The depravity and degradation continues to expand. The latest planned deviancy: live-streaming an execution by firing squad on December 3 for all to see. This appalling desecration of human civilization has been cooked up by the sadistic mind of Killer Pete Hegseth. As if Trump’s America couldn’t get any sicker.
No doubt Killer Pete’s boss, himself a depraved sadist who has a thing for murderous dictators, could not be more excited. Asked if he approved, Trump said yesterday, “Absolutely.” After all, he’s been imagining executions since at least 1989 when he bought a full-page newspaper ad demanding that the Central Park Five be put to death. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote then. “They should be forced to suffer.” Never mind that they were later found to have been wrongfully convicted.
Few would doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who in 2009 killed 13 people and wounded dozens more at Fort Hood in Texas, should be punished for his horrible crimes. Death by firing squad for this crime would be the first U.S. military execution in more than six decades. But the decision to let the public watch is a barbaric new low for these ugly men who continue to ratchet down any basic human decency. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Killer Pete said Thursday, “because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
In other words, in his warped mind, we all need to watch this live snuff film to really understand. As for employing a firing squad, the last time the U.S. military did this was in 1945 when Private Eddie Slovik was executed for desertion during WWII. The last high-profile public execution was the 1936 hanging in Kentucky of Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man who was convicted of raping a 70-year-old white woman.
Clearly, Killer Pete—a blight on humanity—wants to bring back those good old days. Publicly displaying an execution would put the U.S. in the charming company of Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea. Pete and his family must be so proud; another valuable life lesson for his four children and three stepchildren. By matching Hasan’s terrible crime with another depraved and deviant act, he is trying to force Americans to “define deviancy down.” That’s the tendency coined by New York senator and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who observed that societies faced with shocking or deviant behavior respond by lowering their moral standards for what is permissible. This so-called war secretary is determined to expand the country’s appetite for and acceptance of public executions as a fact of life.
So what do you think? How much lower can Hegseth and Trump go? Are you surprised by the plan? How concerned are you that the public display of an execution will add to the downward spiral of deviancy? Is there any world where such an act actually teaches witnesses about the gravity of the crime—or is it an incitement for other sick minds to pursue deadly acts? And do you think the stain of this event can ever be washed away?
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“All cruelty springs from weakness.” - Seneca
How much lower can Hegseth and Trump go? I think there will not be a definitve answer to that until both leave office, whenever and however that happens There is no animal more dangerous than a cornered one. My sense is that, like Hitler, Trump is willing to take America down with him rather than admit that he’s wrong.