The Death Wish and the Birth of a Movement

When America Became Mean AF.

In the cold dawn of January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore faced the firing squad at the Utah State Prison. His last words — "Let's do it" — would echo far beyond the cinderblock walls that contained him. Gilmore’s singular request to be executed, the first carried out in the United States after a ten-year moratorium on the death penalty, marked more than just the end of a life. It punctuated the beginning of something larger: a breach in the collective fear of punishment that had long undergirded the American social contract.

Gary Gilmore's execution was not televised, but its broadcast was considered at the time, that said it attracted significant media attention, with many journalists present to report on the event. His case became widely known due to the public interest in the death penalty and the circumstances surrounding his execution. He was both hero and villain all rolled in one. A hero to those who were against capital punishment and he would be villainized by those who supported execution.

Gilmore’s defiant march toward death upended the longstanding assumption that the state’s ultimate power — the power to kill — could deter violence. If the threat of death could no longer cow even a petty criminal born of American despair, what, then, could it possibly mean to the hardened foot soldiers of crime and rebellion? Gilmore's death wish, romanticized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, cracked open the facade of American justice at precisely the moment another American myth was breaking apart.

When America Got Mean

Only three years earlier, Richard Nixon resigned under the weight of Watergate, the scandal that metastasized from a bungled break-in into a roiling crisis of governance. The tapes, the lies, the smug invincibility — Nixon’s downfall severed the last thread of faith in American institutions for a generation raised on post-war idealism. The most powerful man in the world had been a common crook, and rather than face his punishment, he was pardoned by his unelected successor. For many, this was the moment the game was revealed: laws were for the little people, and justice was a performance played out for those naive enough to still believe.

If fear of punishment could no longer hold the criminal class in check, and if the government itself was irredeemably corrupt, what was left to bind the American experiment together? Into this breach stepped two movements — the John Birch Society and the nascent Religious Right — long relegated to the margins of American life. Their rise was no coincidence. They found fertile ground in the twin disillusionments of Gilmore and Nixon. The Birchers, with their feverish anti-communism and conspiratorial worldview, had been dismissed as cranks since the 1950s. The Religious Right, still embryonic in the mid-70s, found its earliest footholds not in abortion politics but in the defense of segregated schools under the banner of religious freedom.

Both movements offered a simple, punishing answer to the chaos: the system was corrupt because it had turned away from God and the Constitution. Both insisted that the only way to restore order was through a new moral order — not imposed by government, but by the righteous. What had once been paranoid whispers on the fringes became organizing principles. The path from Gary Gilmore's stoic death to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 on through to Trump’s reign ran through this fever dream — a current of punishment, little redemption, and the desire to burn the whole thing down in order to rebuild it in a Christian manner.

The modern conservative movement was not born in triumph, but in the shared conviction that something essential had been lost. It promised not only to restore power to these self-righteous Christofascists but to wield that power with the fury of the newly disillusioned. This was not the sunny optimism of Reagan’s “Morning in America” so much as the dark, Calvinist certainty that suffering was the only route to salvation.

The irony is that Jesus didn’t come to rule on earth for the self-righteous. I am not a biblical scholar, so a little research shows that Jesus apparently came for the poor. Jesus said, “I have not come to call the self-righteous John Birchers, but for the sinners and bad people to offer repentance.” I’m paraphrasing here, lol.

So the religious extremists got it wrong according to their upside-down bible. Today we see on full display the ultimate in self-righteousness and dangerous asshattery sitting on a throne.

Gary Gilmore went to his death without flinching, a man convinced that punishment could purge his soul. The movement that followed him, though it rarely acknowledged its debt, carried that same unblinking zeal — not to be spared from punishment, but to impose it, again and again, on the guilty and the damned. The fear of punishment had broken. In its place rose something far more dangerous: the certainty that punishment itself was righteousness.

So when someone asks “How the fuck we got here?” you can ring up my mind chime and look goddamn brilliant.

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