The Democratic Party is going all-in on a “weird” messaging push, building on Minnesota Gov. and potential Democratic vice presidential pick Tim Walz’s description of the Republican Party.
As Democratic politicians across the board have adopted the word, some conservatives decided that the swift adoption of the phrase reveals it must be a secret CIA plot.
The posters deemed it the new Mockingbird, a reference to alleged covert programs undertaken by the agency to influence news coverage during the onset of the Cold War.
The claim kicked off thanks to a supercut from podcaster Dave Rubin showcasing recent people making the weird claim, calling them “NPCs.”
“Just a bunch of weirdos, in the Mockingbird Media, getting talking points from their CIA handlers. Weirdos calling normal people weirdos is just weird!” posted @w5ebo18002 over a different supercut of politicians and reporters calling the GOP “weird” edited side-by-side with Vice President Kamala Harris meeting with drag queens and transgender people at the White House.
“What’s truly weird is not thinking for yourself, and instead being a mockingbird freak who repeats whatever you’re told to repeat when the Democrat bat signal goes up,” added @aliveness_ape. “I believe it’s shaped like a hammer and sickle.”
Mockingbird has become shorthand for the idea that the media is controlled by the intelligence services and repeats, like a mockingbird, their narratives.
“Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business,” wrote Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame in a 1977 Rolling Stone article explaining the program. “The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work: he is accorded unusual access by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off‑limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities.”
The CIA has never acknowledged a program called Operation Mockingbird but did use the code name “Project Mockingbird” during a Kennedy-era wiretap program to weed out government leaks by spying on journalists’ telephones. The Church Commission, which tried to frisk the agency in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, did unearth agency ties to journalists. And intelligence services have long leaked stories to the media to shift a preferred course of action.
On X, much of the Mockingbird discussion was focused on the idea that Democratic Party politicians and aligned pundits were repeating the “weird” framing after receiving marching orders from the CIA.
“Operation mockingbird in full swing. The left can’t even do propaganda right, it’s not supposed to be obvious,” posted @McfarlaneGlenda.
“Using operation Mockingbird tactics, today’s magic word pushed by Democrats & the mainstream media is ‘weird,’” added @DavidRy01734524.
But Democratic posters pushed back and said that framing the messaging push as being part of a CIA plot was just more evidence that conservatives are, well, weird.
“rightwingers: ‘people are calling us weird. it must be because the cia activated operation mockingbird again,’” commented @avoidthehanoid dryly.
Not everyone in the party was completely on board though with the idea that the messaging came from deep within a covert CIA research center.
“I have a theory about how Kamala Harris’ ‘weird’ messaging campaign got going,” wrote commentator Mollie Hemingway, “So a company that was hired to come up with messaging completely forgot to do the work or they all got drunk or something. And then yesterday the campaign demanded to know what they came up with. They panicked and claimed that they had focus grouped the ‘weird’ thing and the numbers were off the charts. They said, ‘you have to say it everywhere immediately.’ And it was such an audacious lie that the entire campaign fell for it and immediately started doing it.”
Or it’s that.
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