Fiction Alert!
This story is fiction.
It does not depict any real person or actual event.
Graveyard Whistler’s Career Update and Latest Find
Graveyard Whistler has an updated report on his career path and his threat to become a lawyer. Plus he offers a political rant with a rebuttal, which was suggested to him by one of his readers.
Graveyard Whistler Here! Bet You Thought I Forgot about Y’all!
I finally did it. Took the plunge, and decided to take a job with a law firm. I know I’ve been quiet about my pursuit of legal studies, but that’s simply because I do love literary studies so much, and it does take a lot of my time.
But even as I pursued the PhD in lit, I was simultaneously working toward my JD, which I got, and then took a job at Spirit, Mission, and Frees Legal Firm, leaving the university position I originally started. I have not looked back; university teaching is for the birds, not for serious scholars.
Funny, I have been asked to join the University of South Field as an adjunct to teach a lit crit class at night; it would run 6:30 to 10 p.m. So far I have resisted the offer, but I am considering it.
My day job is fantastic; it doesn’t require a lot of homework, but still I do like to guard my time to keep for my own literary studies—am currently working on a book of sonnets. Yeah, I know. I didn’t use to consider myself a creative writer, but that has slowly changed, and I’ve taken up writing both fiction and poetry. Oh, well!
The thing is I spend my daytime doing legal briefs and simple legal tasks, like wills and contracts—stuff that doesn’t take a lot of time, and never interferes with my off time—no weekends, no evenings—what they used to call bankers hours 9 a.m. to 3 p. m.. And so you know how I spend my off time. So let’s get to it!
TDS Sufferer Spews Unhinged Rants
The following political engagement comes from a reader who alerted me to a Trump Derangement sufferer, who used his personal blog to excoriate the USA president. What he found interesting about the blog was that another blog had offered responses to the TDS sufferer.
Initially, the reader simply wanted my thoughts on the exchange, which I gladly gave him. But then it occurred to me that the rest of my audience might find this exchange interesting. If either the TDS sufferer or the respondent ever expresses displeasure with my using their content, I shall be obliged to take it down. I find it unlikely that should ever occur, but then with the internet, one never knows how far one’s reach might have become.
I probably ought to qualify the word “exchange”: it is not clear that the TDS sufferer was ever even aware of the the so-called “Corrective Response” offered by the respondent, so I have no idea if there really was an exchange: it is merely a rant plus a corrective.
Because I aim for anonymity for these individuals, I have not added any names or dates, associated with the blogs. I also have not corrected any grammatical errors or typos. So you get exactly what they wrote—warts and all!
Well, time for me to shut up and you to start reading! Enjoy!
I. TDS Sufferer Spews an Unhinged Rant
Republican Terrorism
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know what this is. Political terrorism is using fear as a weapon to get what you want politically, to bend people into submission. That’s exactly what the American fascist Republican regime is doing — not metaphorically, not “sort of,” but flat-out, at home and abroad. They are actively terrorizing people inside the United States in order to strangle democracy and replace it with their own permanent rule, and they are terrorizing most of the Western hemisphere and Europe to grab resources and power so their already grotesquely rich caste can suck up even more.
The people who own and run the Republican Party treat politics like their private amusement park. Their deepest pleasure is not money itself but the rush of superiority, of watching others squirm under their decisions. They convince themselves that their wealth and power prove they’re better than everyone else, which magically makes anything they do “justified” — no matter how depraved the rest of us think it is.
But there’s a problem for them: a lot of people don’t accept being used, abused, and discarded. Ordinary human beings resist; they try to build decent lives outside the fascist circus. That offends the would‑be masters, because if people can live meaningfully without them, the illusion of superiority cracks. So the authoritarian clique has to prove its “greatness” by crushing resistance — or even just crushing people who want to exist beyond their control. They tried to do this “politically,” by rigging laws, gerrymanders, courts, media ecosystems, all of that, turning their private hunger into a national “policy agenda.” But it hasn’t delivered fast enough or completely enough for their security, so they escalate. They move where authoritarian movements always move when tactics fail: open violence, state violence, the gun and the badge and the cage.
At this point, they are using official, armed force to create a permanent atmosphere of fear — raids, crackdowns, targeted cruelty — not as accidents, not as “glitches,” but as strategy. Terror is the point: make everyone scared enough that the very idea of resistance feels suicidal. They behave like thieves, rapists, and murderers with legal cover — the worst impulses of humanity, wrapped in a flag and sold as “law and order.”
And no, this is not some shocking new aberration. American elites and the American state have done versions of this over and over, from slavery and genocide to strike‑breaking and coups and dirty wars — violence as the default way to “solve” political and social “problems.” That habit, that reflex to reach for violence, is one of the toxic psychopathologies of American democracy: a democracy that loves to talk about freedom while using terror to keep actual freedom in a cage. The story you’re telling in this novel is not a twist; it’s an x‑ray. The plot doesn’t just thicken; it exposes the rot.
Which is why that passage from the Tao Te Ching hits so hard here. In Le Guin’s translation of Chapter 74, “The Lord of Slaughter,” the text asks: “When normal, decent people don’t fear death, / how can you use death to frighten them? / Even when they have a normal fear of death, / who of us dare take and kill the one who doesn’t? / When people are normal and decent and death-fearing, / there’s always an executioner. / To take the place of that executioner / is to take the place of the great carpenter. / People who cut the great carpenter’s wood / seldom get off with their hands unhurt.”
That is exactly what this authoritarian project is doing: trying to take the place of the executioner, trying to play god with life and death, trying to use terror and slaughter as a shortcut to permanent power. And like every regime that puts itself above all law, all decency, all limits, it is sawing away at the world and at itself at the same time; the only real question is how much damage it does to everyone else before its own hands are finally shredded.
Corrective Response
The rant badly overreaches, confuses categories, and treats contested political claims as settled fact; it reads more like polemic than analysis and collapses important distinctions that matter if words like “terrorism” and “fascism” are to mean anything at all.
A more careful look at mainstream scholarship on terrorism, fascism, U.S. foreign policy, and even the Tao Te Ching shows how strained, selective, and self‑confirming its argument really is.
“Political terrorism” and fear
Most contemporary definitions of terrorism emphasize deliberate attacks on noncombatants by non‑state actors or clandestine agents, carried out to intimidate a population or compel a government.
Even when definitions are broadened to include “state terrorism,” they still distinguish between brutal or unjust policies, on the one hand, and systematic use of indiscriminate violence against civilians as the primary instrument of rule, on the other.
Calling all domestic law‑enforcement, border enforcement, or even harsh partisan rhetoric “terrorism” erases those distinctions and makes the term so elastic that it loses analytic value.
Fascism, authoritarianism, and the GOP
There is an active scholarly debate about whether Trump, MAGA, or the Republican Party should be labeled “fascist,” with serious analysts coming to different conclusions or using more cautious terms like “authoritarian,” “illiberal,” or “proto‑fascist.”
Even critics who see disturbing parallels to interwar fascism normally stop short of declaring the entire party a fully realized fascist regime, precisely because the United States still has competitive elections, institutional checks, divided government, and significant internal dissent within the GOP itself.
Treating “Republican = fascist terrorist” as an axiom ignores both this scholarly disagreement and the complex reality that large parties contain factions, conflicts, and moderating constraints.
Foreign policy and resource “terror”
U.S. foreign policy is absolutely entangled in competition over strategic natural resources, from oil to rare earths, and policymakers openly frame access to these resources as a national security concern. But analyses of U.S. strategy emphasize a mix of diplomacy, trade agreements, supply‑chain diversification, and alliance‑building, rather than some monolithic project of “terrorizing” entire continents to enrich a tiny domestic caste.
Washington’s approach is often criticized as self‑interested, sometimes destabilizing, and shaped by corporate influence, yet it is also contested, constrained, and frequently reframed in terms of “resilience,” “partnerships,” and “sustainability,” not openly embraced as violent extraction for pleasure.
Misusing Tao Te Ching 74
The ranter’s first mistake here is the use of the Le Guin personally interpreted version of the sacred text Tao Te Ching, instead Gia -Fu Feng and Jane English’s translation which remains faithful to Lao Tsu’s writings.
Chapter 74 of the Tao Te Ching issues warning against rulers who govern through harsh punishments and death, and against arrogantly usurping the role of the ultimate “executioner” or cosmic order (Tao, Ultimate Reality, or God).
Commentators across traditions underscore that the text criticizes bloodthirsty punishment and urges rulers toward restraint and humility, not toward projecting contemporary partisan enemies onto its lines or canonizing a specific American party as the unique embodiment of “the executioner.”
Instrumentalizing the passage as proof that one modern faction is “the Lord of Slaughter” is a rhetorical move, not a responsible interpretation of Taoist political thought.
Pathologizing democracy vs. analyzing it
Finally, serious work on the “psychopathology of power” and the decline of democracy in the United States looks at structural incentives, elite capture, polarization, media ecosystems, and economic inequality across the entire political system, not just one party. Researchers stress feedback loops between fear, status anxiety, and institutional decay, and they typically treat both major parties and multiple social forces as implicated to varying degrees.
Reducing all of this to “Republicans are thieves, rapists, and murderers who uniquely embody American democracy’s psychopathology” is not “speaking hard truths”; it is collapsing a complex, multi‑causal crisis into a single demonized out‑group, which is exactly the kind of polarization that those scholars warn can itself accelerate democratic backsliding.
II. TDS Sufferer Spews Another Unhinged Rant
I remember Viola Liuzzo getting gunned down back in 1965, right after she joined the Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights. Cruising through the dark Alabama countryside, she got ambushed by Klan thugs who pulled up alongside her car and blasted her dead. Fast-forward to now: the shooter’s some federal ICE agent (today’s equivalent of the KKK) pulling the trigger in broad daylight on a city street, with locals protesting all around, then getting hustled off by his agency like they’re shielding a hero instead of covering for a cold-blooded killer.
Corrective Response
The attempt to equate Renée Nicole Macklin Good’s death at the hands of ICE Deportation Officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, with Viola Liuzzo’s 1965 assassination by the Ku Klux Klan is not just intellectually dishonest—it’s a nauseating perversion of history that defiles a civil rights activist’s sacrifice to launder aggression as victimhood. This isn’t moral equivalence; it’s moral bankruptcy, and the facts inter it without mercy.
Viola Liuzzo, a courageous 39-year-old volunteer from Michigan, was executed on March 25, 1965, by four Klan murderers—Collie Leroy Wilkins, William Oscar Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe—on a desolate Alabama highway post-Selma march.
These cowards shadowed her car in darkness and riddled it with shotgun and pistol fire at close range, slaughtering her before black passengers she was ferrying to safety. It was deliberate racial terrorism to terrorize the Voting Rights crusade into oblivion, unprovoked by any threat from an unarmed advocate of justice. Federal trials convicted the killers and served prison sentences, while her martyrdom accelerated the Voting Rights Act. Pure evil met pure heroism.
Renée Nicole Macklin Good’s encounter? Public bodycam, dashcam, and witness accounts show her accelerating her Honda Pilot directly at Officer Jonathan Ross during a confrontation because of her illegally parked vehicle in Minneapolis. Ross fired four shots through her windshield as she floored it toward him—textbook response to an imminent vehicular homicide threat.
This act was not mere passive protest amid a cheering crowd; it was her choice to escalate a traffic stop into a deadly assault on a federal officer in broad daylight. Ross went on standard administrative leave; the incident’s under transparent DOJ/FBI review with all footage released—no shadowy Klan-style extraction or agency whitewash.
Why This Analogy Is Repulsive Rot
Every pillar of the comparison is pulverized:
- Actors: Klansmen were rogue supremacist killers targeting racial justice; Ross was a duty-bound officer neutralizing a driver trying to crush him. Badges enforce law; hoods annihilate it—conflating them is fascist-baiting drivel.
- Victimhood: Liuzzo offered no violence, only solidarity. Good initiated lethal force by weaponizing her SUV—aggressor, not martyr.
- Setting: Nocturnal Klan cowardice vs. documented daytime confrontation with witnesses affirming her attack, not a “protesting” entourage mourning a righteous activist.
- Purpose: KKK engineered fear to sustain segregation. ICE upholds borders; Ross preserved his life and public safety per protocol.
- Aftermath: Killers faced justice; Ross faces scrutiny. No “defense of a killer”—just accountability applied.
This isn’t savvy parallelism—it’s a sniveling, ahistorical smear deploying Liuzzo’s blood to rehabilitate a felon’s fatal miscalculation while demonizing lawful defense.
Liuzzo confronted monsters for freedom; this rant is weaponizing her ghost to coddle chaos and indict order. It’s not critique—it’s contemptible propaganda that cheapens true atrocity and betrays any claim to seriousness.
III. TDS Sufferer Spews Another Unhinged Rant
All right, enough. Seriously—enough.
Rise up, all you daughters and sons of liberty, because at this point what do we actually have left to lose? Just the dead weight: the obscenely rich techbros cosplaying as geniuses, the oil barons setting the planet on fire, the political grifters running nonstop scams, the fake prophets selling salvation by subscription, and the sexist, racist, white-male-supremacist thugs who think cruelty is a governing philosophy.
This is the moment. The clock’s run out. The bat signal is up. Springsteen. Rachel. Bernie rallying tonight in New Jersey. If that combination doesn’t wake people up, I honestly don’t know what will—but still, here we are. (And yes, there will be more.)
Even Rick Wilson—yes, that Rick Wilson, conservative, ex-Republican, longtime insider—is saying it out loud now. When he’s ringing the alarm bell, maybe people should stop pretending everything’s fine.
And zooming out for a second: I’ve been saying this to my Canadian-American friend C, who lives in Canada. From where she sits, it’s painfully clear. Canada has Carney—steady, competent, sane, actually adult. Responsible, smart, clear-headed. Meanwhile, Trump’s mind has very obviously left the building. It’s a national scandal that Republicans are still propping him up. Some of them are terrified of his grip on their base; most of them just find him useful—as the pointy end of their fascist, authoritarian spear.
This should be a golden opportunity for Democrats to step up with real, visionary leadership on everything—climate, democracy, inequality, rule of law. But the party’s Old Guard just doesn’t have it. They’re exhausted, timid, stuck in a political era that no longer exists. The good news? A new generation is emerging—plus Bernie, because of course—and there’s a real chance they could force their way into the spotlight as the election season kicks off right now.
And then there’s what C wrote back, which honestly says it all. She can’t even settle her nerves watching Trump actively dismantle the U.S. She feels torn between the two countries—watching Canada become a genuine beacon of hope while the United States slides openly toward fascism. She was born in Minneapolis. Her father too. She still has family there. One of her second cousins lives just a couple blocks from Renee Good—and his 16-year-old daughter just watched a Native or Hispanic woman beaten and dragged into a van.
That’s the reality. That’s the country Trump and his gang are building. Monsters, full stop. And while she sees all the good Carney is doing, she knows—because how could she not?—that every step Canada takes toward sanity and justice only throws the U.S.’s collapse into sharper, more damning relief.
This is where we are. Anyone still pretending otherwise is either lying—or willfully blind.
Corrective Response
Trump Is Not a Fascist—He’s a Disruptive Politician in a Constrained System
Much of the contemporary rhetoric about Donald Trump relies on apocalyptic language rather than evidence. Terms like fascism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship are invoked freely, yet the factual record does not support them.
Trump governed for four years within a constitutional system that consistently limited him. Elections occurred on schedule. Courts—including those staffed by his own appointees—repeatedly ruled against him. Congress blocked major initiatives. States openly defied federal policy without consequence. Media criticism intensified rather than diminished. These are not the hallmarks of fascism; they are signs of a functioning, adversarial democracy.
Trump’s confrontations with institutions are often cited as proof of authoritarian intent, but institutional conflict is not authoritarianism. Publicly disputing the media, the courts, or the bureaucracy—however aggressively—is protected speech. No opposition parties were banned, no media outlets shut down, no courts dissolved. The system held because it was designed to.
Republican support for Trump is frequently described as fear or moral collapse. A more straightforward explanation is electoral alignment. Trump delivered outcomes many Republican voters wanted: conservative judicial appointments, deregulation, energy expansion, border enforcement, and skepticism toward elite consensus. Support based on policy agreement is political reality, not coercion.
Trump’s communication style is unconventional, assertive, and narrative-driven. He presents events in self-favoring terms and challenges competing accounts aggressively. Supporters view this not as dishonesty but as resistance to institutions they perceive as biased or hostile. Disliking the style does not transform it into evidence of mental incapacity or authoritarian rule.
Comparisons to foreign leaders often rely on idealization rather than analysis. Countries like Canada face serious internal challenges of their own, and calmer rhetoric does not necessarily translate into superior outcomes. Prior to COVID, U.S. economic growth, employment, and energy production compared favorably with peer nations.
Finally, anecdotal claims of isolated violence or misconduct—especially when unverified—cannot responsibly be laid at the feet of a president. Crime and law enforcement outcomes are overwhelmingly shaped by state and local governance and occur under every administration.
Trump is not a dictator, nor did he dismantle American democracy. He is a disruptive political figure operating within—and often colliding with—institutions that constrain him. Criticism of his policies or tone is legitimate. Depicting him as a fascist threat to democracy is not supported by the factual record and ultimately weakens serious political debate.
IV. TDS Sufferer Spews Another Unhinged Rant
Ha! Ha! Take off their masks and the whole tough-guy act falls apart. Suddenly they’re not these larger-than-life outlaw heroes anymore, not these badass desperadoes swaggering around like the rules don’t apply to them. Without the masks, they’re just guys who want to look powerful while doing things regular, open-faced, law-abiding people would never get away with.
Once you stop letting them hide, it becomes obvious what’s really going on: these are outsiders rolling into towns they don’t belong to, claiming they’re here to bring “justice” or “order,” when what they’re actually doing is hurting local people. And the moment you see that clearly, they’re no longer above anything. They’re subject to the same community laws, the same basic humane, democratic standards everyone else is supposed to live by.
Look at how this works now. The modern battlefield look is all about gear—body armor, helmets, masks. The mask is the final piece of the costume. Cloth pulled up over the face so you only see the eyes, which stop being human and turn into weapons. Add sunglasses, goggles, maybe even a gas mask, and suddenly they’re sealed off from the world. Untouchable. Immune. Able to move anywhere, do anything, even gas people without worrying about breathing it themselves.
But take the mask away and the illusion cracks. That blurry line between “law enforcement” and “soldier following orders” disappears. You see them for what they are: agents of an agency, playing soldier, acting like thugs and goons while telling themselves they’re enforcing some higher federal law that magically excuses everything.
This all fits perfectly with the Miller–Hegseth, white-male-supremacist fantasy of what the American military is supposed to be. In that story, the ideal soldier is a huge, towering man. And the purest way he proves his manhood? By overpowering and humiliating a woman who’s stepped out of line, forcing her back into her “place.”
The mask is key to that fantasy. It turns him into an alpha-male warrior villain, someone who believes in this fake “law of the jungle” where women don’t get autonomy and dominance equals righteousness. And watching these guys drag a woman out of her car, swarm her, pile on—it’s deeply disturbing. It hits something primal. It violates one of our most basic ideas about human relationships. Anyone who’s seen footage like that knows exactly how sickening it is.
So yeah—take the mask off. Pop the bubble of ego and mythology. Without the costume, without the fantasy, he’s not some fearsome warrior at all. He’s just your average dick.
Corrective Response
The Fantasy of the Mask—and the Politics of Reduction
There is something revealing—if not especially serious—about the claim that unmasking a law enforcement officer will puncture his authority and reveal “just your average dick.” It tells us far more about the speaker’s fantasies than about policing, power, or the law.
The masked officer is not a medieval knight, an alpha-male avatar, or a roaming outlaw living beyond law and morality. He is an employee operating under written authority, body cameras, supervisors, attorneys, judges, and after-action review.
The mask does not confer mystique or invulnerability; it reduces risk—of chemical exposure, airborne hazards, and retaliation in a digital age where officers’ families are routinely targeted. Treating protective gear as symbolic tyranny is a category error bordering on costume drama.
The insistence that anonymity equals lawlessness is similarly unserious. Authority in a democracy does not reside in facial visibility but in legal mandate. Judges wear robes. Jurors are anonymous. Witnesses are protected. Federal agents routinely obscure identities during sensitive operations. None of this suspends accountability. The fantasy that “unmasking” restores justice confuses symbolism with governance.
What truly collapses under scrutiny is the psychosexual melodrama layered onto the argument. The image of officers as “towering men” seeking erotic domination of women is not analysis; it is projection.
Modern law enforcement includes women in combat roles, female commanders, and mixed-gender teams operating under strict use-of-force protocols. Reducing institutional authority to a rape fantasy may feel transgressive, but it is analytically empty and ethically reckless.
The final flourish—reducing a masked officer to “just your average dick”—is not only crude but incoherent, but it also claims to oppose dehumanization while practicing it enthusiastically. It condemns power while imagining power as nothing more than male genital insecurity. It pretends to puncture conceit while indulging in its own: the conceit that contempt is insight.
In reality, removing a mask does not dissolve authority, expose villainy, or restore moral clarity. It merely satisfies a desire to humiliate—an impulse indistinguishable from the one being condemned. Democratic accountability is not achieved through insult, symbolic stripping, or adolescent reductionism. It is achieved through law, evidence, procedure, and restraint.
If the argument requires turning public servants into cartoon villains and ending with locker-room sneer, the argument has already lost. What’s left is not a defense of liberty, but a tantrum dressed up as theory.
Afterword from Graveyard Whistler
Interestingly, this mocking criticism continues. I just picked out four of the most telling at this point. I might add others, if they strike my fancy just right.
Until later . . .
Literarily yours,
Belmonte Segwic
aka Graveyard Whistler
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