the edit, vol. 44
the rage economy
Fewer than ten transgender athletes compete among the roughly 510,000 who participate in NCAA sports. This figure comes not from a civil rights organization but from NCAA President Charlie Baker, who offered it in congressional testimony in late 2024 as factual context for the policy debate consuming his sport. Ten athletes among five hundred and ten thousand is a ratio of 0.002 percent — a number so small it is genuinely difficult to visualize.
Congress has passed three pieces of legislation addressing transgender participation in women's sports since January 2025. It has not passed legislation on Medicaid funding, prescription drug pricing, housing costs, or the constitutional questions raised by a war started without a congressional vote. It has not scheduled a single floor vote on the Stop Insider Trading Act, which has been introduced repeatedly and died in committee each time, including during the weeks when trading records showed suspicious spikes in call options immediately before a presidential Truth Social post moved markets by twelve percent in a single day.
The gap between what consumes legislative attention and what affects the largest number of lives is not accidental. It is the product of a specific and profitable political economy — one that has learned, over decades, that outrage at small and vivid threats generates more engagement, more donations, and more electoral turnout than the slow work of addressing large and diffuse ones. The rage is not incidental to the politics. The rage is the product.
how the product is made
Rage, as a political product, has specific manufacturing requirements. It needs a threat that is visceral rather than abstract, visible rather than statistical, and morally legible to its audience without requiring much prior knowledge. The threat should be small enough that most people never encounter it personally — which makes it easy to inflate — and emotionally charged enough that the inflation feels justified. It should involve bodies, children, or both whenever possible. It should be resistant to resolution, because a resolved problem stops generating engagement.
Trans athletes in women's sports meet all of these criteria. The threat is visceral — it involves physical bodies, physical competition, and the perceived violation of a category most people understand intuitively. It involves children and young women. It generates powerful moral intuitions on both sides, which means it remains perpetually unresolved and perpetually available as a source of conflict. And because the actual numbers are so small, the threat can be scaled to whatever size the media environment requires without any individual voter being able to independently verify whether the scaling is accurate.
The Fox News coverage of transgender athletes between 2023 and 2026 ran to more than 1,200 segments. In the same period, Fox ran fewer than 200 segments on congressional stock trading — a practice that affects every American investor and has generated documented evidence of trades timed to nonpublic information about market-moving policy decisions. The asymmetry is not a programming oversight. Transgender athletes generate higher engagement metrics, stronger emotional responses, and more reliable audience retention than securities law violations. The algorithm knows this. The programmers know this. The executives know this.
The business model of political media is built on the discovery that fear and disgust are more reliable drivers of engagement than hope or satisfaction. A viewer who is frightened stays on the channel. A donor who is outraged gives more. A voter who believes their community is under siege shows up at higher rates than a voter who feels things are basically fine. The political consultants who figured this out in the 1990s changed American politics permanently, and the social media companies that discovered the same dynamics in the 2010s scaled the model to a degree that would have been unimaginable to Lee Atwater.
what the distraction conceals
On April 2, 2025, President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on goods from nearly ninety countries, sending the S&P 500 into its largest three-day drop since World War II. On April 9, at 9:37 in the morning, he posted on Truth Social: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT." Hours later, the administration announced a ninety-day pause on most of the tariffs. The Nasdaq surged 12.2 percent in a single day — its second-largest single-day gain in more than two decades.
Trading records reviewed by the House Financial Services Committee showed a precipitous spike in the purchase of call options approximately ten minutes before the Truth Social post. More than a dozen executive branch employees and congressional aides had sold stocks between the initial tariff announcement and the pause. The Democratic members of the committee, joined by the Republican chairman, sent a letter requesting that every House member immediately file their trading reports for the relevant window. Speaker Johnson did not act on the request. The Stop Insider Trading Act did not come to a floor vote.
The president's financial disclosure, filed July 1, ran to 927 pages and revealed at least $2.2 billion in personal business income during his first year back in office. Approximately $636 million came from a memecoin he launched days before his inauguration, promoted repeatedly on Truth Social throughout his term, and collected royalties on through a structure that generated income for him whether the price rose or fell. A Nansen analysis published the same day showed that 988,905 buyers of that token had lost a combined $3.81 billion. The Senate committee that subpoenaed Anthony Fauci over allegations that he used NIH employees to apply for cash prizes has not called a single hearing on any of this.
The United Arab Emirates — a country with active diplomatic interests in U.S. policy across the Middle East — quietly purchased nearly half of World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture co-founded by the president's sons and the sons of his lead Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. This occurred while the administration was negotiating the Iran ceasefire framework, brokering deals across the Gulf region, and making policy decisions that directly affected UAE interests. No congressional committee has convened a hearing on this. The coverage it received was a fraction of the coverage devoted to Lia Thomas.
the science they are dismantling while benefiting from
Every Republican senator who questioned Anthony Fauci this week has received at least one vaccine developed or funded through the NIH research programs whose budget they have supported cutting. Several of them are alive because of cardiovascular medications whose development was funded through NIH grants. The HIV treatment protocols that have transformed AIDS from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic condition — one of the most significant medical achievements of the twentieth century, developed substantially under Fauci's leadership at NIAID — have extended the lives of tens of millions of people globally, including people in the constituencies of every senator who sat at that dais.
Science is not a political position. It is a method — an organized, self-correcting process for generating reliable knowledge about the physical world. The institutions that house that method — the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, the network of research universities whose work those agencies fund — are imperfect, as all human institutions are. They made real errors during the pandemic. Those errors deserve genuine reckoning and genuine institutional reform. What they do not deserve, and what the current political environment cannot accurately claim to provide, is the kind of reckoning that consists of subpoenaing scientists while leaving the people who manipulated markets around tariff announcements entirely undisturbed.
The NIH's budget has been cut by 27 percent in real terms since 2023. Grant cancellations have disproportionately targeted research on pandemic preparedness, infectious disease, and topics deemed politically sensitive. Scientists who have spent careers building research programs are leaving for positions in Europe and Canada at rates that institutions describe as alarming. The human capital losses compound in ways that do not appear in any single budget line: a researcher who leaves takes their networks, their data, their graduate students, and the institutional knowledge embedded in their laboratory. Rebuilding that capacity, when the political environment eventually shifts, will take a generation.
Meanwhile, the Ebola outbreak in the DRC is spreading into Uganda with no functional U.S.-led global health response. Measles has killed fourteen Americans — the first deaths from that disease in more than two decades, in a country that declared measles eliminated in 2000, driven by vaccination rates that have fallen below the threshold required for herd immunity. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spent two decades publicly questioning vaccine safety, now oversees the agencies responsible for the vaccine schedule. This is what institutional dismantling looks like when it completes.
the mechanics of the misdirection
The political logic of the rage economy requires the enemy to be simultaneously dangerous and defeatable. A threat that is too powerful produces despair rather than mobilization. A threat that is too small fails to justify the emotional investment required. The ideal enemy is one that can be defeated in the telling — where the audience can feel the satisfaction of righteous opposition — while remaining available as a source of future conflict, because the underlying conditions that supposedly produce it are never actually addressed.
Trans athletes are nearly perfect for this purpose. The policy responses — banning them from competition, requiring birth certificate verification, establishing biological sex testing protocols — are simple enough to be enacted and visible enough to feel like victories. But because the underlying social reality they claim to address (gender transition) is not going away, the victories never resolve the conflict. New cases emerge. New legislation is required. New hearings are held. The audience remains mobilized and the donations keep arriving.
Congressional stock trading is nearly the opposite of a good rage economy enemy. The harm is diffuse and statistical — affecting every investor through market distortion rather than any specific individual through a visible act. The policy response — banning members from trading individual stocks, as multiple bipartisan bills have proposed — is simple in principle but politically costly to enact, because the people who would vote to enact it are the same people whose behavior it would constrain. The conflict does not self-perpetuate in the way the trans athlete debate does, because a law banning the practice would genuinely resolve it. And a resolved problem stops generating donations.
This is the structural reason that outrage and corruption tend to coexist rather than compete. The outrage does not exist despite the corruption. It exists alongside the corruption, providing the emotional and attentional cover that makes the corruption possible. When the public's finite attention is consumed by ten transgender athletes, it is not available for the trading records that show suspicious spikes in call options ten minutes before a presidential social media post moved the market by twelve percent.
what rage costs the people who consume it
The people who are most consistently sold the rage economy's products are not the wealthy or the powerful. They are ordinary Americans — working-class voters in particular — who are told, repeatedly and with great emotional force, that the primary threat to their lives and communities comes from a small and specific group of people who can be identified, opposed, and defeated through political participation. The trans athlete. The undocumented immigrant. The coastal elite. The woke corporation. The deep state scientist.
These enemies have something in common: they are not the forces that have most materially shaped the economic circumstances of the people being asked to fear them. The working-class voter whose wages have stagnated for thirty years, whose community has lost its hospital, whose children cannot afford housing, whose retirement savings were disrupted by a market that moved twelve percent in a single day based on a social media post — that voter's material circumstances were not produced by transgender athletes in women's sports. They were produced by policy choices about taxation, labor law, healthcare financing, housing regulation, and financial oversight that were made by people who were, in many cases, simultaneously managing their own investment portfolios based on information the public did not have.
The rage economy's deepest function is to route genuine economic grievance away from the people and structures that generated it and toward targets that are vivid, emotionally available, and — conveniently — unable to respond through the same media channels. A transgender teenager cannot buy advertising time on Fox News. A pharmaceutical company can. An undocumented worker cannot fund a super PAC. A hedge fund can. The asymmetry in who can manufacture and distribute rage is not incidental to who benefits from its consequences.
The Fauci hearing this week was a performance. It performed the conclusion that public health institutions are corrupt, that their scientists cannot be trusted, and that the people who ran them during the pandemic should be held accountable. That performance is available for free on YouTube and will generate millions of views, thousands of small donations, and significant earned media across the networks that have spent three years building the audience for it.
The trading records showing suspicious spikes in call options before a presidential Truth Social post are available in a letter from the House Financial Services Committee, published in February. They have generated a fraction of that coverage.
Rage is a product. Like all products, it is made by people who profit from its sale. The question worth asking is not whether the product is real — the emotions it generates are entirely real — but who benefits from keeping it in production, and what they are able to do while it occupies our attention.
