Happy Tuesday. It’s Editor Audrey Moorehead, writing from the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee, where it’ll be a crisp 86°F later today. Doesn’t that just sound like fall to you?

Just a week after covering the failed execution of Christa Pike, today’s newsletter discusses the plans to livestream the execution of the Fort Hood shooter, an issue that throws my political and moral convictions into sharp relief. Then, a feel-good story on a rescued baby bird. 

It’s a 13-minute read.

Isaac Saul, Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Carina Pacheco, Russell Nystrom, Isaac Wood, and Bailey Saul edited or contributed to today’s newsletter.

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Correction.

In Friday’s edition, we incorrectly identified Dave Wasserman as a pollster. While Wasserman frequently discusses polling, he does not conduct polls himself and is professionally known as an election analyst. 

This is our 159th correction in Tangle’s 375-week history and our first correction since August 24. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

A candid look at Hasan Piker.

Hasan Piker has gained national prominence with his no-holds-barred political commentary and growing influence on the left. On Friday, Executive Editor Isaac Saul explored the streamer’s controversial statements, provocative worldview, and role in the Democratic Party’s future. You can read it here. 

Quick hits.

1. Homeland Security Investigations agents raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), reportedly as part of an investigation into Omar’s immigration paperwork. (The raid)
2. New White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia said the Trump administration has asked U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign amid allegations that she offered access to the administration in return for payments toward credit card debt. (The announcement)
3. President Donald Trump announced a deal for the United States to buy over four million tons of diesel oil from Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the agreement a “[gift] to Putin.” (The deal) Separately, on Monday, Zelensky accused Russia of striking at least six Ukrainian energy targets in violation of a purported energy ceasefire announced by President Trump. (The update)
4. A Justice Department spokesperson said the department is investigating whether major news outlets violated antitrust law when they stopped press pool coverage of President Trump last month, following his decision to ban MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House. (The investigation)
5. Houthi rebels struck Riyadh’s international airport in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, killing 13 and injuring over 300. On Sunday, another Houthi strike at the airport killed one person and injured 11. (The strikes)

Today’s topic.

The Fort Hood shooter’s execution. On Thursday, the Defense Department announced that it intends to livestream the execution of the former Army major who carried out the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting. The convicted shooter is scheduled to be executed by an Army firing squad on December 3, which would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first known execution by firing squad since 1945. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have pushed back on the plan to livestream the event, and President Donald Trump said he is still considering the proposal. 

Back up: On November 5, 2009, an Army major and psychiatrist opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others. The shooter was paralyzed from the waist down by return fire. He said that he carried out the attack because the U.S. military is at war with Islam, calling the United States “a government that openly acknowledges that it would hate for the law of Almighty Allah to be the supreme law of the land.” He was convicted on all charges in 2013 and sentenced to death.

Note: Due to the well documented contagion effect, Tangle does not name shooters or suspects in high-profile attacks. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth backed the plan to livestream the execution, saying, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public — because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Federal regulations prohibit recording executions of inmates in the federal prison system, but the military has not explicitly barred the practice. 

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance suggested the livestream plan may not go ahead, adding that he will not watch it if it does. Separately, President Trump initially told reporters that he had approved the plan but later said he was still deciding, saying, “There are two thoughts: don’t show it and show it. ’Cause you know, by showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did.”

Some Republicans have criticized the plan, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who said, “It would give this individual, who deserves no further notoriety, the martyrdom he seeks.” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) posted on X, “The victims deserve justice administered with solemnity. Broadcasting a death diminishes us and is not an effective deterrent.” Many Democrats also spoke out against the proposal, with Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) calling it a “barbaric spectacle.” 

Today, we’ll share views from the left and right on the planned public execution, followed by Editor Audrey Moorehead’s take.

In The Atlantic, Graeme Wood wrote about “the real harm of a public execution.”

“[This man] deserves what he is probably going to get in December. The rest of us, however, will be ill-served by the spectacle of his execution… Watching people die by violence, even if those people have it coming, damages the spectator irreversibly. I don’t mean physical or emotional damage,” Wood said. “I mean something more like the loss of their humanity and dignity, through partaking in the process of treating a person… like a machine to be turned off.”

“It is hard to appreciate how awful this viewing experience will be, until you have it. And then of course it will be too late. I have seen videotaped executions and have been diminished by every single one,” Wood wrote. “In this world, denying [the shooter] the pleasure of death on his own terms, and letting him instead spend a few more earthly decades in tedious incarceration, would seem a much more onerous punishment.”

In The Hill, Joslin Joseph argued that livestreaming the execution would be “replacing our own moral compass.”

“I have no problem with this man being executed and fully support calling him a terrorist. What he did was abhorrent and his justification of using his religion as an excuse doesn’t hold water to many, Muslim or otherwise,” Joseph wrote. “But livestreaming an execution is yet another way we have caved in and given up our values because of our fears… We have ‘othered’ Muslims so badly and vilified them to the point that we are now acting the way we accuse them of acting.” 

“We abhor terror groups like the Islamic State organization when they release high production snuff films showing prisoners beheaded, shot, run over by tanks, blown up with grenades, or butchered like livestock… We criticize the Saudis for public executions and call them barbaric,” Joseph said. “People flee autocratic Muslim countries because of public executions and come here because we don’t (yet) act that way.”

In his Substack, Steve Vladeck suggested that legal challenges to the execution would face “a significant obstacle.” 

“In a world in which the legality of such a public spectacle ends up in court (and I’m skeptical that it will), Hegseth’s proposal is an unusually accessible illustration of the very real consequences of the shift in the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence since 2019,” Vladeck wrote. “Ever since Justice Kennedy retired, the Court has embraced a more static, 1791-oriented conception of which punishments are — and aren’t — constitutional. 

“For decades, the Court recognized that, because the language of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is dynamic, the Clause ‘must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,’” Vladeck said. “The biggest gap between the Court’s ‘evolving standards’ jurisprudence and its current approach involves punishments that were in broad use at the Founding but have since been largely repudiated. And the public execution of [the shooter] would fall right into that space.”

In the Daily Wire, Andrew T. Walker argued “execution demands a public witness.”

“Public outcry that reduces public execution to a ‘spectacle’ vastly undervalues the magnitude of [the shooter’s] offense. It is true that concerns about the macabre, bloodlust, and prurience are real… No one should derive joy or entertainment from watching another human die, even if the conditions are just,” Walker wrote. “Our society is no more morally enlightened than biblical times, where execution was public… and done so that ‘all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you’ (Deut. 13:11) — in other words, deterrence.”

“I believe capital punishment should be public,” Walker said. “The military serves the nation’s defense, not a single state, and thus citizens across the country have a right — not an obligation — to view the execution if they choose. [The shooter’s] terrorism was a symbolic act against the citizens of the United States.”

The New York Post editorial board said “don’t make… [the] execution a public spectacle.”

“America is supposed to be a model nation, with the highest values, a shining light that leads the world into a civilized future. The spectacle of a publicized, glamorized execution sends us in the opposite direction,” the board wrote. “[The] death is meant to achieve justice for the horrific evil he perpetrated, not serve as a source of entertainment or pleasure for masses… That’s not what America represents. 

“Nor will a public execution deter terror; it’ll only make a martyr out of [the shooter]. It’s precisely what monsters like [him] long for: martyrdom that brings them fame and glory. Jihadis will surely use footage of the execution as a recruiting tool. Rather than tame terrorism, it’ll only inflame it,” the board said. “For the sake of upholding America’s moral stature — and decency itself — Trump must put an end to this abominable idea.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Alex Kozinski made “the case for firing squads.”

“Perhaps states thought lethal injection would fare better in court because it resembled a familiar medical procedure. Perhaps they wanted executions to look less medieval,” Kozinski wrote. “Either way, the appeal was obvious: Put the prisoner on a gurney, attach tubes, administer drugs, and invite the public to imagine that death arrives cleanly and quickly, without anyone getting blood on his hands. Appearances, however, aren’t reality.” 

“Execution by lethal injection is dishonest. It dresses an execution in the reassuring garb of medicine, encouraging us to mistake a state killing for a clinical event. Medicine seeks to preserve life; execution ends it. This blurring of what are diametrically opposite functions is epistemologically perilous and morally repugnant,” Kozinski said. “I have some doubts whether livestreaming the execution is advisable, but Mr. Hegseth should be commended for his honesty.”

My take. Audrey Moorehead Editor

I aspire to a consistent pro-life ethic, but I still grapple with the death penalty.  The Fort Hood shooter committed heinous crimes and has shown no remorse; executing him is a valid form of justice. However, livestreaming the event would turn that act of justice into a spectacle.

Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment or reply to this email.

If you asked me to name the most important political value I hold, my answer would be simple: I am pro-life, in nearly every meaning of the term.

It seems clear to me that the single most important goal of society should be the preservation and perpetuation of human life. Life is precious, from the moment it begins until the moment it ends; to end a life prematurely is the single gravest thing that a person can do. To kill another person is to rob them of the most precious gift they have ever been given, to freeze them in place permanently, to remove their chances of experiencing further joy or bringing further joy into the world. The first murder is one of the first stories in the Bible for a reason.

In short, if you are going to kill someone, you need to have an unimpeachable reason to do so.

Given all this, I grapple with capital punishment more than any other political issue. Christian views on the death penalty are diverse and complicated, as our coverage of the failed execution of Christa Pike showcased. The Catholic Church — the largest Christian body in the world — officially opposes it. Pope Leo XIV distilled the church’s opinion on it in a social media post last weekend, writing, “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

I’m not a Catholic, but I still recognize the Pope’s formidable role in interpreting Christian moral teachings. And his emphasis that redemption is possible for any person, myself included, hits home for me.

Even so, I can’t shake the feeling that the death penalty is permissible for the most serious of crimes, and that the potential abandonment of capital punishment — indeed, our abandonment of older understandings of justice — could be detrimental to us. Amid a debate over capital punishment just after World War II, C.S. Lewis argued that to abandon the retributive theory of punishment, to instead prioritize theories of rehabilitation and deterrence, is to dehumanize the criminal and give concession to tyranny. If we pathologize all of a person’s wrongdoings, we imply that the person lacks the capacity for reason; if we solely focus on deterrence, we open ourselves to justifying the punishment of the innocents just to “set an example.” For those reasons, Lewis argued, society can’t abandon the concept of giving a criminal his “just deserts.”

If we accept that premise, then we must ask what sort of deserts are required by different crimes. Here, Lewis argues, we should rely on the principles of justice developed over centuries of legal theory and the judgments of juries of a convict’s peers. Capital punishment has been a part of this legal system since time immemorial; our ancestors understood it to be necessary, to some extent, and they further understood it to be a just desert for certain crimes. 

Of course, just because the death penalty was once understood to be necessary does not mean that its proponents were right then, or that they are right now. After all, governments have killed and still kill people for crimes that we recognize today as unworthy of the death penalty, and I think that getting the death penalty wrong — by applying it erroneously or incompetently — is the most egregious act a government can commit. Not only that, but the state making the final decision to deprive any person of the chance of redemption genuinely makes my blood run cold. 

Nevertheless, I still find myself thinking that death is the only appropriate punishment for some crimes — mass shootings among them. 

The Fort Hood shooter killed 13 people and injured 32 more, all in the name of fighting America on behalf of radical Islam. In the years since the massacre, the shooter has expressed no remorse and has in fact continued to hold fast to the extremist ideology that drove him to murder. I believe this man must choose redemption if he is to have it, but he has spent nearly two decades refusing it and doubling down at every turn. Execution, in the end, fits the bill of just deserts. In this case, the biggest miscarriage of justice is the fact he sat on death row for well over a decade.

But my support for the death penalty — even in the case of the Fort Hood shooter — is contingent on an important factor: It must be carried out with the solemnity and sobriety that such a punishment requires. We mustn’t take pleasure in ending another person’s life. Instead, we must treat it as a terrible duty, and we must afford the convicted every dignity we can, for our own consciences if not for his comfort. 

So for that reason, when I heard the Pentagon declared that the execution (by firing squad, no less) would be livestreamed, I was filled with anger. I understand the case for public executions — part of the solemnity of execution includes our understanding of the gravity of what we’re doing, and I think that modern, medicalized executions intentionally obscure and desensitize the public to the gruesome finality of the act. But there’s a difference between displaying an execution with dignity and treating it as a show of force or a spectacle. When the enactment of justice becomes a spectacle, people begin to lose their sense of justice, giving way to cravings for revenge fueled by an incendiary mob mentality.

And in my view, offering it on livestream worsens this problem. Viewing violence through a screen evokes a certain desensitization: You’re removed from the full embodied experience, making it feel unreal, like a video game or movie. Easy access to that sort of violent imagery has been found to inspire radicalization and even terrorism — it’s the very reason that the Islamic State, the group that this shooter pledges loyalty to, publicizes its killings. And the livestreamed execution of a paraplegic Islamic terrorist would do their work for them, turning the convict into a martyr and providing evidence of America’s brutality. 

Secretary Hegseth seems either unaware of or apathetic toward these problems. Neither attitude would surprise me. The secretary likes to flaunt Scripture when he thinks it emphasizes strength and bravado, but he’s just as likely to flout its demands for dignity and grace. And that misuse of Scripture, in service of such an egregious betrayal of dignity — carried out by a civil servant in a secular government, no less — makes a mockery of the idea of justice.

My hope is that the better angels in President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s natures prevail here, and that they shoot down Hegseth’s ill-formed idea. Because if they don’t, in my view, it would be better to have no death penalty at all than to have it so abused.

Staff concurrence. Isaac Saul Executive Editor

Audrey and I disagree about the utility of the death penalty (I’ve written in stark opposition to it, including as recently as last week). But I was relieved to see we landed in the same place on the value of a public execution. While I’m almost compelled by the argument that we should have public executions to make the country reckon with what we’re allowing behind closed doors, I’m conscious of the fact that, as Audrey argued, violence begets violence (to say nothing of the fact that this particular killer wants to die a martyr). And turning it into a nationwide watch party feels like I’m stuck in an episode of Black Mirror.   In a surfeit of hypocrisy and violence, this is the same administration that has an HHS campaign bringing together researchers, tech companies, and advocates for a symposium on screen-related harms. Now, it’s guaranteeing a government-sponsored killing goes viral on the internet, inevitably making its way to devices across the world. If it weren’t so nauseating to imagine teenagers firing up the livestream from their phones and computers across the country, it’d be comically absurd to consider. Which, honestly, is a good way to describe Pete Hegseth’s entire term as Defense secretary.

Take the survey: Should the public be able to view executions? Let us know.

Disagree? That’s okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we’ll consider publishing your feedback.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published a Friday edition exploring the debate over artificial intelligence threats. 
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was the interactive sea-level map.
• Nothing to do with politics: Listen to two of the world’s loudest birds.
• Our last survey: 2,384 readers responded to our survey on oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder, with 56% saying states should be able to sue energy companies for damages caused by environmental hazards linked to climate change. “I live in Colorado and we’ve seen record low snowpack, increasingly severe droughts, and days pushing into 90 degrees in October… Cities and states should be allowed to argue their cases for holding them accountable for the damage to the one planet we have to live on,” one respondent said. “How do you determine the percent of damage specifically caused by fossil fuels? What about cattle? What about inherent natural swings? Deforestation? Feels like trying to pull an ice cube out of a fog bank,” said another.

Have a nice day.

A British fisherman called the Waterfowl Sanctuary after his fishing line hooked and entangled a young swan that took his bait. He waded into the water, with the hopes of freeing the swan, but decided to retreat from the possibility of parental attacks. He called the Godmanchester sanctuary, and rescuer Graham Porter was on site within 30 minutes, kayaking out to the swan family. After navigating an advance by the flapping wings of a protective parent, Porter scooped up the bird, paddled away from the parents, and found a patch of daylight to focus on the entanglement. He untangled the fishing line and detached the hook from the bill, freeing the baby to return to its parents. Good Good Good has the story.