In Bed With The Right

This week on In Bed with the Right , we're 19th-Centurymaxxing again! Moira takes Adrian on a wild ride through the origins and strange early history of bodybuilding. This one has everything: Eugenics! Swolitude! Prussians! World Fairs! Gymnastics!

In honor of spooky season, Moira and Adrian once again did homework assigned by the podcast's Patreon -supporters, analyzing two two classic horror films and what they say about gender, sexuality and gender conservatism in their era. This year's Patreon picks were 1987's The Lost Boys and 1996's Scream . These two actually have a lot in common: central California! The youths! A prohibition of fema...

On October 25, 2026 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flavio Bolsonaro in the second round of Brazil's presidential election after trailing his opponent in the first round. In this episode, political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes (whose recent book Anatomy of Disintegration uses Bolsonarismo as a lens to analyze the international far right) helps Moira and Adrian understand the election results and i...

"Tolkien is turning in his grave", Elon Musk tweeted on September 5, 2022 having watched (i.e. not watched) the first episode of Amazon's new series The Rings of Power . Whether it's a new Galadriel-centered TV-show, the Peter Jackson trilogies or just people writing fantasy a little differently: right wingers are very happy to claim J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) as their own, their own reactionary i...

Moira and Adrian continue their deep dive into science fiction fandom. After spending Episode I with the inner workings of right wing fandom (also pod racing), they now delve into the kinds of fan objects right wing fans congregate around. What specific authors, specific subgenres, specific tropes seem to inspire right wing fans (sometime deliberately, sometimes through no fault of their own)? Wha...

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 por...

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...

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 femin...

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 to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[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 th...

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 Adria...

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 of...

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 ab...

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,...

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...

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 brilli...

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...

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 m...

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 s...

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 fu...