Hi, welcome to Fever Dreams. My name's Will Summer. I'm a political reporter at The Daily Beast and the author of an upcoming book on QAnon for Harper Collins.

And I'm Aswin-Sub-Tang, but please call me Swin. I'm a senior political reporter at the Daily Beast and co-author of the book Sinking in the Swamp.

All right, here on Fevered Dreams, we're going to take you on plunges into the sometimes hilarious and sometimes scary world of the American right as they continue to influence our politics. Even in the aftermath of the Trump administration,

the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers is still pushing

our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point. So, Will, these days

you're looking into a little bit of offline activism that a

rogue's gallery of our usual, cookie characters are starting to get into.

Can you give us a read out about that?

Yeah, so this is a little heads up to Feber Dream listeners, that if you see someone out

there carrying a chunky marker, it's not because they're getting into tagging.

Instead, they're getting into tagging. Instead, they're

getting into the latest trend sweeping the MAGA Internet, and in particular MAGA Telegram.

I'm always interested when this kind of activism spills offline. We end up with stuff like

attacks on 5G towers or January 6th. So in this case, the hot new meme on telegram is one that urges people to carry around black markers.

And when you see a QR code, like say on a restaurant menu or maybe as part of some sort of vaccine or testing system, you take the marker and you just put a little dot.

Now, their theory is that this will make it impossible to use the QR code and maybe even, you know, bring down the system.

So let me just read this meme that's been going around.

It's a picture of a big chunky black marker.

And it says, crash the system.

Always carry a permanent black marker pen.

As you pass a QR code, simply add a dot.

Those checking in after will be

...