October 9 2026 - 11:30am
The Pentagon has confirmed that former US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people — as well as an unborn baby — and injured more than 30 others in a mass shooting at a Texas military base in 2009, will be executed by firing squad. It will be the first military execution since Army Private John Bennett was hanged in 1961. And it is going to be livestreamed.
This proposal has prompted shock from across the political spectrum. The conservative Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who has written in support of the death penalty in some cases, described the execution as radically out of keeping with Christian society, representing instead “a ghoulish spectacle” reminiscent of “pagan Rome”. The liberal New York Times drew parallels with “extremist militant groups like the Islamic State”.
If Hasan’s execution is livestreamed, it will be the first public execution in the USA since Rainey Bethea was hanged in Kentucky 90 years ago, in front of a crowd of 20,000, for the rape and killing of a 70-year-old woman. Public mores in the 20th century came to view such events as distasteful and wrong, calling instead for the more humane option of lengthy prison terms. More recently, “anti-carceral” activists have sought even to challenge imprisonment, advocating efforts instead to rehabilitate or meet the unmet needs of those who commit crimes.
Is the culture shifting again? If so, the change precedes the Trump administration, reflecting sensibilities coarsened by the snuff videos which have circulated online since the earliest days of the digital revolution. But in recent years, such content has become endemic, often functioning as a vehicle for activism. Here, the mingled horror and rubbernecking these videos typically evoke becomes a call for sympathy to the cause. The aggregate effect can be grim: for a while, until I took measures to prevent it, my newsfeed routinely juxtaposed snuff videos showing Israelis killing Palestinians with snuff videos showing Palestinians killing Israelis. Earlier, the mix was Ukrainian drones killing Russians and sometimes Russian drones killing Ukrainians.
There are plenty of other categories. I’m deliberately choosing not to link any examples, but a quick search will turn up enough to give anyone nightmares. All press themselves algorithmically on the casual scroller’s attention, at the barest hint of pausing at the latest autoplayed horror. However hard one tries, all of this causes desensitization, and the overall atmosphere produced by the rhetorical serving-up of pain and death is one that normalizes the use of such imagery as tools for propaganda.
In this context, should we really be surprised that an administration whose official communication register extends to extremely online, gamified montages glorifying the bombing of Iran should go beyond reposting snuff-as-propaganda to generating it? More dispiriting yet is the prospect that, given the increasingly post-literate public square, this means of communication may turn out to be much more effective than exhortations, prison, or calls to shared public loyalty.
No one has the attention span for exhortation, the prisons are full, and the world, it seems, is too diverse, networked, and pluralistic to rely on public loyalty. However rebarbative it may seem to those of us who remember the time before infinite scroll, a government seeking to get a message across to a TikTok-fried public might well conclude that a short-form snuff video will reach places no carefully-constructed op-ed or solemn speech could ever touch.
Should the execution of Hasan go ahead, it will set a grim precedent. But it’s unlikely to be the last such event, at least in America. Could it come to Britain? The last public execution here was in 1868, when Michael Barrett was hanged for his alleged role in an Irish nationalist bomb attack. And any return to execution full stop, let alone execution as spectacle, is surely unthinkable to most of the present governing class.
But prisons are hopelessly overcrowded, and public anger is at boiling point over officials’ failure to catch or convict prolific criminals. Britain’s public square, too, is increasingly skewed toward the emotional pitch and high-impact footage typical of short-form video. The public has long been more supportive of capital punishment than British elites, and the proportion in favor has risen in recent years. As these factors converge, it’s possible that reinstating punishment as spectacle may not be as far outside the British Overton window as the shrinking “sensible center” might imagine.
