Every so often, my regular TikTok scroll gets interrupted by somebody rage-baiting Dean Withers’s livestream about how they’d like to see public executions return. So I know that opinion exists, but I’ve assumed they can't be serious. Contrarians across the United States take absurd stances all the time. And we ignore them. Mostly because many of the things they advocate for can’t actually happen. Not here at least… right? Well I certainly thought that true of public executions in the U.S., until Thursday, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Dec. 3 would be one man’s final day in this world, and extended an invitation for Americans to watch. Hegseth thinks that broadcasting such a severe punishment will deter others with violent thoughts from acting on them. But he’s wrong.

He and his supporters seem to think that a progressively sensitive, or woke, society is the reason for doing away with public executions. But the idea that a people witnessing such a morbid scene will repel crime — albeit plausible-sounding —  falls apart when confronted with actual human nature. 

There are few countries that execute people publicly, with Amnesty International highlighting some unique cases in bystanders released video footage in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Even against that backdrop, they don’t run state-sanction broadcasts of. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, however, specified Thursday that a livestream is precisely what he has in mind for the firing squad execution of the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, former U.S. Army officer Nidal Malik Hasan. That way, Americans everywhere can tune in, just as they do football on Sunday night. 

About 15 years ago, Hasan was anticipating his pending deployment to Afghanistan when he opened fire at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where other soldiers were preparing for deployment. In the years prior, he expressed dissatisfaction with the war. During his senior year of his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a medical presentation trailed off into a diatribe against "infidels" titled "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military," arguing that the military should allow Muslims to leave as conscientious objectors. During Hasan’s disaster psychiatry fellowship, classmates reported that he often ranted about the War on Terror actually being a "war on Islam," and after the 2009 shooting of military recruiters in Little Rock, Arkansas, retired Colonel Terry Lee recalled Hasan having defended the attack, saying that the military should expect more of them. Five months later, he himself carried one out — killing 13 and wounding more than 30 people. 

Speaking to Real America’s Voice, a conservative outlet, Hegseth expressed his preference for the U.S. military’s mindset during World War II — the last memory of a public execution.

"Which was, understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground," he said. "So [Hasan’s crime] was radical Islamist terror attack."

He emphasized each word in his characterization as if trying to memorize them.

"Remember what Obama called it?" Hegseth said. "workplace violence? I mean that's what we're up against. That's the worldview we're up against, is workplace violence."

President Obama's early remarks about the tragic loss of life at Fort Hood in his weekly address received widespread criticism at the time for his choice of "workplace violence" as opposed to "terrorist attack,” “shooting” or "violent extremism." But the administration later defended its initial language as appropriate while investigations were ongoing. 

"It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, so he's gonna get a firing squad of soldiers,” Hegseth said. “As it should be.”

His next words shook the nation to its core: 

"And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it's public —because people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things."

It’s a common theory but hundreds of years of history tells us that Hegseth's expectation is not realistic.

In fact, countries with the death penalty (even when practiced behind closed-doors) have  higher crime rates than those without. And when Dartmouth College Mathematics Professor, John Lamperti, studied the evidence to examine other potential explanations for this, he wrote in his 2010 report, "If capital punishment really has any effect on homicide rates, that effect must be small. Worse, it might go the wrong way!"

He isn’t alone in his findings. They’re the consensus among leading criminologists and researchers. Still, those in favor of the death penalty maintain their position — perhaps rationalizing an otherwise emotional argument: that those who commit the most grotesque crimes against humanity must not only be removed from society, but from the world. That their mind is so corrupt that it mustn't serve a purpose in this mortal plane among the rest of us. That, in the event of a judicial slap on the wrist, they might harm another. Or just to be on the safe side of some unpredictable Pluribus-like event where an alien technology merges all of our minds into one collective consciousness, that mental plague can’t possibly spread its dangerous thoughts and disturbing memories. 

Ultimately, capital punishment has proven to be more an act of vengeance than one of retribution. And in the "facts over feelings" era of politics, it's lost legitimacy. 

In 1975, Dr. Louis West observed what he called "attempting suicide by homicide" — strange cases where a person commits murder in pursuit of their own death. In one instance, an Oklahoma truck driver stopped for lunch at a Texas cafe when a complete stranger walked through the door, shotgun in hand, and sent a bullet through his head. What happened next is what you'd expect: the police arrived, disarmed him, arrested him, but when asked why he'd done it, he said frankly, "I was just tired of living." 

And then there's the "brutalization hypothesis," formulated and tested by criminologists William J. Bowers and Glenn L. Pierce in "Deterrence or Brutalization: What is the Effect of Executions?" They argued that the death penalty devalues human life to the point of legitimizing lethal violence as an acceptable means to an end, actually weakening society's moral inhibitions against killing — in turn, inspiring a more violent society; not less. In fact, studies out of London and New York have found an increase in homicides after highly publicized executions. 

But when it comes to outright public executions, the reason the Western world has generally done away with them is because of their ultimately detrimental impacts on public society. In addition to death desensitization and diminished human compassion, psychiatrists and sociologists have long-noted that viewing executions can induce anxiety, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among witnesses, particularly children and vulnerable populations.

Not to mention, throughout history, these kinds of crowds have often devolved into rowdy, celebratory or otherwise debauched gatherings (think historical hangings in England or the U.S.) rather than solemn, meaningful reflections on crime, punishment and morality. These chaotic spectacles frequently attracted pickpockets, brawls and additional criminal activity rather than prevented it. 

And while displayed killings have existed for thousands of years — since codified laws of antiquity’s dawn, until the relatively-recent phase out of the 19th century — they carry a uniquely American weight in the U.S.

In its early days, the U.S. government used public executions as community spectacles, moral lessons, and above all, displays of state authority. That is, until about a century ago when such affairs began happening behind closed doors. 

And before 1850, the American South displayed public hangings for intimidation and shame — most systemically of and toward Black people. 

And that's the similar sound that this moment rings. For roughly nine decades, capital punishment in the U.S. has remained a private process, hidden from the public eye. And crimes like that of Hasan — albeit morally abhorrent — are not unheard of in American life. No, certainly not in American life. 

As of Oct, the CNN School Shooting Database has counted 27 fatalities in the 46 total school shootings seen across the U.S. this year. And yet, the Trump administration has made no comparable public spectacle of the executions awaiting other notorious mass murderers. Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants in a Jewish Synagogue is on death row. The death penalty is being pursued against Payton Gendron, a white man who killed 10 Black people in Buffalo after promising to do just that while self-identifying as a white supremacist in a lengthy manifesto. And Patrick Crusius, the white man currently serving 90 consecutive life sentences for fatally shooting 23 people in an El Paso Walmart, targeting Hispanic people, citing the "Great Replacement" theory. 

Their crimes, too, were acts of ideologically motivated mass violence. So why has the administration chosen this particular execution to make an example of? Hegseth repeatedly emphasized Hasan’s identity as a “radical Islamist,” using the term three times in less than 35 seconds while speaking Thursday, raising questions about the message the administration hopes to send, and to whom.

Still, the more consequential question is why they’re being invited to witness an execution at all.

For centuries, public executions were defended as demonstrations of justice and warnings against violence. Yet the crowds they attracted, the psychological harm they inflicted and the troubling evidence surrounding their effectiveness eventually challenged the very premise of the spectacle. Now, as the United States prepares to make another man’s death a public event, the question is no longer simply why his punishment is deserved, but what happens to a society when its government asks people to watch someone die, and whether the next generation will regard that spectacle as an aberration, or as an ordinary exercise of American justice.