HUGH HEWITT: Manifestos don’t matter — finding the roots of political violence does

President Trump, in a Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview on CBS about Saturday’s attack on the annual meeting of the White House Correspondents’ Association, concluded that he might have been the assassin: “He was probably a pretty sick guy.” “He’s a guy with a lot of problems,” the president added later in the interview.

“I wasn’t worried,” the president said. “I understand life. We live in a crazy world.”

“Look, you have sick people and you have to reduce the risk,” President Trump said. Of course he’s right. But how?

TRUMP CALLS ’60 MINUTES’ HOST ‘SHAMEFUL’ FOR READING WHCD SUSPECT’S ALLEGED MANIFESTO ON AIR

President Trump also showed righteous anger 20 minutes into a 40-minute interview when Norah O’Donnell repeated slurs contained in the would-be assassin’s manifesto. There are so many excellent questions that can be asked in a 40-minute interview that this was an abuse of time and, while predictable, should have triggered a change at “60 Minutes.” It’s not hard to interview the president responsibly.

The decision to quote a crazy person’s slander in front of this enormous audience is a massive failure of editorial judgment and another incredibly forced mistake by legacy media that cannot read the national hall.

This decision ranks with that of former CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood’s epic fail was when he asked then-candidate Donald Trump at a 2016 debate whether his run for the White House was a “comic book version of the presidential campaign”; It was the unmasking that forced Harwood to move to another network in 2019.

The decision to quote a crazy person’s slander in front of this enormous audience is a massive failure of editorial judgment and another incredibly forced mistake by legacy media that cannot read the national hall.

Many credentialed journalists seem to lose their professionalism when speaking to Trump. It’s notable that they can’t resist trying to “score” him for even a minute, and use that time to do something crazy like ask questions about, who knows, the war with Iran.

WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS ASSOCIATION DINNER SHOOTING ACCUSED MAKES HIS FIRST COURT APPEARANCE

Questions about the motives and “manifestos” of assassins and would-be assassins do not interest me. It only takes a sick mind and enough money to acquire a weapon to capture infamy after extracting nonsense from a disfigured reality. What he writes is somewhat interesting, but not much. Frantic scribbles are merely clues to the origins of psychosis.

What is interesting and does not seem to appear anywhere yet is a serious review of all unstable people who have crossed the threshold of violence. Where do they come from and what characteristics do they share in their backgrounds?

These are not “ordinary” criminals who are out for money and resort to violence on impulse or because of a criminal enterprise. These are a small subcategory of the mentally ill; The vast majority of them fail to function well in society, but exist on the fringes of society and are only noticed when their circumstances leave the victims behind.

THE EMERGING VIDEO SHOWS THAT COLE ALLEN WAS THE QUIET INVENTOR YEARS BEFORE THE ALLEGATIONS OF ASSASSINATION OF TRUMP

Although “expressions” are inconsistent, this subcategory is perhaps best classified as “expressive” people.

From Columbine to this weekend’s third major attempt to kill President Donald Trump — and this time most of the Cabinet — there have been dozens of nightmarish plots to kill either large numbers of innocent people strangers to the criminal or public figures; most, if not all, of these were accompanied by “manifestos”. There have also been ambushes in which the shooters took their “agenda” to the grave, and their “motives” or self-proclaimed “agenda” were either unknown or not made public.

There are enough killers inside their own heads engaged in a kind of horrific theater that this question should have been answered years ago by the FBI or some other serious student of violence: What do they have in common? What happened to take them away from the ordinary highways of human development? Or maybe what was missing in their lives? Gun control activists have their own explanations, but they do not fall into this category of killers or killers.

HAWLEY CALLS FOR EMERGENCY HEARING AFTER ALLEGED ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AT DINNER

The second set of questions is what to do about common mental illnesses that permeate society and spread with the speed of the internet. “We live in a different world with the Internet than we did years ago, but even years ago it was pretty dangerous,” President Trump told “60 Minutes.”

“The Internet, perhaps more than anything else, has radicalized some people. It’s made them mentally ill,” the president said, returning to the general issue rather than the specific ramblings of an unstable individual. He also praised the benefits of the new world, concluding: “This is a different era. A very different time.”

Joseph Loconte, author of the excellent “The Battle for Middle-earth: JRR Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945,” describes how two of the most read and influential writers of the last century lived through a dozen nightmare years. Experience stories do not provide answers to our current dilemma, but they do provide some relevant observations.

DAVID MARCUS: DEMOCRATS MUST STOP DEADLY ANTIFASCISM COSPLAY

Both men were World War I veterans, and Loconte wrote in his 2017 book “A Hobbit, a Cabinet, and the Great War: How JRR Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Disaster of 1914-1918.” He recorded his experiences in that vast boneyard in his book in 2017. Loconte addressed the issue of the two men and their World War II in November last year. He returned to specific experiences of the pre-war and war years of World War II.

“Every age has its own perspective on the world, a mixture of clarity and blindness,” Loconte writes in “The Battle for Middle-earth.” “Yet the moral blindness of the twentieth century represented something new, something entirely new: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life.”

“Tolkien and Lewis believed that a point of view rooted in ancient truths could resist this,” Loconte continued, before borrowing from Lewis. “The only cure is to keep in our minds the clean sea breeze of centuries, and this can only be done by reading old books.”

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IS INCREASING. IS IT TIME FOR A NEW DOMESTIC TERRORISM LAW?

Loconte’s study of these men and their friends, and their collective, incredible awareness that a world-shattering outbreak of violence was imminent, contains fascinating glimpses into life in Oxford and Cambridge during the war years; but the focus is on how these two men of genius anticipated, and then reacted to, the horrors of the twisted and seething pronouncements and practices of the murderers who soaked those dozens of years in the blood of millions.

There is so much violence in our recent history in America, much of it stemming from views of politics unrelated to facts; It is possible to find evidence for any theory you want to claim. No theory explains all or even most of these. So, has anyone done pattern recognition based on their biographies?

CLICK FOR OTHER OPINIONS OF FOX NEWS

For example, what are they doing in Quantico, where the FBI investigates serial killers and other categories of crime at the National Center for Violent Crime Analysis? A “study” by the center on “right-wing extremism” has been removed from the Justice Department website for unknown reasons, but it is still available online and does not address the issue of patterns in development.

Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a study of left-wing extremism by Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe; Although this study is interesting, it does not delve into individuals who attempt or commit violence.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD FOX NEWS APPLICATION

The tempting, all-purpose answer for busy people is simply to do what the president did: blame radicalization via the internet. This is true, but it tells us nothing about the similarities (if any) between the Oswalds. Fear created by a “Minority Report” culture that views specific situations as threats can inhibit research.

Yet what dots have never been connected about the factors in the training of actors that lead the unstable into the land of “expression” killers? If there is a serious study on this topic, link to it in the comments. But if not, perhaps some researcher somewhere in the Bureau or academia will recognize the gap.

Hugh Hewitt, Fox News contributor and “The Hugh Hewitt Show” weekday afternoons from 3 to 6 p.m. ET on the Salem Radio Network and simulcast on the Salem News Channel. Hugh takes Americans home to the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on more than 400 affiliates nationwide and on all streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest of Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier on weekdays at 6 p.m. ET A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he started his eponymous radio show in Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has appeared frequently on all major national news television networks, hosted television programs for PBS and MSNBC, written for all major American newspapers, and authored a dozen books. He has moderated multiple Republican candidate debates, most recently the 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in 2015-16. Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians Today Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests, from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HUGH HEWITT