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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Here's where the hope and possibly a naive hope and also one that does not want to diminish. This is what I was saying at the very beginning about long term optimism, maybe a stretch, but long term hope versus short term terror and eyes open reckoning with reality.
OK, and this is what I'm going to try to balance here, because I think Brittany's this is where we're sort of talking about the same thing, which is what is clearly what these victors are doing when I say that that they were unable to accept the defeats of the mid-20th century. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
So they are gonna come and they're gonna beat them in all the language, man, all the language. This is, again, I'm in Hegseth world, but the torture is akin to the rape. You know, we now have affirmative action for rapists in this administration, and we only hire men who've sexually assaulted people, right? This is like a job requirement in the Trump administration, right?
But think about what this has in common. The assertion of brute force- Over bodies that you want to dominate and you want to make a public show of dominating. Right. So this is rape. This is the defense of torture. This is the it's it's the attack on education.
It is declaring there are only two genders. We're going to do this from the top down, literally, and we are going to overpower you physically. We're going to assert our rights to your bodies, okay? In a million ways. You're talking about trans identities. You're talking about reproductive realities. You're talking about incarceration, death penalty, torture, right?
This is like, we are going to dominate your bodies. All right. And so that is what's happening. And I do not want when I when I say anything that is forward looking and optimistic, I do not want to take away from the brutal lived reality of this is going to be deportation, family separation, all these things in front of us now, right now.
I also want to say that Britney's, you know, the history of what happens in the middle of the 19th century is we have a very violent war. And the sort of culmination of generations worth of activism on multiple fronts over periods of well more than a century, extracting certain liberties and certain victories from a government and a system that was designed around oppressions. And then...
You have the rollback of those, the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, the violent rollback, the assertion of brute force and punitive power over the bodies that had extracted certain kinds of liberties and victories, not complete ones, but you have the violent pushing of them back into boxes. And it's not, this isn't clean. They're not clean dates, right?
They're not clean victories by any stretch. You have emancipation. You have the 19th Amendment, not until the beginning of the 20th century. And even then it's incomplete because it does not cover Black women who are already among those Black people who gained the right to vote, but couldn't because of Jim Crow, right? It's not clean, like Brittany was saying, but these are fuzzy borders.
And then out of that, that brutal reassertion of power over bodies that those at the top did not want to have participating in realms where they'd been previously excluded. Out of that comes the reassertion of that drive, that need, that fight from the bottom to say, actually, those victories that you tried to kill from the last century, and that you did, right?
Like Brittany's saying, and like what we're acknowledging. No, that's not the end of the story. You don't just get the past back without any view that there's going to be a future. And that there's going to be a future of these people at the bottom who have a will and have had a raw will. That this country began with people whose bodies were forcibly taken.
Raped, put to work, had no rights, had no voice, had no acknowledgement as full humans, could extract liberty. Horribly, horribly. That people who had no votes could extract votes. That people who had no rights to bodily autonomy could extract some legal protections for bodily autonomy. That has happened, but it's also had to happen multiple times. Right. And that's the important thing.
And so where does that situate us? It's really important. That's the long term versus the short term. It is really important to note that those women who Brittany talks about who stiffen their spines right in ways that we would prefer that we did not have to do. That the stiffening of the spines was like, nope, we have to do this process again.
But that it has been done, not just in the last century, but the century before that, and it has been taken back. And part of what I watch when I have been still, as we talked about at the beginning of this, when I have just been sitting through it, tuning some of it out, but also not really tuning it out, like...
I am watching the displays, like the victory displays, the rolling around in macho, white, masculinist, brutality, grotesque, the rolling around of people who are behaving through their, like, peacocking around their domination and... brutal possibilities. They are behaving like people who aren't scared of anything. But I believe they're behaving that way because they're terrified.
And they want the people at the bottom to think that there's no hope. They want everybody, right? They're like threatening Republican politicians, like Republican senators. It's working. They're saying Elon Musk is going to point his money cannon at you if you challenge this, you know, Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, like all these, you know, this oligarchy, broligarchy, whatever.
Like we will destroy you. We'll just destroy you. We'll destroy your political career. We'll take you out. For civilians, like there's that primary threat for actual Republican, hard right Republican politicians who would do anything to complicate their agenda. For civilians, it's much worse. We'll dox you. We'll threaten you. We'll put you in jail.
You know, like the revenge list, all that stuff, right? You can't do anything. But why are they doing that? Why are they behaving that way? A party that actually is a party and an ideology that is actually secure in its idea that is fulfilling some the will of the people isn't so scared of the people.
You know, they're trying to dominate the people because they're terrified of what the people actually want. And they're behaving like they have a mandate, which they do not have. Right? Remember, and this is not resisting the victory. I want to promise, this is not resisting the victory. But it is pointing out, they won. They really won through what was an electoral college landslide.
It is also true that they won with less than half of the electorate's support. And they're behaving like that is not the case. That's true. So think about what those dynamics mean moving forward.
Showing 121–140 of 165 · page 7 of 9
← Previous
Next →