Daily Wire Host Wants to Bring Back Public Executions, Complains We ‘Don’t See Death Period Anymore’

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles offered an eyebrow-raising answer on his podcast this week to a question about whether or not the U.S. should bring back public executions – fully endorsing them.

During a Q&A session on The Michael Knowles Show, the host replied, “Certainly. Yeah, I think that that would do a lot to bring back the deterrent effect of capital punishment, certainly. But furthermore, it would be good because people just don’t see death period anymore. We used to see death.”

The Yale-educated, former actor continued, “I’m not saying we want more people to die, but we need to recognize that death does happen. We try to run away from death. We try to hide death, we hide aging. We pack ourselves full of cosmetics.”

“We pack ourselves full of all sorts of surgeries to pretend that we’re not aging. And then when people look like they’re about to die, we shove them off into special little centers or hospice and old age homes, and we try to just separate them when they do die. We don’t really do open casket wakes anymore,” he continued, adding:

We don’t do proper funerals anymore. We do these brief little celebrations of life. We burn up the body as quickly as possible. We ignore the fact that death has happened. Then sometime later, maybe you will have a celebration of life ceremony where you basically just gather with your friends and have dinner to try to process death. But it’s a death that you won’t look in the face.

And so we live our lives trying to put it out of our head. But death is very important. It’s one of the four final things death, judgment, heaven, and hell. You are living your life as a preparation to die, and you need to be prepared for your death. In the in the olden times, people would pray for a good death by which they meant death that they saw coming that they could prepare for. And it wasn’t sudden.

Today we people pray for a good death, meaning they don’t want to know what’s happening. They basically want a piano to fall on their head so that they’re just walking along one day with their frappuccino, having a lovely time thinking about, I don’t know, whatever they just saw on Instagram. And then it’s all over and they think they go to oblivion. They don’t think that the soul persists after natural death.

After the somewhat somber meditation on the importance of acknowledging death, Knowles returned to public executions, “And so our view of death is just so perverse now and we’re so separated from it that, yeah, public executions would also help us to have a little memento mori, of course. Next question.”

The clip of Knowles’s remarks went viral online and was first shared by Jason Campbell. 

Watch the full clip above.

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