EXPOSING THE COVID CON: Won’t Get Fooled Again. How can Americans be convinced they were conned into believing that lockdowns and mask mandates were “the science?” It won’t be easy, because they’ve been through a two-year-long version of Hell Week, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges — and once people endure a painful hazing ritual, they’re loath to admit it was all pointless.

In theory, a federal Covid Commission could reveal the futility of lockdowns and mandates, but the public-health establishment and the mainstream media would keep doing its best to suppress the facts, as I write in City Journal. The best hope for a public airing could be a presidential campaign by Ron DeSantis, who could run on his success fighting Covid while sparing citizens, students and businesses from lockdowns and mask mandates. Florida’s cumulative rate of age-adjusted Covid mortality is below the national average, and its overall death toll — the rate of “excess mortality” from all causes — is lower than that of California, which imposed singularly strict measures and suffered one of the nation’s worst surges of unemployment.

The rate of excess mortality among young adults has been consistently lower in Florida than in California, where the strict lockdowns presumably contributed to deaths from other causes. If California’s cumulative rate of excess mortality equaled Florida’s, about 5,000 fewer Californians would have died during the pandemic. And if California’s unemployment rate equaled Florida’s last year, 500,000 fewer Californians would have been out of work.

Those are the hard truths that Americans need to hear.