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, we asked you for some horror movie assignments, and boy did you deliver! We had so much fun that we're planning a bonus episode about more films sometime in the coming weeks, but for this main feed installment we're talking about two films that rose to the top of your list

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

"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: rig

Continuing NerdTober, 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 subgen

Last year, your hosts recorded a long two-part episode about horror films for spooky season. This year, we're looking to keep the tradition going -- there were a bunch of very worthy candidates we didn't get to last year, and lots of points that came up afterwards, including in the comment section o

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 tr

Many of you asked us to comment and reflect on the news coming out of Cornell. The story -- the sudden re-emergence of a 2024 allegation of a gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house and the university's and local DA's characteristically lackluster handling of the initial report -- is evolving exce

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 re

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

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

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! We continue our 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 America

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

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 emp

For 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

In the wake of the death of Jason Arday, many of you asked about a follow-up to our episode on the politics and media ecosystem plagiarism hunting. 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 mo

Tickets are going fast, but you still have a choice to learn HOW TO BECOME A SILICON VALLEY CREEP (IN 10 EASY STEPS) at our IBWTR Live Show!!! We'd love to see some of our amazing Patreon friends this Thursday (08/27/26) at 7:30 at Swedish American Hall in San Francisco! Get your tickets here!

[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%

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 dimin

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 immig

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,

Hi all, we teased it in the mailbag episode, but now it's official: we're doing another live show in San Francisco!!! If you're even vaguely local, we'd love to see you for HOW TO BECOME A SILICON VALLEY CREEP (IN 10 EASY STEPS)!!! The show will take place on Thursday, August 27, at 7:30 PM PDT (doo

To celebrate 3 years of podcasting together, we are going through the amazing listener questions you all posed here on Patreon a few weeks back! 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 will be Patreon-onl

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". It's an episode about TERF self-staging as singular and "deeply personal" apostasy from "gender orthodoxy", which belies an increasingly sophisticated, well

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

[Sorry, dear Patreon listeners, that this one is coming so hot on the heels of our previous episode! We had hoped to space them out, but our editing process had other ideas!] For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the troubled and troubling story of congresswoman Nancy Mace -- a moderate who b

Earlier this month, Moira ruined Adrian's vacation by alerting him to the "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences", which was presented as a broad and searing indictment of "pathologies" in humanities scholarship, but which turned out upon closer inspecti

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 in the 2010s. They touch on the gendered attacks, the question of maturity and accomplishment, and about the c

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 onl

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

This summer we'll be celebrating three years of In Bed with the Right -- hard to believe our first episode came out in July 2023! To celebrate and to reflect on the 130ish episodes we've put out during that time, we're welcoming a couple of returning guests, Moira might make Adrian record from a res

It's a case of the Patreon coming for the mothership! That's right, we're getting cancelly on main! In this episode, we decided to check in with two recent pieces of pop culture that arguably fit into our evolving canon of the "cinema of cancellation" -- the HBO show Rooster and Jonah Hill's new mov

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 manip

For the second part of our deep dive into transphobia in the UK, Moira and Adrian explore what happened when TERFism left mumsnet and anti-trans blogs, and began ruling the roost on the opinion sections of major newspapers. We trace how a double moral panic -- one around youth transition, and one ab

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. This one's got everything: The Book of Job! Aristotle! Martha Nussbaum! Isaac-binding!

On this episode, Adrian and Moira say farewell to your bricks and mortar, and take the good ship Ragamuffin to the multi-TERFed isle! A fortress built by nature for herself, and for a very specific kind of feminist who longs to be able to go to the loo without seeing anyone who doesn't conform to th

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

Hello, welcome to In Bed with the Right, have you ever dined with us before? Well in that case, welcome, and just so you know our podcast is best enjoyed Patreon-style. The first thing that's going to come out is a little discussion of the chef as a cultural figure, and then the changing gendered re

Help us out, folks: If we did an en episode on Guy Fieri, food and masculinity, would you ... think we had ibe too many Pineapple Habanero Margaritas? Would you listen?

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

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 ques

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 i

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

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

Moira and Adrian discuss the life and crimes of Kristi Noem, outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security -- her MAGA conversion, the cabinet member as content creator, the storm trooper cosplay, and of course the whole dog thing!

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 ar

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 in

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, an

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 seve

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into the murder and the reaction across media