The Pentagon Is Going to Livestream a Firing Squad Execution

There was a time when executions were community theater. In 18th-century London, hangings at Tyburn drew crowds of thousands — vendors hawked pies, pickpockets worked the perimeter, and the condemned got to deliver a final soliloquy before the trapdoor dropped. Then we got "civilized" and moved the whole affair behind prison walls, deciding that state killing was too grisly for the public eye. Now, Pete Hegseth wants to drag us back to the town square — except the town square is now a livestream with a chat function and a "like" button. The choice of a firing squad is telling. The U.S. military hasn't executed anyone since 1961, and lethal injection has been the standard for decades. But a firing squad isn't about efficiency — it's about theater. A line of rifles, a single volley, a body crumpling in unison. It's a ritual designed to be *watched*. Livestreaming it doesn't just document the event; it turns the execution into a broadcast spectacle, an invitation to witness death in real time, with all the moral weight (or lack thereof) that comes with pressing play. This lands at the intersection of two uncomfortable trends: the gamification of violence and the erosion of the taboo around state killing. We live in an era of true-crime obsessions, war-footage compilations, and dark-web horror shows. The line between witnessing and entertainment has blurred to the point where a "no brainer" execution livestream feels less like a shock and more like a logical endpoint. Hegseth's casual framing normalizes it — this is justice, he implies, and justice should be transparent. But is it transparency, or is it revenge as content? Are we watching for closure, or for the same reason we slow down at car crashes? The deeper question is what this says about how we imagine state power in the digital age. A livestreamed execution doesn't just kill a man — it turns the entire public into complicit witnesses. You can't look away and claim ignorance; you either watch or you make a choice not to. That's a profound shift in the relationship between citizen and state, wrapped in the language of "public transparency." Whether this proposal survives the inevitable legal and ethical firestorm remains to be seen, but the mere fact that it's being floated — as a *no brainer* — tells us something unnerving about how quickly the unthinkable becomes plausible when it's dressed in the garb of efficiency and spectacle. As reported by Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-hegseth-firing-squad-execution-public-1235640033/