If satire is dead, Brian Kilmeade personally strangled it on live television when he suggested, with all the seriousness of a man discussing football stats, that unhoused people with mental illness should receive “involuntary lethal injections.” His actual phrasing—“just kill ’em”—landed with the thud of a guillotine blade hitting the stage floor of Fox & Friends.
Now, on September 14, we are told he apologized. He looked into the camera, voice trembling with the sort of emotion you reserve for when you realize the thing you’ve said could actually dent ad revenue, and admitted that his comments were “extremely callous.” Translation: the sponsors freaked out, Gavin Newsom tweeted, and the network’s PR team locked him in a room with a lawyer until he agreed to cry on cue.
And yet—Kilmeade’s little moment wasn’t just another Fox gaffe. It was a neon billboard advertising what happens when culture-war logic metastasizes into everyday speech: you stop seeing people as people. You start treating vulnerable lives like punchlines. You confuse outrage for analysis, cruelty for common sense, and then one day you wake up and suggest mass euthanasia between weather segments.
How We Got Here: The Outrage Economy
This whole mess began when Kilmeade and his co-hosts were discussing the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee murdered in Charlotte on August 22. The tragedy should have prompted a sober conversation about public safety, housing, and support systems. Instead, Kilmeade leapt to the rhetorical equivalent of a war crime: “If you’re mentally ill and homeless, we should just kill ’em.”
That wasn’t an off-the-cuff slip like saying “good morning” at midnight. That was the endgame of an outrage economy where dehumanization is the currency. Every day, Fox News turns pain into spectacle: crime reports into political ammo, suffering into clickbait, marginalized people into villains. The escalation treadmill demands that you keep topping yesterday’s cruelty. And when “round up the migrants” starts to feel passé, what’s left? “Just kill ’em.”
The Non-Apology Apology
When the backlash arrived—advocates, governors, basic human beings with functioning moral compasses—Fox scrambled. Kilmeade stared into the camera with the energy of a man caught stealing office pens and muttered that his comment was “extremely callous.”
Extremely callous? That’s what you say when you forget to RSVP to a wedding. That’s not what you say after casually suggesting the state execute people for the crime of being poor and ill.
The apology wasn’t about ethics. It was about optics. Fox knows their audience won’t punish cruelty, but advertisers might. This wasn’t conscience—it was capitalism.
The Timing Couldn’t Be Worse
The apology also came amid a national fever pitch. Just four days earlier, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a Utah rally. Regardless of how you feel about Kirk, his death sparked bipartisan panic about political rhetoric fueling violence. Leaders across the aisle were literally begging the public to cool it.
And into that fragile moment, Kilmeade casually suggested mass killings of the mentally ill. It was like tossing a lit match onto a gas leak while everyone was still sweeping up the shards of glass from the last explosion.
Dehumanization as Broadcast Policy
The real problem here isn’t Kilmeade’s loose lips—it’s that his comment made sense in the Fox ecosystem. For years, the network has treated unhoused people as props in their urban doom porn. Every segment about cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles leans on the same tropes: tents, needles, mental illness, crime. The message is clear: these people aren’t neighbors, they’re threats.
And once you frame people as threats, the solution naturally escalates. First it’s sweeps. Then it’s arrests. Then it’s forced treatment. And when you’ve wrung out all the mid-tier cruelty, what’s left but the final solution? Kilmeade didn’t invent the logic. He just skipped to the last page of the script.
Culture War vs. Reality
What makes this spectacle so poisonous is that it drags real public safety debates into the swamp of culture-war theater. The murder of Iryna Zarutska deserves a policy response rooted in facts: better housing programs, mental health resources, smarter policing. Instead, it got folded into a screaming match about who loves the unhoused too much and who wants to exterminate them quickly enough.
This isn’t policy—it’s performance. And in America, performance often sets policy. When enough talking heads normalize cruelty, politicians follow suit. And suddenly, real people are paying the price for someone’s “just kidding” broadcast banter.
The History of Throwaway People
Kilmeade’s remark felt shocking, but it isn’t new. America has always had categories of “throwaway” people.
- In the 19th century, we warehoused the mentally ill in asylums, out of sight, out of mind.
- In the 20th century, we sterilized people deemed “unfit to reproduce.”
- In the 21st century, we cut funding for housing and mental health, leaving millions on the streets.
Every generation invents new euphemisms for cruelty. Kilmeade just dropped the euphemism and said the quiet part.
The Kill ’Em Logic Everywhere Else
The worst part is how interchangeable this rhetoric is across Fox’s culture-war carousel. Swap in immigrants, swap in trans kids, swap in protesters, and the formula’s the same: dehumanize, escalate, dispose.
- Migrants “invading”? Deploy the military.
- Protesters “rioting”? Run them over.
- Trans teens? Ban them from sports, health care, existence.
- Homeless people? Kill ’em.
It’s all the same slope, just greased with different flavors of fear.
Kilmeade’s Role as Court Jester
Kilmeade has always played the role of Fox’s goofy uncle, the co-anchor who says the silly thing so the other hosts can laugh. But the problem with playing the clown in a propaganda machine is that sometimes your “jokes” are policy trial balloons. One day you’re chuckling about shark attacks, the next you’re floating genocide as a breakfast-table zinger.
Fox gets to shrug it off as “Brian being Brian,” while their audience internalizes the sentiment as common sense. That plausible deniability is how dehumanization sneaks into the bloodstream.
The Danger of Applause
The truly frightening part? Plenty of viewers agreed with him. If you scroll through comment sections and forums, you’ll see support: “Finally someone said it,” “They’re ruining our cities,” “It’s common sense.”
That’s the danger of putting cruelty on-air. Once it’s said, it’s legitimized. Once it’s legitimized, it spreads. Once it spreads, it becomes a proposal at a city council meeting.
Kilmeade apologized, but the idea is already out there, bouncing around Facebook groups, waiting for a less clumsy messenger to polish it into a “serious” policy pitch.
The Cynicism of Fox
At the end of the day, Fox thrives on this cycle. Outrage → backlash → apology → ratings spike. Every scandal is just another reminder to viewers that Fox is “saying what the woke left won’t let you say.” Kilmeade’s apology, far from defusing the situation, only feeds the narrative that conservatives are persecuted truth-tellers.
The machine wins either way: cruelty or contrition, both keep the spotlight.
Summary of Fox’s Latest Human Casualty
Brian Kilmeade’s on-air “just kill ’em” remark about unhoused people with mental illness wasn’t just a gaffe—it was the logical endpoint of Fox’s dehumanization playbook. His apology, framed as regret for being “extremely callous,” was about optics, not morality. Coming amid national panic over political violence, the comment underscored how broadcast outrage warps real policy debates, turning human suffering into spectacle. It fits a long American pattern of treating vulnerable people as disposable, and the backlash doesn’t erase the fact that millions heard it, nodded, and agreed. Kilmeade may have walked it back, but Fox News already ensured the idea rolled downhill.