This week marks the last episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams—but American conspiracy theorists and far-right grifters are still an important part of understanding the country’s current information ecosystem.
After sharing some of their favorite moments from the podcast’s years-long run, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill tackle the latest right-wing obfuscation, which has been amplified by the likes of Elon Musk and his army of recently purchased blue checkmarks: that the mass shooting at an Allen, Texas, shopping mall over the weekend by a self-described white supremacist was a “false flag” of some kind.
“It’s automatic and it’s reflexive in a way that I feel like is a little bit new,” Weill said. “Even throughout the run of this podcast, the idea that violent incidents are false flags I think has really metastasized from being a really fringe thing… to something that people just do almost on impulse on Twitter.”
Then, the hosts talk to comedian and prank phone caller extraordinaire Chris James, who recently fooled Alex Jones into briefly believing that his pal, Tucker Carlson—whose AI-generated voice James used to make the call—wanted to host an erotic show.
“This is a guy who is in the midst of dealing with this massive change, he's been fired from Fox News and he’s got all those legal issues—the idea that you would believe for one second that this person would call up and say, ‘Hey, we should do a show where we lick each other’s nipples’ is just absurd,” James said.
“I was actually very surprised that it took him as long as it did [to realize he was speaking with a prankster],” he added.
Plus! One last segment of Fresh Hell, in which the hosts talk about Trump’s upcoming CNN town hall—and the concessions the network is sure to make to keep the former president in its good graces.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.