Very early on the morning of August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea woke up for the last time. He was a young Black man—Wikipedia pegs his age at the time at 27, while another more authoritative-seeming source I read said he was 22—who had lost his mother and father while young and drifted into a life of itinerant labor and, eventually, crime. Earlier that summer, he broke into the home of 70-year-old Lishia Edwards, who was white. He raped her and killed her and stole some of her jewelry. Or at least it seems like he did—he confessed more than once, but never in the presence of counsel, and at one point he told police he was drunk at the time of his first confession. But a ring was found at the scene that did belong to him.
His execution, by hanging, was set for sunrise that mid-August day. A crowd of 20,000 gathered; vendors sold candy, popcorn, Coca-Cola, and watermelon; some men climbed utility poles, and parents held their small children aloft, for a better view. The Louisville Courier-Journal enthused: “Kentucky is already famous for her hospitality. Her Derby parties are known all over the country. Her hanging parties should have an even wider fame. Most people are interested in horse-racing, but all people are interested in death.”
Coverage was national and intense. The Northern papers were horrified by this macabre spectacle (here’s a photo of the scene). The people of Owensboro resented the way they were portrayed. But the state legislature and the governor had enough of a conscience that not long after, they passed a law outlawing public executions. And the hanging of Rainey Bethea was, by most accounts, the last public execution in the United States (the Death Penalty Information Center’s website says that one more took place, in Missouri in 1937).
In either case, it’s been nine decades, nearly a century, since the United States of America or any of its states decided that turning the killing of a human being into a public entertainment was a good idea. France banned the practice soon thereafter, in 1939. In the UK, public execution was outlawed back in 1868. In 2025, according to Amnesty International, just two countries carried out public executions. The theocrats in Iran held 11, and the Taliban in Afghanistan hosted six. And that’s the company in which Pete Hegseth—the testosterone-obsessed, man-boy “war” secretary—wishes to place the United States of America.
Donald Trump has done a lot of repulsive things as president and taken this country down moral sinkholes most of us never thought we’d encounter. But if he approves the livestreaming of the execution of Nidal Hasan—and Hegseth’s announcement last week was just a recommendation; Trump said over the weekend that he will decide—it will easily be the most depraved thing he’s done.
Hasan’s crimes are sickening. He killed 13 people, including a pregnant woman, and injured 32 more when he opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. I’m an opponent of the death penalty, mainly because there’s just way too much evidence that our justice system wrongly convicts people. Since 1972, 203 people sentenced to death in this country have been later exonerated. I’ll admit, though, that in cases of premeditated mass murder like this one, where the crime was unspeakable and the guilt is clear, I don’t lose much sleep when I learn that the perp will be put to death.
But televising it is barbaric. Turning the killing of a human being, any human being, into a spectator sport is about as sick as it gets. The United States of the mid-1930s was not exactly a progressive Eden, to say nothing of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A Black man was lynched in the state just two years before Bethea was put to death. But even in that place and at that time, people in positions of power knew that killing a person for public amusement was one moral bridge too far and moved to outlaw it.
It’s not too far for Hegseth. The man who has overseen a disastrous war that has cost you and me $45 billion and 81 aircraft worth more than $3 billion thinks it’s a grand idea. He laid it out last week to some right-wing “news” outfit called Real America’s Voice. A “no-brainer,” he said. “It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kinda like the mentality we had in World War II. Which was win.”
Where does one even begin? As if turning murder into a piece of theater is on par with the global fight to stop fascism. As if taking a human life on TV is a “win” comparable to the defeat of Hitler. What kind of monster talks like this?
At another point in the interview, Hegseth gave away what really makes people like him seethe. Of Hasan’s act, he said: “Remember what Obama called it? ‘Workplace violence’? I mean, that’s what we’re up against.” Wow. Did Obama really say that? “Workplace violence” is Andy Bernard punching a wall, not a religious extremist executing 13 innocent people and perpetrating a bloodbath.
But Obama never personally uttered the phrase. In the shootings’ immediate aftermath, he called them a “horrific outburst of violence.” Instead, the Pentagon categorized Hasan’s act as an incident of workplace violence until it much later decided to call it what it obviously was, an act of terrorism (Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire). So that’s what’s eating at Hegseth here—that a Pentagon full of beardos and weirdos, no doubt acting at the behest of a commander-in-chief who would never meet Hegseth’s perverse definition of manhood, was engaged in a bunch of low-testosterone wokery until he came along.
One can agree with Hegseth on that score that if one wishes. But it doesn’t excuse, nothing excuses, livestreaming the event. It still may not happen. JD Vance threw a little cold water on the idea over the weekend, announcing that it wasn’t a done deal and in any case he wouldn’t be watching. Trump, in his remarks, left the door open for an about face.
If it does happen, though: Can there be any doubt there will be watch parties—mini-Owensboros, so to speak—all over the country, or at least certain parts of it? And remember: This will take place on December 3, during the first week of Advent, in between the Sundays dedicated to Hope and Peace.
I wonder what Hegseth—who fancies himself a devout Christian and sports a tattoo saying “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), which was a rallying cry among the Christian crusaders massacring Muslims—makes of that little piece of irony. Or the irony that adheres in the fact that he wants to punish an Islamic religious extremist by doing something that will link the United States of America arm-in-arm with what are almost surely the two most extremist theocratic Islamic regimes in the world. One doubts that irony has occurred to him. And of course it will elude Trump. Our hope is that one of those plastic-faced denizens of Mar-a-Lago might point it out to him in time. And if not, December 3 will take its place as one of the darkest days in modern American history.
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