Is Twitter really going to “go crazy” now that new owner Elon Musk has allowed previously banned users like former President Donald Trump back on the platform?
Hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill discuss the prospects for the beleaguered social media site on this week’s episode of Fever Dreams.
“It seems like the Elon Musk strategy for letting people back on has been people with big fan bases with some amount of quasi-respectability,” Sommer says, predicting Trump “will return to Twitter at some point.”
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“He [Trump] obviously has this kind of psychodrama going on with Elon Musk where it’s like, who’s going to be the big daddy and who’s the little fish? I think that’ll have to be resolved somehow.”
While Trump has indicated he doesn’t really see a need to go back to Twitter, Weill says the man is a “born poster. I don’t know that he can actually keep himself away. He is what Elon Musk wants to be.”
Also on the episode, Heidi Beedle, a reporter for the Colorado Times Recorder and host of the Western Fringe podcast, tells Sommer and Weill that anti-LGBT hate from Colorado Springs community leaders began peaking before this weekend’s shooting at queer venue Club Q.
While the official response from politicians to the shooting has been the “standard thoughts and prayers… Colorado Springs is particularly conservative, from city council to our El Paso County commissioners. They’re all pretty much Republicans or conservative leaning leading up to this event,” Beedle says.
Beedle describes an event from controversial conservative worship leader Sean Feucht and conservative author Eric Metaxas in May that included guests like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), El Paso County Commissioner Stan VanderWerf, and City Councilor Dave Donelson, who also suggested drag queens should be forbidden from using the local library for events.
“If you avoid some of this stuff, folks, you’re guilty of allowing it to continue,” Metaxas said in Colorado Springs at the time.
On the podcast, Beedle says similar inflammatory comments have been seen “at literally every level of government from school boards to city councils to the state legislature to the gubernatorial race here in Colorado during the midterm elections.” Beedle points to numerous other examples, including a Colorado Springs District 11 Board of Education vice president’s apology after posting a transphobic meme in February.
“Already we’re seeing elected officials trying to deny and distance themselves from these past statements,” Beedle says. “People have been saying for years that this kind of rhetoric is going to cause violence and now that it actually has, they don’t wanna accept any responsibility or accountability for it.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Weill discusses the latest cinematic masterpiece from former bounty hunter and right-wing figure Stew Peters, who attempts to land a punch on COVID vaccines with the film Died Suddenly.
Weill explains that Peters has compiled “a whole bunch of news clippings of people who’ve died over the past few years and they died suddenly. Must be vaccines.”
But sometimes they’re not even dead. The film has been criticized for suggesting a basketball player died suddenly when he is very much alive.
“They have a clip of a Florida Gators player [Keyontae Johnson] collapsing on the court in December 2020. One, he didn’t die. Two, vaccines were not available for him at the time. They are very literally manufacturing these incidents,” Weill says.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
