Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Jon Liedtke discusses the U.S. proposal to live stream the execution of the Fort Hood shooter. Liedtke criticizes the move as sensationalized clickbait rather than a deterrent or threat to national security. He also faults the Canadian government for failing to block the broadcast.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: And it’s time for Liedtke’s Got a Take with Jon Liedtke. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Hey, uh, we’re, uh, talking about the Fort Hood shooter, and for people who don’t know, back in 2023, this, uh, soldier, who was also a psychiatrist, was radicalized. And, uh, he was at Fort Hood in the United States, uh, mass murder, killed 13, uh, wounded 32 people. So now the Secretary of Defense, or what they’re calling it now in the States, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, uh, and the Pentagon, are—Pentagon are framing this, uh, live stream as the ultimate act of deterrence, showing terrorists that if you attack Americans, you’ll end up, uh, being executed by a firing squad. Now, they’re going to live stream this! Only two other countries live stream executions: Iran and Afghanistan. Now, George Washington advocated for public executions. Now, is broadcasting an execution an effective deterrent, or is it just a really cheap internet, uh, show of entertainment?
Jon Liedtke: Well, let’s be real about this. Pete Hegseth is not George Washington. George Washington crossed the Delaware. Pete Hegseth wants to get to the top of the leader rankings on Xbox. The Pentagon argues the public needs to see the serious consequences of terrorism, but you know what this actually becomes in 2026? I’d say just like macabre clickbait. It’s not going to be a solemn historical lesson in civic justice. This is going to be sandwiched on your social media timelines between unboxing videos and people ranking fast food. I, like, you put up with the Kraft Dinner, uh, pop that you have. Yeah, I oppose the death penalty categorically. I mean, I think it’s morally gross and it’s a fiscal black hole. I mean, we figured this out decades ago in Canada. Broadcasting state-sanctioned death, though—I mean, that doesn’t deter terrorism. I mean, and I don’t think it actually enables terrorism, either. I just think it degrades everyone watching.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, the, uh, Speaker in the U.S., Johnson, and some U.S. Senators are warning this could be a, like a massive recruitment video for extremists. Now, do you buy the argument that a Pentagon live stream creates an elevated national security risk, or is Washington overthinking this?
Jon Liedtke: I’ll give you a one-word answer: Meh. Washington’s pearl-clutching, and they’re really good at that. I mean, do we honestly believe extremist networks are sitting around empty-handed, just waiting for a Pentagon live stream to drop so they can finally begin the radicalization process? I mean, come on. Th-they’re doing it great right now. They don’t need Pete Hegseth acting as executive producer. I think that this is just classic, overblown Washington talking points from politicians who fundamentally don’t even understand how the internet actually operates. You don’t need external actors to radicalize people. It’s happening right now, and it’s happening organically as well as, uh, uh, astroturfed. But extremists are going to spin anything into absolute propaganda. So the stream itself isn’t the magic bullet.
Gene Valaitis: You know, I like the Australian Prime Minister. I was reading some stuff about him and this execution. He calls it abhorrent, and I agree with him. Uh, they promise to block it down under. Canadian experts are warning, uh, parents that graphic clips will inevitably hit places like, uh, TikTok. So Ottawa, uh, talks a big game about protecting youth from online, online harm. So, should the Canadian government step up and block this feed, or are they chicken of what Trump will do in retaliation?
Jon Liedtke: I think that this is actually, you know, peak Ottawa hypocrisy at its finest. We have a federal government here in Canada that will exhaustively attempt, uh, repeatedly, to regulate streaming platforms to ensure that we’re all fed up enough with CanCon at this point, because I think most people just want to be able to log onto Netflix without seeing their bills continually rise and hearing it’s because the government is trying to force things onto companies, which will then pass the costs onto us. But I mean, when an actual live military firing squad is set to hit our social media feeds on December the 3rd, right now Ottawa has suddenly developed, it seems like, laryngitis. Where are they? They’re not talking. And why? It seems like they’re terrified of poking the bear that is Donald Trump. They don’t want to risk higher tariffs or a border spat with Trump evolving, so they check their so-called progressive morals right at the ambassador or the Gordie Howe Bridge. I mean, this is rhetorical cowardice, Gene. Uh, come on, block the feed, grow a spine and a backbone. We don’t need to be enabling this in our country.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, the, uh, the visual of this, because, uh, the gunman was paralyzed when they took him down. I mean, he’s going to be in a wheelchair with a heart target on his chest. I, I mean, there’s no way in the world I could watch this. And you know what? If people want to see graphic content like that on the internet, they’re going to find it anyway. So does government intervention from Ottawa even work, or are they kind of trying to broadcast—censor a broadcast that people will, will find on the internet anyway?
Jon Liedtke: People are going to find it. I mean, the internet always wins. We know that. But that doesn’t mean that we need to make it easy. If someone wants to genuinely seek out dark, twisted garbage online, that’s their prerogative. Um, but I don’t think that the state need to roll out the red carpet, set up ring lights, and serve it up on a digital buffet. So government intervention here isn’t about successfully scrubbing the entire internet clean, which is, of course, impossible. It’s about ensuring that the firing squad doesn’t autoplay when a 14-year-old is scrolling for hockey highlights on TikTok. If you want to have people watch this, I mean, let them figure it out on their own. Make the sickos work to find it out on their own. But we can shut it down on our main feeds, and that’s easy enough. I mean, they can call up the social media companies, they can tweak some regulations, heck, they could push emergency legislation if they wanted to. They got the majority government right now. Um, so we just got to sit and wait and see as the clock ticks down closer and closer to December the 3rd.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Now Trump loves the big spectacle, as we know. You know, his parade, that arch that he wants to build, his ballroom and all the rest of it. But if the White House does pull the plug on this, is that a sign of diplomatic pressure actually working, or just Trump backing off a bad, bad, politically, uh, motivated, uh, loser?
Jon Liedtke: I think it would prove the whole operation to be a clown show. What we’ve seen is, uh, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War or Defense, shot from the hip and blindsided everyone. No one expected it. There’s now reports out that Trump is actually sweating about this because apparently nobody briefed him that Nidal Hasan is actually paralyzed, as you mentioned, from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. And he’s now apparently thinking about the optics of it and how the firing squad gunning down a paralyzed man in a wheelchair on global television or on the internet might not be the best thing to be representing the United States of America. Even Trump can understand that that’s a monumental PR disaster. So now they’re floating the idea of potentially cutting the feed before shots are fired. I mean, give me a break. They’re trying to turn military justice into cheap reality TV cliffhangers because they finally looked down the barrel of domestic polling and saw that it was bleak.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, you know, the bar is really low on this. I was, uh, talking to the Reverend Michael Coren about this this morning briefly. You know, and I was saying, you know, jokingly, if you can make a joke of this, you know, I’m surprised they don’t have it as the Super Bowl halftime show. But, you know, when you really look at it from like 80,000 feet, uh, what does the fact that we’re even having a serious debate about broadcasting a firing squad on the open internet say about where political discourse is at in 2026?
Jon Liedtke: You’re surprised that the execution by firing squad isn’t happening at the Super Bowl? I’m genuinely surprised they’re not selling VIP lanyards and setting up the firing squad on the White House lawn. Oh, yikes. I mean, it says though, quite frankly, about all of this in political discourse right now is that Trump and his administration are really great at holding a laser pointer and shining it around, and the global media seems to be a cat aggressively chasing a red dot across the floor. I mean, Trump doesn’t care about the outcome of this broadcast. If it happens for him, great. If he pulls the plug, he’ll just pivot and blame some woke general or foreign government for ruining his ratings. This is 100% pure political circus designed to distract us from actual governance failures, from inflation not going down, from gas prices continuing to raise, from the war in the Middle East continuing to ravage on. So we all will sit back, and like I think I have said to you many times before, quite frankly, we’re all living in Donald Trump’s movie, and we’re just the background actors.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Hey, on a completely different topic, I’m, uh, working on the show yesterday afternoon, which I do every single day, and I took some gravel, and I had the CBC on. And, uh, Pierre Poilievre is down in, uh, Windsor-Detroit, and I hear this guy asking him a question, and I’m going, “That’s Jon Liedtke!” So you made—you made it to the CBC yesterday. Good going.
Jon Liedtke: Oh, well, thank you so much. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I, I rushed down there for his presser at the riverfront, and then I made sure that I was back sitting, waiting for the phone to ring for your segment.
Gene Valaitis: All right, my friend. Great take today. We’ll talk to you tomorrow on Friday.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke. Liedtke’s Got a Take. It’s CKTB News.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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