Opinion

Pete Hegseth’s Execution Livestream Plan Is a Step Backward for America

Opinion | By Jeff Beck | North American Talk Radio
October 11, 2026

America should be strong enough to punish a murderer without inviting the world to watch him die.

Pete Hegseth’s proposal to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan crosses a line that should trouble Americans regardless of party or position on capital punishment. It would turn an act of state power into a broadcast event, with consequences extending far beyond the condemned man.

The moral objection is straightforward: human death should not become government-produced spectacle. The psychological objection deserves equal attention. A nation already saturated with violent imagery gains nothing healthy from an official invitation to gather around a killing.

Rejecting that invitation does not excuse Hasan’s crimes. It means refusing to let those crimes dictate America’s standards.

What Hegseth proposed—and what remains undecided

The Pentagon announced plans to livestream Hasan’s execution, scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood. Hasan was convicted after the 2009 attack that killed 13 people and injured 32. Hegseth said the public would be able to watch. Associated Press

However, the broadcast is not a settled outcome. Reuters reported October 10 that President Donald Trump had not decided whether to permit the livestream. Reuters

That distinction matters. Americans still have an opportunity to oppose the proposal before it becomes a precedent.

The victims deserve remembrance, the survivors deserve support, and the families deserve respect. Their suffering should remain central. A worldwide broadcast risks shifting the focus toward the killer’s final moments and the administration presenting them.

No survivor should be told how to feel about his punishment. Yet a government must consider more than whether some people want to watch. It must ask what purpose a public broadcast serves and what it teaches everyone else.

A nation’s character is also shaped by what it celebrates

A criminal conviction establishes responsibility. It does not require the public humiliation of the condemned or an audience for his death.

There is a difference between carrying out a sentence and building an event around it. The latter recruits spectators into the punishment. It asks them to anticipate a death, witness it and then participate in the surrounding conversation.

That is a troubling civic lesson.

We routinely ask Americans to respect life, reject political violence and treat the suffering of others seriously. An official execution livestream would send a conflicting message: under the right circumstances, watching a person die is an appropriate public occasion.

The concern is not that every viewer will celebrate. Some will recoil. Others may watch out of curiosity, anger or a desire to understand. But the state would still be making death available as a shared spectacle.

My objection is to that choice. A government should model restraint precisely when public anger makes restraint difficult.

The same moral standard must apply to Charlie Kirk

This principle also demands some uncomfortable self-examination from people who oppose Hegseth’s proposal.

Charlie Kirk was assassinated while appearing at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. Whatever anyone thought of his politics, his murder was an attack on the basic right to participate in public life without being killed for it. Associated Press

Anyone who publicly cheered Kirk’s assassination and now objects to an execution livestream should look inward. Celebrating one person’s violent death while condemning another death as spectacle contradicts the principle that human suffering should not become a public celebration.

That criticism applies to the individuals who celebrated, not to an entire political party. Criticizing Kirk’s arguments is not the same as applauding his murder. Nor should every opponent of this livestream be presumed to have welcomed his death.

An assassination and an execution following a criminal conviction are different acts, with different legal foundations. Recognizing that distinction does not erase the common moral question: are we treating a human being’s violent death as something to enjoy because we despise the person?

The standard must also run in the other direction. People who rightly condemned celebrations of Kirk’s killing should examine their own consistency if they now welcome Hasan’s death as a broadcast attraction. The identity of the person dying cannot be the only thing determining whether we find the spectacle disturbing.

Republican, Democrat, independent or politically disengaged, we should reject assassination, the celebration of violence and the filming or circulation of a killing for entertainment, humiliation or political gratification. Our principles should survive contact with someone we dislike.

Responsible documentation requires a distinction. A recording may preserve evidence, establish accountability or support necessary reporting. Those purposes differ from staging a killing for an audience or sharing its most graphic moments to provoke delight. Rejecting violent spectacle should not become an excuse to suppress evidence of violence.

No one has to abandon a political belief to uphold this standard. We have to abandon the idea that another person’s death becomes a victory worth watching when that person stands on the other side.

What psychology research tells us about violent imagery

Psychological research cannot predict the national impact of this particular broadcast. However, it offers substantial reasons to take repeated exposure to violent coverage seriously.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 4,675 adults after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Researchers E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver found that six or more hours a day of bombing-related media exposure was associated with greater acute stress than direct exposure, after statistical adjustments for several preexisting factors. Original study

The finding requires care. It does not mean watching one video is more harmful than surviving an attack. Nor does an observational association prove that media exposure alone caused the distress. It shows that extensive engagement with coverage can accompany substantial psychological suffering far from the scene.

A second study, published in Science Advances in 2019, followed a national sample of 4,165 people across three years encompassing the Boston bombings and the Pulse nightclub massacre. It found evidence of a cycle in which trauma-related media exposure predicted later stress symptoms, which predicted worry and further media consumption around a subsequent tragedy. Original study

These studies examined mass violence coverage, not execution livestreams. Applying them here is an inference, not a direct experimental finding.

Nevertheless, they undermine the casual assumption that a violent broadcast affects only the people physically present. A screen can extend an event’s emotional reach. Repetition can extend it further.

The broadcast would outlive the execution

An online execution would not end when the official feed stopped.

Recordings could circulate as clips, screenshots, reaction videos and political arguments. People who declined the original invitation could encounter the footage later. Children could encounter it as well.

Those are foreseeable risks, although the eventual scale would depend on distribution and platform decisions.

For survivors and families, that raises another concern: the permanent recirculation of an event connected to their loss. Some might welcome access. Others could find the repeated attention painful. Their differing needs argue for careful, limited arrangements rather than assuming a global audience serves them all.

The damage to national character is harder to measure than an individual stress score. My concern is that an official broadcast would normalize a new expectation: public punishment should be visually satisfying and available on demand.

That is a moral and cultural judgment, not a diagnosis of millions of Americans. It is still a judgment worth making before the government creates the footage.

America has condemned public executions abroad

The comparison with countries America has criticized should be precise. Public executions, official execution imagery and internet livestreams are related practices, but they are not identical.

In December 2022, Iran publicly executed Majidreza Rahnavard in connection with nationwide protests. Amnesty International condemned the proceeding as unfair and described the execution as an instrument of repression. Amnesty International

In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s return to public executions and floggings drew explicit American condemnation. At a December 19, 2022 briefing, State Department spokesperson Ned Price described those practices as “barbaric violations of human rights.” State Department briefing

The United States has also criticized executions in Iran. The Associated Press documented Trump’s own statements opposing Iranian executions in its coverage of the Hasan broadcast proposal. Associated Press

Hasan’s military prosecution is not equivalent to Iran’s treatment of protesters, and America is not the Taliban. Differences in offenses, procedures and institutions matter.

But those differences do not answer the narrower moral question: why should the public display of killing become acceptable when our government supplies the cameras?

America weakens its criticism of punitive spectacle abroad when it embraces a version at home. Human dignity cannot be a principle we invoke only against adversaries.

Our own history warns against reviving the crowd

America does not need to look overseas for examples of execution spectacle.

Rainey Bethea’s 1936 hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky, drew thousands of spectators. It is frequently described as the country’s last public execution, although the Associated Press notes another public hanging in Missouri in 1937. Its historical account describes growing objections to the carnival atmosphere surrounding such events. Associated Press historical account

The lesson is not that America’s past was morally clean. It is that moving away from the execution crowd represented an important boundary.

A livestream would revive that crowd on a vastly different scale. The courthouse square would become an internet audience. The ability to replay the killing would make the spectacle more enduring.

Calling that technological modernization would miss the underlying regression. New cameras can deliver an old form of public cruelty.

Deterrence does not settle the argument

Supporters may argue that watching an execution would discourage future crimes. That claim requires evidence.

The National Research Council’s 2012 review concluded that existing research could not reliably determine whether capital punishment increased, decreased or had no effect on homicide rates. National Academies

That finding does not prove the death penalty has no deterrent effect. It means the evidence reviewed did not resolve the question. It certainly does not establish that broadcasting an execution adds protection.

A public-safety argument cannot simply assume that a more visible punishment produces a safer society. Before introducing an unprecedented broadcast, officials should demonstrate why it is necessary.

Anger is understandable. An evidence-based policy still needs more than anger.

Transparency deserves a better answer

The strongest argument for a broadcast is transparency. If the government takes a life, citizens should be able to scrutinize its conduct. Secrecy can conceal mistakes and suffering.

That concern deserves respect. Yet transparency can include independent witnesses, meaningful press access, public records, detailed reporting and investigation of any failure.

The public needs reliable evidence about government conduct. Providing that evidence does not require organizing a worldwide audience for the instant of death.

Likewise, limited access for affected families is a separate question from unrestricted public distribution. A policy aimed at their needs should be designed around those needs.

America should reject the livestream

Hasan’s crimes were horrific. They do not relieve America of its responsibility to act with moral discipline.

The country can honor the victims without producing a death broadcast. It can demand accountability without cultivating spectatorship. It can defend public safety without treating an unproven deterrence claim as sufficient justification.

Hegseth’s execution livestream proposal would be a step backward because it revives an idea America should have outgrown: that the state strengthens society by gathering an audience around a killing.

Our response to evil reveals something about us, too.

America should refuse the spectacle—and apply that principle regardless of whose death is on the screen or which political side is cheering.

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