Pip: Welcome to The Babblings of JT — where the contradictions in American public life occasionally become so vivid they start writing the script themselves.
Mara: JT Santana has one piece this episode, and it covers a collision that’s hard to look away from: book bans, a proposed execution livestream, and what the gap between those two things says about where we are as a country. Let’s start with the contradiction itself.
We Ban the Memoir, Consider Broadcasting the Execution
Pip: The frame here is a moral whiplash so severe it barely needs commentary. School districts across the country have spent years removing Maya Angelou’s memoir from library shelves — on the grounds that students need protection from its depictions of trauma and sexual violence. Then the Pentagon announced plans to livestream a firing-squad execution.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: “public institutions have repeatedly decided that students should not have access to the memoir through their schools.” In Utah, Angelou’s estate joined a federal lawsuit after the book was pulled from the Davis and Granite school districts. In Iowa, the Council Bluffs Community School District removed 59 titles under Senate File 496 — Angelou’s memoir among them.
Pip: So the argument isn’t that the book became illegal — it’s the narrower, more damning one: schools decided, repeatedly, that students shouldn’t encounter it through their own libraries.
Mara: And on the execution side, this isn’t a fringe proposal. The Pentagon announced it. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promoted it. The Army scheduled Nidal Hasan’s execution for December third. Trump approved the sentence and spoke publicly about the proposed broadcast, though he gave contradictory answers about whether it was settled.
Pip: Army regulations already state no one under 18 may witness an execution. Legal experts have noted the obvious tension with a public livestream.
Mara: The post raises that directly — a seventeen-year-old barred from the execution chamber, potentially one shared link away from the footage on a laptop. And the distribution questions remain genuinely unresolved: several major platforms had not clarified their policies as of mid-October.
Pip: There’s also the Christa Pike case sitting right beside this. Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital on September 30. Pike kept breathing. The state failed to carry out the execution, emergency response was delayed by confusion, and days later the national conversation shifted to whether the next execution should be livestreamed.
Mara: The post doesn’t let the transparency argument stand unchallenged either. Hegseth’s own reported justification — that people should watch so they see serious acts bring serious consequences — is a message-delivery rationale, not an accountability one. The post draws a hard line: “Transparency does not require turning death into programming.”
Pip: And then there are the victims’ families. Former Army sergeant Alonzo Lunsford, shot seven times during the attack, wants to face Hasan at the execution — and still opposes a public broadcast. Keely Vanacker, daughter of victim Michael Grant Cahill, has said it converts the event into entertainment rather than centering the people Hasan killed.
Mara: The post names all thirteen victims by name. That’s a deliberate choice — the argument being that a livestream risks making Hasan the central figure on December 3 and pushing the dead to the background.
Pip: The book-ban hypocrisy is where the piece lands hardest. If context can’t rescue a challenged novel, civic transparency can’t sanitize gunfire. The standard either applies or it doesn’t.
Mara: And the post asks what lesson the inconsistency actually teaches — not in a classroom, but institutionally. Which violence causes outrage, which receives applause, which stories vanish from shelves, which images officials want broadcast.
Pip: One develops moral reasoning. The other risks satisfying morbid curiosity. The post is clear about which is which — and clear that we should be too.
Mara: The question the post ends on isn’t rhetorical anymore: what kind of country are we choosing to be?
Pip: When survivors of a mass shooting have to remind the government that execution shouldn’t become entertainment, that’s the answer already starting to form.
https://jtwb768.com/2026/10/13/we-ban-maya-angelou-from-school-libraries-then-consider-livestreaming-a-firing-squad-execution-what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-america/
