CT Blue

This is really scary:

In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.”

On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.

Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.

The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds don’t exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren’t Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan.

It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren’t Real and the movement’s followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.

What Birds Aren’t Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.

At the center of the movement is Peter McIndoe, 23, a floppy-haired college dropout in Memphis who created Birds Aren’t Real on a whim in 2017. For years, he stayed in character as the conspiracy theory’s chief believer, commanding acolytes to rage against those who challenged his dogma. But now, Mr. McIndoe said in an interview, he is ready to reveal the parody lest people think birds really are drones.

…

“Dealing in the world of misinformation for the past few years, we’ve been really conscious of the line we walk,” he said. “The idea is meant to be so preposterous, but we make sure nothing we’re saying is too realistic. That’s a consideration with coming out of character.”

A parody, really? I think not! The New York Times is so easily deluded.

Think about it.

Isn’t it obvious?

Lets say you are a deep state actor who has just replaced all the birds with drone replicas. Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your nefarious act was not discovered and you wanted people to go on believing that birds are real. What could work better than getting the word out through someone who claims he’s just goofing on conspiracy theorists? That way, no one would believe the truth because the guy revealing it would upfront say he is lying. It’s fiendishly clever.

So, as we all sit back, secure in our mistaken belief that birds are real, the drones can go about their business spying on us and tracking our every movement! If you think I’m paranoid, then explain why there are constantly flocks of birds in my yard, hanging around with every opportunity to use their secret electronic sensors to report my movements to the deep state! Some people might say that they are real birds and are swarming around because of the birdfeeders, but those are the same people who will tell you that Ivermectin won’t cure COVID. Besides, there’s always crows out there too, and they don’t feed from birdfeeders, and they’re big enough to contain a vast amount of high tech surveillance systems. It all couldn’t be more obvious, so long as you engage in the type of critical thinking that the situation demands.

McIndoe is clearly a government agent, running a highly sophisticated disinformation program by pretending to run a disinformation program. He is spreading lies by telling the truth! He may be able to fool the New York Times, but he can’t fool me. Now I know for sure that Birds Aren’t Real!