He wants you to see justice delivered in blood and on your screen. Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, is set to face an Army firing squad on December 3. The defense secretary says it will be public.
If the execution is allowed to proceed as suggested, that means via a livestream. The point, Hegseth said, is that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” He invoked the memory of American firing squads performing executions in World War II. Many of Hegseth’s shocked critics reached for the darkest comparison in more recent memory than 1945.
What, is he mimicking ISIS executions?” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on CNN. The Daily Beast ran its story beneath the label “MAGA MEETS ISIS,” adding the strapline: “He’s planning something we haven’t seen in 90 years—but which ISIS reveled in.” Others on X made the same logical leap. House, positioning Hegseth as worse than the radical Islamist be-headers of the erstwhile caliphate.
"We’re fighting terrorism by becoming ISIS," wrote Gev Iskajyan, advocacy director of the Armenian National Committee of America. "A brilliant strategy by the frat bros running the United States." The writer Mark Ames argued that Hegseth wants a livestream for the same reason ISIS posted its killings: to radicalize and recruit disaffected and downwardly mobile young men. There is a strong case against broadcasting an execution, which would break a modern taboo in Western societies well beyond even having a death penalty, which is rare.
But the ISIS comparison is not it. It is lazy, it is false, and it buries the argument that might actually persuade. Hegseth’s critics are right that this is a morbid spectacle.
America stopped executing people in public, and for good reason. That Hasan has been paralyzed since officers shot him to end his rampage only makes the optics worse, despite his appalling crime. But ISIS did not invent the public execution.
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