Americans Should Reject All State-Sanctioned Murder, Live-Streamed or Not
Last year, the US was 1 of only 17 countries to record an official execution.
The Pentagon’s self-described “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth recently announced a plan to live stream the execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, a wheelchair-bound veteran convicted of a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.
President Donald Trump eventually backed away from the live-stream plan. But not before Americans across the political spectrum agreed that—whatever Hasan’s crime—live streaming an execution crossed a line. In one poll, 80% opposed it.
That’s not surprising. Live streaming the slaughter of a human being, especially when the spectacle is cheered on by a defense secretary who claims to worship his troops’ killing power, their “lethality,” above all else—including their loyalty to the Constitution—falls outside any definition of morality.
The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.
The thought of kids pulling out their phones on the playground, or adults glued to their tablets at work, to witness an execution is uniquely horrifying. But much of the official criticism of Hegseth’s proposal to make the execution public also had a particularly chauvinistic quality to it.
Some argued that it would lower the integrity of the US to the level of “other” countries. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said: “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Yet beyond the issue of live streaming, the underlying act of state-sanctioned homicide itself sounds a lot like what “they” do. The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.
Last year, only 17 countries recorded official executions, according to Amnesty International. China led the list with the most executions, followed by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yemen (with 51) and the United States (with 47) rounded out the top five. During that same year, no executions at all occurred in Europe or Central Asia. And for the last 17 years, the United States has been the only country in the Americas to officially execute anyone.
The US embrace of the death penalty as other countries abandon it is disturbing enough. Equally disturbing is the fact that executions here historically have often been quite public.
The US has a long legacy of lynching, whether carried out by a wartime firing squad or hanging people from a makeshift noose on a tree. During racist lynchings carried out from the Civil War era well into the 1960s, crowds of people—including well-dressed women, men with children on their shoulders to make sure the little ones could see, poor and rich but all white—gathered near the tree with picnic baskets and post cards for sale to commemorate the slaughter of Black men, women, and children.
Yet this isn’t only about our past. It’s about this administration’s effort to normalize a level of deliberate bloody slaughter being carried out today—whether in the Gaza genocide, the US bombing of school children in Iran, or Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) brutal treatment of immigrants and protesters. All based on the idea that some people simply have no right to live.
These decisions made here have international impacts.
The Israeli government is openly borrowing from the cruelties of the US prison system. Earlier this year, the Israeli parliament legalized capital punishment. From its founding in 1948, Israel had not allowed an execution—with only two exceptions, one of whom was Adolf Eichmann, the main organizer of the Holocaust.
But in March 2026, the Knesset passed a law requiring death by hanging for Palestinians convicted in military courts of any lethal action Israel deems terrorism. (Jewish Israelis, including illegal settlers in the West Bank, remain completely immune from the threat of capital punishment.)
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s extremist national security minister, made a video showing off the gallows under construction—gloating that the new site would have an open viewing area, “just like in the US.”
Still, it’s encouraging that Americans’ outrage forced Trump to back off from Hegseth’s brutal spectacle. And with the percentage of Americans opposing capital punishment climbing year after year—alongside public opposition to war, genocide, and ICE’s violence—perhaps one day the White House will similarly abandon those horrors as well.
