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
Speaking of my own industry, which I feel a little alienated from right now, more than a little alienated from right now. especially around the way the political commentary is working.
And there are some examples about media caving, like talk about a news industry making it easier for these kinds of scare tactics to work and depress any kind of even storytelling, like accurate storytelling is the sort of caving on these lawsuits, making it so that these people can sue media organizations. Anyway, that's a whole other story.
But I also want to talk about just the nature of how the media tends to cover Like this is a political story, you know, because we know that there's a tendency for political media to treat everything as a distant game, a horse race, literally, whether we're in an election cycle or not, like a who's winning, who's losing every day.
And I want to speak to what Brittany just said about these 75 year cycles, right? You know, one of these facts that gets lost that there's only one person who lived from 1848 to vote, like who was at the Seneca Falls Convention. Oh, wow. There's one person. who was still alive to cast a vote, one woman who was alive to cast a vote after the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
She was a child who was at Seneca Falls. I had her name and I don't have it now, but think about what that means generationally, right? And so you're gonna see, I already, resistance has collapsed, right? This is one of my least favorite things happening in the media right now is this notion, we're sitting here talking about pausing, resting, sitting still, listening, watching, right?
Not behaving the way we did, but I wanna be real clear about something. The storyline that the resistance failed last time, first of all, what is the resistance? Is it the guys like in the Mueller time t-shirts or is it people who were running for office and fundamentally changed the Democratic Party?
Honestly, like it's the most crucial infusion of new blood and a new generation into the Democratic Party of our lifetimes, which is... process that needs to continue and is continuing. We've seen, you know, Run for Something, which is the tremendous organization that trains first-time candidates to run for office, had record number of signups in the weeks after the election in November.
So this idea that there's just like a deadness and a passivity is not accurate. Secondly, this question of the resistance failed, is it because Trump wasn't put in jail? Because he wasn't impeached? Because the things, the systems that certain people believed were gonna save them in fact didn't save them? Okay, but that's different from saying that,
resistance in his first administration failed because during his first administration, you had a record-breaking 2018 where you did have this infusion of new energy, where you had AOC, you had the squad. It changed the face of American politics and was the biggest blue wave since the Nixon administration.
That same year, you had the defeat of the attempt to overturn the ACA, which was because people on the ground went and terrified their local Republican representatives and got them to vote against ACA repeal. You had Me Too, in which really powerful, abusive people lost their jobs and their continued ability to abuse with impunity. You have seen...
One abortion referendum after another be won by the forces that these guys want to suppress. And yet they have won, including in red states. So I want to first of all, tell everybody to question this notion that the resistance didn't work last year, like their last time around. That's not a true story. Secondly,
with that view to that 75-year cycle, right, that we are talking in centuries about forward motion and pushback and forward motion and pushback. I want everybody listening to question every time they hear political media tell them that this is just not the same as last time. There's not the same spirit of resistance, okay? This is not a problem that is going to be solved
this week with a march, and the fact that this is not a problem that's gonna be solved because a person is yelling, especially when the other thing you're telling us is that the last time when people yelled, it didn't do anything, right? So these are part of the reason that you pause, that you take a breath, that you breathe into the stretch. is to prepare for something far longer term.
Work that you can't have the expectation is going to be finished in a week or this term or this administration or this lifetime, you know? But that doesn't mean that you're like, this is the next generation's problem either. And so it's that balancing of how do you think about time and work and effort and who's in coalition with you and what is the work to be done together.
And let me put in a plug for InWords too. InWords. Because, I mean, and this is, you know, Brittany and I basically were on a rage tour during the last administration. We both had books about women's rage. Yes. And we often were speaking together. And I think both of us got asked a lot. Versions of... What can I do?
Maybe I got it more because often white women were my audience and a lot of them were newer to wanting to do something to begin with. And so it was like, what can I do? I'm not a protest person or what can I do? And a thing I used to say to them that this conversation has reminded me of is. is like, there is not one model at all. And it's not just like, there's not a comforting thing.
This is an energizing thing. Fuck no, there's no one model. If everybody just liked to go to protests and felt that we wouldn't get anything done. You don't get anything done by just protesting, right? And if everybody just wanted to run for office, that would, right? So you should think well beyond it might be
finding a social circle that brings you in contact with new people with whom you're not going there to secretly infiltrate it to then talk about politics. But in fact, if you find that you share interests and humanity, it becomes... more available to extend through social connection, expand your own personal moral universe, right?
And have conversations that might not be had otherwise, whether it's crocheting or gardening or whatever. But there's also this inward thing that we've touched on before. what about getting the kinds of education that they would prefer that we not get? So a thing I used to regularly tell people who were like, I don't know, I'm not good with people. I don't knock doors.
And it's like, go to a library. Right. Go find some of this history. In my book, I wrote a ton about history that I did not know as a very expensively educated person with a strong background in history and feminism and anti-racism. There is history.
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