A Barbaric Spectacle, Courtesy Of Hegseth
War Secretary Pete Hegseth says they’re going to livestream the December 3 execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist who murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood for Allah. This is wrong. I am at peace with Hasan getting what he deserves for his crimes, but it is barbaric to turn it into a spectacle. It is disgraceful. Hegseth keeps trying to be manly, but this comes off as merely macho.
You know Hasan is in a wheelchair, right? Is it really good for us to take pleasure in watching a man in a wheelchair, even a vile criminal like Hasan, shot to death? Really?
Remember the story from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” about his Christian friend Alypius? He had accepted an invitation to go to the gladiatorial games, but vowed to himself to shield his eyes when one man slaughtered another. Yet moved by the roar of the bloodthirsty crowd, Alypius uncovered his eyes and looked. He was possessed by a spirit of bloodlust after that, and took years to overcome it.
If justice, and maintaining law and order, requires the execution of Hasan, then let it be done dutifully, without passion. We should not grow fond of seeing men executed, even if they deserve it. In ages past — and not too long ago either — excited crowds would gather to watch men hanged, or in France, guillotined. Did this do their souls, or their moral senses, any good?
In the Orthodox Church, there is a tradition that requires soldiers returning from combat to go to confession, even if their war was just. The idea is that taking the life of another man, even if morally necessary, still stains one’s soul. It is a good tradition, a humane one. I see in that AP story I linked in the first paragraph that an academic who opposes the death penalty thinks that people seeing Hasan shot to death will have their consciences shocked into rejecting capital punishment. I doubt that very much. I would bet rather that it will increase their bloodlust.
Putting executions of prisoners on video and streaming them over the Internet is what Muslim terrorists do. We are not them. We must not become them.
Rod Dreher, who then turns to the grifting and whorishness of our Ambassador to Greece.
Maybe one day, under the accumulation of crap like Hegseth’s stunt and Kimberly Guilfoyle financial corruption, Rod will figure out that the Republicans are no less an existential threat than the Democrats:
I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.
This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.
This truth is not uniquely Christian: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6). “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Whether you embrace that company in your house or on social media, it corrupts. There are sins that “lead people into more and more ungodliness” as “their talk [spreads] like gangrene” (2 Timothy 2:16–17).
There is a character connection between rulers and subjects. When the Bible describes a king by saying, “He sinned and made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 14:16), it does not mean he twisted their arm. It means his influence shaped the people. That’s the calling of a leader. Take the lead in giving shape to the character of your people. So it happens. For good or for ill.
John Piper (expanding on a quote from my last post).
Marco Rubio … took a real swing at defining a new political philosophy for the American right. And it was, well, weird. On the plus side, it was great to hear a Western politician speak of the unique glories of our inheritance, and stare down the relativists and globalists. But to single out thymos — “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” — as the core Greek virtue, and therefore ours, is more than odd.
For the ancients, thymos always had to cede to reason to be exercised properly, and always, as for every virtue, in moderation. The consequences of unrestrained thymos could be disastrous, as Socrates taught, and Alcibiades, who rashly got Athens into a war it could not win, proved. So no, the West is not defined by ambition, nor by “the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” For most of the last two thousand years, after all, “national power” did not exist. Christendom did. The West is defined by reason allied with Christianity, which eventually gave us the liberal order. Rubio wants to replace that with unconstrained passion allied with the will to power. God help us.
But that just reveals how virulently anti-Christian the American right has now become. Fame and glory are the great goods, achieved by a constant, manly struggle to be the best: more Sparta than Athens, let alone Jesus. Rubio seemed to say that power is valuable for its own sake; and that “fighting for dominance” is the purpose of the state. You will not find one word in Rubio’s speech about the benefits of peace, or freedom, or Christian virtue. This is nihilist and it is pagan: an attempt to plunder, misread, and cherry-pick Greek thought to defend Trump’s sociopathy.
And so it’s fitting in this context, is it not, that the barbarians claiming to be conservatives who run this country are now planning to hold a live-streamed public execution of a paraplegic old man by firing squad — a practice the church itself regards as a grotesque betrayal of human dignity. Killing a disabled Muslim is, in fact, a great illustration of the core principle of the Trump era. Not the mere assertion of power: the convicted prisoner is utterly under state control and will face death anyway. But the brandishing of power for its own sake, the enforcement of not just punishment but humiliation, a public celebration of cruelty and revenge. With a tinge of religious bigotry thrown in.
Andrew Sullivan. Damon Linker, below, also comments on Rubio’s misbegotten speech.
Trump and Hegseth want you to watch [the execution of Nidal Hasan] because they think you’ll enjoy it. They want you to enjoy it. And more importantly, they want you to feel comfortable enjoying it.
I joked with colleagues this morning that my daily challenge with this newsletter is having to find newish ways to make the point that postliberalism is all about normalizing ruthlessness. Whenever the president and his fans bump up against some law or norm that’s keeping them from sating their tribal appetites, inevitably their impulse is to sweep it aside and indulge. It’s the ur-narrative of this entire era.
Trumpism is more an alternate morality than it is a political program, as regular readers have seen me say a good two dozen times. Has there ever been a clearer example than Hegseth wanting to stream an enemy’s death live on the internet?
Nick Catoggio. I suffer from excessive fear of mission out (a/k/a FOMO), but from this I will avert my eyes for sure.
Trusting media
There are respected pollster types who assess public trust in mainstream media. They have measured some unexpected friends, such as Democrat, trust of media trending downward, while Republican trust of media trends upward. Nick Catoggio speculates about the reasons:
The tricky part in trying to interpret data like this when you’re a news junkie is to avoid imputing your own freakishly high degree of media literacy to the general population.
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Maybe populist right-wing media has grown so grotesque and self-parodying that it’s begun to inspire Strange New Respect for outlets like the New York Times in some conservatives.
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[T]he hard truth is that what used to be known as “conservative media” now consists almost exclusively of brain-dead Trumpist house organs on the one hand and unspeakably repellent postliberal goblins on the other. Your choice as a right-wing media consumer in 2026 is between Fox News propagandizing on behalf of the president and podcasters propagandizing on behalf of Hitler.
I find this plausible because I, a conservative, cannot bear most “conservative” media these days. Even the Free Press was on the chopping block because, in an apparent effort to be all things from center-left to fairly far-right, they’re publishing a lot of crap; but then the introduced Ross Douthat as a weekly columnist.
Bad precedent
I had a conversation with one of the fired generals not long ago, and this person pointed out that, in essence, they were fired for following orders. In other words, the Biden administration handed down some edicts and some orders regarding D.E.I. — diversity, equity, inclusion and other things — and as loyal soldiers, whether they agreed or not, they saluted and they carried out those orders. And Hegseth comes in and essentially says: Well, if you were carrying out the orders that were the priority of the previous administration, you’re woke, you’re weak, whatever, and you’re gone.
And one of the fears that was expressed to me by this former general was that, well, does that then set a precedent that if you are a general officer and you follow the orders of an administration, that the next administration will come in and purge you, replace you with general officers who have to then follow their orders, who will then only be purged by the next administration?
It strikes me that the Trump administration is setting a precedent here that if actually carried out by other presidents would be catastrophic for the integrity of the military. And it’s setting a precedent that, given enough time under the current administration, could be catastrophic for the idea that merit matters as much as political fidelity. But it was very chilling to me to hear the general essentially say, “I was fired for following a lawful order.”
Civitas profunda
There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.
Cullen Murphy, The Fall of Rome All Over Again?
Marco Rubio on thumos
You gotta hand it to Marco Rubio: Not only did he deliver a powerful speech in defense of Western civilization on Wednesday afternoon (which also just so happened to be the third anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023). He also did it in Athens, Greece with a sunset-drenched Acropolis glowing behind him. As props go, that’s about as good as it gets …
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[T]here is something else in the speech that’s perhaps even more worthy of criticism. Or rather, not something in the speech so much as something surrounding the speech—and that is the commander in chief Rubio serves. There is something faintly absurd, even insulting, about listening to a man praise excellence and the greatest achievements of Western civilization while representing an administration led by a president who exemplifies tackiness, cruelty, ignorance, corruption, and incompetence. My thumos—my love of my own country and culture—inspires me to respond to this man with disgust and contempt. I find him utterly loathsome and consider it indisputable that he has had an atrocious influence on American public life, pulling it continuously down to his own low level that always, somehow, manages to sink ever lower.
In this respect, Rubio’s speech is very much exemplary of our cultural moment in the sense that it feels like a virtual reality facsimile of the world we all live in—one that’s been tidied up and transformed by technological gimmicks into an airbrushed version of the real thing, a world in which (in Mark Lilla’s words) this country chose, for the second time in a decade, “a dim Caesar to sit at the pinnacle of institutional power.”
Who does Rubio think he’s fooling? Achilles, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch—his speech is filled with references to people, places, and events that were all touched by a greatness he wants us to reach for again. Sounds good! If Rubio himself were president, or any number of other Republicans prior to the past several years, then maybe this could be a serious conversation, a serious proposal for national, cultural, and civilizational renewal, with rhetoric and policies to match and reinforce it.
But under this president? Who starts a war without reasons and declares victory dozens of times while the fighting goes on—and who repeatedly issues threats to annihilate whole civilizations if he doesn’t get his way? Who stands before the United Nations and declares he took Venezuela’s oil because he could (because might makes right)? Who regularly calls the country’s other party the Dumbocrats? Who starts trade wars with allies and rivals on the basis of whims and personal pique? Who profits from his own policies by buying and selling investments before public announcements are made? Who seeks to rule by decree because he can’t be bothered to make use of a legislature his own party controls? Who deports immigrants to tinpot dictatorships where they have no ties of family or language?
I could go on for thousands of additional words listing Trump’s offenses against reason and virtue and good governance and basic human decency. But what would be the point? We all know the litany. We see it in the news every single degrading, obscene day. The United States during the second Trump administration is many things, but a champion or exemplification of excellence it most emphatically is not. It certainly has plenty of thumos, or at least well-acted public displays of thumos among members of the president’s paid and amateur cheerleading section in public office, the media, and online. But this is the kind of thumos that troubled Plato’s Socrates—the kind that’s deaf to reason, and that attaches itself to demagogues and false saviors cloaking their petty self-interested ambitions in lofty appeals to honor and glory.
I’m not convinced Rubio has identified a major malady that requires the country’s leading diplomat to propose a diagnosis and a cure. But I am convinced that if the illness is a real one, a representative of the second Trump administration may well be the least fit person on the planet to lead the charge to combat it.
Shorts
- A postliberal political party will always campaign as the lesser of two evils because it is evil, and unapologetically so. (Nick Catoggio)
- “Can you feel the thymos?” – Damon Linker on Hegseth announcing the public execution of Nidal Hasan. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
- “Rightists will scream ‘Colorblind meritocracy!’ right up until the point where Indian people start doing well, at which point every rightist turns into Ibram Kendi,” – Noah Smith. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
