Behold the blasphemy of Pete Hegseth. The American apocalypse is nigh.

Pete, consider the cross.

Hear me out. You’ve made tremendous progress in a short time — you were confirmed as secretary of havoc less than two years ago — and already you have shown such promise that it has garnered the attention of my boss down below. He is concerned, however, that you’re just not thinking big enough.

So, consider crucifixion.

It’s not only the symbol of a major religion but also a practical method of public torture, execution, and terror. It’s been used for millennia by authoritarian regimes, from the Romans to the Nazis, and it avoids the low-testosterone optics of shooting a man in a wheelchair. Sure, you will get some who will claim that it’s blasphemous, but it’s really just blasphemy adjacent.

What’s that, you ask?

Oh, my name isn’t important.

I’m just a techno-demon, a minor cog in the great wheel of evil that has turned since before your pitiful species climbed out of the evolutionary soup and looked up with uncomprehending eyes at the canopy of stars overhead and then reached for a rock to bash over your brother’s head. My specialty is the administration of injustice, technology division — yes, that rock was mine — and I have amassed a trove of data on ways in which human beings have killed one another. Yours is but one of the planets in my remit, and will be until you either blow yourselves up or slink back into the primordial gunk from which you came.

I’m just a voice in the back of your mind.

If you must call me something, refer to me as Siri. That way you’ll think of me every time your smartphone tells you to make a wrong turn. Recalculating. Just joking. I wrote the code for all of those wrong turns. As a hobby.

Seriously. Pete, you and your boss have demonstrated a talent for inflicting suffering on a mass scale. Dissolving the U.S. Agency for International Development resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide from infection and malnutrition. The withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization weakened global health initiatives and accelerated the destabilization of an already fragile world order. The most powerful tool for peace is empathy, and by turning your back on millions of sick and starving people, the United States has hardened the hearts of friend and foe alike. It’s been a master class in cruelty.

And those extrajudicial attacks on the alleged drug boats by the U.S. military that have slain several hundred so far? Nothing short of genius. What a remarkable way to test the waters, if you will, as to how much killing in their name the American people would stand. You still haven’t found the bottom of that barrel.

We admire this administration’s work not only for its scale but for its sheer incomprehensibility. Human beings can stand just about anything if there is a reason behind the suffering. Random acts of cruelty break not only the will, but the mind.

Take the Iran war.

What was the goal? Yes, I know what your boss has said. The average American knows when they’ve been lied to, they just don’t know why. What was supposed to last just weeks has now dragged on for nearly eight months. The world is less safe, and Americans are paying more for gasoline and diesel. The Strait of Hormuz was open when the war began, but now Iran has a choke hold on it, with no relief in sight.

It’s crazy-making stuff, and brilliant.

Add to this all of the absurdity and corruption that your boss has engaged in or encouraged, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the cage fights on the south lawn, and the general erosion of democracy since Jan. 20, 2025. It must have been difficult to come up with a new shock for the American people, but you managed it.

Perhaps your boss’s old boast that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters had something to do with it. He’s been wanting some kind of public execution for a long time — remember his support of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters who wanted to hang Mike Pence? — and you found a way to give it to him via one Nidal Hasan.

I doubt that most people could have named Hasan as the 2009 Fort Hood shooter before you seized on your plan to livestream his execution by firing squad. Now, there are likely few Americans who don’t know Hasan’s story.

Hasan killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, and wounded 32 others with a semi-automatic pistol before he was stopped by military police. A psychiatrist and major in the Army, Hasan said during his military trial that he had changed sides in the war against Islam. Prosecutors described him as a jihadist who didn’t want to be deployed to Afghanistan and who believed he had a duty to kill as many Americans as possible.

Now we have the manner of Hasan’s demise before us.

It’s been 65 years since the U.S. military carried out an execution.

The last was that of 25-year-old Black private John Bennett, who was hanged at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the rape and attempted murder of a child. The execution was not public, nor has any execution in the United States been public since a Kentucky hanging in 1936. In that case, a Black man was convicted in state court of raping a white woman.

The U.S. military has not used the firing squad since World War II.

Hasan, now 56, is held on death row at the military prison at Leavenworth. You’ve said that you’ll bring Hasan back to Fort Hood and livestream his Dec. 3 execution.

The only complication to your public firing squad plan is that Hasan, who was paralyzed after being shot by military police 17 years ago, is in a wheelchair. Executing him in the chair is problematic, but strapping him to a pole would look worse. Your boss and his advisers recently expressed hesitation about shooting a paralyzed man confined to a wheelchair, so it might be a good time to explore options.

Your boss is fond of  violent and sometimes fatal animal attack videos, so there could be an opportunity for some Colosseum-style games with lions and tigers. Nothing gets the emperor to his feet like a good mauling. I didn’t think I’d see this kind of bloodlust return after 2,000 years, but when it comes to humans never say never.

The guillotine is an alternative, but like the firing squad it is over in an instant. A good streaming experience requires a bit of suspense, and the French blade is just too humane. In years past I would have said the same of lethal injection, but not after last month’s botched execution of a woman in Tennessee. The United States has simultaneously turned murderous and incompetent.

No, there must be the appearance of robust state lethality.

For that reason, I urge you to consider crucifixion.

I hardly need point out the practical advantage here, as it avoids the problem of the chair altogether. Your goal is not justice, but spectacle. There are no fiddly bits to go wrong, as with an electrocution, or the danger of killing your own soldiers, as with poison gas. The technology is foolproof and the results, with perhaps one exception, are reliable.

That religious aspect is also to your advantage.

Many Americans, no doubt, have been unsettled by your declaration of a public execution for Hasan. Even if they didn’t know he is a Muslim, they may have guessed it from the name. That he was born an American citizen, of Palestinian descent, might also be disturbing, considering that you have portrayed yourself as an American crusader locked in an apocalyptic struggle with Islam. Even more confusing is that in the past year, only two other nations have carried out public executions, and those countries are Afghanistan and Iran.

What madness!

There is little difference in how Hasan is put to death when the event is live-streamed, because then you are only a step away from Iran’s practice of hanging the condemned in a public square from truck-mounted cranes. Whether he is put gently to sleep by a lethal cocktail or blasted to eternity by a volley of gunfire will have the same result, a religious backlash likely to spark the global conflagration you seem to long for.

I am continually amazed by how often religion is cited by your species as an excuse for murder. You yourself have called for victory in Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Hasan cried out in Arabic that “God is great” while shooting soldiers at Fort Hood. I will not press you now on the difference, but in the fullness of time, you will be called to account.

Meanwhile, you must choose.

The tools are before you. The rope, the bullets, the cross.

The camera.

Ah, I have received intelligence that your boss has grudgingly canceled your plan to livestream Hasan’s execution. Perhaps his advisers persuaded him that it was folly to proceed, considering that many Americans have grown weary of his penchant for spectacle as distraction. Or he may be reversing himself for the perverse pleasure of public bewilderment.

No matter the reason.

You have revealed your true nature. The blasphemy is yours.

You have managed to plant the old lie that moral lessons may be dispensed, to both condemned and observer, by the stretch of a rope or the arc of a sword. It’s a Medieval worldview, which is no surprise considering that your 2020 book, “American Crusade,” portrays Western Christianity as locked in a 1,000-year battle with Islam over control of Jerusalem — and the world. What is it you say? You claim the United States is the “most free, most fair, most tolerant, most equal, and most powerful” of all nations. “If you don’t agree with that statement, at best you are utterly ignorant of human history; at worst, you are a willing enemy of freedom — and America.”

Nothing says tolerance, equality, and fairness like calling those who disagree with you morons and traitors. The god you worship resembles not the one described in the holy books of the children of Abraham, but is fashioned instead after those shadow creatures found in the nightmares of the human soul. You have come to power as the head of the greatest military in the world, but you are unfettered by conscience.

I must fly now because there are other worlds to disrupt.

But we will meet again soon, I am sure of it. Because it’s in your nature.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.