Palmer Luckey says that executions should be 'public and brutal' — not 'private and medicalized'

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."

It's not a new position; Luckey cites George Washington as an intellectual predecessor. Washington was a fierce disciplinarian who supported public hangings.

In his post, Luckey derided this shift toward private executions as "awful and dystopian."

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Luckey had some sympathy for the pacifists who want to end the death penalty altogether. That argument is logically consistent, he wrote in response to another user. "If people don't want the Trump administration executing people in public, they definitely shouldn't want them doing it in private!"

Others saw eye to eye with Luckey, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who wrote that he "agreed."