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Birds Aren’t Real
Why we believe conspiracies, but deny systemic racism.
In 2017, Peter McIndoe started a satirical conspiracy theory positing that birds are actually drones operated by the U.S. government to spy on Americans.
He created an entire backstory for his joke, including that the federal government exterminated all birds between 1959 and 1971 and replaced them with lookalike drones, that they sit on power lines to recharge themselves, and these “birds” poop on cars to track people.
With the growth of social media over the past decade+, people have come out of the woodwork to spew over the internet every imaginable conspiracy. Many aren’t far are from the “birds aren’t real” joke.
The theories come from the left and the right and range from fabulations such as the government doesn’t want you to know that medication used mostly for animals and for some parasitic human diseases can now cure cancer, to QAnon’s conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is secretly fighting a “deep state” cabal of Hollywood Jewish satanic pedophiles and cannibals.
