On the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Asawin Suebsaeng—returning to the podcast he helped launch—talk about the “little people just riding around the miasma of MAGA-ism.”
One of those people is Ray Epps, whose life has been turned upside down by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.
“Basically Ray Epps and his wife have had to go on the run because the Trump grassroots and the rightwing media that he once loved, turned on him as a convenient patsy for the guy that they could blame for Jan. 6,” Sommer explains.
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“This guy is probably one of the most notorious figures if you’re pretty steeped in right-wing media. I mean, this guy is like a great villain. And so now because of the kind of the swirling forces of rightwing media, conspiracy theories, and because of a confluence of events just sort of landed on him and now his life is ruined.”
Epps’ case shows he is a “prime example” of the how easily the “little guy” can be destroyed, says Suebsaeng, now a senior reporter at Rolling Stone. “He is perhaps the quintessential example of that today.”
But the big guys have problems, too. Also on the podcast, Sommer and Suebsaeng discuss former President Donald Trump’s motivations to run for president again in 2024.
“In this case you say Trump has some very particular criminal law needs that are driving him to run for president,” Sommer says. Explains Suebsaeng: “He’ll kick around things like saying, ‘It’s much harder for the nasty Democrats and politicians and prosecutors to get to you if you are sitting in the Oval Office, they couldn’t do this to me. It was harder for them to get to you while I was president of the United States.’”
Elsewhere in this episode, Matt Ford, a writer for The New Republic, delves into the nitty gritty of how exactly we got to where we are as a country with an aggressively right-wing Supreme Court.
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss right-wing Canadian pundit Lauren Southern “spilling all of her and other people's guts” after releasing a three-hour video turning on her former allies.
“She portrays it as like the scene in Reservoir Dogs where everyone has guns pointed at each other,” says Sommer.
“But instead of guns, these people are holding just enormous amounts of blackmail they have on one another.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
