Outside the Beltway

Fox New Host: Involunatarily Execute Mentally Ill Homeless People

Yes it was said. No the context doesn't make it better.

Matt Bernius · Saturday, September 13, 2025 · 3 comments

One of the points I have seen a subset of “conservative” “people” repeating on Xitter in the wake of the Kirk assassination is summed up in this Xeet: “Most leftists are so in a bubble that they don’t understand that [Charlie Kirk’s] positions are extremely moderate views on the right.” This is the source blue check account for it. I’m including the link to show my work. I ask you to trust me and not click it and give that account more engagement. Allow me to explain why.

Social media companies optimize their display algorithms to screen for and promote content that causes high engagement. Systems tend to optimize towards the easiest metrics to measure, which is why engagement was interpreted as clicks for “read mode” (as long as “read more” kept visitors on the platform) and responses (including emoji reactions, repostings, and other feedback).

Highly emotionally charged posts got more engagement. And someone being wrong on the internet got even more engagement. Basically, conflict leads to high engagement. High engagement leads to cash(?) for the platforms. Or at a minimum, people staying longer on that social media site.

Elon Musk had the great idea then of reworking Twitter’s Blue Check program. On Twitter, the mark was assigned by the company to indicate someone was (generally) who they said they were and a person of some nebulous significance.¹

In the brave new world of Xtter, the Blue Check was reworked into a pay-to-play program. For the price of somewhere between $7 and $8 a month, you could pay for a blue check and have your Xeets boosted to the top of most reply chains. You have to “promise” you are who you say you are, and you’re in no way, not possibly a bot (or if you were, you had to opt-in to identifying your account as a bot/LLM account). Better still, Xtter would pay people if their Xeets topped a nebulous engagement threshold.

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, everything. Because we’re living in the dumbest timeline.

As a general rule, anyone willing to pay $8 a month to have their takes seen is likely to have the worst takes. I write that as someone who has bad takes, but is smart enough not to try to pay a platform to promote them in hopes of profit through engagement.² Elon’s model is the basis of every MLM and “we’ll turn you into a model/actor/recording artist” scam.

But there are other consequences to this sort of “pay $8 to have my intentionally triggering takes promoted to the world. If I were a hostile foreign power, I’d definitely shell out $96/year to have a blue check account connected to an LLM or staffed by a low-wage worker and used to post the most awful rage-inducing content designed to drive wedges between Americans. I am hard-pressed to think of information warfare tactics with a higher ROI–especially as reporting on what nuts are saying on social media (and making one or two nuts stand in for an entire political “side”) is low-hanging fruit for other news outlets.

This is my way of saying, don’t pay attention to randos in the replies on Xtter (or even making direct posts) as there is a significantly better than 0% chance that they may not be human, or American, or posting for any other reason that to either (a) make you mad for profit or (b) is running a psyop to convince you that the other side (or at least isn’t part of your group) is a raving lunitic or wants to cancel or kill you and therefore, by transitive properties, anyone espousing a slightly similar viewpoint feels the same way.

Neither is a good look.

That was something I’ve wanted to write out for a while, and now seemed like a good time. It also leads me to: if you are going to pay attention to people saying awful shit to their audiences, make sure they are professionals.

That leads me to Brian Kilmeade’s comments from today’s Fox and Friends:

I read that summary and couldn’t believe someone would say that. So I listened to the video. And he said that. My first question was, “is this a deep fake?” Aaron Rupar is a pretty reputable source in terms of posting clips from programs, so that didn’t seem really possible. However, editing can make an innocuous statement sometimes sound bad.

While this wasn’t an innocuous statement to begin with, maybe broader context would improve it. NOPE!The longer version of the clip makes it worse.

Yes, a homeless man committed a terrible crime and is currently moving through the criminal legal system.

Additionally, our country does, in fact, have a huge mental health problem that both sides of the political spectrum have contributed to in many different ways. We also have a set of American values, particularly regarding individual liberty and self-determination, which make addressing the problem a challenge. Further, even when some of them become enshrined into law–for example, involuntarily taking firearms away from people who have been diagnosed as being in a mental health crisis–there are special interest groups (ex, the NRA) that work to overturn them because of larger political goals.

Worst still, addressing the issue will require public infrastructure investment at all levels of government, and that is currently antithetical to many state governments and definitely to the current party in control of the Federal Government (which is actively defunding and dismantling the social safety net).

Kilmeade’s co-host, “libertarian”³ Lawrence B. Jones was not talking about that specific case. He was talking about a broader population of the homeless who are suffering from mental illness and are either not being treated or not complying with their treatment.

Kilmeade’s response:

“Involuntary lethal injection, or something,” Brian Kilmeade told viewers of the network’s flagship talk show, Fox & Friends in a clip that resurfaced on Saturday. “Just kill them,” he added for clarity.

Kill them, not because they murdered someone. Kill them because they are mentally ill and homeless and *might* kill someone.

Final point. Two days ago, MSNBC fired a commentator for making a series of negative comments about Charlie Kirk. For me, while I think that was an overreaction, I can at least understand why they did so. I don’t think Dowd was wrong in what he said, just when he chose to say it.

I don’t expect that Kilmeade will face any real censure from the network for saying something much, much, much worse.

This gets to a point I made earlier this week:

To be human is, unfortunately, to have a limited capacity for attention. That requires us to see some people as “harmable, torturable, and killable” so we can continue to operate in the world successfully.

That isn’t to say we celebrate that they are harmed, tortured, and killed. It’s just we, as a world, have come to expect that will happen to them as a price of doing business.

School children are supposed to occasionally be murdered by people with guns (or knives). Charlie Kirk, the political commentator, didn’t belong to the “harmable, torturable, and killable” class.

Homeless people, the mentally ill, and especially homeless people⁴ who are mentally ill also fall into the “harmable, torturable, and killable” class.” That means people on the most-watched cable television news network in the United States can call for their extrajudicial involuntary murder and most likely face no serious repercussions.

That to me is a flashing warning light to everyone about the challenges that lay in front of us. I’m not sure what the answer is, but we all need to start working on it together.

Also, ignore randos on Xtter telling you that Charlie Kirk’s views are moderate conservative positions. It’s probably for profit or a psyop… unless, of course, a Fox News host says essentially the same thing with no repercussions.

Then maybe the bot/agent provocateur is actually right, and we genuinely are fucked without real collective non-violent action and opposition to these evil viewpoints.

1. The OG Blue Check program was very arbitrary and had a lot of issues. It’s nothing to be celebrated. Still, it created some fleeting sense of authenticity. ↩︎
2. Work for free for that platform? Sure! After all, in social media, we are the product, and we love it. But I draw the line at paying to work for someone else. ↩︎
3. Nothing like watching a self-avowed libertarian sit idly by as their cohost suggests that the government should be allowed to deprive mentally ill people of their greatest liberty. Then again, Jones was advocating for involuntary jailing of the mentally ill, which also doesn’t feel particularly libertarian to me either. ↩︎
4. BTW, if you are the type of person who throws fits about someone using the term “unhoused” or “people experiencing homelessness,” just remember that while you are spending energy tone policing your side, significant media figures on the other side of the aisle are advocating for executing mentally ill homeless people. But hey, at least they called them homeless.
   
   Also, I specifically avoided using those phrases because I needed to engage with those types of people to get through the essay. I hope you appreciate my adjustments to my tone… until I didn’t. Please consider this a call-in from a point of care. ↩︎