Rage-bait Republicans, explained

Photo via: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In the past 10 years, the U.S. has become increasingly politically polarized. The rise in polarization has many causes, but the emergence of social media has pushed it past the limit. 

Social media has created a workforce where influencers can be paid to create almost any content they want. That can be problematic for many reasons. Most importantly, influencers commonly gain a cult-like following in which viewers will believe almost anything they say. When that is incorporated into an already hostile political environment, a niche genre of political content creation is created: “Rage-Bait Republicans.” 

Rage-bait is a social media phenomenon that describes influencers growing their platforms by posting content that elicits shock from viewers. Some Republican social media personalities have adopted this strategy. They do this by pushing radical conservative and far-right beliefs that they know will get people to watch and interact with their videos, therefore receiving more money and a bigger platform. Notable examples of these people are Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate, Pearl Davis, and Charlie Kirk. 

Recently, the digital media company Jubilee released a video titled “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?” on YouTube. This video starred Charlie Kirk, a longtime representative of the radical right, and 25 liberal college students that Jubilee recruited. The video included a series of prompts including “Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate,” “college is a scam,” “trans women are not women” and many more. Kirk stated these prompts and competitors then raced to the chair across from him for a chance to respond to the prompt. 

However, the debate was not set up for the college students to succeed. Kirk was the only person to know the prompts before going into the debate, very few people in the room had any previous debate experience and no one had told the students who they would actually be debating. 

Brad Brady, a student at UCLA and a participant in the video, offered his opinion on Kirk. “There’s a reason I think that conservatives like Charlie Kirk debate only college students, and there is a reason that probably four out of the 20 of us there had experience in debate,” Brady said. “It’s because they are purposely casting people who will make more interesting content and not more insightful discussion in debate.” 

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, and since then he has made stops all over the country on his “You’re Being Brainwashed” tours.

When Kirk is on tour, he sets up a booth with arrows pointed at him and the words “prove me wrong” written on them. During that time, students will approach a mic and debate Kirk, very similar to the setup for the viral Jubilee video. He has made himself into a professional debater. However, Kirk is rarely seen debating anyone other than college students. 

“I can’t debate factually against a media-trained professional like Charlie Kirk, who has numbers in his head even if they're from different sources,” Brady said. “He can use those in different ways, because he’s professionally trained in this area, whereas 20 college students aren’t.”

Alize Fuentes, a student at California Western School of Law and participant in the video, corroborates Brady’s view. 

“He picked out the topics so he knew them beforehand and we didn’t. We had absolutely no idea what we were going to argue about,” Fuentes said. 

Additionally, the video allegedly was edited to portray a less authentic version of Kirk. 

Amanda Agu, recent graduate of UC Berkeley and participant in the video, said, “His edit was very graceful. They edited him in a way that made him seem way more cool tempered or level headed than what he actually was.”

One of the prompts in the video was “abortion is murder and should be illegal.”After Kirk stated that abortion should be illegal with zero exceptions, participant Maren Carrere proposed a hypothetical situation in which Kirk’s 10-year-old daughter got pregnant as a result of rape. Carrere asked Kirk if his daughter would be forced to have the child, to which responded yes. In a heated moment, Carrere said, “I hope your daughter has a wonderful life and gets away from you.”

This moment has gone viral, but when editing the video, Jubilee left out a key moment. Agu, Fuentes, and Brady all separately mentioned a comment that Kirk made following Carrere’s exit from the table. Each recount of the moment was different, but they all stated that he referred to the participants as idiot teenagers who were hooked on benzodiazepines. 

Agu stated that the producers chastised the participants for the comment, but did not address the way Kirk responded at all. 

“After that, Jubilee, behind the cameras, kinda put us in check. They said ‘don’t disrespect him.’ They didn’t check him, but they made sure to check us and they told us to watch what we were saying,” Agu said. 

Additionally, Fuentes stated that she believed the producers’ beliefs aligned with Kirk’s. Another video, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” was filmed on the same day and the participants of Kirk’s video got to watch. 

“They stepped in a lot during ours, but for the Republican one, it didn’t really look like they did that a lot,” Fuentes said. 

The production for the two videos were very different, in that they made the liberals look less put together. “For [the Republicans’ video] they didn’t let everyone run up to the chair at once, whereas for ours they said it was a free-for-all, so we looked like idiots,” Fuentes said. 

The perpetuation of rage-bait Republicans can be unhealthy for society, as it pushes harmful beliefs. “It causes a public outcry for things that aren't really there,” Agu said. “For example, with things like affirmative action or DEI, these are things that people didn't really have issues with until the far right started to hype it up as something that it’s not.”

However, there are things that people can do to avoid preserving rage-bait content. 

“The longer you engage with it, the more you share it, the more you comment, or if you like it you’ll be fed more of that content later on by the algorithm,” Brady said. “The best thing we can do about this content is instead of engaging with it and sharing it with people, disengage, unfollow, don’t interact with the content, because that’s how you get it off your feed.”