still image of Jesse Watters; chyron: Homelessness is out of control in America

Jesse Watters’ decade-long hate campaign against homeless people

Written by Helena Hind, Jane Lee, Alicia Sadowski & Isabella Corrao

Published

Fox News’ newly promoted 8 p.m. host, Jesse Watters, has attacked many groups during his career on the network, and homeless people are one of his favorite targets. Watters has harassed and demonized homeless people since his earliest Fox appearances on The O’Reilly Factor, when they were often targets of his infamous man-on-the-street segments.

His demeaning rhetoric has only continued since then: Watters has called for involuntarily institutionalizing homeless people, claimed homelessness is a “choice,” accused Democrats of “euthanizing the homeless” for providing them help, and labeled them “zombies” and “demons.”

Watters’ willful misrepresentation of the factors causing homelessness combined with his obvious contempt for the unhoused fits with Fox News’ broader demonization of America’s homeless population. By promoting Watters to 8 p.m., Fox executives are demonstrating not only their endorsement of his hateful rhetoric, but also their desire to promulgate it.

Here are some examples of Jesse Watters attacking homeless people and prevention/aid efforts:

Select a narrative

  • Attacking homeless people and the places they live

    • Watters attacked San Francisco as a common location for homeless people: “In New York, you see the homeless people, they're might be one or two at a time. And in San Francisco , they travel in packs. You have your vagabonds, you have your street kids, your runaways, your ‘60s hippie retreads. And they're pretty aggressive. And then at nighttime, forget about it. It's like you're in Amsterdam. You have the neon signs. You have the advertisements for the massage parlors, the strip clubs, the porn shops.” [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 11/17/08]
    • In a segment criticizing former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Watters claimed the homeless had taken over New York City. [Fox News, The Five, 5/16/19]
    • Watters complained on behalf of San Francisco “young tech entrepreneurs” who are “paying astronomically high rents”: “They're falling over homeless people. They're getting mugged. There's syringes and condoms right outside of where they sleep. It's disgusting.” [Fox News, The Five, 7/2/19] 
    • In a segment praising then-President Donald Trump for attacking California cities over homelessness, Watters said liberals “just live in filth where they actually live, which is disgusting.” [Fox News, The Five, 9/12/19]
    • On homelessness, Watters claimed: “A lot of this is driven by addiction and mental illness, but some people just don't want to work.” [Fox News, Watters’ World, 10/19/19]
    • Watters defended Las Vegas after the city banned homeless people from sleeping on the street: “Vegas is a party city, and this is a party foul. You can't have people pitching tents on the street. It ruins the mojo of the gamblers.” [Fox News, The Five, 11/7/19]
    • Watters said San Francisco doesn’t actually care about the environment “because they let the homeless people treat the city like a toilet.” [Fox News, The Five, 12/27/19]
    • Watters claimed that homeless people “refuse the help they're given.” [Fox News, The Five, 4/29/20]
    • In a segment about supposed “chaos” in New York City, Watters described a homeless woman who had set up an encampment across the street from Fox’s New York office. [Fox News, The Five, 9/11/20]
    • Watters whined that homeless people were exempt from wearing masks: “So houseless have special rights. And I have a house, so I have to be punished. That doesn’t make any sense.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/25/21]
    • Watters said: “If you don't want to walk over a homeless man with needles sticking all out over the place, vote [California gubernatorial candidate Larry] Elder.” [Fox News, The Five, 9/13/21]
    • Watters complained, “You cannot touch a hair on a deranged, violent, homeless man's head, but he can go around pretty much doing whatever the hell he wants in a society.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/18/22]
    • Before playing a video of a homeless man, Watters declared, “I think it's clear that homeless people — from the people that have spoken — want to be homeless.” After the clip, Watters asked his guest, “Did you catch the face tattoo?” He added, “I don't know if I should be giving my tax dollars to a guy with a forehead tattoo. I’m just – maybe that should be a rule in welfare. If someone has a tattoo on their forehead like that, they don't get 600 of my dollars.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/10/22]
    • Watters suggested that Californians deserve the homelessness crisis: “They voted for these people. This is a democracy. It's on you guys. If you guys want to have homeless tent cities with meth heads running around and get free food and free cash, you guys do you.” [Fox News, The Five, 4/13/22]
    • Watters commented that he “can’t tell the difference” between a homeless encampment and a “Syrian refugee camp.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/19/22] 
    • Watters blamed “homelessness” and “open air drug use” for turning San Francisco into “a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/8/22]
    • Watters said he avoids Penn Station in New York “because you start seeing these half-naked homeless guys, you know, their crack is hanging out, you know. Who knows what could happen?” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/8/22] 
    • Watters: “California used to be such a beautiful state. Now the streets look like this: homeless encampments, just a bunch of filth.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/18/22]
    • During a lengthy rant, Watters accused liberals of “protesting for the ability of homeless people to smoke crack in front of a nursery school.” He added that liberals “want the homeless to stay sick and homeless and dirty and disgusting” and that they encourage homeless people to live “a depraved, disgusting, unhealthy life next to children.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/10/22]
    • Watters said he was “going to talk directly to the homeless drug addicts and ex-cons” before launching into a lengthy monologue in which he told them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps: “Do some pushups, go for a walk, find a book, read, sleep all night and work all day. It’s that simple.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/9/22]
    • Watters called homeless people “an invasive species.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/22/22]
    • Watters agreed with his guest that homeless people want to remain unhoused, noting that he will call them “housing deniers.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/4/22] 
    • Watters labeled San Francisco “America's canary in the coal mine” because “it was one of the first major cities to go soft on crime, drugs, and homelessness.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/10/22]
    • Watters claimed that homeless people in New York City are allowed to “urinate on your shop,” but “no one does anything” because “they are mentally ill, you don’t want to put them in jail” and you have to “let the homeless be homeless.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/24/22]
    • Watters likened homeless people in Portland to zombies: “Another homeless tent city pops up every day. And citizens are scared. The zombies are taking over.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/3/23] 
    • Watters mocked the Centers for Disease Control for encouraging the use of more inclusive language to describe the homeless: “What about homeless people? Well, that also has been changed to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. So, if they are sleeping in tents on the sidewalk, we are just going to call them campers.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/10/23]
    • Watters suggested that it’s “child abuse” to make children walk past drug-addicted homeless people on the sidewalk. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/19/23]
    • Watters said that he was going to “issue another Primetime travel advisory” because of Portland’s homeless population. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 3/23/23]
    • Watters referred to drug addicts and homeless people as “demons” and claimed San Francisco required an “exorcism.” He continued: “The city needs saving and San Francisco politicians aren't even trying. The sick thing is San Francisco is making money off these demons. The more drugs, crime, and homelessness, the more money gets spent.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 4/11/23]
    • Watters complained that while “being homeless used to be a struggle,” individuals without homes are now “kicking back, making themselves comfortable” and “taking over sidewalks like they own the place.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/17/23]
    • Watters expressed his appreciation for the Canadian wildfire smoke affecting air quality in New York: “Now we just can't see the junkies, the homeless, the migrants. It's like, you know, ignorance is bliss.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/7/23]
    • Watters claimed that the solution to homelessness is to “stigmatize” it and acknowledge that the homeless are “people that have failed in life, and they're on their deathbed.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/13/23]
    • Watters mocked the homelessness crisis in Oregon: “Well the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the home of the military industrial complex, but Portland, Oregon, that's the home of the homeless industrial complex.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/14/23]
    • Watters described homeless people in San Francisco as “bags of flesh mutating on the sidewalks.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/16/23]
    • Watters lamented his guest’s comment that the homeless are now a “protected class,” saying: “Trans is protected, homeless are protected, and no one in Portland wants to talk about it.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/27/23]
    • Watters said government officials need to “extinguish” homeless encampments. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/29/23]

  • Harassing homeless people

    • In an O’Reilly Factor segment called “Stoned Homeless” that suggested legal marijuana is to blame for homelessness in Denver, Watters harassed multiple homeless people and quizzed them on how much marijuana they consumed and if they had any “addictions.” Watters even asked a woman if she “turns tricks.” He then said to O’Reilly: “It's a different type of homeless species than there are in San Francisco. In San Francisco, it's like hardcore aggressive junkies.” [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 10/6/14]
    • In a segment on The O’Reilly Factor, Watters asked homeless people living in Penn Station invasive questions about their addictions before lamenting that police didn’t kick them out. [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 6/29/15]
    • In a segment about homelessness on The O’Reilly Factor, Watters harassed a homeless person who repeatedly asked not to be filmed. Watters later said, “This guy should have been institutionalized.” [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 7/27/15]
    • Watters reminisced about his previous television show Watters' World, where he would be “chasing [homeless people] down the street and humiliating them.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/23/19]

  • Calling for institutionalization and other cruel strategies to alleviate homelessness

    • Watters said California was allowing “junkies to run wild, homeless people to run wild.” His solution for the homelessness crisis was to “get tough and clean stuff up and knock heads together and institutionalize people and clean up the streets.” [Fox News, The Five, 5/23/19] 
    • Watters outlined his solution for homelessness: “Bulldoze the 50-block radius, and you institutionalize everybody.” He also called Los Angeles’ homeless population “drugged-out zombies chasing barefooted babies through piles of garbage with hypodermic needles and fire everywhere.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/3/19]
    • Watters repeated his call to institutionalize homeless people: “Involuntarily commit these people, detoxify them, get them into rehab, and then release them into some public housing.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/19/19] 
    • Watters compared homeless people to people who weren’t disciplined as children: “What happened to those kids? They didn’t turn out so well. You need tough love in California. You need to go in there, you need to clean it up, institutionalize these people, detoxify these people, put them in rehab facilities, put them in halfway housing, and then affordable subsidized housing. And then clean the streets up.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 7/3/19] 
    • In response to business owners using fences and cacti to keep homeless people off their property, Watters offered additional cruel ideas: “Canines, they bark very loudly. The homeless will never be able to sleep, OK? … I would install video cameras to monitor illegal activities, so then when you call the cops you have proof. The best thing: sprinkler systems. You install a sprinkler system manually, effective, boom. They can't sleep. They're all wet. They have to move somewhere else.” [Fox News, The Five, 7/11/19] 
    • Watters again pushed his idea to use sprinklers on homeless people: “Have a little sprinkler system, then maybe wet them and then move them. Or loud music or loud canines.” He then attacked liberal policies which he claimed enabled homelessness and quarantined homeless into “zombie zones.” [Fox News,The Five, 7/12/19]
    • Watters referred back to prior guest Mark Geragos, echoing his complaints by saying that “deranged homeless people that are causing crime and sleeping in tents all over California” can’t be institutionalized. [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 6/30/21] 
    • Watters suggested that involuntary institutionalization of “anyone with facial tattoos” would end mass shootings [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/05/22]
    • Watters argued that it was “more civilized when we banished” homeless people to “asylums and put them in straitjackets.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/22/22]
    • Watters complained that Biden’s infrastructure bill allowed a town in New Hampshire to build a “$20 million heated sidewalk for the drug-addicted homeless people to sleep on when it gets cold.” In reality, the sidewalk was seemingly intended to help snow melt faster. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/19/22]
    • Watters made a joke about police robots rounding up homeless people: “Take the robots, don't give them guns, and they just make little claws and they take the homeless and they just kind of throw them in the — I’m kidding. I would never support that.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 11/28/22]
    • Watters commended a man seen in a video spraying a homeless woman with a hose to force her to move: “So while California’s leaders have abandoned the homeless and the cops can’t do anything about it, the residents are taking matters into their own hands.” (Watters later criticized the San Francisco district attorney for charging the man with battery.) [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/10/23]

  • Attacking homeless prevention programs and aid

    • Watters attacked California’s policies regarding homeless people, saying the state allows “drug-addict crazy people to roam the streets and keep coming in and out of prison.” [Fox News, The Five, 9/18/19]
    • In response to stimulus checks, Watters said, “I just see every homeless person or someone down on their luck or drug abuser, they'll just move to LA, Chicago, New York, get a mailbox address, collect a thousand dollars a month, why not?” [Fox News, The Five, 4/23/21]
    • Watters blamed the homeless crisis in California on the state “listening to experts for a long time,” saying they provided “failed idea after failed idea to solve the problem, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 4/12/22]
    • Watters argued that San Francisco Democratic leadership “just want to virtue signal” after the mayor proposed a $6 million plan to end homelessness for transgender people. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/3/22]
    • Watters sarcastically remarked: “The mentally deranged, Black, homeless drug addict is the victim of America's unjust system. So therefore, he’s the one that needs special treatment, because if you send him to prison, you are just re-victimizing him. And everybody knows when you put someone in prison, it creates more criminals. So, he’s going to need free housing. He’s going to need free health care, and he’s going to need free magic mushrooms so he can deal with all of his demons.” [Fox News, The Five, 7/18/22]
    • Watters attacked government aid for homeless people: “You have to let people hit rock bottom. Because then they bounce back up. Democrats want to make rock bottom comfortable.” [Fox News, The Five, 10/26/22]
    • Watters criticized then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot for building tiny homes for unhoused people in Chicago, saying Democrats want “to turn the homeless into Keebler elves.” He then argued that Democrats are “actively downsizing the American dream. Lower your expectations? More like lower whatever your idea's success is.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 12/5/22]
    • Watters attacked Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ plan to address homelessness as giving the politician “unlimited power and money” to “take your house” for homeless people. He then declared that homeless people “[don’t] want help” and would “rather smear feces on people in the street than on your walls.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 12/14/22]
    • Watters attacked Democratic-led cities for having programs that aid the homeless: “It's never been easier to be a homeless person in Democrat-run cities. Why bother getting a job and cleaning yourself up when you can enjoy free meals and get high all day thanks to liberal policies?” [Fox News, The Five, 1/4/23] 
    • Watters suggested that homeless people need to “hit rock bottom to bounce back up,” and later prodded his guest to criticize government-funded “stipends or these housing vouchers.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/31/23]
    • Watters said Democrats are “euthanizing the homeless” by giving them “drug money” and food. He added, “This is like hospice for the homeless. Let's make them comfortable before they die.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 3/1/23]
    • Watters argued the homeless should not be entitled to receive help: “These are grown men and women who made a choice and instead of getting sober and getting a job, they just want to shoot up all day on the sidewalk, it's not a secret.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/3/23]
    • Watters declared grants to reduce homelessness a “scam”: “You're subsidizing homelessness and homelessness is increasing.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/15/23]

  • Claiming homeless people do not deserve basic necessities

    • Watters lamented seeing a homeless person with a phone and “a really nice sleeping bag.” He declared, “They shouldn’t have all this kind of stuff.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/22/22]
    • Watters disparaged LA for not preventing homeless people from installing washing machines: “This is what happens when Democrats never say no. You get tent cities with Whirlpools. Oh, you're hitting rock bottom? Make yourself comfortable. Take drugs, spread yourself out.” [Fox News, The Five, 10/26/22]
    • Watters attacked an unhoused man for building a shed to live in: “[The man] doesn't consider himself homeless. … That kind of delusional thinking would make him a great asset in the Biden White House.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/28/22]