It turns out that birds are not real. Just check out the billboards, T-shirts, social media postings and the messages on a truth van touring the country. Birds are actually government surveillance drones that recharge themselves by perching on power lines right over our heads. That explains a lot. The fact that Twitter has a little bird as its symbol should tell people everything they need to know about the powerful forces at work.
Of course, the “pro-bird” crowd will make the typical, predictable arguments about how there’s nothing to worry about, and that these are just, well … birds. But clued-in people know better. Wake up, America! Especially you “Cardinals” fans.
A healthy movement is afoot across the country to inject a little bit of humor into the crazed conspiracy “truther” mindset that inspired some of the insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. QAnon has finally met its match in 23-year-old Peter McIndoe, principal messenger behind the Birds Aren’t Real movement.
This viral movement underscores how easy it is to create conspiracy theories out of something as stupid as the existence of birds. Just as Stephen Colbert stayed in character for 11 seasons as a crazed conservative in order to poke fun at crazed conservatives on his nightly Comedy Central show, McIndoe has insisted since 2017 that his movement is genuine.
A video on his website, purportedly recorded in 1987, shows his team intensively researching to expose “the biggest crime ever perpetrated on the American people.” Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government “has been committing genocide,” killing billions of birds to replace them with “sophisticated robot replicas.” A photo on his birdsarentreal.com website displays as evidence a photo of President John F. Kennedy with his hands on a Thanksgiving turkey that has a sign hanging from its neck: “Robot bird Prototype.”
McIndoe travels in a white van covered with messages exposing the truth about birds. There’s even a satellite dish on the van’s roof. He stood atop the van in July near the Gateway Arch to burn a Cardinals flag in protest of the flag’s “pro-bird” message.
McIndoe insisted in an interview on WREG-TV in Memphis that he’s not the “founder” of the movement but merely a messenger. Wearing a T-shirt that states: “Bird watching goes both ways,” he sat for a serious interview with two incredulous, unsuspecting morning show hosts. One interviewer suggested with a nervous laugh that this is “really satire” and asked what the message was with his movement. An uncomfortable silence followed. McIndoe leaned forward to state, deadpan, “Honestly, that’s kind of offensive.”
His Memphis billboard proclaiming, “Birds Aren’t Real” in giant black letters has prompted what he says is an outpouring of support from “bird truthers.” The billboards have spread to Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
The truthers are everywhere. But then … so are those birds.
This is seriously funny stuff — for a nation that badly needs to recover its sense of humor.
