By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
Back in the ’90s, George Carlin had a whole bit about televising executions. On his special, Back in Town, Carlin mused about how depraved the American public is, claiming that you could slap a Budweiser logo on the wall and they’d clamor to sponsor the televised death spectacle. Thirty years later, we’ve arrived at that grim moment.
Recently, the Pentagon announced that Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, will die by firing squad at Fort Hood on December 3. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended it, Trump signed off, and Hegseth celebrated with a one-word post: “Justice.” If carried out, it would be the first US military execution since 1961. Army rules call for a couple of news outlets to witness it. Give this crew five minutes and they’ll want it streaming with Kalshi as a sponsor.
Once again, Hegseth proves he never really left the Fox & Friends Weekend couch. He spent years learning that outrage gets shares, and now he runs the Pentagon like a weekend morning segment: big statement, big reaction, cut to commercial. A firing squad isn’t smart policy to him. It’s a ratings play. I won’t be shocked when the day comes that he has to answer for his time in office.
I’m tired of the sentence “Idiocracy was a documentary” because it becomes truer every day. Politics should be boring. We shouldn’t idolize people who are supposed to make our lives easier. They should do their jobs and drift back to their normal lives, not become cornerstones of coffee-table conversation. But no, we have a damaged reflecting pool, a “Department of War” because it sounds manlier, and groceries costing so much that “Dollar Store Meals” is trending on social media.
I know the spectacle of watching someone die appeals to the lizard brain. That doesn’t make it the best move. The same people who’ve shown no shame about the Iran war, who want to nuke the whole region and call everyone in it “animals,” should sit with this: public executions are exactly what we point to when we call other countries barbaric. Livestreaming one doesn’t make us tougher than them. It makes us them. And yes, this is where it always starts.
First, it’s Hegseth wanting to teach a lesson, then it’s the Trump White House cutting a deal to make The Running Man a reality. Edgar Wright’s remake came out in theaters last November. Less than a year after we paid $15 to watch Glen Powell run from a televised death game, you’ll get it free on Trump’s YouTube channel, which, of course, he’ll monetize.
Executing Hasan on camera gives him exactly what he wanted. At trial, Hasan called no witnesses, didn’t testify, and didn’t contest the charges. His own court-appointed lawyers worried he was trying to get himself executed. A livestream hands him the martyrdom he was angling for. The clip gets memed and passed around forever, while 13 families keep grieving.
Carlin’s joke? It happened. The last public execution in the US was Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936. About 20,000 people came. It turned into a carnival, with vendors selling food to the crowd. The backlash helped end public executions in America.
We don’t need a culture of people wearing shirts commemorating the day they watched a man get shot. We’ve already got enough tacky political gear, and at this point it’s basically the same thing. Put down the Polymarket app and pick up a history book. We’ve been here before, and we were ashamed of it.
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