Palmer Luckey wants to bring execution out from behind the curtain.
Anduril’s founder weighed in on the case of Nidal Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Hasan’s execution will be televised live. President Donald Trump said he was still considering the decision.
Luckey said he has “frankly wanted public executions for more than a decade” – and his position has not changed.
“Executions should be public and brutal, impersonal and medical,” Luckey wrote in a Sunday post on X. “He is a prime example of the state’s monopoly on violence.”
Voters must face the real truth about the state’s murders in every case, Luckey wrote, in order to have “confidence or revulsion in the institution.”
It is not a new position; Luckey cites George Washington as his intellectual predecessor. Washington was a strong disciplinarian who supported public hangings.
Luckey’s thoughts echo those of a French philosopher who lived two centuries after Washington. In “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault traces the spectacle of public execution to the medicalization of private execution behind prison doors.
In his post, Luckey derided this shift to private execution as “ugly and dystopian.”
“This creates more unnecessary executions, not less,” he wrote. “Those who disparage this as barbaric or yucky are guilty of all.”
Luckey has sympathy for pacifists who want to end the death penalty altogether. The argument is logically consistent, he wrote in response to another user. “If people don’t want the Trump administration to execute people in public, they certainly don’t want them to do it in private!”
The post was certainly controversial. People at X called Luckey a “true psycho” and compared Silicon Valley to a psych ward. “Next time he’ll rationalize a gladiatorial arena for condemned prisoners,” wrote one user.
Others saw eye to eye with Luckey, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who wrote that he “agreed.”
“Palmer Luckey and George Washington were not barbarians,” Lonsdale wrote. “Our society is now too soft in a way that harms our citizens.”