going on right there.

EARHARDT: Right, right.

JONES: Put him in a mental institution, put him in a jail, and you guys figure it out. But people having to duck and dive on the trains and the buses, walking through the street, this is one case, but this is happening all across the country, and it's not a money issue. They have given billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to take the programs, a lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary. You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you and — or you decide that you are going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now.

BRIAN KILMEADE: Or involuntary lethal injection.

JONES: Yeah.

KILMEADE : Or something. Just kill ‘em.

EARHARDT: Yeah. Brian, why did it have to get to this point?

KILMEADE: Right, I would say this, we are not voting for the right people. In North Carolina, wake up. You can't put — keep putting these people in power….

It took four days for Fox/Kilmeade to issue an apology, and then only after news media across America were attacking Kilmeade. And Kilmeade’s apology, in an exchange with Jones on Fox & Friends, was perfunctory:

[view this clip here]

KILMEADE: [W]e 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 institutionalizing or jailing such people so they cannot attack again. Now during that discussion, I wrongly said they should get lethal injection. I apologize 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. Lawrence, back to you.

So, Kilmeade clarified that he only meant to say that some people who are unhoused and labeled with mental illnesses should be killed off. And while doing so, he completely misrepresented the context in which he’d made the remarks. Basically, Kilmeade ducked responsibility and evaded sincere self-reflection, correction, and apology by acting like a husband who yells at his wife when she’s running a bit slow for a dinner date, and then “apologizes” to her with, “I’m sorry I yelled at you when you were so horribly threatening me.” But she never had threatened him—nothing of the kind.

Kilmeade’s original remarks were actually in response to Jones’ speech about homeless people and mental illness more generally, and specifically Jones’ proposal to involuntarily institutionalize or jail anyone who declines the “help” the state offers them. It was then that Kilmeade suggested “involuntary lethal injection… just kill ‘em” as another approach.

Both Jones and Earhardt casually assented, and continued on as if summary execution were indeed the obvious, next rational step in involuntary psychiatric treatment protocols. “Right,” responded Earhardt. “But Brian why did it have to get to this point?”

And indeed, how DID it get to this point?

[Direct link to this post.]

It has gotten to this point because of the uninformed views and unquestioning attitudes of too many news reporters, politicians, and commentators around the country like these Fox & Friends co-hosts. And because of a growing, widespread willingness in our society to promote blatantly violent attitudes towards others—without stopping even briefly to truly question one’s own level of understanding.

Consider Jones’ tirade leading up to Kilmeade’s remark.

Jones said that no one should have to deal with “fear” or having to “duck and dive on the trains and the buses, walking through the street.” Basically, Jones suggested that a well-to-do person being inconvenienced while walking about town is justification enough to institutionalize or jail people who are poor and stuck living on the street.

Jones said that billions of dollars have been “given” to “help” homeless people with mental disorders, while many people refuse that help and problems remain. Yet Jones never asked why all of this mental health “help” has not solved homelessness, or why so many homeless people refuse these forms of “help.” But as I describe at length in Your Consent Is Not Required, “mental health help” for people who are unhoused or at risk of homelessness too often means little more than coercive interventions such as psychiatric incarceration and forced drugging followed by residency in coercive and/or chaotic environments such as shelters, congregate care facilities, hazardous group homes or nursing homes run by corporations or profiteering private equity firms, low-end, bedbug-infested motel rooms, and so on. This part of the publicly-funded mental health industry—much of it embedded in principles of policing, force, and incarceration—is often focused more on helping its owners and operators than on providing what the patients themselves find helpful.

Jones suggested forced psychiatric institutionalization or jail as if they were reasonable solutions to homelessness. But America is already the most carceral nation on the planet, with the highest per capita rates of people in prisons and among the highest rates of psychiatric detentions—does it appear to be helping?

Indeed, in the very murder case the Fox co-hosts were discussing earlier, they themselves noted that the perpetrator had been in jail for years and had been psychiatrically institutionalized at least once—did it help? Or did the man’s experiences of carceral violence quite possibly worsen his state of mind and opportunities to live a better life, rather than improve them, as is known often happens? Is it not worth at least asking some questions about this?

All the while, at no point did Jones mention housing affordability—even though abundant evidence shows U.S. homelessness is usually worst in cities where rents and housing costs are the highest relative to local standards of living. How can anyone think that a discussion about solving homelessness among people with little money is remotely sensible when housing affordability is never mentioned?

Jones packed his incorrect, misguided, and misleading views on all of these issues into his one rapid-fire rant, and finally provided his iron-clad, only-possible-option solution: Just give them psychiatric incarceration or jail. “You can't give them a choice,” he said.

So essentially, Jones teed Kilmeade (and the entire audience) up, like a pro-gun advocate presents a false-dichotomy scenario to a hopeful pacifist: “You have a choice of either shoot or let an innocent newborn baby be viciously torn apart by a vile monster, and there is absolutely no other possible option available—so, do you shoot??”

If we were to believe and go along with everything that Jones said, it might well seem that the only possible solutions would be locking up all homeless people forever or executing them. And if you’re perfectly comfortable doing that—comfortable with violently dehumanizing others while utterly failing to consider that you might be misinformed or misunderstanding or self-centered or too unquestioning—then murder can also look like a “reasonable” solution.

This is why, as much as I’m glad to see it, Kilmeade’s apology and the critical news coverage ultimately mean relatively little. In many ways, Jones, Earhardt, Fox, and reporters at a hundred other major news outlets helped construct and sanction the whole skewed public narrative underlying Kilmeade’s grotesque statement—and the fact that none of those people have apologized, or have even seen any need to apologize and issue correctives, is a more dire warning of where our culture seems to be headed.

As I’m finishing writing this on September 15, news is rolling in of a series of violent assaults on unhoused people in Toronto, including one dead.

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