Nora Webb, Publisher
A note from the author: In the piece below, I use the word “homeless” deliberately. The softer, currently popular term “unhoused” reduces people to their relationship with a commodity, a thing you can rent or own, as if the absence is just a neutral condition. By that logic, I’m unLexus’d, unLabubu’d, and unLouboutin’d. But a home is more than a commodity: it’s about community. Homelessness is therefore a community failure; it is an indictment of systems that have not met their obligations of care. I insist on centering that failure.
On Wednesday, September 10th, Brian Kilmeade, one of the Fox & Friends hosts, suggested on air that mentally ill homeless people who “refuse help” should be subject to “involuntary lethal injection, or something…just kill ‘em.” For context, Kilmeade’s remarks followed the tragic stabbing of a Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, allegedly committed by a homeless man whose family said he’d been diagnosed with “schizophrenia and suffered hallucinations and paranoia.”
His colleagues, Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt, did not push back; they just kept moving, turning it into an issue of North Carolina politics. By Saturday, the 13th, the clip with Kilmeade’s words went viral, and outrage was spiking online; on Sunday, the 14th, he apologized. He said his words were “extremely callous.” Monday evening, Minneapolis was reeling from two mass shootings at homeless encampments that left more than a dozen wounded, five with life-threatening injuries.
The sequence is chilling; Kilmeade’s words helped create the atmosphere in which these shootings occurred. When a national news host imagines “just killing” the homeless, he reinforces the idea that their lives are expendable. We cannot separate the violence in his language from the violence in Minneapolis. Even now, Minneapolis has responded by clearing one of the sites, citing “public health and safety.” That’s not protection. That’s displacement, and it’s in line with Trump’s executive order, which bureaucratizes the same logic: it treats homelessness as a disorderly problem in need of removal.
And if we’re thinking about punitive action, the backlash to Kilmeade was loud online, but his job is secure. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for his comments on Charlie Kirk. ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel for his comments on Kirk’s alleged killer; Disney just announced last night he will return this evening, Tuesday the 23rd. Kilmeade, however, has faced nothing beyond the requisite bland, network-mandated on-air apology. Given the hot button I’ve just slammed my hand onto, let me be clear: while I fundamentally disagree with Charlie Kirk, disagreement is not a death sentence. He did not deserve to die, and he certainly did not deserve a violent, horrifying death. Broadly across the political sphere, his death has been justly condemned. Why can’t we summon the same urgency to condemn violence against the most vulnerable in our communities? This double standard is hypocritical, and it reveals what lives our society treats as worthy of protection.
I don’t study politics, but I do work with rhetoric, and rhetoricians remind us that language is never neutral. James Berlin once described rhetoric as “the uses of language in the play of power.” Cheryl Glenn extended that insight, arguing that rhetoric always inscribes the dynamics of power by indicating “who may speak, who may listen, and what may be said.” And Jay Dolmage has written that “to care about the body is to care about how we make meaning.” His words feel prescient here: Kilmeade’s comment and Trump’s executive order both reveal what happens when bodies are not cared for: when rhetoric renders some lives expendable. To dismiss the homeless rhetorically is also to dismiss their bodies, to mark them as outside the circle of care and meaning. Value and worth are not finite resources. You can mourn the tragic, senseless death of a Ukrainian refugee without reinforcing an ideology that the lives of the homeless are negligible.
There’s another path. Cities can invest in permanent housing, accessible mental-health care, addiction treatment, and harm-reduction measures like sanctioned safe spaces. Culturally, we must recognize that there is danger in allowing language that dehumanizes people to pass as just another hot take. Kilmeade’s comment wasn’t just, as he noted, “extremely callous.” It was an act of dehumanization, and Minneapolis bore the cost. If our outrage is sharper at those who speak the truth about political actors’ harmful language than at those who are calling for executions, then our compass is broken.
I hope the perpetrators of the Minneapolis shootings are caught and held fully accountable. I hope Kilmeade faces more than a ripple of bad headlines and social media’s vitriol, because free speech has limits. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that even the Ku Klux Klan leader who gave a televised speech threatening “revengeance” could not be convicted unless his words were both intended and likely to spark immediate illegal action. That test still governs today. When a national news host on a show with an average of 1.6 million viewers fantasizes about killing the homeless on air, that’s complicity, and that’s courting violence. Until we hold that complicity accountable, until violent words that dehumanize carry real consequences, we will keep paving the way for more tragedy.
THE CAROLINIAN 