Some controversies are so stupid that we should just ignore them. For instance, I couldn't care less about a celebrity who failed to buy a mechanical bird. Kelly Clarkson deserves about as much sympathy as Oprah did when she had trouble buying a purse.
The horror!
But some controversies are stupid, and they DO deserve notice, not because they are eye-catching for the celebrity-obsessed, but because they reveal something deeper about how stupid a good fraction of our society is.
This is one such controversy:
The Trump regime is going to execute a paraplegic Palestinian psychiatrist who has spent 17 years in prison by firing squad, and livestream it. No other country in the world currently televises or livestreams executions.
— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) October 9, 2026
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has chosen to broadcast the execution of Nidal Hasan, and that controversy makes sense to me. I see both sides.
I have mixed feelings about the live-streaming controversy itself. First, I have no desire to watch somebody get shot live, and I am uncertain that it will have the intended effect. But I am much more concerned that it will become an event that spawns a million memes, which seems inappropriate given the gravity of the situation. Making the execution public does not in itself make me that squeamish, but the afterlife through the memes really does.
I see the argument that people whose lives were upended should have the right to watch the execution should they so choose, and that group is larger than just the immediate family members of the dead.
Most Americans have limited exposure to public violence, so it seems barbaric, but members of the CIA and the military often know it up close and personal, and it may mean something different to them than to the average American. I think we should respect their wishes if they feel watching the execution will help bring them closure. They are not monsters for having a different relationship with violent death than civilians; they have lived in that world, and have done so at our request.
But this controversy that is being ginned up that Nidal should not be executed because he is a paraplegic? That's nuts. He's a paraplegic by choice, having been shot while he was executing Americans. This line of argument is no different than a parricide asking for mercy because he is an orphan.
Yet many people seem to be buying the argument, or at least pretending they do.
How cruel! Executing a paraplegic! He's a victim!
No, he's not, and thinking like that reflects so much of what's wrong with the intersectional ladder of oppression, which abstracts from individuals' realities and responsibilities and reduces people to categories.
Categorizing Nidal Hasan as being in the "victim" category because he shares one characteristic, or in this case multiple ones, such as the fact that he is non-white, misses the point entirely. He is not being executed BECAUSE he is a paraplegic or a Muslim; he is being executed because he is a terrorist.
Reduce him to the intersectional categories, and you miss the particulars that matter. And the particulars here matter a lot.
The man executed innocents for no other reason than that he hated a general category of people. It's not a motive different in kind from a KKK member lynching a man because he is black or blowing up a bus full of people because they are Jews. He is, in kind, the same as the perpetrators of 9/11.
He deserves punishment. And the punishment here is the death penalty.
I am fine with people opposing the death penalty for any number of reasons, but if your reason is simply that he is in a wheelchair, that's stupid. If you applaud Luigi Mangione, the assassination attempts on Trump's life, or the murder of Charlie Kirk, but find this execution evil because this terrorist sits in a wheelchair, because the only way to stop his execution spree was to shoot him, you are morally stunted.
Personally, I don't care much either way. A lifetime in supermax would be fine, or a firing squad would be fine. What isn't fine is treating him as if he were the victim.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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