Why Doesn’t the Right Understand Public Executions are a Terrible Idea?

Just a quick note that I’ve just left for vacation so next week’s piece will be a rerun of an older piece.

A downside to running this publishing schedule while I'm away is that I had to finish this piece early, which means it's unwise to write something timely. And so, unwisely, I wrote something timely. At the time I finished this piece to schedule it to run today, the Trump administration was scheduled to livestream a man's execution. Thankfully, within the past couple of days that has apparently been cancelled.

That doesn't mean they don't want to do it. Pete Hegseth still clearly does, and social media is still ablaze with bloodthirst from those on the right who still think it would be a good idea. So any time I talk about this particular in the following paragraphs as though it's going ahead, please just consider the idiocy that made anyone think it was a good idea in the first place.

The Trump administration recently had the bright idea to announce that the death penalty in the USA is too woke and gay and they’re going to ease into a policy of public, violent, livestreamed executions, beginning with the scheduled December 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood massacre. At this point they haven’t said that they intend to make this a regular thing but I am one hundred percent certain that this is a trial balloon for their desperately hoped future executions of Luigi Mangioni and the guy who shot Charlie Kirk.

My only question for the Trump admin, should this actually go ahead (author's reminder - apparently it is not) is … how could you actually be this stupid?

No seriously, put aside for a moment the craven bloodlust of it all. We’ll get to the question of “how could you be such monsters” later, but weighing on my mind is “how could you be such idiots?”

Most everything that the new right does is downstream of the mentality that they’re sick of hearing from subject matter experts and scholars and studies based on data because those people and studies keep coming to conclusions that are the opposite of what these guys feel in their bones, and this is no different. The populist right just gets angrier and angrier and angrier every time learned experts tell them that something like publicly televised executions are simply a bad idea, for lots of reasons.

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This goes beyond what people think they want. People are idiots. As far as I can discern, the word “idiot” isn’t etymologically connected to the psychological term “id” but in this sense they might as well be, in the way populist right idiots think it’s always socially optimal to slavishly satisfy your most primally violent desires. Those cheerleading this on social media are very clear that they want him to be tortured; they want the executioners to rape and sexually degrade him beforehand, and—kind of strangely—they want them to ritually insult his god.

This last and very common sentiment is really bizarre to me, by the way, because it implies that a hell of a lot of people think that both the Christian and Muslim deities are real, separate beings, and all the gods are real and walking around up there like in Marvel’s Thor universe, that this is all part of some celestial turf war and that sending a jihadist back to Allah clean-shaven and riddled with bacon bullets is a righteous middle-finger to an enemy god.

Like I said: Pop-culture fantasy-brained idiots.

Palmer Luckey, one of the lesser-known but not inconsequential techbros of the Silicon Valley Nerd Reich, has called for years for executions to be regular, more brutal, and televised. A rationale he gave recently pushes back on the barbarism charge, arguing that this would make us more human, not less:

And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself.’

But for all the supposed Rationalist Maximalism of these guys’ ideologies, “feels good, man” is still doing a hell of a lot of work, here. Where is the evidence that public, broadcasted executions will have any positive net effect on society besides giving people like Palmer Luckey a big boner?

Hey, did you know that the USA is the only Western nation in the world that still does the death penalty? This even surprised me when I looked it up just now. I thought, at the very least, that El Salvador was doing that shit. But nope, it turns out that every other Western nation and most developed ones including fucking Russia, the champions of bloodthirst, have paid attention to an overwhelming scientific consensus that the death penalty does nothing whatsoever to deter crime or reduce crime rates, at least not the types of crimes for which you’re likely to be sentenced to death.

And, when you actually think about it, why would it? “Gee whiz, maybe I should rethink this, because it just occurred to me that this might lead to me dying rather than going on to lead a long and fulfilling life,” said no spree-killer ever.

So the only conceivable purpose of having a jurisdictional death penalty is either some concept of closure for the criminal’s surviving victims (and it’s incredibly dubious whether that’s the best or even the top fifty best methods of therapy) or else in service of some sort of state-sponsored propaganda, which is why all of the countries that still have capital punishment on the books are either ideologically super-authoritarian nightmares or fundamentalist theocracies. I will leave you to decide which of these categories the USA falls into.

Still, almost no nation on Earth will touch the idea of public broadcast executions, because striking an own-goal that hard is a concept that’s relatively unique to the American Republican party.

Possibly the most anticipated and celebrated execution in American history wasn’t on US soil, but in Pakistan in 2011 during Operation Neptune Spear when Navy SEALs broke into Osama bin Laden’s hideout and shot him dead. That execution was fully recorded. There’s a pretty famous photograph of Obama’s entire situation room watching the footage live while it happened.

So why didn’t they ever release that footage for the catharsis of millions of Americans who had carried the physical and psychological wounds from both 9/11 and the GOP’s subsequent wars for a decade?

It’s for the same reason that they put his corpse on a ship, took it out into the middle of the Indian Ocean, and threw it overboard with no publicized funeral.

It’s not because the Obama administration was all squicky about killing people. Obama and Hillary Clinton catch flack all the time from the left about how murderhappy they were, and the bin Laden thing was celebrated by that administration as one of its proudest accomplishments. They never released the footage because it would be astronomically stupid.

What would a preferred exit look like for bin Laden under Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, and the drooling vulgarians of the Twitter peanut gallery? Drag him into the middle of a stadium dressed in a tutu and rubbing bacon rashers in his face like a bunch of sneering hobgoblins while Osama defiantly recites passages from the Koran and calls to action against the savage West that are broadcast live around the entire world. Then shoot him, put his body on display, bury him in a public grave and build a state-funded Dead Osama Theme Park around it.

You can see how this type of spectacle would be extremely pleasing to a lot of people. I’m hoping you can also see a couple of problems with it.

The Venn diagram of “crimes most deserving of capital punishment” and “acts done for the explicit purpose of drawing attention” has quite an amount of overlap, you see. Sure, sometimes you’ll get someone who snaps and takes out a whole family and then thinks “golly shit, I hope nobody ever finds out about this,” but most of the time atrocities are committed either to selfishly make an impact on the world or to deliver a message to the world, often against the very institution that will be deciding their fate.

Let’s put aside for now the specific issue of jihadists. There’s always been a lot of debate about whether we should even publicize the names of mass shooters who seem to have been specifically motivated by the prospect of historical notoriety. To be clear, I don’t fall into the camp of people who would argue for the suppression of information like that, because I think it crosses a line of censorship that’s more harmful, but it’s a discourse that has also led me to the conclusion that I can’t see any moral, practical, or rational argument for the death penalty at all, let alone an argument for making it more brutal or more public or more sensational.

Take your average school shooter candidate, teetering on the edge, believing that their existence will only matter if they make some sort of impact on other people, and the only way they can do that will be to commit some sort of atrocity. Do you think they will be more or less inclined to go through with it if the likely result will be that the details of their crimes and their whole life story will be televised worldwide in a spectacular execution livestream hosted by Jesse Watters inside the Digger auditorium?

You had, in all likelihood, forgotten that the 2009 Fort Hood massacre had even happened until I slipped that reference into the text a few paragraphs ago. A bunch of you probably opened a new tab to Google it just so that you’re on the same page with me. There’s no shame in that; in fact, that’s the ideal situation, because—with absolutely no shade intended on the families of the victims—that event would have faded into history without anyone having remembered the name of the guy who did it.

The only reason his name is back in the zeitgeist at all is because of this proposed spectacular public execution extravaganza during which the condemned man will be subjected to the very last thing that any committed jihadist would ever want: His message getting out.

Have they never thought it odd that the term “martyr” has never brought shame upon those to whom it is applied?

I would never want to portray the right-wing precursors to Trumpism as less evil, mind you, but I’m happy to say they were smarter. The crimes of US soldiers, Blackwater, the CIA, and administrators of Abu Ghraib prison during President Bush’s Iraq War were committed in secret specifically because of what an incredible propaganda boost they would be to international Islamic radicals should they become known.

And when they did become known, guess what happened?

Obviously the smartest idea would have been not to commit these abuses in the first place, but if not raping and torturing people is too high a bar, as seems to be for Republicans, then the second less stupid idea would be … not broadcasting it around the world?

I had a slightly different conclusion for this but right now, this minute, as I’m editing this piece to run in my absence, I have half an eye on social media where it’s breaking that the President of the United States himself and the White House’s official channels have started pumping most of their pre-midterm communication strategy into … relentlessly mocking a profoundly mentally ill man in a UK zoo who fell into a tiger enclosure and was tragically killed by the animal.

Keep in mind, this was a random tragedy. The victim was not of any of the political or racial groups that Trump considers an outright enemy. They—by whom I mean the official communications team of the current United States government—just think that it’s really funny that someone they consider to be a re—rd fell into a tiger cage.

Remarkably, and bizarrely, I don’t think these people have anything left but performative cruelty. Maybe, now all but this has been stripped back, performative cruelty was all that it ever was to begin with.

I'm writing a book about right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. I've been dropping parts of the draft as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers.

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