We Need to Talk About Brian

     So, Brian Kilmeade wants to execute all the homeless.

     It's impossible to imagine people like Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley saying something that astoundingly heartless. But that's emblematic and perfectly illustrative of the depths to which television discourse has sunk in the Age of Trump.

    On September 10th, the day Charlie Kirk was shot, Kilmeade was on Fox and Frauds, Pete Hegseth's old perch, and said, “Or involuntary lethal injection… or something. Just kill ‘em.” They were discussing the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian woman who had been senselessly murdered by a homeless man who'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

     It inspired a firestorm on social media, as well it should. It was so great, that Fox's brass strong-armed Kilmeade into issuing a fake apology (which is being accepted at face value by the usually supine MSM). But what everyone seems to be missing is the fact that Kilmeade's co-hosts, Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt, acted as if Kilmeade hadn't said anything. No condemnation, no correction, nothing. They could have taken that opportunity to remind Kilmeade that murder is, you know, illegal and that his comment was astoundingly cruel.

     But they chose not to do that. Either they're cowards  or they're onboard with Kilmeade's suggestion for genocide.

     Kilmeade never should have been given the chance to save his job by issuing a brief, bullshit apology. He should have been fired on the spot. But they, too, are cowards. Or maybe it was greed. We all know corporate entities first look to the their bottom line in time like this. Ad revenue, market share. That's what's important. Then they inevitably mask their fiscal damage control as morality and spout bullshit about such comments "not being consistent with our values", blah blah blah.

     Kilmeade should be out of a job right now and making preparations for doing a podcast out of his mud room. And Jones and Earhardt should've been reprimanded, at least privately, about their complicity.

     Kilmeade's remarks about the homeless, especially the mentally disturbed, is alarmingly consistent with Nazi Germany's attitude toward their own mentally impaired. Nazi Germany, obsessed with purifying the Aryan race of all "impure elements", rounded up their mentally, emotionally and physically-impaired citizens. They even had a word for them: "eaters". Then they stuffed them into trucks and gassed them to death using exhaust fumes. That first wave of the Holocaust was the T4 program.

     And in his zeal to execute all the mentally impaired homeless, he never seemed to have given a single thought to the question, "How do you determine who's mentally ill or not?" There are different gradations of mental instability, after all. Some is organic, some self-inflicted (drug and alcohol abuse), some are environmental. Some can still function in society, some cannot.

     But no one deserves to be homeless and no one certainly should be executed by sneaky lethal injection. How is injecting poison into their bodies better than setting them on fire or gassing them in a truck?

      I live in Phoenix, a city that has a homeless problem exceeded perhaps only by San Francisco. Metropolitan Phoenix has, as of the 2020 census, a population of roughly 5.2 million people. Public officials dismiss the homeless problem by saying "only" 1% of the city's population is homeless. That means, if that statistic holds true, there are over 50,000 homeless people wandering the streets of Phoenix. That's enough to populate a small city.

     As I've been living here for nearly a year and a half, I've had quite a few interactions with the homeless. I try to be a good liberal and help some of them out because I've been homeless twice before, not including my current situation. And, yes, you could say that about half of the homeless are out of their minds. Some get hooked on fentanyl or some other drug. Some of them walk down the street by themselves pumping their fists and screaming at no one in particular.  And, yes, some of them can be violent.

     And people often become homeless through no fault of their own. As heartless as Massachusetts is with its housing laws, even they can't hold a candle to Arizona. In Massachusetts, evictions are carried out by constables or sheriffs. In Arizona, property owners can call in the police department, even though eviction is a civil and not a criminal matter. 

     Several homeless people here told me their landlord gouged them on their rent. Others told me their significant other had passed away (something with which I can perfectly sympathize). Again, many of these people are homeless through no fault of their own. Who in their right mind would want to live on the streets of a city where the summer temperatures often exceed 115 degrees and the sidewalks, according to NASA, reach 160?

     Living in an environment like that, with an entire city and state government letting you fall through the cracks, will take a relentless sledge hammer to your mental and emotional well-being.

     But sociopaths like Brian Kilmeade don't consider these things. And Fox's willingness to keep him on the payroll proves they're part of the problem.