Fiction Alert!
This story is fiction.
It does not depict any real person or actual event.
Graveyard Whistler’s Latest Find: “Nutty Professor Spews Unhinged Rants”
Rummaging through the Politics Section of the Stone Gulch Lit treasure trove, Graveyard Whistler has found a new story that struck his fancy. Also he has an updated report on his career path and his threat to become a lawyer.
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.
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!
Nutty Professor Spews Unhinged Rants
The following features a former student who is refuting with acerbic glee it seems the political rantings of one of his former professors. Apparently, the prof was a lit prof, and the student a lit student, pursuing a PhD in American and World Literature at a large mid-western university. The professor and student had an amicable relationship, until the student had finished his doctorate and started to publish.
It seems that the prof became madly jealous and began to harass his former student. I don’t have all the details, but it appears to have happened all online. The student was shocked to receive messages from the prof filled with nasty criticism of his publications; he published poems, short literary fiction, and critical essays focusing on many modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. The prof, it seems, had had many of his works rejected by publishers in favor of the student’s.
Apparently, the student got fed up with the many unwelcome exchanges, and when the prof started his personal blog, the student began writing acerbic critiques of the prof’s rants.
There is no information about what ultimately happened; it is not clear that the prof ever became aware of the student’s own personal blog, wherein the student offered not only clear, reasonable refutations, but he did so with great harshness. The title of the student’s blog is quite revealing: “Nutty Professor Spews Unhinged Rants.”
In order to maintain anonymity, 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—worts and all!
Well, time for me to shut up and you to start reading! Enjoy!
I. Nutty Professor Spews Unhinged Rants
American Terrorist Regime
Political Terrorism is the use of fear to achieve political ends.
That’s what America’s fascist authoritarian* Republican regime is doing, at home and abroad. It is terrorizing American citizens and other residents, for the purpose of replacing democracy with its own rule, and it is terrorizing everyone else in the Western hemisphere and Europe (outside Russia) for the purpose of gaining control of resources that it wants to use to make its superfluously wealthy members more wealthy.
The owners and leaders of the Republican Party are using politics as a means toward the purpose of their own pleasure. Their highest pleasure is their sense of superiority, which they believe justifies what everyone else considers unjust, their use and abuse everyone else.
Not everybody will agree to being used and abused. In order to actualize their claim to superiority, the fascist authoritarian few must prove it by subduing everyone who resists (or simply tries to live a good life apart from the political). They have tried to subjugate by means of politics, thus making their personal goal political. That attempt has failed (or at least not succeeded fast enough for their satisfaction or completely enough for their security). So they must achieve their political goal by means of violence. At this point they are using official, armed violence to achieve the violent state of widespread fear.
Thieves, rapists, and murderers, they are the worst of the worst.
This is not surprising, since it has been done many times in American history by the American government and ruling elite.
Indeed “propensity to violence” as a means for removing perceived problems is one of the negative “psychopathologies of American democracy” that are the subject of this novel. The plot thickens.
And from this morning’s Tao Te Ching (74 “The Lord of Slaughter”): “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.”**
*I take it that by the mid-‘30s the political goal of the Republican Party, in both its “conservative” and “liberal” wings, was to roll back FDR’s achievements and re-establish a fascist America, but keep democracy (although dominated by pro-fascist Rs). Probably this was even true of early “movement Conservatism,” beginning with Goldwater. But after the LBJ achievements, the Rs increasingly eliminated their liberals, and then increasingly became a fascist (American-style), authoritarian, anti-democratic party. /** trans. Ursula K. Le Guin, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way (Shambhala, 2009/2019).
Former Student of the Nutty Professor Responds (The student’s title here was simply “My Response”)
Labeling the entire contemporary Republican Party an “American terrorist regime” is a rhetorical sugar high, not a factual description of U.S. politics, and it collapses under basic legal, empirical, and historical scrutiny.
1. What Terrorism Actually Means Under U.S. law, “international terrorism” and “domestic terrorism” require violent acts (or acts dangerous to human life) that violate criminal law, intended to intimidate or coerce populations or governments.
That is, terrorism is not “politics you dislike,” it is criminal violence or threat of violence; you do not become a terrorist by passing tax cuts or appointing judges any more than you become an arsonist by turning up the thermostat.
2. Is the U.S. a Fascist Terror State? Freedom House’s 2025 “Freedom in the World” report still rates the United States as “Free,” with a Global Freedom Score of 84/100, not as an authoritarian, terror-based regime.
Internet freedom in the U.S. is likewise scored as “Free” with an Internet Freedom Score of 73/100, which is a strange profile for a supposed “fascist authoritarian” state terrorizing its population into submission.
3. Violence and “Official Armed Terror” The statutory definition of terrorism hinges on violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate the criminal law; regular law enforcement, however flawed, operating under constitutional review does not meet that standard.
Equating all uses of “official, armed force” (police, military, etc.) with terrorism turns the term into a verbal fog machine, where counter-terror operations and literal jihadist bombings end up linguistically indistinguishable from a policy you saw on C‑SPAN.
4. “Thieves, rapists, murderers”: accusation inflation Calling a whole party’s “owners and leaders” “thieves, rapists, and murderers” is not an argument; it is an incantation.
In a system still classified as “Free,” with competitive elections and alternation in power, those leaders win and lose offices through ballots and court challenges, not through the party-wide crime sprees that this rant casually asserts as if citing a police blotter.
5. History, pathology, and the Tao Te Ching cameo The author’s own “psychopathologies of American democracy” frame admits that a propensity to violence has recurred across American history and across institutions, not just within one modern party, undercutting the claim that a uniquely Republican “terrorist regime” has newly replaced democracy.
Quoting the Tao Te Ching about the “Lord of Slaughter” to describe contemporary Republicans does not transform a partisan jeremiad into political science; it just means a classic text has been dragooned into service as a very cultured bumper sticker.
II. Nutty Professor Spews Another Unhinged Rant
I remember when Viola Liuzzo was killed, after she participated in the Selma-Montgomery march for civil rights. As she drove in the night in the countryside, klansmen drove up beside her car and shot her. Today the shooter, analogous to the klansman, was a federal agent, who killed in broad daylight on a city street, surrounded by protesting local residents, and then was whisked away, in the agency’s defense of a killer.
Former Student of the Nutty Professor Responds (The student’s title here was simply “My Response”)
1. “I remember when Viola Liuzzo was killed…”
This opening isn’t context; it’s credential signaling. The memory is invoked not to illuminate history, but to launder authority—I was there, therefore I’m right. Unfortunately, remembrance is not argument, and nostalgia is not evidence. History is being summoned as a mood, not analyzed as fact.
2. “After she participated in the Selma–Montgomery march…”
This is moral inflation. By front-loading Liuzzo’s virtue, the writer attempts to pre-sanctify the comparison that follows. It’s a classic rhetorical trick: elevate one side to sainthood so the other can be damned by proximity, regardless of relevance.
3. “Klansmen drove up beside her car and shot her.”
Here, the facts are accurate—and cynically weaponized. The KKK were private actors, motivated by explicit racial ideology, committing an illegal political assassination. These details matter enormously… which is precisely why the writer will now ignore them.
4. “Today the shooter, analogous to the klansman, was a federal agent…”
This is where the argument collapses outright. “Analogous” is doing fraudulent labor here. A federal agent is, by definition, a state actor bound by law, policy, oversight, and post-incident investigation. A Klansman is none of those things. The analogy isn’t strained; it’s fraudulent. Calling it an analogy doesn’t make it one.
5. “Killed in broad daylight on a city street…”
This is cinematic filler, not reasoning. Daylight is morally irrelevant. Geography is morally irrelevant. The sun does not confer guilt, and urban settings do not transform force into murder. These details exist solely to inflame, not to explain.
6. “Surrounded by protesting local residents…”
Crowds are introduced as moral witnesses, as if proximity equals insight. This assumes—without argument—that protesters are omniscient, impartial, and fully informed in real time. It’s populism masquerading as ethics: the crowd felt something, therefore the facts are settled.
7. “Whisked away, in the agency’s defense of a killer.”
This is the rhetorical tell. “Whisked away” replaces “removed from the scene,” because neutral language won’t sustain the outrage. “Defense of a killer” replaces “due process,” because legal reality is inconvenient. This is not reporting—it’s verdict laundering.
Final assessment:
This isn’t analysis. It’s historical vandalism. The writer pillages a real atrocity, strips it of its specific causes, actors, and meaning, and repurposes it as a blunt emotional shortcut to a predetermined conclusion. Viola Liuzzo becomes not a person, but a prop.
The KKK becomes not a specific evil, but a free-floating insult. And the reader is invited not to think, but to react on cue.
Nothing here advances justice. Nothing clarifies truth. It is moral cosplay for people who confuse intensity with insight and analogy with accusation.
Cold verdict: emotionally indulgent, intellectually unserious, and historically abusive.Final assessment:
This isn’t analysis. It’s historical vandalism. The writer pillages a real atrocity, strips it of its specific causes, actors, and meaning, and repurposes it as a blunt emotional shortcut to a predetermined conclusion. Viola Liuzzo becomes not a person, but a prop.
The KKK becomes not a specific evil, but a free-floating insult. And the reader is invited not to think, but to react on cue.
Nothing here advances justice. Nothing clarifies truth. It is moral cosplay for people who confuse intensity with insight and analogy with accusation.
Cold verdict: emotionally indulgent, intellectually unserious, and historically abusive.
III. Nutty Professor Spews Another Unhinged Rant
Rise Up, Ye Daughters and Sons of Liberty!
We have nothing to lose but our superfluously wealthy, artificially intelligent, techbros, oil barons, political grifters, false prophets, and sexist/racist malewhite supremacist thugs!
The time has arrived. The call is going forth: Springsteen and Rachel. And Bernie will rally in New Jersey tonight.
If that won’t do it, I don’t know what will. But…
(there will be more)
Indeed: And so says conservative former-Republican, Rick Wilson.
[On a more general note, as I’ve opined to Canadian-American friend C, who lives in Canada: It’s great for tout le monde that we have Carney—responsible, smart, clear (and, bref, sain d’esprit). It’s totally obvious now that T’s mind has left the building—it’s a scandal that the Rs are keeping him in office; I think some are still scared of his influence with their constituents, but most still find him useful as a tip of their fascist authoritarian spear). It’s an opportunity for the Dems to grab visionary leadership on all major issues, but La Vielle Garde of the Party hasn’t got what it takes. But a new generation of leadership definitely is emerging (+ Bernie), and there’s a chance that they will assert themselves during the election campaign season (which is beginning now). Her reply: “I find it hard to settle down with trumps destruction of the US. I feel conflicted between the two countries. I watch Canada becoming a beacon of hope for the world and the United States becoming a fascist country. I was born in Minneapolis as was my father. I have some second cousins there, one who I am friends with on facebook. He lives only a couple blocks away from Renee Good and his daughter 16 just witnessed a native or hispanic woman being beaten and dragged into a van. Trump and his gang are monsters. I see all the good things Carney is doing but at the same time am aware that all of this good will hurt the US.”]
Former Student of the Nutty Professor Responds (The student’s title here was simply “My Response”)
The post reads like a group chat meltdown that someone mistook for a manifesto: high on indignation, empty on substance, and padded out with YouTube links like that’s how you overthrow a regime.
“Nothing to lose” and zero to prove
“We have nothing to lose but our superfluously wealthy, artificially intelligent, techbros, oil barons, political grifters…” is not a slogan; it is a tantrum with commas.
When you stuff “sexist/racist malewhite supremacist thugs” into the same sack, you are not doing analysis, you are just shaking your fist at the entire world and calling it politics.
Revolutions don’t run on playlists
The grand call to arms is…Springsteen, Rachel Maddow, and a Bernie rally in New Jersey.
That is not “Rise up, ye sons of liberty”; that is “I made you a vibes playlist and called it 1776 because it felt powerful.”
Rick Wilson, born‑again prophet of the apocalypse
Invoking Rick Wilson as moral authority is peak self‑parody: the man spent decades cashing checks as a Republican hit‑man and now monetizes confessing his sins to the MSNBC choir.
If your proof of fascism is a career political arsonist reassuring you that, yes, the fire is very bad this time, you are not resisting the grift—you are paying premium for it.
Facebook fascism and long‑distance courage
The quoted Canadian‑American friend “watching” the U.S. “becoming a fascist country” from a safe distance in Canada is less Resistance and more doom‑scrolling with a guilt complex.
A single incident—“a native or hispanic woman being beaten and dragged into a van”—is exaggerated through an outright lie and offered as proof of Trump‑era fascist collapse, as if criminals never resisted arrest before 2016 and as if shouting “monsters!” on Facebook were a serious response.
Monsters everywhere, arguments nowhere
Trump and “his gang” are declared “monsters,” the GOP is a fascist spear, techbros and oil barons are evil incarnate, and Democrats are maybe‑possibly‑hopefully the New Founders if they can just stop being “La Vieille Garde” long enough to do something inspirational on cable.
This is not an argument about institutions, law, or power; it is a Marvel script where every disliked group is a supervillain and the author is the unseen narrator who bravely RTs the Avengers.
The harsh truth: this “Rise up” rant is not a call to liberty; it is a comfort blanket for people who want the emotional rush of resistance without the work of reality, and it weaponizes words like “fascist” so casually that, by the end, the only thing actually terrorized is the English language.
IV. Nutty Professor Spews Another Unhinged Rant
Ha! Remove their masks and they are no longer able to pose as outlaws, larger-than life, free-living, badboy desperadoes wielding superpower outside the laws that apply to open-faced, law-abiding, peaceful townsfolk. When they are de-depersonalized outsiders who have invaded a town in order to harm local persons, under false pretenses of bringing justice and succor, they will be subject not only to local, community laws prohibiting attacks on persons, but to the universal, humane, democratic bases of the law. On today’s battlefield, the mark of the soldier, kitted up and geared to attempt invulnerability, is the face covering that completes the knight’s amor—cloth that covers the face except for the eyes (now penetrating weapons rather than “windows to the soul”), augmented by sun glasses, or goggles, or even the full gas mask (making them invulnerable to even their own gas attacks, so that they can go anywhere and do anything, ubiquitous in an environment that endangers animal life). Remove their masks and their ambiguity as law enforcement agents of government who are also soldiers obeying orders to violate the law in the name of the “higher,” federal law, and you expose them as agents of an agency, posing as soldiers, performing as thugs and goons. In the Miller-Hegseth, malewhite-supremacist fantasy of an American military, the iconic soldier is a towering man. He displays his manliness most purely when he is subduing and dominating a misbehaving girl or woman and putting her back “in her place.” The paramilitary mask is the mark of an indomitable Alpha-male warrior-villain who follows the self-styled “natural law of the jungle,” where there is no self-determination by a female. Indeed the sight of these monsters dragging a woman from her car and piling onto her (and surely Renee Good had seen such, in films by witnesses), is traumatizing to the soul, violating one of our deepest ideals of relationship. Unmask him, prick the bubble of his conceit, and he is just yr common dick.
Former Student of the Nutty Professor Responds (The student’s title here was simply “My Response”)
This is not political analysis. It is cosplay—an overwrought fever dream in which military logistics, constitutional law, gender studies buzzwords, and pornographic fantasy are tossed into a blender and served as moral revelation. It does not argue; it emotes. Loudly. And incoherently.
The central claim—that a face covering magically transforms lawful agents into outlaw marauders—would be laughable if it weren’t presented with such unearned solemnity. Masks do not create power, erase jurisdiction, or suspend law. Authority does not reside in cheekbones. If it did, every ski resort would be a coup factory. The author seems to believe that legality is determined by vibes and eye contact, as though courts, statutes, and command structures dissolve the moment someone puts on goggles.
The essay’s obsession with “unmasking” is not legal reasoning; it is ritual humiliation fantasy. The idea that stripping protective gear somehow reveals “thugs” underneath belongs to comic books, not constitutional democracy. Soldiers and federal agents remain legally accountable whether bare-faced or wrapped head to toe. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not contain a loophole labeled balaclava.
Then comes the absurdity piled on absurdity: soldiers are “invulnerable,” yet simultaneously terrified; omnipotent, yet psychologically dependent on cloth; governed by “natural law of the jungle,” yet also bureaucratic automatons of federal power. Pick one. You cannot be both Conan the Barbarian and a faceless DMV clerk at the same time. This isn’t critique—it’s incoherent mythmaking.
The sexualized gender narrative is where the piece fully disintegrates. The author does not merely criticize abuse of power; the brainwashed partisan indulges in lurid imagery of men dominating women while pretending to mourn it. This is projection, not analysis. The U.S. military is not a Jungian archetype of “Alpha-male warrior villains.” It is a massive, administratively suffocating institution full of women, minorities, paper-pushers, mechanics, medics, lawyers, and exhausted junior officers trying not to screw up their careers. The hyperventilating author erases all of them so he can stage his morality play.
Calling this fantasy “Miller-Hegseth malewhite-supremacist” ideology doesn’t make it accurate—it just signals ideological allegiance. The actual U.S. armed forces are among the most racially integrated institutions in American history, with minorities overrepresented in enlisted ranks and women serving in combat roles. One can criticize militarism without lying about demographics. This piece chooses lies because lies are more cinematic.
And then there’s the laughable notion that removing masks will cause these supposed demigods to deflate into “just yr common dick.” Name-calling does not provide a political conclusion; it’s middle-school insult comedy. After thousands of words of overheated prose, the grand insight is… genital mockery. That vacuity tries to stand as the intellectual payoff. The emperor has no clothes, and the critic has no argument.
Most damning of all: the essay claims to defend law and humanity while openly despising the very concepts that make accountability possible—institutions, procedures, evidence, due process. Instead of courts, it offers theater. Instead of oversight, it offers sneering. Instead of justice, it offers catharsis.
This effusive bluster is not radical critique. It is adolescent ressentiment wrapped in academic diction. It does not expose authoritarianism; it imitates it—by reducing real people to monsters, replacing facts with symbolism, and mistaking contempt for courage.
In short:
This piece is not dangerous because it is wrong.
This piece is dangerous because it teaches people to feel smart while thinking as an unhinged lunatic.
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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