‘The Reckoning:’ Sorting Covid Facts From Authoritarian Fiction

It During Lowe's pro savings days, save more on the brands you trust to deliver on the job. Right now, get a free DeWalt 20-volt max 8-amp hour battery when you buy a DeWalt 10-inch 20-volt max dual-bevel compound mitersault. Plus, get up to 35% off select major appliances. Save even more on what you need to keep the job moving. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valid through 731. While supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details. And we are back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at The Federalist and your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. As always, you can email the show at Radio at the Federalist.com. Follow us on X at FDRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and, of course, to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is historian Thomas Beckett Kane, author of the forthcoming book, Interesting Deep Dive Look into the COVID era. It's called The Reckoning, a definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic and other absurdities. Thomas, thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I said as we were talking before we started broadcasting here, that this is a timely book. And I mean that because while the COVID outbreak was more than five years ago, you know, this still resonates today. And your book really delves into that. The consequences. of the mass hysteria, the lockdowns, you know, the government policies, the takeover by the bureaucratic health system within the government and without. The ripple effects still resonate to this day, do they not? Exactly, exactly. And it's interesting because when someone sees that there's a book about COVID, they probably think to themselves, oh, well, I live through it, right? And then why should I care? I understood what happened and all of that. But I see it in a much broader context. I see it as representing not only a turning point in our democracy, but really symptomatic of a broader downward trend into sort of this abandonment of rationality and logic. and how we descended into the state of madness, I don't think it's a point of isolation. I think it proves that we're just as capable of acting in that way again, and that a lot of the horrors and atrocities of history are just as possible today as ever.

How did we descend into this from your perspective? Because you've done, like I said, a deep dive dig into all of this. You've done the research. And again, I don't know if it's easier to do this kind of research relatively soon after the event or if you're better to do that with more perspective of time or if it's easier, I should say. Obviously, this is an important topic of concern. You know, we had people who are absolutely rational, including, I must admit, yours truly, when this thing started to hit, there were so many unknowns. And all of a sudden, you had this fear being whipped up. And again, that's what happens when you have unknowns. And at first... I was very concerned for my family and for my friends and everyone around me. Oh, my goodness. You know, we're seeing people die from this thing. We saw a significant number of people die from this thing. And then all of a sudden, I'm seeing... The state of Wisconsin, for instance, because I was there at the time, the governor of the state, trying to shut down places of worship, which really was the tipping point for me early on. That's when I said, well, wait a minute here. This is more than just a health crisis. This is a health crisis being used in the furtherance of... particularly leftist causes. How did we get to this point? I'm sure fear played a significant factor in all of this. Absolutely. And you mentioned the places of worship. And of course, during the summer 2020, right, the places of worship were banned from congregating, but then you were allowed to go protest on the street. So a lot of contradictions during that whole period, we can dive into them. To go back to your earlier point, a history written as it's occurring is going to differ from one written five years later. And there'll be histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic for years to come. I'm sympathetic to some of those views at the time that I've heard actually in response to coming out with this book. Well, we didn't know, right? We didn't know how serious it was going to be. We had to react accordingly. And the problem with that is, of course, that there were people at the time who were begging our leaders and even everyday people to pump the brakes, right, and to approach this in a more cautious and measured way. But of course, they were ignored and we further. went down the path that we did. How do we get here? It's obviously a confluence of a lot of different factors, right? Something so complex and enormous as the COVID-19 pandemic, there's going to be numerous factors at play. Fear is obviously, I think, probably the biggest one. And for me, in doing my research, I came across the primary method of testing, which you might remember was RTPCR, which stands for real-time polymerase.

chain reaction testing. And so this was a dramatic leap in terms of our testing capability compared to only 17 years earlier when a very similar SARS virus was spreading throughout the globe and that was SARS-CoV-1. It was just called SARS-Cove, right? And then it was COVID-19 came along and now it's SARS-Cove 1, COVID-19 being SARS-Cove 2, which emerged in Hong Kong in 2003. And we don't need to get bogged down too much into the technical details of how they tested for SARS back in 2003. But in short, it was a much more complex, much more time and financially intensive process that was dependent on trained professionals, staffed in centralized laboratories. Basically, you had to really want to test someone for a respiratory virus, a novel coronavirus. like SARS. And so what that did was it dramatically reduced the number of positive cases that we were able to accrue, right? And so if you fast forward to 2020, you now have real-time polymerous chain reaction testing, where now you can have dozens, if not hundreds of tests done all at once at a fraction of the cost. And so what that created was this kind of super pipeline of data. from the testing facilities to the public health agencies and then on to the media organizations to then broadcast in their telecasts. And so it just, it created a pipeline of 40,000 new cases this week, 80,000 new cases this week. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we should shut down the world and our economy and our society. And so it was this technological advancement in testing that actually created a doom loop in terms of panic and fear. I remember researching this and investigating this in a series of investigative reports back in 2020. And one of the things, of course, I know the prepositional work that was involved in the so-called scientific expert community. But certainly in health departments and in county morgues, coroner's offices, there was a prepositional battle that went on. And early on, I started looking at that prepositional battle. And that was individuals dying of COVID. individuals dying with COVID. Comorbidities, that's a term that we kept hearing early on. And that's something that I think got lost along the way is in the shaping of this outbreak, who it really ultimately impacted and how we went way overboard. on that prepositional battle. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Right. It's interesting. I like that first prepositional battle, right? It's something where you had cases of people who died in a car crash, right? And they tested positive for COVID-19 at the morgue and then they were tallied into the overall death counts. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. And if you take away comorbidities from the equation, you're looking at a death rate somewhere in line for those under 60 years old of 0.07%. Right. So this was not all that serious of a concern. And so this goes yet to another facet of the madness that I talk about in the book, which is the manipulation of statistics, right? And again, it's part for the course. I don't know if we can expect anything less, but there's an incentive to obviously broadcast and report the most. dire headlines possible, right? If something is going well in a given place, you're not necessarily going to hear about it. And that's been a trait of journalism for centuries, probably. But what it created in our environment when it came to COVID-19 was that only the worst cases were reported. That's what the public heard. And it further drove that dissent into fear and panic, which drove the lockdowns and the restriction of our freedoms. Well, I talked about this recently with another guest in the Federalist Radio Hour, and that's in the political sphere, the Rahm Emanuel statement, and he didn't invent it, but he certainly furthered it in the Obama administration when he said, never let a good crisis go to waste. Was that a defining mantra throughout particularly the first two years of the... the COVID era. 100%. And again, what I'm about to say, it's again, it's just one factor. I'm not, I'm not going to reduce it to this one factor. But obviously, you had a sizable contingent of the press and the left who did not like who was in the presidency at that moment, right? We all know who I'm talking about, Donald Trump, right? And this was a prime opportunity. to cast a blame on him. And Trump, in many ways, sort of stepped into the trap, right? These are nanoparticles that are traveling and circulating through the air. And they can't be stopped, right? No matter what you do, you can lock down populations for forever. Right. But inevitably, once human beings begin to mingle again, you're going to have the transmission of this virus. So I think that Trump, and we don't need to go down the rabbit hole too much on Trump, but that Trump sees the world in kind of a win or lose way. And I think that's effective in many respects. But he saw the COVID pandemic as yet another opportunity. to kind of notch another victory. And so the problem with that is that, again, it could not be stopped. And so by trying to take responsibility for stopping the pandemic, he opened the door for his opponents and say, oh, well, you want to take responsibility? Well, it's still spreading. We're going to cast the blame on you. And it ultimately resulted in his defeat because I think without COVID, you see Trump winning in 2020 and serving on his second term.

I agree 100%. I agree 100% with a lot of what you just said about Trump as well. I think he was listening to the so-called experts. And remember, Donald Trump, just like the rest of us, were repeatedly told to follow the science. Trust the experts. In other words, shut up. Turn off your mind of rational, reasonable thought and let these people who we found out were manipulating the system tell you that if you stand six feet, exactly six feet away from someone. You are likely not to get COVID. If you wear a paper mask about your face and somebody else does too, that will stop all transmission. That's what we heard over and over again. Do you think that the Anthony Fauci's of the world really got into his ear, got into the administration's ear, and they said, President, you better do this? 100%. That's one of the ironies of the situation is that Trump was accused of not acting in a stringent enough way against the virus. And I think we're both in agreement. He followed the expert's advice almost to a T, right? And I think that goes to his personal character, which he's a germophobe, right? And there's nothing wrong with that per se, right? It's going to be clean and protect yourself. But I think the idea of a transmissible bug. which has happened to many people across the country, they sort of abandon their principles. They abandon their capacity for logic and rationality, this idea of a bug infecting their body. Now, suddenly, any and all previously held values that you may have had and how to respond to crisis, kind of go out the window, right? And so for Trump, he allowed Anthony Fauci to come out and broadcast to the public exactly what he thought. the world should do in doing that in allowing him to take the stage in the in the white house press briefing room you you you give credence to the public health establishment and you allow them to to steer society as they they deem appropriate so yes i do think they got in his ear and again he felt like he could stop it right and that that would be another talking point to say hey you know isis defeated the stock market up 9000 points and COVID eradicated, right? But unfortunately, it could not be stopped and it fell right into his trap. How is September the worst month of the year for the taxpayer? The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast with Chris Lisa Murkowski. Every day, Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects your wallet. Government agencies have to spend every single dime by the end of September, plus take out more debt for another CR. In the last 48 days, the federal debt is up by a trillion. We have a severe debt problem. Whether it's happening in D.C. or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchdog on Wall Street podcast with Chris Lisa Murkowski on Apple spot.

wherever you get your podcast. Trump's instincts, as he said before, often prove successful for him. And by the result, in a lot of times, successful for policy. That said, he was trusting a guy who was deeply involved in something we would learn a lot more about. We'll get to the blackout on real... honest reporters and real honest scientists who were trying to get the full story told to the American public. But Anthony Fauci was involved in something that feels quite nefarious now the following the COVID outbreak, gain of function experimentation. And where was that gain of function experimentation taking place? many years ago, how much did the taxpayer-funded gain of function in the world epidemiology and in China impact where we are today? And with that, I imagine you have some thoughts on the wet market theory that jumped out originally in the wake of the COVID outbreak. Right. And part of the problem with discussing this, and it was the case at the time as well, is that it sounds kind of like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, right, to suggest that viruses were made transmissible to human beings and laboratories and far off places like Wuhan, China. And that... that filtered right into what the left did and what the lockdown enthusiasts wanted to do, which was cast anyone who was skeptical of their prescriptions as sort of wacky Alex Jay Jones kind of level conspiracy theorists. Well, well, we watched a movie of it in the 90s with Dustin Hoffman, didn't we? I mean, it seems like it played out via the Hollywood script if you track all of the tentacles here. It really did. It really did. And gain a function research, which if your listeners don't already know, it means to literally add a function to a virus, right? And it had some grounds in legitimate scientific research in that the idea was if you were to make a virus that was previously not transmissible to humans and then make it transmissible to humans by altering its genome, then we are more readily able to... assess its effects and develop potential treatments if that natural mutation occurs in the wild, right? Well, the obvious risk and one that people had been warning about for two decades prior to 2020 was that one of these viruses that was not transmissible to humans, you've now taken it to the lab, made it transmissible to humans, and then now it could potentially escape and infect the population, right? And so, of course,

That's exactly what happened. And again, another symptom of kind of the madness that we went through was this unwillingness to reckon with how a coronavirus emerged at the coronavirus lab in the same city in which the coronavirus started, right? Sort of just a logical deduction that's not above the abilities of a third grader to do. Yet for whatever reason, our society seemed incapable of making that connection. One thing to note, is that at the time when it was happening, obviously Dr. Anthony Fauci and others realized it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but they had spent the past two decades defending the practice against people who said this was incredibly risky. And so when it came time for the investigators to kind of follow the breadcrumbs back to Wuhan, they had to jump into overdrive and claim that anyone who was asserting this was racist or a conspiracy theorist. And so it was an understandable reaction. And it was only until things began to get extremely out of control that they finally had to sort of admit that, yes, this came from gain of function research. Is the contemporary wisdom now pretty much settled on that fact? Because you had, you know, the usual suspects, including the accomplice media, effectively saying, no, no, no, it didn't come from a lab. It didn't come from a lab. Again, that's a conspiracy theorist. Then all of a sudden, we had government agencies that... deal in this kind of stuff, say, well, chances are it probably came from a lab. But there was divided, in the Biden administration, there was divided, there was disagreement, I should say. There was not consensus. Have we arrived that this is truly something that was doctored through gain of function in the Wuhan lab? I think so. If you look at the official channels from the U.S. government, so the CIA and the Department of Energy, they haven't said conclusively. They haven't given that conclusive label to it, but they've concluded with high probability that it did. originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And I think it comes down to just regular people, if you were to ask them today, they almost uniformly would go, yes, the coronavirus emerged from the coronavirus lab. You know, it's funny. It was John Stewart, right, famously said on Stephen Colbert that, you know, if an outbreak of chocolatey goodness were to emerge in Hershey, Pennsylvania. then we would probably look to the local chocolate factory as the likely culprit. So I think the population's capacity for just basic rationality and logic has now reared its head, so to speak, and now we have all accepted that, yes, it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Urology.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, if you take a look at the, you know, what they were trying to sell us at the time, if, you know, people, Chinese patrons, consumers were getting COVID from bats at a wet market. You think Ozzy Osbourne would have gotten COVID many, many years ago in Des Moines, Iowa when he bit the head off the bat at a concert. But here we are. We have to go through, I think, as always, a lot of suffering until we get to the truth. Our guest today is historian. Thomas Beckett Kane, he's author of the forthcoming book, fascinating book, The Reckoning, A Definitive History of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other absurdities. What did not help, obviously, was a complete and almost complete. blackout of real true science, of real true reporting. I can tell you this. I'm very proud to work at a news organization that didn't stop looking and didn't accept the pat answer from the so-called scientific experts. They were digging into this. There were some others as well. But mainly, you had corporate media buying into this whole thing, including the lockdowns, hook, line, and sinker. Worse than that, you had social media. where more and more people were getting their information, we're getting their news, block out, censor anything coming from the scientific community that did not follow the corporate line. I imagine that you too experienced that situation. What have we learned over the last five years about that kind of censorship and what it means in a Democratic Republic? It's a great question. And it still goes on today, right? In my initial promotions of my book here, I was promoting it on social media. And anything that really matters, anything in terms of something of substance when it comes to this event, you want to talk about the leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, you want to talk about the real death rate from COVID-19. It's all censored, right? TikTok, Instagram, even X. to a certain extent, even though we like to think of X as a completely open forum now, some things still aren't allowed to get through. And it's sad. And we need that free and open expression in order to have these honest discussions about what's going on and how to move forward. I think with the media... You know, unfortunately, there's a specific brand of person that tends to go into journalism. I'm happy to hear that you are not one of those people, but this sort of wanting to save the world mentality. And of course, they have an extreme bias towards leftist organizations of the Democratic Party and this vitrelic hate of Donald Trump, right? And so anything that can be...

in order to support those causes and damage the other side is reported. I think that the media going forward has obviously lost a lot of its credibility and the COVID-19 pandemic is not the only example of that, but certainly that was kind of the final nail in the coffin for many people. And going forward, we have to understand that there's an agenda and that there are very few neutral. sources of information in the media. And luckily, I think the American public has turned on to that more than ever. This Trump hating corporate accomplice media, as I like to call it, nothing surprises us anymore. Of course, every day is a new revelation of what they are capable of doing. But you, looking into this, the scientist, the scientific community. There were so many in the scientific community that either put their blinders on or willfully did these kinds of things. And the people, the scientist who spoke out against what was happening and who stood up for science. among other basic rights, the First Amendment, principally, among them, they were blacklisted. They were fired from prominent universities. Their reputations were dragged in the mud. Some of them were investigated. Some prosecuted. This is unbelievable stuff for a country that has gone through purges in the past. Have we learned nothing? Very little, very little apparently. Of course, as you're probably familiar with, you've got the Great Barrington Declaration, which was published during 2020, and it was an attempt to say that the lockdowns were not an appropriate response to this respiratory virus. And as you know, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others around him, they have the email records of this, were deliberately trying to smear those authors of that report in major media organizations. And of course, they... They went along with it right in step with whatever Dr. Anthony Fauci recommended in terms of that. It is sad to see that true science conflicting opinions, right? You can see it on climate change, right, the whole 99.7% consensus, right? Of course, any consensus in science means that likely that field of study. is completely corrupted, right? The whole idea of science is you have conflict, you have disagreement, and then we move towards the truth. You have a scientific method. That was completely divorced from all that was happening then. I mean, don't you find that astounding that even the basic principles of science were thrown out the window in some, whatever the quest was, they say it was to save lives, but we're learning more and more that that was, if it made the list at all at the end of the list.

Right, yeah, so much for the scientific method, right? It's unfortunate, it's because so many of these different fields of sciences has been politicized, right? You can see it in, say, transgenderism, right? It used to be 10 years ago that was considered a mental health disorder, right? Gender dysphoria, right? And due to the political climate of today, that was changed to something that's natural, right? And something that... it can be treated, right? And so all these fields of study in science, another way, you see it in climate science, you see it in gender theory, right? It's been politicized and it's being co-opted to support different agendas. And I can only hope that they change their ways and we can begin to sort of return to normalcy when it comes to science and the progression of knowledge. You've had to dig through a lot of documents. This book, I'm sure required a look through a lot of email communications, contemporaneously, some very troubling things. Obviously, the house started at least in 2023 to really investigate what was happening behind the curtain. What are the emails that you have seen, the records you have seen, most troubling to you about this corrupted movement in a portion of the scientific community? Certainly, well, I mentioned one, and that was the Dr. Anthony Fauci email to his colleagues to begin to smear shows. We were skeptical of his prescriptions. Another set of emails, which was disturbing, has to do with State Department officials who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology around 2018. And they began to report that there were serious safety concerns in terms of how the virus was being stored and protected. at the laboratory, right? You had ventilation systems that were malfunctioning and leaving particles suspended in the air so that likely a lab technician could become infected. And then obviously he doesn't sleep and live at the laboratory, right? He goes home and mingles with the general public. And so that's very likely how the virus escaped from the laboratory. And so you had this acknowledgement that things were not being done safely at the laboratory. The National Institutes of Health was warned about this, about how this was ongoing, and yet nothing was done. And yet they continued to defend the practice of gain of function, and ultimately it led to its escape and the pandemic and all its horrors, right? Another area of information suppression, I think that was, and still, like most of the stuff, still lingers today and is very concerning, is kind of the blackout on the COVID vaccine. The storyline that was told early on, and they kept trying to tell it. And then science, of course, reality got in the way of all that. I'm looking at it.

a press release right now. And I remember this photo. You probably do too. I think a lot of our listeners will. The press release, Dr. Francis Susan Collins, Dr. Anthony Fauci and several others, including frontline health care workers, received COVID-19 vaccination at NIH Clinical Center. Here's a photo of Anthony Fauci with his arm rolled up. He's in that paper mask and he's getting the shot. We have learned a lot. Still, there is a lot to be learned from the consequences of this hastily produced. vaccination. What have you found along the way on this front? Right. It's tough because in some ways, Operation Warp Speed should be celebrated as kind of a technological miracle, right? A scientific miracle. And sure, we want to applaud some of that to an extent. But of course, the issue comes with how it was developed in such a... a quick amount of time and it bypassed all the normal scientific safeguards that we put in place for the development of anything that goes into a human being's body in that respect. As you know, it was the first time that an MRNA vaccine was approved for widespread dissemination. And the obvious issues are that it hijacks the human genome in order to produce the virus so that the immune system can learn. to defend against it, right? This is contrary to how normal vaccines work, where you grow and develop the virus in a laboratory for 10 to 15 years, and then you put that into the vaccine and so that the immune system can learn to respond to it more effectively. But this was the first time it had ever been done in sort of this hijacking of the human genome way. And the effects that are well known are also myocarditis. right, especially in young men. You had young men keeling over randomly having sudden heart failure after getting the vaccine. Of course, the media was unwilling to really reckon with that and really deal with, hey, maybe we should be asking questions about a vaccine that was developed in, you know, one-tenth of the time that it normally takes to develop. It's tough because the vaccine... in some respects was positive. It helps people with pre-existing conditions and those who feel that they're very vulnerable. It gives them that added barrier, but we don't yet fully understand all of the side effects. And I think myocarditis is just the tip of the iceberg potentially. Luckily, no sterilization. It looks like global population numbers have tended to stay steady since the pre-pandemic days. But who knows, there could be serious, serious complications that emerge in the near future. You know, we talk about all those health consequences in their myriad, but we would be remiss if we didn't mention the societal, educational community consequences of what it means to be locked down by your government, locked out of connecting with human beings, a basic social need.

that had significant damage. Look at the test scores in our public schools in particular, particularly those schools that through their teachers unions kept up and kept up locking kids out of schools. long after the consensus was, don't do this. This is more damaging to them than this virus that has a very, very limited mortality, insignificant mortality rate among kids. We're still dealing with that years later. What have you seen and learned in terms of the people behind those lockdowns and will they ever be held accountable? I don't think it's certainly not held to account. I mean, you look at Dr. Anthony Fauci, right, and President Biden, as he was leaving office, issued an outgoing pardon to the good doctor. So we'll never see him held to account. As for some of the effects that the lockdown inflicted on people, just apart from the skyrocketing suicide rates and drug and alcohol addiction that we saw. during the pandemic, and of course, medical care facilities and resources that were diverted away from people who were suffering from really serious problems like cancer. It was diverted to address the COVID issue, and those people suffered as a result. You mentioned the children. And it reminds me of a statement that renowned philosopher Sam Harris once said, you may have seen this, but he said in an interview that it would have been preferable, had more children died during COVID, as that would have basically made anyone who was skeptical of the lockdowns a non-starter, right? And that if this disease had been... killing children on a massive scale, then that would have been a positive development because then you could go to the skeptics about lockdown and say, oh, well, you have nothing to say here. And I think he's probably right. Had the virus had a high death rate among children, there would have been no room to ask questions about any of this stuff. But as to those lasting effects, you can see it in speech disorders and some lasting... learning disabilities that children still exhibit today and that teachers are noticing. And lastly, I'd say that there's, I think, and you may feel it too, especially among young people that I've interacted with, there's sort of a nihilistic kind of haze that envelops us right now. Where are we going? There's no real vision, right? And I think part of that has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. It was so startling, so sort of bewildering that many of us. don't really see a vision for the future, and especially young people go, well, if the government can react this way, then why even give it a shot, right?

I think they're dealing with fear shock to this day. I think a lot of us still do. I think many of us have awakened to the bad dream that it was, not just people dying from this virus, but the consequences from the response to that and all of those impacts are. are with us today. And quite frankly, I think they will be with us for some time, including the economic impacts that when you shut down an economy on a dime, what that does to the supply chain, for instance. When you put people out of work and then you decide, okay, since we put them out of work, then we're going to pump a lot of money into their accounts for not working. That has a deleterious effect, I think, too. But real quick. I kept hearing and reading during the opening days of the pandemic. Why are these people objecting to these lockdowns? They did these same things during the Spanish flu, which of course you were told you couldn't call it the Spanish flu anymore because that was xenophobic. But that's what they called it in 19, when folks returning home from World War I. But I've read a lot of historical accounts. I wasn't around. I feel like I was around, feel old enough to have been around at that time. But there weren't these massive lockdowns of the entire country and business and community. I'm sure there were some communities. I've read that. But there wasn't a lockdown of the country. Why did this take root as a defense of this thing? Yeah, it's interesting in that dovetails with the Spanish flu. Actually, it begins under the Bush administration. And the story goes that I've read, this may be apocryphal, but that George W. Bush read a very good book called the, basically the Spanish epidemic by an author named John Barry. You'll have to get back to me on the name of the book. But it's a very well-written book about the Spanish flu, and President Bush read it at the time in 2005 and became transfixed. on the issue of a respiratory virus killing millions in the United States and around the world. And he dispatched a task force to begin to devise methods of ways to combat it. And the problem with that is that actually Dr. Anthony Fauci funded a study, a co-wrote a study on this and that the number of deaths from respiratory illness has fallen by something like 98% since the Spanish flu. Thankfully, modern medicine has progressed to such an extent where respiratory viruses are no longer the huge civilization threatening virus that they were.

in the early 1900s. And so it begins there, and this task force begins to see, instead of allowing people to take individual precautions, take responsibility for responding to an infection, we need to lock down entire populations. We need to restrict movement. We need to close down businesses. And so these ideas begin to take root. And by the time 2020 happens, they install that playbook in terms of how this should be responded to. And you get... the tyrannical lockdowns that we saw in 2020. With all that said, final question for you with what you have found along the way in your research, what we have all lived through, do you see something like this happening again? And I don't mean a pandemic. I don't mean a virus that has deadly, sweeping deadly effect. I mean how the United States, in particular, the free world responds to it. Do you see? what we experienced in 2020, 2021 in particular happening again. I think unfortunately, yes. And like I said before, despite all of these scientific and technological advancements that we should be thankful for in many respects, we're just as ill-prepared as ever for responding to crises. And for me, the lesson, the ultimate lesson from all of this, and you can look back at history in any sort of tyrannical episode, is that they don't end by the subjugators sort of magically going, hey, we're done, right? We're going to stop. doing what we're doing. They end with the collective refusal of the general population to say enough. You know, we're tired of being subjugated. We're tired of what's going on. That's what happened with COVID. There was never any sort of grand proclamation from above from Anthony Fauci saying, hey, let's stop the lockdowns. Let's get on with normal everyday life. It was individuals standing up and saying, we're tired of this and they got back to their everyday life. Two-fold answer there. Yes, I think it's possible, but the ultimate lesson is that they end by us saying enough and rising up. I think you're absolutely right. And I saw it firsthand. I reported on the stories of so many, you know, courageous people who stood up early on and said, no, this is not right. This is not America. This is not our country. And we want it back. And they stood up to, you know,

little tyrant Karens in health agencies and county departments. And they stood up at county boards and school boards. And they stood up all the way to Congress. And that, at least, is the silver lining in all of this. I hope we have such courageous people the next time around. Thanks to my guest today, historian Thomas Beckett Kane, author of the forthcoming book, The Reckoning. A definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic and other absurdities. You've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. I heard the fame voice of reason.