Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
The year 2021 brought some major grifts in MAGA-land, as Fever Dreams hosts Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer noted in their final podcast of the year—think Melania Trump’s NFTs and the ‘Freedom phone,’ which was basically a “rebrand of a cheapo Chinese phone” selling at five times the price. But the Qux Box (pronounced “Cucks”) takes the prize as the pair’s “favorite dumb character of 2021.”
Months after it was first promoted by its inventors—a former Infowars reporter and her husband—“I’m still trying to figure out what the Qux Box is,” Sommer notes. “Seems to be an off-brand Roku as best as I can tell.”
Despite orders pouring in from right-wing Telegram groups, the mysterious box has not yet manifested into real-life deliveries, despite promises of a fall 2021 debut. But true believers are convinced the box—which allegedly will offer an internet experience free from Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey—is for real: “They think it’s gonna change the world.”
Meanwhile, just in time for the New Year, the world finally has some resolution on the saga of whether MyPillow maven and Trump supporter Mike Lindell did or did not date comedienne Jane Krakowski, as The Daily Mail claimed. Both Lindell and Krakowski denied the story and Lindell sued the tabloid—but he recently lost the case when the courts ruled that the story wasn’t defamatory.
And as the Omicron wave hits the United States with a vengeance, some right-wingers are convinced that the reason they’re sick is not because of the widely transmissible and near-ubiquitous new variant of COVID-19, but because of… anthrax. Yes, anthrax, that 9/11-era throwback, is the deep-state conspiracy du jour for the steal-the-election crowd—led by an alleged failed treasure-hunter named Jovan Pulitzer, whose supporters were convinced he is a victim of said bioweapon. As Sommer notes, “This is, weirdly enough, not the first time that what have seemed to be COVID symptoms have been [construed as] some sort of deep state attack. In the fall, we had a spate of QAnon people and other conspiracy theorists who hated the vaccine suddenly dying of COVID and people were saying, well, you know, is the deep state murdering them with plutonium?… I mean, this is like Jason Bourne-type stuff.”
And finally, what would a 2021 round-up be without mentioning the “controversial MAGA falconer”? We’re talking about Alan Parrot, who, as Sommer notes, “promised at the end of 2020 to reveal all this evidence that Osama bin Laden was still alive and Joe Biden killed all these Navy SEALs.” Turns out Parrot—who at one point teamed up with a former Survivor contestant turned James O’Keefe operative—never made good on this promise. But Sommer did some digging into Parrot’s background and what he uncovered was pretty wild. “It turns out he was at one point an informant for the, I believe, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the heated world of falcon smuggling—which, you know, falcons are so highly prized, they are often referred to as feathered cocaine.”
Parrot, who was accused of “informing on rival falconers in the gyrfalcon trade” also ran afoul of the Mongolian authorities in the ’90s after accusing the government there of falcon smuggling. Fast-forward to 2021 and he’s convinced a lot of die-hards on the right that he’s got the secret goods on a Biden murder cover-up. Whether Parrot and his shady falconry past continue to haunt the Fever Dreams podcast in 2022? Only time will tell.
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