Tag: birds

‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists

In early 2017, Peter McIndoe, now 23, was studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, and visiting friends in Memphis, Tennessee. He tells me this over Zoom from the US west coast, and has the most arresting face – wide-eyed, curious and intense, like the lead singer of an indie band, or a young monk. “This was right after the Donald Trump election, and things were really tense. I remember people walking around saying they felt as if they were in a movie. Things felt so unstable.”

It was the weekend of simultaneous Women’s Marches across the US (indeed, the world), and McIndoe looked out of the window and noticed “counterprotesters, who were older, bigger white men. They were clear aggravators. They were encroaching on something that was not their event, they had no business being there.” Added to that, “it felt like chaos, because the world felt like chaos”.

McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join 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.”

That statement was “birds aren’t real”. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The “deep state” had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you.

Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement. Or is it a movement? You could call it a situationist spectacle, a piece of rolling performance art or a collective satire. MSNBC called it a “mass coping mechanism” for generation Z, and as it has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, “mass”, at least, is on the money.

It’s the most perfect, playful distillation of where we are in relation to the media landscape we’ve built but can’t control, and which only half of us can find our way around. It’s a made-up conspiracy theory that is just realistic enough, as conspiracies go, to convince QAnon supporters that birds aren’t real, but has just enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on. It’s a conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy, a little aneurysm of reality and mockery in the bloodstream of the mad pizzagate-style theories that animate the “alt-right”.

Birds Aren’t Real didn’t stay in Memphis – in a sequence reminiscent of the Winklevoss scene in The Social Network, when they realise just how big Facebook has become, McIndoe recalls being back at college, five hours away from Memphis. “I remember seeing videos of people chanting: ‘Birds aren’t real,’ at high-school football games; and seeing graffiti of birds aren’t real. At first, I thought: ‘This is crazy,’ but then I wondered: ‘What is making this resonate with people?’”

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Racist Bird Names Are Next on the Chopping Block

You would think that the Bachman’s sparrow and the Wallace’s fruit dove would be the least controversial creatures on earth. But it’s not the birds, it’s the people they were named after that’s generating the controversy. Alfred Russell Wallace actually has 4 other birds named in his honor — and each of them may be called something else before too long.

Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, and anthropologist who is credited, along with Charles Darwin, of conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. But his writings are apparently filled with references to the “N” word. Despite his numerous accomplishments and contributions to science, he must be canceled for the sin of thinking like most other white people at the time.

“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a black ornithologist. Has it been “driven” by “white patriarchy”? Or is it that whites organized most of humanity to protect the natural world when no one else did? It’s not “patriarchy.” It’s common sense.

Admittedly, whites went about the task of cataloging and studying the natural world like typical racists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. That’s when most of the nomenclature for animal species was applied. Some pretty despicable people have lent their names to the lexicon and perhaps the issue deserves serious study.

What the issue doesn’t need is the hysterical caterwauling of those who claim injury from a bird name.

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Leader of Viral ‘Birds Aren’t Real’ Movement Swears He’s Not Joking

It’s no secret that conspiracy theories are spreading like never before, thanks to the internet. Whether they’re dangerous and toxic ideologies like QAnon, or outlandish claims that are incorrect but less threatening (think: the flat-Earth theory), conspiracies have become part of the fabric of daily life in America.

One “theory” that seems intentionally nonsensical but is nonetheless gaining traction on social media is the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement, which is built around the claim that, well, birds aren’t real.

The unsubstantiated theory alleges that, between 1959 and 2001, the government killed off all birds and replaced them with surveillance drones. It’s such a bizarre idea that it almost seems like a parody of other conspiracy theories—and it very well might be, despite what the movement’s apparent leader insists.

According to its website, the Birds Aren’t Real movement started in the 1970s, although its frontman, Peter McIndoe, told Newsweek that it started in the ’50s—an inconsistency that might be a sign from McIndoe that the whole thing is one big gag.

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