Robert Mueller died on March 20, 2026. The next day, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
In his March 25 conversation with James Webb, Tucker Carlson offered a thought worth keeping: “there’s a certain reverence in death that’s required if you’re going to have reverence for life.”
A human death should carry a weight that survives our judgment of the person who died.
Now the Pentagon plans to livestream Nidal Hasan’s execution. Apparently, even a firing squad needs an audience.
I oppose the death penalty.
If ever someone deserves it, Hasan does.
Those statements can coexist: the enormity of someone’s crime does not settle what powers we should give the state, much less what we should encourage people to enjoy.
I argued against capital punishment in 2007, then acknowledged how readily a horrific crime could provoke my own desire for vengeance. In 2020, I put the tension plainly: “As much as I sympathize with the desire to watch horrible criminals like child murderers die by state power, it’s past time to end the death penalty.”
Understanding an appetite gives us reason to examine it. Governments can cultivate appetites, too.
The Running Man imagined a society that packaged killing as televised entertainment. The audience was essential to the machinery. Viewers learned to experience someone else’s destruction as pleasure, participation, even justice.
In 2011, I recoiled at an audience applauding executions. Now we’re discussing how to deliver the spectacle directly to everyone’s phone.
Classic Trump. Late-stage bread and circuses, with the state supplying the body and calling the production strength. Spectacle can distract us while teaching us what to applaud.
Public accountability demands that we scrutinize what government does. Promoting an execution as something to watch recruits us into a different relationship with power—one in which we are invited to enjoy the killing of a human being.
Hasan’s guilt tells us something about him.
Our appetite for watching tells us something about us.
