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

“He was probably a pretty sick man,” President Trump correctly concluded about his would-be killer in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night on CBS about the Saturday night attack on the annual meeting of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “A man with many 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 limit the risk,” President Trump concluded. He’s right, of course. But how?

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President Trump also expressed some righteous anger twenty minutes into a forty-minute interview, when Norah O’Donnell repeated the smear in the would-be assassin’s manifesto. So many excellent questions can be asked in a forty-minute interview that this was a waste of time that, while predictable, should cause a stir at “60 Minutes.” It is not difficult to interview the president responsibly.

The decision to quote a madman’s libel in front of that enormous audience is a colossal failure of editorial judgment, and yet another incredible, unforced error by the traditional media that simply cannot read the national audience.

That decision echoes the former CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood’s epic failure in a 2016 debate when he asked then-candidate Donald Trump if his run for the White House was a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a mask fallout that may have ultimately forced Harwood to move to another network in 2019.

The decision to quote a madman’s libel in front of that enormous audience is a colossal failure of editorial judgment, and yet another incredible, unforced error by the traditional media that simply cannot read the national audience.

Many qualified journalists seem to lose their professionalism when talking to Trump. It’s remarkable how they can’t resist taking a moment to ‘score’ on him and use that time to, who knows, do something crazy like asking about the fight with Iran?

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The questions about the motives of murderers and potential murderers and their ‘manifestos’ do not interest me. All it takes is a sick mind and enough money to acquire a weapon with which to seize infamy after sifting through the mangled reality. What they write is of some importance, but not much. Insane scribbles are only clues to the origins of the psychosis.

What would be interesting – and it doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere… yet – is a serious assessment of all the unbalanced people who have gone beyond the point of violence. Where do they come from and what characteristics from their past do they share?

These are not ‘ordinary’ criminals who look for money or use violence out of impulse or because of a criminal enterprise. They form a small subcategory of the mentally ill, the vast majority of whom cannot function properly in society but live on the margins and are only noticed when their circumstances leave victims behind.

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This subcategory is perhaps best classified as ‘statement’ people, although the ‘statements’ are disjointed.

From Columbine to this weekend’s third major attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump — and this time much of his Cabinet — there have been dozens of nightmarish plots to murder large numbers of innocents who are strangers to the criminals or public figures, many, but not all, of which are accompanied by “manifestos.” There have also been ambushes where the gunmen took their ‘agenda’ to the grave and whose ‘motives’ or self-proclaimed ‘agenda’ were either unknowable or not released to the public.

There are enough murderers involved inside their own heads, in some macabre theater, that the question should have been answered years ago by the FBI or other serious students of violence: What do they have in common? What happened to them to throw them off the normal highways of human development? Or perhaps: what was missing in their lives? Gun control activists have their statements, but they don’t reach this category of killers or potential killers.

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The second set of questions is what to do about the widespread mental illness that is pervading society and spreading at 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 quite dangerous,” President Trump told “60 Minutes.”

“The Internet, perhaps more than anything else, has radicalized some people. It has made them mentally ill,” the president said, returning to the general issue and not the specific talk of an unbalanced individual. He also praised the benefits of the new world before concluding: “It’s a different era. It’s a very different time.”

Joseph Loconte, author of the excellent ‘The War for Middle-earth: JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945’, charts how two of the most read and influential writers of the last century endured a decade of nightmare years. The accounts of their experiences do not provide answers to our current dilemma, but they do offer some relevant observations.

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Both men were veterans of the First World War, and Loconte had chronicled their experiences in that enormous charnel house in a 2017 book, “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.” Loconte returned to the subject of the two men and their specific experiences in the pre-war and war years of World War II last November.

“Each age has its own view of the world, a mixture of clarity and blindness,” Loconte notes in “The War 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 only a vision rooted in the ancient truths could resist that,” Loconte continued before borrowing from Lewis. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books.”

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Loconte’s study of these men and their friends and their collective, incredible awareness of the impending eruption of earth-shaking violence includes fascinating glimpses into life at Oxford and Cambridge during the war years, but the focus is on how two men of genius anticipated and then responded to the horrors of the twisted and foaming statements and practices of the murderers who had soaked in the blood of millions for those twelve years.

In our recent history in America, there have been so many forms of violence – much of it rooted in views of politics divorced from reality – that it is possible to find evidence for any theory you care to assert. No single theory explains them all, or even most of them. But has anyone done any pattern matching based on his biographies?

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For example, what are they doing at Quantico, where the FBI studies serial killers and other crime categories at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime? One ‘study’ on ‘right-wing extremism’ by the Center was removed from the Ministry of Justice website for unknown reasons, but is still available online and does not address the issue of development patterns.

Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a study on left-wing extremism by Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe that, while interesting, does not delve deeply into the individuals who attempted or carried out the violence.

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The tempting, catch-all answer for busy people is simply to do what the president did: blame radicalization on the Internet. That is true, but tells us nothing at all about any similarities between the so-called Oswalds. Fears of a ‘Minority Report’ culture that views idiosyncrasies as threats could hamper research.

But what points have never been connected about the factors in the actors’ upbringing that land the unbalanced people in the land of statement killers? If there is a serious study on that topic, link to it in the comments. But if not, perhaps some researchers at the Bureau or somewhere in the academy will take notice of the gap.

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