Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
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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 Kine, author of
the forthcoming book interesting deep dive look into the COVID era.
It's called The Reckoning, A Definitive History of the COVID
nineteen pandemic and other Absurdities. Thomas, thank you so much
for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Do they not exactly exactly?
Speaker 3: And it's interesting because when someone sees that there's a
book about COVID, they probably to themselves, well, I live
through it, right, 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.
Speaker 1: As Ever, how did we descend into this? From your perspective,
because you've done, like I said, a deep dive of
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. But 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.
Speaker 3: Of this, absolutely, And you mentioned the places of worship,
and of course, during the summer twenty twenty, 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 nineteen pandemic for years to come. And
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 nineteen 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 polimerase chain reaction testing. And
so this was a dramatic leap in terms of our
testing capability compared to only seventeen years earlier when a
very similar SARS virus was spreading throughout the globe, and
that was.
Speaker 2: SARS cove one.
Speaker 3: It was just called SARS cove right, and then it
was COVID nineteen came along, and now it's SARS cove one,
COVID nineteen being stars cove two which emerged in Hong
Kong in two thousand and three. And we don't need
to get bogged down too much into the technical details
of how they tested for sorrows back in two thousand
and three, but in short, it was a much more complex,
much more time and financially intensive process that was dependent
on trained professionals, staffed and 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 twenty twenty, you now have real time
Polmearius 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 onto
the media organizations so then broadcast in their telecasts, and
so it just it created a pipeline of forty thousand
new cases this week, eighty thousand 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.
Speaker 1: I remember researching this and investigating this in a series
of investigative reports back in twenty twenty. 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 coroners 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?
Speaker 2: It's interesting, I like that phrase, prepositional battle. Right.
Speaker 3: It's something where you had cases of people who died
in a car crash, right, and they tested positive for
COVID nineteen at the 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 that are sixty
years old of zero point zero seven percent. 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 par 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.
Speaker 2: Right, if something is going.
Speaker 3: 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, right. But what it created in our
environment when it came to COVID nineteen was that only
the worst case is were reported. That's what the public herred,
and it further drove that dissent in the fear and panic,
which drove the lockdowns and the restriction of our freedoms.
Speaker 1: Well, I talked about this recently with another guest in
the Federalist Radio Hour, and that's in the political sphere,
the ram manual 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 COVID era.
Speaker 2: Hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And again, what I'm about to say, it's again it's
just one factor. I'm not going to reduce it to
this one factor. But Obviously you had a sizeable 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.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: 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 winner 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.
Speaker 2: And so the problem with.
Speaker 3: 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 to 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 twenty twenty and serving on a
second term.
Speaker 1: I agree one hundred percent. I agree one hundred percent
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 that will stop all transmission. That's what we
heard over and over again. Do you think that you know,
the faucies of the world really got into his year,
got into the administration's year, and they said, President, you
better do this one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And 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 took the he followed the expert's advice
almost to a t, right, And I think that goes
to his personal character, which he's a germ of phobe, right,
And there's nothing wrong with that, per se right, it's
going to be clean.
Speaker 2: And protect yourself.
Speaker 3: But I think the idea of a transmissive, 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 Christ He's
kind of go out the window, right. And so for Trump,
he allowed faut Cheap to come out and broadcast to
the public exactly what he thought the world should do.
In doing that and allowing him to take the stage
in the in the White House press briefing room, you
give credence to the public health establishment and you allow
them to steer society as 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 nine thousand points
and COVID eradicated right, but unfortunately it could not be
stopped and it fell right into his trap.
Speaker 4: How is September the worst month of the year for
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Government agencies have to spend every single time. By the
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We are in the last forty eight days. The federal
debt is up by a trillion. We have a severe
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Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 4: Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris
Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Trump's instincts, as he said before, often proved 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.
Speaker 3: 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 had conspiracy
theory right to suggest that viruses were made transmissible to
human beings and laboratories and bar off places like Wuhan, China,
And that filtered right into what the left did, what
the lockdown enthusiast wanted to do, which was cast anyone
who was skeptical of their prescriptions as sort of wacky
Alex Jones kind of level conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1: Well, well, we watched a movie of it in the
nineties 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.
Speaker 2: It really did.
Speaker 3: 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 and legitimate scientific research in that. The idea was,
if you were to make a virus that was previously
not transiscible 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.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Well, the obvious risk, and one that people had been
warning about for two decades to twenty twenty, was that
one of these viruses that was not transmissible to humans
you've now taken 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.
Speaker 2: One thing to.
Speaker 3: Note is that at the time when it was happening,
obviously doctor Fauci and others realized it had leaked from
the Wan Institute of Virology, but they had spent the
past two decades defending the practice right 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
conspiracy theorist right. 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 gata function of research.
Speaker 1: It is the contemporary wisdom now pretty much settled on
that fact. Because you had, you know, the usual suspects
and 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 saying, well, the 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?
Speaker 3: I think so if you look at the official channels
from the US 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 with high
probability that it did originate from the Wuan 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.
Speaker 2: You know it's funny.
Speaker 3: It was John Stewart, right fame infamously said on Stephen
Colbert that you know, if at an outbreak of chocolatey
goodness were to emerge in Hershey, Pennsylvania, then we would
probably look to the local chocolate factory as a likely culprit.
So I think the 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 Virology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess. I mean, if you take a look
at 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 nineteen 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 pad answer from the so called scientific experts.
They were digging into this. There were some others as well,
but mainly you had the 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.
Speaker 3: 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 want and suit of virology, you want to
talk about the real death rate from COVID nineteen, 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 form now, some things still don't aren't allowed
to get through, and it's that and we need that
free and open expression in order to have these honest
discussions about what's going on and how.
Speaker 2: To move forward.
Speaker 3: I think with the media, you know, unfortunately there's a
specific brand of person that tends to going to 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 or the Democratic Party, and this vital.
Speaker 2: Virlic hate of Donald.
Speaker 3: Trump right, and so anything that can be lobbed 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
nineteen 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 is turned onto that more
than ever.
Speaker 1: 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 put
either put their blinders on or willfully did these kinds
of things. And the people, the scientists 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 thest have we learned nothing,
very little, very little apparently.
Speaker 3: Of course, as you're probably familiar with, you've got the
Great Barrington Declaration which was published during twenty twenty, and
it was an attempt to say that the lockdowns were
not an appropriate response to this respiratory virus. And as
you know, doctor Fauci and others around him, they have
the email records of this we're deliberately trying to smear
those authors of that report in major media organizations, and
of course they went along with it, right in step
with whatever doctor Fauci recommended. In terms of that, it
is sad. It is sad to see that true science
conflicting opinions.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: You can see it on climate change, right, the whole
ninety nine point seven percent consensus. Right, of course, any
consensus in science means that likely that field of study
is completely corrupted. Right, the whole idea of sciences. You
have conflict, you have disagreement, and then we move towards
the truth.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so much for the scientific method. Right.
Speaker 3: It's unfortunately it's because so many of these different fields
of science has been politicized.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: You could see it in say transgenderism, Right, it used
to be ten 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, right, And
so all these fields of study in science another way,
you see it in climate science, you see it in
gender theory.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: You've had to dig through a lot of documents this book,
I am I'm sure required a look through a lot
of email communications contemporaneously, some very troubling things. Obviously, the
House started at least in twenty twenty three 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.
Speaker 3: I mentioned one, and that was the doctor Fauci email
to his colleagues to begin to smear shows who were
skeptical of his prescriptions. Another set of emails which was
disturbing has to do with State Department officials who visited
the Wuhanasuo Virology around twenty eighteen, 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 lat 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 acknowledgment 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
a function and ultimately it led to its escape in
the pandemic and all its horrors.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: 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
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. Doctor Francis Collins, doctor Tony Fauci,
and several others, including frontline healthcare workers, received COVID nineteen
vaccination at NIH Clinical Center. Here's a photo of 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?
Speaker 3: 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 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 beings body. In that respect,
as you know, is the first time that an m
RNA 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.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: This is contrary to how normal vaccines work, where you
grow and develop the virus in a laboratory for ten
to fifteen 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 and 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
about a vaccine that was developed in 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 a 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.
Speaker 1: You know, we talk about all of 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 of in
our public schools in particular, particularly those schools that, through
their teachers' unions, kept up and kept up locking kids
out of schools a 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.
Speaker 3: I don't think certainly not held do held do account
I mean, you look at doctor Faucira and then President
Biden as he was leaving office issued and 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 know, you mentioned the children, and it reminds me
of a statement that renowned philosopher Sam Harris once said.
Speaker 2: You may have seen this.
Speaker 3: 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 lockdowns 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 be especially young, among young
people that I've interacted with, there's sort of a nehalistic
kind of haze kind of 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
nineteen 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 you even give
it a shot, right?
Speaker 1: 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 with us today and quite frankly, I
think they will be with us for some time, including
the economics that when you shut down an economy on
a dime, what that does to the supply chain, for instance,
And 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
nineteen nineteen when folks returning home from World War One.
But I've read a lot of historical accounts. I wasn't around.
I feel like I was around. I feel old enough
to have been around at that time. But there weren't
these massive lockdowns of the entire country and business and
commune there. 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.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting, and that dovetails with the Spanish flu.
Actually it begins under the Bush administration, and the story
goes that I've read it's maybe apocryphal, but that George W.
Speaker 2: Bush read a very good.
Speaker 3: Book called the Basically the Spanish Epidemic by an author
named John Berry. You 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 two thousand and five
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.
Speaker 2: To combat it.
Speaker 3: Right, And the problem with that is that actually doctor
Fauci funded a study co a study on this, and
that the number of deaths from respiratory illness has fallen
by something like ninety eight percent since the Spanish fluid. 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 nineteen hundreds, 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.
Speaker 2: And so these ideas begin.
Speaker 3: To take root, and by the time twenty twenty happens,
they install that playbook in terms of how this should
be responded to, and you get the tyrannical lockdowns that
we saw in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: With all that final question for you, with what you
have found along the way in your research 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 twenty twenty, twenty
twenty one in particular happening again?
Speaker 3: I think, unfortunately yes, And like I said before, with
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.
Speaker 2: And for me, the lesson, the.
Speaker 3: 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 and to say enough. You know, we're
tired of being subjugated. We're tired of what's going on.
That's what happened with code right. There was never any
sort of grand proclamation from above from FOUCH saying hey,
let's stop the lockdowns, let's.
Speaker 2: Get on with normal everyday life.
Speaker 3: It was individuals standing up and saying we're tired of this,
and they got back to their everyday life. So it's
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.
Speaker 1: 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 board and they stood up all the
way to Congress. And that at least is the silver
lining and 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 nineteen pandemic and other Absurdities.
You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm at Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom.
I'm anxious for the friend heard the fame by Serison
Speaker 2: Then