My time in bed with the Left Academics love an echo-chamber

To defeat your enemies, you must first understand them — which is how I ended up in bed with the podcast In Bed with the Right, eagerly tuning in whenever there’s a new episode out. Its selling-point is that it “takes conservatism seriously”, analysing “Right-wing ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality”, in conversations on subjects ranging from “Fag Hags” and Mark Zuckerberg to Otto Weininger and Usha Vance, in order to destroy them. One might think that “taking conservatism seriously” would involve empathising with its motivations, or even humanising its advocates. The Right they’re in bed with, however, reliably turn out to have been hideous monsters all along.

Whether we like it or not, we are all in bed with In Bed with the Right: the podcast reflects a worldview that is still ascendant in high places. One of its co-hosts, Moira Donegan, is a columnist for the Guardian US, which is gradually overtaking the mothership in the race for relevance even in Britain. The other, Adrian Daub, is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, as well as director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Although they indulge in some sweary pugnacity, along with some “populist” postures on economic issues, the podcast’s nerdy aspirations elevate it beyond, say, the “dirtbag” Leftism of Chapo Trap House. Nor do they go in for the Parks and Recreation-style wonkery of Pod Save America; there is no glib “Obama nostalgia” here to be found, their gloominess about America’s past is outmatched only by their gloominess about its future. But whereas the former podcast provides a window into the peripheral and not altogether flattering underbelly of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the latter a subculture of D.C. sad-sacks, In Bed with the Right reveals the state of Left-wing opinion in one place it is still very much alive, and flourishing like never before: humanities faculties at elite universities. It is self-consciously high-minded — even when applying those high minds to low subjects — and determined to assert its monopoly over all serious thought in general, and to discussions of gender in particular.

In Bed with the Right promises all manner of confrontations, but tends to take the easy route. In the first episode, we are confronted with the interesting question: why did the intricacies of the debate over gay marriage so quickly get “memoryholed”? Daub and Donegan alight upon the uninspired and unconvincing answer that the opponents of gay marriage simply “moved on to the next-best target”, namely trans people. Of course, the real story of gay marriage is much more interesting than that, as they elsewhere acknowledge. Its dynamics cannot be mapped neatly onto those of earlier or later “culture wars”. People were sometimes on unexpected, and unpredictable, sides. Andrew Sullivan — “not a good guy”, they say, a “frequent subject of dunking on this podcast” — was among the most influential proponents of gay marriage, and now hitches his wagon to the “TERFs”. They appear to regard this, however, not as a provocation for inquiry into Sullivan’s actual thought and motivations, but as the inexplicable foible of one lesser man.

“How”, asks Donegan in a similar vein in one of her articles, “did transgender children in the US become so politicized?” Again she takes the easy route, pointing her finger at “one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history”. To this J.K. Rowling replied: “Minors sterilised, healthy breasts cut off teenaged girls, a total failure to address kids’ mental health problems and a major study suppressed because it didn’t show what an ideologue doctor wanted it to. ‘You’re only upset because baddies brainwashed you’.” Donegan never explains why such concerns are figments of imaginations, primed for bigotry by “propaganda”. But Donegan exists, writes, and thinks in a milieu where such things can be taken as a given, and where the likes of Rowling can safely be smirked at. Facing such arguments head-on is simply not something one would ever have to do, and may be viewed as a mark of legitimation — and therefore also of suspicion.

Unsurprisingly, such arguments as Rowling’s were absent too from the whole In Bed with the Right episode devoted to “Trans Kids”. There they roll their eyes at the thought of anyone on the “gender-critical” side really caring about women’s sport. “It’s never trans men in sports” that people are worried about, Daub says at one point. One suspects a child would be able to explain to him why this should be the case.

In their recent and ongoing series, they narrate the history of Germany in 1933 month by month. Their motivations here are expressly political, with an eye on the present moment: the whole point of telling the story is to find parallels between then and now. When Daub describes Germany’s collapse into fascism, Donegan lets out sardonic exclamations like “Wow, that’s crazy!” — the experiences of 1933 are uncannily alike her own in 2025. “Nazi” is a word used liberally on the podcast, and the two hosts are mightily pleased that on this occasion nobody can accuse them of hysteria or exaggeration — or threaten to sue for libel.

In an earlier episode Donegan insists that “democracy is intimately bound up in policy outcomes for the Left”: the more democratic the process, the more Left-wing the outcomes. This might explain why, in their election debrief, they laugh off the idea that voters thought Harris was “too woke” — even though there is extremely strong evidence that this was so. Were they, in any case, to consider such a thing, they would deploy the same manoeuvre as they do with the “trans panic”: “baddies brainwashed you”. Indeed, they did exactly this in their discussion of the recent German election. A political moment which was, by common consent, principally about immigration, becomes, in their hands, about everything else. The notion of a misogynist backlash against Angela Merkel — who, one would like to remind them (Daub, who is German, especially), ceased to be chancellor four years ago — gets more attention; and all talk about immigration is airily dismissed as the product of yet more “propaganda” or unacceptable dog-whistling.

“Every year,” writes Daub in What Tech Calls Thinking, peering down at Silicon Valley from nearby Stanford, “I get emails from anguished parents asking me what their kid could possibly do with a degree in, say, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.” I am inclined to sympathise with his frustration: lots of worthy academic disciplines cannot be justified on such narrow, utilitarian grounds. The problem with such increasingly popular areas of study isn’t that they won’t lead to a good job; it’s that they shouldn’t lead to a good job, in a just world, because they are not conducive to good thinking. They stack the deck unfairly, in favour of certain “factors”, in ways that more traditional subjects in the humanities, like history and literature, do not: they tell you, in other words, where to look first when seeking to explain certain phenomena, rather than letting the evidence lead you there naturally. “X–studies” are not to be trusted for this reason: the Copernican point, around which all inquiry must revolve, is right there, preordained in the name.

An “expert” in “feminist studies” looks at the recent German election and thinks something latent and Oedipal about Angela Merkel has more explanatory power than unprecedented levels of immigration. An “expert” in “gender studies” takes it as axiomatic that his or her ideas about gender are correct and J.K. Rowling’s are false, and for this reason sees nothing wrong with treating Rowling as an astronomer might treat an astrologist, or a mathematician might treat someone who believes that 2 + 2 = 5. An “expert” of such a bent will invariably look at Germany in 1933 only in order to find weak parallels between then and now. It is hardly surprising that, in academia, these disciplines form the most dogmatic echo-chambers of all. And nor is it surprising that those who purport to be their most intellectually curious adherents would, in the end, rather spend time in bed with a strawman.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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