5 min read
Photo: U.S. Army
On December 3 at 1 p.m. Central, the United States government will shoot a man to death on camera. And you will be able to watch it live.
That is not a rumor. That is the plan as announced by the Pentagon.
Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, will face a firing squad. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has confirmed the execution will be livestreamed for the public to watch.
Major Takeaways
The Pentagon will livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan on December 3, the first public execution in America since the 1930s.
It will be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first military firing squad execution since 1945.
Legal experts warn this turns state killing into public spectacle, a practice America once condemned in other nations.
A Spectacle 90 Years in the Making
The last time America held a public execution, Franklin Roosevelt was president. Crowds gathered in Kentucky and Missouri in the 1930s to watch men hang.
Since then, this country decided some things should not be entertainment. That consensus is now gone.
Hegseth did not hedge. Speaking aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, he said the public would watch soldiers fire the rifles. His reason was blunt.
“We need people to understand that there is serious consequences for these types of things.”
President Trump confirmed he approved the plan. When reporters asked, his answer was two words: “Absolutely I did.”
But here is the detail that should stop you cold. Vice President JD Vance, asked about the livestream while traveling in Ohio, said he did not know if it would actually happen. Then he added this.
“If it is ultimately livestreamed, I am not going to be watching it.”
The vice president does not know if the plan is real. And he has already announced he will look away.
What This Means for Our Children
Now let us talk about what the user asked. What does this look like for Americans and American children.
On December 3, a child with a phone will be able to watch the United States government kill a man in real time. Not in a history book. Not in a movie. Live.
Think about what that teaches. It teaches that killing can be content. That death can be a broadcast event. That the state can turn a human life ending into something you watch the way you watch a game.
For Black families, this hits different. We know what public spectacles of death look like in this country. Our grandparents know. The history books know.
Lynchings were public events. Crowds gathered. People brought their children. Photographs were taken and sold as postcards. The spectacle was the point. It was meant to send a message about who holds power over life and death.
America decided long ago that was barbaric. Now the government is bringing the spectacle back with better cameras.
The World Is Watching Too
Here is something Hegseth did not mention in his interview. According to Amnesty International, out of thousands of executions worldwide in 2025, only 17 were carried out publicly.
Eleven were in Iran. Six were in Taliban run Afghanistan.
That is the company America is about to join. Not France. Not Germany. Not Canada. Iran and the Taliban.
Sweden’s foreign minister did not mince words. She called the death penalty inhumane and irreversible, and said her country opposes it everywhere, in all contexts.
Legal scholars are sounding alarms at home too. Eugene Fidell, a military law expert at Yale, called the livestream plan “a performative action and one that smacks of spectacle.”
Military law professors told Bloomberg Law the plan lacks legal precedent and invokes practices most commonly associated with authoritarian governments.
Does It Even Work
Hegseth says the broadcast will deter future violence. The evidence says otherwise.
Decades of research on the death penalty have failed to prove it deters murder. And there is a darker concern that experts keep raising.
A public execution gives a killer exactly what he wants. Attention. An audience. A final moment of significance broadcast to millions.
As one commentator put it, terrorists fantasize about being martyred in front of a crowd. A livestream hands them that stage with better production values than they could ever arrange themselves.
Hasan killed 13 people in 2009. Thirteen families have lived with that loss for 17 years. Nothing about a livestream brings those people back. It only creates new images that will live on the internet forever.
What We Tell Our Kids
So what do we tell our children on December 3.
We tell them that what they might see online that day is not normal. It is not entertainment. It is not something a healthy society does.
We tell them that a government strong enough to protect its people does not need to prove it by killing on camera.
We tell them that every human life has value, even the life of a man who took 13 others. That is what separates justice from revenge. That is what separates us from the countries we claim to be better than.
And we tell them to look away. Not because we are hiding the truth from them, but because some truths should not be turned into shows.
The vice president already made his choice. He will not watch. On December 3, millions of Americans will have to make theirs.
Urban City Podcast will continue following this story. For more news that matters to our community, visit urbancitypodcast.com.
