Palmer Luckey wants to bring executions out from behind the curtain.
The cofounder of Anduril weighed in on the case of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed. President Donald Trump said he was still weighing the decision.
Luckey said that he’d been “outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade” — and that his position hadn’t changed.
“Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized,” Luckey wrote in a Sunday post on X. “They are the ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence.”
Voters need to be confronted with the hard truth of these state killings in every instance, Luckey wrote, so that they can have appropriate “confidence or revulsion in the institution.”
It’s not a new position; Luckey cites George Washington as an intellectual predecessor. Washington was a fierce disciplinarian who supported public hangings.
Luckey’s thoughts echo a French philosopher who lived two centuries after Washington. In “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault traced the spectacle of public executions to the private medicalization of executions behind prison doors.
In his post, Luckey derided this shift toward private executions as “awful and dystopian.”
“It makes needless executions more likely, not less so,” he wrote. “People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point.”
Luckey had some sympathy for the pacifists who want to end the death penalty altogether. That argument is logically consistent, he wrote in response to another user. “If people don’t want the Trump administration executing people in public, they definitely shouldn’t want them doing it in private!”
The post was certainly controversial. People on X called Luckey a “true psycho” and compared Silicon Valley to a psych ward. “Next they will be rationalising gladiatorial arenas for condemned prisoners,” one user wrote.
Others saw eye to eye with Luckey, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who wrote that he “agreed.”
“Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric,” Lonsdale wrote. “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”
