Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced his intention to live-stream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, a disgraced Army major who shot and killed 13 people at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Though FCC chair Brendan Carr refused to answer whether he’d allow broadcasters to air the government-funded shooting, many have expressed the profound harm public executions could have on the national psyche. Others noted that this type of gleeful bloodlust is more akin to the disturbing spectacle found in dictatorships, which, yeah, these guys are aware.
Luckey, the extremely normal guy who encourages oxytocin doping to force women to stay in loveless marriages, has been an “outspoken” supporter of “public executions for over a decade,” standing by the position that “executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized.” He leans on the 300-year old teachings of George Washington, who used public executions and, we assume, also live-streamed them on the internet for everyone to see, to back up his point. At which point, the co-founder of the military tech company Palantir, named after Tolkien’s seeing stones that drive people insane, Joe Lonsdale agreed, saying, “Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric; but our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”
As if it wasn’t already clear, these guys have a few moral qualms with killing lots and lots of people for lots and lots of money. Luckey came to prominence as the creator of the Oculus VR headset, which he later sold to Facebook. He describes himself as a “radical Zionist,” is a major Trump donor and fundraiser, and has generated billions via his automated drones, becoming one of the world’s leaders in AI-powered killing machines. He also got sports podcaster Bill Simmons a really cool hat. Meanwhile, Luckey’s defense tech cohort, Lonsdale, said of his company’s drones killing 150 people, mostly children, at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, “It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.” Both companies are funded, in part, by reality’s Saruman, Peter Thiel, who believes the anti-Christ will return in the form of AI regulation. So not a lot of clear thinking is happening in the realm of AI-powered, potentially world-ending weaponry.
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