Journalist Bridget Read talks with Moira and Adrian about the most American of scams, the multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme. Companies like Amway, Mary Kay and Herbalife have had an outsize impact on American politics, and have been an insidious and at times covert part of the backlash against women's liberation, labor organizing and civil rights. This one has it all: eugenics, scammy Stanford-grads, and alfalfa. So much alfalfa. Bridget's book on the pyramid scheme, Little Bosses Everywhere, is on sale now and is absolutely fantastic!
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52:52
Episode 78 -- Project 1933, Part III: May 1 to May 31
For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue 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. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This second installment covers May 1 to May 31 -- the fate of trade unions, the nascent LGBT movement and the women's movement.Here are the books/texts we refer to in this episode: Timothy Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (1995)Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic (2016)Richard J. Evans, “Workers didn’t bring us Fascism”, Jacobin (2021)Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 [here on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/feministmovement0000evan/page/238/mode/2up] Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933 (1981)Jens Dobler, Polizei und Homosexuelle in der Weimarer Republik (2020)Rainer Herrn, Der Liebe und dem Leid: Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933 (2022)
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1:35:03
Episode 77: San Francisco
Moira and Adrian tackle the longstanding conservative fixation on the city of San Francisco, its people and its mores. From demographic anxieties, via Joan Didion's hippie-hate, to disaster movies, doom loops, and progressive prosecutors -- the history of SF-hate is a history of US politics. Books and media cited in this episode: Joseph Plaster, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (2023)Susan Stryker, Victor Silverman (dirs.), Screaming Queens (2005)Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love (2013) Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood (1974)Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)
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1:19:39
Episode 76: Depp v. Heard with Kat Tenbarge
In this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by journalist Kat Tenbarge for a look back at the media spectacle that was actor Johnny Depp's April/May 2022 defamation suit against his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard. The conversation touches on #MeToo backlash, what counts as evidence in the social media age, content creation and YouTube commenting, and why some women find online misogyny persuasive.
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1:06:54
Episode 74: The Trustees (with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd)
Have you been enjoying stories about all-powerful student activist groups shutting down vigorous debate on college campuses? Of the insidious cabals of Performance Studies professors thwarting the progress of science? Well, wait till you get a load of the people who actually run the show. In this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (of the American Campus podcast) to discuss the trustees, their role in university governance, why we tended not to hear much about them ... and why suddenly, in 2025, we very much do!Books, articles and podcasts discussed in this episode: Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars (2023)William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom' (1951)Richard White, Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University (2022)Matt Seybold, The Gilded Network (Podcast, 2025)Nathan Heller, "Will Harvard Bend or Break" (The New Yorker, 2025)
On In Bed With the Right hosts Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub welcome a range of scholars and critics to analyze right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and to plumb the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment.
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