Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads | A Beach Read for the Outraged
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Plotz talks with author Carl Hiaasen about his new book, Fever Beach. Fever Beach is a political satire that follows a couple of dimwitted white supremacists, a corrupt congressman, and the people that try to take them all down. They discuss the real-life racist event Hiaasen witnessed that inspired a central scene in the novel, how Matt Gaetz factors into the book, Hiaasen’s next moves, and more.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Gapfest Reeds for July 2025. |
| 0:09.4 | I'm David Plotz, one of the hosts of Slate's political Gapfest. |
| 0:14.5 | As far as I can tell, and that means I did two Google searches, there are a lot of states that have poets laureate, |
| 0:21.7 | but none, as far as I can tell, as an official novelist. This is a shame because my guest on |
| 0:28.4 | Gapfest reads today would surely have held that title for the last 30 or so years in Florida. |
| 0:34.7 | Carl Heism is one of Florida's great treasures. He's the author of 20 or so |
| 0:39.3 | novels about his state, a dozen or so other books, nonfictiony books and young adult books. |
| 0:45.9 | Hyacin's books, almost all of them bestsellers, have been turned into TV shows. I see a bad monkey |
| 0:50.9 | poster behind him on the Zoom screen here, movies, the movie Strip Tees, which I |
| 0:57.6 | did not know, songs. And now he has a shockingly current new novel, Fever Beach, which tells the |
| 1:04.9 | story of incompetent white supremacists teaming up with a fail-sun Republican congressman to try to |
| 1:12.2 | disrupt an election. Fever Beach is it's buoyant. It's extremely funny. It's a beach read. |
| 1:18.9 | It's a beach read for the person who doesn't like put their outrage away when they go on vacation |
| 1:23.4 | because it's it is connected to today's outrage. So Carl, welcome to the GabFest Reeds. |
| 1:30.3 | Thank you. Thanks, David, for having me on. So who is Dale Figo, the incompetent white |
| 1:35.4 | supremacist at the heart of Fever Beach? What is he trying to accomplish? And also, why was he |
| 1:39.5 | kicked out of the proud boys? Well, he was kicked out of the proud boys. He was there on January 6th at the |
| 1:44.9 | insurrection. As if you're if you'll remember a lot of people stormed into the capital and |
| 1:49.6 | some of them thought it'd be a great idea to defecate in the capital as a political statement |
| 1:55.8 | of some sort. And so he joined in to that activity and he, well, he basically took a dump on the wrong statue. |
| 2:04.6 | He chose a statue that he thought was Ulysses Grant when in fact it was a Southern Confederate |
| 2:10.6 | General revealed by the proud boys there in the South. |
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