Explore every episode of the podcast In Bed With The Right

This fall, Moira and Adrian will take a deep dive into right wing fans. In recent years, right wingers from Milo Yiannopoulos to Elon Musk have leveraged science fiction fandom to stoke media outrage and build onramps to the far right. But when they have done so, they have built on something of a tradition. While we'll eventually end up with the kinds of "fans" who get upset about Black actors portraying elves or storm troopers, this first episode delves into the forms of fandom that right wing culture war skirmishes have traditionally drawn on, or as which they have camouflaged. What's the role of gender in fan communities? What version of “fealty”, possessiveness and community come into play in these skirmishes? How come so much of our contemporary politics seems to be routed through fandom?

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity to talk about the resistible rise and precipitous fall of Milo Yiannopoulos. We trace Milo's origins living parasitically off of fan cultures, the culture war-politics of Breitbart, and explore both the power and very real limits of right wing politics of outrageousness. What happens to the provocateur when provocation becomes a tool of governance?

CONTENT NOTE: Yes, Adrian knows that it was national treasure Jennifer Connelly, not Jennifer Garner hanging with the goblins in Labyrinth! He will not be taking questions on this matter at this time.

CONTENT NOTE: Also, there's discussions of a lot of hateful ideas, actions, terms in this episode. All the content warnings that come naturally with discussing Milo Yiannopoulos apply to this episode.

For this episode, Moira takes Adrian on a trip into the long, many-colored history of the iconic Dolly Parton (1946-2026), from the Tennessee mountains where life was as peaceful as a baby's sigh, via Nashville to a corner office where you tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, and naturally pour yourself a cup of ambition. Throughout her life, Dolly modeled a very particular style of femininity, one that managed to be both pastiche, an expression of American mores circa 1970, and very much her own. Moira and Adrian talk about what to make of this style of campy, self-mocking, but also very assertive womanhood -- and what contemporaries made of it across the six decades of Dolly's presence in American life.

For this episode, Moira and Adrian talk about Chief Creep Elon Musk, his worldview and the role gender plays in his politics with Ben Tarnoff, co-author of the recent Muskism. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss what shaped Musk's ideas of autarky, vertical integration, "fortress capitalism", and how a gendered siege mentality is remaking the way we work and live in the United States today.

Here it is, the second half of our IBWTR live show, recorded with 250 of our closest friends at Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco! In it, Moira and Adrian continue their deep-ish dive into tech creep masculinity, and how it came to be so dominant at the present moment. A huge thank you to the folks at Swedish American Hall, to Andrew Roan Gibson for engineering the show, and to Mark Yoshizumi, who just turned around two of these episodes in a single week!

If you'd like to learn more about tech creeps and what they're doing to society, governance, labor and our collective sense of possibility, check out Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here).

Last month, Moira and Adrian appeared at Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco for a special IBWTR live show. In it, they took a deep and snarky dive into tech creep masculinity, and how it came to be so dominant at the present moment. This episode is the first half of that live show -- the second half will drop later this week!

If you'd like to learn more about tech creeps and what they're doing to society, governance, gender, labor and our collective sense of possibility, check out Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here).

With a special shout to all our friends/enemies, we are back with Part 2 of our deep dive into Carl Schmitt, Nazi jurist, total weasel, and dead-fish-painting-hater! This episode follows Schmitt through the year 1933, his precarious position in the early Nazi state and the utter shamelessness he employed to get out of that precarious position.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the genesis and long shadow of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), from the book's leery reception in its own day to its rediscovery as both a feminist text and as a possible site for a critique of certain strands of feminism.

Works cited in this episode:

• Sandra Gilbert/Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is worth buying, but you can also find it here.
• Gayatri Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) can be found here.

In the wake of the death of Jason Arday many listeners asked us to comment on the media campaign against him. We hesitated, but felt we really needed to talk about this case -- about the allegations themselves, what became of them, and the tragedy they set in motion. Months ago, we actually did a Patreon episode on the politics and media ecosystem of plagiarism hunting -- so we decided to record a follow-up to that episode. If you feel like this is still too raw of a subject, we'd advise maybe skipping this episode. We are also keenly aware that the story still keeps shifting -- partly because Jason Arday isn't here to set the record straight. And so we offer this episode as a state-of-play as of August 25, 2026, not as the definitive word on this story. So if you're encountering this at a future date, please bear that in mind.

Note: This is a PREVIEW -- to listen to the whole episode, as well as our first look at how academic dishonesty gets metabolized in mainstream media, please subscribe at patreon.com/inbedwiththeright!

[REMINDER: We're less than 10 days away from the In Bed with the Right Live Show in San Francisco: August 27, 7:30 pm Swedish American Hall. Tickets are going fast, but still available -- get yours here!]

This week, to prepare for Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here, take 20% off at checkout with "daub20"), Adrian takes Moira back to Germany just before 1933 to discuss the life, opinions and odious politics of Carl Schmitt -- one of those right wing thinkers that never seems to go really go away, and that is being brought back in our own day by sundry Silicon Valley creeps and their lickspittles. This episode focuses on Schmitt's early writings -- On Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political, among others -- and on Schmitt's strange and messy personal and religious life.

Weird troll and sitting Vice President JD Vance's last memoir, 2016's Hillbilly Elegy, made him a household name and a darling with some surprising corners of American letters and politics. His new memoir-slash-retread, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith reheats the Elegy-pie to massively diminishing returns, and is likely to endear him to just about no one. In this episode, Moira and Adrian talk to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie about the book and the strange and deeply resistible rise of JD Vance.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through hundreds of years of history in search of lesbian nuns -- and in search of the various meanings that were attached to the lesbian nun throughout the centuries in a patriarchal system. Walk-on cameos by the Derry Girls, nunsploitation films, Canadian immigration law and an angel named Splendatello!

This is a preview for a Patreon episode! So it'll cut off at some point, and if you'd like to hear all of it, please go to https://www.patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight to join!

In America when the sun goes down and we sit in our apartments recording our podcast, watching the long, long skies over Oakland and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the East Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, we think of Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, and we are seized with a desire to talk to her about being on the road. This is our episode about cars, about gender, and about one particular way in which they mix: the road trip and its peculiar fate in American media and society.

To celebrate 3 years of podcasting together, we are going through some amazing questions our listeners posed! The results ran a little long, and so this is only the first part of the resulting mailbag episode (this one is main feed, the next one, in a few weeks, will be Patreon-only)! We decided to delve into more general questions first, so the topics under discussion include: Problematic faves, updates on Moira's squirrel, Adrian's adventures in art history exam taking, some thoughts about student AI use, and the pronunciation of Adrian's name!

For the third installment of our TERF Island series, we use the case of JK Rowling herself to trace TERFism's "march through the institutions" in the UK and beyond. It's an episode about TERF self-staging as singular and "deeply personal" apostasy from "gender orthodoxy", which belies an increasingly sophisticated, well-connected and well-funded network pushing anti-trans talking points in public.

This is a PREVIEW, if you'd like to hear the remainder of the episode (and the previous episodes in the series), please head over to patreon.com/inbedwiththeright to become a supporter!

PLEASE NOTE: we recorded this episode before the latest re-emergence of Rowling as TERFism final boss with the release and subsequent suppression of the Amnesty International report on anti-trans hate groups. But that imbroglio certainly made us even happier we're doing this series behind the paywall.

It's Hot California Summer over here on In Bed with the Right! For this first installment (of probably three), Moira and Adrian delve into the work of noted California-native and inveterate California-explainer Joan Didion, whose conservatism was a central part of our episode on San Francisco in the conservative imagination. The episode's focus is on Didion's 2003 book Where I Was From, a brilliant diagnosis of, and only intermittently self-aware display of, a particular California ideology. It's an ideology that continues to shape how the world views California, and how California views the world.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the troubled and troubling story of congresswoman Nancy Mace -- a moderate who first became MAGA, then a vicious transphobe, and then became a gendered apostate from that movement (while remaining hugely transphobic). Trigger warning: While we initially thought this would be an acerbic deep dive into an unusual MAGA politician, the portrait that emerged was instead pretty complicated, and Mace's story turned out to be incredibly dark.

For this episode, Adrian and Moira discuss the life, career and (many, many) opinions of Lena Dunham -- creator of Girls, writer of memoirs and the face that launched a million think-pieces back in the 2010s. They touch on the gendered attacks, questions of maturity and accomplishment, nepobabydom and the Apatow extended universe, as well as on the conspicuously different reception Dunham's new memoir has received when compared to her earlier work.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the history of Mifepristone. Developed in France in the 1980s, this medication (which, together with Misoprostol, is used to end pregnancies) has been a flashpoint in Europe and the United States pretty much since it was first created. Today, it is the only way for millions of Americans living in states where abortion is illegal or impossible to get to safely terminate their pregnancies safely. This episode dives into the attack on Mifepristone, the history of medical abortion and what the future might look like.

In this episode, Adrian walks Moira through the strange politics of plagiarism hunting -- an (initially non-partisan) German preoccupation that became another line of attack in the right wing assault on higher education in the United States. The episode details how legitimate concerns about academic fraud were fused with a broader populist critique of "university corruption", which effortlessly fused with anti-woke and anti-"DEI" critiques of the university.

NOTE: As he feared, Adrian was indeed incorrect on one particular point: German dentists do not have to write a dissertation, though a surprisingly large percentage of them do.

For a while now (though mostly on Patreon), Moira and Adrian have examined a strange canon of films and texts about. powerful people being taken down by forces of social justice. Many of these take place on college campuses or near them (Oleanna, Deconstructing Harry,The Human Stain, After the Hunt); others center figures of the art world (Tàr). There have been a few new entries in this genre, and they tell us a lot about where our culture and are politics are with regards to consequences, impunity and powerful men. The focus in this conversation is the HBO show Rooster starring Steve Carell and Outcome starring Keanu Reeves.

For this episode, Moira guides Adrian through the life, career and legacy of Marilyn Monroe, and the role gender played in all three. Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926 -- so her centennial is coming up in a few weeks. We touch on Monroe's suffering, her canny manipulation of her own image, and the political dimension of her public persona.

Here are some of the books and articles we refer to in the episode:

Joyce Carol Oates, "Blonde"

Norman Mailer, "Marilyn, A Biography" (NOT an endorsement)

Gloria Steinem, Marilyn Monroe: Norma Jeane

Jaqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times

Lois Banner, "Marilyn Monroe: proto-feminist?"

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 about gender and the (far) right: specifically about an alliance and a competition between tech bros and religious fundamentalists.

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 and Wagner).

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 Nazi Germany will be out in April and can be preordered here.

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 our sources for this episode:

On Bari's reign of terror at CBS: Clare Malone, "Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS"

Radley Balko's takedown of the Free Press piece about George Floyd: "The Retconning of George Floyd"

If you read German, and want to know more about the tech elite's "vibe shift" around 2020, you can check out Adrian's new book! (Or you can wait until September 10 to get the English version!)

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! We meant (in this one very specific instance) no disrespect.

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 of anti-feminist politics.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of articles we refer to in the episode:

-- Botstein's 1999 op-ed "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood" can be found here

-- Botstein's book Jefferson's Children can be found here

-- Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable can be purchased here

-- Reporting on the various lawsuits and Title IX investigations against Bard and its president can be found here (2015 case), here (2016 case), here (2020 case), here (2022 case)

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, whose column that Adrian and Moira refer to in the episode (and who did the drive with Adrian), you can find that here and here.

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, its history, and the use of comparing it to ICE for our Patreon. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-119-149640913

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)

-- Mikaeli Anne Carmichael, Rebecca Louise Thomson, Lisa Jane Moran, Thomas Philip Wycherley, "The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Athletes’ Performance: A Narrative Review"

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 with the Gestapo, and the "look what you made me do"-theory of authority.

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 trace the fates of some of the protagonists of this series after 1933. Thank you for staying with this series for hours and hours of this complicated and depressing story!

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 hawk, and noted gender conservative! Our deep dive is -- fair warning -- about 3 hours long. But we felt Sullivan -- who is, as Moira put it, sort of "gender conservatism's Forrest Gump" -- was worth spending time with. He intersects with so many strands and trends, so many institutions and pathologies of the last forty years. Specifically, we're going through his complicated work by focusing on specific texts, by situating them in their moment and explaining their legacy. This first episode covers Sullivan's early years, 1980 - 1996: Oxford, Harvard, The New Republic, The Bell Curve, and Virtually Normal.

If you like what you've heard, and you haven't already, consider subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight! We have a lot of cool episodes coming up, including the aforementioned one on NuzziGate, RFK Jr., and structures of impunity.

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 so many of them!

So we decided to narrow our noms to one particular genre of cursedness this year, and to present awards for ... drumroll ... achievements in anti-wokeness.! From queer tieflings to kids getting coddled in the 4th dimension, from socialist mayors (and not the one you're thinking of!) to French people teaching Americans how to islamophobia, to the world's creepiest Blue Man Group, this one has something for everybody!

Some links to articles we mention:

-- Matt Bernstein's in-depth episode on the long dark road of Debra Messing can be found here

-- Adrian's New Republic article about a row over "islamogauchisme" in France can be found here

-- Michele Goodwin's interview with Jess Michaels as part of her series Surviving Epstein can be found here

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 episode is about this bizarre exercise, about how average Germans experienced it, and about how émigrés reacted to a country that was fusing more and more with its ruling regime.

One quick content note: Adrian moved a little quickly through the election results about 25 minutes in. The first set of numbers he's talking about are the ones for the parliamentary election (where basically only Nazis could be voted for, but some non-Nazis were on the ballot). The second set of numbers are about the referendum about leaving the league of nations. Our apologies if this didn't become clear!

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, and its relationship to "anti-liberal" and other "anti-woke" thinking on the Right.

A few links:

-- Helen Andrews, "The Great Feminization"

-- "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?", Helen Andrews in Conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant and Ross Douthat

-- Becca Rothfeld's review of Leah Libresco Sargeant's The Dignity of Dependence, which Moira mentioned in the episode, can be found here.

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 versus the Nazi party and the elites.

On the episode we mention our LIVE SHOW: if you're interested in joining us in San Francisco on November 20, tickets can be purchased here.

A selection of books we consulted for or referred to in this episode:

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Albrecht Ritschl, "Deficit Spending in the Nazi Recovery, 1933-1938"

Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State

Christiane Kuller, Bürokratie und Verbrechen: Antisemitische Finanzpolitik und Verwaltungspraxis im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland