Tag: conspiracy theories

‘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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QAnon Leaders Push Followers Into Multi-Level Marketing

In a December livestream to his QAnon fanbase, conspiracy theorist Phil Godlewski laid out what he described as the key to their financial futures: buying silver.

The precious metal, Godlewski insisted, would soon explode in value after the passage of legislation some QAnon believers think will bring on a utopia. Income taxes would be eliminated, debt would be abolished, and anyone holding silver would become fabulously wealthy.

But Godlewski didn’t want his followers to buy silver from just any company. Instead, he told them to buy through 7k Metals, a multi-level marketing business and metals dealer.

Godlewski and other leading QAnon conspiracy theorists have found a new way to make money from their supporters: directing them to buy and sell products for multi-level marketing companies.

MLMs, which rely on new members recruiting subordinate salespeople, with the original “upline” making money from their “downline” recruit’s sales, have previously been the domain of leggings and essential oils companies. But now QAnon leaders want in on the action.

While many MLMs are legal, some have been compared to illegal pyramid schemes, in which new members pay in money to join without any possibility of making their money back. Disillusioned MLM members have complained that they’ve been left badly in debt when their profits failed to materialize.

Selling silver through 7k Metals marked the latest business move from Godlewski, who served time in jail last year after bouncing a bad check for more than $21,000, then falsifying bank records to avoid being caught. In an unrelated 2010 case, Godlewski was indicted over carrying on an alleged sexual relationship with a 15-year-old. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of corrupting a minor.

Godlewski isn’t alone. More QAnon promoters have turned to promoting multi-level marketing companies as ways to monetize their followings.

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ABC Anchor: Questioning Judge Jackson About Light Sentences For Child Porn Offenders Was “A Message To QAnon”

Yet another media talking head has claimed that Republicans probing into Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s history of light sentences for child porn offenders is some kind of “message to QAnon.” 

As we noted last week, several lawmakers grilled Jackson over the issue, prompting her to state that the cases she has presided over are “difficult” and that judges have to look at “various aspects of the offence and impose a sentence that is sufficient but not greater than necessary”.

Discussing the matter Sunday, ABC Jon Karl suggested that GOP lawmakers were sending some kind of message to right wing conspiracy theorists by continuing the line of questioning.

Karl suggested that the questions in the Senate were “harsh and highly unusual” and wondered “could the sharp questioning backfire” on Republicans with midterm elections approaching.

Karl then asked former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile about the “focus on child pornography and pedophiles,” To which she simply replied “QAnon.”

Karl responded “it was a message to QAnon, wasn’t it?” further suggesting “these are not major cases, these were sentencing decisions.” 

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Biden: ‘There’s Going to Be a New World Order’.

U.S. President Joe Biden discussed a “new world order” at a Business Roundtable CEO Quarterly Meeting on Monday, deploying a phrase often pilloried by corporate media outlets as “conspiracy theory.”

“You know we are in an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy” the Commander-in-Chief said, “Not just the economy, the world. It occurs every three or four generations. As one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. Lot of people dying [now], but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting. There’s gonna be a new world order out there, and we’ve gotta lead it. And we’ve gotta unite the rest of the world in doing it.”

– President Biden, Monday March 21st 2022

The statement leans in part on the “fourth turning” or Strauss–Howe generational theory, though in a clumsy fashion. It is not the first time Biden has appealed to such messaging.

In 1992, then Senator Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “How I Learned to Love the New World Order.” In the article, Biden – who was also the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s European Affairs Subcommittee – said: “Having contained Soviet communism until it dissolved, we need a new strategy of “containment” – based, like NATO, on collective action–but directed against weapons proliferation.”

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Meme Police: DHS Scanning Employees’ Social Media for ‘Conspiracy Theories,’ ‘Extremism’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a report recommending an increased focus on scanning the social media accounts of its employees in order to detect “extremism.”

Among the examples of “extremism” cited by DHS are: a belief that fraud occurred in the 2020 election, and objections to current coronavirus policies.

From the DHS report, obtained by Reclaim The Net:

A March 2021 unclassified threat assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Department of Justice, and DHS, noted that domestic violent extremists “who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” The assessment pointed to newer “sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence” that “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”

The report shows increased DHS concern with rooting out “extremists” within its own ranks, including through monitoring the social media accounts of employees.

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DHS increases efforts to identify “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” on social media

Last Spring, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas ordered an internal review to identify how to best detect, prevent, and respond to threats related to domestic violent extremism within the department.

A component of this was based on online activity. “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult,” the unclassified initial report stated.

The report (obtained here) said that extremists, “exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

One of the recommendations is to increase “efforts to better identify and evaluate mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) with a homeland security nexus, including false or misleading conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse violence.”

While not directly stated, it was inferred that the DHS was in some way monitoring online activity. Obviously, some privacy and free speech concerns were raised.

And now, this month, the DHS has released a report with the findings of the review.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

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