While shocking, it actually comes as little surprise that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the department will livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan.
Since taking office, Hegseth has been preoccupied with death. To be more precise, he has been preoccupied with killing. And, to be even more precise, he has been preoccupied with the aesthetics of killing.
Hegseth announced on Wednesday that the Dec. 3 execution of Hasan, an Army Medical Corps psychiatrist who was convicted of killing 13 people during a mass shooting at the Ft. Hood army base in 2009, will be “public.” The Pentagon later clarified that it would be livestreamed, with more details to follow. If it goes forward, it will be the first public execution in the United States in 90 years.
These public displays of violence have been an essential part of Hegseth’s political vision and President Donald Trump’s effort to change the country. And now, their quest for an ever-more-intimidating image of personal power and state-sanctioned violence has escalated to the unthinkable: a demonstration of brutality and vengeance that seems to fly in the face of the ideals of modern American justice.
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The celebration of violence that comes from livestreaming an execution acts as a transgression against the liberal and democratic order that long ago ended public executions or abolished the death penalty altogether. It comes at a time when American approval for the death penalty overall has been dropping steadily for 30 years, and just days after a horribly botched execution in Tennessee reopened the debate over the humanity of capital punishment.
But that is hardly an accident: The defiant celebration of violent state power is also a means to secure Trump’s now-flagging project of turning the country toward autocracy. Because it is the liberal and democratic order that Trump and Hegseth would like to set aside in their desire to remake the image of America.
The only countries that still engage in public executions are repressive autocracies or failed states. It’s a short list: North Korea, Iran, Somalia and Afghanistan. (Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy, reportedly ended public executions in 2022.) And now, the United States.
But even these other nations don’t livestream their public executions on the Internet.
Public online executions are not the provenance of states, but of terrorist groups. Such a spectacle brings to mind the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg by al-Qaeda leaders and the many videotaped murders committed by ISIS.
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Unlike Hasan, these people were innocents, convicted of no crime. Still, it is hard not to see the decision to livestream Hasan’s execution as a reflection of what the terrorist groups he affiliated with did to Americans and others. It is yet another marker in the moral decay wrought by the conservative movement that brought Trump and Hegseth to power.
It is unclear how Hegseth’s desire to livestream Hasan’s execution may manifest. Most major online streaming services have terms and conditions that prohibit violence. FCC broadcast rules are similar, although FCC Chair Brendan Carr has said he will defer to the Pentagon. Vice President JD Vance has already indicated he has doubts about the plan. And the public backlash has been widespread.
In Trump’s vision of the world, the only law that matters is that might makes right. Now, he and Hegseth seek to implicate the American public through a shared experience of violence that they hope leads to a form of communal regeneration and release. Killing is a force that gives them meaning — and they want it to do the same for you.
