Lesley Stahl is blind

I got a little upset tonight watching 60 minutes report on the murder of Jeff Hall by his 10 year old son.  Jeff was a construction worker and professional victim from the Inland Empire, California who allegedly got really mad at immigrants when he couldn't find a construction job during the recession so he decided to become a neo-nazi.  Jeff was charming for an angry neo-nazi so he quickly rose amongst the small ranks to leader of the west coast chapter of the National Socialist Movement.  When he wasn't preaching hate and saying that all non-whites should leave the country, he was down on the border with a gang of mercenaries with night vision goggles and automatic weapons rounding up Mexicans who tried to cross over.  In his final days he would take his 10-year old son Joe along with him and bragged that the boy knew how to operate the guns and goggles.  But all this comraderie wasn't enough to fill the void in Jeff's soul so when the other neo-nazis would go home he would drink a lot and beat up his wife and kids.  This didn't seem to sit very well with his son Joe, so Joe decided to solve the problem by putting a bullet in Jeff's head one night while his dad was sleeping.  

Throughout the 60 Minutes piece Jeff's Mother (Joe's Grandma) vehemently defends her son as a good father and says that although she didn't support Jeff's hate fueld politics, she thought his home was perfectly healthy and normal.  Suffice it to say that I question every word that comes out of this woman's mouth, including that she's raising the remainder of Jeff's five children as 'conservative Republicans' and not neo nazis, grandma says on camera that she always believed her grandson might kill his father:  "I wasn't surprised by it, I somehow felt it could always happen...my grandson was who he was from the time he was born."  Stahl seems to take the word of grandma, the same woman who believes it's OK to raise your kids in a neo nazi home, and then presses the prosecutor who is working on Joe Hall's case to validate this theory for her.  Stahl asks the prosecutor the age old question of whether a killer can be 'pre-programmed' (i.e. is a killer born or made).  The investigator answers, "[Joe] had everything physically in place that it didn't take much to bring him along to thinking that murder is appropriate."  Stahl jumps on this vague answer by positing that little Joe Hall was "born the match" and then had the circumstances to make him a killer -- a statement to which the investigator agrees.  The only problem is that neither the grandma, the investigator nor Stahl can provide any evidence for their theory because, to put it simply, we currently have the same ability to prove genetic correlations to murderers as we do to prove the existence of alien colonies in far off galaxies.  Stahl is taking extradinary liberties with Science in a baffling attempt to prove that this little boy was BORN a murderer rather than looking at the facts of the case or what could have MADE this boy murder his father.

Stahl says in the piece that she traveled to California to investigate the story of a son who murdered his neo nazi father, but that she found something much more complicated.  She seems surprised to find a troubled family with a history of abuse and children who were out of control.  It's as if she expected to find a child with a full conception of right and wrong who decided to murder his father on ethical grounds.  When talking about little Joe's problems at school his grandmother says "Joe was Joe and they were having a real hard time figuring out what his problems were."  But it seems pretty clear to me that when you are broke and jobless and spend your free time either giving hate speeches or going to the border with night vision goggles and automatic weapons and then getting drunk and beating up your kids, you aren't focusing too much on your kids' problems at school.  Stahl reports that Jeff began abusing his wife and son two years ago and wonders aloud whether it was the deepening recession or his rise in the nazi community that contributed to the abuse.  What Stahl fails to see is that this question is irrelevant and that it's simply not possible that Jeff Hall was a "devoted father" or that the abuse only began two years ago.  It is counter-intuitive to simultaneously report that Jeff Hall was a good father and that he physically abused his wife and kids.  I'll even take it one step further -- it's not possible to simultaneously be a neo nazi and a good father.  These two concepts are not mutually exclusive.  To be a good parent you must first be able to instill good ethics in your children and a neo nazi would by definition be unable to do this. What makes a lot more sense is that Joe Hall was raised by angry, alcholic parents who abused him since birth, taught him hate instead of ethics and showed him how to use automatic rifles instead of how to toss a baseball.  On top of that, Joe's grandmother believed the man who was abusing him walked on water (you can just see the glint in her eye when she referred to her son as a "nazi leader"), but that Joe was born bad and so he most likely began to believe it himself.  Feeling no escape from the situation, and believing that he was born a bad child, Joe acted in the only way he had been taught -- with mercenary-like violence.

Given the facts of the case, for Stahl to take the position that Joe Hall is some sort of genetic mutant seems simply evil.  Despite writing on the CBS website that she had an open mind going in to the case, Stahl seems to doggedly pursue her genetic bad seed theory in this story without any evidence to back it up.  She seems more invested in believing Jeff's mom that her son was a good boy and a loving father who got tossed a bad hand by the economy than digging into what it must've been like to live under the roof of a hateful neo nazi.  Stahl uses the fact that there are fewer than 10 cases of 10 year old murderers in FBI records as further evidence for her bad seed theory when it seems to me to prove just the opposite.  I can only hope that the other 6 million viewers of this story are better critical thinkers than the producers and journalists who put together this segment.