Fox News host Brian Kilmeade ramped up the network’s rhetoric against protesters against police brutality on Tuesday, calling for law enforcement to lock up left-wing activists and “interrogate them almost like you would al Qaeda.”
With protests flaring up over the Labor Day weekend—some featuring violent clashes between far-right, pro-Trump groups and antifa, the loosely affiliated, leftist anti-fascist movement—Kilmeade appeared Tuesday morning on the Fox Business Network to demand more action against antifa protesters.
“We’ve seen over 100 days of protests in Portland,” Fox Business host Ashley Webster wondered aloud. “It has been another weekend of violent protests in Seattle. The Michigan GOP headquarters building was vandalized with anti-police statements. I want to know, it becomes increasingly frustrating, when does this end?”
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Kilmeade, meanwhile, immediately replied that the demonstrations could come to an end when police officers “are empowered to stop it” and mayors use federal resources to combat it. At the same time, he called for protesters to be treated as enemy combatants of the state while implying that they should be tortured.
“When we start convincing these antifa—these law enforcement officials to not let the antifa individuals go,” the Fox & Friends co-host exclaimed. “Sit there, lock them up, and interrogate them, almost like you would al Qaeda because they are undermining our country the same way these Islamist extremists were doing it.”
“We were dead serious about that,” he continued. “We’re not dead serious about this.”
Kilmeade calling for enhanced interrogation techniques on American protesters comes on the heels of Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s months-long campaign to push the Trump administration to designate social justice movement Black Lives Matter and antifa as domestic terror organizations.
After repeatedly calling for the federal government to “frog-march” protesters in front of cameras and charge them as terrorists in a series of “mass arrests,” Carlson asked acting Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf last week why the leaders of BLM and antifa haven’t been brought up on conspiracy charges “like the heads of Mafia families.”
“Well, this is something that I have talked to [Attorney General William Barr] personally about,” Wolf responded at the time. “I know that they are working on it.”
