From the Vaults: Andrew Sullivan, Part 1
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Happy Holidays from In Bed with the Right!!! Unfortunately, the festive season has gotten away from us and the two remaining episodes on our schedule are absolute monsters (the two-hour final (!) installment of Project 1933, and our episode on the media hubbub around "American Canto"), so to tide you over while we record and edit we thought we'd do a re-release of one of our Patreon magna opera from the Patreon. So this week, feast your ears on Part 1 (today) and Part 2 (Thursday) of our deep dive into the life and times of Andrew Sullivan -- editor, blogger, Iraq War hawk, and noted gender conservative! Our deep dive is -- fair warning -- about 3 hours long. But we felt Sullivan -- who is, as Moira put it, sort of "gender conservatism's Forrest Gump" -- was worth spending time with. He intersects with so many strands and trends, so many institutions and pathologies of the last forty years. Specifically, we're going through his complicated work by focusing on specific texts, by situating them in their moment and explaining their legacy. This first episode covers Sullivan's early years, 1980 - 1996: Oxford, Harvard, The New Republic, The Bell Curve, and Virtually Normal.
If you like what you've heard, and you haven't already, consider subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight! We have a lot of cool episodes coming up, including the aforementioned one on NuzziGate, RFK Jr., and structures of impunity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb, and this is In Bed with the Right. So this week's episode is a little bit |
| 0:06.2 | different. Moira is traveling, and I'm traveling, and part of my travel, I mean, I'm visiting |
| 0:11.9 | family, but I'm also in Germany researching Project 1933, the final episode of which was going to be, |
| 0:19.3 | and still is going to be, the final episode we do in 2025. |
| 0:23.8 | Basically, it's turned out to not be a great idea to record what will likely be a two-hour episode, |
| 0:30.8 | conclusion to a pretty massive, what is it, 10-part series, 11-part series, I don't even know, |
| 0:36.8 | on hotel Wi-Fi with a six-hour time |
| 0:39.4 | difference, not recommended. Anyway, we weren't able to get this all squared away this week, |
| 0:45.8 | so we thought, well, why don't we just pull something from the vault? The vaults, in this case, |
| 0:50.3 | being our Patreon. We thought, given that it's the holidays, given that many of you are |
| 0:55.7 | probably traveling, given that some of you are probably dealing with families, et cetera, et cetera, |
| 1:00.7 | why not make it a real doozy? So we decided on our two-part series on none other than |
| 1:07.8 | noted gender conservative Andrew Sullivan. It's an episode that we did back in the summer, |
| 1:13.2 | and we're going to release one episode today and one on Friday. |
| 1:17.2 | And, yeah, it's an episode we remain very proud of. |
| 1:19.9 | I think we really got into what makes this man so maddening so interesting, |
| 1:24.4 | and we were able to, I think, record him a great deal of humanity |
| 1:27.4 | and a great deal of understanding, while also really calling him out on all his spoiler alert, |
| 1:33.6 | copious bullshit. |
| 1:35.8 | Speaking of which, if this is the kind of content you like, if you think, like, wow, three |
| 1:41.6 | hours of podcasting on Andrew Sullivan sounds awesome to me. |
| 1:45.5 | Or if you just like our style sort of more off the cuff on the Patreon and you're not yet a supporter, |
... |
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