Hi, I'm Will Summer. Welcome to The Daily Beast's Fever Dreams. I'm a politics reporter at The Daily Beast, and I'm currently working on a book about Q&ONN called Trust the Plan for Harper Collins coming out later this year.

And I'm Kelly Weil. I am also a reporter at The Daily Beast, and I'm the author of the book Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People will believe anything. On this podcast, we're going to take you on

plunges into the sometimes hilarious, sometimes scary fanatics, infecting the way that millions of

Americans view the world and how they vote. Even in the aftermath of the Trump administration,

the energy of these conspiracy theorists, rifters, and influencers is still pushing our mainstream

political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point.

All right. Welcome to Fever Dreams. We're joined today by new co-host and Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weil.

Hey, Will, it's good to be back and kind of around in a more formal capacity.

Yeah, you're here for a good time and a long time. That's right.

Yeah, you know, I think this will be great going forward.

All right, let's pop it off.

So first up, last week's guest, Taylor Lorenz, a columnist writing about technology

at The Washington Post, has a hot story out about the Libs of TikTok Twitter account.

So this is a, you know, for folks who haven't had a chance to read this

yet, I recommend checking it out. But this is a Twitter account that's interesting because it's

sort of grown to have a weirdly large amount of influence. Basically, the person behind this

account, a woman named Chaya Richik, she kind of combs TikTok and finds, like, typically

maybe like a purple-haired teacher or something

and who has like a trans acceptance flag in their classroom here and then says something like,

you know, this is sick, you know, teachers like this should be fired. But as Taylor documents

in this story, this account has become huge in implementing a lot of this, like

promoting a lot of this kind of like, don't say gay stuff. Ron DeSantis's staffer said this account

...