Fox News faces outrage for Brian Kilmeade "involuntary lethal injection" comment
Kilmeade was responding to Fox And Friends co-host Lawrence Jones' comments about imprisoning mentally ill homeless people who refuse treatment.
Brian Kilmeade, Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images
It’s been a weird week for free speech in America, as the responses to the fatal shooting of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk on Wednesday have come in with a healthy dose of shock and awe attached. Cable news, obviously, has been the crucible for many of the emotions provoked by the violent attack on Kirk, with MSNBC wasting exactly zero seconds acceding to demands that it fire analyst Matthew Dowd for stating, when asked in the immediate aftermath of the shooting about the “environment” in which it took place, that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Social media has filled up with reports of people collecting names and employers of those who expressed schadenfreude at Kirk’s death, or suggested that he was anything less than the free-speech saint that his supporters and mourners have been portraying him as, while politicians, talk show hosts, and more have raced to be the first, or at least the loudest, to condemn all forms of political violence. (Even as folks like Elon Musk have continued to propagate calls to “fight back, or you die” to a quarter of a billion followers on social media.) Fox News has been at the forefront of this vocal outrage, rolling out guys like Sean Hannity to cluck his tongue at Illinois governor JB Pritzker suggesting that Donald Trump’s rhetoric may have contributed to an American culture of political violence. They clearly feel the moral high ground is theirs.
