There is a growing campaign claiming that birds aren't real. Many support this, and you'll see them on various social media platforms. Here's what you should know about this issue.
Birds Aren't Real Conspiracy Theory
Peter McIndoe, 25, started the conspiracy theory. He studied psychology at the University of Arkansas in 2017 and recounted that things were tense following Donald Trump's election win. He remembered people walking around and felt like they were in a movie. For him, "things felt unstable."
On the weekend of Women's Marches across the US, he observed older and bigger white men encroaching on an event not for them. For him, they had no business being there, and he felt that it was "chaos," so he made a placard and joined the march.
"It's not like I sat down and thought I'm going to make a satire. I just thought: 'I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on.' An absurdist statement to bring to the equation," he explained.
His placard read, "Birds aren't real." When asked what his sign meant, he made up a story.
He claimed to be a member of a 50-year-old movement that was initially founded to conserve American birds but ultimately failed. The movement had all been destroyed by the "deep state," which had replaced them with drones for monitoring. He claimed that all birds you see are little robots with feathers observing you.
McIndoe and his friend, Connor Gaydos, wrote a false history of the movement. They devised elaborate theories and created fake documents and evidence to support the wild claims.
Memphis continues to be the epicenter of the Birds Aren't Real campaign. McIndoe was being filmed when he spoke about the movement, and someone posted the video to Facebook, where it went viral.
It might be called a collective satire, a situationist spectacle, or a moving work of performance art. MSNBC dubbed the campaign a "mass coping mechanism" by Generation Z. It has hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and with a mass following, McIndoe and Gaydos made money from it.
McIndoe began selling "Birds Aren't Real" merchandise and made thousands of dollars monthly, enough to sustain their living expenses.
More About Birds Aren't Real Campaign
Although the movement seemingly dismissed the existence of birds, the founders knew that birds are real. They claim that the real purpose of What Birds Aren't Real is to mock a social movement. So, it has nothing to do with questioning whether actual birds are real.
In a world where conspiracy theories dominate the internet and post-truth, young people have united around the goal of mocking, opposing, and scoffing at false information. It's an absurdist attempt by Gen Z to turn the rabbit hole upside down.
"It's a way to combat troubles in the world that you don't really have other ways of combating," said Claire Chronis, 22, a Birds Aren't Real organizer in Pittsburgh. "My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy."
"It basically became an experiment in misinformation," McIndoe said. "We were able to construct an entirely fictional world that was reported on as fact by local media and questioned by members of the public."
Gaydos added that if someone thinks birds don't exist, then we're the least of their worries because there's probably no conspiracy those people don't believe.
Per McIndoe, their money went into billboards and flying members to rallies, and none went to anything harmful. The founder added that they ensured their movement would not hurt the world but offered a safe place for people to unite and process the conspiracy takeover in the country.
He added, "It's a way to laugh at the madness rather than be overcome by it."
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