In Bed With The Right

In this episode Moira and Adrian discuss the natural law tradition -- its origins, its long varied history, the many uses to which it has been put, and the way conservatives are trying to revive it in our own day.

In recent months, the call to repeal the 19th amendment and rescind American women's right to vote, has proliferated as a hashtag, meme and a shibboleth in certain far-right spaces. But how serious are those championing the cause? In this episode, Moira explains to Adrian that while we needn't worry that the 1920 amendment is going anywhere soon, this demand is about jockeying within the masculinist coalition that brought Donald Trump to power. While the supposed "arguments" for a repeal don't really bear engaging with, the history of the demand and its proliferation at this moment tells us a lot...

For this episode, Adrian and Moira talk about gender and food -- specifically about the figure of the chef, visible and invisible labor and masculinity. Their main exemplar is Guy Fieri, the self-declared Mayor of Flavortown, but they also discuss 2022's The Menu, Anthony Bourdain, #MeToo in the restaurant world, and the baffling appeal of Gordon Ramsay. Please note: this is a preview for a Patreon-episode, to hear the whole thing, please go to our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902). Famous as a pioneering feminist intellectual and crusader for women's suffrage, Stanton is today also remembered for the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that dominated the second half of her incredibly long career. We explore how these two go together, and what Stanton's life tells us about the effects of political disappointment.

Find Ellen Carol Dubois's new Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life here.

Read (or "reëncounter") Moira's review essay in the New Yorker here.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange, disturbing world of looksmaxxing. We try to spend less time asking where this phenomenon comes from, less time gawking at the weird terminology and rituals of this subculture (though we do spend some time, we're only human!)--but our main question is what a phenomenon like looksmaxxing says about masculinity, right-wing gender politics, and heterosexuality.

This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis-metaphors, the Best Little Whorehouse in Grailland, and the final split in the bromance known as Nietzgner (probably? We're talking about Nietzsche...

Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do with what you think of as persecution. Sam's book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women...

In the second half of our two-part series on one of In Bed with the Right's bêtes noires, Adrian and Moira chart the resistible rise of Bari Weiss's from her time on the canceled-person circuit to the pinnacle of American news media. Topics covered: the rise of the Free Press and the decline of the free press; how a certain kind of Silicon Valley creep fell in love with what Bari was selling; how she rode the "vibe shift" among tech elites to maximum profit; and why the Trump-era may well prove her undoing.

Some of o...

It's the first half of our (possibly? hopefully?) two-part series on In Bed with the Right final boss, Bari Weiss: reactionary centrist extraordinaire, #MeToo backlasher and the woman who parlayed a grifty "cancel culture" Substack into running pretty much 90% of the news you're still allowed to air on TV. This first episode deals with her origin story, up to her high-profile exit from the New York Times.

CONTENT NOTE: Yes, we know we're mispronouncing her name. It's really hard to get out of the habit, but we promise promise promise to get better at it before Part 2...

Last week, Adrian and Moira went to the movies and watched director Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (trailer here). In this episode they explore the gender politics of the novel, of this adaptation and what it says about the fate of romance fiction in the 2020s.

Here are some of the texts we refer to in the discussion or used in preparing for it:

Elizabeth Hardwick, "Working Girls: The Brontës"

Georges Bataille, "Literature and Evil"

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Madwoman in the Attic"

One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira, herself a graduate of Bard (Class of 2012, baby!) walks Adrian through what the Epstein/Botstein friendship can tell us about the last 50 years...

A few months ago, as part of the research for his forthcoming book What Tech Calls Governing, Adrian took a drive down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back. This episode is about what the billboards along that stretch of highway tell us about Silicon Valley, about our tech elites, and about how technology is remaking society (it's not in the way you think).

If you'd like to buy Adrian's book, it's available for pre-order in the German edition only for now.

If you'd like to check out the work of Wendy Liu...

The Epstein files are many things: a study in elite impunity, a deep core sample of societal misogyny, a record of institutional failure. But they also give us a fascinating, if terrifying, alternate story of #MeToo and what came after. For this episode, Moira and Adrian take the recent drop of several million more pages of Epstein emails--and Moira's walk-on cameo in them--to think about networked antifeminism, #MeToo backlash, the traffic in women as social conduit, and the solidarity of (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) predatory men.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in Minneapolis. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into questions of gender, solidarity, whiteness and the MAGA imagination as they pertain to the murder and the reaction across media and society.

Please note: We briefly mention the comparison sometimes made with the Nazi-era Gestapo. If this is a comparison that interests you, Moira and Adrian recorded an emergency episode on that group...

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Abby Kluchin from the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast to discuss a recent publishing phenomenon and its implications for gender politics: romantasy, a genre that's been emerging over the last 10 years with renewed force. Series like Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and the Empyrian-novels by Rebecca Yarros mix fantasy tropes with costume drama and pretty explicit sex scenes -- and they rely on a very particular kind of trauma heroine, and what seems to be a very particular understanding of gendered trauma.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the conservative attack on birth control, and in particular the influencer-led, MAHA-adjacent surge of misinformation about menstruation and birth control. At issue is ultimately a deeply reactionary, and deeply troubling picture of the gendered body and women's autonomy. Topics covered include: cycle synching, the politics of "naturalness" and the weaponization of legitimate grievances with the medical establishment for ideological purposes.

Here is the list of books/articles we refer to in this episode:

-- Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (1998)

On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a killing that was captured by multiple camera phones and witnessed by dozens. Since the killing, the Trump administration has used several gendered lines of attack to discredit Renee Nicole Good, to celebrate the killing and to make propagandistic hay of this murder. In this emergency episode (recorded 2 days after the killing), Moira and Adrian talk about the killing, about the question of gender and where we go from here. Among the topics discussed: the echoes of the murder of George Floyd, the parallels...

To start the year off right, Moira and Adrian were joined by Michael Hobbes to discuss Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto, the media hubbub about it, and what both artifacts say about our media environment, our elites, and about gender.

Pieces we cite in the episode:

Becca Rothfeld's review of the book in the Washington Post

Alexandra Jacobs' review of the book in The New York Times

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This tenth installment covers December 1 to December 31, 1933. In this episode, Moira and Adrian close out the story of this terrible year, draw out some overall observations at the end of about 30 hours of recording and 15 hours of podcast, and...

As a special Holiday treat, out from behind the paywall, here's the second part of our Andrew Sullivan episode -- or "Andrew 2: Electric Boogaloo", as we started calling it. Covering the full second half of the Life, Times and Opinions of Sullydish, Gentleman, aka the "We Didn't Start the Fire" of reactionary centrism: Barebacking, Substacking, Moira's misandry, 9/11, 5th Columnists, Other Columnists, Testosterone, Trans Kids...

If you enjoyed these two more in-depth episode, consider subscribing (or gifting a subscription) to In Bed with the Right on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight

Happy Holidays from In Bed with the Right!!! Unfortunately, the festive season has gotten away from us and the two remaining episodes on our schedule are absolute monsters (the two-hour final (!) installment of Project 1933, and our episode on the media hubbub around "American Canto"), so to tide you over while we record and edit we thought we'd do a re-release of one of our Patreon magna opera from the Patreon. So this week, feast your ears on Part 1 (today) and Part 2 (Thursday) of our deep dive into the life and times of Andrew Sullivan -- editor, blogger, Iraq War...

It's cold outside, the Holidays are here, and you know what that means: It's Cursed-Discourse Awards-Season, motherf@ckers! Not-even-close-to-live from a theatre miles away from the Dolby Theater, it's the Third Annual Cursties!!! For the third year in a row, Moira, Adrian and special guest Michael Hobbes give out awards for the most cursed discourses around sex and gender for 2025. Problem is: we've dealt with so many cursed discourses around sex and gender in 2025, and pretty much all cursed discourses seem to have with gender panic these days. And In Bed with the Right has covered so so so...

Moira walks Adrian through the strange, diagonalist history of the idea of "natural birth" -- from 1930s eugenicists to hippie communes, from radical feminist spaces to MAHA and the "wild birth"-movement. This episode comes with a bunch of trigger warnings -- please make sure you're in the right headspace before diving in!

Some of the texts we refer to in the episode:

Grantly Dick-Read, Natural Childbirth (1933)

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1977)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives and Nurses (1972)

Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery (1975)

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This ninth installment covers November 1 to November 30, 1933. It's about democracy after democracy. On November 12, the Nazis held an election, the second after Hitler had become chancellor, but the first since the Enabling Laws had fully established a dictatorship. This...

To celebrate our 100th episode (belatedly), your intrepid hosts recently took to the stage of San Francisco's Swedish-American Hall for a special live Moral Panic Bingo Night. Moira and Adrian were joined by the amazing Sarah Marshall (of You're Wrong About) and Matt Bernstein (of A Bit Fruity) to talk about moral panics big and small, and how they continue to fuck up our lives. Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics is linked here, sans awesome original cover. Sarah Marshall's 8-part CBC series The Devil You Know can be found here.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through "The Great Feminization" -- a recent talk/essay that took the right wing by storm, and that subsequently got its author invited to discuss women ruining things in the New York Times. The essay posited that women's entry into the American workforce is to blame for ... wokeness? General societal disorder? The Decline of the West (TM)? Among the topics this episode touches on: the reasons why ideas like these are catching on at this particular moment; the reconceptualization of class distinction through (supposed) gender markers; the history of the "Great Feminization" thesis...

In this episode, writer Sarah Weinman walks Moira and Adrian through the story of the 1978 case Oregon v. Rideout and how spousal rape became a crime in the US. Weinman's book about the case -- Without Consent -- is out now. A moving, upsetting story about how the judicial system keeps pace (or doesn't) with legislation; how media shape how we think about social progress; and how that progress can come from strange places. PLEASE NOTE: This one comes with basically all the trigger and content warnings.

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This eighth installment covers October 1 to October 31, 1933. It's all about the economy: about how the Nazis tackled (or pretended to tackle) the economic problems in Germany; how monetary policy interlocked with rearmament; and how everyday Germans experienced the economy...

To get you ready for spooky season, here's In Bed with the Right with a second look at some classic horror films, asking: What's scary about gender? And what's gendered about fear in these movies? The second part of our "Powers of Horror (Film)" two-parter dives into two more classic 1970s horror, into changing workplaces and fairy tales, into gialli and mouths with mouths in them. Our focus is on 1977's Suspiria and 1979's Alien. Hope you enjoy!

Just in time for spooky season, here's In Bed with the Right with a look at some classic horror films, asking: What's scary about gender? And what's gendered about fear in these movies? In keeping with the Halloween theme, we got way into this and watched way too many scary movies. And so we made a two parter. This first part dives into 1973's The Wicker Man and 1976's Carrie. The second part will be about Suspiria (1977) and Alien (1979).

Here are the texts we refer to in this episode:

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative...

You guys, IBWTR just hit 100 episodes! And we'll be honest, this milestone snuck up on us. We'll be celebrating this anniversary over the next few episodes -- including a deep dive into CBS News' new boss, another Wagner-show, and a Live Show in San Francisco! But for now we thought we'd kick off our festivities by tackling more questions from you, our amazing listeners! We ended up with a far-ranging conversation about #MeToo, cinema, bodies, hormones and Doing the Reading! Hope you enjoy! (Oh, and Adrian's Substack post on Tár can be found here.)

Fetal personhood is one of those doctrines that have moved from the fringes of the conservative legal movement (and even from the fringes of right wing theology) to the center. While it is not clear how much support there is at the US Supreme Court for the idea that fetuses are people and have rights under the 14th Amendment, this once-obscure doctrine has been filtering into abortion and pregnancy criminalization since the Dobbs decision. In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange history of this doctrine, and through its awful consequences for pregnant people or those who can...

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This seventh installment covers September 1 to September 30, 1933. It's about culture: about how the Nazis took over the culture sector, how the émigrés began to establish an alternative, and how our modern picture of the Third Reich began to em...

This is the second part of our epic deep dive into the life of Phyllis Schlafly -- the far-right firebrand who brought down an amendment and arguably helped transform a political party. In Part 2, Moira walks Adrian through Schlafly's attack on the Equal Rights Amendment, and how she pioneered a whole new style of politics to defeat what had been essentially a done deal -- or carried it into the mainstream, at any rate.

Here is a list of books we'll be referring to in both parts of this episode:

Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women<...

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life and times of Phyllis Schlafly -- the far-right firebrand who brought down an amendment and arguably helped transform a political party. This first part charts Schlafly's path before she launched her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment, focusing on: Paleoconservatism, America First, the John Birch Society, Cold Warriors, Goldwater Gilrls and space-based weaponry (for some reason).

Here is a list of books we'll be referring to in both parts of this episode:

Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women

Jane J. Mansbridge, How We Lost the...

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This sixth installment covers August 1 to August 31, 1933. Meaning: This is a summer episode. It finds many of the institutions the Nazis have subjugated on summer break, the ongoing processes of synchronization and Nazification either already completed or about to...

It's taken us forever to do this, but here it is at last: In Bed With the Right's first ever mailbag episode! We asked our Patreon supporters to send in questions, and they sent tons and tons. All of them were brilliant and fun, and because we wanted to answer as many of them, and because we couldn't shut up when answering them, it's only Part 1! This episode delves into how the podcast came to be, our main takeaways from Project 1933, the history of HR departments, identity politics, the "girl code", and what gives us hope for the future...

Historian Quinn Slobodian (Crack-Up Capitalism, Hayek's Bastards, and the forthcoming Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed) walks Moira and Adrian through the fate of IQ on late 20th century and early 21st century right wing thought. How did this concept bring together the nationalist right and self-described libertarians? How did it become a load bearing self-identifier for many a "gifted" kid of the 1990s? And how did it take hold so thoroughly among the Silicon Valley elite?

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This fifth installment covers July 1 to June 31, 1933 -- and is devoted entirely to two separate, but intertwined phenomena: Nazi collaborators and the Catholic Church. We cover the different valences of resistance and collaborations in Germany in 1933 -- from culture...

2025's strangest scandal involves facts that have been known for years and absolutely no new information. And yet it has managed to keep consummate bullshitter Donald Trump seemingly flatfooted. In this episode, Patrick Blanchfield (co-host of Ordinary Unhappiness) joins Moira and Adrian to talk Epstein, the files, the coverup, Trump and the return of the not-at-all repressed. The conversation touches on the gender politics of revelation, conspiracies real and imagined, blood libel, and the long shadow of #MeToo. Lots and lots of trigger warnings obviously!