You’ve likely encountered Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s suggestion that we deal with the problem of homelessness by killing mentally ill homeless people. The remark has widely been treated as an isolated, one-off, a kind of non-sequitur that Kilmeade dreamed up out of the blue, and for which he has now apologized. So, case closed. 

In fact, Kilmeade’s comment is no one-off non-sequitur at all. If you read through the relevant part of transcript of the show, and work through a few minor interpretive puzzles, you come to realize that what Kilmeade did was to draw a logically valid inference from an argument that Lawrence Jones, his co-host, had set up. Far from being a one-off, Kilmeade’s claim only makes sense as an inference from Jones’s argument, implicating both of them in the same set of claims. And far from being a non-sequitur, what the two of them offered up to the public was a well-structured argument. In a very real sense, they’ve done us the service of laying out the logical structure of genocide.

Here is the relevant passage:

Co-host Lawrence Jones said taxpayers have given “billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population,” but “a lot of them don’t want to take the programs, a lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary.”

“You can’t give them a choice,” Jones continued. “Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you … or you decide that you are going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.”

That’s what prompted Kilmeade to add, “Or involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill ‘em.”

What’s initially puzzling is Jones’s claim that the mentally-ill homeless “can’t” be given a choice, followed by the apparent choice of getting resources or letting them “decide” that they will go to jail. It’s tempting at first to dismiss the opening “can’t” as an error and interpret Jones as giving the homeless a reasonable option. But this is a misinterpretation. Jones’s comments make clear that “a lot of them don’t want to take the programs.” Focus specifically on the population that satisfies Jones’s description: it is true of them by definition that if you give them resources, they will truculently refuse to make use of them. Call this population of mentally-ill homeless people the “hold-outs.”

To repeat: hold-outs are mentally ill homeless people who will not take the help you give them. If you try to help them giving them “resources,” they will refuse. But if you ask them to “decide” to go to jail and take those same resources in jail, as a rehabilitative measure, they will refuse that, too. It’s tempting to think that Jones’s use of “decide” is superfluous here because incarceration is forced. So how can it involve a decision?

This misses Jones’s point. His point is that even if incarceration is forced, the mentally ill still require resources while in jail. Being hold outs, we know they won’t take them. So his point is not that “give them resources or send them to jail” is a live option, but that it isn’t. If you give the hold-outs resources without threatening jail, they won’t take them, but if you offer them resources after putting them in jail, the same thing will happen. His point is that jail is insufficiently coercive for this population. Jail or no, they’ll need the same resources, but refuse to take it. That’s just how they are. When that happens, we’ll be stuck having to spend a lot of money making them accept our help. But we’ve already done that ad nauseum, and it’s failed. So let’s do something else. 

This is the context in which Kilmeade suggests mass killing. And given what precedes it, it’s a perfectly natural inference. But the inference has been set up by Jones, not by Kilmeade. Implicitly, Jones’s argument is:

Either give them an option of X or Y, or else do Z. 

It is understood that the hold outs will take neither X nor Y. So Z is the only option.

Given the content of the discussion, there is no plausible value for “Z” but death, and no plausible way of bringing it about but mass killing. The value for Z must be something in some sense beneficial (from Jones’s and Kilmeade’s perspective, taken as proxies for “society”), which, once effectuated, requires no further outlay of resources. CNN correctly says that Jones’s comment “prompted” Kilmeade, who merely drew the obvious conclusion from it: hold-outs have to be killed. The sense in which the hold-outs “can’t” be given a choice is that they have to die, whether they want to or not. In short: “Z” is for Zyklon. 

The effective structure of the argument is:

Either the mentally-ill homeless must be offered resources that they voluntarily accept, or they must be offered resources in jail that they voluntarily accept, or a solution must be found for them that requires no further outlay of resources, i.e., death.

They won’t accept the resources, so they have to be killed. You couldn’t have come up with a better example of what Arendt called the project of “killing the juridical person in man.” 

Once you realize this, you realize that it’s pointless for Kilmeade to repudiate the one sentence that people have found offensive. That sentence is a valid inference, by disjunctive syllogism, of an argument for genocide. What has to be repudiated is the argument, not just the conclusion.

If you want my personal opinion, neither an apology nor a repudiation is enough. Kilmeade and Jones have to be fired. Advocates of genocide cannot be permitted to function as normal, authoritative members of our society. They have to be thrown directly into the street. I doubt that doing so will make either of these assholes homeless, but it’ll come closer than they currently are, and that’s as it should be. 

It’s a gigantic mistake to “go easy” on genocidaires, even at this “early” stage of things (and it’s not early, as both Gaza and Yemen make clear). Genocidal discourse is now on its way to normalization in the United States. Either we resist it, or we tolerate both its normalization and its eventual realization. Time to choose.