Law and Order: "Rage Bait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, November 5 after the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Forsaken” my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order show that was even more chilling. It was called “Rage Bait” and dealt with the murder of Aaron Dressler (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.), a promising young college basketball player. Writers Scott Gold and Ajani Jackson throw us a few red herrings along the way, centered mainly around the sports betting sites that have become a bane on modern life. It seems that Aaron, a high-school star but one who was outclassed in the college game, was put in the game during the last nine minutes, with his team already comfortably ahead. But he sank a three-point shot that put his team’s victory margin above the stated odds on the gambling sites and thereby cost bettors a lot of money. Once those get resolved, however, there’s little doubt as to who the killer is: he’s Tyler Duncan (Michael Drayer), a Right-wing Internet provocateur whose schtick, under the pseudonym “Stone Freedom,” is going up to Black people on the street, calling them “chimps,” making ape noises at them, and goading them until they react to him. He uses his smartphone camera to photograph them doing this and post the footage online. Tyler’s basic defense is he isn’t a racist, he just plays one online to make money. He admits to shooting Aaron but claims he did so in self-defense because Aaron responded to his provocations by hitting him in the face.

Gold and Jackson throw us a few more curveballs, including giving Tyler a Black wife who shows up in court to defend him and having him hire a Black woman lawyer to represent him at trial. The principal witness against Tyler is Alexis Fisher (Jade Jones), a Black bodega clerk whose testimony is raked over the coals by Tyler’s lawyer, who discredits her by pointing out that she originally told the police that the insulting word Tyler had used towards Aaron was “chump” and she only later changed that to “chimp.” Meanwhile, the audience section in the courtroom is being packed by Right-wing podcaster Tom Phillips (John Romano) and his acolytes, who loudly demonstrate every time a ruling goes against Tyler that he’s being made into a martyr for his Right-wing racist views. Things seem headed towards an acquittal for Tyler until assistant prosecutor Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) stumbles onto a video recording, outtakes from an appearance Tyler made on Phillips’s podcast weeks before Aaron’s murder, in which Tyler said that actually killing a Black person on the street would be the ultimate thrill of his life. By playing that in court (presumably over the objections of Tyler’s Black woman attorney), prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) gets his conviction. This Law and Order is unexpectedly timely given how the midterm elections turned out and Donald Trump’s response to his defeat by appointing his most rabidly prejudiced aide, Stephen Miller, to be his new White House chief of staff. It’s more evidence that the racism and the cruelty that have driven Trump’s immigration policies from day one – beginning in his first term as President and even more so in this one – are alive and all too well in the current governance of our country.