The Pentagon’s self-described “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth recently announced a plan to live stream the execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, a wheelchair-bound veteran convicted of a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.

President Donald Trump eventually backed away from the live-stream plan. But not before Americans across the political spectrum agreed that—whatever Hasan’s crime—live streaming an execution crossed a line. In one poll, 80% opposed it.

That’s not surprising. Live streaming the slaughter of a human being, especially when the spectacle is cheered on by a defense secretary who claims to worship his troops’ killing power, their “lethality,” above all else—including their loyalty to the Constitution—falls outside any definition of morality.

The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

The thought of kids pulling out their phones on the playground, or adults glued to their tablets at work, to witness an execution is uniquely horrifying. But much of the official criticism of Hegseth’s proposal to make the execution public also had a particularly chauvinistic quality to it.

Some argued that it would lower the integrity of the US to the level of “other” countries. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said: “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Yet beyond the issue of live streaming, the underlying act of state-sanctioned homicide itself sounds a lot like what “they” do. The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

Last year, only 17 countries recorded official executions, according to Amnesty International. China led the list with the most executions, followed by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yemen (with 51) and the United States (with 47) rounded out the top five. During that same year, no executions at all occurred in Europe or Central Asia. And for the last 17 years, the United States has been the only country in the Americas to officially execute anyone.

The US embrace of the death penalty as other countries abandon it is disturbing enough. Equally disturbing is the fact that executions here........

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