It was just another normal morning on Fox & Friends—coffee mugs, smiles, and a light rail murder—when co-host Brian Kilmeade unveiled his newest, boldest idea yet for tackling America’s homelessness crisis: kill them.
The remark landed during a September 10 segment about the killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a homeless man with schizophrenia in North Carolina. Co-host Lawrence Jones had been inching toward the usual Fox News policy sweet spot—mandatory confinement and jailing—when Kilmeade, apparently tired of baby steps, blurted out his now-viral suggestion: “Or involuntary lethal injection … or something. Just kill ‘em.”
Ainsley Earhardt, sipping her coffee as if nothing had happened, replied: “Yeah, Brian, why did it have to get to this point?”—a question viewers might have asked about the broadcast itself.
Kilmeade then pivoted to politics, scolding cities for electing the wrong people and exhorting North Carolinians to “wake up” and vote Republican in 2026, apparently believing that nothing drives home a get-out-the-vote message quite like advocating extrajudicial killings on breakfast television.
Reaction: America’s Breakfast Show Goes Full Death Panel
The internet’s reaction was swift and brutal:
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Rep. Don Beyer tweeted, “Nobody deserves to be murdered by the government for mental illness or poverty,” reminding Americans that over a million children and tens of thousands of veterans are in the homeless population Kilmeade proposed eradicating.
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Activist Shannon Watts contrasted Kilmeade’s free pass with MSNBC firing Matthew Dowd for comparatively tame remarks, calling it “moral asymmetry” and warning that this normalizes extremist rhetoric.
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Even conservative publisher Sarah Longwell could only muster “My God. What is happening?”—a sentence that may become the epitaph for cable news.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom, no stranger to criticism over his own homelessness policies, chose the Bible: Proverbs 21:13—“Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered”—which in context reads less like scripture and more like a subtweet.
In one segment, Fox & Friends achieved what generations of demagogues could only dream of: rebranding murder as a municipal policy option before the first commercial break. That Kilmeade’s co-hosts responded with polite curiosity rather than horror underscores how far the Overton window has shifted.
The satire practically writes itself: a network that spent a decade warning about imaginary “death panels” now airs an actual death-panel proposal over bagels. The segment’s whiplash move from “compassion” to “involuntary lethal injection” would be too on-the-nose for a parody script—yet here it was, live at 8:30 a.m.
