America Magazine: The death of the American conscience will be livestreamed
by Sam Sawyer, S.J.October 9, 2026
The U.S. government will “make sure that people are able to watch” the Dec. 3 execution of Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Condemnations of Mr. Hegseth’s plan for a public execution were swift and widespread. Lawmakers from both parties rushed to denounce his plan, and Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, described it as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”
The military’s proposal—which Mr. Hegseth endorsed with a social media post—to livestream the execution is so far outside the moral norm that it almost becomes difficult to articulate why the idea of a public execution is so morally awful. The issue is not only that the execution itself is violent, but also that putting it on public display threatens to reshape our conscience to celebrate the state’s capacity for violence. Yet sadly, that seems to be exactly what Mr. Hegseth is asking us to do.
In Archbishop Coakley’s words, this act by our government “will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”
Lowest of the low.
The amoral monsters now in charge of the US want to bring children down to their own level.
I’d speculate that this unsavoury event is aimed more at sending a message to Islamic terrorism than just being a gory primetime show. It’s interesting though that Pope Leo in the past has linked death penalty executions with abortion deaths. But unfortunately, innocent unborn children are being executed every day by abortion in our maternity hospitals and in homes with abortion pills, having committed no crime, other than having been given human life by God. 11,000 each year in Ireland and more than one million in the EU annually, fully supported by most of our politicians, particularly on the left. Yet, we all seem to remain silent to this slaughter of the innocents on our own doorstep. We know that the Church unequivocally condemns it but there seems little or no protest beyond that. There are a few great advocates against abortion out there however, who fight daily to expose the horror, one example that springs to mind is in Ireland: https://x.com/PreciousLifeCom