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“We made it local and tangible,” McIndoe said, “and we created systems where people could feel like it was their own.”

Now the question is: If young people will turn up in such massive numbers with such unflagging energy for a fake cause, can McIndoe help turn them out for a real one?

“The line just wrapped around the block—around multiple blocks—of people waiting to enter; the building’s spilling out with people, with every seat taken up by people with signs,” McIndoe recalled.

Peter McIndoe spent the first several years of his 20s traveling across the country, being insulted by strangers.

Between 2018 and 2021, McIndoe, now 25, went from state to state, playacting the role of radicalized cult leader pushing an absurd conspiracy theory—that, as he put it, “birds aren’t real.”