I’m typing this at 2:17 AM. My husband is asleep, presumably dreaming of spreadsheets or whatever it is he does. I’m in the living room, scrolling through Twitter again, because OF COURSE I AM. It’s an objectively stupid thing I do, this whole defending a podcaster thing, but here we are. It started, I think, subtly. Just a stray comment here, a dismissive retort there. Someone would post some overly dramatic critique of his content – usually something incredibly minor, like his tone during an interview, or a slightly off-color joke from 2019 – and I’d feel this… *surge*. Like an electrical current. Not anger, exactly. More like… defensive activation. It’s almost a reflexive response now. I see the little red notification, indicating someone has dared to voice an opinion contrary to the accepted narrative (my narrative, apparently), and my fingers are already flying across the keyboard. My husband, bless his oblivious heart, will sometimes ask from the other room, “Are you arguing with the internet again?” And I’ll just mumble something about “just reading comments” or “fact-checking,” which is a blatant fabrication. I’m not fact-checking. I'm engaging in what I can only describe as a sustained, low-level intellectual skirmish. The weirdest part is the intensity of the feeling. It’s disproportionate. This isn't my actual friend. I don’t know this man. I’ve never met him. He doesn't know I exist. Yet, when I read something particularly vitriolic, something that feels like an unfair personal attack, I feel the same protective instinct I would if someone were publicly dissecting, say, my sister's parenting choices, or my best friend's career trajectory. It’s almost a physiological response – my shoulders tense, my jaw clenches. I feel this primal urge to step in, to clarify, to correct, to SHIELD. It’s utterly absurd. I’ve tried to analyze it, of course. Is it a projection? Am I seeing myself in his struggles against online scrutiny? Is it some deep-seated need to feel intellectually superior by defending the ‘underdog’ (even though he’s a multimillionaire podcaster)? Perhaps I’m vicariously experiencing some form of external validation through his perceived intellectual dominance. Or maybe it’s just the inherent human desire to belong to a tribe, and his listeners are my tribe, and this is how I demonstrate loyalty. I don’t know. All I know is, it's 2:28 AM, and I just spent twenty minutes crafting a meticulously worded rebuttal to a user who suggested his latest guest was "a bit dull." I should probably go to bed. This is stupid.