"Just Kill Them"

Is Brian Kilmeade's counsel a signal of the banality of cruelty in America?

One word stood out in Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade’s response to DeCarlos Brown Jr’s brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska. One little word made my blood boil and my spine chill. That one little word is them. Kilmeade and his co-hosts had broadened their discussion from the murder of the young Ukrainian refugee Zarutska by the mentally-ill, homeless Brown to mentally-ill homeless people in general.

Co-host Lawrence Jones had proposed that such people should be forced to accept treatment. Apparently, that was insufficient for Kilmeade, who quickly upped the ante: “Or, involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them,” he deadpanned, with not the slightest hint of sarcasm.

Setting aside for the moment one’s views on capital punishment in general, the statement should shock and offend anyone. Kilmeade did not call for the eye-for-an-eye version of equitable punishment. His statement did more than call for Brown’s death as punishment for the sick man’s crime. No, Kilmeade advocated for genocide; he suggested that an entire class of human beings—“them,” people with mental illnesses—should be eliminated.

Their elimination would not be based on capital crimes committed by each and every person in that category. Instead, every mentally-ill homeless person would be eliminated because of something bad they might do. In the movie Minority Report, “precogs” are able to foresee the future, so when they identify individuals who will commit major crimes, those individuals face the justice system based on what they would do if not removed from society. If that scenario is chilling, Kilmeade’s proposed solution to the “problems” that might be caused by mentally homeless people is barbaric. “Just kill them.”

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the reason for Kilmeade’s heartless suggestion is that he truly wants to prevent more tragedies like the cruel murder of young Ms. Zarutska. But eliminating an entire subset of human beings would be—excuse the crude-but-appropriate term—overkill. If Kilmeade’s suggestion were ever implemented—God forbid—then how far could that doctrine be stretched? A gay person committed murder, so all gay persons should be killed? A Native American Indian committed murder, so all Indians should be killed? A conservative white male committed murder, so all conservative white males should be killed?

It's almost beyond imagination that our nation—governed as a constitutional, democratically elected republic full of mostly decent people—would ever descend into such a heartless society. But just a decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine that we’d ever hear a host of one of the nation’s most-watched news commentary programs suggest that the answer to the problem of mentally-ill homeless persons is to “just kill them.”