It’s been five years since the start of the covid pandemic, and Americans still don’t truly have a shared reality about the disease and the government’s response. Much of this is due to deliberate right-wing misinformation and absurd conspiracy theories. However, ultimately, the pandemic exposed and heightened ideological differences related to collective sacrifice versus personal freedom.
I recently spoke with Thomas Beckett Kane, author of The Reckoning, who has a more libertarian-influenced perspective that doesn’t exactly align with mine. (Full disclosure, he was critical of covid lockdowns.) But he also doesn’t share the far-right insistence that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates created covid in a secret lab as part of their diabolical plot to subjugate humanity.
Most readers of this newsletter probably agree with me on covid more than they would Kane, but I think you’ll still enjoy our discussion.
Look out tomorrow for an unofficial “sequel” interview with filmmaker Jessica Ellis, who is also critical of how the government — both Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s administrations — managed covid, but her perspective is very different from Kane’s.
