Fox News host Pete Hegseth suggested over the weekend that a man who tried to kill police officers in Dallas and people at a pool party in McKinney, Texas were similar because they did not respect law enforcement.
On Saturday's edition of Fox & Friends, Hegseth argued that "growing anti-police rhetoric" could be part of the reason James Boulware allegedly shot at Dallas police and planted explosives before snipers shot him to death.
"It really does get to the question of respect for authority," Hegseth told a panel of guests. "This is a violent instance, but we've seen it as a cultural trend."
"The root is that we've lost a generation, one generation ago, that are now the helicopter parents, raising a lot of children," conservative talk show host David Webb argued. "We've got a culture that's basically broken down, where authority is not respected as much."
"Parents give kids boundaries; in the classroom, teachers give kids boundaries," Webb continued. "Those boundaries are now being overshot because they feel that there is nothing that someone can do about it. If your parents spank you, you call DPS or some social services. The parents are in trouble."
"No child ever died from spanking. They may have died from abuse, which is terrible. But a spanking never hurt a child, and never did anything more than probably embarrass him."
Hegseth agreed that bad parenting was part of the problem: "When fathers and mothers don't lay down actions, why respect those authorities?"
"We see it from teenagers to youth," he explained. "We also see it with adults with the [McKinney] pool party incident recently."
