Fox News host Tucker Carlson introduced Wednesday night’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with a monologue questioning the “science” behind the ongoing national lockdowns.

After noting the lack of basic freedoms and economic hardships many Americans are experiencing, Carlson observed that they’d “better not complain about it” lest they be censored or even arrested.

“What country is this?” he asked. “It’s a country in a lockdown. We’re told we have no choice but to do this — to stop our lives completely.”

Yet, Carlson explained, the “science” behind the shutdowns is far from proven.

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“Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives,” Carlson said. “But that’s a lie. They don’t know it’s true, despite what they’ve claimed. There’s no scientific record to consult. It’s never been done. We’re currently living through the largest and most expensive experiment ever conducted in human history. We’ve spent trillions of dollars, and crushed millions of people, purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus. Has it worked? Was the guess correct?”

Looking at the “data,” the Daily Caller co-founder noted that the eight U.S. states that have yet to issue shelter-in-place orders are still “below the national average in coronavirus cases, and deaths, per capita.” He then referred to the work of “journalist and professor Wilfred Reilly,” who “did the math” comparing per capita numbers per state and finding that “a state’s lockdown strategy had virtually no effect on how severe its outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus was.”

“Are you surprised by this?” Carlson asked. “Maybe you shouldn’t be. You can see the same trend at work in other countries. Sweden, most famously, has never locked down. Restaurants there have never closed. That country is still suffering from coronavirus, suffering more in fact than we are in the U.S. But the country’s epidemic appears to have peaked. And without locking down, Sweden has, and this is the key, has fared far better than other European countries that did lock down. That includes Britain, Italy, Spain and Belgium.”

“How can this be true?” he asked rhetorically. “It seems to contravene everything we hear all day long. ‘Lockdowns stop the virus.’ That’s what they tell us, almost always at high volume and with maximum outrage and self-righteousness daring us to disagree. But in fact, there’s not much evidence that it’s true.”

After criticizing Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for his city’s draconian measures, Carlson quoted a study by USC researchers who found that “as of early April, up to 5.6 percent of the entire county had contracted the illness.”

“Up to 320,000 adults in Los Angeles apparently had already had it,” he said. “At the time, the official number of infected people was about 8,000 people. City officials had no clue. They weren’t even close. The virus had spread throughout a huge population right in the middle of the most restrictive quarantine in American history. What does that tell you? It tells you the lockdown didn’t work.”

But instead of admitting failure of learning from their mistakes, officials are “by and large ignoring any evidence that indicts their policies, or that might threaten their new and much-loved power.” (RELATED: ‘No Penalty For Petty Authoritarianism’: Tucker Carlson Blasts ‘Mediocre Politician’ Gretchen Whitmer’s ‘Power’ Grabs)

“They don’t want to know what the facts are,” said the Fox News host. “Indeed, some are now promising even longer lockdowns, maybe through the end of the summer, and even tougher punishments for those who flout them.”

“This is insanity,” he concluded. “It is definitely not science. This is not science. It has nothing to do with the public’s health, much less the broader public interest. This is instead what happens when mediocre people suddenly find themselves with God-like power: deciding who can go outside, when people can get married, which medical procedures you’re allowed to have. That’s a feeling of omnipotence, and they like that feeling. It fills an empty place inside. They don’t want to give it up. They want it to last forever, even as the country dies. But it can’t last forever. Because it’s not their country. It’s ours.”