 great piece in New York magazine by David, wait, Benjamin, Benjamin Wallace, okay, he's got a hyphenated last name, David Wallace Wells, that's his name, how the West lost COVID, how did so many rich countries get it so wrong? And how did others get it so right? And David Wallace also has a terrific Twitter thread on this. If you wanted to explain the devastating American pandemic through American policy failures, the evidence would seem to be there that the failures looking obvious to anyone. So why did so many of the countries of Europe and indeed throughout the Americas fail at roughly the same scale? What does it say about the obvious American errors that they were reproduced in most of the places the country considered as peers? From a global perspective, one year later in two very large facts about the course of the pandemic loom above all others. First, the policy levers Americans have obsessed overall year, mask wearing, social distancing, lockdowns can not be the sole drivers of transmission, given that states taking very different measures, California and Florida most famously performed quite similarly. And given how countries that were very strict Peru or Italy did not reliably outperform those places which took much looser measures Japan and say Sweden. As a group, the nations of the world once often grouped as the West. Europe and the Americas had a categorically more catastrophic experience than anyone else. The United States had many reasons to expect to outperform peer countries like Germany, United Kingdom or the Netherlands, larger state and medical capacity, for instance. But there are also reasons containing a pandemic here might have been more difficult a large and diverse country full of co morbidities most 70% of Americans are overweight. America's at the center of global commerce but as awful as the American experience seems to Americans compared to the rest of Europe and the Americans. America's it was by the crude metric of deaths per million citizens about average, not at all exceptional. And yet in nearly every forensic account, the American pandemic published in recent months, the country's poor performance was explained almost entirely with reference to American policy choices with hardly any acknowledgement of the global context of Western failure. So the New York Times published a long piece how the United States guaranteed its own failure. One year 400,000 coronavirus deaths, how the US guaranteed its own failure. And then in the same New York Times piece retrospective on how the CDC the Centers for Disease Control did the CDC waited its entire existence for this moment what went wrong. The technology was all the data poor the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing the administration not in agreement. And all these journals have been writing about the unique US failure to control the virus but there was nothing unique about America and a COVID virus. The Washington Post was similarly blinkered. They published an article the CDC's failed race against COVID-19 a threat underestimated. So there's no context to all these news reports about how America was just so uniquely horrible in responding to COVID-19. Let me play a little bit here from Christopher Cordwell. I would say in the simplest sense the book doesn't really have a thesis it's a narrative it's basically the story of the country from the assassination of Kennedy to the election of Trump. And it talks about a lot of elements of things that have changed in the country the you know the role of the Vietnam War the role of feminism that kind of thing. But there is one let's say theory that runs through the book and I would say is that the heart of the book which is that a lot of the politics of today has to do with some elements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that that perhaps people didn't see or that perhaps have changed over time. I think it's fair to say that there were there were for all the good that that act did and for all the admirable motivations that it had. It has evolved in ways that have caused great problems for the country. Basically in 1964 the country was confronted with what it thought was kind of a local problem that is segregation in the deepest part of the deep south. Outside of the south and this is something that that I think that opinion polls from the time show quite clearly. Most Americans did not feel that the issue of racism and segregation really concerned them at all. They almost looked at the south as kind of a foreign policy problem in the border south. There was segregation there was also progress. I think that people were looking primarily at Alabama Mississippi Louisiana and seeing horrible scenes of you know of people having fire hoses and dogs turned on them at at at demonstrations and they wanted it to stop. And I think that there was a big there was a consensus in the country particularly after Kennedy died and particularly after Lyndon Johnson portrayed civil rights as as John F. Kennedy's noblest aspiration. There was a consensus in the country to do this. But it was a tricky thing to do. I mean one of the things I say in the book is that this has always been considered a problem in the United States. There has never been a year of American history in which the race problem has not been considered a problem. The reason that nothing had been done about it until 1964 is that it was a very difficult thing to do. And it was a it was a difficult thing to do in large part because the south was a democracy. Now nowadays you'd say well some democracy where you know people have to fill out a literacy test to to vote or you know you can say that it was you can you can call it a bad democracy you can call it a sham democracy but it was a democracy. And in order to undo the laws of Jim Crow it meant overturning a democracy. Now if there were a way to limit that overturning of democracy to sort of Alabama and Mississippi we would not be having this conversation today. Right. David Wallace writes in New York magazine this is just a terrific overview of how the West lost COVID. And essentially it boils down to the virus is the virus. The virus has its own logic and its own trajectory. Now in the United States over the past year the story of our struggle with COVID has been dominated by the character of Donald Trump who supposedly presided over it so ineptly often with such indifference it seemed he was rooting for the disease. But the problem with assigning Donald Trump all or even most of the blame for America's suffering is that America's failure is not unique. Before the arrival of vaccines the American experience of the coronavirus was not exceptional it was typical among European nations. So use the metric of deaths per capita. The United States suffered less than the United Kingdom, less than Portugal, less than the Czech Republic about the same rate as Italy, Spain and France. South America just below these countries. Now none of these countries say Brazil had presidents or prime ministers who so callously downplayed the threat of the disease as Trump or who tried to suppress testing or held indoor political rallies during a local surge. But there's not much evidence or reason to believe that if someone else was president we would have had a different experience. There are only so many tools at our disposal. It's not obvious that different measures taken in different places clearly led to different outcomes. It's simplistic to say oh these countries they controlled the virus, they eliminated the virus and they just did things extremely differently. The interventions that took place in countries like New Zealand and Australia they weren't drastically different in stringency or in duration from what the United States and European nations did. The country that had the strictest lockdown for the longest in the world is Peru. Peru was absolutely devastated by COVID. There's not a set of policies that just bring success dealing with COVID and can be just applied to any place in the world. Now for American liberals they see COVID as a straightforward management challenge in which the pandemic can be solved through science first policy and dutiful compliance. Liberals look at COVID as a morality play. So you've got social distancing and masking. These are tests of personal and executive virtue and these things determine the course of disease but that's nonsense. So if you read the national press from any first world industrialized country be it Germany, Switzerland or France it's always about oh why did our nation state do so terribly? This is a reflection of national narcissism. So the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany they frame everything in terms of narratives of national crisis. The highest per capita death rate in the United States was not found in Texas or in Florida or in some red state it was found in New Jersey. During the devastating fall surge of COVID a poll found 90% of Americans were wearing a mask. Close contacts in states with heavy restrictions were not dramatically higher than in lazy fair places. Draconian lockdowns produced typically plateaus or slow caseload declines not rapid descent to zero. There are very few relative success stories in the United States. Death rates in Florida proudly one of the loosest states with its COVID restrictions. Hardly any higher than they are in California self-flagellatingly one of the strictest states. So this Los Angeles Times reporter went to basically every expert how can this be? How come the results in California are no different from Florida? And I just kept asking these experts over and over and over thing I kept hearing from the experts was they don't know. They don't have a good explanation. They kept saying, I don't know why why was the country's worst autumn surge in COVID? Why did it take place in southern California? Place with about the strictest restrictions. So it's not saying that policy and behavior don't matter. And we don't know the mitigation measures on which the country is focused the most such as wearing a mask, social distancing, school closures, restaurant restrictions. Perhaps they bet the curve, but they were not firewalls. Many of the factors playing a much larger role in shaping the spread of the COVID pandemic fit much less comfortably in a technocrats shorter bag, liberals scouting moralism. There is the element of chance. There is demography, demography, certain demographics seem much more susceptible. You've got a skew of lethality so dramatic that in many of the country's world's youngest countries, there's virtually no death toll. There is the distribution of co morbidities, such as obesity throughout the population. There is geography islands enjoy obvious advantages. Communities at higher latitudes are more at risk. There is a country's relationship to its own borders to its neighbors are his position in the networks of travel and commerce. There is climate, temperature, humidity. These things shape national outcomes. There is air conditioning. There is the catch all of cultural forces, covering everything for a multi generational living and employment structures to cheat kissing and handshakes. There's residential density. There's blood type. There's vitamin D. There's ICU capacity. There's proximity to bats. At any time you try to put a finger on one single dominant factor. The disease slips away defiant reductive models suggesting counterpoints and counterfactuals. Japan is old, hardly any COVID. Brazil is largely tropical, devastated by COVID. England is an island devastated by COVID. There's hardly any air conditioning in France, which was devastated by COVID. So there is a chaos to COVID. It seems random, mysterious. The spread of the disease has resisted mathematical modeling. Recent collapse in American case numbers came right after the new year, after the country being warned that this would be the pandemic's darkest season. Looking back, you could find just a few lonely voices suggesting winter would be calmer than autumn. CDC modeling is being way off. 24 of the 26 mathematical models said what ended up happening over the first few weeks of 2021 was statistically impossible. The other two models gave it at best a sliver of a chance. So for all the mystery, there is one distinct pattern. National outcomes fall into three obvious clusters. In Europe, North American, South America, you've got nearly universal failure. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, high case loads, low death rates, probably owing to the age structure of populations. In East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania, you've got massive success. So why, however, is Canada outperformed the United States? Why is Uruguay outshone Argentina? Why is Iran suffered so much? How is Japan, which never locked down, never tested all that widely? How has Japan succeeded so brilliantly? Now, the differences in outcomes between the groups of nations are far greater than those within them. So much so, they appear almost as the burn scars of an entirely different disease. In terms of damage, the coronavirus has not been a Chinese flu. It's been a Western malady. Take Germany, since the beginning of the pandemic, Angela Merkel has been celebrated as a beacon of rational leadership. She's a technocrat with a doctorate in quantum chemistry. She's presiding calmly over an unprecedented crisis. She's got a citizenry stereotype that's compliant, orderly, respectful of science. To judge by death rates, Germany has mildly outperformed the United States. But only moderately. What happened, though, is that the Civil Rights Act was framed in very general terms. And it was a very strong lesson. It allowed you to basically overturn court verdicts. It allowed you to rewrite the election laws of affected states. It allowed you to overturn what people understood as being matters of freedom of association. It did many things. And it was not in its text limited to race. And so the application of the civil rights laws began to spread. It covered sex. It covered immigrant status. And so as time moved on, people began to notice, well, wait a minute, I don't live in the South, and yet my children are getting bussed to schools. Why are kids in Louisville, which is a border South state, and Boston to take two of the sort of like serious places? Why did they have to have their children bussed to school? What did that have to do with with Alabama and Mississippi? And so it spread geographically. It's spread in terms of who was affected. So women who felt their careers thwarted, say, in a corporation would say, you know, I want to I think there ought to be more women in positions of authority in this corporation. And people would say, well, it's up to the corporation. And the women would say, well, I think there ought to be a law. And someone said, well, go, go tell the state house and try and pass a law. The women would say, no, I don't want that. I don't want to get my rights that way by going to the state house and passing a law. I want that same emergency plan to get me the rights now that blacks got in 1964, because my situation as a woman or as an immigrant or as a Spanish speaker or eventually as a disabled person or a gay person or a or a transgender person, my situation, they would say is analogous to that situation that black people were undergoing in the early 60s. And so you had a situation where it was spreading geographically. It was spreading in terms of who got affected with it. And finally, it was spreading in intensity. Okay, so you had you had much more serious remedies than you had when the legislation was first passed. You had, you know, when 1964, no one envisioned affirmative action. I mean, there was a word affirmative action. But no one no one envisioned it as a source of quotas, you know, let alone the sort of like the talk of equity that we have today, there's really a lot that the government can do. If you run a business, say, or if you're just going about your business, there's a lot that government can do to you for a lot of different reasons. And so what you had was, basically, the introduction of this second constitution, as I say, which was authorized. In the name of this great moral emergency to overrule the first. And that's why, you know, people would be voting for things. And they wouldn't happen. You know, you know, in California, you know, there was a vote to deny benefits to illegal immigrants in the 1990s. I, you know, regardless of what you think of that vote, it is the way laws are passed in the state of California and it passed, it passed by I think 5 million votes. Yet you had a you had a judge sort of who, as soon as the election started to become law, who said, nope, that you can't do that. One judge in the name of this second constitution. So that generally, I mean, I think that's what you're looking for when you say a thesis. I wouldn't call it a thesis, but it is the style of government. Okay, here's Ethan Ralph, interviewing an ex porn star. How did you get involved in this in the first week? Like, I think that this is, you know, I like to do this with every guest, but like, what made this like even a thing for you? All right, I'm going to ask you a question as a rebuttal. So do you want the the answer that makes you feel good inside? No, I want the real or do you want the answer that's like the harsh reality of the world? I want to I want the real answer. The real answer is I've been sexually assaulted and or harassed the last five jobs and schooling that I have had to the point where I just feel like I was born to be a whore by default. And I don't know what else to do with my life. Wow, did you really feel like that? Two years old. Really? I was sexually molested. My first childhood memory is molestation. That's yet. Yeah, I, you know, and we've had guests in the show before and people will say, well, you know, all sex workers, all porn stars had been molested and they have. Wow. On the psyche. I want to kill myself. How is it on the psyche? I want to kill myself. How is it on the psyche? I want to kill myself. And I really why because why I would I would rather be angry and murder people. If I was a man, I probably would go into the military. I probably would fucking fight. But the thing is, I have a vagina and I have been oppressed my entire life. No. And I think they're and men will never care. They laugh. Responsibility lever. They always laugh at women's rights. They always do. Well, this is why because you talk about oppression by men and then you you justify becoming a porn star because you were oppressed by men like you won't you want to own that like your own choices and stuff. What's your first childhood memory? Riding a tricycle. Yeah, fuck you. Mine was getting raped and making child pornography. You piece of shit. Okay. How there be a man, I really. Why were hit with a with a cry, a global crisis? We failed and that's what I learned. I learned that has it been for you. How about has it been for you and then how do you think it's been for everybody? I mean, I got covid. Oh, I got covid on Thanksgiving and I was a super spreader on accident on accident. And regardless of my of my public health knowledge, you are I was a super spreader when we were. Wow. This woman is just extraordinarily frank. I want to hear more of what she has to say. Come on now. You know, I think that was something that I had playing in the background. What in the fuck was that? Hey, I'm I'm a first guest. So we got to work it out first live in studio. Guest out. OK, you know what? First thing I'm allowed to talk. I'm the first to sit at this desk. That's true. That's true to have an interview. I guess you are the first. I don't know why we can't hear Gator at all. It's kind of weird. Do we just talk to him right before you can't but the chat can't chat. The whole setup of there is new. So I'm originally from California. Born and raised California and I was an academic before doing porn actually. Wait, wait, wait. OK, what kind of what part of the Academy were you? Well, ironically, pre covid public health. Really? I actually have a bachelor's of arts and public health, not bachelors of science. And I was really discouraged by what I learned in my degree program while I was going to school for public health. And I decided to pursue adult work per an instructor's advice instead of going into a master's program for public health. Now, wait, there's a couple of things that have to break down here first. First off, what made you disillusioned in the first place? The entire first couple of semesters in public health with female instructors brought to light, mostly female health issues. And I was essentially instructed that it would be more profitable to do adult work than it would be to pursue anything in the public health sphere. Now, and then when we saw what happened with the global pandemic, it was basically true. We were not prepared for a global pandemic and that's what I learned about while studying in school. And I gave up on my public health dreams. So I was actually instructed, I was instructed while in school to just do porn. I'm not even- Why did your professors instruct you to do porn? He raised a good question. Was it your professors or was it like- No, my actual instructors told me that I would be better off doing porn than I would be to do anything in public health because there's no hope for humanity. Wow. And that's what we saw. We really did see that. When we were hit with a global crisis, we failed. And that's what I learned. I learned that we- What do you think COVID has been for you? How about? Has it been for you? And then how do you think it's been for everybody? I mean, I got COVID. I got COVID on Thanksgiving. And I was a super spreader on accident. On accident. Regardless of my public health knowledge. You gotta say you are a super spreader. I was a super spreader. How many things did you get when you got here? I was a super spreader. I got sick on, I know cause it's funny, I'm a porn star. They're like, yeah, you're a super spreader. But I, so a family member was shopping at an Aldi's grocery store and they were infected and unbeknownst to us, it was spread on Thanksgiving dinner. I got the virus on Thanksgiving.