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.

Moira and Adrian welcome historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne) to talk about what happens to conservative "preacher" masculinity in the age of swaggering, crass and often libertine sexuality.

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.

Germany voted for a new parliament last Sunday, and if you weren't ready for the words "far right" "Germany" and "20% of the vote" to pop up on your doom bingo, well, then you don't know 2025. Journalist Annika Brockschmidt stops by the pod to talk Adrian and Moira through Germany's political system, how the election results will impact it, and what the results suggest about Germany's future.

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 Gisèle Pelicot put it, "has changed sides." Philosopher Manon Garcia attended the proceedings in Avignon, and now speaks with Moira and Adrian about what the case says about patriarchy, misogyny, masculinity and collective memory.

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 trajectory both reflects this gendered hierarchy and its breakdown. [You can find Adrian's book What Tech Calls Thinking here.]

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) "spending freeze" at Slate here, Adrian's run-down of the EO on gender affirming care here, and Moira's more hopeful note on the opposition all this will run into here.

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 the report here, and Hortense Spiller's brilliant dissection of it here. [Note: there are a couple of words in this episode that we weren't wild about saying. Just be warned.]