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It is Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. In this week Christians around the globe remember the last week of Jesus of Nazareths life, his death, and his resurrection. This week began with a pop-up parade where we see Jesus riding into the temple complex in Jerusalem, the seat of power for both the religious authorities and the Roman occupation. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of average, everyday people heralded his arrival shouting Hosanna! which means Save us!

The ones crying out were mostly those who society deemed unimportant for some reason or another: ability, illness, gender, occupation, ancestry, nationality, age, marital status. They were the ones who were told they didnt matter again and again. But they were also Jesus friends. They heard and believed his message: The way things are is not the way things have to be. A better way is possible. Lets discover it together.

On June 18, 2022, thousands of people who have been told they dont matter again and again will parade themselves by car, bike, coach bus, train, plane, and foot to the seat of power in this country. Their voices are the ones who just might save this nation from its deadly trajectory.

They will demand this country live up to the ideals enshrined, but never fully realized, in the Constitution. And through their courage, we will have to see the truth: Another way is not merely possible, it is absolutely necessary to secure a vital future for this country and the world we live in. Their message will threaten those who gain the most from the world as it currently is. It may even provoke violence. But like Jesus, they will meet any violence that tries to silence them with the power of love and a commitment to nonviolence, and they will not back down.

The Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is a nationwide grassroots movement calling our nation to a revolution of values at every level of our society. Using non-violent direct action like the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it is continuing the work started by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 calling our nation to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. We understand that as a nation we are at a critical juncture that we need a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.

The Poor Peoples Campaign is about engaging what the Wisconsin Council of Churches calls holy imagination. If a more just world cant be imagined, then it cant be realized, either. When you read through the policy priorities of the Poor Peoples Campaign, you can begin to see a picture of a different kind of world: one that criminalizes poverty, not poor people. One that privileges people and life over the accumulation and hoarding of money. One that does not abide massive levels of unjust incarceration. One in which our national and state governments can and will provide for the common welfare which includes access for all to clean water and nutritious food, quality education, meaningful work that pays a living wage, adequate and affordable housing, and healthcare for all. Not only does the movement call out for these seemingly dreamy things, it has real ideas and practical plans to make it happen!

One way that the Wisconsin Council of Churches is observing Holy Week is by raising funds for the Wisconsin Poor Peoples Campaign. (You can hear Pastor Ari Douglas discuss his work with the Wisconsin Poor Peoples Campaign at the WCCs Facebook page.)

Our goal is for $6,600 to Raise a Bus to offset travel costs of people who will travel from Wisconsin to Washington D.C. in just a little over two months from now for the June 18 Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. We will continue to raise money through the end of May.

There are some who may say that it is not the place of the Church to engage injustice in this way. They will claim that supporting this movement violates the separation of church and state. This is both a misunderstanding of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and a distortion of the Christian faith. As the Freedom Forum Institute states, The establishment clause prohibits all levels of government from either advancing or inhibiting religion. The establishment clause separates church from state, but not religion from politics or public life. Individual citizens are free to bring their religious convictions into the public arena.

Christians are not merely free to bring their religious convictions into the public arena, they are compelled to do so as followers of Jesus example. In the stories of Holy Week we see just how public Jesus ministry was. It was so public it built enough of a committed following that the state and religious authorities plotted to kill him! Then they carried out their plan. Violence and death won that day.

For too many people in this country, violence and death win the days. Poverty is violence. In the wealthiest nation on the planet, 140 million people are poor; 39 million of them are children.

Holy Week ends with Easter Sunday, the day Jesus was raised from the dead. This is the day Christians proclaim that in and with God, violence and death are forever and ultimately defeated.

The stories of this week are the central story of the Christian faith. They lead us to remember and hope and imagine Salvation, wholeness for all. The Poor Peoples Campaign does the same.

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Why Wisconsin churches are aligning with the Poor People's Campaign - Wisconsin Examiner

Florida Legislature: How are teachers supposed to teach history with 'anti-woke' laws?

In this excerpt from Florida Pulse, reporters talk about the challenges schools and teachers will face with passage of "anti-woke" legislation.

Rob Landers, Florida Today

Are you woke? Have you been accused of being woke? Are you anti-woke? Just what is wokeness, anyway?

Black Americansand allies fightingto bring attention to racial injustice and police brutality urge others to get and stay woke. Some companies and politicians try to embody the concept, others hope to capitalize on the perception of it. Some conservatives fight against wokeness because they see it as performative and liberal indoctrination.

The Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year empowers citizensto go after woke indoctrination. The bill blunts what he has warned isliberal ideology influencing the teaching of history in schools and coursing through corporate diversity training. Stop WOKEprohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin, and blocks businesses from using diversity practices or training that could make employees feel guilty for similar reasons.

Were going to teach honest history, said Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland. But were not going to influence it with personal opinion.

Democratic critics called it a way to whitewash history and diminish the abuse and inequities faced by minorities in the country, as well as away for Republicans to satisfy their voting base.

This is the red meat they want, Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami said. But this is not what our state needs.

Stop WOKE Act: New limits on talk of race in schools and work sent to Florida Gov. DeSantis

More: COVID-19 crusader Gov. DeSantis gets new title: Chief of woke police

Recently, after Bob Chapek, the CEO of Disney World criticized Gov. DeSantis over the "Parental Rights in Education" legislation critics dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, the governor lashed out against the company'swokenesswhileaccusing Disney of interfering with parents' rights and taking money from China.

"In Florida our policy's going to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations," DeSantis said.

Are we all talking about the same thing?

For a long time "woke" just meant "not sleeping."But recognizing its changing common usage, Meriam-Webster added a new meaning in 2017:

U.S. slang meaning "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

They took their time. "Woke" has been around for much, muchlonger than that in Black communities.

"It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slangs origins are usually spoken," Merriam-Webster's update says, "and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect."

The earliest recordedusage of wokenessthat can be interpreted to mean stay aware, rather than wake up, is in a collection by Jamaican philosopher and Harlem activist leader Marcus Garvey in 1923 which included the call, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa" in a plea for Black people across the world to open their eyes to racial subjugation and get involved in politics.

'Fight for your own liberation': From Jamaica's Marcus Garvey came an African vision of freedom

A few years later, in a recorded spoken afterword to the1938 song "Scottsboro Boys" by blues musician Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) about nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women, he says,"I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there best stay woke, keep their eyes open."

In Black communities in the early tomid-20th Century as the Ku Klux Klan re-emerged, mob justice and lynchingswere not uncommon, and segregation and Jim Crowlaws were often harshly or fatally enforced, "stay woke" came to mean to stay vigilant in a world stacked against you.

The word eventually spreadoutside the Black community along with other African-American Vernacular English(AAVE) slang. In 1962 Black novelist William Melon Kelley wrote about white beatniks appropriating African American slang in an article for theNew YorkTimes Magazine titled, "If You're Woke You Dig It."

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. touched on the feelingin 1965 during acommencement address at Oberlin College:There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. … The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake.

In a 1972 play "Garvey Lives!" playwrightBarry Beckhamwrote: I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, Im gon stay woke.

The word reached a wider audience in 2008 when Grammy-award-winning singer Erykah Badu covered Georgia Anne Muldrow's song "Master Teacher" for her albumNew Amerykah Part One(4th World War), changing the chorus from "I stay awake" to "I'd stay woke." In 2012 Badu used "stay woke" in a tweet supporting the imprisoned Russian feminist rock group Pussy Riot.

Black social media users began using "stay woke" more often to point out racial issues,but it also was stillused to mean "watch out for a cheating partner," to not fall asleepor to jump on a rising hashtag bandwagon to get attention.

Also in 2012, neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old student, Trayvon Martin. The hashtag #staywoke was used to spread awareness of the shooting, and of the outrage of Zimmerman'sacquittal the next year. With the public outcry, #blacklivesmatter became a hashtag and a movement that only increased as more reports and videos of the shootings of unarmedBlack people spread rapidly across social media. #staywoke once again became an urgentwarning.

Then, a police shooting brought wokenessinto the mainstream.

Less diversity: DeSantis' 'Stop WOKE' Act could force Florida businesses to rethink diversity training

Two years later when police officers shot and killed Michael Brownin Ferguson, Missouri, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists used #staywoke as a rallying cry to raise awareness about police shootings of Black Americans, along with hashtags for each new incidence of an unarmed Black person killed by law enforcement.

Protests and marches grew nationwide, rising up again with every new name:Eric Garner (who died after being put in an illegal chokehold by police),12-year-old Tamir Rice (shot immediately and killed by police after officers mistook his toy gun for a real weapon), George Floyd(died in custody after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eightminutes), Sandra Bland (found dead in a Texas jailhouse after a confrontational jail stop),Daunte Wright (killed during a traffic stop). Breonna Taylor (shot while sleeping during a no-knock raid) and many more.

#SayHerName: Breonna Taylor and hundreds of Black women have died at the hands of police. The movement to say their names is growing.

Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright and George Floyd: Would more de-escalation training stop police from killing people?

"The word woke became entwined with theBlack Lives Mattermovement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action," according to Merriam-Webster. "Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke." The 2016 BET documentary on the BLM movement was called "Stay Woke."

60 years of activism: From the Freedom Rides to BLM, generations discuss work, parallels

As BLM protests rose up across America "stay woke" rapidly became extremely popular on Twitter and became an internet meme. In May 2016, MTV News included it in 10 words teenagers should know. In 2017, it was added to Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary.Essence magazine named its Woke 100 in 2020 and Hulu premiered the TV series "Woke"with Lamorne Harris as a cartoonist who always avoided heavy issues awakening to racial inequality (and getting talks from inanimate objects) after getting slammedto the ground by aggressive police officers.

'That's not bringing about change': Obama advises 'woke' young people not to be so judgmental

"Woke" continued to evolve.White allies of the BLM movement also used the term to signal their support but manygradually began using it to call attention to other progressive issues as well as race such as the #MeToo and #NoBanNoWall movements, which brought accusations from Black commentators of co-opting the term or using it merely to gain activistcredibility.

Most people who are woke aint calling themselves woke. Most people who are woke are agonizing inside, Muldrow told Okayplayer news and culture editor Elijah Watson. Theyre too busy being depressed to call themselves woke.

Conservative commentators who saw the rising BLM protests as violent or anti-police and opposedthe movements "woke"was being associated with began using it sarcastically, the newest replacement for previous derogatory terms about what they called hypersensitive identity politics like"social justice warriors," "snowflake," "race card," "virtue signaling" or the earlier "political correctness."

Progressive arguments or legislation were dismissed as woke and therefore defined and dismissed by conservatives as either insincere plays for attention or overzealous efforts to undermine American values with liberal indoctrination. Many complained of "woke mobs," "woke culture," the "woke police," the "woke brigade," and referred to people with conservative views as "anti-woke."

Sen. Rick Scott warned Woke Corporate America that a backlash was coming. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said there would be serious consequences if businesses kept acting likea woke parallel government.Former President Donald Trump mocked "woke" military generals for being weak and ineffective.Rep. Matt Gaetz kicked off his re-election campaign promising to fight against woke-ism.

"Woke" also was tied in conservative media to the phrase "cancel culture," as public figures who said insensitive or racial things (not woke, in other words) faced a backlash and occasionally loss of income or influence because of it, something conservative commentators considered a violation of First Amendment rights and an infringement of their personal freedoms.

"So in addition to meaning aware and progressive, many people now interpret woke to be a way to describe people who would rather silence their critics than listen to them," according to Michael Ruiz of Fox News.

'You will be happier elsewhere, as will we': Palm Beach Police investigating letters warning 'woke' New Yorkers to leave Florida

'Your woke sky': Dictionary.com jabs Republican lawmaker's tweet criticizing 'millennial leftists'

Both terms refer to companies that showcase theirpublic support for progressive causes but fail to actually do any genuine reform.

That really depends on who's saying it. By 2021 woke seemed to mostly come from conservative commentators and as part of Republican Party campaign talking points, along with "cancel culture" and "critical race theory."

CNN called "wokeness" the biggest threat to Democrats in the 2022election.

It didn't help that "woke" was quickly pulled into pop culture to be further watered down and sanitized. SaturdayNight Live presented "Levi's Wokes" in 2017. There were How Woke Are You? quizzes on Facebook. The New Yorker asked, "What's in a Woke McRib?" BuzzFeed named Hasan Piker the "woke bae on your Facebook Feed."

Some Black thought leaders consider "woke" to be problematic, weaponized against them, and largely meaningless now.

"As is disturbingly often the case, White people (or any racial group outside the terms origin) will sometimes begin using a term that originated in a community of color often as a term of pride, endearment, or self-empowerment years or decades later," saidDana Brownlee in an article for Forbes, "while either willfully or inadvertently distorting the original meaning of the term."

"It is extremely convenient from a culture-war perspective, to be able to use a word likewoketo signal at approximately seven different things," said Slate's Rachelle Hampton. "When you say that wokeness is a political ideology, youre not talking about anything. Youre talking about people who talk about race. And that just immediately brands them as a member of the wokerati."

Many still use "woke" in its original meaning, though, despite the changes.

Contributor: John Kennedy, Capitol Bureau, USA TODAY - FLORIDA NETWORK

C. A. Bridges is a Digital Producer for the USA TODAY Network, working with multiplenewsrooms across Florida. Local journalists work hard to keep you informed about the things you care about, and you can support them by subscribing to yourlocal news organization.Read more articles by Chris here and follow him on Twitter at @cabridges

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What does it mean to be 'woke,' and why does Florida Governor Ron DeSantis want to stop it? - Palm Beach Post

However this era of angry polarization, crime and violence ends, it will be left to historians to decipher how America got so far off track. Instead of building on our unprecedented prosperity and role as the worlds ultimate superpower, we declared war cultural, political and social on each other. Even our nations Founders are not spared.

The reasons will be better understood in hindsight, but its hard to believe the 2016 presidential campaign wont be seen as an inflection point. Our move toward disunion didnt begin then, but it certainly gained steam and vitriol during and after the election of Donald Trump.

Two recent developments illustrate how that campaign remains a radioactive hot spot. With both developments centering on Hillary Clinton, they underscore her role and the depths of her venality.

Just when you think youve seen the worst of her, proof emerges that she was even more duplicitous than we knew.

The first evidence came in a little-noticed decision from the Federal Election Commission. It ruled on a complaint from the Coolidge Reagan Foundation that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee violated federal law by hiding how they funded the odious Christopher Steele dossier, perhaps the most destructive disinformation document in United States history.

The FEC agreed with the complaint and ruled that Clinton and the DNC, which she effectively controlled, hid their payments to Steele as merely legal fees, without mentioning him or his work. In fact, the money was funneled through a law firm, Perkins Coie, which then hired the smear merchants at FusionGPS, who hired Steele, a former British spook.

The layers and false claim about legal fees were intended to put distance between Clinton and Steele because knowledge of the truth would have destroyed her campaign. Although her lawyers and the DNC argued they did nothing wrong, they agreed not to contest the findings and quietly paid fines totaling $113,000.

If this effective admission on funding the dirtiest dirty trick in presidential politics is news to you, dont blame yourself. Much of the media ignored or downplayed the finding and Clintons fine, saying the issue was just one of misreporting or mislabeling the Steele payments.

Thats because the truth would make them look guilty, too. To report on the election commissions significance would force the Dems propaganda arm to acknowledge its own culpability.

By treating the Steele dossier as if it were holy writ, or at least credible, the media furthered Clintons campaign to paint Trump as a Russian stooge.

Of course, the FBI was also complicit, using the dossier as a crutch to justify its unjustifiable spying on a presidential campaign. A remaining question is, under Jim Comeys leadership, was the FBI the dumbest ever or the most venal?

Probably both but whatever the answer, J. Edgar Hoover finally can rest in peace.

The second recent development involves a new court filing by special counsel John Durham in the case of Michael Sussmann, a Clinton lawyer and campaign operative who is charged with lying to the FBI in 2016. His alleged role expands the deception annals by showing Clintons team wasnt relying only on Steeles farrago of lies, lies and more lies.

Perhaps doubtful that Steele, even with his FBI friends and media contacts, could make up for her unpopularity, Clinton financed a bookend to his dossier with another fabrication.

This second scam had Sussmann, a tech executive and the same smear merchants try to sell the FBI on a concocted story about a Trump computer secretly communicating with a Russian bank.

Durham calls the effort a joint venture of the conspirators, a phrase that gives a sense of the plot and the players. There wasnt a scintilla of truth to back up the computer nonsense, and even though the FBI saw through the tissue-thin claim, many in the media naturally fell for it.

They managed to find in this particular lie a confirming detail of the larger lie Steele was spinning that Trump was a toady of Vladimir Putin and was colluding with him to steal the election.

The case is a criminal one because Durham accuses Sussmann of lying by saying he was not representing any clients as he tried to spin a top agency official on the computer connection. In fact, Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign, which he billed for the meeting, and the tech executive, identified as Rodney Joffe.

Although Sussmann pleaded not guilty, Durham released a text message in which Sussmann explicitly tells the FBI he is not representing any clients.

His trial, scheduled for next month, has the potential to be a breakthrough in Durhams long-running effort to reveal voluminous wrongdoing by Clinton and the federal government against the Trump campaign.

Based on his court filings, the prosecutor appears to be planning to link Sussmanns efforts to the dossier, in part because of the role his firm, Perkins Coie, played in both scams. Also, Durham said Sussmann met with Steele and FusionGPS in Perkins Coie offices and raised the possibility that Steele could testify.

Even before a verdict, the case moves the responsibility closer to where it ultimately belongsin Clintons lap. Whether Durham will ever be able to show her fingerprints on any criminal conduct is the great unknown, but in one sense, its also beside the point.

We already know with 100 percent certainty that she is guilty of igniting the false accusations of Russian collusion that continue to shape our culture and politics. Although Trump was hardly a model president, the widespread claim by her party and the media that he was an illegitimate president wasnt just dirty politics. It was a nuclear attack on the spirit that has always held our nation together, however tenuously.

Clinton lost the election and Robert Muellers special counsel probe came up empty, yet the collusion narrative lives on among major elements of the political left. To judge from the tumultuous years since, many of those who subscribe to her lie are using it as a license to try to destroy America.

Tragically, they are having a good deal of success.

Reader Steve Lounsberry, fearing that violence in New York is too entrenched to be reversed with halfway measures, offers what he admits is a draconian solution. He writes: If you possess an illegal gun

5 years in prison. Use an illegal gun in commission a crime 10 years. Shoot someone in commission of a crime 20 years. Kill someone in commission of a crime life without parole.

He says sentences should be mandatory with no plea bargaining and adds: I bet victims and family members would like the idea.

Amid a COVID outbreak, The Wall Street Journal reports from Hong Kong that At least 20 patients died in recent weeks at the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital, according to members of several families.

Anybody see Andrew Cuomo lately?

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America is still paying the price for Hillary Clinton's treachery - New York Post

Hillary Clinton has held many high-profile roles, including first lady, a U.S. senator representing New York, and U.S. secretary of state. Most recently, of course, Clinton was the Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election.

In April and May 2022, theater audiences in Arkansas can hear Clintons latest venture, where she will voice the role of The Giant in the musical Into the Woods, staged by the Arkansas Repertory Theater.

According to the theatrical news publication Playbill, its most likely that the theater company will use a recording of Clintons voice for the role instead of having her backstage for every performance during the plays run, from April 19 May 15.

Clinton is no stranger to Arkansas, having served as the states first lady when Bill Clinton was Arkansas governor from 1979 to 1981, and again from 1983 to 1992.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods is a play on several Brothers Grimm fairytale characters and plots, including Cinderella and Little Red Ridinghood, which imagines the consequences of their wishes coming true.

Sources:

Hall, Margaret. Hillary Clinton Joins Into The Woods at Arkansas Repertory Theatre. Playbill, 26 March 2022, https://playbill.com/article/hillary-clinton-joins-into-the-woods-at-arkansas-repertory-theatre.

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Yes, Hillary Clinton Will Play an Off-Stage Role in a Theater Production - Snopes.com

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 Womens 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. Its not like I sat down and thought Im 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 arent 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 Arent 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.

Its the most perfect, playful distillation of where we are in relation to the media landscape weve built but cant control, and which only half of us can find our way around. Its a made-up conspiracy theory that is just realistic enough, as conspiracies go, to convince QAnon supporters that birds arent real, but has just enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on. Its 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 Arent Real didnt 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 arent real, at high-school football games; and seeing graffiti of birds arent real. At first, I thought: This is crazy, but then I wondered: What is making this resonate with people?

Its no surprise that it first gained popularity among high schoolers. The younger you are, the quicker you get it. Teenagers understand it, they dont need footnotes, McIndoe says. I asked my own two teenagers if they were aware of Birds Arent Real. They went off on some crazy extemporising, where pigeon was pronounced piggin and doves had the greatest surveillance accuracy, and it seemed that they really did have a good working knowledge of how a fake conspiracy theory functioned, with its need for jargon and taxonomy. Then I asked again the next day, and it turned out that theyd never heard of it, they were just taking the piss. Teenagers do just seem to get it. I still need quite a lot of footnotes.

This is the fourth interview McIndoe has given as himself, not his conspiracist character. If you go looking for interviews with him on Spotify, you will find him explaining to sub-Rush Limbaugh local radio shock-jocks, in total seriousness, how the CIA was explicitly founded to spy on the American public these robot birds were their crowning achievement, listening to and watching everyone all the time.

He describes sombrely but matter-of-factly the genocide of the real birds, which Birds Arent Real was tragically unable to prevent. The shock-jock will typically say something noncommittal, such as: Huh. Thats bad. (In fairness, if it were true, it would be quite bad.)

Its a vivid dramatisation of how divisive conspiracy theories are; people who believe them live in another world, where any wild theory flies and even the most fleeting attempt to fact check it or test it against logic (if birds have been destroyed, whos eating all the worms?) marks you out as a brainwashed liberal. People who dont believe them cannot think themselves into the headspace of those who do. Then along comes a guy with a sign, and maybe hes not bridging this implacable divide, but hes certainly disrupting it.

That day of the Womens March, as McIndoe ad-libbed his conspiracy to whoever would listen, he had no plan. He was talking about robot birds one minute and Killary Clinton (a trope used by conspiracists about Hillary Clinton) the next: I was just saying things that were the funniest thing to me at the time.

It was a character based on the people I grew up around, he says. I grew up in rural, deeply conservative Arkansas, in a home-school environment. I had these intensely negative experiences of it. Im not a conservative person. At a very young age, I became more of an observer than a participant, which created a real loneliness, from an ideological standpoint.

Until he could drive, McIndoes entire life was home, home-school co-operatives run by the church, and church. He knew no one who didnt believe exactly the same thing, and Even though everything is [an] echo chamber, he says, the ideas in these home-schooled communities are bad echoes. Im sure that there are beautiful Christian communities that are doing good things somewhere. Im not trying to bash spirituality. But from my experience, the deep fundamentalist communities that I was in have caused way more harm. And Ive seen pure evil coming from them.

As his movement grows, though, hes started to think that maybe that kind of schooling made him more independent-minded, even though it emphatically didnt intend to. It creates a different relationship with the world. I wasnt involved in normal cultural settings, I was barred from a lot of traditional media. I didnt go to school. It definitely creates a different type of thinking, which can be in some ways more free and exploratory.

He also draws a tentative line between faith and conspiracy theory: The Christian worldview is really just about how youre determining truth. Where are you getting truth from? What is your relationship with truth? For the Christian, your foundational relationship with the truth is determined by faith, its definition is that you cant argue with it or interrogate it.

That mindset, plus the religious yearning for one single theory that explains everything, really softens up the brain these are my words, not his for conspiracy theories, which meet the same need. I think there is an actual concrete example of this journey, from fundamentalist Christianity to QAnon (again, this is definitely me not him, he is much less strident than I am). The paedophile element of QAnon, where Hillary Clinton and a huge global web of powerful liberals, are abusing children and keeping them in tunnels, sounds completely unhinged. But if youve been vehemently anti-abortion on faith grounds for years, then to your mind, feminists and other liberals are already in favour of murdering children.

So the leap isnt as great as it looks. McIndoe is more interested in tribal language and how conspiracy theory language echoes, in many ways, what I saw in a religious community. From QAnon, one of the main tag lines was the storm is coming. I hear many Christians talking about that right now, about coronavirus and the end times.

One more thing happened on the first day of Birds Arent Real. I met someone, her name is Madeleine. She has been my girlfriend for four years, shes the love of my life. So before long, he decided to drop out of college, and move to Memphis. I lived with people I didnt know, and worked at the richest country club in the south, as a waiter. It gave me a real window into how the 1% of Memphis talks about other races, since the entire staff are minorities. It was a very interesting time to start an idea about American polarisation.

Although birds arent real was very quickly picked up as a chant, getting the movement to snowball did take some work, McIndoe says. We set up the Bird Brigade, our boots-on-the-ground activism network, led by Claire Chronis. That was the first step to building a structured movement, getting it from Memphis to the rest of the US, getting people to put up flyers that I designed very poorly on Photoshop, which works for the conspiracy theory aesthetic.

They made up facts, faked secretly leaked CIA documents and made videos we created a world with laws and evidence and took out billboard adverts, which people posted on Instagram as selfie backdrops. If you put something absurd into the world, people are trying to present themselves as irreverent or funny, so that really spread.

Meanwhile, real conspiracy theorists, he says, will approach me like Im their brother, like Im part of their team. They will start spouting hateful rhetoric and racist ideas, because they feel as if Im safe.

In describing the movement, he gets towards perhaps the closest definition of what is happening: It is a collective role-playing experiment. There is true community found through this, it breaks down political barriers. We have taken pictures of a car park at a Birds Arent Real rally. There are people who will show up with a US flag on their car, Republican, patriotic, and a car right next to them with Bernie Sanders stickers. I was a Bernie guy myself. You see these people marching together, unified.

Theyre unified on the prank, right? There arent people there who think birds genuinely arent real? (I still need a lot of footnotes.) Yeah, theyre role-playing together. Theyre role-playing the collective understanding of the conspiracy theory.

The response of real-life conspiracists to Birds Arent Real has shifted now: They think Birds Arent Real is a CIA psy-op. They think that we are the CIA, were put out there as a weapon against conspiracy theorists.

McIndoe has a long game with Birds Arent Real: I think it has the potential to be a creative collective for a long time. I would love Birds Arent Real to continue to be a space to process the badness. I dont think the madness is going to necessarily end. I think the lunacy is going to become more intense.

He ends with an image that is poetic, freighted and incredibly neat. We talk about it like an igloo. Making a shelter out of the same thing thats posing the threat. Take the materials of what is around us, build something with them, be safe in there together, and laugh.

Excerpt from:
The lunacy is getting more intense: how Birds Arent Real took on the conspiracy theorists - The Guardian