1. United States
2. Md.
3. Letter

I'm writing from Halethorpe, Maryland, as a constituent who needs you to publicly oppose the Pentagon's plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan on December 3rd. I want to get the easy objection out of the way first: this is not about Hasan. What he did at Fort Hood in 2009 was mass murder, and no one is asking you to say otherwise. The hard question — the one that actually requires courage to answer — is what we're willing to become in response. The answer being offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is: a government that broadcasts the killing of a paralyzed man from a wheelchair, carried out by soldiers who are being urged by their own Archbishop to request religious exemptions because Church teaching prohibits their participation. Cardinal Parolin called it "unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle." Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty inadmissible. The Vatican Secretary of State said it was "truly incomprehensible." These are not voices this administration can dismiss as soft on terrorism. Neither are the Republican ones. Sen. Thom Tillis called the livestream plan "beyond disgusting" and compared it directly to public executions in Iran and Afghanistan. Speaker Johnson warned that terrorist groups will use the footage for recruitment. VP Vance said he wouldn't watch it. Even Trump has reportedly expressed private doubts. When that coalition agrees something is wrong, the argument is over. What's left is whether anyone in a position of authority will say so clearly and publicly. I'd like you to be one of those people — and I want to explain why this goes beyond the question of one execution. This administration has already deployed military personnel domestically in ways that strain legal authority, including stationing soldiers at locations tied to election infrastructure. Public livestreamed executions carried out by those same soldiers function, whether intentionally or not, as a message: comply, or face consequences administered by the state, on camera, for everyone to watch. Pair that with an expanding definition of "domestic terrorist" that has been applied to protesters, and you have the architecture of something much more dangerous than a single spectacle in December. We also just watched a botched execution in this country this week — Christa Pike, returned to prison alive after a failed attempt. Whatever one believes about capital punishment, this moment makes clear that we do not have reliable systems for what we're being asked to normalize as entertainment. My ask is simple: state publicly, before December 3rd, that you oppose the livestream. Not Hasan's sentence — the broadcast. That is the specific, actionable line that separates accountability from spectacle, justice from bloodlust. The people cheering this on are the co-founders of Palantir and Anduril — defense tech billionaires who openly say executions should be "public and brutal." Look at who's asking for this and who's pushing back.