The Worst Tech Bros and the Worst Christian Nationalists United Behind an Extreme Plan. Then It All Fell Apart.

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President Donald Trump on Thursday walked back his administration’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers and shot dozens more at Fort Hood in 2009. The execution will move forward and the victims’ immediate families will be able to view it in person, Trump said, but it won’t be broadcast for the public.

Trump may be in retreat because, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the planned livestream a week ago, the condemnation was swift, brutal, and broad—and not just among the administration’s typical critics.

Joe Kent, who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026, called it “a stain on our morality.” A daughter of one of the men Hasan killed said livestreaming the execution “stabs us in the back.” Even some conservative personalities shared their distaste. “Public executions are soul-twisting and we should not go down that road,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson said on social media. Almost all Republican lawmakers who spoke about the idea did so with dismay. “Live-streaming executions is what jihadists do,” wrote Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia. Vice President J.D. Vance was lukewarm to the idea—declining to criticize it but saying he would not watch—and Trump was reportedly having doubts last week before he announced the cancellation Thursday.

The opposition to the now-nixed livestream was not, however, universal: A strange coalition of the most ardently Christian nationalist evangelical leaders, joined by a group of new-right tech bros, made common cause over the idea that it’s not only acceptable, but good, for the federal government to ensure the public can watch agents of the state execute a murderer.

These supporters represented a relatively new strain in conservative politics. These elements of the right, both religious and secular, are at the vanguard of anti-woke politics, pushing in online discussions for bolder and bolder ideas to remake American society into an imagined 1950s suburban fantasy. And while members of this coalition weren’t the only ones to support the idea of a livestreamed public execution, they were the ones most gleeful about it: The idea had already found traction in those circles, which act as an incubator for reactionary proposals. But when the rest of the MAGA world didn’t follow, and when Trump reversed course, the unpopularity of the idea became abundantly clear—and these Christian- and techno-nationalist elites were shown to be standing atop a largely illusory movement. It turns out that there are some things that are too far even for MAGA.

Theo-Bros and Tech-Bros United

In a post on Sunday, Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, wrote that it was “normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order” to “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it.”

Luckey, a donor to the Republican party, is one of a number of Silicon Valley figures involved in the “Tech Right.” There are variations within this group’s politics, but Luckey has a background well-aligned with Hegseth’s hyper-masculine code. Anduril is a military technology company, and it produces drones and surveillance systems. Musing on the idea of public executions, Luckey argued that “executions should be public and brutal” because “they are the ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters” with the act.

Luckey wasn’t the only one to make this argument. Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the military tech firm Palantir, which helped ICE track down undocumented immigrants, shared Luckey’s mentality. “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm,” he wrote. This wasn’t a new position for him. In December 2025, after the U.S. military hit a boat with alleged drug traffickers with a missile, Lonsdale chided “leftist schoolmarm leaders” who opposed the extra-judicial killings, accusing them of breeding “violence and evil in our civilization.” To create a peaceful society, he argued, “bold, virtuous men” should “deter evil” by hanging criminals in public. Such “masculine leadership” would “protect our most vulnerable.”

These Tech Right figures talk of wanting to correct the ills of what they see as an overly bureaucratic, feminized society. Luckey and Lonsdale, like Vance, claim Palantir’s Peter Thiel as an influential mentor. Thiel has long expressed skepticism about democracy; he and the other tech oligarchs claim to think bigger and more experimentally. These champions of “free thought” landed on boldness and strength as guiding stars.

And in this, they share common ground with the New Christian Right. In evangelical America, there is a small network of whiskey-drinking, bearded men with podcasts who have built brands around uncompromising Reformed theology. These men lead small churches but have much larger followings online, and they take provocative stances, such as ones against women’s suffrage or interracial marriage, that are often rewarded by the algorithm. The religion reporter Bob Smietana has dubbed them the “Jim Crow Theobros” because of their penchant for fantasizing about a racially unified—white—country.

Like the Tech Right, these men see noble masculinity as the solution to most of society’s ills. They, like Elon Musk, were eager participants in the discourse about the “sin of empathy”. Both groups believe the most important thing is for strong men to protect the weak and vulnerable—sometimes from themselves. Women will be happier once they have their liberties stripped from them, these Christian Nationalists claim: they will find personal and spiritual fulfillment in being submissive wives and mothers. It’s a fulfillment they cannot find with careers or later-in-life pregnancies or the angst of feminism.

Just as Thiel looms large in the Tech Right, these Christian Nationalists share a connection with the Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Wilson, who is older and slightly less caustic than the more podcast-bro types but no less radical, leads a network of churches that includes Hegseth’s. Vance has his Silicon Valley friends. Hegseth has his Theobros. They all flirt with violence in pursuit of a more traditionally ordered society.

“If we’re televising executions, let’s start the trials in DC,” the pastor and content creator Joel Webbon wrote on social media over the weekend, before suggesting that Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, should be executed for treason.

The Arizona pastor Dale Partridge, another member of this new Christian right, has proposed fixes for our society that include banning women from elected office and putting only white Christian men in leadership positions. When it came to the idea of public executions, he saw another promising idea. “If we executed criminals swiftly and publicly on a weekly basis,” he wrote, “America would be a safer and more beautiful place.”

A Divide Among Evangelicals

Hegseth believes in his own righteousness. He saw no problem with bragging about a public execution—something that conjures images of Jim Crow-era lynchings or Taliban sports stadium killings—because to him, righteousness is firmness and discipline. Hegseth has spoken of a wrathful and warlike God, as when he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

So he may have been caught by surprise when the news of the plan was met in the evangelical world with ambivalence, wariness, and, occasionally, alarm. Unlike Roman Catholics, who uniformly condemned the announcement, evangelicals have no theological qualms with the death penalty itself, and a solid majority of Americans still see capital punishment as justified for murder. But Walter Kim, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, argued that the livestream “risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being.” Bart Barber, who led the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, from 2022 to 2024, warned that “this culture isn’t serious enough to watch something like this,” predicting that “people will hoot, howl, and thump their chests instead, as though they just delivered the kill shot in an [first-person shooter] game.”

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson, a die-hard Southern Baptist, seemed to indicate he thought it went too far, arguing that it would serve as a propaganda tool for terrorists.

There were, of course, the people who have wedged themselves so firmly into the Trump machinery that they cannot break from it. A few edgy right-wing Christian political influencers bragged about the administration’s strength. As did a few more standard Christian Nationalist leaders, including the controversial charismatic preacher Mark Driscoll; the dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist theological seminary, Andrew Walker; and Robert Jeffress, the pastor of one of the nation’s most influential Baptist megachurches. Jeffress, in particular, offered a theological defense of live-streamed executions: “Capital punishment is commanded by God in Genesis 9:6 to remind people of the sanctity of human life,” Jeffress said in a social media post. “The more people that can see that truth illustrated through a public execution, the better.”

But these figures, members of the traditional evangelical elites, do not speak for the entire community of evangelical elites. They instead stood out against the other evangelicals who made pleas for a sense of decorum and human dignity. It seemed clear, in their jumping to defend such a cruel decision, that even as Trump’s political power wanes, they see their role as performing loyalty to Trump. They were different from the dissenting evangelical leaders, who, it seems, still hope to impose their own religious values onto the conservative public, rather than the other way around. And they were different from the Theobros, who hope to lead by pulling the entire MAGA movement to the right.

So the true champions of public executions remain the Theobros and Silicon Valley oligarchs, the truest match for Hegseth’s wrathful, hyper-masculine theology. For a brief moment, they scored a kind of symbolic victory. But in the end, the episode backfired on them. Gleefully supporting public executions didn’t make these men look strong. It made them instead seem too grotesquely bloodthirsty for even today’s conservative movement.