In Bed With The Right

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902). Famous as a pioneering feminist intellectual and crusader for women's suffrage, Stanton is today also remembered for the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that dominated the second half of her incredibly long career. We explore how these two go together, and what Stanton's life tells us about the effects of political disappointment.
Find Ellen Carol Dubois's new Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life here.
Read (or "reëncounter") Moira's review essay in the New Yorker here.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange, disturbing world of looksmaxxing. We try to spend less time asking where this phenomenon comes from, less time gawking at the weird terminology and rituals of this subculture (though we do spend some time, we're only human!)--but our main question is what a phenomenon like looksmaxxing says about masculinity, right-wing gender politics, and heterosexuality.

This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis-metaphors, the Best Little Whorehouse in Grailland, and the final split in the bromance known as Nietzgner (probably? We're talking about Nietzsche and Wagner).

Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do with what you think of as persecution. Sam's book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany will be out in April and can be preordered here.

In the second half of our two-part series on one of In Bed with the Right's bêtes noires, Adrian and Moira chart the resistible rise of Bari Weiss's from her time on the canceled-person circuit to the pinnacle of American news media. Topics covered: the rise of the Free Press and the decline of the free press; how a certain kind of Silicon Valley creep fell in love with what Bari was selling; how she rode the "vibe shift" among tech elites to maximum profit; and why the Trump-era may well prove her undoing.
Some of our sources for this episode:
On Bari's reign of terror at CBS: Clare Malone, "Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS"
Radley Balko's takedown of the Free Press piece about George Floyd: "The Retconning of George Floyd"
If you read German, and want to know more about the tech elite's "vibe shift" around 2020, you can check out Adrian's new book! (Or you can wait until September 10 to get the English version!)