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, grifters, and influencers is still pushing our mainstream

political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point.

Hi, this is Will Summer. I'm joined today on fever dreams, not by Kelly Wilde, but by Daily Beast

reporter Zach Petrizo. Zach, how's it going? Good. How are you? Thanks so much for having me.

I'm really looking forward to this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know you've been reporting on a lot of

pretty wild stuff, so I think it'll be a good episode, lots to discuss.

For those wondering, Kelly, our regular co-host, had a baby. And so she is on maternity leave for a good long while.

So instead, we're going to have people like Zach. We're going to have a rotation of guest hosts coming in throughout the summer, doing their best to fill Kelly's shoes. So first up, we have Zach. Zach, you've been covering this beat for a couple years now.

What would you say are the hottest issues on your mind as we head into the midterms?

Sure, absolutely. Well, I think we have more kind of these Trumpian candidates running all over, right?

We have people like RSBN hosts, Mike Crisp don't know, is a very Trumpy YouTube channel. I didn't realize, okay, like, our SBN host running is pretty wild.

Yeah, so, like, my eye is really on Trump world and how that intersects with media, and we cover that kind of really well at the Daily Beast, that intersection there. And this is kind of like spilled over into congressional races in many ways, right? One being Mike and many others, of course, Crispy has advisors like

Roger Stone, for example, and others. So we see kind of this once kind of isolated Trump world

type of stuff kind of really leaking into the mainstream Republican Party more and more seemingly

every day. All right. So moving on to our first item, Zach, you have been a war boy pursuing

the Mad Maxian People's Convoy. The People's Convoy folks may remember, sort of inspired by

Canadian trucker protests. It came to D.C. once already. But now they're back in D.C. or back

in what you could describe as the very generous D.C. metro area reaching, I believe,

...