A Fever Dreams Carol

Fever Dreams

The Daily Beast

News & Politics, Government

4.4 • 767 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The year 2021 brought some major grifts in MAGA-land, as Fever Dreams hosts Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer noted in their final podcast of the year—think Melania Trump’s NFT’s and the ‘Freedom phone,’ which was basically a “rebrand of a cheapo Chinese phone” selling at five times the price. But the Qux Box (pronounced “Cucks”) takes the prize as the pair’s “favorite dumb character of 2021.” Months after it was first promoted by its inventors—a former Infowars reporter and her husband—“I’m still trying to figure out what the Qux Box is,” Sommer notes. “Seems to be an off-brand Roku as best as I can tell.” Meanwhile, as the Omicron wave hits the United States with a vengeance, some right-wingers are convinced that the reason they’re sick is not because of the widely transmissible and near-ubiquitous new variant of COVID-19, but because of … anthrax.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, welcome to Fever Dreams. My name's Will Summer. I'm a political reporter at The Daily Beast and the author of an upcoming book on QAnon for Harper Collins.
0:07.8	And I'm Aswin-Sub-Tang, but please call me Swin. I'm a senior political reporter at the Daily Beast and co-author of the book Sinking in the Swamp.
0:15.2	All right, here on Fevered Dreams, we're going to take you on plunges into the sometimes hilarious and sometimes scary world of the American right as they continue to influence our politics. Even in the aftermath of the Trump
0:24.6	administration, the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers
0:29.0	is still pushing our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point.
0:34.6	Fever Dreams listeners, you are probably right now listening to this right
0:38.8	between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve 2021. For our special holiday in regramum edition
0:47.7	of fever dreams, we were kicking around some ideas of what to offer you and we were thinking
0:52.2	about, okay, should we put together a major investigative package and something new that we can sort of serve you guys up while you're trying
0:59.3	to get over your Christmas ham? We thought to ourselves, no, you're not paid subscribers. You're
1:04.7	getting this shit for free. So Will, what have we decided to do in terms of this sort of collated
1:10.2	yearbook edition, 2021, of
1:12.6	Fever Dreams?
1:13.8	What a year it's been for Fever Dreams.
1:15.5	You know, we kicked off the pod and so many of you joined us.
1:18.0	So we thought we would check up on some of our favorite characters and in some cases our
1:22.7	favorite gadgets, as well as, you know, maybe introduce some new ones or some people we thought were maybe
1:28.0	overlooked in 2021 and that we think we'll be recurring and popping up again in 2022.
1:33.5	So it's sort of a rogues gallery even more than the podcast normally is.
1:38.0	Right. Like if you think we didn't touch on some of the characters that we've touched
1:42.1	briefly on over the past year or so
1:44.4	of recording. You're in luck. Let's go over our fever dreams notes. Let's compare notes,
	...

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