Vlog or Die, Feat. Abbie Richards

Fever Dreams

The Daily Beast

News & Politics, Government

4.4 • 767 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One surefire way to garner some extreme MAGA-cred nowadays is to get COVID-19, lie about it and say you just have pneumonia, and remain unrepentant as an avowed anti-vaxxer. But there’s at least one MAGA diehard—an associate of Steve Bannon—who has taken things a step farther. This guy has recently been vlogging (yes, vlogging) from his hospital bed—after being admitted for contracting the coronavirus. Of course, he’s talked about how thrilled he is that he never got the COVID vaccine… even though he’s been vlogging lately from a COVID ward about how much trouble he’s had breathing. Join Fever Dreams hosts Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng, as they offer this latest glimpse into a most lethal American culture war. Elsewhere on the episode, Suebsaeng and Fever Dreams producer Jesse Cannon interview Abbie Richards, a TikTok “power user” who’s also a leading expert on how conspiracy theories wildly proliferate on TikTok.

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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 QAnon for Harper Collins.
0:07.8	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.
0:15.2	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,
0:25.4	the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers is still pushing
0:30.5	our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point. Well, have you heard
0:36.1	which guy has just been anointed the new permanent host of the 7 p.m.
0:41.3	slot over at Fox News?
0:43.4	Yeah, so this is the big shakeup over at Fox News.
0:45.9	We've got Jesse Waters, these sort of Crankster Prince, the young imp of Fox News.
0:50.8	Oh, did you watch his stuff back?
0:53.5	It feels like an eon ago. I feel like I first started
0:56.0	seeing the clips in the late Bush era of him being ostensibly he was a producer. I don't know
1:01.3	what the fuck he was producing, but he was a producer on the O'Reilly factor back before Bill O'Reilly
1:05.8	got embroiled and scandaled and ejected from Fox News. but he was like Bill O'Reilly's sidekick.
1:12.0	He would come on the show, tell Bill O'Reilly how great he was, and Bill O'Reilly would send
1:16.4	him into the wild with a camera crew to, like, ambush random enemies of Bill O'Reilly.
1:21.9	Yeah, exactly.
1:22.8	Jesse Waters has sort of gone through so many permutations since then that even I was just sort of dimly remembering this time when he was like Bill O'Reilly's sort of man out in the world.
1:31.2	Like a huge idiot.
1:33.0	Yeah, I mean, Bill O'Reilly's in the studio.
1:34.4	Jesse Waters is dispatched.
1:35.7	She's like his Ray Donovan.
	...

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