Rebecca Traister
speaker
165 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 Mar
Rebecca Traister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, which is that I started I had just like water coming out of my eyes. It wasn't crying. I can't describe it. I thought it was the cold. It's the winter. I was on a plane. It was dry. But like I was going into the Senate offices and like sort of completely just being like, hi, hi, sorry, I have allergies or something. I don't know what was happening, but like I was in a steady state of.
having wet eyes and tears rolling down my cheeks, but I was not emotionally crying. And then when I came back, so I went that first week, I wrote a story, sort of anticipatory, what are the Democrats going to do, like a Beltway story.
And then I went back and I had to sit through the confirmation hearing with Pete Hegseth, where a lot of this stuff about masculinity, strength, weakness, top down, bottom up, these things that we're talking about began to rear their heads.
And it was an incredibly, it was more than four hours of listening to just this incredible power play of getting this manifestly incompetent, dangerous, terrifying, menacing man through via a lot of communicative political strategizing around menace and around threat and around like that was happening both inside the room and outside the room. And it was
deeply unpleasant and afterwards there was a young reporter who was in the room with me who was clearly shaken and we talked a little bit and then on the on the flight home which was the next day i just started to cry on the flight for no reason there was not a conversation that preceded it i was just on a plane to go back to my house and i cried for the hour and 15 minutes that we were in flight with this poor guy next to me like what's happening with this lady
So anyway, there's a lot of things that I just can't stop thinking about. And I don't know if some of my tears come from my own frustration at not being able to untangle them.
I don't want to sort of force this question on Brittany, but Brittany's work in particular, her academic work about the generation, she's one of the first people whose work I read who made me think about in real time what it is like to be born in a period where your trajectory is backward.
Because we always, we tell a very neat story about the United States in forward motion in which we have just gotten... freer and more equal and better and things have gotten better and the arc of the moral universe has bent toward justice. But we lose so much when we don't look at the periods where in fact things have moved exactly backwards.
And Britney's academic work, which is very tied to, but distinct from her contemporary political commentary, Traces the generation of black women who were born in an era and whose lifetimes were by the time they were adults, they had fewer rights and freedoms than when they were born.
And so I think of that as like a period that is analogous to where we are right now in a very real and meaningful way. Yeah.
But this is what you just described that the failure I want to I want to take this. I hope I can make this make sense. What you just described about the resistance to pretending that this thing hasn't happened to being like, no, that can't have happened. I would say that that describes exactly where our current victors, right? The American right.
I don't even want to talk about this in partisan terms, Republicans and Democrats. I want to talk about like the American right, the ascendant, like backlash, white supremacist, hetero masculinity, blah, blah, blah, right? That whole thing, the punitive, whatever. What you just described, which was the refusing to acknowledge the victories and just complaining, whining, this was unfair.
That actually describes, I mean, we could do this on any kind of scale, the last 50 to 70 years of the American right. And everything that I heard in that Hegseth room that I hear is actually... just bitching and moaning about losses that occurred in the middle of the last century that they have never gotten over. And then they haven't actually learned how to do real leadership, right?
From like, whatever you want to talk about, an actual conservative point of view, a fiscally conservative point of view, even a socially conservative point of view that isn't just mired in These people can't have won inclusion in our power. The redistribution of power to people besides a certain set of wealthy, white, mostly male, right? Like that is unacceptable to us.
And we are whining about it. And I sat there through those hearings, through the hearing last week. And just, I think that stands in for a lot of the other stuff, listening to the sort of platform that these people have come to their victory on. Okay. And it is, it is not future leadership. It is not innovation. It is fury at battles that were lost several generations ago.
And that's one of the things I keep thinking about as they, you know, I listened last week to stuff about how this new it was specific to the candidate who's going to be our secretary of defense, but it was also obviously more broadly about how they want to present. I heard about a warrior ethos. There are no more soldiers.
There are war fighters about, and like the entire argument was for this question of whether this person was going to be a qualified secretary of defense where there was no affirmative argument made about him. Truly like you can, you know, You could look at somebody like Brett Kavanaugh, who should never have been confirmed to the Supreme Court and been like, well, at least he understands law.
I mean, you know, like badly. Like there's no like Pete Hegsath. Well, he's really good at this. There's literally no argument for him. And so the argument that was being made was that he loved Jesus and that he hated DEI. And that was the entirety of his confirmation hearing.
But that was really instructive because it was every argument that was made for this guy was actually an argument against inclusion, against racial equality, against gender equality, against ways of looking at the world that had in any way diminished the power of the kind of person who'd had power throughout this country's history.
And so that thing that you just described about the inability to acknowledge the victor, I think begins... here with the right. And they have just extracted a victory and a real victory. And I want to also heed your advice and say, right, they won. And I think that's sort of what we're talking about, which is like, let's sit and look.
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