These fucking ghouls want to execute a man on live television (The Guardian):

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.

Hasan's crime was deplorable, but a livestreamed execution by firing squad isn't about justice; it's a sadistic carnival act that launders the end of a human life into a hollow promotional stunt for a fascist regime.

And what are we all supposed to do about this? Vote? Voting got us here.¹

Public sadism should be beneath us, but apparently that’s not the world we live in any more.

One of the most frustrating things about the hellscape is how much violence is happening from people and places that seem beyond my reach. I can't fire Pete Hegseth any more than I can impeach Donald Trump, and our representatives in Congress seem to be doing an awful lot of sitting on their hands (and I can't fire them, either). Our problems stopped being about Republican vs. Democrat long ago; now it's bald-faced class war, and since I'm not stupid-rich with major corporate backers, I don't even exist for the people in power. How do I hold to account someone who doesn't even acknowledge me?

Well, it turns out refusal is a type of praxis. They’re planning to do this thing on December 3rd at 1pm, and I have no doubt they’re hoping to see every social media platform flooded with images and videos. The way I see it, we’ve got two options:

1. Withdraw our attention. A public execution doesn’t do much for the regime if the public simply refuses to show up to witness it. Tell your people and make sure they know to log off and touch grass on December 3rd. Better yet, plan an outing with them.

2. Flood the zone. For those of us who are terminally online: imagine if every hashtag and keyword for this horror got flooded by—just spitballing here—memes clowning on Hegseth and Trump, to the point of making the execution imagery incredibly difficult to even find. You can think of it as adversarial direct action, or you can think of it as protecting the unaware from stumbling onto traumatic footage. Or… why not both?

What I love about art is that nobody can actually stop it. It’s too innate to the human condition, and everyone can make it. Sure, we could report every post with execution imagery to get them taken down—and those of us who are online that day absolutely should do that—but the platforms that carry water for the regime can just as easily ignore those reports.

What they can’t do is stop all of us from flooding the zone with art.

And speaking of art: Sometimes the only way to deal with the horror is to write through your feelings, and author Ian Patterson has done that eloquently in The Execution Will Be Televised:

Because what kind of country do you have to be

To cover up state funded murder of innocents in the streets

Involvement in genocide you try to delete

And glorify the death of the guilty on TV.

Ian’s poem, I think, grows from the same deep rage and betrayal I felt when this execution was announced, but he approaches it from an artistic angle, painting a swift and effective pastiche of the banality of this evil. (Read the whole thing here.)

I like Ian’s ability to do this so much that Shiraki Press—of which I’m a co-founder—recently published his book Fruits of Our Labor, a provocative near-future sci-fi novel exploring the social and political impact of human parthenogenic birth. He also has a terrific sci-fi trilogy about the commodified outsourcing of illness, The Narrator Cycle—the first book of which won the Colorado Book Award—and all kinds of other short-form and serial stuff on his Substack, They Don’t All Have to Be Good.

In the spirit of art, my question to you this week, dear reader, is this: show us your art. Whatever the medium, whatever the subject, let’s see it and celebrate it.

P.S. Bonus points for memes clowning on Hegseth and Trump. We gotta start building up that war chest before December 3rd!