This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

Where exactly is rock bottom for America? How low can that nation sink? Perhaps the country won’t be satisfied until people are once again burned alive before baying mobs, or strung up from lampposts for all to see.

The vile bloodlust of America, the sadistic delight in public cruelty and humiliation, the national taste for horror and spectacle: these are the symptoms of a country diseased beyond salvation. Morally, America is irredeemable.

Pity, compassion, decency, empathy, wisdom and grace have been expunged from the American public realm. All that matters is power, and the violence which power can inflict.

America is to livestream the public execution of a fellow human being by firing squad. 

I struggle to come to terms with the fact that I’m writing these words in 2026. Even now - even after all that the Trump administration has done - the US still has the power to shock me to my soul.

Once my stomach turned at the executions of young women in market squares in Saudi Arabia, the public hangings of opponents of the totalitarian Iranian regime, or the machine-gunning to death of innocent Afghans by the Taliban in football stadiums. 

Now America will also turn the most terrible act a state can commit into theatre. This is blood as entertainment; atavistic barbarism; sadism from the Dark Ages. America reprises the Colosseum.

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