Another Way Out: Public Execution Is an Everyday Reality—Livestreamed or Not

For some, the Trump administration’s plan to livestream an execution was unacceptable because it wouldn’t happen behind closed doors

By William C. Anderson, Prism

“There are people, who in good faith ask this question: How would it be possible to live without government? And they conclude saying that a supreme chief, a crowd of officials, large and small, such as ministers, judges, magistrates, legislators, soldiers, jailers, policemen, and executioners, are necessary.” –Ricardo Flores Magón 

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the now-canceled plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas, the response was mixed. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll revealed that 8 in 10 people believed “the execution should not be live-streamed to the public.” However, “a narrow 53 percent majority of Americans support executing Hasan by firing squad.” All of this information has to be digested in relation to the fact that livestreamed executions are an everyday reality in the U.S. The Trump administration’s plan wasn’t necessarily abnormal, but many found its formalization shocking. This is a problem the U.S. public has yet to overcome: It often decries atrocities when they are announced plainly, while ignoring the fact that they are a part of the society’s culture.

President Donald Trump is the embodiment of this sort of conundrum, as someone liberals commonly denounce for not being “a real American.” However, Trump, like public execution, represents much of what’s at the core of the U.S., and we only have to look around to understand why.

In my 2023 essay, “Police killings are public executions,” I argued that extrajudicial killing is so normalized that it has failed to register with onlookers as a propagandistic broadcast. This is how the “psychological augmentation of the police state” becomes deeply ingrained in us “as accepted fascistic violence.” I highlighted that it was so regular that people like Tyre Nichols and Keenan Anderson referenced the public execution of George Floyd as they themselves were executed. Take this into account along with the practice of spectatorship, the recording of police murders that then go viral, and the institutional faux accountability measure of police body cameras. Combined, we have much of what we need to create a readymade meal for societal conditioning. Those who watch the murder have digested it to such an extent that they become desensitized, avoidant, and disempowered. That’s what makes the livestream execution debacle particularly curious.