120 avsnitt • Längd: 50 min • Veckovis: Onsdag
Inside the right’s push to retake power, from the conspiracy-slingers to the MAGA acolytes to the straight-up grifters. Thought the Trump era was crazy? Wait ’til you hear what they have planned next. Hosted by Kelly Weill and Will Sommer. New episodes every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app today.
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The podcast Fever Dreams is created by The Daily Beast. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
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Fever Dreams examines the recent headline-grabbing actions of right-wing media darling Steven Crowder, who was outed this week for allegedly exposing his genitals repeatedly to employees. Plus! The latest on Ammon Bundy’s latest brewing standoff attempt.
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On this week’s episode of Fever Dreams, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill discuss how Trump’s decision to fly to New York instead of hunkering down in Mar-a-Lago to face his historic arraignment had the markings of a political scheme—one which denied stoppedDeSantis from making his own big patriotic stand against the charges. Then, national political reporter for Semafor, David Weigel, joins the podcast and weighs in on the latest Trump drama.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene is up to her old tricks—this time, protesting a routine ATF inspection of a Georgia gun store Monday under the guise that there apparently were too many agents from “blue states” conducting the operation. Then, investigative reporter Luke O’Brien joins the podcast to talk about the ongoing trial of Douglass Mackey, a 33-year-old ‘alt-right’ figure dubbed the “Disinformation King” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.. Despite the fact that Mackey allegedly engaged in election interference, he’s become a cause célèbre in right-wing circles—even garnering a number of segments on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show. Plus! Benny Johnson, the former Buzzfeed writer who was fired for plagiarism before becoming a right-wing media star, ditches Newsmax in order to pursue an independent career.
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While prosecutors appear to be closing in on Donald Trump and preparing to file formal charges, he’s been posting up an absolute storm on Truth Social. It’s all happening amid the backdrop of a potential arrest for the former president—which some pundits predict will bolster his re-election campaign. The Fever Dreams team isn’t so sure. Plus! Daily Beast reporter Jake Lahut joins the program to talk about his recent reporting on what appears to be DeSantis’ fledgling campaign—including a number of troubling anecdotes about the Florida governor’s ability to make small talk and press the flesh at his early stops in Iowa and elsewhere.
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If Tucker Carlson seems a little lost at the moment—that’s because he is. At least, that’s what Media Matters researcher Kat Abughazaleh says, and she has to watch the fire-breathing Fox News host every day for work. Then, Fever Dreams digs into the obfuscation being performed by Fox and others in the conservative media after one of the country’s worst banking collapses. Plus! In the podcast’s Fresh Hell segment, Weill and Sommer discuss the worst dressed man in North America—Jordan Peterson—and how exactly he styles the atrocious outfits he’s recently become known for.
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This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), long a mainstay in Republican politics, wasn’t quite the A-list event of years past. Isaac Arnsdorf joins the podcast to talk about his own CPAC experience, along with breakout star, Kari Lake, who failed to win Arizona’s governor race last November but propelled herself to MAGA stardom with a Big Lie-style campaign at the state level. Plus, in the podcast’s Fresh Hell segment, Weill gives an update on the legal woes of Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer and alleged human trafficker currently detained in a Romanian prison—as well as the bizarre rumor that he has lung cancer.
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Hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill unpack the QAnon connections behind newly elected Michigan GOP leader Kristina Karamo, who declared Michigan as “ground zero for the globalist takeover of the United States of America.” A wave of more than 100 deaths over the past two years at Fort Bragg has rocked the U.S. military—caused in part by an increasing number of overdoses, says Rolling Stone investigative reporter Seth Harp on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast. Plus, a look into both hosts’ personal history with the comic Dilbert—and its embattled artist, Scott Adams, who sparked a firestorm last week by going on a racist rant and calling Black people a “hate group,” among other things.
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On this week’s Fever Dreams, James O’Keefe gives his fans and foes a truly memorable send-off, while the Libertarian Party continues to its slide to the right. Plus, co-host Will Sommer discusses his years of reporting on QAnon—as well as his new book Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.
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What if there was an atomic bomb about to detonate and kill millions of people—and the only way to defuse it was to have an Artificial Intelligence chatbot say a racial slur? Also on the podcast Weill and Sommer interview Trevor Aaronson, the host of the investigative podcast the Alphabet Boys, which tells the story of FBI informant Mickey Windecker, who almost single-handedly derailed the Black Lives Matter movement in Denver. Plus! Weill and Sommer recap a bombshell investigation into Eliza Blue, an overnight internet sensation who rose to prominence by becoming an ombudsman for victims of human trafficking.
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The first thing Andrew Tate did after his arrest on Romanian human trafficking charges was to complain about “the Matrix”—a shadowy power structure hell-bent on taking him down for, well, some unspoken reason. He is, of course, not the first one to use this term—it’s an emerging meme in right-wing spaces online, says Fever Dreams host Will Sommer on this week’s episode. Even Logan Paul, the YouTube provocateur and wannabe boxing star, has thrown out the theory to push back on critics after a particularly bad week of PR which began with the discovery of an abandoned pig he apparently once owned. Also on the episode, Sommer and co-host Kelly Weill investigate the origins of a new front in the culture war: gas stoves.
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Ineitha Lynette Hardaway—better known as “Diamond” from the pro-Trump broadcasting duo “Diamond and Silk”—passed away this week, leaving the future of the pair’s popular act in limbo. In this week’s episode of Fever Dreams, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill speculate on what comes next for “Silk”—who was never really the group’s frontman, so to speak. Then, the pair tackle Brazil’s own Capitol riot, which came nearly two years to the day after Jan. 6. In terms of pure aesthetics, the two scenes were incredibly reminiscent of each other: “They had the flags, they had the marching groups, they had the people walking through government chambers, trashing things,” Weill said. But even as this was all going on, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been camped out in Florida at the home of an MMA star, signing autographs and meeting with American fans of his Trumpian governing style. The state has become a new nexus for the world’s various right-wing movements in recent years, according to Fever Dreams guest and The Daily Dot political reporter Claire Goforth—and it appears Bolsonaro is angling to stay there and trade in on his popularity with the MAGA base rather than face the music back at home.
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It may be the start of a new year, but the Republican Party is back to its old antics again—throwing the House of Representatives into chaos as a rogue group of far-right Congresspeople refuses to step into line and back Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the speaker’s gavel. Kelly Weill and Will Sommer, hosts of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, predict that 2023 will only bring more insane antics from the chamber’s more controversial corners—and Fever Dreams favorites like Reps. Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are already floating their best ideas for what to do with their newfound majority power. Plus, the pod explores the arrest of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate—and how the downfall of a MAGA-adjacent internet celebrity leaves the rest of that ecosystem in the lurch.
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Kanye’s West’s “traveling roadshow of right-wing internet fame balls” may be the topic of the week, but according to Fever Dreams host Will Sommer, fame, like money, does not equal happiness. In this week’s episode, Sommer and co-host Kelly Weill discuss the aftermath of Ye’s controversial dinner with former President Donald Trump last week. Notably though, it was Ye’s guest, the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, that had tongues wagging. Then, Cerise Castle, who covers the presence of gangs in the LA Sheriff's Department in her new podcast, A Tradition of Violence, explains what it takes to become a member.
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Would you eat raw testicles to become an alpha male? This week, Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly of the QAnon Anonymous podcast join us to discuss their new series “Man Clan,” which delves into the dark, dietarily dubious world of masculinity influencers. Meanwhile, as voters go to the polls, election vigilantes are flocking to Telegram channels where they award each other “points” for conspiracy theories about people they baselessly believe to be election “mules.” If Republicans take the House of Representatives, the right might mount an effort to impeach President Joe Biden, albeit on unclear charges. Fever Dreams co-hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill break down how Republicans might try to oust Biden, plus why failed candidate Laura Loomer is now blaming her primary loss on fellow rightwing mudslinger Milo Yiannopoulos.
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There’s a very good chance that at least two secretary of state positions in the battleground states of Nevada and Arizona will be won by people who are part of a coalition put together by a QAnon promoter who some people believe is also JFK Jr. In this week’s episode of political podcast Fever Dreams, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill take a deeper look at that “shadowy character,” Juan O. Savin, and how he, along with his supporters, could destroy American democracy. Also on the podcast, Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters for America who is an expert on all things Savin, says that while it’s hard to say exactly what would happen if these candidates take office, “the concern is that if these people got elected they could try to cast doubt on the election result or frankly just try to flat out overturn it and refuse to certify it. What this could do is essentially connect QAnon to a constitutional crisis, and that’s what could play out here if that/s what happens.”
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Things have gotten a lot crazier over the past few years for award-winning former CBS News war correspondent Lara Logan. Now reinvented as a far-right commentator, she was most recently kicked off Newsmax after appearing on Eric Bolling’s primetime program and launching into a QAnon-themed rant on air, claiming world leaders drank children’s blood and made people eat insects, among other notable wild conspiracies. Elsewhere in the episode, Maurice Chammah, a reporter at The Marshall Project and author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, talks American sheriffs and their far-right tendencies. In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss reports of intimidation at early ballot drop boxes, particularly in Arizona from those who are hyped up by Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked conspiracy film, 2000 Mules.
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The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, faces an uphill battle to revive the “ghost town” that is the conservative MAGA site Parler, say hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill in this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast. Ye is buying the social media platform after being kicked off Instagram and Twitter for an antisemitic post, Parler’s parent company announced Monday. Also on the podcast, Kyle Spencer, journalist and author of the new book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, talks MAGA media personality and radio talk show host Charlie Kirk and how he got his start. Then, in this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Sommer reviews the Fox Nation special The Trial of Hunter Biden, which he describes as “honestly one of the strangest pieces of content” Fox has ever produced.
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Kanye West has been inching towards reimagining himself as both a virulent antisemite and the public face of Fox News and over the past few weeks, he’s been off the handle. Also on the podcast, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and host of the podcast, Posting Through It, discusses a new report that he co-authored on the ugly election trends we can expect in 2022 and 2024. In this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the new Republican “unwoke” bank, GloriFi, and how unfortunately, the new venture doesn’t seem to be getting off the ground, considering it is on the verge of bankruptcy.
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Herschel Walker already faced an uphill battle to become a U.S. senator after The Daily Beast reported he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. But now it appears Walker is embroiled in another fight: one with his own son. Christian Walker, a conservative with a substantial social media following—particularly on TikTok—has taken aim at his father, whom he accused of violence and said abandoned his children from multiple women. “Herschel’s problem is that his son has such a way with words,” Will Sommer tells co-host Kelly Weill in this episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, referring to Christian’s impassioned online reaction to his father’s denials of the abortion allegations. Also on the podcast, Travis Waldron, senior national reporter at the Huffington Post, talks Brazil and its politics, which have been popping off thanks to the Brazilian general election. “The stakes of this one feel pretty high given the concerns about democracy and [President Jair] Bolsonaro’s efforts to follow Donald Trump down the path of election skepticism and potentially an all out challenge to the result of the elections,” Waldron says.
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“Corruption chic” is in. That’s according to The Conservateur, a new “D.C.-based fashion-and-lifestyle platform” from some of conservative fashion’s most elite, who, upset over Vogue snubbing Melania Trump, are now throwing in their political views with a cute new pair of shoes–or ankle monitors–in their own attempt at creating content. Michael Schaffer, a senior editor at Politico whose Capital City column runs weekly in Politico Magazine, tells hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill in this episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast that while he doesn’t think Anna Wintour is losing a lot of sleep, the “MAGA answer to Vogue” has landed, and it’s already making headlines. In this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the right’s reaction and misreporting to the emerging trend of colorful fentanyl pills dubbed rainbow fentanyl.
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It’s on par with Don’t Worry Darling for being one of the most talked about cinematic events of the fall, but just how bad is Goonies star Robert Davi’s film My Son Hunter? On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and returning co-host Kelly Weill review the biopic of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. “It’s got legs on Don’t Worry Darling,” Weill says. “I think I fell into some kind of brain fog while watching it.” Also on the podcast, Ethan Chorin, Libya expert and author of the new book Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink, digs into the famous 2012 terrorist attacks and the way that Benghazi exists in our politics to this day, particularly on the right.
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Just when you thought Dr. Mehmet Oz was losing the war against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, this week, the reality TV star found a new arsenal at his disposal. On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Ursula Perano, politics reporter at The Daily Beast, discuss the latest in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Also on the podcast, Philip Bump, National correspondent at The Washington Post, explains how he became the guy to go through all of the 2020 election fraud claims, eventually debunking each of them one by one. As well, Sommer talks about the confusing mess that was far-right political commentator and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’ supposed arrest by the FBI last week.
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On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Andrew Kirell, senior editor at The Daily Beast, discuss the new song released by the pro-Trump YouTuber, who has used some of his wealth to fund a rock song, “Only Ever Wanted.” Also on the podcast, Andy Kroll, a reporter for ProPublica and the author of the upcoming book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, discusses how the story of Seth’s life and death took on this bizarre, conspiratorial afterlife online.
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Sometimes the biggest surprises come from the strangest of places. On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Andrew Kirell, senior editor at The Daily Beast, return to the icy north to discuss the QAnon “Queen of Canada,” Romana Didulo, and her disco RV.Also on the podcast, Rolling Stone political news reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez talks former kickboxer “turned-awful-man” Andrew Tate.
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The fallout from the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort feels never-ending, and those still suffering the sting of the right-wing backlash are the ones who enforced the move, including the federal magistrate judge who signed off on the search warrant.Also on the podcast, the hosts talk with Nick Lutsko, a musician who writes and sings songs that, according to Sommer, are a crossover between our crazy political moment and the lives we lead on the internet. But most importantly, says Sommer, Lutsko sings about conservatives including Dan Bongino and, unsurprisingly, Alex Jones.
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On the latest episode of Fever Dreams, host Will Sommer and guest host Anthony Fisher discuss the motive behind Donald Trump’s endorsement for Eric…but which one? The team also discuss and review Alex Jones’ “documentary” as his Sandy Hook trial continues. Elsewhere in the episode, Matthew Remski, cohost of the Conspirituality podcast, explains the meaning behind “conspirituality” and what it encompasses.
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The Proud Boys are at the center of the January 6 committee hearings — but who are they? HuffPost editor Andy Campbell, the author of an upcoming book on the Proud Boys, joins Fever Dreams host Will Sommer and guest host Sam Brodey to give. from their cereal-themed beat-in rituals and their varying self-love regiments. Sam, a congressional reporter for The Daily Beast, weighs in on the committee hearings. In other extremist news, Will and Sam discuss a botched appearance from Patriot Front white supremacists at an Idaho gay pride parade. And finally, Will takes us to a lower depth of “Fresh Hell” that was previously believed possible, exploring the right-wing manosphere’s belief that receipts somehow steal their masculinity.
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From the newest development in the Capitol riot investigations, with Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy indictments, to Kevin McCarthy’s war with MAGA hardcore believers, Will Sommer and guest host Zachary Petrizzo break down the state of the political right in this week’s episode of the Fever Dreams podcast. As for the guest this week, the duo was joined by documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger who is behind the upcoming Nextix docuseries Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies, and the Internet. (Watch the trailer here.)
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Who’s the most goated pro-Trump rapper alive? Perhaps it’s Forgiato Blow, the trash-talking, Hooters-addicted “Mayor of Magaville.” Vice News reporter Tess Owen joins Will Sommer and guest host Zachary Petrizzo to talk about her recent profile of Blow. Plus: the wheels come off the trucker convoy, and Zach and Will break down the latest failed stunt from Jacob Wohl.
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A newly nominated Republican congressional candidate in Ohio claims he’s not a QAnon guy, despite appearing to own an extensive wardrobe of QAnon merchandise. This week on Fever Dreams, we revisit J.R. Majewski, the next likely candidate to join Congress’s growing Q wing. Elsewhere, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill discuss a falling-out among the white nationalist America First movement, which entered a bitter feud after its former treasurer got a girlfriend (a faux pas with the movement’s celibate leader). While that racist youth movement flounders, another is quietly amassing influence. Reporter James Pogue joins us to discuss the New Right movement, an anti-liberal alliance whose star candidate J.D. Vance just won his GOP nomination for Congress. Finally, we visit a more longshot candidate, who, if elected, pledges to blow up a Georgia monument that she believes is Satanic.
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Is this the country’s most off-the-rails local Republican party? This week, Fever Dreams checks in on the Kootenai County, Idaho GOP, where local leaders are accused of trying to force a hostile takeover of the local Democratic party, and install an antisemitic troll as the new Democratic leader. Plus, we bring you the latest from Mar-A-Lago, where Donald Trump is making angry phone calls about his floundering social media site, Truth Social. We’re also joined by Reason reporter C.J. Ciaramella, who tells us about the FBI’s secret collection of police brutality statistics—and why those numbers might never see the light of day.
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Donald Trump is racking up massive Secret Service bills—and hassling those agents about their physical fitness and whether they voted for him. This week on Fever Dreams, we visit wannabe demagogues at home and abroad. In Florida, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a Hitler-hyping white nationalist conference. Other members of her party, meanwhile, prefer to heap praise on Vladimir Putin, whom they laud as “anti-woke” as he oversees Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That attack is so large that researchers have been sounding alarm bells about Russia’s military buildup for months. This week’s guest, Daily Beast reporter Adam Rawnsley, describes how researchers have tracked Russian troop movements through Google maps and TikTok videos, bursting the Russian military narrative about the reason for the invasion.
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Will JFK Jr. rise from the dead and proclaim himself QAnon King in a Dallas press conference this week? Probably not. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from gathering in Texas to meet the long-departed lawyer. This week on Fever Dreams, Will Sommer and guest host Kelly Weill discuss the nuttiest legal battles on the far right, from conspiratorial attorney Lin Wood accusing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of stiffing him $5,000, to neo-Nazis representing themselves in a trial over the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. NPR correspondent Tim Mak joins the podcast to discuss his new book MISFIRE: Inside the Downfall of the NRA, which delves into the secrets of the powerful gun lobbying group and its downright weird leader. Plus, Will gives a harrowing cautionary tale from the metaverse.
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With the Arizona audit in chaos after confirming Biden won, the boys are joined by Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy to talk through the aftermath — and the audit-enthusiast civil war. Kelly Weill joins to talk about the new book bans. Plus: the rise of “vigilante medicine” urging COVID patients to stay out of the hospital, and a consideration of rising Gen Z Republicans Gunnar Thorderson and Morgonn.
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This week’s episode of Fever Dreams features the brilliant Atlantic columnist Adam Serwer, whose new book—The Cruelty is the Point: the Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America—builds off a 2018 essay to examine how President Trump weaponized racism and white identity politics to build in-group belonging among his supporters, as has happened countless times before in U.S. history. Meanwhile, DOWN IN ARIZONA... Our intrepid co-host Will Sommer recently traveled to the Copper State to hang out with QAnon promoter “Baby Q” and see the premiere of former Overstock CEO and amateur election-fraud hunter Patrick Byrne’s new election movie, "The Deep Rig."
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If the federal investigation into Matt Gaetz does indeed end up spelling the MAGA congressman’s downfall, it’ll be partly because of a group of wannabe Instagram influencers.
On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, hosts Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng welcome fellow Beast reporters Jose Pagliery and Roger Sollenberger, the duo that’s been breaking story after story on the Gaetz scandal in recent weeks. The pair reveal new details on the Gaetz saga that haven’t been publicly released before, including additional passages from the confession letter secretly written by disgraced Gaetz wingman Joel Greenberg, and sent to Trump associate and longtime GOP ratfucker Roger Stone.
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So, remember when ex-President Donald J. Trump insanely told the United States that injecting yourself with bleach might be a cure for the coronavirus? It turns out that there’s a whole slew of wackos who have been promoting bleach drinking—disguised under the name of “miracle mineral solution”—for a range of health problems long before #45 took office and let more than 400,000 Americans die from COVID on his watch. That includes a scammy father-son duo who tried to form a church of bleach so they could claim it was their religious right to sell their chlorine dioxide snake oil. The feds didn’t buy it and now they’ve been indicted (after a brief stint on the lam in South America) in the biggest takedown yet of these dangerous bleach peddlers.
Plus! Sportswriter David J. Roth walks us through how anti-vaxx stubbornness among some players is causing big-time chaos in baseball.
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Note: If you're coming here from The New Abnormal the interview picks up after the commercial around 12:30
He founded the noxious online forum that gave QAnon life. And now, he thinks “Q” should be arrested and tried.
In Q: Into the Storm, HBO’s new six-part documentary series on QAnon, the filmmakers make their case that father-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins are the true culprits behind “Q.” In a new interview with The Daily Beast, the breakout star of the doc dishes on the Watkins’ “fascist” ramblings (including expressing sympathy with Spanish conquerors who mutilated indigenous populations), why he thinks the Watkins should be prosecuted, and the precise moment he discovered that his former cohorts could be singlehandedly duping the world with a deranged conspiracy theory.
In this special bonus episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, New Abnormal host Molly Jong-Fast joins Fever Dreams producer Jesse Cannon and co-host Will Sommer to interview Fredrick Brennan, the star of HBO documentary. Brennan, founder of the website 8chan that would become a breeding ground for QAnon, has since become an outspoken opponent of the website’s current owner, Jim Watkins, and his son Ron.
Brennan argues that Ron and Jim should be arrested for allegedly posing as the mysterious “Q,” likening them to scam artists.
“Essentially, what QAnon was—what the Q poster was doing—was impersonating a federal agent,” Brennan said. “And the Watkins have received material gain for that, in terms of their site getting bigger, them being featured in mass media, he had a super PAC…that received donations. He received ads that he would not have received otherwise.”
Brennan added, “I think that this case is too important and that the courts should be left to decide whether or not what they did was impersonation of a federal agent…We can't keep looking at the Internet and being like, ‘Oh, well it happened online.’”
Brennan elaborates on the very moment it dawned on him that his 8chan successors could actually be behind the far-reaching and destructive pro-Trump hoax.
“When 8chan came back online, it was extremely unstable,” he recounted. “I was trying to post on it to see if it worked. And it was not working at all for me, but somehow, ‘Q’ was posting. And that was kind of the moment for me that sealed the deal…If they had not already been controlling it before, they were controlling it now.”
Brennan also describes why he believes the Watkins family wants to do far more than just shitpost—that they would love to help bring about a “fascist” state.
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By the end of the big new documentary series on QAnon, the filmmakers show off a pretty damn strong case that a shitposting systems administrator named Ron Watkins is the guy currently behind “Q.”
But the docuseries doesn’t fully capture—at least not in detail—all the crazy lengths to which Watkins went in order to finger Steve Bannon as the head of the violent, culty conspiracy movement.
“Ron actually had been planting the seed for Bannon from the very first time I met him,” Q: Into the Storm director Cullen Hoback tells Will Sommer and Swin Suebsaeng on the new episode of FEVER DREAMS. “So he had known me for, I think, less than 48 hours. And at the end of that interview… he pulls me aside and he just says, ‘You know, you should look into Steve Bannon.’ Which I immediately found pretty suspicious... Right from the get-go, he was planting the seed.”
Hoback wasn’t the only guy Watkins was trying to convince. Even in his own shop—the notorious troll-haven 8Chan—Watkins was attempting to shine a light on Bannon. “It seemed like he had even done that internally. Somebody who works with them [Ron Watkins and his father Jim] at one point… showed me a chat they'd had that went all the way back to early January of 2018, where Ron was internally suggesting Steve Bannon.”
Hoback adds, “It seems that this was a red herring. This is my interpretation, that it was a red herring that he had been planting for some time. And I suspect that he had put a lot of work into this and wanted someone to pick up on it.”
As the documentary shows, Watkins even produced a supposed “data set” meant to demonstrate that “Q” and the former top Trump strategist were in the roughly same place at roughly the same time.
But suspicion eventually swung back to Ron and his dad, even though they were almost certainly not “Q” originally. (Most likely, it was a group of folks.) Back then, you might be surprised to learn, “Q” was treated as a joke—one of a whole gaggle of “anons” claiming to have insider knowledge the nefarious workings of the deep state. There was even one character named “BigDickAnon,” Sommer says.
“It's interesting reading the first posts where everyone's like, ‘Get outta here, Q, you're a total loser.’ There's a really funny line where Q's like, ‘I must go dark, the deep state is closing in’ and someone's like, ‘Yeah, time to log off. Mom's meatloaf is ready, loser. Get out of here,’” Sommer adds. “It's just fascinating to see how people treated Q initially and how it turned into this thing that would have people in Congress—and storming Congress.”
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Did you know that everyone’s favorite Suez-Canal-blocking ship is now the subject of a QAnon conspiracy? The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer lay out why the adrenochrome set is convinced that the stuck ship’s cargo is full of trafficked children on the latest episode of our Fever Dreams podcast (Hint: it has to do with Hillary Clinton’s secret service code name—you guessed it, EVERGREEN.)
Speaking of Hillary conspiracies, Suebsaeng and Sommer discuss why the right just can’t seem to come up with a good Joe Biden conspiracy to smear the new president; Trump’s base seems more interested in reverting to their old hatreds of Clinton and Barack Obama. (As Suebsaeng points out, Biden quite simply is not Black or a woman, and so doesn’t inspire the same level of vitriol from the hardcore racist, misogynistic Trumpites.)
Meanwhile, there’s a tug-of-war going on between those in the Trump administration who want the former president to receive “credit” for the COVID vaccine drive and the rightwing anti-government, anti-vaxx diehards who refuse to believe that their Emperor God actually wants them to get the shot. The tussle is crystallized in Trump’s former HHS staffer Michael Caputo, a “really brash, incredibly Trumpy longtime Republican operative” who has taken it upon himself to prosthelytize about the vaccine in biker bars among the “MAGA Sons of Anarchy”—and who’s running into a lot of resistance.
Keep an eye out for the interview with The Daily Beast’s own Kelly Weill, who walks our hosts through the crazy cast of lawyers and faux-lawyers who have sprung up to defend the Capitol Rioters and anti-masker businesses—one of them quotes from Lord of the Rings, another has never actually passed the bar because he thinks it’s a British conspiracy.
And most importantly, we learn about Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’ supervillain origin story, how Texas National Guard troops faced a hostage situation with Pizzagate overtones, and how Will Sommer is singlehandedly responsible for bringing the phrase “soy boy” out of the Internet swamp into the national spotlight.
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Take one self-proclaimed satanism expert. Add in a pinch of dumpster-diving. Throw in a chicken-coop fire, and (of course) pillow magnate and Donald Trump pal Mike Lindell. And you’ve got the recipe that Trump 2020 deadenders are currently leading in the great state of Arizona to try to, somehow, overturn the election there.
“It could be like a Coen brothers movie. It has that atmosphere,” Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer tells his colleague and co-host Asawin Suebsaeng on the premiere episode of Fever Dreams, The Beast’s new podcast. “You have these kind of vigilante groups of people who connect on Facebook and say, well, let's go to the board of elections—and then they dive into the dumpster and see what they can find…Or there was a fire at a chicken farm owned by or connected to this guy who's opposed to the recount, and they said, well, he probably put the ballots in there and set the fire! And then they go out to the farm and they smell the air and they say: This smells like burnt ballot to me!”
Fever Dreams takes you inside the right’s push to retake power, from the conspiracy-slingers to the MAGA acolytes to the straight-up grifters. Thought the Trump era was crazy? Wait ’til you hear what comes next.
To start, there’s the slew of Republican efforts to not only to keep challenging the 2020 presidential contest, but to also execute further election and voter crackdowns across the country.
“What’s going on is that Republicans need some shred of voter-fraud evidence that they can then use to impose more voting restrictions,” Will adds. “But what they’re doing here in Arizona…[the recount effort involves] this satanism guy, who maybe does not have the most credibility, or they were looking to hire this very pro-Trump outfit that’s been laughed out of other state recounts.
To help further unpack how the Trump era was just one long, aggravating, and monumentally blood-drenched Coen brothers movie that we were all forced to live through, Swin and Will welcomed Ike Barinholtz, the comedian and star of such films as Blockers and the Neighbors franchise, as well as in TV series Bless the Harts, Eastbound and Down, and The Mindy Project.
The whole Trump presidency “really was Burn After Reading,” Ike contends. But “if you want to learn how the insides of the [Trump] White House work, you have to watch Step Brothers. It will all make sense.”
Ike also opens up about what it was like to co-star in the 2020 satire The Hunt, just as then-President Trump was busy issuing, in Swin’s words, a “cultural fatwa”—via tweet—on the movie. “No one loves ‘cancel culture’ more than the Republicans. It’s their favorite thing, they love it, they thrive on it,” he says. “The worst possible thing is for Donald Trump to tweet about you. Just, it changes your life in a terrible, terrible way…I was super nervous that he was going to tweet about it. And then he tweeted about it!”
As a result, he and others working on the movie were, naturally, inundated with threats of retribution and violence...
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.