A TV Hero Goes Down the Wormhole

Not even our heroes are immune from the algorithmic dragnet that’s rotting our brains.

Note: This story includes feedback from a central character in this story — I’ve included that at the end in its entirety.

Hi,

When I started Webworm four years ago, it seemed like a novelty to write about people getting sucked into beliefs like QAnon. As Kiwi lingerie makers opened their third eye to the 5th dimension on their quest to become Starseeds, and celebrity chefs embraced neo-nazis, it felt like a freak show of sorts.

I felt a certain distance between my world and that world. 

That distance has decreased significantly — and I’ve become a lot more freaked out about how our collective critical faculties have been thrown into the ocean. 

I suppose I started getting quite depressed with Trump in 2016, who was quite clearly a malignant narcissist, and yet was able to convince hundreds of millions of some truly dumbass stuff just by repeating it a lot. He was Mister Organ before I met Mister Organ.

Eight years later and I’m in the worst time-travel film ever: Trump will be back on the ballot, even though he’s been convicted of things like sexual abuse and financial fraud.

Before Trump, I generally assumed most people had some critical thinking skills, but the last eight years have been a lesson in how that’s no longer true, if it ever was in the first place.

And it seems that anyone can lose their mental faculties and start spewing the world's dumbest hate theories if they're served up enough tweets — including my talented, smart, TV heroes.

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Growing up in New Zealand, my TV idols oscillated between Louis Theroux (obviously), Jeremy Wells, and a guy called Leigh Hart, from Moon TV.

I remember my excitement at getting one of Leigh’s DVDs which featured a compilation of his famous “Speed Cooking” segments, which parodied the home cooking shows that were pretty popular at the time.

Leigh Hart was a master of finding the absurdities in the stuff that was all over our screens in the early 2000s. It wasn’t just cooking shows — he parodied police shows with Speedo Cops, and news panel shows with Late Night Big Breakfast.

Watching his stuff, I saw a man who could think critically. I became a huge fan. In the years since he got a popular radio show on Radio Hauraki, became part of the Alternative Commentary Collective podcast, fronted Hellers Meats, and was a popular contestant on the first New Zealand season of Taskmaster.

But over the last few years things have taken a turn on his social media.

That was my hero saying “Genius” last week, quoting a tweet claiming white people are at risk getting erased. 

To clarify: white people are not at risk of getting erased. The tweet he’s quoting, from author and former Real Housewives of Auckland contestant Gilda Kirkpatrick, is repeating the ideas of a racist conspiracy theory called The Great Replacement:

Once largely relegated to white supremacist rhetoric, “The Great Replacement” has made its way into mainstream consciousness in the past several years. From the chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” on the University of Virginia campus to then-U.S. Rep. Steve King’s tweeted protest, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s complaints that the Democratic party is attempting to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters,” the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived.

In summary, the tweet Leigh hailed as “genius” is definitely not genius.

What’s alarming about all this is that Leigh Hart is, or was, smart. He’s not an idiot. As he was beginning his descent, The Spinoff wrote a gushing piece about his smarts, writing that “underneath all his characters are some strikingly innovative business strategies.” 

Unfortunately, he’s also living proof that brain worms can squirm their way into any of us if we’re not careful.

Leigh Hart in a popular Hellers ad campaign.

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I’ve been watching Leigh’s social media over the last few years. His descent seemed to start with a tweet or two about trans people in sport. A lot of those earlier tweets are deleted, but the beliefs appear to remain, going by recent shares like this:

There are a few key topics that send you down a rabbit hole if you engage with them on social media. Vaccines are one. But the biggie is tweeting anything negative about trans people.

Doing that will almost immediately see you ensnared in an algorithmic drag net. From trans issues, you’ll quickly get served up a lot of racism, and eventually full-blown white nationalism. Josh Drummond described the anti-trans radicalisation pipeline best when he wrote:

The Q conspiracists are transphobic, the Covid cranks are transphobic, the Islamophobes and the anti-Semites and the white supremacists and the overt Nazis are transphobic. Transphobia is, almost invariably, the one thing that binds them all. I find that very telling, and deeply worrying.

There are a lot of social factors at work here also, including the fact that when Leigh started tweeting transphobia he lost his usual tribe.

People that were dependable allies (or, like me, fans) started criticising him, for good reason, when he started obsessing about the competitive integrity of US amateur swim meets.

But the catch-22 of any kind of social shunning is that when they get abandoned by their old friends and followers, they start searching for a new community. Almost invariably that effort leads them to a place where their prejudices are reaffirmed every day on an endless loop. They find the alt-right waiting with open arms, telling them they were right all along; it’s their old friends who were the deluded ones.

Scrolling through Leigh’s recent posts, there’s a smattering of, well, everything. Mostly he’s re-sharing other posts, which include Islamophobia:

A bunch of anti-Palestine rhetoric:

And there’s a tweet outlining the virtues of the Argentina’s President, a man who “believes selling human organs should be legal, climate change is a “socialist lie,” sex education is a ploy to destroy the family and that the Central Bank should be abolished.”

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Leigh Hart is far from alone. 

The yawning mouth of the bigotry wormhole is sucking up more people every day, transforming them in its swirling malignant mass into something unrecognisable to their former selves. As its influence spreads, the buttresses we used to rely on to draw them back to reality are weakening. 

Almost every day it feels like we get a new story about a media organisation shutting down or announcing lay-offs. Vice is gone. The LA Times got rid of 115 staff. Some of the best writers at the Washington Post were compelled to take redundancy. For many people, news articles are just something they see in the background of TikTok video essays. 

Social media has undercut the news media's business model, which wouldn't be so bad if it hadn't replaced that content with an artillery barrage of idiocy blasted straight through the eyeballs of everyone from Kid Rock to the guy who used to wear speedos on Moon TV.

Leigh Hart parodying police shows with Speedo Cops.

In these informational black holes, a huge proportion of people are already unable to sort fact from fiction. Look at the comments under any story about layoffs at a news outlet, and they’re filled with people who read some tweets and think they’ve found the real truth away from the lying media.

And as was the case when Vice News folded this week, those “truths” are often incredibly racist:

Meanwhile, tech companies have seen our potentially civilization-defining struggle to agree on a shared reality and decided that what they need to do is add some more AI-generated crabs into the mix.

It increasingly feels like we’re headed towards a collective epistemological nightmare, if we’re not in one already.

Of course the tech and social media giants do not care, because they are making a shit tonne of money. Their cries of “people are smart and can think critically” only serve one thing: Them.

It may cost the brains of a lot of people, including some who once made great TV, but the important thing is that they’re making massive bank. 

All else be damned.

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Update: I reached out to Leigh Hart seeking comment for that story. I’ve provided those exchange below for full transparency:

Sunday, February 25th, 2024 at 12:08 PM

Hey Leigh,

Quite an odd email to write, but I am working on a piece for Webworm about people going down the wormhole on social media around issues like trans athletes and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Over the last year or so you’ve been expressing a lot of thoughts on such things via retweets, replies and posts.

I just wanted to get your take on why you’ve taken such a strong interest in this stuff so publicly on your social media.

Any comment appreciated as I get this piece together. My deadline is end of day tomorrow.

Best 

David

**

Sunday, February 25th, 2024 at 12:39 PM

Hi mate, 

Hope you are well. Yes certainly an interesting one not sure how out all works on that front, have been hacked a nuimber of times it would seem, many posts not my own, most of my posts, if any mind tend to be panda bears falling out of trees. Will take the safe option and shut account down once again, easiest and safest way to deal with it I suspect. Certainly healthier for the brain.

Thanks for reaching out and keep up the good work.

**

Sunday, February 25th, 2024 at 1:14 PM

Thanks for getting back to me! 

Just so I have this clear, you’re saying it’s not always you tweeting over the last year?

eg a recent tweet you said “Genius” to a post about the white race being under threat.

That wasn’t you? 

David 

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Sunday, February 25th, 2024 at 1:19 PM

Hi mate, 

Correct. Makes no sense, been researching this, may even have to change my email as well now!, which will be a total pain in the arse. Hopefully shutting twitter down will be enough?

Leigh

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A few minutes later, Leigh’s Twitter account was offline.

The “I’ve been hacked” response is not new to Webworm, but I think it’s only fair Leigh’s response is published here.

I find it unusual in that Leigh continued to run his Twitter account despite it being allegedly compromised, and populated with tweets that were allegedly not made by him.