Pete Hegseth’s High-Tech Barbarism

Last Thursday, days after signing off on the death-by-firing-squad of Nidal Hasan, an Arab American army psychiatrist convicted of a mass shooting at Ford Hood in 2009, self-styled “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth announced that the execution would be livestreamed to the general public.

This is a full-frontal assault on the foundational principles of the Enlightenment, and, as many political figures even within the GOP understand, a deliberate wrecking ball aimed at the integrity of the US legal system. It is also a decision bound to propagate anti-Muslim animus, and radicalize more young men. This barbaric order is, in short, catastrophically shortsighted.

If the livestreaming does, indeed, take place, it will place the American government firmly on the wrong side of international opinion—and, in many cases, laws against the distribution of violent material online. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Online Safety Act is designed to protect children, in particular, from encountering extreme acts of violence online. The biggest social-media companies have internal policy guidelines barring users from posting video footage of executions, though since they are not always good about enforcing them, plenty of people are bound to repost footage of Hasan’s execution. The federal bureau of prisons bars the distribution of execution footage. States, too, have laws preventing the filming and distribution of executions: Legislators all over the country have long recognized the damage that publicly broadcasting executions would have. Now, however, if Hegseth—who purports to be so “pro-life” that he has made it extra difficult for women in the services to secure abortions—has his way, the US military will be marking its territory in the snuff movie business.

Hegseth’s bloodthirsty move is placing the American government front and center in the business of hawking the spectacle of cruelty, which is, of course, what all fascist regimes do. Hegseth is legitimizing snuff movies as official government policy, which puts children the world over at risk of trauma and radicalization if and when they and their circle of friends decide it would somehow be cool to tune in to watch a man in a wheelchair be shot in the heart by a squad of masked soldiers.

If Hasan’s execution is indeed livestreamed to the world, it will mark the ultimate destruction of the military’s honor code at the hands of Trump’s fanaticism. But it won’t have occurred in a vacuum.

Trump and Hegseth have spent two years purging the military’s top brass, as well as the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG System) of personnel willing to push back against illegal orders. The testosterone-obsessed, rabidly anti-diversity Hegseth views women and Black people as less likely to mindlessly follow his extreme commands, and in consequence, has repeatedly denied promotions to those groups. More generally, he has fired anyone he suspects to have reservations about the MAGA agenda and loyalty to Trump. This is Führerprinzip politics in action.

At gatherings of generals and admirals, Hegseth has railed against “woke” policies that place limits on the military’s ability to kill anyone and everyone who gets in their way. Trump, too, has addressed the generals and troops in a series of meetings that come off as campaign rallies, and told them their biggest enemy is within the US itself and that they should consider American cities as training grounds for counterinsurgency campaigns.

Time and time again, with a few brave exceptions, the military’s leadership has failed to push back against this MAGA takeover, partaking in the clearly illegal campaign of extrajudicial assassinations of fishermen in the Caribbean and the Pacific over the past year, including releasing video footage; showing the targeted ships exploding obeying the illegal “double tap” orders to kill the survivors of one of the ship attacks; carrying out the clearly illegal kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro; failing to push back against the illegal war of choice in Iran; and purportedly drawing up plans to invade Cuba.

Each illegal order and the decisions to comply with them take the top brass further down this dark road. The order to partake in Hegseth’s Hasan execution snuff movie production is just the latest grotesquery.

If carried out, the execution will put the United States in truly despicable company. In 2026, Iran and Afghanistan have both carried out public executions. There are also reports of public executions in Somalia and Saudi Arabia. But even these outlier countries didn’t go the extra mile and broadcast or livestream the killings to a national or global audience.

During the ISIS caliphate, ISIS executions were put out on the internet, and they met with worldwide revulsion. So, too, in the years following the 9/11 terror attacks, Al Qaeda routinely killed its hostages in front of web cams, using the decapitation imagery to instill panic and fear around the world. Eventually, though, even Al Qaeda veered away from this strategy.

In the early days of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the mercenary Wagner Group used Telegram channels to broadcast the brutal killing of deserters—presumably as a way to scare others who were having reservations about fighting this illegal war back onto the straight and narrow. These, apparently, are Hegseth’s role models.

The last time a legally authorized execution was carried out in front of a mass audience in the US was in 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when an estimated 20,000 people turned out to watch a Black man swing from a rope after being convicted of raping a white woman. What Hegseth and Trump are proposing would create a vastly larger audience than a Southern mob livestreaming a state-conducted killing to the entire world.

You can parse this in any way you want, but if you are honest with yourself you will still reach the same conclusions: This is nothing more or less than psychopathy gussied up as official government policy.