In Bed With The Right

In Bed With The Right

by Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
Season 5
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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