“Okay, but, have you ever seen a baby pigeon?” said a friend to me last summer. This was, of course, a reference to the conspiracy theory that birds are engineered by the government to spy on humans. Although the comment was made in jest, I hadn’t seen a baby pigeon before, so I still took the time to google a picture.
The were ugly. They had shriveled skin, bulging eyes, and matted tufts of yellow feathers on their heads. Even worse, their technical name was “squab.” As I sifted through the photos of wrinkled pigeons, I smiled at the incredulity of this conspiracy theory. The Birds Aren’t Real movement was in 2017 by Peter McIndoe, an English and Philosophy major from Tennessee. And although it may sound like a genuine against birds, McIndoe’s movement is actually a thinly-veiled act of parody.
The Birds Aren’t Real movement claims that 12 billion birds were murdered by the CIA and replaced with hyper-realistic robots that are used to spy on Americans. In a sarcastic , McIndoe calls out the “sheeple” who can’t face the truth as he runs down the side of a road in a shirt that says “I am a lie” with a pigeon printed on the back. The phrases that spill out of McIndoe’s mouth–“face the sheeple,” “freedom of speech,” “Did Hillary send you?”–are eerily similar to those of genuine political activists. If his words weren’t coupled with such eccentric actions–running down the side of the road or dancing with a sign that says “Make Love, Not Birds”–they could very well pass for genuine snippets from a segment on The Daily Show.
As multiple news outlets have noted, McIndoe won’t state outright that Birds Aren’t Real is a parodic movement. What he will do is share colorful activism merchandise on his site, , and continue to release sarcastic videos on an account with more than 342,000 followers.
McIndoe’s movement pervaded society so much that it even found its way into my basement in 2019, as I held a casual painting night with friends. While I sketched out a pair of koi fish, two of my friends crafted sunset pictures with “The Birds Work for the Bourgeoisie” written across the sky in thick black paint. This particular phrase was based on a 2019 video by from the University of Missouri, who suggests that Ronald Reagan killed all of the birds in 1986. In this video, McIndoe’s ironic statements tangle with Marxism to produce a viral soundbite that resonates with viewers all over the country.
What is so captivating about McIndoe’s movement? What causes people to purchase “,” shirts or paint “The Birds Work for the Bourgeoisie” on a random summer night? Maybe it’s because, in a country that increasingly grapples with movements, McIndoe’s “conspiracy theory” helps us comically ground ourselves in reality.
In a world where Alex Jones spouts claims that the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 20 first graders, was a government-orchestrated ploy to strip Americans of their gun rights, society is marred by people who actively combat truth. This attitude extends from gruff figures like Jones to the comparatively sweet-toned Kellyanne Conway, who made headlines with her usage of the phrase “alternative facts” in a 2017 interview.
Outside of explicitly political circles, post-truth sentiments pervade events such as the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference, where attendees combat years of scientific evidence in their quest to disprove the idea of a spherical earth. And countless other inflammatory claims exist, such as “Bush did 9/11,” “the moon landing was fake,” or the idea that prominent Democrats ran a ring. Suffice it to say that numerous mainstream conspiracies have circulated in the past several decades, and they stem from a variety of sources.
In an interview for the American Psychological Association, Dr. Karen Douglas illuminates some of the reasoning behind conspiracy theories. “Believing in conspiracy theories and being suspicious about the actions of others is in some ways quite an adaptive thing to do. We don’t necessarily want to trust everybody and trust everything that’s around us,” she says. Essentially, the human tendency to question and distrust authority may stem from an adaptive mechanism to keep us safe.
Douglas continues to detail three primary motivations––that motivate humans to believe in conspiracies. I find the social motivation particularly resonant, which rests on the idea that people “like to feel good about themselves. And potentially one way of doing that is to feel that you have access to information that other people don’t necessarily have.” Whatever the motivation for these theories, the bottom line is that they are not rooted in fact. And so, as entertaining as the less-consequential ones are to hear, their presence exposes the dark, anti-intellectual underbelly of human society.
Oftentimes, it is difficult to converse with people who believe in these theories. When one’s beliefs are not rooted in empirical evidence but stem from haphazard inclinations, no amount of data will bring them back to earth. It is in these moments that I find McIndoe’s Birds Aren’t Real movement particularly striking. What better way to display the illegitimacy of these movements than to model them in real-time–to copy their rhetoric but twist it ever-so-slightly to expose their festering hypocrisy?
Overall, McIndoe’s work is nothing short of a masterpiece, and one that lifts us comically away from the chaos of a post-truth society.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 老司机传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 老司机传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.