FORT HOOD, TEXAS, LIVE AND IN HIGH DEFINITION (The Daily Whatever Press) — The United States government is going to shoot a man to death on December 3, and Pete Hegseth wants to make damn sure you’ve got a good seat.
Today the Pentagon confirmed that the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan — the Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 more at Fort Hood in 2009 — will be livestreamed. Where? They haven’t said. The Pentagon already posts its greatest hits to X and YouTube, so somewhere a comms staffer is probably picking a thumbnail.
Like and subscribe, I guess.
Nobody here is lighting a candle for Hasan. He walked into a building full of soldiers waiting in line for immunizations and deployment paperwork, and he opened fire. Twelve soldiers and one civilian never walked back out. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, his appeals ran out, and whatever your thoughts are on capital punishment, the law is the law.
What the fuck the United States thinks it’s doing with a stream key? That’s a separate question entirely.
Hegseth didn’t announce this from a podium, because the Pentagon hasn’t held a formal press briefing since May. He announced it on Real America’s Voice — cable home of Steve Bannon’s War Room — from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, promising, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” Hasan, he said, is “gonna get a firing squad of soldiers. As it should be.” Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America said: “Don’t care.”
I think we’re still supposed to care about final requests? Aren’t we??
The timing makes it worse. In April the administration added firing squads, electrocution, and gas to the federal execution menu. Then, days before Trump signed off on Hasan, Tennessee botched Christa Pike’s lethal injection so badly the governor halted executions for the rest of the year, and Trump called the whole thing “an interesting situation.” So while one state is stopping to ask how it got killing people this wrong, the federal government has decided to do it on camera. During Trump’s first term, all 13 federal executions happened behind closed doors in Terre Haute, Indiana. This one gets a livestream and content calendar.
This country hasn’t held a public execution in about 90 years. The last one was in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936, when thousands of people showed up like it was the county fair, and the national coverage was so humiliating that America looked at itself and said, never again.
Pete looked at the same history and saw untapped engagement.
In 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in The Running Man, a movie about a broke, authoritarian America that pacifies itself by watching the state kill people on live TV, hosted by Richard Dawson in a sequined jacket. It was set in 2017. We were supposed to watch it, get a little creeped out, and rewind the tape before Blockbuster hit us with a late fee. Nobody was supposed to take notes and take action. Every GenXer also remembers the sleepover where somebody’s older brother produced a bootleg VHS of Faces of Death and we all pretended we weren’t about to throw up in the Doritos bag. Running Man was fiction. That tape was mostly staged. This one won’t be, and your tax dollars are covering production.
The stupidest part loops all the way back around to dangerous. Hasan’s own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He represented himself at trial and cast himself as a soldier who’d changed teams. The man went looking for martyrdom — and the Pentagon is about to film it for him, in HD, with the U.S. Army seal in the corner, then hand it to the open internet so every extremist recruiter on earth can clip it, caption it, and set it to music.
Somebody also has to stand in that squad. Hegseth bragged it’ll be soldiers at Fort Hood, the post where their fellow soldiers were murdered. Will their faces be in frame? Will the chat be on? Nobody has said, because nobody at the Pentagon takes questions anymore.
I spent years fiddling with parental controls so my daughters wouldn’t stumble onto disturbing content, like a man getting shot on the internet. Turns out the thing I should have blocked was the Department of Defense. This is what governing looks like when the only emotional register available to the men in charge is look how hard I am. Gravity, mercy, and any flicker of shame get cut for time.
And here’s the punch line: it might never even air. Hasan can still file a habeas appeal in civilian federal court that could stall this for years. Pete may have just announced a premiere date for a show that gets shelved.
Thirteen people died at Fort Hood. Their families have waited 17 years.
Whatever you believe about the death penalty, those families deserved a government that treats killing a human being as the heaviest thing a state can do. Instead they’re getting a premiere date and a comment section.
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We should all care about all of this. They’re making a huge example of this because he’s Muslim and that is gold for them right now. Biff lives☠️
This is sickening. I really don’t understand why they would stream an execution. Deserved or not.