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, The New Republic, The Bell Curve, and Virtually Normal.

If you like what you've heard, and you haven't already, consider subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight! We have a lot of cool episodes coming up, including the aforementioned one on NuzziGate, RFK Jr., and structures of impunity.

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 In Bed with the Right has covered so so so so many of them!

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!

Some links to articles we mention:

-- Matt Bernstein's in-depth episode on the long dark road of Debra Messing can be found here

-- Adrian's New Republic article about a row over "islamogauchisme" in France can be found here

-- Michele Goodwin's interview with Jess Michaels as part of her series Surviving Epstein can be found here

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 "wild birth"-movement. This episode comes with a bunch of trigger warnings -- please make sure you're in the right headspace before diving in!

Some of the texts we refer to in the episode:

Grantly Dick-Read, Natural Childbirth (1933)

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1977)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives and Nurses (1972)

Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery (1975)