Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Nidal Hassan via firing squad would be performed on December 3rd and livestreamed. This would be the first public execution in America since the 1930s (more on that shortly). Predictably, the effeminate voices of Christian YouTube rushed to oppose the public aspect of the execution whilst the Catholic Church became anti-death penalty. These include Mike Winger and Gavin Ortlund.
Mike Winger vs Public
This exchange between Mike Winger and Kangmin Lee highlights the cognitive dissonance in Mike Winger’s logic. He supports the event being public, but with exclusive access.Â
However, this is hardly public at all and he is describing the current practice of death penalty in the United States, which is explicitly private. Government affairs are often made public via livestream. County commissioner, city council, and board of education meetings are generally livestreamed in 2026. CSPAN was established to give public access to the halls of Congress via a “livestream.” And trials are regularly livestreamed all across the county, although not federal trials.
All this is to argue that livestreaming is the gold standard of making something public record, be it a meeting, a legislative session, a trial, and yes, an execution. The government’s primal reason of existence is the execution of murderers, and therefore livestreaming this function confers transparency as well as legitimacy.
The Public Execution of Rainey Bethea
Gavin Ortlund argues that livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan is unprecedented, even though public executions were what Americans did until the 20th Century, when many progressive ideas about the criminal justice system took root. Gavin Ortlund decries the last public execution in America as a moral failing that received just backlash that led to banning the practice.
The execution Ortlund refers to is none other than the death of Rainey Bethea. Bethea, a Black man in his early-to-mid-20s (sources vary between about 22 and 26), was convicted of raping 70-year-old White widow Lischia Edwards (who was also murdered during a burglary/robbery). Under Kentucky law at the time, rape convictions could result in a public hanging carried out by the county sheriff in the county of the crime, while other capital offenses typically led to electrocution at the state penitentiary. Prosecutors charged only rape to allow a local public execution.
20000 were supposedly in attendance and it was denounced by the press as carnival-like. The picture of the event looks orderly.
Nevertheless, the event would be a Norm MacDonald meme where the worst part of publicly hanging a murdering rapist is that society enjoyed it too much. Gavin Ortlund also argued that public executions conferred sympathy to the executed, which is on its face perverse.
Public Execution = Gladiators?
Gavin Ortlund’s primary contention against public executions is that livestreaming it turns it into entertainment because entertainment is how most people spend their time on the internet. Ortlund concedes that executions were public in the Old Testament era and and argues that it would not have been memed. But in the Bible disgraceful deaths are cataloged and remembered, like Jael’s tent pole. So, hard to say that a local stoning being an ancient butt of a joke is somehow beyond unthinkable.
Nevertheless, Ortlund argues that watching an execution is akin to watching a gladiatorial game in ancient Rome. He uses pull quotes from Christians opposing the games to argue against public execution. However, the needless bloodshed of gladiators resulting in the death of slaves is hardly comparable to the civil magistrate executing a murderer. But this is ultimately how Gavin Ortlund concludes the video.
Conclusion
Gavin Ortlund and Mike Winger are clutching their pearls and thinking about the children, ignoring the fact that the Trump Administration’s move to bring back public execution is a regression to the mean of human history, as well as biblical prescriptions where governments execute murderers publicly. Their squeamish opposition is both effeminate and illogical.
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It never fails, anytime anyone wants to enact justice of any kind, these effeminate cowards come out of the woodwork to finger wag and pretend there’s non-existent problems with a straightforward case. Way to make and issue out of nothing, Mike.