FEVER DREAMS: What Its Like When MAGA Nation Wants to Kill You for Your Movie
Take one self-proclaimed satanism expert. Add in a pinch of dumpster-diving. Throw in a chicken-coop fire, and (of course) pillow magnate and Donald Trump pal Mike Lindell. And you\u2019ve got the recipe that Trump 2020 deadenders are currently leading in the great state of Arizona to try to, somehow, overturn the election there.
\u201cIt could be like a Coen brothers movie. It has that atmosphere,\u201d Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer tells his colleague and co-host Asawin Suebsaeng on the premiere episode of Fever Dreams, The Beast\u2019s new podcast. \u201cYou have these kind of vigilante groups of people who connect on Facebook and say, well, let's go to the board of elections\u2014and then they dive into the dumpster and see what they can find\u2026Or there was a fire at a chicken farm owned by or connected to this guy who's opposed to the recount, and they said, well, he probably put the ballots in there and set the fire! And then they go out to the farm and they smell the air and they say: This smells like burnt ballot to me!\u201d
Fever Dreams takes you inside the right\u2019s push to retake power, from the conspiracy-slingers to the MAGA acolytes to the straight-up grifters. Thought the Trump era was crazy? Wait \u2019til you hear what comes next.
To start, there\u2019s the slew of Republican efforts to not only to keep challenging the 2020 presidential contest, but to also execute further election and voter crackdowns across the country.
\u201cWhat\u2019s going on is that Republicans need some shred of voter-fraud evidence that they can then use to impose more voting restrictions,\u201d Will adds. \u201cBut what they\u2019re doing here in Arizona\u2026[the recount effort involves] this satanism guy, who maybe does not have the most credibility, or they were looking to hire this very pro-Trump outfit that\u2019s been laughed out of other state recounts.
To help further unpack how the Trump era was just one long, aggravating, and monumentally blood-drenched Coen brothers movie that we were all forced to live through, Swin and Will welcomed Ike Barinholtz, the comedian and star of such films as Blockers and the Neighbors franchise, as well as in TV series Bless the Harts, Eastbound and Down, and The Mindy Project.
The whole Trump presidency \u201creally was Burn After Reading,\u201d Ike contends. But \u201cif you want to learn how the insides of the [Trump] White House work, you have to watch Step Brothers. It will all make sense.\u201d
Ike also opens up about what it was like to co-star in the 2020 satire The Hunt, just as then-President Trump was busy issuing, in Swin\u2019s words, a \u201ccultural fatwa\u201d\u2014via tweet\u2014on the movie. \u201cNo one loves \u2018cancel culture\u2019 more than the Republicans. It\u2019s their favorite thing, they love it, they thrive on it,\u201d he says. \u201cThe worst possible thing is for Donald Trump to tweet about you. Just, it changes your life in a terrible, terrible way\u2026I was super nervous that he was going to tweet about it. And then he tweeted about it!\u201d
As a result, he and others working on the movie were, naturally, inundated with threats of retribution and violence...
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