Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister is an award-winning writer covering women in politics and media, a best-selling author and one of Sophia’s idols!

Rebecca joins Sophia to discuss the shifting ideas of power distribution, the clash we are in the middle of now, what preceded the rise of Donald Trump, the preventable death of a pregnant teen in Texas because of the state's abortion ban, and the Republicans' plan to undermine workplace protections.

Rebecca is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry," "All the Single Ladies," and "Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger." For more information on Rebecca and her work, visit rebeccatraister.com. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in progress. Hello friends, today,
I am absolutely geeking out because we are joined by

(00:21):
one of my favorite writers and researchers of all time,
Rebecca Traster, is here with us today. Tracer's first book,
the nonfiction Big Girls Don't Cry. The Election That Changed
Everything for American Women, came out in twenty ten and
was a New York Times Notable book. Her second nonfiction book,
All the Single Ladies, Unmarried Women and the Rise of

(00:42):
an Independent Nation in twenty sixteen, became a New York
Times bestseller and is one of the most well researched,
deeply informative examinations of women's bids for independence and power
spanning centuries. In twenty eighteen, Tracer published another book, Good
and Mad, The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, which I

(01:04):
think is hands down one of the best books I
have ever read. And in addition to being an award
winning writer covering women, politics, media, and entertainment from a
feminist perspective, Traster is a mother. She is married to
a public defender. She is an incredible human who really
has perspectives on justice and equity and how we all

(01:27):
participate in a society that's built for everyone that I
am so so grateful for. And today I'm going to
ask her a million questions about what she thinks is
going to happen next week, and how no matter what happens,
we can continue organizing and building power to build a
more equitable society, especially for US ladies. Let's hear from

(01:50):
Rebecca Chaster. I am so amped to have you here.
I am an enormous fan of your work. I so
appreciate the way that you make research feel sexy and

(02:13):
inspiring and like something people want to do. I don't
think that that is incredibly common, and so thank you
and your twenty eleven book, Big Girls Don't Cry investigated
the impact of the two thousand and eight election on
American politics and women and feminism, and you have continued

(02:33):
that trend, obviously with the book in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
I'm wondering if you can.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Give folks a little bit of the landscape of this.
You know, when you think about the last close to
twenty years now of your research, what do you see?
How would you explain our current political moment with the
thing that tends to be missing historical context for the
folks at home.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Your question is terrific.

Speaker 4 (03:01):
I've been thinking so much about it in these days
and weeks as we get closer to this like really
truly existential election, and there's sort of a I think
you know, people are like, Oh, they tell us it's
the most important election every election. Yes, that's true, because
it is. There isn't an election that's not important. But

(03:24):
what we are looking at now is, and I'm going
to return to the basis of your question in part
with this answer, we are looking at a choice between
a candidate and actually what his party has become that
wants to actually destroy the very mechanisms of not only democracy,

(03:45):
but like how the country works, what protections are in
place for people, how the country was built around at
least the idealized possibility of delivering resources and stability. I
don't want to pretend we've ever completely followed through on
that right or provided what everybody needs. But you know,
we're talking about breaking healthcare systems, breaking legal systems, breaking

(04:09):
the free press, breaking the way that that Congress works, right,
and you've seen it. That's not hyperbole, right, it's not hyperbole.
Even stretching back to before Trump himself, when you had
a Supreme Court seat that should have been filled by
the sitting president stolen as part of an effort to
stack a Supreme Court, a court that has successfully followed

(04:32):
through on a lot of right wing aims, including overturning
Roe v. Wade, gutting affirmative action, creating like enormous labor
and environmental problems. Why is this all happening now? Why
are we in the middle of it? Why are we
living through this? This is not the kinds of story
about the United States that many of our parents or
grandparents told. And so that gets back to your question
about the stuff that I've written about. It's now been

(04:55):
when I started doing the work of covering women in
politics and media, and I didn't initially set out to
be like a femin political reporter at all.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
I didn't even set out to be a journalist. And
I came of age.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
I'm in my late forties now, and I came of
age at a time in the nineties when feminism when
there was a like still a very strong anti feminist
backlash that had happened after the sort of second wave
nineteen seventies feminist what we call the Women's movement, alongside,
of course the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement.
There had been this very conservative Reagan Bush era anti
feminist freeze, and that's what I grew up in. And

(05:28):
when I started covering the world from a feminist perspective,
I had no idea I would be writing about politics.
In fact, my first few campaigns that I had to
write political coverage of, even from a feminist perspective, I
was writing about daughters and mothers. And it wasn't until
you know, like the wives of the candidates, meet Teresa
Hines Kerry, who was John Carey's wife, who was fascinating.

(05:48):
But it wasn't until the two thousand and eight election
when suddenly, on major tickets you had candidates who were
not like presidential candidates we've seen before. There was Barack
Obama obviously, who won that election, won that primary, and
his remarkable wife, Michelle Obama, who is still very central

(06:12):
to this election. I just wrote a piece about a
speech she gave last week. Yes, Hillary Clinton, John McCain,
the Republican candidate for president, nominated Sarah Palin. There were
all these issues that had never had this kind of
focused before in a presidential context, around gender, around race,
around class which was certainly a lot of the conversation
around Palin herself. Now, the people at the top of

(06:34):
the ticket aren't the whole story. It's also what that
says about how the country's changing and making space for
people in places where they're different kinds of people, where
historically there hadn't been space for those kinds of people.
So the idea that we somehow fix things with the
civil rights movement, fixed things with a women's movement is
all a little bit mythical. Things change, they're very disruptive.

(06:56):
Suddenly there's room for people to have econo social sexual
powers that they hadn't that hadn't previously been on offer
for them. But that takes a lot of time in
many generations of progress. And I think what's happened in
the past twenty years politically and socially is you've seen
all of these kinds of promises of those mid twentieth
century social movements may manifest so that you actually have

(07:20):
people who are not straight white men doing everything from
running for president, winning a presidency, securing major party nominations,
making up more of our elected bodies like in federal
congressional level, and.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Also in our state and local governments.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
You see more people who are not white men running corporations.
You see more people who are not straight and white
men having all different kinds of family configurations, you know,
marriage equality and people postponing. I had a second book
that was about changing marriage patterns in the United States.
That's a huge part of it too. It's not just
the people who are running for president. It's and think

(07:59):
about and how much of that is being discussed in
this presidential context where JD. Vance is going nuts on
child ass cat ladies right. Marriage patterns were changing. The
ways that we understood gender and race and what categories
people were in were really in flux, not just on
a presidential stage, but in our homes, in our lives.
You look at me too, the sort of saying and

(08:21):
that had been building for years, going back to Anita Hill,
going back to the moment that we first understood what
sexual harassment was, which was really coming out of the
seventies and eighties. It takes time for these things to change,
and then they can happen in really eruptive ways that
are disruptive and then to and make people uncomfortable because
they're not familiar. And some of that is natural then

(08:43):
what you get and what we are living through and
are living with and are on the brink of being.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Ruled by is this incredible?

Speaker 4 (08:51):
That discomfort and the people who are discomfited, the people
who feel like I don't understand how this works.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
I don't understand what lives are supposed to be like if.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
They're not sorted along these hierarchies of power and resources.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
This makes me uncomfortable. Am I losing something?

Speaker 4 (09:05):
A lot of that begins to coalesce around a political movement,
and you see the rise of a hardcore right that
precedes Donald Trump, the Tea Party. Sarah Palin was a
part of that. Actually, even as a female candidate. Right,
these things aren't easy. You don't just draw clear lines
around people's identity, and it builds and builds, And it

(09:26):
was the Tea Party that really started making the sort
of most recent aggressive push, for example, against reproductive healthcare,
voting again and again and again to defund plant parenthood.
Even when they didn't succeed, they were building this force
and they were taking over with this very hard right rhetoric.
And then you see the rise of Donald Trump, who

(09:47):
comes to power on a racist birtherism argument about, you know,
the idea that Barack Obama's presidency is somehow illegitimate, that
he wasn't born here, that he's not a real American.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
That takes us.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
There's a direct straight line and from the rally, the
horrible rally that just happened last week in at Madison
Square Garden, where Trump's advisor Stephen Miller says America for Americans,
and you have a Republican convention where people are holding
up signs that say mass deportation. Now it's this incredible, punitive, violent,
We've seen the violence.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
This is the January sixth.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
Backlash response, desire to put down those changes in terms
of who can participate in new ways. And so that
is the I mean, I don't know, that's probably I
don't know if that's the answer you were looking for
or not. But that's the way that I see these
past twenty years in which I have been writing writing
about power. You know, at first, I think I would
have said I was just a feminist journalist and then

(10:44):
but I didn't have any kind of race or class analysis.
When I first started writing about this stuff. I was
not well.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
Schooled in it.

Speaker 4 (10:51):
Increasingly, I think of what I write about as power
and shifting ideas of who's allowed to have power, who's
allowed to have certain kinds of authority and voices, and
that is it is changing all around us, and we
can see it from the people at the top of
the systems to the way that many of us live
our lives now, which is very different from how our
parents or grandparents might have structured their lives. But those changes,

(11:13):
which for the most part imperfectly get us in just
closer to something a little more equal than what the
country than the power distributions the country was founded on
and built around, also provoke this violent resistance, and that

(11:33):
is the clash that we're in the middle of right now.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
It is like, you know, epic battle, and it won't
be one or loss.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
Like there's a huge step, a huge, huge, necessary step
in terms of the election on Tuesday, yes, but it's
not as though if one party wins that's the end
of this battle. This is going to be the rest
of all of our lives, no matter who wins.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
And now a word from our sponsors who make this
show possible, Well, when you think about, you know, the
sorts of violence that people dealt with generations ago, you know,

(12:24):
klu Klux Klan violence, the Jim Crow South like these
those things were born out of the rage and the
backlash against emancipation. Exactly exactly I think people need to understand,
particularly in this moment where so many people want to.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
See change happen immediately.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
For example, with the economy, you know, people will say, well,
I was better off in twenty sixteen, and it's like, well, yeah,
twenty sixteen, you had Barack Obama's economy. He spent eight
years rescuing America from a Republican recession. If you study
the data on the economy, That's pretty much been the
story with presidencies since the you know, mid nineteen sixties.

(13:05):
Democrats rescue us from the debt that Republicans get us into.
So the idea that they're better, that Republicans are better
for the economy is actually a farce.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
And the reason I.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Bring up the economy is because a lot of people
love to say to two women talking about equality in
America that we're on our moral high horse and that
you know, what you've really got to focus on is
how people are paying their bills, and then you can
talk about your feelings. And I'm like, well, actually it's
all connected. One of the things that I find fascinating,
you know about what you're talking about, what you've been
studying for the last twenty years, the shifts in power

(13:38):
is how unabashed about the power grabs the right is.
When Mitch McConnell brags that his forty year plan to
defund public education and to make people more radically right
wing is working. I think it's pretty wild that he'd
say it out loud.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
When JD.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Vance goes after childless cat ladies and then tries to
say it's a joke, it's.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
It's not a joke.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
It's a palatable way for him to sell his idea,
which actually, for our friends at home, as Rebecca as
an expert on is about ending women's autonomy, not just
around abortion, but even ending no fault divorce. Yes, and
to be clear, prior to no fault divorce existing, the
rates of women being killed by their domestic partners and
husbands was exponentially higher than it is today. No fault

(14:22):
divorce has actually saved women and children's lives, and they
want to end it so we can't get out of
terrible marriages, abusive marriages, so that they can claim a
statistical win on how many people are staying married, no
matter what those marriages look like within the four walls
of their home. So we have to understand that these
aren't just gotcha's and political points scoring with inappropriate quote

(14:46):
unquote jokes on Twitter. But this really is a battle
for who gets to survive, because when we desire power
and equality, it's not to kill men, it's not to
kill right wingers, but when they didn't demand power over us,
and when they deny our equality, we often die.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
And that's very literal, and I think that, I mean,
I have been whole acts in the past couple of
days by the couple of stories that have been reported
out of Texas.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
And it's not surprised. It's just horror and grief.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
You know, today this morning, there's as the morning that
we're recording this, there was a story about a teenager
who was denied medical care and went to three emergency
rooms and had her mother with her and died. And
and yesterday was a story about a woman who couldn't

(15:46):
get because of the abortion laws in Texas, could not
get the care she needed and died of sepsis.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
And this is not you know, so the.

Speaker 4 (15:58):
Death that you're talking about literal, the suffering, the pain,
the violence, the economic hardship. Right.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
You talked about the economy.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
For years when I was younger, political analysts separated reproductive
healthcare into this category that was like, you know, culture wars,
as if it were you know, without understanding that repredictive
justice is entirely tied up with how many of us

(16:32):
experience the economy in our homes, questions of whether, if
and under what circumstances we have children, whether there are
benefits in place. I mean, when people talk about the
economy under Biden versus under Trump, I think people Joe
Biden's administration, which included some of the best economic policy

(16:52):
of my lifetime and the best And I was not
I have never been a huge Joe Biden person, right,
and my politics actually are to the left of his.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Decades.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
But he actually hired a group of progressive economists who
you know, the child tax.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Credit, which slashed child's poverty.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
By over fifty percent.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Over fifty percent.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
The opposition that bleets about, you know, oh the bad economy. No,
under Joe Biden, child poverty was cut in half. That is,
that's in households, that's families.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yes, And what people forget about this is again, Biden
was able to bring us back from the worst economic
devastation in one hundred years without triggering a recession, which
even the most progressive economists said was impossible, and he did.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
We thought it was impossible, and he did it. And
he did it.

Speaker 4 (17:44):
By infusing money, giving money to people.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yes, and everyone who's saying, well, but I was better
off in twenty seventeen with my taxes than I am now,
I would just like to remind everyone that that was
still Obama's tax policy for the.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
First couple of years of Donald Trump's presidency.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
And when Donald Trump passed his tax cuts for the wealthy,
and suddenly your taxes went up. And now you think
that's Joe Biden's fault because he's currently the president.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Donald Trump's tax policy.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
Is in law until next year, until twenty twenty five,
so we are currently living with.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Trump's tax policy.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
And despite that, Joe Biden was able to cut child
poverty in half, despite that, he was able to pass
the infrastructure bill, despite that, he was able to pass
the American Rescue Plan and not trigger a recession.

Speaker 4 (18:30):
And the student loan forgiveness that Billy happened under Joe Biden. Again,
sometimes when we talk in numbers, I don't think people,
because what we're always told by political pundits who want
us to imagine an average voter that, oh, you know,
the average voters I know in my life are like
I had tens of thousands of dollars of student debt

(18:53):
that had been hanging over my head for decades, and
it's given. It changed the daily economic law lives of
lots and lots of regular people. And when we talk
when when Kamala Harris talks about the things that she
would like to do, things that could not get done
under Biden, even though they tried, for example, around care policy,

(19:15):
you know, making it more affordable for Americans and their
pocketbook issues, to care for elder family members, to have
paid leave, to be able to afford child care.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
These are all tied in.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
Again to these questions around reproductive health, among other things,
What can we afford? What sheep can our families take
should we want to have them? What kinds of costs
are we going to incur when we think about childcare,
When when we think about access to good education, when
we think about access to health care for ourselves and
for the children who will eventually grow. You know, these

(19:55):
are all economic questions and they're all tied together, and
you are right that the thing at I would say
that a thing that has changed in the in since
Obama has become president, since Obama became president, I think,
and I think it's there's no more sophisticated answer than that, like,

(20:15):
there was an enormous racist backlash to Obama's ascension, and
that it came hand in hand with a misogynistic backlash
to the fact, you know, the fact that there were
so many women in play, you know, Clinton as the
presumed successor to Obama.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
Like all of this was happening, there was.

Speaker 4 (20:32):
This period in which there was a story that people
could tell about how non white, non male people were
gobbling up shares that they hadn't previously had, thus depriving others,
and it spurred a part of this intense and very
openly racist and sexist backlash. And I think that openness

(20:55):
is something that has changed in the years after the
Civil rights movement and the Women's movement. I think that
a Republican party actually wanted a lot of the same
things Ronald Reagan, you know, vilified welfare moms and and
and by the way, Democrats including Bill you know, Bill Clinton,
gutted welfare. There was this a lot of the policies

(21:18):
around the economy certainly had an.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Impact that was.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
That was particularly acute for women, for people of color.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
You know, that was all true, but people were polite
about it.

Speaker 4 (21:38):
People tried to pretend that that was not that was
not a motivating factor, that it was that that racism
and misogyny, disregard and resent for and resentment of people
who were not the kind of people who historically had
been in charge and been the beneficiaries of so many
rights and resources.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Right.

Speaker 4 (22:00):
They tried to pretend that it wasn't about that this
was just about sensible government or what you know, and
that has fallen away the pretense so that that's how
you get and it's not.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
It's building.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
It still has the capacity to shock the Madison Square Garden.
The horrifying jokes about Puerto Ricans, black people, Jews, Palestinians,
accompanied by stuff like Stephen you know, that's oh, it's
a comedian. But you had Steven Miller shouting Americas for Americans.
You had Rudy Giuliani talking about Palestinians, as you know,

(22:34):
born within at two years old, taught to kill people,
I mean, horrifying the humanizing language.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
And by the way, whether it's Rudy Giuliani or the
quote unquote comedian, I want to be very clear with
people at home. When you speak at an event with
a presidential candidate, every word that comes out of your
mouth is vetted and approved. It's on a teleprompter, right.
Those things were approved and co signed by that campaign.
And one of the things that I feel like I
have to up with you that I find so disturbing

(23:01):
that hasn't even made the news because the Nazi wannabe
rally was so disturbing on every level, is that one
of the references made in that set was about how
we should expect Travis Kelce to be the next O. J.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Simpson.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Oh yeah, how this football player was gonna unlive his beautiful,
successful girlfriend. The violence against women, the way that they
call for it, the way that they find it funny,
the way that they're trying to ensure that we die
and operate in emergency rooms and potentially in our homes
at the hands of violent spouses, is not lost on me.

(23:38):
Here and just this morning, on the day you and
I are recording, which is two days before this episode
will air, we had Donald Trump sitting on a stage
calling for Liz Cheney to.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
Be executed by a firing squad.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yes, and yet people say they don't really mean it,
They say it couldn't really happen here.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
Well, they say that at the same time that they
spin fictions about how a purported woke left is hunting
down Donald Trump. You know this, the the fictions that
they are putting out into the ether, that the that
the attempt made on Donald Trump's life was somehow instigated

(24:17):
by the left, when in fact the shooter was a
registered Republican. You know, this is not there's there's no correlation.
But right, so so they can I mean, and this
is one of the things.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
And I wrote a lot about.

Speaker 4 (24:32):
This in Good and Mad, my book about women's anger,
about one of the ways that power works is that.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yes, please break this down for us. This is so good.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
I'm going to try to I'm going to try to remember.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
I haven't I haven't talked about this conversationally in a while,
so I hope I can remember the sort of what
the tools that I had to make this clear. But
I'll tell you the first time it became clear to
me this particular dynamic, and the dynamic is that when
power is challenged in any way, in a way that's

(25:06):
not because power is supposed to go from the most
powerful to somebody who has less power. When that is
reversed in any way, one of the first moves of
the entity with more power is to claim victimhood, to
claim to behave as though it.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Has been stripped of all its power.

Speaker 4 (25:24):
So there are a million examples of this, but I
will tell you the first time that I saw it
as a reporter was in twenty well, that I noticed
it and was able to identify it in a way
that was happening around me. It was in the week
of Freddie Gray's murder in Baltimore. Freddie Gray was a
young black man who was taken on a rough ride
by Baltimore police and died. Was killed, and there were

(25:46):
protests in the wake of his death, and the protesters threw.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Rocks at police cars.

Speaker 4 (25:55):
And when this was covered by the major media, the
way it was covered was the violence began when protesters
started throwing rocks, and I as somebody in the media
was reading this coverage and this was not right wing.
This is not Fox, this is like you know, CNN
the times, this is mainstream media. And it was one
of the first times in my life that I was

(26:18):
just hit in the face with the reality. Wait, the
violence started when protesters threw rocks, So the violence didn't
count as violence. There wasn't a commencement of disruption when
the cops killed this young man. That wasn't the beginning
of That wasn't the beginning of the violence. Violence only
became discernible when protesters, people whose only weapons against armed

(26:42):
cops were rocks. That was the moment that the people
in charge of telling the stories the media could visualize
violence starting. The other stuff was natural, that's just how
it's supposed to happen. But when it happens in the
direction where the people have less power make a move

(27:03):
against the entity with more power, it because it's unusual,
because it's disruptive, that becomes the thing. You could see
it around Me Too constantly. In all the talk about
which hunts and the mob, you know, what was happening
during Me Too was that people who had were telling

(27:25):
stories of having been wholly disempowered right in one way
or another, sexual harassment and sexual assault by powerful people,
people who ran you know, companies, movie studios, who had
political power that you know, there were there were so
many stories that had gone untold in many cases for decades,
and the people who had had no power, who in

(27:45):
some cases had signed away their voice even in nondisclosure agreements,
were using the only and who'd had their careers ruined,
who'd lost money, who had had you know, physical violence
done to them, psychological violence done to them, right, who
suffered while the perpetrators had remained powerful, continued to earn,
continue to gain more power, those are economic right and

(28:08):
then when those people who had been stripped of their power,
their place, you know, it had been heard, spoke up
and there was a moment in which there was a.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Flood of those voices.

Speaker 4 (28:20):
And yes, some of those powerful people that they were
accusing lost jobs, lost money, lost their positions of power.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
And the way that it was framed in so much
media was that it was a.

Speaker 4 (28:32):
Mob right, that it was a that it was a
witch hunt, that the victims were these guys who were
falling prey to this mob violence, and it was such.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
A reversal of the actual power dynamics in play.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yes, that they were somehow being victimized rather than being
held accountable. Right, we'll be back in just a minute,
but here's a word from our sponsors. I mean, God,
Good and Mad is for our friends at home. It's
such an amazing book. And if you're trying to figure
out how we got here and you haven't read it yet,
that's where you start. But it really makes me think

(29:09):
a lot about the article that you wrote this year
for New York magazine about Republican women.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
I mean, you.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Literally wrote an article called how did Republican women end up?

Speaker 4 (29:18):
Like this?

Speaker 1 (29:19):
And it is incredibly difficult, knowing what we know, all
these things that we're talking about, to see women vote
against their own self interest, no matter what policy debates
you want to have or whatever, to vote for a
party that believes you are more akin to property than

(29:43):
to a person, it's really it's alarming. And I understand
that it is about this sort of psychosocial storytelling.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
It's about the.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Tea of society. We've all been steeped in all of
these things.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
How do you.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
See the these.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Power dynamics that you started writing about then when you
had your aha moment, how would you translate them into
this moment? How do you how do you explain, you know,
the ladies from South Carolina in the front of these rallies,
like what's going on here?

Speaker 4 (30:16):
Well, the ladies from South Carolina at the front of
these rallies is one of the oldest stories in this country.
White women have always as long as we've counted electorally,
and then well before that, and I'll talk about that
a little bit, there have always been white women not

(30:40):
only willing but eager to go to the to the
battle lines on behalf of white patriarchy, which yes, does
disempower them in terms of the patriarchy, but empowers them
in terms of the white supremacy. So there are a

(31:00):
couple things that I want to say about. So this
goes back so far, you know, during the very, very
long battle for women's suffrage, which did take place over decades.
It is so hard when we tell stories about American
history and progress. We so often get them in condensed
forms like the PBS documentary that makes it seem like

(31:21):
the Civil rights movement was some neat project that took
a few years, when in fact you are talking about
you're talking about decades and centuries of work and division
and collapse of alliances and rebuilding of those alliances, right,
that's true around you know, the abolition and suffrage movements,
which began as a joint project, brutally split apart, have

(31:44):
come back together. You know, the really long history for
all of these battles, they take forever and go through
many lifetimes and generations. But in parts of that battle
for women's suffrage, there actually were here and there votes
about whether women should get the right to vote, and
women voted against their own right to vote.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
Right, So this is this is not new to have
to have.

Speaker 4 (32:11):
You know, the story I wrote about Republican women this
year is about this particular sort of Trumpian era of
Republican women where you see a lot of esthetic changes
and expressive choices around women trying to express the kind
of root masculinity that Trump admires at the same time

(32:32):
that they try to esthetically also fit a model that
he likes, which is a very hyper feminized model, and
the sort of confusions around that. That's the piece I wrote.
But the broader question of why do you have white
women there? You know, white women were at the frontline
standing against school integration in the mid twentieth century. This

(32:54):
and I think that there you can't you can't answer
that question without going in a cup different directions.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Why do they do it? One is that they benefit
from it. They benefit And.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
You know, my friend and colleague Britney Cooper, who wrote
an incredible book called Eloquent Rage about black feminist anger.
Brittany is the person who really taught me to think
about this as a structure. So within a white capitalist patriarchy,
there are different benefits that can accrue in different directions.
So you know, men of different races benefit from patriarchy

(33:29):
and women benefit from white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
And so there are incentives and you have.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
To do that because if you're if you're in a
white patriarchy where only white men have certain kinds of power,
and you actually wound up with a majority that opposed you,
you would lose that power. So you have to create
incentives to ensure that there are going to be portions
of that majority that are willing to fight for and
defend your unequal grip on power. And so for white

(33:57):
women there are all kinds of benefits that are true
to them because of their whiteness individually right earning power,
their own economic stability, their own access to different kinds
of resources, to healthcare, to education, to you know, whiteness
has benefits. It is also true that if within a

(34:23):
white patriarchy, being willing to fight on behalf of the
white men who are at the top of that structure,
white women are attached to those white men, sometimes as
spouses or partners, as daughters, as sisters, as others, And
so there are all kinds of incentives in place for

(34:44):
women to do this and are motivated by all kinds
of the same reasons that human beings are motivated by
racism and by misogyny, the desire to make yourself feel
by making someone else smaller than you. It is a
him an instinct sadly in many cases, to feel good

(35:05):
by making others feel bad.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, well, and I think about it particularly. I'd be
curious to know your thoughts on this, that it's almost
this kind of flywheel for women who look like us, right,
because when you have experienced you know, oppression and gender
violence and reduction and salary and all the things that
we have because we are women. I think when you

(35:29):
haven't really like dug down to the depths of what
this supremacist patriarchy does to everyone involved. Your husband might
be the one who makes you feel safe. Your dad
might have been a bully, but he's familiar to you.
And perhaps you're more willing to go with a familiar

(35:51):
bully who's friendly sometimes than you are willing to take
a leap into the unknown.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
And risk it.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
All right, And I wonder about how deep lea subconscious,
that very tribal kind of fear of risk, of scarcity
that affects everybody is. And I think if you're unwilling
to examine it, you wind up being You wind up
being an agent of harm rather than an agent of change.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
Right, I would also say that I think that's exactly right.
I think that they are all kinds of the Other
thing is that we structurally create dependency relationships.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
That makes it very difficult.

Speaker 4 (36:27):
That's one of the things I wrote about a lot
in my second book, All the Single Ladies, which was
about changed marriage patterns, and I.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
Really could not ever have predicted in a million years.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
I mean, I have to tell you that when we
entered this election season, I did not think nobody needed
to hear anything else I was ever going to say
about Joe Biden. I did not think I was going
to be reporting on an election season until Kamala Harris
became the nominee. And then suddenly we've had this season
where these three books I've written on very different topics. Actually, right,
I am a journalist who very broadly covers women, but

(36:58):
like one was about as particular election, the two thousand
and eight election, one was about married women, and one
is about angry women.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
But suddenly all three of them are sort.

Speaker 4 (37:07):
Of woven into what we have been living through for
the past y Yes.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
They're so incredibly relevant all over again.

Speaker 4 (37:13):
And I could never have anticipated that. But in one
of the things I thought a lot about when I
wrote All the Single Ladies is why is there such
a conservative.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Drive that is so on view with Vance and with
you know, and.

Speaker 4 (37:29):
Even with Trump, who's had three wives and millions of affairs.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
And I mean, you know, what is this thing with marriage?

Speaker 4 (37:36):
Well? Marriage, you know, we have all kinds of mechanisms
that romanticize it for us. And of course, you know,
we live in a world in which there are plenty
of happy marriages, and love is something that human beings
seek out and sex and all those things. But what
about marriage, marriage, marriage, especially hetero marriage, it's like so fetishized.
Why it's a containment mechanism, it's it and it's historic.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Forms very unromantically.

Speaker 4 (38:02):
It was a way to organize power and organized responsibility too, right,
So it wasn't just so there was so there would
be pairs of people who could do the things that
made life in the you know, somebody to be out
earning money in a public way, providing economic stability, and
then another partner in the pair who would do the
domestic labor that has to get done right, that has

(38:23):
the feeding, the cooking, the childcare, all that stuff. But
then what that created was an economic hierarchy that created dependency,
and around all the social rules we made around it,
around sex and child bearing and everything, you wound up
with a structure that contained in its hetero form gender
along these with these lines that created a situation where

(38:46):
women were dependent on husbands. Whether you know, is it
the kind of physical protection you're talking about, is it economic.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
Protection, like you literally can't leave because.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
You are you have been doing the labor at home,
or or because the workplace is structured in such a
way where women are still likely to make less and
therefore you're dependent on a partner's salary.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
The number of women in my mom's peer group who
could not leave, right, Like, yeah, we obvious in our grandparents' generation,
but even in our parents' generation, so many people could
not leave because of these historic economic structures.

Speaker 4 (39:25):
And I want to say, going back to this question
of why do people behave the way that they do,
and often in these cruel, oppressive, exclusionary ways. You know,
I think a lot about this because I was talking
about white patriarchy, and it makes it sound like all
white people are out there living large and like you
benefit from it, And of course that's not the case.
In this country, which is riven by terrible economic inequality.

(39:47):
You have millions and millions of white people, women and
men are who are suffering, who are living, who cannot
you know, afford to live, to eat, to raise their kids,
to to have safe and stable housing, all that stuff.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
And this is a big problem. You know, this is
a big problem.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
Sounds so retective, like this is the core of what
like a left movement has been pushing toward. This is
the appeal of like the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren wing
of the Democratic Party, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,
is to acknowledge the way that economic inequality, aside from
these sort of identity differences, which absolutely are about distribution

(40:28):
of power and resources, but layered over with stark economic inequality,
where government policies of both the right and a sort
of centrist left have.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Privileged corporations and corporate entities.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
Over regular people all the time, Which is what we're
talking about before when we were talking about what does
an economy mean when you're talking about either child tax
credits and child care and extended unemployment and stuff and
loan forgiveness that affects people we know, versus the kind
of corporate and wealthy tax cuts given by Donald Trump
that will definitely benefit Jeff be those who you know anyway.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Who doesn't need any more money, does.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Not need more money.

Speaker 4 (41:06):
So thinking about the people with that project, think about
that project, Think about that left project, which should be
very rational in a country of millions of people, many
of whom are struggling with prices, with housing, with groceries,
with gas, like.

Speaker 3 (41:21):
All this stuff, childcare, all this stuff.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
But the project of build building and alternative like alternate
systems can feel daunting, right, sure, God, how do we
change these things? And it's that So there's the constructive
way to look at the inequalities, dissatisfactions, lack of dignity

(41:44):
and stability that our government is currently providing millions of people,
and there's one way to say, like a constructive way
to say, okay, we need to change that. But it
can feel like it's our systems have been built to
make it, make us feel like that's a hopeless project,
you know.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Or that it would take so long.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
And then there's the destructive aim, which is the messaging
that comes from the right that says you can blame
other people and that's right available to you today.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah, rather than blame the ones in charge, right, blame
other people, because.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
It's true that blaming the ones in charge is really
hard because they have the money and the power, and
so getting mad at them, which is correct, is also
overwhelming because how can you, the person who is struggling
to pay for your groceries or your housing, like fight
Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump and these corporate oligarchs who

(42:35):
are right, you can't.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
There's this feeling that you can't. You can, of course
you can you can?

Speaker 1 (42:41):
That's what Tuesday's about, right quite literally? On Tuesday, people
have the choice to vote for progressive policy that will
create more economic opportunity and equality, or to give even
more money to the oligarchy. So I guess I'm curious.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Like we look, we see the issues.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
I think to study them and understand them is of
paramount importance because when you look around and you know
you're dissatisfied for whatever reason, I mean, the collective you
have to know where you come from to know what
you can build. And I am very curious because you
are an expert who I often look to to make

(43:27):
sure I know what the fuck I'm talking about. How
do you on the Sunday before the election find hope,
what inspires you to stay in the fight? How do
you think people besides you know, casting their votes for
a candidate and down ballot candidates who actually care about
the social fabric of our country and want to support

(43:49):
people and families and their children, how do you feel
like people can find some inspiration or some joy in
their own politics today?

Speaker 4 (43:58):
So it actually gets this question we just were touching
on about, like how do you fight if you are
at the bottom and you're looking at fighting toward the top,
and it comes from the stuff that I've wound up
learning again accidentally, I didn't set out to do the
kind of writing or the kind of that wasn't my
idea of what my career was going to be. But

(44:19):
as part of my work, I have had to learn
so much about American history that I wasn't taught. And
it goes back to what I was saying before about
how we were taught about these things being neat stories.
The United States likes to flatter itself and pat itself
on the back, and so it tells its stories of
correction to its founding and equalities as being pretty neat

(44:41):
and uplifting, and in fact, in many cases they were
long and brutal and violent and dispiriting. And many generations
of people died not seeing any movement toward making a
better world. And that's real, and we don't get told
that part of the story enough. But when you go

(45:03):
and look at you learn how long it took. But
you also begin to think about the fact that people
who were enslaved enslaved when we talk about not having
any power, yes, we talk about people who were enslaved,
who won freedom. You talk about people who did not
have the franchise, who did not have access to about

(45:26):
ballot box, who could not express their political will, got
the right to vote. The labor when thinking about like
how do like little people fight back against these court
wealth and corporate entities. The labor movement in this country,
which was bloody and long and continues, but in its

(45:49):
one a work week, one weekends, one workplace safety protections
often often in the aftermath of horror.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
You know, the triangle shirtwaist factory. He was just gonna say, right.

Speaker 4 (46:08):
So the triangle shirtwaist factory is you know, there was
there had been this, There was a period of.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
Strikes.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
There had been an uprising of shirtwaist workers who were
very likely to be poor immigrant women, unmarried, working in
these terribly dangerous shirtwaist which is a kind of blouse
in the early part of the twentieth century, shirtwaist factories
where there.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Were no escapes, no.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
Ventilation, where there were toxic chemicals around, where they were
kept for hours at a time, doors were locked, they
weren't able to leave, and they were working for a
pittance for terrible wages on which they could not support themselves.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
Or their families.

Speaker 4 (46:49):
They had no power, and there had been strikes, major
strike and the strike had won new contracts with almost
all the shirtwaist manufacturers, accept a couple, including one called
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which was in Greenwich Village in
New York City, and it caught fire and the women

(47:10):
could not escape. The women who were working there could
not escape, and they died horribly in the building jumping
out of the building.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
The doors were locked.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
And people who witnessed that fire, including Francis Perkins and
Rose Schneiderman, and witnessed the women dying on the sidewalk
in New York altered the course of their lives and
began to make policies, for example, around workplace safety, like
when you go into rooms that have exit signs and

(47:41):
you have to There are now requirements on the books
that mean that you have to have.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Exits from buildings. Yeah, this is both a horrible.

Speaker 4 (47:48):
Story and one that gives me hope a thinking about
labor protections. Labor protections were one by people who had
no power, yes, against people who had all the power,
and they were one over years and through a lot

(48:08):
of suffering striking workers who lost their salaries.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
Who were beaten, who died.

Speaker 4 (48:14):
You know, this isn't a pretty story, but the fight
eventually produced changes that shape our lives today, that shape
the lives of workers today. And there are instances in
that fight, many of them in which you are witnessing
the horror of a burning building. And I think about

(48:34):
that right now, as you know I was. I think
about that as I watched the Medicine Square Garden rally,
as I read and think about what might happen under
a Trump administration and advanced administration, And I think about
how so much of what this party is doing is
trying to pull back those battles that are won, the

(48:56):
ones that give me hope, you know, for workplace protection,
for better wages, for all kinds of labor, protections, for
the vote, for productive autonomy.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
For those are the exact things.

Speaker 4 (49:09):
Think about the fact that that is what a contemporary
Republican party, those exact things are what they are looking
to dismantle. Why, exactly why they are looking to undo
the work that was done by generations of people who
gave their their lives and all their energies and often
did not live to see any victory. Yeah, and yet

(49:31):
there would not have been victory had they not given
their energies in their lives. So I think of this
actually as a proud inheritance, and that means a lot
of things. It means it's an incentive to spend your
time and your energy continuing to fight and care for

(49:52):
the things that the people who came before you fought
and cared for and gave their lives for. It is
also a reminder when things feel bleak, because they really do. Yes,
things are very bad, but that the worst thing you
could do when you think about the generations that came
before you, where things were, the setbacks, you know, were

(50:13):
as bad or worse than what we're facing today.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
And they had many fewer tools.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
They did not have the vote right, they did not
have any economic power, they did not have anything like
sexual liberation, they did not have anything close to some
of the changes we've made around gender, race and sexual equality,
nothing like that, and they kept going. And I think

(50:38):
that that is so important, moving into Tuesday and then
moving beyond because the other thing that I am obsessed
with and have thought about so much, and I've thought
about it a lot around row about the left progressives, However,
you want to define yourself.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Is that.

Speaker 4 (50:58):
We have to get better at continuing to fight after
both loss and win. Yes, I don't know what's going
to happen on Tuesday. I do know what has happened
since Donald Trump won the election in twenty sixteen, and
that's a lot of what good and matter is about.
And it's interesting because a lot I see a lot

(51:20):
of my peers in journalism not take this seriously, but
in fact it has shaped what has happened politically in
the eight years since. And again I'm making no prediction
about Tuesday. I am just observing what has happened since
November ninth to now. You saw people get engaged in
organized and a lot of this. You know, black women
have been on the frontlines organizing around electoral politics, around

(51:42):
social movements for a long time, but a lot of
white suburban women, white middle class women who felt insulated
by their race and their class status, and they had
not experienced the kind of harms that would have kept
them awake. We were awakened by Donald Trump beating Hillary
Clinton in twenty sixteen and began to organize in ways

(52:05):
that they hadn't and the impact of that, which again
a lot of the political media is not telling you
this story right now, but it's just there. It's not
even this is not even like a controversial argument I'm making.
Democrats have done better than expected in almost every election
that has happened between November ninth, twenty sixteen, and now,

(52:29):
and that includes the twenty eighteen midterms, when a group
of untested, first time, young, racially diverse, progressive candidates ran
for office and won a historic victory and the political class,
including Democrats, couldn't even see it coming. The night of
the twenty eighteen midterms, I sat, I was, you know,

(52:51):
my book Good Mad.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
Was coming out. It had come out, I guess weeks before.

Speaker 4 (52:55):
I'd written about the power of women's anger around elections
and organizing and an new generation of politicians. And I was,
so I was waiting for this election. And I turned
on my TV and James Carvell got on and said,
this is not the blue wave the Democrats were expecting,
and I thought, oh my.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
God, we're not going to win.

Speaker 4 (53:12):
This is all like it was the biggest blue wave
since the Nixon administration. They just didn't know it until
like a couple days later when all the votes came in.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
It was the biggest blue wave.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
It was a historic number of women who were sent
to Washington to be in Congress. You then had twenty twenty,
You had elections. John ossoff ran and there was for
a House seat in twenty seventeen, and there was unprecedented
energy and organizing by all kinds of.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
People in Georgia around that race.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
He lost that congressional race in twenty seventeen, and then
he won a Senate race later.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
Again, the sort.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Of the pulling of people who had been previously disengaged
into politics has produced results. The twenty twenty two midterm results,
the abortion reference, the flipping of majorities in Michigan and Minnesota,
the Supreme Court elections in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, every abortion

(54:11):
referenda up until now, whatever happens on Tuesday, you know,
could change that. But up until now, every state referenda
on abortion access has been won, including in states like
Kansas and Ohio where they did everything possible to make
it impossible to win. So we have evidence in front

(54:32):
of us right now on Sunday, two days before an
election that this kind of engagement changes state laws. What
happened in Michigan when they elected Gretchen Whitmer and gave
her a trifecta.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
In the Michigan everything got better in Michigan. It did.

Speaker 4 (54:48):
Abortion is protected in Michigan. LGBTQ rights are protected in Michigan.
This is the same thing in Minnesota what Tim Walls
and Peggy Flanagan did with a one vote majority.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
And look at what Tim Walls did.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
Put put lunches, lunches, free lunches for kids in Minnesota.
Children can eat again. You want to talk about economic
issues and family values. Children eat lunches now in Minnesota
because people were energized and organized and voted in a majority,
So it is entirely possible to do this. But I

(55:23):
also want to say that when we win, we can't
then be like fixed it.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
Because that is part of what happened.

Speaker 4 (55:29):
It is part of what happened when we elected Barack
Obama in two thousand and eight. I wrote that book
about that election. Everybody again America's tendency to pat itself
on the back was like, Wow, I guess we fixed racism.
That was I mean, obviously ludicristian's face. But then what
happened is that the coalition that built around Obama which
was like a social movement that helped get him into office. Yes, dispersed,

(55:51):
it was like great, we fixed it, and there was
no defense there for that massive, retributive, resentful, violent wave
of backlash against Obama.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
That is part of what landed us Trump exactly.

Speaker 4 (56:04):
And I say this as a person whose politics are
to the left. If we do elect Kamala Harris president,
the job will not in any way be done.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
There is so much to push her on.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
There's so much to push her on, and there's also
so much I think one of the ways I think
about this a lot. What you're saying is that we
have to be better at holding the line because the
minute we don't hold it, we get pushed back.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Yes, so we have to hold.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
The line even if we win, and then we have
to continue to push. We have to enshrine abortion rights
across the country, we have to enshrine lunches for children.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
And none of this is woke, by the way, none
of this is radical. This just should be it.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
When you know, if you and I were asked to
invest in a friend's startup, let's say, and all that
startup did was burn our money and we never saw
our return.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
We wouldn't invent again.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Your taxes are a literal investment in a company, in
the Company of America, and you better see a benefit.
And the idea that that is somehow radical or leftist
is crazy to me.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
It's just good. It's good economics.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
And that's something. I'm grateful that Tim Wallas' is on
the ticket. And yes, I very much hope will be
in the White House because he's so good at starticulating that.
And he says, you can call me whatever you want.
You can call me a communist, you can call me woke, whatever.
I just want to build, build schools and feed kids
and build roads. Right, that is what and that is
something I have been looking for the Democratic Party to
talk about his policies.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
That way.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
My long time complaint with the Democratic Party that I
grew up with is that they ran away from their
own shadow. When somebody said, well that makes you seem
like a communist, they really good.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
You know, I really do want to like tax of the.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Ridge, and now a word from our sponsors. I look
at our party and I'm like, guys, you just have
to talk about the pragmatism progress. Yes, this is literally pragmatic.
We are solving math problems. We are making things more efficient,

(58:07):
We are making sure people don't go hungry, people don't
die of preventable disease, Like this isn't supposed to be complicated.
My question for you actually is kind of based on that. Like,
clearly we agree on we're two progressive women, you know,
we agree in policies that benefit all, and we're also

(58:29):
not Pollyennish about it. We are talking about what really
is pragmatic and good for people, and on that sort
of idea of I don't want to call it logical progress.
I want to call it earned and owed progress. I
understand how that sort of fits into the political landscape
of what.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
We're talking about.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
But when you pull back, which I imagine is hard
for you to do, I know it's really hard for
me to do, and you think about just your life
and you think about at current your work in progress.
Is it all work an election focused or is there
a layer underneath it that's more personal for you, you.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Mean, just in terms of my basic.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
Work life, just in terms of your life, Like is
it impossible to see through it at the moment because
we're so close to Tuesday, or is there that sort
of layer for you, Rebecca, where you think, like, oh,
my work in progress is actually this thing over here
that people might not expect when they read my books
and know the kinds of research that I do.

Speaker 4 (59:30):
Well. It's interesting that you asked that, because, as I said,
I wasn't expecting to be doing so much election coverage
this year. Was you know, I was not going to
be the perfect match for the Joe Biden reelection campaign.
So a thing about me as a journalist, which is
I get to say and I get to live because

(59:53):
of a very lucky position that I have, which is
that I get to be a reporter who is a
reporter who gets to tell reported stories, but also make
clear that I have a perspective. Now, I don't believe
that there's any such thing as objective journalism. I think
that's horsesh that is actually created by a power structure
to defend its view of power. Yeah, but there are

(01:00:14):
reasonable people in journalism may disagree, and there are a
lot of people believe in objective journalism. I've never had
to be objective just because of the kind of beat
i've the kind of career I was lucky enough to
be able to carve.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
But a thing about.

Speaker 4 (01:00:28):
It is that I also, unlike I think a sort
of fantasy traditional journalist who has distance from her subject matter,
I have no distance and I have no shell.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
And it is I all of this. It's like, there's
not it, there's no gap. Now. I do have I
have a life, right, I have. I have a life.

Speaker 4 (01:00:52):
I have loved ones I you know, I have, I
have kids, I have.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
Pleasures, I you know, all those things I'm not.

Speaker 4 (01:01:02):
I don't want you to think I'm in a weird
like my weird basement or addict, just sort of sitting
here and being raw.

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
I plant flowers, I cook like I do lots of
things like that.

Speaker 4 (01:01:13):
But it is definitely true that I am the membrane
is very permeable, and that this, you know, my adulthood
of telling the story, this, this what's happening has been taxing,
you know, the because my work has meant that I
am not able to look away from it or pretend

(01:01:34):
it's not happening, and because my personal and professional approach
is that there's not a barrier between it and me.
It is I have internalized at all. I am. I'm
a I'm a mess like in a in a I
think within the realm of messiness that we would all understand.

(01:01:57):
I'm not sleeping, I have, you know, torn all the
skin off my nails, like all the things I feel
enormous grief and anger and fear that I think a
lot of people are feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
I think it's appropriate to the moment.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
I really I really appreciate the way you just described that,
that there's no shell and no distance. That is exactly
how I feel. And I don't think I've ever known
how to say it. Yeah, I guess I will say
that rather than knowing. My hope for us is that
after next week, you and I can talk about how
we're going to organize to continue to push for progress

(01:02:42):
in a world where we're still allowed to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Yeah. I hope so too.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
And that is what you just said about the world
in which we're still allowed to do that. I think
I don't know who's listening right now, but I certainly
know that a lot of people with whom I share
an enormous amount of perspective are feeling pain and fury

(01:03:07):
on behalf of people and issues who they feel aren't
represented by either candidate. Ye and I I think that
the thing that you just said is so important in
that regard, because there is one and I am. I
deeply respect and in many cases agree with a lot
of that level of activist.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Fury and frustration.

Speaker 4 (01:03:32):
But I also think that one of the things that's
on the table is the question of whether there will
be mechanisms, yes, available for those who are compelled through
for every single morally correct reason to object and to

(01:03:54):
fight for better and for more people, and to protest
and to change, not just protest.

Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
But to you to pressure.

Speaker 4 (01:04:03):
A government, a democratic administration, to do better. Those mechanisms
by which dissent can be communicated, conveyed, an ideally work
to make change of the powers that be. Those mechanisms
will exist in one scenario, and they will.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
Cease to exist if truing exactly, and that is that's real.

Speaker 4 (01:04:28):
I'm not doing an apology tour for Kamala Harris campaign.
I'm not pretending that there's just I respect lots of
people out there who are furious at both campaigns and
both candidates.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
But they are not the same.

Speaker 4 (01:04:43):
But they when it comes to literally the ability to
take that correct and righteous fury and do the kind
of work we've been talking about here that's been done
over generations. You are talking about a choice where one
of the options will shut down all the abilities to do.
That will strip everything we've been talking about, will strip
all of the levers that will be available in your lifetime. Yes,

(01:05:07):
I am a hopeful person. I do not believe it
is the end of the world or the nation of
the democracy. But for our lifetimes it would be the end.
It would be the end.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
For our lifetimes, in our children's life.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Yes, and not as when I say it's actually quite
important to look at history, to look at the kind
of leaders who want us all this progress and not
cut off the nose of their legacy to spite the
face of our current problems. Right, It's incredibly important.

Speaker 4 (01:05:35):
It is the preservation of the victories that those generations
have fought for. And I am not trying to pretend
that in presume you know, in electing one candidate you're
going to I mean, I hope that everything I've said
has been real clear about like this is not that
this is not the final battle.

Speaker 3 (01:05:50):
This is an.

Speaker 4 (01:05:51):
Epic, crucial moment in which one of the things we
will learn is will we have the mechanisms.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
That generation of people thought to make available to us.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
Well, will we be able to battle or will we
become will we become a different Will literally everyone in
the country become a lower class than the rulers because
people may feel that way, but there are protections in
place that make it different. And you know, if you
want to be able to protest, if you want to

(01:06:23):
be able to demand, whether it's healthcare or cease fire
or the rights of women, you have to have a
government that will at least allow you to do that.
So I'm with you in that, and I guess that's
why I say I really do hope that after Tuesday
we can put our organizing heads together and talk about
ways we're going to continue to push for more progress

(01:06:45):
instead of lamenting that we've lost everything that's been built
over the last two hundred and fifty years.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
I keep my fingers crossed for us. Thank you so
much for joining us today.

Speaker 3 (01:06:55):
You're just thanks for having.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
The coolest person I know. And I still can't believe
you came on the show.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
Thank you so much for having me on. I'll come
back anytime.