In this searing and darkly satirical chapter, Jack peels back the layers of secrecy surrounding a big-box university's Behavioral Risk Assessment Committee (BRAC)—an obscure, almost mythological campus entity with no visible public charter and yet, somehow, the power to investigate faculty and staff without their knowledge or consent.

What begins as a Kafkaesque tangle of open records requests turns into something even more disturbing: a bureaucratic specter capable of branding a man a threat based on bolded email hearsay, surreal musical titles, and cartoonishly bad assumptions. This episode dives deep into:

🕵️‍♂️ Hidden administrative surveillance
🎵 The criminalization of instrumental music
📜 Open records requests as weapons of clarity
🧠 Mental health, family loss, and the long shadow of post-lawsuit grief
🍫 A PayDay bar, a piñata, and a lanyard collection all make cameos

Plus: A faculty member accuses Jack of “stalking by SoundCloud,” a dean drops a pizza-parlor-pedophile punchline, and the university Police confuse him with his own father. It’s absurd, it’s infuriating—and it’s all true.

With help from fellow whistleblower and historian Alberto Martinez, this episode isn’t just a personal reckoning; it’s a surgical dissection of a shadow system that treats reputation as risk and satire as threat.

🟧 Trigger warning: gaslighting, defamation, uninvestigated accusations, and the misuse of mental health frameworks as instruments of silencing.

🟦 Content warning: brief discussion of depression, injury, and grief.

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The Awful Shadow: Unblocking the Self / Unboxing Big-Box Academia