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.

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.

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

administration, the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers

is still pushing our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point.

Before we get to the rest of this episode, I want to say a few quick words about Tim Mack,

a very talented investigative correspondent over at National Public Radio.

Fever Dreams listeners may remember Tim as someone who we've had on this podcast recently

when we interviewed him when his scoop-heavy book on the NRA first came out.

Full disclosure, Tim is a Daily Beast alumnus. Anybody who has

access to Google or a search engine could figure that out. He worked here a few years prior to

joining NPR. I also used to live in the same house as Tim, and he was best man at my wedding.

So it's not like I'm coming at this as an entirely neutral bystand.

Having said that, if you listen to NPR regularly nowadays, or if you've been following Tim on

Twitter.com, you would have noticed that for the past couple of weeks, he has been on the ground

with the NPR team working in and traveling around Ukraine, covering the brutal Russian invasion

and ongoing campaign of

atrocity in that country. There are certainly a lot of people, both Ukrainian and otherwise,

in that nation today, who need a good deal of watching over and who are doing their very best

to stay safe and help others as the country gets ripped apart by a maladjusted, bloodlusting

foreign despot. But since we obviously

have an intensely personal affection for Tim Mack over here at Fever Dreams, I'm going to take

...