Hero shit. Okay, I do find it genuinely difficult to tell if the world is ending or if the smallness of social media makes it feel like the world is ending, but even by the “everything is burning” standards I’ve come to expect from Twitter it’s been a wild week. Spared the full Katrina, New Orleans was nonetheless savaged by Hurricane Ida. Today, the city is looking at a month without power. In California, our endemic wildfire crisis has destroyed 1.7 million acres since July 14th. Of note: less than a year ago, the state cut proposed spending on controlled burns by about a half billion dollars, and Governor Newsom punted the already-modest goal of 500,000 treated acres to 2025. Covid spikes across the country have prompted the European Union to restrict travel from the United States, as if we’re ground zero for some kind of zombie apocalypse, and the last American troops have left Afghanistan. In their wake? We gifted the Taliban, a terrorist organization dogmatically obsessed with a militant murder faith, an 18-billion-dollar armory. In almost every piece of this, there’s a story to tell of stunning government failure. But the failure isn’t strictly speaking American, or at least not as defined by the broader American people, and therein lies our hope.

One of the strangest aspects of American representative democracy is the citizens of this country are somehow not reflected in their leadership. A few friends of mine over at Anduril reminded me of this when they put an incredible project on blast:

Our world is a reflection of incentives, and the best America has to offer — our smartest, our bravest, our most creative — are not incentivized to politics. That doesn’t mean our smartest, bravest, and most creative don’t exist. Operation Recovery is funding an all-volunteer group of American veterans called Task Force Pineapple, and running search and rescue in Kabul. We’re talking about retired commandos risking their lives carrying out Captain America-level shit in the middle of a war zone to keep a promise our government broke. Working with, but not under, the U.S. military, the group has saved Americans and Afghan allies around the city for weeks.

Task Force Pineapple is part of a larger effort Melissa Chen characterizes as a 21st Century Underground Railroad, which she wrote about this week in a great, extensive piece for Bari Weiss’ Common Sense. It’s an inspiring story at a dark moment, though with the deadline for America’s hard exit passed, and the airports in Afghanistan under Taliban control, I do worry the work is more or less concluded.

The Anduril team — brilliant, good people building defense technology that has never before existed — reminded me of possibly the greatest departure from the ongoing failure of our government: private industry. Companies like Palantir have transformed U.S. intelligence, companies like Stripe have helped hundreds of thousands of people start businesses, and it’s always worth repeating our pharmaceutical industry spun up a vaccine for Covid-19 in two days. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is maybe the greatest recent example of a company taking over where our government has given up, dramatically reducing the cost of space transport in a world that by the way now has rockets that land. I often find myself in a position of critique, but from soldiers and doctors to the founders of our most important companies, Americans are still doing great things. We can’t lose sight of what’s working, and there is a lot that’s working.

Our media landscape is, of course, not that.

Tell me more about this horse drug, doctor. Few things so perfectly sum up the stupidity of our present cultural moment as the ivermectin debate, which is frankly so convoluted and insane I’m not sure I’ll be able to provide a fully accurate assessment of sides. But roughly what we’re looking at is something like this: the FDA doesn’t want Covid-positive patients to dose themselves with ivermectin, which folks across the media have interpreted — apparently without a single Google search — as “ivermectin is a poison horse drug.” Senator Rand Paul interpreted this interpretation as “the media would rather kill you than compliment Donald Trump,” which is odd on account of I don’t think Trump has ever mentioned ivermectin. What we do know is some Trump supporters on Facebook are super into the drug, and any time some Trump supporters on Facebook are super into anything the media sounds alarm bells. It’s either an anti-vaxx thing or a Nazi thing, or… has there been a crossover story yet? Has hippie Hitler made his debut?

In a now-deleted tweet, Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, gave it the old college try:

A phenomenal piece of cringe, entirely deserving of the epic ratio Arne received. Almost art, really. But, if just for the moment, let’s table the question of whether or not people who have failed to get their vaccine are morally equivalent to fundamentalist mass murderers. I’m curious about the Rand Paul horse guy drama. What do we actually know about this scary new drug ivermectin?

Oh wait it’s not new at all, and we actually know a lot.

Ivermectin, a modification of the Nobel Prize-winning avermectin, is an FDA-approved drug (though not for Covid), and has been since 1996. You’ll have to do a few minutes digging for that fact, however, as Google’s buried the information in a mountain of alarmist Covid headlines. For the most part, the drug has been used as an antiparasitic, perhaps most notably for something called River Blindness, but it’s also been used to successfully treat many different viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which leads to Covid-19. This is likely the reason many people are hoping there might be some use in the drug against the disease. There’s some evidence to support that hope. But one large study in favor of ivermectin’s Covid application has also just been retracted. It seems there are a lot of people who really want this to work, a lot of people who really want this not to work, and all of them are committed to lying in the service of what they know, with very little evidence, to be “true.” As of yet, nothing is settled. Nonetheless:

The ivermectin conversation has been reduced to “horse drug bad,” which the media yanked directly from our own government:

Is ivermectin toxic? No. Is ivermectin toxic when your doctor refuses to prescribe it so you try to get it on the black market and accidentally dose yourself with enough of the drug to cure a 2,000 pound horse? I mean yeah, that’ll probably kill you. But we can’t have that conversation because honest, adult conversations concerning things like trade-offs and risk and our actual, ongoing reality are no longer allowed. Americans can’t be trusted to their own choices given accurate information, so the information has to be distorted — for our own good. Ivermectin isn’t an effective drug against SARS with anecdotal evidence concerning Covid in both directions, it’s lethal. Stop taking lethal horse drugs, idiot. You actual moron. Just do what you’re told.

And if you don’t?

The Chicago court’s decision to take a mother’s child on grounds she wasn’t vaccinated has since been reversed. This is perhaps because the mother in question was advised not to take the vaccine by her doctor, which is a detail in this story that shouldn’t even be relevant, but we are nonetheless tumbling towards real authoritarianism.

I do think the ivermectin debate is also, in its way, about vaccines. As our media and government believe it their moral duty to convince us of behavior they believe healthy, rather than to accurately inform us about the world so that we can make personal decisions about our own health, it’s important to consider every Covid-related story in light of what the truth arbiters want. And the truth arbiters want you to get a vaccine. I think you should get a vaccine too, for what it’s worth, but I’m not about to pump propaganda to scare you into doing it.

“Cures” to Covid, if even benign, will be demonized until they are proven beyond all doubt to work, not because the people telling us what to do are worried about our safety, but because they want us to believe we need the vaccine. Again, I believe that anyone physically capable of doing so should take the vaccine. But that doesn’t mean true facts about the world cease to exist, and I refuse to accept the framing of therapies and vaccination as oppositional. There’s a moral thing here, in the first place. I just think it’s wrong to lie about health-related questions. But there’s also a practical piece. The people telling us what to do are, you know, chronically wrong about pretty much everything.

We know that contracting Covid outside is close to impossible. We know that a vaccinated individual’s chance of dying from Covid is statistically close to zero. We know that incentivizing indoor behavior is extremely unhealthy. So here’s a great idea from the governor of Oregon: let’s force vaccinated individuals to mask outdoors.

What?

As with the efficacy of masking outdoors, the “toxic horse drug meme,” which is clearly a lie with intention, carries with it far more significant consequence than spreading misinformation. Once someone digs into the story for five minutes and realizes they’ve been lied to — about their health — this is the sort of thing that becomes extremely radicalizing. One walks away with the sense the “government is lying to you, man.” Then we clutch our pearls and wonder why people no longer trust “the experts.”

There’s a scene in Cold Mountain I can’t get out of my head.

It’s the Civil War, and with the men gone to fight the women are left to a state of something very close to anarchy. They try to make do, and Renée Zellweger’s character is particularly impressive. But eventually, just for a second, she cracks. “Every piece of this is man’s bullshit,” she says. “They call this war a cloud over the land, but they made the weather, then they stand in the rain and say ‘shit, it’s raining.’”

I’m dragged into conversations about misinformation on social media almost every week, and I agree that misinformation is a problem. In fact, it’s a problem I’ve written about sort of a lot. I also agree in part with researchers in the space like Renee DiResta, who cite lack of trust in media and government as leading to trust in crazy people (I’m paraphrasing). But the problem is not our lack of trust in media and government. Our problem is almost no one in media and government deserves our trust, and in this age of the internet it has never been easier to catch a would-be arbiter of truth in a lie. For the mall cops among us, I suggest a new approach.

Has anyone considered telling the truth?

-SOLANA