Featured Essays Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil: Born Again and the Fascism of State Gangsters The show doesn’t shy away from its depiction of Fisk’s authoritarian tactics. By Zack Budryk | Published on May 4, 2026 Credit: Marvel Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Marvel Studios Content Warning: This article involves brief discussions of state-sponsored genocide. The existence of Daredevil: Born Again can feel like a minor miracle. To begin with, there’s the sheer feat of corralling the original cast seven years after the cancellation of the Netflix series where they debuted, to say nothing of sticking the landing after the complete creative retooling the series underwent mid-production. But the actual content of the show, which explicitly depicts it as noble to resist authoritarian government even through extralegal means, was striking in early 2025, an era when the entertainment industry in general and Disney in particular had seemingly resigned itself to behaving as though reactionary politics had won the culture (a wildly premature conclusion, as it would turn out). And yet, two months into Donald Trump’s second term, here was a mainstream TV show in which the cops and political leaders are the bad guys.  Much of this feels like an easier sell in the show’s second season, when real-life jackbooted thugs beating and shooting Americans in the street have drawn fierce backlash, and indeed, people involved with the show have subtly conceded the similarities between mob boss-turned-Mayor Wilson Fisk’s anti-vigilante shock troops and ICE aren’t a mere coincidence. But the show’s depiction of Fisk’s specific authoritarian tactics are also a genuinely enlightening depiction of how fascism works in practice, with this literal gangster illustrating how authoritarian governance functions as a combination of gangster tactics and the state’s monopoly on violence. Authoritarianism has historically had a deceptively complex relationship with organized crime. More traditional criminal organizations are often the subject of purges–when he took power in the 1920s, Benito Mussolini cracked down on the Mafia, largely because their regional influence in southern Italy threatened his agenda of centralized national control (they gave as good as they got—Lucky Luciano, the man often credited with inventing the structure of the American mob, allegedly provided crucial intelligence to the Allies during World War II).  The Nazi party likewise targeted the urban crime syndicates known as Ringvereine. But gangsters have also been major assets for authoritarian governments in need of someone who knows their way around targeted violence. Henri Lafont, who ran the French auxiliary of the Gestapo, was a local gangster authorized by the Nazis to recruit his old partners in crime from prison. Decades later, the Indonesian genocide that killed up to a million communists (real or accused), union organizers, ethnic Chinese and other minorities, was largely carried out by organized crime elements, including Anwar Congo, who re-enacted his own crimes for filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer in his harrowing 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. “We need gangsters to get things done. Free, private men who get things done,” then-Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla tells a cheering crowd in Oppenheimer’s film. On a more philosophical level, though, fascism and the mob go hand in hand because fascism runs on mob tactics. The most obvious is the use of brutal, swift and disproportionate violence, both from agents of the state like ICE or the SS and from state-affiliated paramilitaries. But there’s also the constant, ambient cloud of scams and heists and rackets, from the Nazis’ looting of Jewish valuables to Donald Trump’s longstanding fixation on “taking the oil” from uncooperative nations. Born Again teases out the extent to which Fisk’s mayoralty reflects this. The brutal Praetorian guard of cops who will become his Anti-Vigilante Task Force are introduced relatively early, but they’re not that out of place in a superhero story. It’s only later in the first season that we see his broader agenda, to profit personally from a zoning loophole that allows him to use a marine terminal as a free-trade zone. Despite a few little throwaway hints to the contrary, not only is Fisk still a gangster, he’s using the machinery of the state to both personally enrich himself and, like Mussolini, eliminate the non-state competition. That’s also what makes his task force, and their real-world equivalents, a unique threat: it’s not just that they’re violent and heavy-handed, it’s that they’re a private army in the guise of public employees.  There’s something particularly dread-inducing about the depiction of authoritarianism at the municipal level; particularly in a country the size of the United States, one can know an illiberal, authoritarian national government is in place but rarely see its effects in person unless you live in a city targeted by its security forces or, like I do, go to work amid National Guard patrols and ostentatious banners outside staid federal agency headquarters. Fisk’s tyranny, however, manifests as skin-crawlingly intimate even in the vastness of New York, in contrast to uneasy allies like Matthew Lillard’s affable CIA emissary. It’s no easy feat to flee an authoritarian country, but there’s something particularly claustrophobic about being trapped on an island with a dictator. In real life, we’ve seen local and state leaders stand against federal overreach, but when your mayor is the one having people dragged out of restaurants and bodegas, no one in government is coming to save you. That dearth of “legitimate” allies makes the season’s ongoing philosophical debate between Matt Murdock and Karen Page over the morality and practicality of revolutionary violence particularly immediate. Batman may be committed to never taking a life, but Batman is also friends with the police commissioner; these principles can be a far heavier lift when the cops, the nominal legitimate keepers of the peace, are prepared to shoot you on sight. Fisk’s use of the police to brutalize dissidents feels especially resonant, precisely because even in the negotiable reality of superhero media they feel so much like real-life cops. Fisk and the task force’s brutish leader Powell, much like their real-world counterparts, assert a mandate to bring down their fist on the worst of the worst but their violence is overwhelmingly concentrated simply on people who piss them off. In real life, big city mayors and New York mayors in particular are often strong-armed by their police forces (during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the NYPD notoriously doxxed then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter) but the brutality Fisk’s cops inflict is with his enthusiastic blessing and support. When Fisk gruesomely murders his uncooperative police commissioner, Gallo, in the first season finale, he’s not just settling a personal score, he’s making an offering to cops like Powell by killing the kind of man they perceive as tying their hands. With Fisk’s backing, Powell and his thugs deal out violence in deeply realistic way, from Powell’s assault of a journalist in the first season to his cold-blooded murder of one of his own as an excuse to turn the police response to a protest into a riot (In an amusing bit of meta-irony, Fisk’s cops are depicted as huge fans of the iconography of the Punisher, just like their real-world counterparts, but with the added cognitive dissonance that they are actively seeking to kill one another).  Like any other mob boss, or aspiring mob boss, Fisk as mayor has people who understand when he needs someone killed, to the point that he doesn’t need to directly order it. Part of what makes his murder of Gallo so shocking is that it’s the first time he’s personally killed someone in the series after doing it left and right in the Netflix era. It’s a further point on the board on Karen’s argument for a more proactively ruthless approach when, as Fisk makes explicitly clear during his brawl with Matt, he holds all the cards as the only player willing to kill.  By the second season, all of this coincides with Fisk instituting martial law as part of his purge of vigilantes, with not just active vigilantes like Matt Murdock driven underground but anyone who either supports them or is a political dissident in general. Authoritarianism and fascism thrive on contradictions, on the idea of a world gone mad. If nothing means anything, state officials can corruptly benefit from their offices while also fearmongering about a different, scarier kind of criminal, one who will have free reign if the regime itself is constrained by the law. If a cop can’t shoot or shake down whoever he wants, both Fisk and his real-world analogs warn, we’ll be at the mercy of the thugs.  It’s easy to see all this stuff and wonder what the hell any of us are supposed to do about it once we understand it. Daredevil: Born Again understands how paralytic this can be, and even as Daredevil and his allies undertake individual missions to push back against the Fisk regime, much of their downtime is tactical debates between Matt and Karen that wouldn’t be out of place in Andor. Ultimately, Matt and Karen and the show itself eschew easy answers, because we know this real-world moment doesn’t have easy answers, or at least, it has answers that require patience, community organizing and a willingness to accept the idea that you might not see the seeds you plant bloom. But ultimately, it can be an odd comfort to understand how much of the fearsome force of an out-of-control state is simply cheap thugs who can’t work to their full capacity if we deny them our fear. That’s why their natural enemy, in both the show and real life, is a man (or a person) without fear.[end-mark] The post <em>Daredevil: Born Again</em> and the Fascism of State Gangsters appeared first on Reactor.