This week’s Trailblazer takes a different turn. I don’t typically call out folks in this newsletter, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing—rage-baiting, especially from women and people in my wider progressive community.
It’s everywhere, but it’s particularly disappointing in the spaces where I exist and expect a higher standard. This issue is a “calling in” for all of us, including me.
Rage baiting.
It’s the art of manufacturing outrage—pre-raging, assumption-raging, trope-raging—designed to pull us in with the intoxicating feeling of “Yes! F that! I’m all in!” We see someone “brave enough” to say the thing we’ve been thinking, and suddenly, we’re following them, liking their posts, sharing their words, even handing over our money. Because we want to feel that same indignation in our own rage. We admire their ability to speak up so boldly. We think that we can learn from them if we stay close (and in their feed).
But here’s the thing: rage baiting is designed to keep us dependent on the rager and their carefully constructed outrage. It’s a formula: set up a villain, take a bold stance, stir the pot, reap the engagement. Sound familiar?
The current U.S. president is a rage baiter too.
So, let’s have a real conversation about rage. Because if you’re a trailblazer, you’ve felt it. Maybe this past month, you’ve felt it coursing through your veins—rage tinged with fear, grief, exhaustion, or the sense that something was done to you without your consent.
Rage is real. It’s generative. It can be the first spark of transformation—when we choose to use it wisely.
The Weaponization of Rage
I mean, this is Militarism 101. My area of specialization in my women’s and gender studies doctoral program was militarization—the process by which everything, from culture to language to daily life, gets shaped by war logic. I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Cynthia Enloe as my advisor when I was a student at Clark University.
Renowned in the International Relations world, she was one of the first to ask the question: How does gender shape the way we wage war?
And that doesn’t just apply to war on a battlefield.It applies to how we wage war in discourse.It applies to how we wage war in our minds.
This is what rage baiting taps into—it’s militarized thinking. It turns disagreement into combat. It positions every ideological divide as a battlefield. It asks us to choose a side, not based on clarity, but based on emotional escalation.
When we rage-bait, we mobilize people like soldiers. We turn them into foot soldiers for someone else’s war. We don’t question the mission. We don’t ask if the battle is ours to fight.
That’s how militarization works. That’s how power gets reinforced. And that’s exactly why we have to be smarter about how we engage rage.
Rage Baiting Requires an Enemy
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: rage baiting requires an enemy. We need someone to rage against. Sometimes, rage baiters manufacture the most nonsensical villains—child refugees, women in leadership, women living in poverty, people observing certain religions, the very concept of equity or feminism. The outrage machine churns out enemies that shouldn’t even be up for debate, and yet, here we are.
Other times, the “othering” is more grounded in reality—people who actually hold power to make and change laws that impact our families, our finances, and our basic rights. The anger toward those who can and do make life-altering decisions may be more “logical.”
And yet—even in the latter case, I caution taking on someone else’s rage.Because no matter how justified the anger is, we have to ask: What is this rage leading me to do?
Yes. Rage at Injustice. Rage for Something. Rage with Purpose.
That’s different than taking on the contagion of someone else’s rage.
There’s a difference between using rage as fuel for meaningful action and getting swept into the emotional firestorm of someone else’s agenda. Rage that’s rooted in your values, in your own lived experience, in your unwavering sense of right and wrong—that’s fuel.
Rage that’s been planted in you for clicks, virality, or engagement—that’s manipulation.
Here’s the thing about manufactured rage: It wears us down before it moves us forward. Then what?
Exhaustion.
Overwhelm.
Anything but trailblazing.
Rage alone burns hot—but without direction, it burns us out. |
