Pete Hegseth’s Firing Squad Livestream Is Finding Fans in the Defense Industry

“I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.”

So said Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, a military technology company that sells autonomous drones and software to the Defense Department, Customs and Border Protection, and militaries abroad in a vocal defense of “public and brutal” executions in general, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in particular.

Executions are the “ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence,” Luckey wrote in a Sunday night X post, arguing that all executions should be public to discourage the acts in question—and that to “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it…is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order.”

Last week, Trump approved the execution by firing squad of Hasan, who opened fire on unarmed fellow soldiers, killing 13 people, at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced shortly after that the execution would be livestreamed.

Hasan was an active-duty major in the Army at the time, and was shot in the back by police during the mass shooting. He is now paralyzed from the waist down. The mechanics of the execution—including whether Hasan would remain in his wheelchair—have not been officially addressed by the Pentagon. 

Luckey, who has donated $5.9 million to Republicans since 2017 according to FEC records, cited George Washington, who authorized public executions in the military to reinforce discipline, to support his stance. 

“The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms,” Luckey wrote. “It makes needless executions more likely, not less so.”

Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty attorney, told my colleague Sophie Hurwitz in April, when the Justice Department announced plans to revive executions by firing squad, that White House supporters of public executions by means like the firing squad have an “affection for causing visible harm to people…They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”

Fellow defense automation enthusiast Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of military tech firm Palantir and frequent advocate of far–right positions on social media, leapt to Luckey’s defense. “Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric,” he wrote. “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”

But according to Axios, even Trump has expressed doubts on livestreaming the execution. Opposition to broadcasting Hasan’s shooting has been bipartisan. On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CBS News that a livestream could be used by terrorist groups to recruit more people. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a vocal critic of Hegseth, called the plan “beyond disgusting” last week, comparing it to public executions performed in oppressive dictatorships.

In a follow-up to his first tweet, Luckey concluded by suggesting that non-public executions were fascist.