cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/12189
Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as “masculine leadership” to the US.
In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called “three strikes” anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.
“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” he wrote. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”
Lonsdale then added that “our society needs balance,” and said that “it’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”
Lonsdale’s views on public hangings being necessary to restore “masculine leadership” drew swift criticism.
Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter “The Nerd Reich,” argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale’s call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are “entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.”
“For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump’s authoritarian rule,” Durán explained. “Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.”
Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.
“A point of nuance here: ‘masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable’ is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions,” he observed.
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale’s remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.
“Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age,” he wrote.
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.
“Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide,” he wrote. “So let’s have the conversation.”
And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing “thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse.”
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Even the most backwater places in the world don’t carry out public hangings. The only time public execution is a necessary evil is where state has completely and totally broken down and a military faction is trying to assert themselves as the new state. Once you’ve asserted control and become the state you can do them quietly and with a legitimacy that doesn’t drive people towards carrying out revenge acts.
Insecurity masquerading as strength. All of these people are deeply insecure and screaming for attention and validation. They massively overcompensate for their own feelings of inadequacy.
These people have zero engagement with society at large or other people, they probably only know public executions are something the cool frontier justice in media is shown. They have no idea about how to govern because they have never had anyone be openly antagonistic to them.
Yeah it’s frontier justice because the frontier has almost no fucking state. It’s an act used to reinforce a weak state that needs to assert itself loudly or else people will not listen to it. It’s an act carried out when people are genuinely following “be ungovernable”. It’s an act of force to enforce governing by a faction laying claim to an area.
There is absolutely no reason to do public executions in an area where the state is already basically fully recognised as controlling the area and people do not generally try to assert a different organisational structure’s claim to governing its people. You carry out public executions when you want people to see that you have the power to do it and the other organisations do not have the power to stop it, therefore you are the supreme power.
Yeah but they feel like the country is in near-insurrection because they aren’t being sufficiently worshipped.
I agree, but they’re proudly ignorant of that fact, on top of their whole ideology being based around causing suffering, rather than maintaining control or anything internally consistent.
Funny enough, public executions used to be routine in a lot of societies e.g. medieval Europe. I wonder why it changed.
Weak states asserting themselves over and over again due to the high potential for rebellion. Local Lords needed to constantly assert their power because their control and the total resources they wielded was actually tenuous at best. Without doing so the people could have asserted governing themselves or some ambitious person could have driven them to rebellion for their own ambition to become the local lord.
You don’t hear of situations where the local populations were self governing having to assert themselves through such acts. It’s when state power asserted itself that it began.
I figure if the person being executed is notorious enough it could be useful to prove they’re actually dead but you could just parade the body through the streets