In Bed With The Right

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity to talk about the resistible rise and precipitous fall of Milo Yiannopoulos. We trace Milo's origins living parasitically off of fan cultures, the culture war-politics of Breitbart, and explore both the power and very real limits of right wing politics of outrageousness. What happens to the provocateur when provocation becomes a tool of governance?
CONTENT NOTE: Yes, Adrian knows that it was national treasure Jennifer Connelly, not Jennifer Garner hanging with the goblins in Labyrinth! He will not be taking questions on this matter at this time.
CONTENT NOTE: Also, there's discussions of a lot of hateful ideas, actions, terms in this episode. All the content warnings that come naturally with discussing Milo Yiannopoulos apply to this episode.

For this episode, Moira takes Adrian on a trip into the long, many-colored history of the iconic Dolly Parton (1946-2026), from the Tennessee mountains where life was as peaceful as a baby's sigh, via Nashville to a corner office where you tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, and naturally pour yourself a cup of ambition. Throughout her life, Dolly modeled a very particular style of femininity, one that managed to be both pastiche, an expression of American mores circa 1970, and very much her own. Moira and Adrian talk about what to make of this style of campy, self-mocking, but also very assertive womanhood -- and what contemporaries made of it across the six decades of Dolly's presence in American life.

For this episode, Moira and Adrian talk about Chief Creep Elon Musk, his worldview and the role gender plays in his politics with Ben Tarnoff, co-author of the recent Muskism. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss what shaped Musk's ideas of autarky, vertical integration, "fortress capitalism", and how a gendered siege mentality is remaking the way we work and live in the United States today.

Here it is, the second half of our IBWTR live show, recorded with 250 of our closest friends at Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco! In it, Moira and Adrian continue their deep-ish dive into tech creep masculinity, and how it came to be so dominant at the present moment. A huge thank you to the folks at Swedish American Hall, to Andrew Roan Gibson for engineering the show, and to Mark Yoshizumi, who just turned around two of these episodes in a single week!
If you'd like to learn more about tech creeps and what they're doing to society, governance, labor and our collective sense of possibility, check out Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here).

Last month, Moira and Adrian appeared at Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco for a special IBWTR live show. In it, they took a deep and snarky dive into tech creep masculinity, and how it came to be so dominant at the present moment. This episode is the first half of that live show -- the second half will drop later this week!
If you'd like to learn more about tech creeps and what they're doing to society, governance, gender, labor and our collective sense of possibility, check out Adrian's new book What Tech Calls Governing (available here).