Photo: George Walker IV/AP Photos
When the Pentagon announced plans to livestream the execution of mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in December, the only surprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth likes a little ultraviolence — inked on his body, in the form of Crusader tattoos, or the Scripture he quotes. “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle,” he intoned in a press briefing this spring, citing the Psalmist in defense of the war on Iran. In his imagination, he is the great champion of a “warrior culture,” by which he means masculinity or a homicidal version of it. He’s long defended war criminals like Clint Lorance, who ordered the murders of two Afghan civilians, and Eddie Gallagher, who reportedly stabbed a wounded, teenage ISIS fighter to death. So he chose to kill Hasan by firing squad — the first military execution in 65 years — and he wanted to show off for the world. A broadcast would remind the public that “there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” he told podcaster Jack Posobiec, an admirer of dictators Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco.
But Donald Trump apparently had misgivings, and on Thursday morning he said there would be no livestream. Hasan will still die by firing squad, he promised, and families of the victims can watch the killing in person, making this a conventional American execution after all. The impulses motivating Hegseth will not disappear so readily: Others share his lust for state brutality and, with it, the illusion of order. Although Hegseth’s planned livestream faced bipartisan criticism, the American right’s thirst for violent retribution has grown. Immigration authorities under Trump beat and shoot unarmed migrants, and in some cases, they kill them. Trump has praised the Philippine ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, and his extrajudicial killings of thousands of alleged drug dealers, and wants to apply the death penalty more freely to anyone convicted of similar crimes. The modern right exploits a weakness in the American definition of justice, which looks more like vengeance.
By conventional American logic, Hasan deserves to die. The former Army psychiatrist and Islamic extremist killed 13 people on the Fort Hood military base in 2009, and injured 32 others, ahead of a deployment to Afghanistan. There have, of course, been “serious consequences” already: Law enforcement shot and paralyzed Hasan the day of his rampage, and he has spent the last 13 years on death row at Fort Leavenworth, awaiting the execution he said he desired. Hegseth was ready to grant his wish. Had Trump not intervened, U.S. soldiers would have shot Hasan to death while he was strapped into a wheelchair, for an audience of billions. The optics worried Trump more than the killing itself; only his “deep understanding of imagery” made him skeptical of a livestream, a source told CNN. There was no moral sensibility at work, only the vague sense that the public and bloody execution of a paralyzed man would reflect poorly on the administration.
Trump is right, in a way. The botched execution of Christa Pike took place behind curtains. Most state-sanctioned killings do. When the state does kill in the open, it rarely choreographs the carnage in the same, deliberate manner as the execution of Hasan. To date, “The various forms of televised death the administration has put out to this point have been abstract,” observed Marine veteran and novelist Phil Klay in the New York Times. The public might watch “a video feed of a building or boat and then an explosion,” he continued, but that’s not enough gore for Hegesth. To him, bloodshed is justice. Only by ordering soldiers to perforate a human being with bullets in front of us could he satisfy himself. Perhaps he thought that he is like everyone else; that we all long to watch a man bleed out in real time. Or that it would be good for us to do so, whether we realize it or not. Violence can become its own justification.
A few prominent conservatives agreed with Hegseth’s logic. Doug Wilson, who co-founded the Christian denomination to which Hegseth belongs, took issue with a livestream but not with public execution. If the government wants to hang Hasan in a stadium, that’s fine, he wrote on his blog, but it should not sell “popcorn and hot dogs” to the audience. “You obviously must have tickets, but they would have to be apportioned by lottery,” he mused. Palmer Luckey, a major Republican donor and the co-founder of Anduril Industries, said he has wanted “public executions for over a decade,” because they are the “ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence.” We should all “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it,” he added, for it is “aligned with our natural and national order.” Palantir co-founder and University of Austin founding chairman Joe Lonsdale concurred, saying, “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”
Though most Americans opposed the livestream, just over half support the execution itself. If the U.S. has a national order, as Luckey suggested, it’s reflected by that number. We are one of the only developed nations in the world that still administers the death penalty. Although we’ve moved executions into the sterile environment of the prison death chamber, this was not always the case. Hasan’s public execution would have been the nation’s first since “the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea,” CNN reported, “a Black man from Kentucky who was found guilty of raping a White woman by an all-White jury.” The Death Penalty Information Center says that 20,000 people gathered to watch Bethea die. Although history does not tell us if anyone sold popcorn and hot dogs, attendees could and did buy Coca-Cola and sandwiches. One spectator told reporters in 2016 that she was 5 years old when she watched Bethea die, and the sight haunted her for life. “I started having nightmares after I was older,” she said. “It’s like his spirit was just hanging all around me.”
There is a difference between a national order and a natural one. Most of us will never watch the condemned shake or hear their last breaths. “Do we really want to see?” asked Klay in the Times. For now, we don’t. Hegseth’s plan, the state killing as spectacle, tested our moral disposition — and found where it holds fast, and where it fails. The gap between what we accept and the truth we are prepared to confront benefits the most brutal among us. They can say that our justice is deficient. That we are incoherent, even cowardly, if we tolerate bloodshed but don’t want to perceive it. Had Hegseth won, and forced us to look, maybe we’d have nightmares, too. Maybe we should.
