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Notes -
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?
I do not think this will help deter anyone. It will not deter a single jihadist. It will hardly deter any normal criminal -- the ones who don't have the stomach for it will simply not watch. And the ones who will watch will not decide that the threat of getting shot after a few decades of prison will make it not worth it.
And it will very much not be a grim if dignified affair like Ned Stark beheading someone. People will watch it on TV in bars. School boys will make bets if the condemned will shit himself before or after being shot.
Let me try an analogy. Many parents want grandchildren, and many royalists want a royal heir. However, this rarely means that either group would be very interested in observing the process of the baby being conceived or born on live TV. As long as the processes are handled competently, most parents and royalists will prefer to see the end result without the various fluids involved along the way. The ones who would prefer to watch everything are probably perverts.
With a public execution, most of the public in favor of it will decide that as long as it happens, they do not need to see it done. A few will tune in because they feel it is their duty as citizens to bear witness. The main audience will be people watching out of morbid curiosity. Some will watch to confirm their opinion that the death penalty is barbaric.
And MAGA will obviously turn this into a media circus. Hegseth has a day job, he is in charge of the most expensive military on the planet. The particulars of the implementation of the judgments of military courts are only a tiny part of that job, in most administrations they would be handled three layers of management below him. Instead, the former Fox News moderator decided not only to make the execution public, but also to personally announce it.
Can I be sure that he does not share my aesthetic revulsion regarding death by shark? Not really, it could be that for once our aesthetics and moral judgments would agree. His previous readiness to embrace war and warrior aesthetics would make it surprising, but you never know.
Still, I concede that attacking MAGA over what I think they might want to do was bad on my part. I am confident there will be enough for me to criticize after their circus without me having to speculate what the distasteful particulars might be beforehand.
What part of the sentence you quoted do you think was referring to jihadists or normal criminals?
You are arguing public perception. I am also arguing public perception. I believe that execution of murderers is good and proper. I believe, both in this matter and in many, many others, that attempting to reach accommodation with those of incompatible values has been an obvious chronic failure, and the proper path forward is to do what I and others like me perceive to be correct, with little to no regard for how this is perceived by the outgroup. We should offer the public a concrete alternative to the Blue Tribe consensus, not in terms of theory but in terms of actual practice, so that our way and their way can be directly compared. The outgroup does not grant consideration to our moral positions, and we should cease to grant consideration to theirs. the alternative is to be led by the nose in a game of "optics" designed from the ground up to be unwinnable; "only do things that Blue Tribe bigots won't hiss slurs at you for" is a recipe for paralytic abdication.
I do not perceive public execution of a traitorous mass-murderer to be shameful. I do not care if he is in a wheelchair; why should I? His powerlessness is not in question here, this is an execution of a condemned prisoner, not an honorable duel. I do not perceive a valid moral argument against execution of violent criminals, much less murderers, still less mass-murderers, and am entirely comfortable with a debate over the consequences of this approach versus the status quo. I think it is better to force Blues to burn resources attempting to shame us for doing what we perceive to be correct, than to do things we perceive to be wrong in the false hope that they will not shame us, thus granting them further power without contest. I perceive the latter strategy to have resulted in vast ruin, while the former strategy has delivered more victories in a shorter timeframe than any within my tribe dreamed possible. If you believe that this will in some way offend the normies, feel free to explain why widespread celebration of actual lawless murder in numerous previous and quite recent cases has not offended the normies even more.
What evidence leads you to believe this is the case? I think they do need to see it done. I think seeing it done, and the national conversation that follows, will have a significant positive effect on the state of our nation. Certainly I will be drawing comparisons to the reaction to this execution and to previous lawless murders. The disparity in reaction is obvious and instructive.
Should we discuss media circuses, and what they tell us about the people generating them? I do not perceive a shortage of actual, past-tense media circuses with which we might contextualize the hypothetical media circus you are predicting, nor is such an analysis one I expect to get the worst end of. It seems to me that your post above was exceedingly uncharitable; if you want to talk about media circuses and their effect on public opinion, why not reach for the rich context readily available? I think it unlikely that MAGA is going to turn this execution into more of a media circus than Blues did the murders of Kirk and Thompson, or the Lindsey Clancy saga, or the attempted assassinations of Trump, or the death of George Floyd and so on and on and on. Is it somehow worse to have a media circus over the execution of a traitorous murderer than it is over the murder of a law-abiding businessman or a milquetoast political activist or a multiple-felon drug addict ODing in police custody because he swallowed his stash? Or is this a Russell's conjugation thing: my social movement, your media circus, his shameless propaganda? Do these questions seem unreasonable to you, and if so, why?
Fair enough. Let's pick it up when the facts are in.
TL;DR - you are appealing to an image of social norms that seem entirely fictional to me, based on direct observation of the real world. I decline to be swayed by such fictions, and I think confronting them head-on is straightforwardly better than attempting compromise with them. The idea that there is some sort of stable, respectable social consensus that must be respected or accounted for is entirely unsupportable, and it is better to actually have the argument here and now than to allow appeals to this fictional consensus to pass unchallenged.
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