In this week’s episode of political podcast Fever Dreams, hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill take a deeper look at that “shadowy character,” Juan O. Savin, and how he, along with his supporters, could destroy American democracy.
As reported by The Daily Beast, these candidates have teamed up with the QAnon influencer—whose real name is Wayne Willett—and “treat him as their hero or at least a very influential figure,” according to Sommer.
The hosts reveal how Savin went from a nobody to “a guy who really rises to power quickly.” Sommer says: “This guy has emerged from just absolute obscurity from the forgotten realms of 1990s conspiracy theory stuff to now become maybe the most prominent figure in the QAnon movement.” That reputation has led to his involvement in some of the most crucial races of the midterm elections.
“We’re looking at several secretary of state candidates who just love Juan O. Savin and have signed onto his beliefs, which include just absolutely totally nutty stuff about D.C. being a satanic sacrifice pit… and they see him as sort of a mentor figure.”
Weill stresses the importance of a secretary of state role and how “it is pretty consequential in how elections are run.” Helping these figures win such a position is like “letting the fox into the henhouse,” she says.
“These are the people who certify their state’s elections, and if a state secretary of state wants to put their foot down and say, ‘Nah, something was wrong with the presidential election’ or a gubernatorial election, well that’s a huge hang-up and it’s a real worry that if you install these election-denying secretary of state candidates.”
Also on the podcast, Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters for America who is an expert on all things Savin, says that while it’s hard to say exactly what would happen if these candidates take office, “the concern is that if these people got elected they could try to cast doubt on the election result or frankly just try to flat out overturn it and refuse to certify it. What this could do is essentially connect QAnon to a constitutional crisis, and that’s what could play out here if that’s what happens.”
Kaplan says Savin appeals to many of his supporters because “he seems to act like he has knowledge about everything. He’s always giving opinions or analysis about all different types of stuff. He apparently is like a foreign policy expert. He’s talking about stuff like Russia all the time, claims to have inside knowledge about how apparently Facebook wasn’t really founded by Mark Zuckerberg. He claims the government was involved. What he’s saying isn’t true, but they seem to think he’s some guru that has this secret knowledge that other people don’t have. And I think that’s part of the appeal.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Weill says that even though the election may be over in Brazil, the fight continues. Jair Bolsonaro, the hard-right Trumpist candidate, has not outright challenged his loss, but conservatives in the U.S. are already doing it for him.
“The night Bolsonaro’s loss was announced, they were ready to roll with this,” Weill says. “We are seeing folks like Steve Bannon who has been stanning Bolsonaro for ages. He’s been doing a lot of hits on Brazilian right-wing media and the night of the election, Bannon was already saying there is no mathematically possible way that Bolsonaro has lost this.”
However, Weill says, all the polling long in advance showed Bolsonaro well behind leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “Bolsonaro lost the preliminary elections to Lula. This was just a secondary election because they didn’t meet the threshold of 50 percent. And so to call this mathematically implausible is an outright lie, there was no evidence suggesting that Bolsonaro was somehow cheated.”