Billionaire Baron Demands Public Hangings RETURN

Gavel, handcuffs, and Death Penalty sign on desk.

A billionaire who helped build the digital nervous system of American policing just endorsed old‑fashioned public hangings as the cure for crime and “soft” leadership.

Story Snapshot

Joe Lonsdale, billionaire co-founder of Palantir, publicly called for hanging repeat violent offenders in town-square style executions.
He framed the spectacle as necessary “masculine leadership” and a rebuke to what he calls “leftist schoolmarm” elites.
His remarks collided with an already simmering controversy over lethal U.S. strikes on suspected “narco boats.”
The episode spotlights how some tech elites now speak comfortably about authoritarian punishment in moral, even heroic terms.

When a Data Baron Demands the Gallows Back

Joe Lonsdale did not merely say he supports the death penalty; he spelled out a vision of America where men with three violent crimes are “quickly tried and hanged” in public squares to frighten everyone else straight. He tied that image to what he branded “masculine leadership,” casting himself and men like him as willing to do the bloody work weak leaders will not. That rhetoric matters because Lonsdale is not a fringe blogger; he is a billionaire who helped build Palantir, a core contractor in the modern surveillance and policing state.

Lonsdale’s comments came as he rushed to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had boasted on social media about sinking another “narco boat” amid a bombing campaign that has killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and Pacific. When Australian writer Claire Lehmann called such bragging “grotesque,” Lonsdale attacked what he described as “leftist schoolmarm leaders” and insisted that sinking suspected smugglers and hanging repeat violent offenders in public are exactly the kinds of acts real men should proudly advertise.

Public Hangings, Deterrence, and American Memory

Americans have not seen a public execution since Rainey Bethea’s 1936 hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky, a botched spectacle in front of thousands that helped end the practice nationwide. That shift was not some academic nicety; communities saw how crowds treated executions like carnivals and how easily “justice” blurred into cruelty and incompetence. Modern executions moved behind prison walls for a reason: to keep the state’s gravest power sober, limited, and accountable. Lonsdale’s call deliberately reverses that logic by glorifying the spectacle itself as the deterrent.

Death penalty debates have always wrestled with deterrence claims, and the evidence has never been conclusive enough to justify shortcuts on due process or public dignity. Conservatives who value ordered liberty have usually insisted that the state’s power to kill must stay bound by procedure, transparency, and constitutional restraint. Lonsdale instead proposes speed—“quickly tried and hanged”—and theater. That formula would amplify every known weakness of the system: human error, politicized prosecutions, and disproportionate impact on poor and minority defendants.

Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder Pushes Return of Public Hangings as Part of 'Masculine Leadership' Initiative https://t.co/iUeq7CHVOT

— Common Dreams (@commondreams) December 7, 2025

Masculine Leadership or Authoritarian Aesthetic?

Framing execution and military violence as proof of “masculine truth” does more than posture; it imports a long-standing authoritarian aesthetic into American tech and defense debates. Scholars of strongman politics have documented how regimes from Mussolini onward wrapped brutality in language about virility and protection of the vulnerable, casting critics as effeminate scolds who do not understand the real world. Lonsdale’s attacks on “schoolmarm” leaders and his insistence that “bold, virtuous men deter evil” echo that script almost line for line.

From a conservative perspective grounded in common sense and the rule of law, strength is not measured by how loudly one celebrates killing “bad guys” but by how reliably limited government wields force under law. Calling the Pentagon the “Dept. of War,” cheering airstrikes that may have killed unproven smugglers, then proposing public hangings as a cultural correction crosses from law-and-order into something closer to state theater. The risk is not only moral overreach; it is strategic. A government that learns to treat violence as a brand asset rather than a grim last resort tends to expand that violence, not refine it.

Tech Elites, Surveillance Power, and the Gallows Imagination

Palantir’s software already sits at the intersection of big data, predictive policing, and intelligence work for the U.S. and allied governments. Civil liberties advocates have warned for years that such tools can supercharge opaque, unaccountable state power—especially in communities that already live under disproportionate scrutiny. When a founder of that ecosystem publicly fantasizes about hanging people in front of crowds, critics reasonably connect the dots: the same mindset that wants perfect data on citizens now dreams aloud about using the resulting apparatus for exemplary, public punishment.

Supporters might argue that Lonsdale only targets “men after three violent crimes” and that his aim is to protect “our most vulnerable.” The trouble is that American history shows who usually ends up labeled irredeemable and expendable when leaders promise crackdowns and shortcuts. Wrongful convictions in capital cases, racial disparities in sentencing, and past abuse of anti-crime crusades are not theoretical. They are the reason many conservatives insist that any state strong enough to hang with haste in the town square is also strong enough to do the same to political enemies later.