Flat-Earthers Keep Alienating Other Conspiracy Theorists—Even QAnon Believers
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MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is no stranger to weird claims. The cushion kingpin is one of the country’s loudest election denialists. But Lindell (apparently joking) added a new conspiracy theory to his stump speech this weekend, falsely accusing Fever Dreams host Asawin Suebsaeng of forcing the voting machine company Dominion to sue Lindell.
“I don’t think I have that clout with anybody in my family or anybody I work with,” Suebsaeng says of Lindell’s comments.
Election fraud fantasies aren’t the only wild claims we visit on this week’s Fever Dreams. Guest co-host Kelly Weill reads an excerpt from her just-released book on the flat-earth movement, featuring an interview with a man who was arrested for distributing flat-earth literature on a school playground.
Weill recalls learning about the flat-earth movement while covering extremist groups for The Daily Beast. “I thought flat earth was such an interesting parable about how people can believe anything,” she says, “because we see other conspiracy theories that might be more reality-adjacent, or you can understand someone’s political motivations. But flat earth seemed so out there that I wanted to understand it better.”
Elsewhere on the pod, Suebsaeng and Weill try to check out Donald Trump’s new social media site, Truth Social, but find that the newly launched platform is so buggy that users can’t even make accounts, let alone post about the ex-president. As Suebsaeng notes, the website is the latest attempt by conservatives to make a new Facebook—never mind the fact that Facebook can be a far-right plague ship.
“It’s just an attempt to try to stick their thumbs into the eyes of Silicon Valley because they think Twitter and Facebook are too liberal, or too left-wing, or too mean to people like Donald Trump,” Suebsaeng says, adding that, “I can’t emphasize enough how much of their brand, how much of the popularity of their ideas in America and abroad… would evaporate if Facebook disappeared.”
Later we’re joined by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress Dylan Gelula, who guides us through the weird trivia that makes her podcast Lecture Hall a comedy cult hit. (Did you know that Dr. Phil got his big break when he helped Oprah Winfrey prepare for a lawsuit over her comments about Mad Cow Disease?)
Gelula discusses the combative nature of Twitter and the strange comments she receives as a politically vocal actress. “I think if your tweet gets more than a thousand likes, you have people arguing about body positivity in the comments,” Gelula says. “That’s just sort of the nature of it; it’s very weird.”
Finally we preview the worst thing coming to Orlando, Florida, this week: the “America First Political Action Conference,” an annual convention of Nazi clout-chasers and fringe elected officials. The conference has the backing of an Arizona state senator, and is featuring a Jan. 6 rioter who’s accused of defacing a Hanukkah display outside that state senator’s office.
“If that’s not a sign of the guardrails coming off, I don’t know what is,” Weill says.
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