By Justin Baragona

Copyright independent

Fox News host Lisa Montgomery – who goes by the moniker Kennedy – openly criticized Donald Trump for the bombing of two Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean that the president has insisted were carrying drugs and operated by “narcoterrorists.”

While many of her Fox News colleagues and MAGA supporters continue to applaud the Trump administration’s operation, which it says is targeted at Venezuelan drug cartels, Kennedy’s rebuke of the campaign joins a growing chorus of conservatives who have expressed concern that the strikes are illegal.

Earlier this month, the US military killed 11 people after it blew up a boat off the coast of Venezuela. While the White House released a video of the strike and claimed that it killed members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua transporting drugs, officials have yet to identify who was on board the ship and which illicit drugs were being carried.

With Congress already sounding the alarm that the strike signaled an expansion of Trump’s war powers and experts questioning if the bombing violated international law, Trump announced on Monday that a “second kinetic strike” had been carried out, killing three “narcoterrorists” aboard a small ship.

Claiming the boat was heading to the United States, the president linked the ship to “extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels” while claiming it posed an imminent threat to the nation. Though he claimed the people on board the boat were “positively identified,” he did not name any specific group or organization they were allegedly associated with.

During Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld – who has taken libertarian positions on the so-called “War on Drugs” in the past – cheered the president and justified the actions that human rights organizations are decrying as extrajudicial.

“These people that are being taken out are not good people. Again, everything Trump does is within a very clear frame. We go after the bad guys. Not people we disagree with,” Gutfeld said. “None of this is driven by emotion or ideology. Just laws and facts.”

He went on to say that “we don’t have to virtue signal” and “dress ourselves in empathy or compassion,” claiming this is “what we do” and there is “no rationalizing.”

Kennedy, who also describes herself as a libertarian, pushed back against the president’s campaign and warned that it could lead to the loss of innocent lives, if it hasn’t already.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Because all it takes is one fishing boat with a broken radio or people who don’t speak English and you’re killing innocent civilians, and I do not like that.”

Saying the “war on drugs” failed the first time around, Kennedy asserted that “things can go very badly here” before pivoting to the issue of illicit drug abuse in the United States.

“We have not properly addressed demand in this country. That has not gone away. That is one of the reasons that the cartels proliferated during and after the war on drugs,” she stated. “So we do have to address demand in this country. We do have to address why do people, especially kids, in this country want to put things in their body they know can kill them? It is terrifying.”

After calling for an increase in mental health treatment and drug abuse rehabilitation, she expressed her agreement with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has been the most prominent Republican critic of the Venezuelan boat strikes.

“I do agree with Rand Paul here that if there are people we want to go after, instead of just killing them without any due process, put them on trial,” she concluded. “And, you know, if they get tried in a state where they do have the death penalty, then let due process play out.”

After Vice President JD Vance said he “doesn’t give a sh*t” if the administration’s boat strikes amounted to a war crime, Paul groused that “killing people he accuses of a crime is the ‘highest and best use of the military’” while angrily rebuking the vice president’s stance.

“Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird? Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” Paul declared on social media.