 Oh, good day mate. Forty here. So I'm going on first of Cotto later to talk about COVID and the right. Like how has the American right responded to COVID-19? Has it covered itself in glory? And what are the implications for the future? So it seems to me that COVID has not brought out the best in the right, in the American political right. And one piece of evidence for this is that Donald Trump lost the election. And how did Donald Trump lose the election? There was a 2% swing against Donald Trump and the Republicans in the suburbs. So I don't think that Donald Trump was particularly bad in his response to COVID. I don't see evidence that he was any worse than the average leader of a Western industrialized nation in response to COVID. So he did some good things, such as, one, I think leaving a lot of things up to the states, because you're going to govern very differently if you're in a state with a large number of COVID cases versus a state where there are very few COVID cases. So also Trump funded a massive Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, which I thought was excellent. Also, I think he was right in stopping travel from China in January 31 and then soon after stopped travel from Europe and the United Kingdom. The vaccinated are super spread as a nonsense. There's absolutely no evidence for that. What we do know is that people who are vaccinated make up only about 1% of those who are currently dying from COVID. And they make up only about 1% to 5% of those who are hospitalized from COVID. So the vaccines against COVID that have been approved for use in the United States have been highly, highly effective. So let's divide up the various strands of the American right to think about how they responded to COVID. So the human biodiversity crowd, meaning people like Steve Saylor and Greg Cochran, they took COVID seriously from the get-go. The populist right as invited by the America First crowd, talk radio, Fox News, they minimized the seriousness of COVID and they were wrong. And as I just think about, has the HBD crowd been wrong on any major issue? I can't think of it. I mean, conventional conservatives were all for invading Iraq in 2003. That was a disaster. The HBD crowd said this is a really bad idea. So it seems to me that the actions to COVID-19 have separated the contenders from the pretenders and those who were flipped about the dangers of COVID-19 have revealed themselves to be pretenders. So Robert says the Moderna vaccine is best followed by Pfizer, followed by Johnson and Johnson, followed by doing nothing. Yeah. So any of the approved vaccines are far better than just doing nothing. So remember the American rights reaction to 9-11, right? So they chose to make it ideological and argue, well, the terrorists, they hate us for our freedoms and therefore we are committing to a war on terror. Just an insane, terrible, stupid, dumb response, right? To react to 9-11 and say, this is ideological, they just hate us for our freedom. Right? Really, really stupid reaction to 9-11. I think a much smarter reaction to 9-11 would have been to treat it as a law enforcement problem and a threat to public safety. Rather than an ideological problem, it's all about our freedom. So too, the American rights response to COVID has also been similarly moronic. It's like, oh, it's all about our freedom. The Dems want to take away our freedom. They want to take away our most precious freedoms to peaceably assemble, to practice our religion, to gather with friends and family and community. So, yeah, the Iraq war was based on lies and complete nonsense. And the American rights response to COVID, generally speaking, has been based on lies and complete nonsense. So Al Qaeda did not hate us for our freedom. The attack on 9-11 had nothing to do with our freedom. Right? So just as 9-11 called for a law enforcement public safety response, so to COVID called for a technocratic public safety response, rather than an ideological response about our freedoms. I think COVID also revealed the poverty and the barrenness of right wing media. I mean, right wing media has been particularly pathetic with regard to COVID, talking Fox News, New York Post, talk radio, the America First crowd. I think the American right has nothing like the New York Times or even New York Magazine. Now, in practical terms, Republican governors of Florida and Texas, if you want to say they embody the American rights reaction to COVID, and they are less restrictionist than the typical Democratic governors and less inclined to take away freedoms. And I think you can make a case that the Republican governors of Florida and Texas have not been awful. They seem to have done a decent job. It does seem that the left has more faith in expertise and technocratic solutions. So what about the Wall Street Journal? So the Wall Street Journal has a right wing op-ed page, which is okay. And the newspaper itself is centrist to center left. So most of the writing in the Wall Street Journal is not right wing. So most of the writing is kind of dull. Didn't help that the health authorities endorse the protest rallies for racial grievance. Well, there's virtually no evidence for outdoor transmission of COVID. So we don't have much evidence that those outdoor rallies for George Floyd and against police brutality as they were taking place outdoors. We don't have much evidence that they were super spreader events. So on the face of it, it seems, oh, the health authorities are completely hypocritical. They're telling us not to gather. Then they say it's okay to gather for anti-racism. Well, if they'd made it clear that outdoor transmission of COVID is far less likely than indoor transmission of COVID, that would have been a more valuable distinction than trying to claim, well, if you gather together to protest anti-racism, that's good. But if you gather together for any other reason, that's bad. That's obviously stupid. Why is that efficacy against infection seems to drive to about 43% as per some studies. But that's as far as coming down with the virus. That's not with regard to hospitalization and death. So with regard to the threat of hospitalization and death, all of the vaccines approved for use in the United States are highly, highly effective. Overwhelmingly, people are getting hospitalized now from COVID and people are dying from COVID. About 99% of them are not vaccinated. So I am not an expert on vaccines, but from what I know, I just can't think of any popular position right now that's more clueless and more deadly than denying the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in the United States to dramatically reduce your chances of being hospitalized or dying from COVID. They called lockdown protests outside super spreader events. Yes, they did and so they looked ridiculous. People who are vaccinated are interested in more than not dying. They want to not get sick. Well, they primarily don't want to die and they primarily don't want to go to the hospital. If you're vaccinated and you experience COVID as just another case of the flu, it's not as bad as if you're hospitalized and your life's in danger. So expertise is a complicated matter. Generally speaking, you just nailed it. Hey, stop that. So it seems to me, generally speaking, that the center and the left puts more priority on expertise than certainly the populist right. Now, I believe in equal amounts of skepticism, right? Equal amounts of skepticism with regard to expertise and equal amounts of skepticism with regard to denying or ignoring expertise. I don't think either a position as a default reaction being either automatically pro or against expertise is a wise course. So sometimes the experts are right. Sometimes the experts are wrong. I think with experts, you have to ask, what are the incentives that they face? Who's funding them? What's the upside in following their advice? If they're right, what's the downside and following their advice? If they're wrong. So what incentives are experts operating under? What is their track record? People on the right, they generally speaking, have a much stronger fear response than people on the left. So you'd think on the face of the people on the right would have a stronger fear response to COVID, right? People on the right generally have a stronger fear response to pathogens. But I notice that conservatives, so people on the American right, tend to put much more value on free will as a reason for life outcomes, including health outcomes than people on the left. So people on the right, conservatives are much more likely, oh, if you just make the right choices, now you're going to be fine. And I think people in the center and the left, they don't put as high a value on free will. So I think that COVID exposed how naive much of the populist right is about power. So all functioning democracies, whether it's the United States, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, all functioning democracies have unlimited power to take away an unlimited number of your freedoms when confronting an emergency or what looks like an emergency, right? You cannot have a functioning democracy without this ability to respond to a purported emergency. But much of the rights response to COVID has been complaining about, oh, we've had this unprecedented loss of freedom from these COVID restrictions. Well, COVID is unprecedented in about 100 years. You haven't had anything like COVID in about a century. And the right has spent much of the past year complaining about how COVID restrictions are not constitutional. Well, the Constitution is not a death warrant. The Constitution provides emergency powers for government to deal with unprecedented situations. So power does not come from a Constitution. Power comes from your ability to coerce other people to follow your dictates. So Americans generally think that their system of government is a democracy and that other less fortunate people live in dictatorships because dictatorships are what democracies are not. Dictatorships are the very opposite of representative government under a Constitution. But this opposition between democracy and dictatorship is greatly overstated. It's a terrific paper from Yale University, right? All functioning democracies contain the capacity for dictatorship. When a policeman stops you, he essentially has fairly close to dictatorial powers over you. You can't sue a bureaucrat if you don't like their ruling. Bureaucrats in industrialized nations are largely insulated from the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. They have quasi-dictatorial powers. So it seems to me that those people on the right who were opposed to the 2003 Iraq invasion, this realist crowd, have also been right about COVID, right? So back in 2017, Steve Saylor spoke to Andrew Morance of the New Yorker several hours. And Morance was really disappointed by Steve Saylor's answer to his question, which historical event was the dividing point between establishment and anti-establishment conservatives. Saylor answered the Iraq war. So Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 for no good reason, right? That divided the establishment conservatives from the anti-establishment conservatives. And so too, with regard to COVID establishment conservatives, we've spent a lot of time believing about our constitutional freedoms, while the anti-establishment conservatives seem to be more data-driven. So big business has taken COVID seriously. By and large, Republican politicians have not taken COVID as seriously as Democrats. And so I've read figures that four times as many Republican politicians have tested positive for COVID than Democratic ones. COVID became partisan in the United States in ways that did not happen in many other countries. So I think that's because freedom is a dominant value in the United States. So COVID restrictions are bound to rub many Americans the wrong way. But in countries that put a premium on fairness, such as Australia, New Zealand, possibly England, there was less resistance to restrictions on measures to fight COVID. So I noticed in Australia and New Zealand, many other countries, they have much more faith in government, that government is acting in their best interests, while much of America regards government as the problem. I think the conservative media, by and large, was highly unimpressive in their coverage of COVID. So Rush Limbaugh was a denialist. Much of talk radio was denying the significance of COVID. American Thinker published a story March 9, 2020, saying that headline coronavirus CODs wallop and statistics about the pandemic should be taken with a grain of salt. New York Post told its readers March 8, 2020, the spread of the virus continues to slow. Dr. William Hazeltine, writing for Fox News, March 21, predicted the pandemic would end sooner than we expect. So Fox News is a tabloid operation. The New York Post is a tabloid operation. Much of the right-wing media is a tabloid operation aimed at like a 100 IQ crowd. The New York Times, it's a left-wing publication, but it's aiming at an average IQ level of about 115. So by and large, the right-wing tabloid media was denialist for as long as they could about COVID. And then after that, they would frequently complain that the cure, that these COVID mitigation measures were worse than the disease, which by and large was not accurate. And then also the right-wing media and Republican politicians have spent much of the pandemic bashing Democrats. It's interesting that viewers of Tucker Carlson's show were about a week earlier to take COVID mitigation measures compared to viewers of the Sean Hannity show. So conservatives tend to see free will as the primary driver of outcomes in life. So they're more liable to think that if you just use your free will, accurately, you can mitigate a threat like COVID. So it's a little bit like thinking, oh, I can use my free will to mitigate the threat of this onrushing fire that's coming towards me. So liberals seem to be more accepting of the idea that randomness plays a significant role in life outcomes, which I think is accurate. So compared to liberals, conservatives tend to attribute outcomes to purposeful action to free will. So in the context of a pandemic, conservatives are more likely to blame any negative outcomes on the life choices of individuals. So conservatives did not feel by and large as threatened by the virus. So pro-Trump counties reduced their movements about 10 percentage points less than Clinton voting counties. And they reduced their visiting of nonessential services 20 percentage points less than Clinton voting counties. That seems true for me. So support for COVID restrictions was positively predicted by personality traits like submission to authority and negatively predicted by traits such as dominance and anti egalitarianism. So reluctance to reacting to government restrictions was negatively predicted by submission positively predicted by dominance and anti egalitarianism. So right-wing ideological sub factors contributed to the individual's perception of the amount of threat posed by COVID-19. So in the United States, I think more than any other country, the threat of COVID was politically polarizing. So Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to view COVID as a dire threat. Conservatism was correlated with lower levels of perceived personal COVID-19 vulnerability and increased skepticism about the threat of COVID, which is unexpected given that generally speaking conservatives are more threat sensitive than liberals and have a heightened motivation to avoid pathogens. So people on the right tend to be much more concerned about system level threats such as terrorism over personal threats such as COVID. So right-wingers relate to external threats that pose a danger to society as a whole, invasion, terrorism, but they don't relate to internal threats, threats that simply pose a risk to individuals. So people on the right tended to be less concerned about threats to their personal health from COVID and they were more concerned about political, economic and social threats adjacent to COVID such as government restrictions on social and economic behavior. So NBC reported in December 2020, doctors say they're facing increasing skepticism and pushback from patients over COVID-19 treatments and they attribute this to misinformation by right-wing media such as Fox News. So one published academic analysis found that right-wing outlets published about three times as much disinformation as conventional outlets and that right-leaning media viewers were more than twice as likely to endorse COVID-related misinformation. So certainly individualist right-wingers meaning libertarian inclined right-wingers are going to be more opposed to government intervention in general than corporate right-wingers. I think COVID reveals once again the limitations of a libertarian approach. So when some doctors would talk to their patients about COVID-19 and the COVID vaccines, they would often try to find out where their patients are getting their information. So one doctor says, I feel like the education I have to provide depends on what news channel they watch. So you get a lot more mixed messages about COVID vaccines on Fox News obviously than the other mainstream outlets like CNN and MSNBC. So skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines is a common theme in conservative media. Also right-wing populists have not tended to perform very effectively in regard to COVID. So India had massive problems dealing with COVID as did Brazil. So Bolsonaro, Amlo, Putin, Trump, Erdogan and Modi all struggled to deal with COVID. And so the Washington Post wrote May 3rd of this year, right-wing nationalists failed during the pandemic. So perhaps the COVID epidemic lanced the boil of populism, said Francis Fukuyama. It seems to be a correlation between being a populist leader and doing badly in reaction to COVID. So populist distrust experts. And I have equal amounts of distrust of experts and of those who say we don't need expertise. So I am equally balanced between those two perspectives. So two of the worst hit major countries, Brazil and India, are governed by right-wing nationalists. So I am going to talk about all of this in much greater depth in less than three hours with Joseph Cotto.