Palmer Luckey says that executions should be 'public and brutal'

Palmer Luckey called private executions "awful and dystopian." Bloomberg/Getty Images Palmer Luckey said that he was in favor of public executions.

Luckey weighed in on the case of Nidal Hasan, who Pete Hegseth said would be executed on a livestream.

Private executions are "awful and dystopian," Luckey wrote on X.

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.