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.
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 by In Bed with the Right to help Moira and a very lost Adrian make some sense of these and other questions.
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 covers January 1 to March 15.
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 the panic over trans kids to Gen X's drift to the right. Also this one has an airhorn.
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 kinds of image they're discussing, it might be helpful to check out Roland's huge thread on Bluesky. And if you're trying to follow along with our discussion of specific images, we have collected a bunch of the examples we discuss in the episode here.