Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Master satirist Carl Hiaasen is back with a new novel aimed at mocking white supremacists in his home state of Florida. At the center of the story is Dale. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed. He's been kicked out of the Proud Boys and has started a far-right hate group called Strokerz for Liberty. You heard me right. He has a high-profile backer, a corrupt Florida congressman who funnels $2 million donated by some rich anti-Semites.

The front is a service group of children who build homes called the Wee Hammers. Yes, kids with power tools. Dale's plan keeps getting foiled by a wily pair, his tenant Vera and Twilly Spree, an angry millionaire who is passionate about protecting the environment. The New York Times says the book is full of dark money, white power, and colorful weirdos. The novel is titled Fever Beach. Carl Hiaasen joins me in studio. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Carl Hiaasen: It's good to see you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: You are one of my favorite authors. You already know that. [laughs]

Carl Hiaasen: No. Well, thank you.

Alison Stewart: What was the seed of inspiration for this book?

Carl Hiaasen: Well, everything that was happening politically, you're already in that sense. Then one day, I got up, and I went out to get the newspaper from my driveway. There was this Ziploc bag and it had been weighted down with rice. Inside had been inserted this anti-Semitic screed. I looked up and down the street and every driveway had one. Someone who was throwing these out of their window of their car, I don't know what they were hoping to accomplish.

Just being a writer in addition to being repelled by the idea, I thought it popped in my mind, "Who are these idiots?" I thought they might belong in a book. You start to imagine the lives of people who take the time. They're in some crappy apartment and one guy is holding the Ziploc open. The other guy's pouring the rice in and inserting the hate litter, and then they've got to drive around. One's driving, the other's got to throw, so that's their lives. I just thought maybe they're worth looking at.

Alison Stewart: The book is really funny, but then you start to think about some of the issues that you're tackling with. They're dire.

Carl Hiaasen: Yes, dark.

Alison Stewart: White supremacy and corruption. How do you find the funny and how do you balance it out?

Carl Hiaasen: It's a trick, but I think it's also a survival mechanism. To cope with just the headlines every day. This, in particular, was after January 6th. Watching that was, I think, upsetting to everybody. Didn't matter what your politics were. I thought it's a way to cope but also to examine, in a way, the stupidity of some of the hatred. Some of it is just stupid and inexplicable. Florida had more January 6th defendants than any other state.

I thought, "Well, that deserves some sort of mention, some sort of notice, too." Then I, as a Floridian, asking, "Why? Why here?" The Proud Boys started in Miami. Honestly, it would be a bigger bunch of bumblers you couldn't find, but I was going to take it to these characters who got 86 from the Proud-- One of them couldn't even make the Proud Boys. Imagine that's a low bar if you can't make that. If you're out there throwing Ziploc baggies in people's driveways, you've-- you know.

Alison Stewart: Not spelling Holocaust right.

Carl Hiaasen: No, they have a lot of trouble with spelling.

Alison Stewart: In the book. [chuckles]

Carl Hiaasen: The other thing is the swastikas. They have to keep practicing drawing them, because if you're going to be distributing this, you at least got to get-

Alison Stewart: Get it right.

Carl Hiaasen: -the main symbol for Hitler right, and they can't. They've got Sharpies out and they're sitting there practicing on cocktail napkins. That, I promise you, is probably not far-fetched.

Alison Stewart: How did you learn how white supremacists talk? Did you spend time on message boards or did you just use your imagination?

Carl Hiaasen: Oh no, I don't go on the message boards and the internet. You talk about depressing. Also, as a writer and someone who reads a lot, almost as disturbing as the message is the grammatical mess and the sheer mangling of the English language. It's hard to look at on a message board. No, look, I grew up down in Florida. I've been around in a lot of-- I don't want to say rednecks because I'm probably a redneck. It wasn't hard to imagine.

What I did do was I watched a lot of the interviews. We couldn't help but see it in the wake of January 6th. Some of the people that had come up from Florida who were clearly-- they weren't just there because of-- Especially Republicans, they were there because they wanted to push an agenda. Listen to them be interviewed, and then just the likes of Alex Jones and those kinds of monsters. You can pick up. You get the idea. You get the tempo of what's going on.

Alison Stewart: You have written about Florida. You write about its beauty. You write about people who seek to destroy it. What's changed, let's say, in the past five years?

Carl Hiaasen: Well, one thing that's changed is that there was a time when all of us who wrote down there, and I worked for the Miami Herald, we all felt proprietary about the weirdness and depravity. We felt we're a special place. We're at a whole other level than the rest.

Alison Stewart: Florida man does X, Y, or Z, right?

Carl Hiaasen: Yes, and this was even before the hashtag. We just felt like we could tell by the scroll on a news story whether it happened in Florida or not. You knew. Now, it's spread. I feel like Washington has been infected with Florida people, and that we don't have it all to ourselves anymore. It used to be just South Florida. Then it was all the way up finally from Key West to Pensacola, yet it was all weird.

Then now, you see the headlines. The other day, there was a story about a woman who got arrested. It was a raccoon sitting in her car with a meth pipe in its hands. I said, "Well, that's got to be Florida," and it wasn't. It was somewhere in the Midwest. I was freaked out. I said, "What's happening to the world? That's a Florida story." The raccoon wasn't smoking, but he was holding like he knew how to smoke.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] My guest is Carl Hiaasen. His new novel Fever Beach is out now. Let's talk about some of the other characters in the book. You got Dale, not too bright, packing those bags full of rife and misspellings of Holocaust, et cetera, but he's got this woman who's a tenant. Her name is Viva. She's liberal, we assume, because she reads New Yorker. She's kind of stuck living there.

Carl Hiaasen: Yes, she got bad marriage, was moving to Florida to get away from a situation like a lot of people do. It's expensive to live in Florida, believe it or not. She ends up renting a room. When she rents it, she doesn't know she's running from Dale, that he's a white supremacist, but then she stumbles onto the whole Ziploc operation. She just says, "Okay, you're not doing that in front of me, and you're doing it in this room. I don't want to see," because she thinks they're harmless haters.

If you're around them or you see them, sometimes you would think, "Well, they can't be a threat to anybody. They can barely get out the door in the morning." Then she realizes eventually that what they're doing is serious and that they're bad folks. They're part of a bigger picture. These guys, they think that they'll solidify their place in the pantheon of white supremacists if they steal or control an election, a small congressional election in Florida.

The one precinct is all they can handle. They can't really steal much more than that, but they're going to do the one precinct. She has to get involved along with Twilly to thwart that, but she gets drawn into it. I like that character a lot. She has a lot going on. She's working for a charitable foundation that she thinks is doing good things. They're just washing a lot of cash. Again, Florida. None of that is a surprise, but I do like her.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned Twilly. Twilly has appeared in your novels before.

Carl Hiaasen: Yes, he appeared in Sick Puppy, and then he was in one of the books I wrote for kids for a little bit, yes. I like the idea of someone who's a conservationist, environmentalist, but who's not conventional. In other words, he really has a short fuse. He's got all this money that he inherited. He doesn't think he deserves it, so he's going to spend it fighting for what he believes in. He doesn't have much anger management at all. When something happens, he just goes off and does something, but he can afford it.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] In a book, a lot of writers I talk to, they say they have empathy for their characters, even the bad ones. What's your approach to empathy when you're writing, especially these not great characters.

Carl Hiaasen: It's hard because I know in my novels, this is the selfish part of writing. If you're in journalism as I was, all your life, you don't get to write a lot of happy endings. You certainly don't get to control if the bad guys are going to get what they deserve, but I know going in that these guys are going to get something at the end. I don't know how much empathy I have. I have empathy for their friends and family because they've turned out this way and like in Dale's case.

Alison Stewart: His mom.

Carl Hiaasen: His mom, who used to be a professional boxer, she has to come over every now and then and just beat him around. She gives him a left-right a couple of times because he'll say something so offensive. It comes out of his mouth. Her own mind is going, "Where does this come from? How did I raise this person to be this way?" The scene itself can be humorous, but my empathy is with-- If one of my kids turned out that way, that's how I would feel.

Alison Stewart: I felt that way about her as well because she's thinking, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"

Carl Hiaasen: Then she even tries dragging him to church one day, but it turns out she's got a beef. She doesn't stay long in church because she's got an old beef with the church, but she's trying in her own way. She doesn't understand it. I know people who don't understand the directions that some family members take, whether it's politically or any other way that, all of a sudden, how did they turn out like this? That's where that's come from.

Alison Stewart: There are people in this novel who are very, very wealthy. The corrupt congressman comes from wealth from his father. You've got Twilly Spree. He's wealthy. You've got the billionaires who are giving their money to things that are somewhat anti-Semitic. What did you want to explore about wealthy people, the relationship of wealth?

Carl Hiaasen: I didn't think of it like that. That's one of the things that's happened in Florida. We've always had wealth migrating there, but because of the tax laws, state income tax in places like California and New York-- Frankly, that's why Trump changed his residence to Florida. We call it the "six months and one-dayers."

Alison Stewart: Oh yes.

Carl Hiaasen: Because if you have to take six months in one day and you can claim you're a resident, then you don't pay any state income tax at your other residents. There is a ton of money, particularly in South Florida. Obviously, Palm Beach. It's just a boatload of money. If nothing else, just from all the Fox News hosts that have bought second homes down there.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] It's interesting because President Trump, as you said, resident of Florida, a lot of people like him because they think he's kind of funny. How can humor be a powerful tool in politics?

Carl Hiaasen: Well, I don't know that he's ever been accused of being witty. He might be funny, but he's not incapable of charm, especially one-on-one. I know a lot of people that know him. The performative part of the politics, where you're appealing to the worst instincts. For instance, we're going to throw out all these people, Haitians, Cubans, others who literally are going to go back to society where they could be persecuted, but let the white South Africans in because there's a group that's really down on their luck, right?

That kind of thing, that's funny, objectively funny, but then when in real life-- but if you write satire, it's the sort of thing. Satire has a target or it's not satire. It's not slapstick. It's tough to walk that line. You're right, it is, and there are people that-- You know what I mean? I know why Florida went solidly for Trump, but I'm not sure a lot of those voters right now who are very, very unsteady and feeling like, "What did we do?" I don't think they saw all of it coming. Who could? I think as a novelist or even as a journalist, you've got to just look at it all in a different way necessarily than I would as a citizen.

Alison Stewart: In the novel, some of the details, they're hilarious. Jonas is this guy. He's in the Strokerz for Liberty. He's got a beard that's styled red, white, and blue. He has a dog named Himmler.

Carl Hiaasen: Oh, that's based on a real dog I knew.

Alison Stewart: Seriously?

Carl Hiaasen: Yes, his dog's name is Himmler. I was on an island off Belize. I'm not lying. It was a camp, a fishing camp. The dog, the mascot, was named Hitler. It was a pit bull dog named Hitler. I said, "What? Hitler." They explained that the dog belonged to one of the guys who lived there. He broke up with his girlfriend. The girlfriend named the dog Hitler because she didn't like the dog. You'd literally say, "Come on, Hitler. Come here." Anyway, I'm not lying. Actually, the dog was sick, and it was sad. He sat outside my room and howled all night long. Hitler did.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles]

Carl Hiaasen: No, I'm not. This is a real thing. Go on. I'm sorry.

Alison Stewart: That answered my question actually. That answered my question. As you're reading the characters, I'm like, "There are certain people who resemble congressmen."

Carl Hiaasen: Oh, you think?

Alison Stewart: There's a certain kind of congressman. Do you go to your imagination or are your targets right there?

Carl Hiaasen: Well, in Florida, a lot of times, they're right in front of you. I wrote the column for so many years for the Herald. Then about a couple of weeks after I retired in 2021, I didn't write the column anymore. I was feeling okay about not writing a column. Then the Matt Gaetz story broke, and I was crestfallen. I was morose because it was just a slow pitch down the middle of the plate, and I wasn't there to take a swing at it.

They're right there. Ron DeSantis, every day, right there. It's true. It's easy pickings. At the same time, it is a place that I love and care about. The only place I've ever lived in my life. It's what gets back to what you were talking about earlier. There are mixed feelings. You have to go after these things. At the same time, yes, you're laughing, but you hope and pray that your readers are laughing for the right reason. They get it. They get it.

Alison Stewart: You wrote once that my friend Pete Hamill never gave up on New York. That's how I feel about Florida.

Carl Hiaasen: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What remains magical about Florida to you?

Carl Hiaasen: Oh, gosh. Well, I can still get in the car and drive a couple of hours and then get in a boat and drive for a while and be in a place in the Everglades that looks like it must have looked eons ago, and no other boats, nothing. You can still find those places, and that's magical to me. Being in a mangrove forest somewhere where no planes going over, no boats.

You see things all the time. I live in just a typical kind of suburban neighborhood, but we have bobcats walk through the yard. I think that's so cool. I know this sounds corny, but we have a little owl box. We have screech owls that come every year. They stay in there and they poke their little heads out. It's corny, but there's still a lot of wildlife. There's still nature.

If you just let it catch its breath a little bit, it will come back after things. Those kinds of things keep you going because now, maybe my grandkids will get to see that. My fear always was watching this get paved over where they're not going to get to see all the cool stuff that I saw when I was a kid. Now and then, I see some. I said, "Okay, this is worth fighting for."

Alison Stewart: My review of this book is that it is snort-worthy.

[laughter]

Carl Hiaasen: I love that.

Alison Stewart: The name of it is Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen. Thank you for coming in.

Carl Hiaasen: Oh, thanks, Alison.