Situational Journalistic Professionalism

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I watched John Stewart interview CNN’s Caitlin Collins today. One could not help but be impressed by her steady professionalism. But at the same time I had to wonder, where was this kind of professionalism during the Biden administration? What I saw at the time was a press corps that often behaved more like a rabid mob. I didn’t hear much talk about journalistic professionalism at the time. Instead they repeatedly defended their overtly combative reporting as central to their journalistic duty to “get to the truth.”

It made me wonder how much of this talk about journalistic professionalism is a reaction to Trump; a posture, defense, and excuse adopted to protect themselves from criticism that they are too timid with this President. It made me wonder where those aggressive reporters from the Biden press room were today?

The White House press corps likes to imagine itself as a principled institution: adversarial but civil, skeptical but professional, always serving the public rather than its own performance. On paper, that’s even their job description — ask hard questions, shine light, hold the president to account. In practice, though, what we see looks less like fixed journalistic integrity and more like situational professionalism: the tone changes depending on which president is standing at the podium and how much disrespect the room can get away with — not how much respect the president actually deserves.

Look at Joe Biden’s Geneva press conference in 2021. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins shouted a question as Biden was leaving the stage, pressing him on why he was “so confident” Vladimir Putin would change his behavior after their meeting. Biden turned back, visibly irritated, and snapped, “Where the hell — what do you do all the time?” before later telling her she might be “in the wrong business” if she couldn’t see the meeting’s value. He eventually apologized, but the exchange is revealing: the press felt free to crowd him, shout questions, and keep pressing until they got a reaction.

That dynamic shows up again in the Biden-era briefings. In one 2024 age-and-debate fallout briefing, while reporters were pressing the White House for Biden to address his future directly, an off‑camera reporter quipped “If he’s awake” about the president. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell immediately called it “inappropriate,” and the press secretary echoed that judgment. But the line only happened because the room had drifted into a mode where casually disrespectful asides about the president’s faculties felt thinkable in the first place.

Those moments aren’t isolated glitches. They sit on top of a structural reality that Biden “probably takes more questions overall” and does frequent informal Q&A, which gives the corps more opportunities to shout, overlap, and push. You end up with a press environment where the president’s openness becomes an invitation: the more he tolerates the noise, the more the corps turns toughness into a kind of blood sport.

Now set that next to Donald Trump’s long, combative press interactions. The man who called “fake news” the “enemy of the people” over and over again made the press into a personal foil, publicly attacking outlets and individual reporters from the podium and on social media. In one notorious coronavirus briefing, Trump literally played a campaign‑style video attacking the media’s coverage before lashing out at reporters who questioned his response, insisting “everything we did was right” while the media was “guilty”. CNN and MSNBC cut away and labeled the video propaganda. That’s not a calm professional exchange; it’s a president turning the briefing itself into a weapon against the press.

The Charlottesville press conference in 2017 fits the same pattern. Trump took questions in an aggressively defensive tone, arguing “both sides” were to blame and sparring with reporters about CEOs resigning from his manufacturing council and whether the violence counted as terrorism. The transcript reads like a tense negotiation, with the press trying to hold him to clear moral language while he pushes back on their framing. It’s adversarial, but the corps largely sticks to a more formal, single‑voice question pattern instead of the shouted swarm you see in some Biden clips.

Put bluntly: when the president reliably punches back, calls the press “fake news,” and threatens access, professionalism is a posture the press adopts as a defense. When the president absorbs the blows and apologizes, “professionalism” loosens into jokes about whether he’s awake and shouted questions that run right up to the line of personal disrespect. The standard isn’t the same; the risk profile is.

This is where “situational professionalism” comes in. If you only listened to the self‑image of the press corps, you’d think there was one unified ethic: adversarial, serious, fair. But the examples tell a different story:

  • With Biden, openness to questions correlates with the corps becoming louder, more overlapping, and sometimes casually derisive and contemptuous, because the likely consequence is at worst a scolding and later apology.
  • With Trump, the corps often presents a more pious, ceremonious face even while asking pointed questions, because retaliation — rhetorical and institutional — is a real threat.

The White House Correspondents’ Association itself emphasizes the noble language: “It is our job to report on the president… to shine a light and hold the government accountable,” framed as a tradition grounded in the First Amendment. That’s fine in theory. But when the everyday practice shifts based on how much pushback a given president will deliver, what we’re watching is less a fixed code and more a calibration: how far can we go today without paying for it tomorrow?

In that sense, civility for the corps becomes a function of the president’s temperament rather than a consistent journalistic principle. The same reporter who is comfortable shouting at a departing Biden may choose a more tightly controlled question with Trump, not because the underlying issues are less serious, but because the cost of triggering the president is higher. Professionalism becomes a slider, not a standard.

None of this means every reporter in the room is insincere. There are people who clearly try to keep the focus on the substance rather than on their own reactions or one‑liners, and there are moments when colleagues clamp down on crossings of the line, as O’Donnell did with the “if he’s awake” remark. But the broader pattern is hard to ignore if you watch enough of this stuff in sequence: the corps will happily perform toughness when the president lets them, and tout their restraint when the president punishes them.

If professionalism is only strict when retaliation is looming, then it’s not really professionalism. It’s self‑preservation in formal clothing. And if journalists want the public to trust that they’re acting on principle rather than opportunism, they need to close that gap: be just as careful with their tone when the president is easy to shout at as when he is itching to declare them the enemy of the people.

Otherwise, “professionalism” risks becoming just another situational costume — something the press corps puts on or takes off depending on who’s standing at the podium, how much they think they can get away with that day, and whether aggressiveness or respectfulness serves them better.

Gobi Nights: Exploring the Dark

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I just published a new novella on Amazon Kindle.

Gobi Nights: Exploring the Dark (see here)

It’s “fictional non‑fiction” in the sense that it stitches together real conversations and lived experiences into a tight story about one woman’s journey to places she never expected to go—and the surprising people she meets in a world where solitude may be the hardest thing to bear.

Set in 1996, when Mongolia had only recently opened to the West and evangelical missionaries were among the first foreigners to arrive, the book follows the threads of ambition, Christianity, Buddhism, and everyday life as they all converge around a vanished yoga icon.

Gobi Nights is a quiet story about searching for, losing, and slowly regaining one’s purpose and meaning in a changing world. And it’s about two women who profoundly change each other.

Recommended Summer Reading

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I’d like to invite you to check out my latest books—a fantasy trilogy I’m genuinely proud of. The series is called Monks and Mages, and it includes Where Spectres Dwell, The Nefarium, and The Darker Twin.

At its core, this is Epic Dark High Fantasy.

“Epic” in the true sense: a sweeping narrative with world-shaping events, a broad cast, and a timeline that spans lifetimes. At heart, it’s also deeply personal—almost biographical in the way it follows the lives and evolution of its two central characters.

“Dark” because the story doesn’t pull its punches. There are moments of real terror, dread, and loss, the kind that feel earned rather than contrived. Some of its main characters are anti-heroes. But that darkness is balanced with heart—warmth, sacrifice, and moments that draw tears. It’s written for adults, but accessible to teen readers who enjoy layered storytelling.

“High” because it delivers on scale: powerful magic, formidable antagonists, and ideas that reach beyond the immediate story into larger questions about personal and wider social relationships.

The writing is intentionally dense and efficient. This isn’t a ten-book sprawl—but interestingly, one reader told me it could have been. That is exactly what I was going for. Another reader said “it kicks the shit out of Harry Potter.”

At its center, Monks and Mages is about relationships and growth. There’s wit, banter, and a cast that should feel both vivid and familiar. In fact, one of the most potent characters is Marika, the “Darker Twin”—a woman with no supernatural abilities, but formidable insight and cleverness to match.

Out of curiosity, I once asked an AI to compare the series stylistically. It came back with this:

“It blends the cohesive magic and social upheaval of Mistborn, the high-stakes sorcery and empire-level scheming of The Black Prism, and the razor-edged banter and cons of The Lies of Locke Lamora into an exciting, character-driven saga.”

To that, I would add: it shares a joyful spirit of warmth and intimacy found in The Brotherband Chronicles.

If that sounds like your kind of story, you can find the series on Amazon Kindle. It’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited (see here).

Fear of Irrelevance

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Fear of death gets a lot of attention. Fear of irrelevance mostly doesn’t. Yet if you look at how humans actually behave, that quieter fear—the dread that when we are gone it will be as if we never existed—seems to drive much of the machinery. It is this fear that religion, spirituality, secular philosophies, and even celebrity culture all, in their different ways, are built to soothe.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in The Denial of Death that human civilization is essentially a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. We are the animal that understands we are going to die, and we find that fact intolerable, so we build stories that insist our lives have enduring significance. Terror Management Theory (TMT), a later development in social psychology, puts this into experimental form: awareness of death creates deep anxiety, which we “manage” by embracing cultural worldviews that tell us what the universe is about and how someone like us can count as a person of value within it. Self‑esteem, in this framework, is not just a pleasant feeling; it is the sense of being significant in a meaningful world, and studies suggest it helps buffer us against the distress of mortality reminders.

From this perspective, the key human problem is not simply that we die. It is that death threatens to expose our lives as negligible. To counter that, TMT distinguishes two broad strategies: literal immortality and symbolic immortality. Literal immortality is religion’s core promise: the soul survives and goes on to Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, the next incarnation, or some all‑embracing oneness. Symbolic immortality takes over when that story no longer convinces; in that mode, we “live on” in children, nations, artistic or scientific work, institutions, or the memory of our name. Becker called these “immortality projects”: efforts to secure the sense that we were not just biological accidents but contributors to something enduring.

Once you see this, religion stops looking like a separate mental category and starts looking like one point on a spectrum of answers to the same question: “How do I matter?” At one end are formal doctrines of Heaven and Hell. Moving along the line, you encounter looser spiritualities in which “the universe has a plan for me” or “everything happens for a reason.” Farther still are nationalistic stories that promise relevance through being part of a chosen people or a “great nation,” and activist narratives that promise a place on “the right side of history,” another way of saying one will not be erased. Even overtly secular philosophies can function as immortality projects by promising that one’s work contributes to progress or to humanity’s “march forward.”

This is why simply stripping religion away and expecting rational enlightenment to flourish is naïve. The underlying need—to feel connected to something larger and more lasting than a single nervous system—does not vanish with doctrinal belief. Becker and TMT theorists are explicit on this point: the urge to secure meaning and symbolic permanence is built into our condition and cannot simply be “given up.” Secular people and atheists are not exempt; if anything, they are under more pressure to find non‑supernatural ways to meet the same need. Remove religion “cold turkey” without offering better ways to manage fear and irrelevance, and people are likely to trade familiar myths for newer ones: New Age movements, conspiracy cults, political messianism, or other systems that again place them at the center of some cosmic or historical drama.

The chapter “The Tao of Science” in Pandemic of Delusion addresses one common objection: that religion has a monopoly on the feeling of being connected to something greater. Classical Taoism, as described there, seeks oneness with the universe by suspending reason, treating rational thought as a barrier to harmony. Science takes the opposite route: it insists on reason and evidence, yet if that path is followed as far as knowledge allows, the sense of connection it delivers can be at least as powerful—and, crucially, grounded in fact.

Carl Sagan’s remark that “to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe” stands as a compact expression of this scientific “Tao.” It compresses 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution into an everyday act, reminding us that the ingredients in a pie are the products of a long chain of natural events: post‑Big‑Bang matter condensing, stars forging heavy elements, planets forming, life evolving, agriculture emerging, and human culture inventing recipes. In that story, flour and sugar are star‑stuff, and the baker is a temporary arrangement of atoms produced in stellar interiors, briefly self‑aware, rearranging other atoms into dessert.

Science shows that the universe has a history and a kind of life cycle; it has been evolving in structure and complexity and will eventually “grow old and die.” Human evolution is not separate from that story but contiguous with it: atoms now organized as human bodies were forged in stars and cycled through countless organisms before taking this form, and they will return to the larger system. In that sense, we are not guests in the universe; we are the universe, in a particular configuration, looking back at itself. Recognizing this does not require any supernatural additions, yet it can provide precisely the sense of oneness and embeddedness that religious and spiritual systems promise.

Seen this way, science and fact‑based thinking do not leave a person forlorn and disconnected; they offer a way to feel relevant and connected without pretending the universe is designed around us. Our existence becomes meaningful not because a cosmic plan singles us out, but because a 13.7‑billion‑year chain of events has produced beings able to understand and influence a small part of that chain. For many, that realization can be not only intellectually satisfying but emotionally sustaining—an honest alternative to the fake constructs that proliferate when the need for relevance is denied rather than redirected into more grounded perspectives.

Modern culture adds its own twists to how we seek permanence. Contemporary information systems make it easier to spread comforting falsehoods and harder to maintain a disciplined, fact‑based view of the world. The same networks that propagate conspiracy theories and miracle cures also propagate stories about personal significance: follower counts, likes, and shares become continuous, numerical feedback on “do I matter?” in an attention economy. Celebrity culture intensifies this further. Commentators have noted that celebrities often seem to inhabit a kind of secular afterlife; their images and narratives remain visible and emotionally potent long after their deaths, sustaining fantasies of immortality for those who identify with them. Fame becomes a form of symbolic immortality in which the worst fate is not moral failure but obscurity.

If irrelevance is the real terror, this makes celebrity an especially seductive immortality project. It reframes significance as visibility: to be constantly seen is to count; to be forgotten is to vanish in a deeper sense than physical death. In that environment, it is unsurprising that many people’s immortality projects center on building a “personal brand,” collecting followers, or “going viral” at least once—even when these projects rest on distortion or spectacle rather than substance.

Donald Trump is a vivid example of a particularly toxic part of this spectrum. Over decades of interviews, his comments regarding an afterlife have been all over the map. What has been consistent is not any theology but an intense focus on visibility, branding, and ratings. His preoccupation is marking every enduring structure of society with his name. He wants history to remember him, and one is justified in concluding that, if given the choice of being remembered for a hundred years as a good president, or a thousand years as an infamous one, he would choose the latter.

In one reported exchange about Washington, D.C. monuments, he remarked that a previous leader “should’ve put his name on it” because “you’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” That line could serve as a plain‑language gloss on symbolic immortality: physical objects and institutions become canvases on which to inscribe “I was here” in as durable a way as possible. From a TMT standpoint, this is not mysterious pathology but an especially visible form of the same underlying process: the self turned into an immortality project, seeking not divine approval but inescapability in the human story.

Becker and TMT theorists are clear that this drive to secure meaning and permanence cannot simply be relinquished. The question is not whether people will engage in immortality projects, but which ones they will choose, and with what consequences. Religion, nationalism, celebrity worship, and various spiritual or ideological movements can all function as such projects—some relatively benign, others demanding denial of evidence or hostility toward those who threaten the story. Fact‑based thinking and science do not abolish the need but they do offer a way to satisfy it in ways more compatible with reality and with living alongside others.

From this vantage point, the most constructive stance is not simply “against religion,” but “for fact‑based thinking.” If habits of evidence, critical self‑correction, and scientific curiosity are cultivated, the appeal of fake constructs tends to weaken on its own, because it no longer feels necessary to sustain them. A person who understands themselves as a conscious fragment of a 13.7‑billion‑year‑old universe, embedded in networks of ancestry, ecology, and culture, does not need a fabricated cosmic destiny to feel that life matters; they can locate meaning in contributing to understanding, reducing harm, and leaving behind structures—ideas, practices, institutions—that continue to function after they are gone.

The call to action, then, is both personal and social. Personally, it is to recognize the fear of irrelevance in one’s own life—not as a flaw to be ashamed of, but as a feature of being a symbolic animal that knows it will die—and to choose, deliberately, which stories will be allowed to answer that fear. Socially, it is to build cultures, institutions, and educational practices that direct our hunger for significance toward projects that are reality‑based and humane: science, art, honest public service, durable communities, and fact‑anchored inquiry.

No one gets to opt out of the need to matter. But it is possible to decide that the ways we seek to matter will not be based upon delusions. In that sense, advocating for fact‑based thinking is not about taking away people’s sense of meaning; it is about offering a way to secure it that does not require golden idols, invisible plans, or committing mass shootings. Taking joy in being a brief, conscious expression of a very old universe is already a remarkable kind of relevance; the task is to let our stories, and our actions, appreciate and take comfort in that fact.

The Bodies Buried in St Mary Mead

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I just published a new novella on Amazon Kindle (see here). If you love murder mysteries, Agatha Christie novels, or Miss Marple stories in particular, you might really enjoy this two to three hour read.

Here is the official description…

The quiet garden village of St Mary Mead was once home to the most famous string of murders in British history. Clara West remembers her great-aunt Jane only as a kindly old woman in an Edinburgh garden, and first met “Miss Marple” through the lightly fictionalised accounts made famous by Agatha Christie. Now, as a postgraduate criminology student, Clara returns to St Mary Mead to study the long-term impact of violent crime on a small rural community—and slowly uncovers more bodies buried in the village’s troubled past than even Christie imagined.

What Clara finds in her aunt’s neatly labelled files and in the memories of those who survived reveals subtle hints that point toward something unthinkable. The emerging truth threatens not just a cherished literary legend but an entire village’s sense of itself, exposing a disturbing history that should never be unearthed, but must not be left buried.

The Bodies Buried in St Mary Mead is both an homage to Miss Marple and a critical reexamination of her most famous cases, told in the quiet, deceptively gentle style of a vintage English village mystery. It asks what happens when a modern criminologist is willing to question the official accounts, and what it costs to expose the real truth behind a myth that has comforted generations.

Meticulously crafted and AI-assisted, this novella uses contemporary tools for research, fact-checking, and tonal authenticity, bringing a modern intelligence to the history we thought we all knew.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Very Presidential Cage Match

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After several seasons of rehashed dialogue and tired plot twists, the Trump Show has finally hit its stride with a UFC cage match on the South Lawn. This is exactly what many of us have been waiting for: a leader who understands that presidential “dignity” and “decorum” are for losers. In the new America, our values are best exemplified by a steel cage, blaring walk‑out music, and the promise that someone will be bloodied on your favorite streaming service.

The crassness of the event doesn’t cheapen the office; it celebrates its crassness. Why pretend this place is about solemn duty when you can turn it into a premium fight venue with better production values and higher viewer ratings than most State of the Union addresses?

Critics keep asking, “Where’s the dignity?” But this is the dignity. This is exactly what it looks like when a country decides that cruelty is strength and restraint is weakness. You didn’t really think the culmination of that story arc was going to be a thoughtful speech in the East Room, did you? Please. We’ve all seen the trailer. And believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Upcoming seasons of the Trump Show promise to make Homelander look like a Boy Scout with a publicist.

So get used to it, pansy‑ass liberals. Get used to a president grinning beside a cage, a crowd baying for blood, and a flag fluttering garishly over the spectacle put on for your entertainment. Trump promised greatness and he delivered in the form of a giant fight cage on the once‑hallowed White House lawn. In a way, it’s the most honestly revealing thing this president has ever done: no pretense, no paper‑thin decorum, just the rabid attention he craves and the crass spectacle we were eager to see.

Trump Believes

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Classic newswriting practice discourages the use of subjective words like “believes,” “thinks,” and “feels” because they imply an inner state of mind that cannot be independently verified by reporters. Instead, journalists are generally advised to rely on neutral attribution verbs such as “said,” “stated,” or “told reporters.” When distance or skepticism is warranted, words like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “suggested” can signal that the outlet is reporting an allegation or interpretation rather than endorsing it as fact.

Yet in normal political coverage, “believe” is frequently used. Writers routinely say things like “Democrats believe” or “the mayor believes.” That isn’t normally a problem. Used this way, “believes” stops short of endorsing the belief as fact while still capturing that someone is expressing more than a single, isolated quote; it gestures at a broader worldview.

In the context of Trump, however, many otherwise reasonable norms become problematic. When the word “believes” is used to characterize assertions made by Trump or his administration, it becomes subtly misleading. Trump strains or breaks many norms, including the use of the word “believes” to describe his frequently shifting claims. If reporters use the word “believes” to suggest a coherent worldview, that framing is often inaccurate in his case.

Describing statements by Trump and his administration as sincere “beliefs” does more than attribute an inner mental state or suggest a worldview; it risks conferring a kind of moral and epistemic dignity. A belief can be wrong, even wildly wrong, but it usually suggests some sincerity, some continuity, and some relation to evidence as the believer understands it—some sense that, if the world looked different, the belief might eventually yield.

None of that is typically true with Trump. Few of the disingenuous claims he spouts at any given moment can be legitimately called beliefs, apart from some of his most openly spiteful or ideologically consistent ones.

To many readers, “Trump believes” often feels not merely imprecise but almost perverse. It sounds like a credibility upgrade, a quiet promotion from “he says this” to “this is how reality appears inside his sincere inner life.” Even when the rest of the sentence and the surrounding reporting are fully critical—fact-checks, counterevidence, context—the verb itself grates, because it conflicts with the reader’s core assessment: that Trump does not believe in the ordinary sense so much as deploy statements. In that frame, “believes” is not a neutral label; it is an inaccurate and undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The problem is compounded by how small words are processed as we read them. Readers rarely stop on “claims,” “says,” or “argues.” These are background verbs that their brains skip over. But “believes” stands out. It draws attention to itself because it imports psychology. This may help explain why journalists use it; it can subtly signal interpretive authority and make a piece feel more insider-informed.

Because “believes” stands out, once you notice its misuse in regard to Trump, it tends to keep surfacing. Each instance can leave the impression that the writer or outlet is softening or normalizing Trump’s unrelentingly false claims and arguments.

It is unfortunate that, like many things strained by Trump, we can no longer take for granted the otherwise benign use of a word like “believes.” News writers should be far more careful about describing claims by Trump or his administration as “beliefs.”

Daredevil Born Again

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I have never been one to rant about movies and shows. I hate those haters who compulsively rush to nitpick and complain about everything to prove they have better taste than everyone else and that nothing is ever as good as it used to be. If I do rarely write about shows, it is because I particularly loved them. One was Penny Dreadful which was the topic of my very first Figmentum back in 2015. Another of my rare fanboy raves was over the Netflix Daredevil series when that first came out (see here).

But here I am today to rant about Daredevil Born Again. In particular, the absolutely horrible season two finale.

The ending actually made me outraged and angry.

Warning, a spoiler follows...

I am outraged not only by a terrible end to an otherwise great series, but by the larger messages it sends. Storytelling can bend physics, ignore the finer points of criminal procedure, and occasionally tape over plot holes with a well‑timed quip. What it cannot do, at least not without breaking my trust, is casually invert the moral core of its own protagonist and then ask me to applaud. That is what the “Fisk goes free” ending does.

The series doesn’t merely show Wilson Fisk as a corrupt politician or an off‑screen orchestrator of crime. The finale graphically shows him rampage through the NYC courthouse brutally butchering crowds of protesters, with deliberate January‑6‑style imagery, in full public view. We aren’t dealing with a shady back‑room deal or a body count the characters can plausibly hand‑wave away; this is a literal spine-smashing massacre in the heart of the justice system and in full view of the cameras.

In response, Matt Murdock does two things. First, he stops the mob from killing Fisk, which is consistent with his established refusal to become an executioner. Then he does something else entirely: he presses Fisk to accept a political deal that allows him to avoid trial and prison altogether, provided he promises to leave New York.

First off, I will just point out that the idea that Matt could broker such a deal is absurd beyond words. The suspension of disbelief it requires to allow this goes well beyond absurdity. It is just utterly unrealistic and ridiculous even in a superhero show. No city anywhere would allow Fisk to walk away unpunished after such blatant and heinous crimes.

But even if we can get past that small point, in a universe that pretends to care about justice, this is not mercy. It’s complicity. Daredevil has always walked a line between vigilante violence and belief in the rule of law. He beats people up in alleys not because he enjoys it (usually), but because it is his ugly way of dragging them toward a system he still, somehow, wants to work. His no‑kill rule is tolerable precisely because it’s tethered to a conviction that real accountability must happen somewhere else — in a courtroom, in a cell, in a moment where the state, not the man in the mask, passes sentence. Here, that delicate tether is simply cut. Matt doesn’t just refuse to kill; he actively helps dismantle any chance of justice at all. The man who has no compunction about shattering the bones and livelihoods of low‑level crooks suddenly discovers boundless scruples when it comes to the one person proven to be beyond redemption. That is not a subtle ethical tension. It is moral whiplash.

Watching this, I found my mind wandering somewhere I didn’t expect it to go: Batman and the Joker. In the darker takes on that relationship, Batman’s refusal to kill the Joker stops looking noble and starts looking pathological. The body count mounts. Gotham burns. At some point, you have to ask whether Bruce is more attached to his identity as “the man who doesn’t kill” than he is to the lives being lost as a direct consequence. Fans have wrestled with this for years. Daredevil, by contrast, has usually felt healthier. Matt is tormented, but he isn’t supposed to be in love with the endlessness of his war. He wants his enemies actually stopped. His Catholic guilt is directed inward, not fetishized as an excuse to keep the real villains around to justify his own existence.

Fisk’s exile ending throws that distinction away. By brokering a deal that allows a mass‑murdering Fisk to simply walk free, Matt crosses into exactly the territory that makes many Batman stories uncomfortable: the hero who, whether he admits it or not, needs his monster so badly that he is willing to give up on everyone else’s safety to preserve the dance. Except in this case, it’s worse. Batman usually at least turns Joker over to Arkham and pretends the system is trying. Matt skips that step entirely. Instead of “I won’t kill you because I believe you should face justice,” the message becomes “I won’t kill you and I will also help you dodge justice.” It’s not a tragic compromise; it’s a psychotic level of enablement.

The obvious question, and the one that has kept nagging at me, is: how did this get through? How did an entire chain of professionals — writers, producers, executives — look at this and say, “Yes, this is the necessary and best culmination of our story”? The answer, I suspect, has less to do with anyone secretly believing that this is actually a strong ending and more to do with the mundane, grinding logic of franchise management. Marvel has been very clear, in ways both public and implied, that you do not permanently break your toys. As far back as the original Netflix run, creators talked about needing to leave key villains alive and reusable. The Disney+ era doubles down on that. Kingpin is a valuable asset, needed in other corners of the MCU. Born Again needed to end the “Mayor Fisk” storyline without killing him or burying him in a hole the wider franchise couldn’t easily dig him out of.

Within that box, the writers’ room still wants poetry. One man in jail, one man in exile. One in chains, one in a self‑made hell. It looks good on a whiteboard. It sounds powerful in a pitch. You can drape it in Frank Miller shadows and Catholic symbolism and convince yourself you have done something bold. The problem is that the poetry is built on sand. The more clearly the show depicts Fisk’s crimes, the more absurd and grotesque the “deal” becomes. Critics who otherwise liked the episode acknowledge that it “pushes credibility” and amounts to a “grave injustice.” Fans whose tolerance for comic‑book nonsense is usually high describe the logic as “breaking my brain.” And here I am, the usually easy‑going guy muttering “take it easy” at other people’s outrage, pacing my living room and inventing new synonyms for “what were they thinking?”

Although the show did not intend it, perhaps the calculation of Marvel, Disney, and the showrunners here reflects a deeper rot in our society when real supervillains escape justice only to be rebooted over and over because they are “franchise characters” in a gigantic money-making machine. So the larger question is about what our stories teach us to accept. We live in a world where powerful men commit public harms and then negotiate quiet “exiles”: golden parachutes, consulting gigs on another continent, opportunities to reinvent themselves while their victims get, at best, a carefully crafted press release. We already know, at some level, that this is wrong. Fiction has an opportunity — maybe even a duty — to state that clearly, to dramatize the difference between mercy and complicity.

Stories are one of the ways we shape our collective morality. Instead of a nuanced study of justice and retribution, Born Again perverts the pattern and frames it as tragic nobility. The hero of Hell’s Kitchen, the man whose greatest virtue is supposed to be his insistence that regular folks’ lives matter, chooses to let a rich and powerful mass murderer walk because killing him would stain his soul, and the narrative nods approvingly. The dead in the courthouse are reduced to set dressing for Matt’s spiritual aesthetics and Fisk’s franchise viability. This is not an inconsequential message.

There is, in theory, a way to redeem this. Season 3 could treat Matt’s decision not as a clever bit of symmetry but as a catastrophic mistake. Fisk could go on to commit greater horrors precisely because he was allowed to leave. Matt, sitting in his cell, could be forced into the kind of genuine reckoning that Daredevil is uniquely qualified to handle: confronting the difference between refusing to kill and refusing to demand accountability. Forgiveness without consequences could finally be named for what it is: not saintly restraint, but a sin of omission. The man who wears a devil on his chest could realize that in this case, he sided with the wrong one.

I do not expect that to happen. The way the ending has been discussed by the show’s creative leadership and covered by the trades suggests they see it as a striking status quo, not a grotesque misstep. Fisk will be exiled, then of course he will be back, and the story will move on to new villains, new costumes, new hallway fights. Maybe some of that will be good. Maybe I will keep watching out of habit and because I still, stubbornly, like these characters.

So this is not just about one bad decision in a TV writers’ room. It is about the kind of stories we are willing to tell and the kind of compromises we are willing to shrug off because the larger machine needs to keep milking their cash cows. If even Daredevil can lose sight of what justice means, maybe it’s worth pausing to ask whether we might be doing the same thing — in our entertainment, in our politics, in the stories we tell ourselves to rationalize our own righteousness.

I am not the only one disappointed and outraged by this ending, and perhaps that in itself is a tiny piece of evidence that some lines are still visible, even in a world where morals and values must be twisted to serve the sacred franchise.

Sophisticated Arguments for Preposterous Propositions

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Intelligence does not immunize against delusion, and intelligent people can produce sophisticated sounding arguments to support their delusional claims. This has always been epidemic amongst the intelligentsia who believe in, and need to rationalize, the existence of a god that cannot and therefore does not actually exist.

The latest delusional religious reasoning comes from theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in a long New York Times interview (see here) where he announces that the only reason he is not an atheist is that “the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.” It’s an impressively confident conclusion, especially given how weak the actual arguments look once you strip away the prose and the piety. Underneath the erudite-sounding facade, what we are dealing with here is just more misrepresented and logically flimsy pseudo‑intellectual religious nonsense.

Hart warms up with a casual swipe at Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, dismissing it as “decades out of date” when it first appeared and a logical failure. That isn’t just wrong, it’s the kind of wrong you get when you start from “atheists must be idiots” and work backward. Whatever you think of Dawkins’s metaphors, the 1976 book was not peddling obsolete biology; the gene‑centric view it popularized is still one of the basic perspectives in population genetics, even though it has since been supplemented by multi‑level selection and systems thinking, and that’s exactly how its serious critics treat it. Biologists like Denis Noble argue that talking as if genes are little agents oversimplifies a complex causal web, and they argue for reframing and extending, but clearly not for declaring the whole thing “decades out of date” at birth. When Hart actually engages Dawkins elsewhere he mostly attacks the cartoonish way Dawkins talks about “selfish genes” and “lumbering robots,” that is, his metaphors and metaphysics, not the math or the lab work. At no point does he demonstrate that the science was obsolete; he just sneers at a popular book written by an atheist and hopes the insult will do the work of argument. If a Christian apologist wrote a lively popularization of cosmology and an atheist waved it away as “decades out of date” with no evidence, we’d call that what it is: rhetorical BS. If you want to claim modern science has destroyed materialism, you should at least show you can accurately summarize modern science.

The heart of Hart’s case is his insistence that a “mechanistic” view of nature can never explain consciousness, that the scientific picture of the world was built precisely by excluding mental properties, and that trying to add mind back in breaks the machine. He leans toward an idealist picture where consciousness, or “mind,” is fundamental and matter is in some sense derivative. There are at least three big problems with how he plays this. First, he treats “mechanistic” science as if we were still doing physics with brass gears and clockworks. He’s right about one historical point: early modern physics modeled nature as a soulless machine and bracketed talk of purposes and minds to get a clean method going. That was sort of a brilliant move. But he then writes as though that coarse mechanical picture is still the only game in town. It isn’t. Contemporary physics is explicitly non‑mechanistic in his sense; quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and information‑theoretic approaches do not imagine the universe as billiard balls banging around in absolute space. Contemporary biology is likewise not stuck in clockwork mode; it routinely analyzes feedback, homeostasis, regulatory networks, and even minimal forms of goal‑directedness at cellular and organismic levels without smuggling ghosts into the machine. So when Hart admits that “our sciences are not strictly mechanistic” and yet somehow uses that as a weapon against materialism, he’s trading on an equivocation. Materialism in 2026 does not mean “Descartes’s res extensa forever.” It means that whatever exists is ultimately describable in terms of physical fields, structures, and dynamics—even if those structures are richer than 17th‑century clockwork.

Second, Hart treats “no explanation yet” as if it means “requires a spooky extra force.” He is genuinely offended by the idea that a purely physical story could ever explain why there is “something it is like” to be you. Fine; lots of philosophers share that intuition. But “I don’t see how that could work” is not evidence that it cannot work. Physicalist theories of consciousness—from higher‑order thought theories to global workspace models and integrated information approaches—don’t invoke new metaphysical forces bolted onto physics; they identify consciousness with specific kinds of information‑processing and global availability in the brain. Even critics of those theories generally argue about their completeness or conceptual clarity, not about physics needing to invent some non‑mechanical pixie dust. So there is exactly zero empirical requirement for some mysterious non‑mechanistic “force” to explain consciousness; the conceptual puzzles are real, the data gaps are real, but the demand for a supernatural‑ish add‑on is not. Hart’s move is not “maybe we’ll need a modest additional ingredient.” He jumps from “current models leave an explanatory gap” to “the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.” That’s not filling a gap with legitimate science; that’s exploiting any temporary gap to stuff an entire theology into it.

Third, he leans heavily on caricaturing “illusionist” talk about consciousness. Hart loves to quote people like Daniel Dennett saying that “consciousness is an illusion” and then pointing out, correctly, that if you take that literally you’ve sawed off the branch you’re sitting on: if there is no experience whatsoever, there is no one left to be “under an illusion.” But here again he stops at the cheap false victory. Most illusionist or deflationary physicalists mean something much more specific: there is experience, but our naive model of that experience—as a private inner theater with atomic, intrinsic qualia and a simple “self” watching the show—is badly mistaken. On that view, the brain builds a simplified, user‑friendly representation of its own activity and mistakes that representation for a little inner soul; the “illusion” is the brain’s self‑description, not the existence of experience itself. That is not “we gave up on explaining consciousness.” It’s one kind of mechanistic explanation of how an evolved biological control system might misdescribe itself. Saying that consciousness is “in some sense an illusion” is not a concession that mechanistic explanations failed; it is a mechanistic explanation. Hart either does not understand that distinction or finds it more convenient not to. This is not a case where illusion talk admits defeat; it’s a case where Hart is punching a straw man and declaring victory.

Once you clear away the rhetorical fog, the “unanswerable” anti‑atheist case looks very familiar and age old. The pattern goes roughly like this: define “materialism” as a crude, outdated, 17th‑century billiard‑ball picture plus Dennett at his most provocative; show—correctly—that this caricature struggles to account for rational thought, moral value, and consciousness; then declare victory for a vaguely classical‑theist or idealist picture where “mind” or “spirit” is metaphysically basic. The trouble is that many contemporary naturalists explicitly reject the crude “mechanistic” straw man he keeps fighting. They are physicalists, not cartoon mechanists, and they work within a physics that already moved past that picture. Non‑theist philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised similar worries about materialism’s ability to capture value and reason without concluding “therefore, theism,” and Nagel’s critics have shown in detail how you can respond to those worries from inside a broadly naturalistic framework. There is no valid path from “explaining consciousness is hard” to “the God of Eastern Orthodox Christianity exists,” any more than from “we have not yet fully explained crop circles” to “this proves that aliens created them.”

Hart’s move boils down to this: if he defines “atheism” as commitment to a simplistic metaphysics he dislikes, then his arguments against that metaphysics are “unanswerable,” and therefore atheism is irrational. Sure. And if I define “Christianity” as the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that God personally scripts every toddler’s cancer, I can prove Christianity is evil before lunch. Both maneuvers are lazy. If you want to refute atheism, you have to interact with the best naturalist positions on offer today, not with the weakest airport‑paperback atheism plus your favorite 17th‑century straw man.

None of this means Hart is stupid. He’s obviously not. He’s well read, rhetorically gifted, and very good at exposing shallow, popular atheist arguments. But brilliance in one direction doesn’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning in another. What shows through in that Times piece, and in the wider body of his work, is someone starting from a deep emotional and aesthetic commitment to a Christian‑Platonic picture—beauty as a transcendental, Jesus as uniquely “uncanny,” consciousness as a window into a mental foundation of being—and then retrofitting “philosophical arguments” to protect that picture from contact with a godless universe. Along the way he mischaracterizes contemporary science, caricatures naturalist positions he doesn’t like, and leans hard on loaded definitions (“God” as necessary being; “materialism” as crude mechanism) that atheists simply do not have to grant.

From the outside, this is not a rigorous refutation of atheism; it’s a very educated, very eloquent catechism for people who already want Christianity to be true but don’t want to sound naive. As an unabashed atheist, I have no problem with people finding Christianity emotionally or aesthetically compelling. Believe whatever myths get you through the night. What I object to is pretending that this is where logic forces us to go, that atheism has somehow been rendered philosophically childish by “unanswerable” arguments that fall apart as soon as you stop being impressed by the adjectives. If you want to believe in God, own it as a choice, an intuition, a story that works for you. Just don’t try to tell the rest of us that we’re being irrational for declining to share your delusion.

Staying Sane Is Hard Work

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Sliding down into delusion is seductive, easy, and fun. Modern information technology is making it ever harder to resist. Staying sane, on the other hand, is hard work—and it is getting harder every day.

The internet has made it possible for infectious ideas to spread faster than any physical disease. For a virus to circle the globe, you need mutations and air travel. To become infected by fake news and dangerous ideas, you need only a Wi‑Fi connection. Modern technology exposes us to vastly more information than ever before, much of it unhealthy, and every time our neural networks are exposed to bad information, it feels a bit more sensible to us—even if we know it is fake. Mere repeated exposure wears ever‑deepening grooves of familiarity into our brains. The more we see, hear, and click on a claim, the more reasonable it feels. Eventually, insidiously, it becomes self‑evident—common sense that seems inescapable.

In the past, news was filtered through human editors and gatekeepers. They certainly had their biases and blind spots, but at least someone was nominally responsible for quality. Today, sources like Facebook, Fox News, YouTube, podcasts, X/Twitter, and even our government have largely abandoned any obligation to fact‑check before amplifying. They create the illusion of informed reporting but are often almost completely untethered to reality. Their algorithms and personalities have one overriding job: keep you engaged. They notice what you watch or click and then say, in effect, “If you believe that, then check this out!” They do not care whether they are feeding you solid science or the latest conspiracy theory; they only care whether you will stay tuned in and click some more. The responsibility to sort out well‑supported information from unsupported claims, sound logic from specious arguments, is pushed entirely onto you.

That would be a tall order even if our brains were perfectly rational. They aren’t. Imagine you are curious about a fringe idea like Bigfoot. You type “proof of Bigfoot” into a search engine or social platform, intending to investigate skeptically. You will quickly find articles, videos, posts, and even reality shows arguing that Bigfoot is at least plausible or even real. Because you clicked, the algorithms learn that Bigfoot content “works” on you and begin to serve you more of it: more sightings, grainy photos, confident testimony. Before long, your feed is heavily populated by Bigfoot believers. From your perspective, it starts to look as if there is an enormous body of evidence out there. Everywhere you look, people treat the idea seriously. If so many people think there is something to it, there must be something to it.

In reality, you are being drawn out onto ever thinner and more dangerous limbs. The algorithm nudges you along in little steps, each of which seems perfectly solid and reasonable. This process does not just happen with Bigfoot. It happens with vaccine myths, climate denial, election lies, cultish political beliefs, and every other infectious or click‑inducing idea. The result is that many people come to feel they have made a careful, “objective” study of an issue when in fact they have been drawn, step by step, down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland alternate reality.

We cannot redesign the global information system by ourselves, but we can develop habits that make us harder to capture. One simple practice is to explicitly search for the reverse of whatever you are investigating. If you search for “proof of Bigfoot,” deliberately also search for “debunking Bigfoot claims,” and click on those results often enough that the search engines learn you will reliably choose that kind of content too. This at least gives you some exposure to different perspectives. Both sides might still be exaggerated, but you are less likely to be left with the illusion that everyone agrees with one side only.

Another, related technique is to always look back to first principles. If you only consider that next little step out along the branch, it will seem safe and sensible. But if you stop and look back at how far you have wandered from the solid trunk, you quickly realize that you are dangerously far out on a limb. Having acknowledged that we do occasionally discover new species, must really therefore admit that a hitherto undiscovered tribe of Bigfoot might actually exist?

It also matters where you spend your time. Just as like‑minded people congregate in person, different online communities attract and cultivate different kinds of thinkers. Choose to frequent healthy online environments. That is not to say you should avoid diverse ideas; but if rumor, outrage, and unvetted claims infect the community or the platform itself, you will become infected. Seek out vibrant but serious gathering sites where people demand citations, scrutinize sources, and correct obvious nonsense. If you stick to them, your own brain will become better at recognizing sound evidence and logic, as well as specious arguments. If the level of discourse on a trusted site degrades, you should leave and stop exposing your brain to it.

Given all the infectious information we are unavoidably exposed to, it is no surprise that people sometimes slip from belief into delusion. Beliefs, at least in principle, are subject to change. We might hold them strongly, but new evidence can persuade us to reconsider. When a belief becomes impervious to change—when no amount of contrary evidence, no matter how strong or consistent, is allowed to matter—it has crossed over into delusion. Using that word makes many professionals uneasy. In a clinical setting, “delusional” has a specific meaning and diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, in the generally accepted lay domain, delusion is the proper word to describe thinking patterns that have become impervious to evidence or reason.

When a person or a movement has fallen prey to delusional ideas, when contrary facts are dismissed out of hand or reinterpreted as attacks, we no longer function in the realm of honest disagreement. We are locked into a self‑reinforcing mental world that will not adjust to reality. In a culture where influencers dominate the discourse, the rest of us are put at risk. Delusions can be comforting, energizing, and politically useful, but facts always assert themselves in the end. Reality does not care if you believe in it.

As a result of so many infectious ideas being disseminated so quickly, we are currently suffering from a global pandemic of delusion. We cannot wipe it out, but we can protect ourselves and try not to contribute to its spread. We can monitor our own information diets, seek out counter‑evidence, choose better communities, learn to better assess claims, and be more precise in our language. We can and must resist being nudged toward delusion. As susceptible as our brains are to misinformation, they can also be trained to better assess the soundness of claims and to detect specious arguments.

The way repetition reshapes our memories and our very perceptions, the way algorithms exploit our pattern‑seeking brains, the way beliefs slide, inch by inch, into full‑blown delusion—all of these dynamics, and many others, are at work in our politics, our media, our religions, and our personal lives. In my book Pandemic of Delusion: Staying Rational in an Increasingly Irrational World (see here), I unpack those mechanics in much greater detail, with concrete examples and practical tools for recognizing when you, or someone you care about, is being nudged away from reality. If this short essay inspires you to want to bolster your defenses, the book will provide you with a practical field guide: offering insight as to why we are so susceptible to misinformation, how to recognize it, and how to immunize yourself against it. It will give you a fighting chance to stay sane when the world around you seems determined to drive you crazy.