It would not be particularly disruptive to suggest that the public spectacle of Nidal Hasan’s execution—were it to be carried out as proposed by Pete Hegseth—would have been both a moral regression, domestically, and an endorsement of barbaric tactics typically relegated to “oppressive dictatorships,” on the global stage. It would perhaps be more disruptive, though, to then extend this suggestion into an accusation of one man attempting to play God by dangerous proxy of himself assigning qualitative values to human lives. This is to say, when Hegseth announced Hasan’s now-cancelled execution livestream on the grounds that “people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these things,” he at once, if more subtly, appointed himself as the delegator of these consequences as well, publicly signaling that he holds singular and otherwise “divine” power over Hasan’s life.
Of course, he doesn’t. Hasan was convicted by court-martial in 2013, and his execution has been pending since well before Hegseth assumed any government office. But in the public eye, Hegseth’s eager referral to the idea of broadcasting Hasan’s execution as a “no-brainer” decision that he made for the “radical Islamic terrorist who betrayed his country,” aided by his own history of staunch and outspoken Christian rhetoric (e.g., public calls to “break the teeth of the ungodly”), now brings the implication that he is somehow carrying out God’s will by overseeing Hasan’s death.
To a degree (which I am hesitant to label precisely), certain people have always been “closer to God” than others. Biblical fundamentals of intrinsic human equality cannot negate the varying physical conditions that have presented themselves in every single century of civilization, and do little to reduce the struggles of those living toward the southern end of the spectrum. Yet these power dynamics exist between people doing exactly that: living. Rarely has one been able to publicly justify the murder of another, and even more rarely have they been able to do so without directly referencing scripture. Michel Foucault alludes to this rarity in his book Discipline and Punish, writing of contemporary Occidental legal systems, “The execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man… There is no glory in punishing.”
Hegseth seems to disagree, and has managed to assume the necessary office to contend with Foucault on a grand scale. In analyzing how he reached this point, I’m less concerned with his political maneuvers and ladder-climbing than I am with what I label as the dead/alive binary that he has built and leveraged between himself and Hasan: the autonomous or captive conditions of each man, and the resultant distances they are able to stray from death. In the context of Western Christianity—a context which we inevitably find ourselves in—this is perhaps better understood as the extent of one’s separation from God and His divinity. Thus it is apt to assign either man a cursory role somewhere between dead, alive and, paradoxically, divine. Predictably, Hegseth comes out ahead. He is fully autonomous, and can stray as far from death as anyone; for all intents and purposes, he is alive.
Hasan, in contrast, has lost as much autonomy as the American legal system permits one to lose. He is the captive, technically still “alive” in the sociolegal sense but in most practical regards, dead. He has been in this condition since he was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to death—hence, the label equates less to a physical departure from this world than it does a loss of autonomous governance over your own life.
In his book Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen Greenblatt argues that while “the dead could not speak” and have lost this governance, he is “nonetheless certain that [he] could re-create conversation with them” (1). In such recreation, Greenblatt invariably assumes a position of power over the dead by becoming the posthumous mouthpiece for their ideology and character, reinforcing the inferiority of the dead to the alive. The “textual traces” (Greenblatt, 1) left behind belong to the former group, but the translation to normative thought and ethics is done by the latter. Hegseth employs this same act of translation to purport Hasan’s radical anti-Americanism, but exceeds Greenblatt’s alive role by taking explicit ownership over the state of Hasan’s actual life, or lack thereof.
Thus there is still variance within the alive half of the binary. Amongst living men—meaning those who exist “autonomously”—there are still levels of sub-autonomy. Greenblatt, with every resource presently at his disposal, would not be able to effect the execution of Hasan as Hegseth nearly was; accordingly he is further from the divine right to “kill and make alive” (1 Samuel 2:6). In short, by commanding and publicizing Hasan’s death, Hegseth shortens the distance between himself and God, consequently widening that between himself and other men.
Seeing as how this variance exists between living men, and how, as Kelly Brown Douglas writes, God is both “the divine and the human” (What’s Faith Got… 17), the border between alive and divine seems to be to some degree penetrable. God is made divine, following Douglas’s thought, by way of His perception in the eyes of living men. Technically, and very theoretically, His status is attainable by elevating the public image of your power high enough.
If Hegseth is in fact attempting to reach a Christlike status, be it consciously or otherwise, Douglas already predicted his move. She contends that “discourse is… critical to the actualization of power,” and that this discourse must present the public with legitimate reasons to be both trusted and productive (WFG, 8). Hegseth presents this discourse, and the public with their reasoning, via the aforementioned translation of Hasan’s threatening character.
Douglas then continues that through discourse, people are “socialized into supporting the reality of unjust power” (WFG, 8). In the Christian tradition, an appropriation of the divine role is, by all accounts, “unjust power.” It is playing God, so to speak. Hegseth achieves this by accrediting himself not just with the power to kill—this alone is not indicative of divinity—but with the power to independently assess the worth of another man and deem him unfit to live.
Counterpoints
An assessment of Hasan’s execution, however it may play out, could hardly call itself comprehensive without acknowledging its practical political advantages. Bloodthirsty as Hegseth can appear, he is not wholly wrong in the belief that an extravagant display of the U.S. government’s readiness to deploy extreme violence could deter a particular sect of terror attacks. (Whether this deterrence would be massively outweighed by the breeding of domestic “backyard terrorists,” who, as terrorists of all sorts tend, care little for their own bodily welfare, is a separate—though fair—conversation entirely.) By televising an execution, however, the government also dares to say the quiet part out loud. As Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, Western society’s 18th- and 19th-century shift to “a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display” (8) came on large account of a sort of public awakening to the inherent inhumanity of torture, imprisonment and execution. Displaying these punishments, Foucault suggests, empowers the public by informing them as to the government’s methods, whereas conducting them in private leaves them (us) in the dark.
Displaying suggestions of these punishments retains much of the same effect, even if the government fails to carry them out. The media cycle has reliably begun to downplay and spin various left/right politicized narratives to detract from the spectacle of Hegseth’s plan, but his image is now inescapably tied to a failed public execution plan and, in Foucault’s eyes, an inadvertent empowerment of just about every U.S. citizen who doesn’t want to watch someone get shot and killed on live TV.
Works Cited
Douglas, Kelly Brown. What’s Faith Got to Do with It?: Black Bodies/Christian Soles. ORBIS, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. University of California Press, 1988.
“Secretary Hegseth Was Asked about the Execution of Nidal Hasan…” YouTube, U.S. Department of War , 9 Oct. 2026, www.youtube.com/shorts/vNv1ghuVhJI.
Yousef, Odette, and Ailsa Chang. “Why Does Pete Hegseth Want to Livestream an Execution?” NPR, NPR, 13 Oct. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/10/13/nx-s1-5996831/why-does-pete-hegseth-want-to-livestream-an-execution.