🔒 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 probably be some kind of rerun instead of new material.

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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