Return To The Grassy Knoll Feat. Tim Mak
Fever Dreams
The Daily Beast
4.4 • 767 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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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 Q&ON for Harper Collins. And I'm Aswin-Sub-Tang, but please call me Swin. I'm a senior political reporter at The Daily Beast |
| 0:21.3 | and co-author of the book Sinking in the Swamp. All right, here on Fever Dreams, we're going to take |
| 0:25.8 | you on plunges into the sometimes hilarious and sometimes scary world of the American right |
| 0:30.0 | as they continue to influence our politics. Even in the aftermath of the Trump administration, |
| 0:34.3 | the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers, is still pushing our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking |
| 0:42.7 | point. |
| 0:43.3 | Hi, welcome to fever dreams. |
| 0:44.4 | I'm Will Summer, and we're joined today by guest host Kelly Weil. |
| 0:47.7 | Hey, Will. |
| 0:48.5 | So, we're hearing a lot about this Facebook metaverse. |
| 0:51.8 | And for people who aren't keeping up to date with Mark Zuckerberg's latest pronouncements, |
| 0:58.0 | Facebook renamed itself Meta. |
| 1:00.3 | But Will, I think you have a cautionary tale of the Metaverse that our listeners might want to clue into. |
| 1:07.7 | Yeah, so the Metaverse is the thing people get to write kind of like thumb-sucking |
| 1:11.4 | op-eds about, oh, but basically they're talking about, you know, living in virtual reality. |
| 1:16.1 | If people ever saw the children's show reboot, where there were these villains named like |
| 1:20.3 | hexadecimal and I think like Megamind or whatever, and they were like evil computer chips. |
| 1:25.9 | It's kind of like that. But, but, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's |
| 1:29.1 | video of him kind of wandering around in the metaverse and meeting cyber Mark Zuckerberg reminded me |
| 1:33.9 | of an ugly experience I had in the metaverse on second life. So journey back, if you will, to |
| 1:39.8 | fever dreams the college years. The throwback. I'm always ready. |
| 1:46.6 | So this was around 2008 or 2009. And I was in college and I had a professor who was really into Second Life. |
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