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In Bed With The Right

Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan

On In Bed With the Right hosts Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub welcome a range of scholars and critics to analyze right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and to plumb the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment.

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S5 · E139
Yesterday · 1 hr 16 min
Episode 156 -- Dolly Parton
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.
S5 · E138
September 22 · 43 min
Episode 155 -- Elon Musk with Ben Tarnoff
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.
S5 · E137
September 19 · 1 hr 6 min
Episode 154 -- Live from San Francisco, it's How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep (in 10 Easy Steps), Part 2
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).
S5 · E136
September 15 · 54 min
Episode 153 -- Live from San Francisco, it's How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep (in 10 Easy Steps), Part 1
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).
S5 · E135
September 9 · 1 hr 7 min
Episode 152 -- Carl Schmitt, Part 2
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.
S5 · E134
September 3 · 58 min
Episode 151 -- Jane Eyre
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.
S5 · E133
August 25 · 19 min
Episode 150 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- The Politics of Plagiarism Hunting and the Death of Jason Arday
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!
S5 · E132
August 18 · 1 hr 17 min
Episode 149 -- Carl Schmitt, Part 1
[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.
S5 · E131
August 11 · 49 min
Episode 148 -- JD Vance's Communion with Jamelle Bouie
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.
S5 · E130
August 4 · 52 min
Episode 147 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- Lesbian Nuns
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!
S5 · E129
July 28 · 58 min
Episode 146 -- Gender and Road Trips with Sarah Marshall
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.
S5 · E128
July 21 · 1 hr 5 min
Episode 145 -- Third Anniversary Mailbag Spectacular
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!
S5 · E127
July 14 · 39 min
Episode 144 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- J.K. Rowling
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.
S5 · E126
July 7 · 48 min
Episode 143 -- Joan Didion's California
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.
S5 · E124
June 30 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode 142 -- Nancy Mace
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.
S5 · E122
June 23 · 1 hr 24 min
Episode 140 -- Lena Dunham
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.
S5 · E120
June 16 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode 139 -- Mifepristone
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.
S5 · E118
June 5 · 1 hr 12 min
Episode 138 -- The Politics of Plagiarism-Hunting
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.
S5 · E116
May 26 · 53 min
Episode 137 -- Catching Up with the Cinema of Cancellation
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.
S5 · E114
May 20 · 1 hr 3 min
Episode 136 -- Marilyn Monroe
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?"

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