In Bed With The Right

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in Minneapolis. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into questions of gender, solidarity, whiteness and the MAGA imagination as they pertain to the murder and the reaction across media and society.
Please note: We briefly mention the comparison sometimes made with the Nazi-era Gestapo. If this is a comparison that interests you, Moira and Adrian recorded an emergency episode on that group, its history, and the use of comparing it to ICE for our Patreon. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-119-149640913

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Abby Kluchin from the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast to discuss a recent publishing phenomenon and its implications for gender politics: romantasy, a genre that's been emerging over the last 10 years with renewed force. Series like Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and the Empyrian-novels by Rebecca Yarros mix fantasy tropes with costume drama and pretty explicit sex scenes -- and they rely on a very particular kind of trauma heroine, and what seems to be a very particular understanding of gendered trauma.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the conservative attack on birth control, and in particular the influencer-led, MAHA-adjacent surge of misinformation about menstruation and birth control. At issue is ultimately a deeply reactionary, and deeply troubling picture of the gendered body and women's autonomy. Topics covered include: cycle synching, the politics of "naturalness" and the weaponization of legitimate grievances with the medical establishment for ideological purposes.
Here is the list of books/articles we refer to in this episode:
-- Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (1998)
-- Mikaeli Anne Carmichael, Rebecca Louise Thomson, Lisa Jane Moran, Thomas Philip Wycherley, "The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Athletes’ Performance: A Narrative Review"

On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a killing that was captured by multiple camera phones and witnessed by dozens. Since the killing, the Trump administration has used several gendered lines of attack to discredit Renee Nicole Good, to celebrate the killing and to make propagandistic hay of this murder. In this emergency episode (recorded 2 days after the killing), Moira and Adrian talk about the killing, about the question of gender and where we go from here. Among the topics discussed: the echoes of the murder of George Floyd, the parallels with the Gestapo, and the "look what you made me do"-theory of authority.

To start the year off right, Moira and Adrian were joined by Michael Hobbes to discuss Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto, the media hubbub about it, and what both artifacts say about our media environment, our elites, and about gender.
Pieces we cite in the episode:
Becca Rothfeld's review of the book in the Washington Post
Alexandra Jacobs' review of the book in The New York Times