Birds Aren't Real Hats

Birds Aren't Real began in January 2017, when Peter McIndoe, at a Memphis counter-protest to the Women's March, held up a sign that said exactly that and the video went viral. The movement's lore is a deadpan government file: birds were exterminated between 1959 and 1971 and replaced with surveillance drones, which perch on power lines to recharge, and their droppings are a liquid tracking method. Billboards went up in Memphis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, a rally reached Twitter's San Francisco headquarters in 2021, and by the time 60 Minutes covered it in May 2022 it had more than a million followers. McIndoe broke character there to say it is satire, a safe space, in his words, to laugh at misinformation instead of being scared by it. These Birds Aren't Real hats wear the bit in the movement's own field-agent voice. Badges carry the name and the title of bird truther; sentence designs carry the slogans the official store sells, If it flies it spies, Birdwatching goes both ways, Pigeons are liars, and the movement's own question, have you ever seen a baby pigeon. Two of the strongest, the spy line and the birdwatching line, each get a second colorway. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear it to the park, the feeder, or the next power line you pass.