In Bed With The Right

Journalist Bridget Read talks with Moira and Adrian about the most American of scams, the multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme. Companies like Amway, Mary Kay and Herbalife have had an outsize impact on American politics, and have been an insidious and at times covert part of the backlash against women's liberation, labor organizing and civil rights. This one has it all: eugenics, scammy Stanford-grads, and alfalfa. So much alfalfa. ...

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 second installment covers May 1 to May 31 -- the fate of trade unions, the nascent LGBT movement and the ...

Moira and Adrian tackle the longstanding conservative fixation on the city of San Francisco, its people and its mores. From demographic anxieties, via Joan Didion's hippie-hate, to disaster movies, doom loops, and progressive prosecutors -- the history of SF-hate is a history of US politics.

Books and media cited in this episode:

Joseph Plaster, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (2023)

Susa...

Have you been enjoying stories about all-powerful student activist groups shutting down vigorous debate on college campuses? Of the insidious cabals of Performance Studies professors thwarting the progress of science? Well, wait till you get a load of the people who actually run the show. In this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (of the American Campus podcast) to discuss the trustees, their role in u...

The second part of Moira and Adrian's long conversation with Matt Sitman of Know Your Enemy on Roy Cohn -- lawyer to various deplorables, closet case and mentor to a young Donald Trump. This part deals with Cohn's return to New York, his work for the mob, the Church, and the drugs.

Here are the books and documentaries we discuss in this first half:

-- Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (1988)

-- Ivy Me...

Moira and Adrian are joined by Matt Sitman of Know Your Enemy to discuss the life of Roy Cohn -- lawyer, closet case and ratfucker extraordinaire. This first part deals with Cohn's childhood, the Rosenberg trial, and his time with Sen. McCarthy.

Here are the books and documentaries we discuss in this first half:

-- Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (1988)

-- Ivy Meeropol (dir.), Bully. Coward. Victim....

When it comes to the protagonists of MAGA world, they -- like Roxette circa 1990 -- have THE LOOK. You know the one: hair that rises and crests like a mountain range, lips that are strangely beige and eyes that really show off how dead the person is on the inside. How did this style come to define the modern conservative aesthetic? What are its influences? What are its messages? Jessica DeFino (of The Review of Beauty fame) stops ...

Germany 1933 is having a bit of a moment. Which made us at In Bed with the Right decide to explore that year in detail. In this series, Adrian and Moira tell 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. We will be going month by month for these episodes, but this first installment cheats a little bit and cover...

Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri of If Books Could Kill visit In Bed with the Right to talk about the life, times and very, very milquetoast opinions of Pamela Paul, who recently departed from her perch as the New York Times columnist Bluesky loves to hate. Paul emblematizes many aspects of public discourse over the last 5-10 years -- from the emergence of "reactionary centrism" to the renewed freakouts over campus speech, from t...

Why have our new right-wing overlords taken such a shine to chintzy, shiny AI slop? What is persuasive about these phony, artless, slightly desperate images? How do they originate, and how do they circulate? For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Roland Meyer, who is a professor of digital cultures and arts at the University of Zurich and the University of the Arts in Zurich, Switzerland. If you're trying to picture the k...

TW: This episode is almost entirely about a horrifying case of sustained and organized rape.

On December 19, 2024 a court in Avignon, France convicted Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men of rape. It was the conclusion to a spectacular case and trial that galvanized (parts of) France. The victim, Gisèle Pelicot, chose to allow the trial to be public, flipping the script on the way France had thus far metabolized #MeToo: "shame", as ...

Moira and Adrian delve into the career and political trajectory of Mark Zuckerberg. From Facemash to The Facebook to the Metaverse to putting on an absurd amount of sunscreen, they trace Mark Zuckerberg's (and Silicon Valley's) complicated relationship to gender. They explore how data, platforms, innovation and disruption, and guiding Silicon Valley figures like the genius and the drop-out are gendered, and how Zuckerberg's traject...

Donald Trump is issuing executive orders faster than people seem to be able to metabolize what's happening. And many of them have to do with gender, sexuality and wokeness! So Moira and Adrian turn to an expert -- Slate.com's intrepid legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern -- to make sense of at least some of the ones we know about in this special emergency episode. Check out Mark's article on the bizarre (and since possibly rescinded) "...

The Moynihan Report (1965) written by later New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) is an important document in the backlash against the Civil Rights era, but it constitutes an important document in gender conservatism as well. In this episode, Adrian and Moira read through the report in some detail, and talk about the many brilliant critiques level at Moynihan and his project pretty much from the start. You can find t...

In what is already being described as a Festivus miracle, we present you -- at long last! -- the second part of the Second Annual Cursties! It's Moira, Adrian and special guest Michael Hobbes doing the annual airing of the grievances (we're deferring the feats of strength until next year). Featuring the most cursed discourses of this particularly cursed-discourse rich year: with walk-on cameos by Octavian George Collins, the Power ...