The Rage Merchants of Substack

How provocateurs profit from our political collapse

Jul 10, 2025

For the past few months, I’ve had a hard time addressing politics. A lot of the reason for this is probably relatable. As chaos has swept the country, creators are struggling to create. There’s a sense of despondency that many of us are feeling right now. It’s hard to muster the strength to say anything at all.

But a lot of my restraint is because I’m discouraged by the sorts of voices that the masses tend to reward. I see the content that rises to the top when there’s no moderation in place. People want to hear “Fuck the orange dictator!” They want to feel like they’re doing something for cursing up and down about all of the “MAGAts” that voted for “Mango Mussolini.”

As a writer who routinely gets drowned out by ragebait each time I try to offer a more nuanced take, it’s hard not to feel a sense of aimlessness as I figure out what role I have to play in this fight. There are times when I’m so angry about what I see taking place in this country that I barely know how to contain it. But I don’t think there’s any amount of shouting and labeling that’s going to get us through this storm.

Sometimes, I can’t help but write with the understanding that my words are unlikely to persuade people who feel differently than I do. But I hate to close the door on them completely. It’s easy for many to conclude that all attempts to reason with Trump supporters at this juncture will fall on deaf ears. We live in such disparate realities that bridging the gaps between us may not always be an option, it’s true. MSNBC and Fox News viewers speak different languages.

There can be a laziness in writing off all of the people who disagree with us as mere cultists. The truth is that there’s a level of groupthink that most of us are familiar with. Our attitudes are more a reflection of the media we consume than most of us would like to admit.

As I’ve witnessed more and more election cycles, I’ve grown more aware of the things we’re willing to excuse from the leaders we vote for. That’s not to say Democrats’ defense of Obama and Biden was one and the same as what we see now from Republicans, only that we can’t act like the force of confirmation bias is alien to us. Whether a golf game, drone strike, or botched war policy, the action always registers a little differently coming from the president we didn’t vote for. When new issues sweep the country, people fall into reflexive positions. They defend the questionable — the reprehensible — or they argue that broken clocks are never correct. Our leaders can do no wrong and their leaders can do no right.

We’ll need to make concessions if we’re ever going to speak to our opponents again, and there are greater forces at play that we’ll have to acknowledge if we’re ever going to see them as anything other than bigots and fascists.

It doesn’t take a leap of faith to believe a decent person could be indoctrinated or manipulated into voting for indecency. And there’s a great relief in the notion that huge swaths of the people who voted for Trump did so not because they wanted the policies now being implemented, but because they’ve fallen victim to the most virulent misinformation campaign that American politics has ever known.

Trumpism may functionally be a cult, but people leave cults. And it’s rarely through insults or castigation that they decide to. They leave when doubt creeps in and someone meets it with patience instead of mockery.

Sometimes it feels counterintuitive to try to break bread with the people who brought such ill on us with their votes. I won’t deny it. There’s an inherent gaslighting in the notion that it falls on victims to forgive. But conversation doesn’t demand forgiveness. Forgiveness might only come with time.

Trump supporters burnt this bridge, and it may be their moral imperative to rebuild it. But I don’t believe that they will. I don’t believe they’ll accept responsibility for this rift. It’s difficult for people to admit when they’ve made a mistake.

It’s with that understanding that I try to refrain from yelling insults through a megaphone about the people who invited this turmoil. It’s not that I deny that our anger is righteous. Some fury may be unavoidable as we watch our rights erode before our very eyes. But so many of the voices that I feel I’m competing against on Substack these days I believe can be filed simply into the category of “provocateurs and profiteers.”

There are writers and purported journalists who exhibit no interest in speaking to the issues that ail us with any real pragmatism. They virtue signal incessantly about all of the wrongs we’re witnessing, but continue to taunt the aggressors imposing them. In short, they stir the pot for money. I’m convinced that some of them actively want the disease to be worse if it means that they can continue selling the “cure.”

And many of the readers here are too incensed or distracted to notice that the cure they’re buying is vitriol.

I saw a post the other day that made me smile. “I know I’m a better writer than the people who are more successful than me on here,” it said. (I’m paraphrasing.) It was blunt, and maybe a little self-aggrandizing, but it reminded me that I’m not the only one who sees what’s happening on Substack. My father warned me when I entered this profession that this conundrum is hardly unique to writers. There’s slop that sells in any industry. There will always be times when mediocrity drowns out talent, and when people acting in bad faith take away the spotlight from those who most deserve it.

Our failures on here don’t always stem from our shortcomings. Oftentimes, they owe simply to an attention economy that rewards rage over reason and flashy invective over civil debate.

It’s not because I have nothing to offer that I’m earning a fraction of the income of people who bait readers into opening their articles with titles like, “Keep Weeping You MAGA Morons,” and “Fuck Trump and All the Nazis Who Voted for Him.”

It’s because I refuse to play their game or sacrifice my voice. Virality is rarely a measure of quality, and the comparatively small reach of my political writing is no reason to stop reaching out entirely— to stop addressing the issues that affect us most deeply. I’m holding onto hope that, in time, enough people will recognize who cares about figuring out a path forward and who’s just preying on fear, anger, and disunion.

The more we let grifters define the narrative, the more we promote the disease they pretend to cure.

If you found value in this article, you can support my work on here for under $2.00 a month. It would make an enormous difference in helping me to bring you the quality writing you deserve during these times when journalism and the human voice are under attack.