Webworm with David Farrier

This is a conversation between Webworm's David Farrier, and his friend Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. It’s a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Webworm regular Hayden Donnell with an essay about the incompetent executive class.Much has been written about the structural factors accelerating the media’s demise. Tech giants have hoovered up its ad revenue like the sandworms from Dune. Its audiences have migrated to TikTok, or worse, X, where they routinely mistake the deranged inner monologue of @MAGAJackie28743781 for objective journalism.Less has been written about the incompetence of the media’s executives. Vice was home to some of the world’s most principled and talented journalists, but it was also run by cartoonish charlatans who blew half the op-ex on jobs for their friends, cocaine and general horndoggery.Mostly though, media bosses have demonstrated more mundane strategic ineptitude.Enjoy the episode, and see you in the comments over at https://www.webworm.co/p/buffoons This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Episode 14: In this episode, David Farrier reads some feedback from Webworm readers, before Hayden Donnell witnesses the "comeback" of Arise's John Cameron, as John attempts to speak in tongues. This is a look at how Pentecostal Christians tend to be a tight club - and how staging a comeback is part and parcel of anyone's fall. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Episode 13: "I talk to the guy behind Paul T Goldman, 2023's best documentary". David chats with Jason Woliner, creator and director of Peacock's PAUL T GOLDMAN. Visit www.webworm.co for more, and to join journalist David Farrier's Webworm community. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Episode 11: "The Life and Death of P22". A mountain lion walked the streets outside my house, and now it's dead. I'm curious what this fact says about us, and our relationship to nature. This includes an interview with journalist Rob Chaney, author of The Grizzly in the Driveway. For more details see https://www.webworm.co/p/episode11 This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Episode 10: "I was shot with two arrows — first in my stomach, second in my chest — by a man in the depths of the jungle." In this episode I read an essay by New Zealander Matt Scheurich, who back in 2011 found himself face to face with death after being shot by two arrows. He writes about the experience, and how it changed his ideas about death. See www.webworm.co for more details. Note: this podcast contains coarse language — if you’re listening with the kids in the car, maybe drop the audio down for a few seconds at the 7’28” mark. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Episode 8: Arise & Me: Not a Love Story. It’s been a while since we talked about Arise megachurch. I figured it was time for an update. I also became curious what Arise leaders, and the board, thought of me since I started writing about them in April of last year. I am not a mindreader, so I decided to do the next best thing: I made a Privacy Act request, asking for all Arise emails, texts and electronic correspondence mentioning “Webworm” or “David Farrier.” All Webworm and reporting about Arise can be found here: https://www.webworm.co/p/megachurch. Please sign up for the Webworm newsletter for my reporting direct to your inbox: https://www.webworm.co This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

Hi,Hope the weekend went well. I had a blast reading your stories under my secret societies newsletter. Especially loved this from Steff:“In university I won a ‘Freemason’s Scholarship’, which is hilarious because I had to go to an interview with 10 masons — and I’d just seen the movie From Hell, and all I wanted to talk about was conspiracy theories.I won, and I got invited to attend a dinner at their Auckland lodge with my mum and my best friend. So we go off to find the bathroom, and she goes “look at this” and pulls me behind a curtain and through a door and into their secret meeting chamber.And it looks like a movie set! I just couldn’t get over how simultaneously cool and silly it was. Like, all those lovely old men I met at dinner really hang out in here? Why don't they just go bowling?”I loved chatting to you in the comments over the weekend, and after that I chatted to New Zealand journalist Kim Hill about what the hell is going on with New Zealand’s conspiracy scene — you can listen to our conversation here.As for today — it’s time for a Webworm podcast. I wanted to try something every now and then where I share a piece of my writing from earlier in my career. I have stuff scattered in a variety of places — old laptops and computers, USB sticks (remember them?) and of course Google Docs. Today’s piece was originally published on the 3News website, back when I was a journalist in New Zealand.The website no longer exists, so neither does this piece — except, I found it in my Google Docs folder. I enjoyed revisiting it, so — like when Stephen King releases a new edition of The Stand — I decided to clean it up a little, add a few paragraphs, and re-release it into the world.I just compared myself to one of America’s greatest writers. Not arrogant at all.This one is a medical mystery; a rabbit hole I never expected to go down. Trigger warning: if you’re squeamish, this might make you a bit squeamish. Nonetheless — I hope you enjoy it. Let’s travel back to 2015.David. Pulling on a Mysterious ThreadUFOs, chemtrails, shadowy government agents. The phone-calls usually start around 9pm. People call the newsroom with information they desperately want to tell you; information they can’t give to anyone else. Their stories are similar and familiar — and always filled with paranoia and conspiracy. One man insists the government has put an implant in his brain, using it to track his every move. A woman calls up insisting she’s been systematically abducted by aliens for the last 15 years. People call the newsroom — often me specifically — because they see it as their last opportunity to be understood. Or at least be heard. The police are no help. Doctors and medical professionals have turned them away. Most of them don’t even want to consider writing to the government, because the government’s in on it. They want to talk to the open-minded reporter.None of these callers are looking for answers, because they already have the answers. Their problem is that no one will listen to them.These far-flung stories don’t always come over the phone. Increasingly, people direct their story to my Facebook inbox or my Twitter DMs. People like Andy:And Andy started telling his story. It was involved and complex, full of names, dates and allegations. The messages arrived in my inbox in a steady stream. 10… 20… 86 messages by the end of the day.  It was unrelenting and I didn’t know where to start. He claimed many troubling things, but there was no way to verify any of his claims.And then he started talking about the threads. I paused when reading this, and then I re-read it, just to clarify. I didn’t quite get it. Threads? I don’t know what he is talking about. I can’t picture it. Andy is very candid about it: “It’s not normal to be able to pull threads out of your chest. I’ve got wounds everywhere”. Andy tells me he didn’t used to have wounds everywhere. He sent me a “before” photo, from January 2014: A topless, pasty white guy. Now the paste has turned to a blotchy mess. He sends me a more recent photo. These splotches cover his arms, his chest, his back. He blames the splotches on the threads. It always comes back to the threads. Then he sent me a photo of what he was talking about:There are more photos, and they all show the same thing: Andy appears to be pulling threads out of himself, just like he said he was. It’s a strange thing to look at — as I’m still not quite sure what I am seeing.He says he’s approached various hospitals, and seen various doctors. But no answers. He sends me a report from a Diagnostic Medlab:It report ends with “The origin of the foreign material is not apparent”.Andy’s narrative veers back into things I can’t confirm —allegations, conspiracy and paranoia. I don’t know how founded or unfounded any of it is. “I been on the run since January 2014. I try and keep myself a moving target” he types. He’s sleeping rough somewhere in the North Island of New Zealand. He needs to keep off the grid. He’s been contacting me when he gets Wi-Fi on his phone. “I been trying hard at great risk to my own life. I expect to die from my injuries” he sends.It’s easy to write him off as another conspiracy theorist. But I keep on thinking about the threads. I’ve been staring at this confronting photo for a few days now, trying to figure out what exactly I’m looking at:I feel a bit ill. I am not good with body stuff, and I am definitely not good with “bits-of-bloody-matter-pulled-out-of-the-skin” body stuff. In saying that, I’m part of a Facebook chat group with five friends that I like to surprise, so I send the photo to them. Rachel, a speech therapist, sends an immediate reply: “Oh my gosh, he’s got Morgellons Disease”. Devil’s BaitRachel had just picked up a book called The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller written by Leslie Jamison. The book is about being empathetic toward people you didn’t fully understand. One of the chapter’s was called “Devil’s Bait”: “For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange disease, and no one — or hardly anyone — believed them. There there were a lot of them, almost 12 thousand of them — and their numbers were growing. Their illness manifested in lots of ways: Sores, itching, fatigue, pain, and something called formication, the sensation of crawling insects. But its defining symptom was always the same: Strange fibres emerging from underneath the skin”.This sounded exactly like Andy. I immediately went on a Googling rampage, finding examples of Morgellons all over the world, from the United States to Japan. The diagnosis started with Mary Leitao, who in 2001 took her two-year-old to the doctor to examine a crusty sore on his lip. The kid was complaining about some bugs crawling around under his skin. Doctors found nothing wrong, prescribing some vaseline.But the sore didn’t go away, the fibres arrived, and Leitao came up with the term “Morgellons” — referencing something written by a 17th Century doctor about some “harsh hair” he’d found emerging on a patient’s back.Ms. Leitao collects a sample of the strands from Drew’s skin. They glide right off, like filaments from a dandelion. She places them onto slides, examining them under an $8 RadioShack microscope. She’s looked thousands of times into microscopes, fancier ones, first as a biology student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and later for five years as a medical researcher at two Boston hospitals. She’s seen nothing like this before. She shakes her head and thinks, “These things cannot be coming out of my son’s body.”Once the condition had a name, people started coming out of the woodwork. Patients would collect the threads they’d pulled out of themselves and bring it to their GP in little containers or matchboxes. Dermatologists even coined a term for it: “The matchbox sign”. The consensus was that the fibres or “alien bodies” weren’t from within the body, but were just bits of cotton and wool people found on their skin.I thought of my guy, Andy, and his collection of bloody, fleshy fibres laid out on a paper towel. Then I thought of that photo of him pulling them out of his body. They weren’t bits of wool from his fucking sweater. What was going on?A Disease You Catch OnlineThe Centre for Disease Control launched a full scale investigation in 2006 to get to the bottom of Morgellons. They didn’t get to the bottom of it. The report was called Clinical, Epidemiologic, Histopathologic and Molecular Features of an Unexplained Illness and concluded: “We were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition, or a wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestation”.That delusional infestation thing is important.Body horror — think David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Eraserhead — isn’t just a movie genre, but has long been a phenomenon dealt with by psychologists the world over.An idea seeds itself in a patient’s mind: something is crawling under their skin and they have to get it out. Sometimes it’s called delusional parasitosis or Ekbom’s syndrome. Delusory cleptoparsitosis is another one, closely related to a paranoia of bed bugs.In one extreme case several years ago a woman scratched through her scalp and her skull using household implements until she was scratching at her own brain:Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night — and all the way into her brain.I’m not quite sure how you scratch through your skull — maybe some artistic licence there. But you get the idea: It’s an itch you can’t scratch, and it drives you crazy. I mention these other conditions because they lead to another theory about Morgellons: that it’s passed on through the Internet. The Empathy Exams labels the process “Transmission by Internet.” Morgellons diseas

Hi,I had my first surfing lesson this month. I wasn’t very good.It started off okay: I was pretty good at paddling, and smashing through some (tiny) waves to get out. I managed to keep by surf board straight, and I could up sit up and turn around pretty quickly. I could even paddle and catch a wave. The problem was standing up. How in God’s name are you meant to stand up? What, you’re meant to go from this wonderful lying down position to magically standing and balancing while a wave threatens to smash down around you? In other news I had a great time and got a very chafed pink belly. It was some escapism from a month that seemed doomed. The Delta variant has been making its presence known. US hospitals are stretched. Nine Inch Nails cancelled all their shows that I was looking forward to seeing (wise), and New Zealand has gone into a nationwide lockdown (also wise).And in the midst of this, the UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” released a new report that felt like a swift punch to the face. Their reports are usually sobering reading, but this one was horrifying. A “code red for humanity” is how UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it.The climate right now is warmer than it has been in about 125,000 years. And it’s just going to keep getting worse with more droughts, wildfires and floods. We aren’t on target to stop something that now seems all but inevitable. All this was running through my head as I walked to the beach, preparing to be pummelled on my board. The sun was unrelenting, and the literal cliff to my left was a fitting metaphor for humanity’s approach to the crisis we all face. And the question running through all of our heads? “What the fuck can we do about it?” When it comes to talk of the environment, many of us are trying to do out bit. We throw our recycling in the right bin, we use those re-usable bags at the supermarkets, and maybe we try and walk to the shops instead of drive.All the things we’ve being told will help save the planet. But we’re not making a lick of difference. It’s futile, apart from making us feel good about ourselves. We are — as today’s guest Joshua Drummond writes — being denied climate agency. Because we’re trapped in a system that makes it utterly impossible to make a difference. Josh has written for Webworm before, about what QAnon has in common with Evangelical Christianity. That piece seems relevant again this week, as City Impact Church held a “special meeting” for the pastor to spread anti-vaxx messaging in New Zealand.But today, Josh writes about our total lack climate agency and how that makes us feel utterly unhinged. He also offers some ideas about what we can do. It’s a great essay, and I’m so glad to leave it with you for weekend reading. Or listening, in its podcast form. David.If you want more Webworm and to support the work I do here, you can become a monthly or yearly paying member. Only consider doing this if it doesn’t cause you any financial hardship! Imprisoned in a System That Won’t Let Us Act Sanely.an essay by Joshua DrummondI jumped off a cliff once. Everyone else was doing it.It was at Northland waterfall, and I was about 17. The place was a popular swimming hole and there were quite a few spots my mates and I would jump off and do bombs, but there’s one particular bit where — if you get enough of a run-up — you can clear the cliffside and plummet a height even greater than the falls.My mates and I worked up to it. I didn’t go first; I’ve never been great with heights, but I wanted to prove myself. Plus, I have an innate practical streak that wants to see if someone else is going to get impaled before I jump into murky water myself.They jumped, they didn’t die, it was my turn. I jumped too.I didn’t regret it immediately; that came about a tenth of a second in, when gravity grabbed my guts in an unclenching fist and squeezed and twisted and pulled down. It was a visceral lesson; the laws of physics are a pantheon of terrible gods. They’re the authority by which cause and effect abide, and they don’t care about you. I’d fucked with the great god gravity, and this was the “finding out” phase.This month started with a similar set of sensations. A lurch in my stomach, a sudden, dizzying rush of anxiety. The same sense of inevitability, of being at the mercy of a caused effect. I know the feeling well, now. I get it every time a new major climate change report is released.The IPCC has just released their Sixth Assessment Report, which draws a conclusion that will leave few surprised; climate change is real, it’s happening now, it’s getting worse, and it will get much worse if it’s not stopped. Importantly, the report takes pains to underscore the fact that there is much we can and should do to stop warming, but that ray of hope is not what brings the feeling of falling off a cliff, the sensation as inevitability sets in and gravity grabs at your guts, pulling and twisting.The problem isn’t the fall: it’s that we’re currently doing very little to break it. It’s as if (to work the cliff-jump metaphor some more) we’re in free fall and the pool’s dry, but if we’re really quick we can fill it so the fall won’t kill us or even hurt too much — but the controls for the emergency sluice-gates are kept by a very small and very rich group of people who are all saying “nah, saving you would cost us too much. We’re opting for splat.”We know exactly what’s wrong with the climate: there’s an excess of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and it’s causing the planet to heat up. We’re clear on the cause: human activity has done nearly all of it. We know the solution: swap out carbon-emitting technology, and work to draw down the excess carbon we’ve emitted.So, with the problems and solutions clear for decades, what’s being done by the engines of the economy, the leaders, and the gatekeepers: business and the government? Not nearly enough.This isn’t a sane response to an emergency. It’s inhuman. Humans are, for the most part, practical and altruistic. We are brilliant, astonishing creatures. We might be bound by gravity, but we can still fly. The essence of humanity is bound up in working together to solve problems.That’s what makes climate change so maddening. When I say to myself, as any sane person would, “what are we doing?” and “how can I help?” the answers keep coming back, “not enough” and “you can’t.” That’s not how humans work. Being shown a problem and not being able to fix it drives us mad.Anyone who understands the reality of climate change — of the necessity of action — is burning to act. Everyone wants to help, to work, to do. But we’re imprisoned in a system that won’t let us act sanely. We are being denied climate agency.We’re stuck in a system we didn’t opt for, a system built for us without due care by those that benefit from pillaging the future, a system that we are frequently told is “too expensive” to change. In the media, articles about climate change mitigation measures frequently come — absurdly — with a cost-benefit analysis. “Not contributing to cooking an entire planet” is seldom listed as a benefit.Often, taking the individual actions we are told will help ease the crisis is too expensive. Unless you’re rich, in the global scheme of things — you can’t afford an EV. Unless you’re wealthy, in terms of either time or money, you can’t afford to go waste-free, or turn your backyard into a garden, or even buy food that’s free of exploitative farming practices. Ethical behaviour has been monetised: if you want a clear conscience, you’ll have to pay for it. Even the term “carbon footprint,” now ubiquitous and synonymous with taking individual action on climate change, is compromised: it was created and propagated by (wait for it) BP, in one of the most cynical (and effective) marketing campaigns of all time. Unable even to take the drop-in-a-bucket actions that might soothe our consciences — if not actually make a meaningful contribution — the vast majority of us have to live madly, amongst madness. To drive madness, to eat and drink madness. Many simple acts of daily life are poisoned with guilt over the knowledge that not only are you not helping, you are making things worse. An omnipresent, invisible chorus of judgement screams at you for decisions you can’t help making, because our systems don’t allow any other choice. Driving? Guilty! Eating meat? Guilty! Got milk? Guilty! Got plant milk in a plastic bottle? Guilty! No wonder people embrace climate change denial, clutching it like a lifesaver. They’re just trying to stay sane.In a sane world, we’d be pivoting hard — or have pivoted long ago — having never debated whether having a liveable biosphere is good for business. Government and business alike would have switched priorities, poured their all into doing the needful. There would be jobs, endless jobs, available to do work that matters.But it’s not a sane system, and there are few such jobs available. Searching on a hellsite like LinkedIn for “climate change” or “sustainability” is an exercise in futility. Many of the jobs available are in niche positions, or start-ups, or don’t pay well enough for someone without independent means to take them. Tellingly, many climate jobs are at insurance companies — insurance being one of the few sectors that does not have the luxury of choosing not to include climate change in its business model. What we’ve ended up with is a crisis everyone knows about but is powerless to work on fixing, because it’s hard to make rent or pay the mortgage with jobs that should exist but don’t. And the great Invisible Hand of the market isn’t interested in helping out, because saving the world for future generations doesn’t pay now. The Hand would rather sell stuff. Everyone loves stuff. Absent of the ability to live sanely and purposefully in a world that’s on fire, many of us privileged enough to live out of the danger zones live muted, blunted lives.Videogames are a welcome retreat, an opportunity to

Hi,I’ve decided to launch a Webworm podcast, and I wanted you to be the first to know about it.God, how many times that phrase been uttered: “I’ve decided to launch a podcast.” Good Lord.Okay — so let me explain the “Episode 5” thing. When Webworm started, I experimented with four podcast episodes last year. I’ll list those at the end, as they’re all available along with today’s episode.But as of today I formally, officially and excitedly launch the audio component to Webworm! I’m going to use it to complement the written content here when it feels appropriate. When it feels exciting. When it feels — not to get too pretentious — worthy.And so I did a long read of Jez Brown’s heartfelt, horrifying and somehow hilarious essay on having Long Covid. I wanted to see how it would be in audio form. I want Jez’s story to have fresh legs, so people can listen in their cars or while they clean the house. It’s an experiment, and I want to see how you feel about it. You can listen to this episode in this email — it’s embedded in this newsletter — or you should be able to find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.I’ve been enjoying Armchaired and Dangerous so much with Dax and Monica (see below for details of our upcoming live show), so I figure Webworm can have a little podcast life, too. As a subscriber you will always get it in your inbox first.An extra thanks to paying subscribers (seriously, dear God, thank you!) who give me the resources and time to build this thing.I’d love to take your feedback in the comments below. Webworm will always be a written thing — I want you to be able to read it on your phone while you’re in bed or on the bus or at the beach — but I figure audio will be fun to play with. Some stories and interviews may even work better in audio form.Here are the previous episodes from last year:Episode #1: a week of conspiratorial madnessEpisode #2: The Sloppy Nonsense of conspiracy theoriesEpisode #3: “Make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit!”Episode #4: I love The Boys because it features a psychopath with strong hints of TrumpSo welcome to the Webworm podcast. Big thanks to Aaron Short for doing the theme music. You’re great and your love of dogs is eternal and awesome.Armchaired and Dangerous: LiveWhile we’re talking podcasts — we’re doing a live Armchaired and Dangerous in Salt Lake City on Thursday September 16th. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. You’ll be able to get them here.Dax, Monica and I will see you then, Utah!And if you’re in LA on Sunday August 22nd, I’ll be making a brief appearance on stage with Chuck Tingle at his show. You can find details here. It’s sort of a secret that I am popping up, but I am telling you because I want to. If you’re in LA come say hi! Keep it a secret, okay!An update on Dr Dan - and some some reader feedbackEarlier this week I wrote about Dr Dan, a medical professional who since January has been talking a lot about hydrogen peroxide, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as potential Covid treatments on his Facebook and Instagram pages.He also looked nearly identical to Jason Schwartzman which is kinda cool.After that piece — his Facebook account already disabled — he shut down his Instagram account as well:As I mentioned in my piece, I wrote to the New Zealand Medical Council enquiring about the statements and studies he’d posted on his social media.They sent back this comment, attributed to Dr Curtis Walker, Chair, Medical Council of New Zealand:Council takes it very seriously when it becomes aware of any doctor who spreads medical misinformation, which includes anti-vaccination messages. Council notes that the information is no longer publicly available on Dr Quistorff’s social media platforms.The Medical Council recognises that the expert medical advice and scientific evidence strongly support that the COVID-19 vaccination is safe, effective, and necessary to overcome the global pandemic.Our role is to protect public safety and for that reason we have released a joint statement alongside the Dental and Paramedic Councils expectations of doctors, dentists and paramedics. As regulators we respect an individual’s right to have their own opinions, but it is our view that there is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, nor any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media and advertising by health practitioners: Expectations for COVID-19 vaccination released for doctors and dentists.I’d note that at no time did I observe this doctor spreading specific anti-vaccination messages. For all I know, he’s very pro-vaxx in person— and some of his patients wrote to me telling me as much. I choose to trust them.I would note however that talking at length about alternate Covid treatments on social media can act as muddying the water in regards to the very clear message to “get vaccinated”. In simply sharing “fresh research” (that’s a favourable take) of alternative Covid treatments willy nilly, Dr Dan may well have been unwittingly aiding the anti-vaxx movement:And reading comments online about my piece, you can sort of see the ripple effect Dr Dan’s posts can have:I’d argue “looking outside the square of vaccines” isn’t a great train of thought during a pandemic, when we are trying to get people vaccinated. The square is a very good place to be. Insults kept flying in on my social media. Some of my favourites:This “expose” is a cheap shot smear piecePerhaps you should stick to actingWhat are your credentials in investigative reporting anyway?With that in mind, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has just written a really great piece summing up the issues with ivermectin. Gideon’s an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney, Australia — and he talks about ivermectin at length on his Twitter. Ivermectin was the latest alternate Covid treatment Dr Dan was posting about, before he took his accounts offline. After I mentioned it in my newsletter, and on social media, I got plenty of comments endlessly going on about how it’s a valid treatment and to leave the poor doctor alone.Which is why I wanted to share Gideon’s piece: Ivermectin for Covid-19 — An UpdateIvermectin is a horse dewormer and anti-parasitic medication that has been promoted across the world for the treatment of Covid-19. It has been in the news a lot recently, because a large portion of the evidence-base for the drug appears to have been based on fraudulent research, which as scientific rigor goes is usually considered to be a bit of an issue.But we’ve held out hope that the drug works for Covid-19, because despite the foundations of the research being cracked, there were still a number of positive trials and some of them were really well-done. Yes, fraud is bad, but we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just because one study may never have happened at all.Until today. The results from a very large new study were just released, showing absolutely no benefit for ivermectin when compared to a placebo pill. It now seems depressingly likely that ivermectin is probably not useful for treating Covid-19.You can read his whole piece here, but basically:This trial has already demonstrated that hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir are unlikely to be beneficial treatments for people with Covid-19 in outpatient settings, and because of the hype around ivermectin had included the drug in a treatment arm to see if it worked. The results from this part of the trial, including over 1,300 patients, were released in summary form late this afternoon.They showed no benefit for ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19. None whatsoever.It’s a bit like when Dr Dan posted about hydroxychloroquine in June. Despite clinical trials confirming hydroxychloroquine didn’t prevent illness or death from Covid 19 — his post remained up. As did his posts about hydrogen peroxide and ivermectin.Until he took all his accounts offline this week after my piece. And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. Because people trust doctors, and some of those visiting his page would trust the (not defunct) information he’d posted.Some reader feedback: Thanks to all of you for reading the piece, and thanks for the doctor and medical student who also got in touch. They agreed to let me publish their emails as long as I didn’t identify them. For that reason, I’ve changed their names.E-mail #1: Dr. “Sarah”“I am a doctor. I just started my specialist training in palliative care, but up until now have spent a lot of time rotating around various medical specialties in the hospital.Reading your newsletter made me say “oh no no no no no no”. The ivermectin thing has been bizarre. I suggest you look into Brett Weinstein — a smart but flawed guy who is using a big podcast platform to promote very inaccurate and skewed statistics around the same topic. He is very vaccine hesitant.I just want to say after listening to the Armchaired and Dangerous episode about medicine and reading this, that I feel a bit sad about your distrust of our profession. I can understand it though — your experiences have been bizarre. But just know that the Dr Dans are such a small proportion of us. Actually there are so many thousands or millions of us just constantly trying to make an assessment of recent data and interpret its value while balancing it against the patients’ expectations, and everyone I know in this job is just motivated to help people. This guy is definitely misrepresenting his profession, but being an “Integrative and Functional Medicine Specialist” is already a red flag.It’s worth also noting that everyone I know who is a doctor is anxiety-ridden.Ultimately, we are just a bunch of humans so we get things wrong a lot, and sometimes when I don’t think things through properly or carefully enough, my patients can have bad things happen to them or can die. That’s an insane amount of pressure. But everyone I’ve met has just been a good person trying their best to get their patients to feel better while the

These are the words of Joseph Uscinski, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.I spoke to Joe for Webworm, and our conversation made me wonder if things aren’t quite as fucked up as they seem. So I guess today’s newsletter is… hopeful, somehow?Joe Uscinski wrote American Conspiracy Theories (an excellent book) and as you probably gathered from the title, he’s very passionate about conspiracy theories. He’s a member of the University of Miami U-LINK team, which combats online extremist conspiracy theories, and also does a fuckload of survey work for the likes of the Pew Research Centre.In short, he really has his finger on the pulse about what Americans believe.And as debate raged about the possible identity of Q this week, I wanted to talk to Joe about how widespread the believe in QAnon actually is, and how worried we should be. I wanted to know the scale of the problem.I really like Joe. He’s well educated and opinionated — and he’s also a great speaker. Right now, he’s in hot demand. I accidentally Skyped him on the wrong day, and he sounded upbeat but also kinda exhausted. He’d just done six American press interviews in a row, most of them about QAnon.When I reconnected, I really loved our conversation. I think my kiwi accent threw him a little, and there were a lot of laughs as we talked. The podcast version of this newsletter is really fun. He swears quite a bit.In short — we kinda disagree on some things — but I knew we would.He thinks the problem of people disappearing down conspiratorial rabbit holes is no worse than it’s ever been. That it’s exactly the same. Joe told me social media isn’t to blame. I struggle with this, but he’s smart and I wanted to hear him out.We also agreed on a lot of things, including the bit where he yelled at me:“This is a plea to the conspiracy theorists - make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit at this point! Because it is so boring, oh my God!”I found this conversation fascinating, and at times confronting. I hope you enjoy it. Like all the content here on Webworm, this edition is possible thanks to subscribers. They fund the work here, and also get access to bonus newsletters and podcasts. If it doesn’t cause you financial hardship, you can sign up here to stay across future episodes:You can consume our conversation in two ways: a podcast you can listen to (above), or a written version you can read (below).Take your pick.David.Joe - you are a polls expert. Take it away!Just to give you a rundown of the polls in this country, I will tell you the brief history of why I started polling QAnon, because it wasn’t even something I was paying attention to in mid-2018. It got brought to my attention, largely from a little bit of online harassment that I got from these Q people! They went through all my pictures on Twitter and decided to make a collage suggesting I was a satanic sex trafficker. It was the dumbest pictures they picked — and of course they found one of me wearing red socks, and the red socks mean you are a sex trafficker, or eat babies, or something like that. At that point I thought, “OK, let’s see what’s happening here.”And what happened very quickly in late July of 2018 was that some people wore QAnon tee shirts to a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida — my home state.And because of that, QAnon got a tonne of media coverage, in all the major newspapers. So I decided I was going to run a poll in Florida. And I thought “why don’t I throw QAnon on here, and just see what happens?”And a lot of people didn’t know what it was, and it was not rated very highly. So we said “how would you rate the QAnon movement on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 is “you really like it” and zero is “you really hate it.”It came out with about an average of 22. And to put that in perspective, it was about a point higher than where Floridians rated Fidel Castro! And if you know anything about Florida, it’s that we don’t like Castro here! So it was not liked. But what was even more telling was that the average rating from Democrats and from Republicans were not different. So they both disliked it about equally. And what predicted belief in QAnon was not being Republican or Conservative, but just having a conspiratorial world view. So this idea that QAnon is a far right conspiracy theory does just not hold water at all. There is nothing conservative about it, except for positing Trump as a hero — but he is not a hero because he is Republican, but because he is an outsider.I have repeated this poll in Florida just in June, and several other polls nationwide, and have found no growth [in QAnon belief] whatsoever. So most people don’t know what this is, the vast majority of people don’t like it, and it’s not gaining in popularity.However the headlines in all the newspapers are the exact opposite. They say “it is huge and getting bigger, it’s gone mainstream, it’s taking over American life, it’s far right…” Of course, they never tell you what that means. I mean I am reading a piece in the New York Times right now, and the headline says “The republican embrace of QAnon goes far beyond Trump”, that’s the kind of headline we see everywhere.But it really doesn’t. I mean maybe it goes a little bit beyond Trump, but it doesn’t go far beyond Trump. So what is happening here? Are we seeing a huge disconnect between the reporting and the perception of what your polling numbers are actually saying?Well the data is out there, I published my initial poll in the Washington Post, I followed up with my polls in the Washington Post, the Emerson poll is out there for anyone to see, the Pew poll is out there — and that made headlines! So there is no excuse at this point for journalists to get this wrong. So they are doing it purposefully.And I think some of them are starting to see, and to change their language, just enough to get away with the crap: “Oh, well, there are millions of QAnon accounts - and that’s growing…” Right? And if you are not reading carefully… accounts aren’t people. Accounts are accounts, who knows if they are sincere, or real people, or if one person has 1000 accounts.So some of this is, frankly, dishonest at this point. I would have forgiven them before, but they should know better. And I don’t want to speculate on people’s motives — it may be that they are chasing clicks, by inciting this moral panic. It could be that the mainstream news legacy outlets have it in for social media, and are more than happy to attack them saying they are turning everyone into a nutcase, when in fact they are not. It could be that there is some political bias here, maybe it is easy for them to say “Republicans are a bunch of QAnon nutcases” and then ignore stuff like ANTIFA and stuff like that.I think there is this thing at the moment where people are coming across the idea of a conspiracy theory for the first time, and they are panicking about it. I feel that in America, it’s been a part of its culture to have this way of thinking about things! That what you are told is not necessarily the truth. I mean, right back to the foundations of the country, it’s always been there. It just feels like perhaps there is this knee-jerk reaction to what we are seeing now.I mean it’s true it’s always been there, but it’s also a media myth that the US is exceptional in this way. I would say Americans are exceptional in many ways, but conspiracy theories is just not one of them!Polling, when you do it across countries… we are middling, at best. If you read the news headlines, whenever a major newspaper will talk about conspiracy theories in whatever country, it’s always the people of that country who are the most conspiratorial!All these claims are based on nothing, it’s all baloney. And also when you read about “when is the time of conspiracy theories?” - journalists say it’s always “now, now. Now is the time.” And you can find headlines almost every year saying “this is the golden age, this is the time!” But it can’t always be true.I am just observing from New Zealand, but say we focus on COVID, there seems to be a lot of disinformation and misinformation that is fuelled by social media sending you along on an algorithm. Look at something like Plandemic, that documentary that was shared around so widely: how do you feel about the positioning of something like that as being “oh holy shit everyone is doing down the rabbit hole” — do you think that has been blown out of proportion?Yes. Absolutely. This is the funny thing, having been polling on COVID conspiracy theories. I ran a poll in March, and another in June, and Plandemic placed in the middle of that, and was shared supposedly millions of times.Yet — no difference in the conspiracy beliefs. No difference.And so it’s like we known a lot about how media affects people. We have been studying this for a very long time. For hundreds of years. And we have strong theories to explain this, and we have decided to throw this all out and just decide that everyone is a lemming, when it comes to internet conspiracy theories.It is not the case that conspiracy theorising has gone up at all. It is not clear that conspiracy theorising has gone up due to social media. We may find in effect we may have people who already have strong conspiratorial world-views and they are going to search out what they want to find anyway.And they are writing about it on their Facebooks walls…Yeah. So the view is already there, right? Even when we look at polls of specific conspiracy theories over time, it is not the case that pre and post internet more people are believing conspiracy theories. There may be less. Essentially what you are saying is that during a pandemic, people that are already predisposed —Well not even during a pandemic! Just put the pandemic aside for now, just in the age of the internet people will find what they are looking for. And when this pandemic first started, I was thinking to myself “if I were to take people into a lab and to

In this Webworm episode, I talk to science fiction writer Sonny Whitelaw — who after writing some Stargate books, discovered some fans thought Stargate was very, very real. We discuss what this says about conspiracy theory culture in 2020. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe

This was not planned; it was not expected. But I turned my mic on, and just decided to reflect back on this unhinged week of conspiratorial madness. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.webworm.co/subscribe