Pete Hegseth says the military will live-stream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter. He’s making a government-sponsored snuff film. What a sick bastard.
Hegseth is clearly excited about it, just like he was about blowing up boats in the Caribbean. He thinks it’s tough and glorious to kill people who can’t fight back. He’s a guy who revels in the suffering of others and in belittling people who have little power. He’s the personification of MAGA.
Trump loves a spectacle. Live-streaming a military execution is the same impulse as his military parade. It’s why they renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. For him, it’s all about the ratings.
In reality, the move will disgust decent Americans. The last public execution in the United States was almost 90 years ago. Western nations stopped public executions for a reason. They believed their societies had moved away from barbarism and become more humane. Execution is punishment, not entertainment.
Firing squads were fairly common during the Civil War, and witnesses found them distasteful. At one execution early in the war, a soldier wrote home, “It was the most horrible sight I ever seen [sic]. It was the first time that I ever seen a man shot and hope the last…I would rather be shot myself than to shoot another man.” He likely went on to see worse, but most Americans won’t.
In making America great again, Trump, Hegseth, and company are mimicking tin-pot dictatorships. As conservatives demand we defend Western values, they are embracing the morals of the mullahs in Iran. Instead of appealing to our better angels, they are summoning our demons.
This whole episode comes on the heels of a botched execution in Tennessee that tortured a woman for hours and left her on life support. That’s truly the theater of the absurd. Instead of promoting the death penalty as entertainment, we should be moving to abolish it, like every other Western nation.
I don’t have much sympathy for most murderers, and I’ll admit many deserve to die, but I don’t believe in torture and I don’t believe our justice system is infallible. We’ve already seen numerous botched executions, and we’ve almost certainly executed innocent people. We should be moving forward in history, not returning to barbarism. Glorifying a killing by making it a public spectacle demeans us as a country.
If Trump and company publicize this execution, I hope the backlash is fierce—but I suspect it will mostly reveal, once again, who among us we should fear and can never trust, in public and private life alike.
I have no doubt they will move along with the most lurid spectacle they can. And in the process we will discover that our nation is filled with barbarians and savages at a level that will be hard to comprehend. Yes, Trump and Heggsbreath are sick bastards, but there’s a sick army of cult members marching in locked step behind them.
Remember to call Tillis and Budd and thank them for this repulsive spectacle.