In Bed With The Right

<p>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, <em>The New Republic</em>, <em>The Bell Curve</em>, and <em>Virtually Normal</em>.</p><p>If you like what you've heard, and you haven't already, consider subscribing to our Patreon at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight">patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight</a>! We have a lot of cool episodes coming up, including the aforementioned one on NuzziGate, RFK Jr., and structures of impunity.</p>

<p>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 <em>In Bed with the Right</em> has covered so so so so many of them!</p><p>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!</p><p>Some links to articles we mention:</p><p>-- Matt Bernstein's in-depth episode on the long dark road of Debra Messing <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_YMlTus7tg">can be found here</a></p><p>-- Adrian's <em>New Republic</em> article about a row over "islamogauchisme" in France <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/194678/grenoble-france-university-islamophobia-controversy-wokeism">can be found here</a></p><p>-- Michele Goodwin's interview with Jess Michaels as part of her series Surviving Epstein <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://msmagazine.com/podcast/on-surviving-epstein-part-i-with-jess-michaels/">can be found here</a></p>

<p>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 "<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation">wild birth</a>"-movement. This episode comes with a bunch of trigger warnings -- please make sure you're in the right headspace before diving in!</p><p>Some of the texts we refer to in the episode:</p><p>Grantly Dick-Read, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/naturalchildbirt0000gran"><em>Natural Childbirth</em></a><em> </em>(1933)</p><p>Adrienne Rich, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/ofwomanbornmothe0000adri"><em>Of Woman Born</em></a> (1977)</p><p>Barbara Ehrenreich, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/witchesmidwivesn0000ehre"><em>Witches, Midwives and Nurses</em></a><em> </em>(1972)</p><p>Ina May Gaskin, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/spiritualmidwife0000unse"><em>Spiritual Midwifery</em></a> (1975)</p>

<p>For this episode of <em>In Bed with the Right</em>, 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.</p><p>One quick content note: Adrian moved a little quickly through the election results about 25 minutes in. The <em>first </em>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 <em>second</em> set of numbers are about the referendum about leaving the league of nations. Our apologies if this didn't become clear!</p>

<p>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 <em>Moral Panic Bingo Night</em>. Moira and Adrian were joined by the amazing Sarah Marshall (of <em>You're Wrong About</em>) and Matt Bernstein (of <em>A Bit Fruity</em>) to talk about moral panics big and small, and how they continue to fuck up our lives. Stanley Cohen's <em>Folk Devils and Moral Panics </em>is linked <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/folkdevilsmoralp0000cohe_x6y2">here</a>, sans awesome original cover. Sarah Marshall's 8-part CBC series <em>The Devil You Know</em> can be found <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/2054-the-devil-you-know-with-sarah-marshall">here</a>.</p>