Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, has authorised the livestreaming of an execution by firing squad. The decision transforms capital punishment from a legal process conducted behind closed walls into a broadcast event — a category shift that places the American state in the company of non-state actors who distribute execution footage as a communication strategy. The comparison to terrorist beheading videos, drawn by letter-writer John Boaler, is structurally precise: both use the spectacle of killing to project power and intimidate. Britain ended public executions in 1868, recognising that the crowd dynamics of witnessed killing brutalised the society hosting the spectacle rather than deterring crime. That 157-year-old insight is being discarded. The decision to broadcast an execution is not a transparency measure — executions already have official witnesses. It is a performance choice, designed to maximise the audience for state violence. The mechanism here is normalisation. Each escalation under the second Trump administration — from rhetoric to policy to spectacle — shifts the baseline of what the public treats as unremarkable. Livestreaming an execution does not create new deterrence. It creates new tolerance for state killing as entertainment, a tolerance that compounds over time and enables further escalation. The authorisation sits within a broader pattern of the administration using the machinery of government for symbolic dominance rather than functional governance. The firing squad itself is a deliberately archaic method — chosen not for efficiency but for visual impact. The medium is the message: this is about demonstrating that the state can kill visibly and that no institutional norm will prevent it. The international signal is equally important. Allied democracies will read this as further evidence of American institutional decay. Adversaries will use the footage in their own propaganda. The soft-power cost is real, even if it never appears in a budget line. The letter from Boaler frames this correctly as an act of terror — not metaphorically, but structurally. Terror is the use of spectacular violence to coerce a population through fear. When the state livestreams an execution, the intended audience is not the condemned. It is everyone watching.
