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On December 3rd, the United States military will publicly livestream the execution by firing squad of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
I’ve made my strong support of the death penalty — and specifically of public executions — abundantly clear over the years. (For a primer, you can listen to this episode of the now-defunct Motte-adjacent Bailey Podcast, my first and to date only podcast appearance.) My initial reaction to this news was jubilant: talk about getting what I voted for! While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging, a firing squad is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of de-medicalizing capital punishment and emphasizing its fundamentally violent and retributive nature.
My observation of the discourse around it has given me pause, though. The apoplectic relationship from the political left has been predictable, and was unfortunately always priced in; the reaction from some on the right, though, has been sobering. Professionally Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect. (“This makes us no better than Al Qaeda! We aren’t some third-world dictatorship! This isn’t Who We Are™️!”) Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists. (We’re giving Hasan exactly the attention and validation he always wanted!”)
These arguments give me pause not because I agree with them, but because they highlight the way that this is a rubber-meets-the-road moment for my ideology. To what extent have I allowed myself to become so radicalized by hermetically-sealed online discourse, such that I imagine my beliefs to be far more popular than they are in reality? Is what I imagine to be a broadly common-sense perspective actually going to prove deeply unpopular and massively polarizing once implemented publicly? Scott Greer, generally a reliable barometer for where the normal Middle American opinion sits, thinks so.
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty. (There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors.) There is a part of me that wishes that the first public execution in America since 1937 should be postponed until it can be overseen by an administration that is less inherently polarizing than this one. To some extent, about a third of the country is fully committed to hating whatever Trump does, no matter what it is; perhaps under a future administration with a higher baseline level of public trust, this event could serve as an opportunity for genuinely restrained public discourse about capital punishment, rather than an opportunity for retrenchment of existing political fault lines. If done incorrectly, this event has the potential to set back the political hopes of death penalty maximalists such as myself for a generation or more.
I’m still planning on tuning in to watch this execution. As someone who discovered the snuff film parts of the internet at a relatively young age, I’m pretty thoroughly desensitized to images of death. (And frankly, having seen a number of videos of firing squad executions, they’re a lot more mild than you might think.) I hope that perhaps there will be some small number of individuals who might find it inspiring — and that there may be others who are in some way deterred, even marginally, from future criminality. The executioners need to strike a delicate balance during the proceedings: solemnity and restraint, acknowledging the humanity of the condemned while also not getting bogged down by mawkish faux-contrition about having to end his miserable wasted life. Keeping the proceedings focused primarily on the victims, including testimony by survivors such as this guy may help to quell any instinctive sympathy for the condemned that viewers could otherwise experience.
I do not get it. Even for pro death penalty people, I do not think there is a bigger point in making the execution public. If the US says they have executed someone in prison, few people will doubt them, so even before AI made video evidence unreliable establishing common knowledge would not have been a great reason.
Nor do I think that the shock value will scare people straight. It does not work too well with the shock pictures the EU puts on tobacco products either.
I think the most coherent reason is that MAGA wants a spectacle.
But then why go for something as tame as a firing squad? Where is the suspense, the thrill? The obvious baseline for RETVRN-leaning MAGAs should be pagan Rome, they knew how to put on a show. Wild animals, fighting, messy deaths. Crucifixions are right out though, not only because they would offend the Christian right, but also because two hours in viewers will get bored and start scrolling TokTok.
Presumably Seaworld was not willing to let Hegseth drop him into a shark tank? Or have him fight for his life with a dagger against an angry polar bear? Perhaps Hegseth could fight him bare-handed to the death, thereby proving his manliness? The horror genre is full of ideas on how to make the spectacle last longer. Is there nobody in the administration who would want to channel their inner Mason Verger by having a jihadist being eaten alive by pigs? Or it could even be episodic, where the convict gets to face some deadly threat every Tuesday at prime time, sometimes getting maimed, until he finally succumbs to one. Think of the money Trump could make on prediction markets by rigging that game!
Presumably Hegseth was advised that the SCOTUS would declare most of these options cruel and unusual, but even the boring firing squad thing would offer the potential for some excitement. Think about it: if execution by firing squad is legal, then execution by a firing squad chosen in a particular fashion is legal. Trump could run a weekly casting/game show where would-be members of the squad compete against each other for the honor of firing the shot. The courts might even allow bringing the convict along for every episode. Fox could make a killing. Bait the left: let Trump's kids and the ICE goons who shot Hope and Pretty compete.
Obviously, the key question would be if Trump would want a woman and black guy on the squad to increase his demographic appeal or if that would be too DEI.
Execution is the proper and just disposition of some crimes, of which this is one. It is not a shameful event to be hidden away in a cellar, it is a demonstration that our society possesses the moral conviction to see that justice is done. People need to see it happen, and they need to understand that this is not something they can overcome with language games and infinite isolated demands for rigor. Further, this method is better than many others, certainly better than pseudo-medicalizations like lethal injection or fossilized techno-futurism like the electric chair or gas chamber. It is proper that this person should be killed, and so we kill them with our standard killing tools.
If you are wondering why your opponents, who you have modelled as cartoonishly evil, are not acting cartoonishly evil, maybe it's because your model is wrong? Maybe you should revise your model, rather than detailing all the ways their actual behavior could diverge less from your imagination's paintings of how awful they could be?
I have watched Blues publicly celebrate lawless murder of innocents, many, many times. Would you appreciate it if I wrote a post like this about something Blues hadn't done, but I could imagine them doing?
Public executions were big parties. Life was so boring that thousands of people would turn out and get drunk watching a man be hanged.
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