FNC's Tucker Carlson on Monday addressed troubling videos from China in recent weeks as Shanghai is locked down for Covid-19. TUCKER CARLSON: The first mass quarantine in human history began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, back in the beginning of 2020. Within days, pictures and videos of what was happening there began to appear on English-language social media. At the time, the images were shocking to everybody in the west. The Communist Party of China had effectively imprisoned 11 million people simultaneously. The citizens of Wuhan were confined by government order to their apartment and those who try to leave sometimes found themselves welded inside. Some of them starved to death. Authorities and hazmat suits dragged screaming citizens into vans and then drove them to internment camps. Watching this, you could barely believe it. China seemed to have gone insane, moving from authoritarian to dystopian in a single day. So this was the world's introduction to Covid-19, a virus we later learned the Chinese government itself helped create. Looking back it all seems like a bad dream. Covid panic has now ended. A trick of the virus no longer counts as a public health crisis in this or any other country. It's clear in retrospect that government lockdowns, whatever the motive, hurt far more people than Coovid itself did in the end. Far more people than Covid itself did. The much-touted vaccines provided nowhere near the production drug companies promised and at the same time came a significant risk that even now has not been openly discussed. At this point, knowing all this has everybody does, countries all over the world are lifting their coronavirus restrictions. Next will come the apologies, and in free countries at least, lawsuits and criminal charges against people who did this. So we are just beginning to reckon with the nightmare that all of us have lived through and it's impossible to imagine living through it again. But in China, they are living through it again. The government of China has just completely shut down the city of Shanghai. Shanghai is the biggest city in the country. It's one of the largest cities in the world. More than 25 million people live in Shanghai. And the lockdown there is by all accounts more brutal and more far-reaching than anything we saw in Wuhan two years ago. ... So for once CNN is not exaggerating. There are 25 million people locked inside their homes. You have the largest prison camp in human history. Anyone who tests positive for Covid is shoved into a van and then taken to a quarantine camp. Watch it happen to this child. ... Where are those vans going? Here are pictures of a quarantine camp in China. The child that you just saw might be there now. Thousands of Chinese citizens are. At this camp, mattresses are strewn on the floor. There is no water. There's just one shared toilet. Just days ago the inmates you see here were living ordinary lives in their own homes. Now they are in prison. What happened to the lives they left behind? What happened to the dogs and cats they left at home? Chances are Chinese police beat those dogs and cats to death on the streets. That's happening tonight all over Shanghai. A mass slaughter of pets. It's too horrible. It's also real and we thought you should know. ... Eight corgis beaten to death with a shovel. In China, that's Covid protection. The Chinese government has confiscated a huge but unknown number of house cats from peoples' homes, thrown them in bags, and left them on the sidewalk to be killed. Again, it was a tough judgment call whether or not to put that on the air but it's real and you should know exactly what the authorities are talking about when they say the Chinese government is responding to Covid. There are videos like that all over social media. The Chinese government isn't denying this is real and it's not apologizing. A spokesperson for the Chinese health commission, effectively he is China's Tony Fauci. He gave an interview to the state-run newspaper People's Daily, explaining the government's thinking. "China adheres to Covid zero. China's socialist system has a strong ability to organize and mobilize which will help ensure the success of the Covid zero strategy." So the Chinese government certainly has the capacity to mobilize. But what does success look like? This is what success is in Shanghai tonight. This is a video shot by a resident of one of Shanghai's countless apartment towers. What you are hearing is the screams of the people trapped inside. Has there ever been a clearer picture of what hell is like? 25 million people in prison in concrete apartment blocks screaming for help and slowly starving. In the words of a western journalist... who was apparently stuck in Shanghai: "This is the biggest, richest, most international city in China and people are starving without medicine, without freedom. Parents separated from their children. The military is on the streets and Shanghai's optimism has ground to a halt." But it's worse than that. Some in Shanghai are so desperate they are crying out for food. We are starving, they scream at stony-faced police as drones overhead tell them to stop yearning for freedom. This is the richest city in China and you never thought you'd see anything like it so the question is what is going on here. Obviously, it's not about Covid. Let's stop pretending. Shanghai doesn't have a Covid crisis. And if Shanghai did have a Covid crisis, from recent experience this is not the way to handle a Covid crisis. So from the perspective of China's central government, the problem is not Covid, the problem is Shanghai itself. Shanghai is probably the freest place in China, it certainly has the most foreign nationals than any city in China. There is a lot of trade at its historic port. By XChina's standards, Shanghai is an independent-minded city. That's the problem. For authoritarians, independent-mindedness is the main threat. If you're the head of the communist party of China and you're trying to run a highly volatile country of 1.4 billion people from Beijing, naturally, your top concern always will be Shanghai. Shanghai is one place where a meningful insurrection might start, and that's especially true this year. Xi Jinping, the Chinese autocrat, is set to take a third consecutive term beginning in the fall. That was not supposed to happen. There were term limits in China. But four, years ago, the Chinese communist party did away with those and now Xi Jinping can rule the country forever. Even in China, that's a controversial move. As a Chinese expert put it, from Beijing's perspective there's no higher priority than stability ahead of the party Congress this fall. This is the closest you might come to seeing a campaign season in China. There it is right there. A campaign season. Even in an authoritarian country, public opinion still matters. A campaign season is still real even if you are president for life. Sound familiar? China's rulers want to stay in power forever, in order to do that they are using Covid restrictions. They are pretty sure Covid restrictions work. They watched our last presidential election closely. How should we respond? If you believe in democracy, this is repugnant. 25 million people just lost their most basic human rights. The question is does anyone in the Biden administration, constantly lecturing about democracy and human rights, said anything about this? Has the State Department issued an angry denunciation of Xi Jinping? Is the U.S. Government threatening sanctions against China for building the world's largest prison camp? Of course not. Effectively our leaders are defending what China is doing. Here is Tony Fauci admitting on camera he will never criticize the Chinese government. ... Yeah, so they lied about an international pandemic that they clearly had a hand in creating, but according to Tony Fauci there was quote "nothing wrong with the Chinese government lying about Covid." There's certainly nothing wrong with starting the population of Shanghai. He would've said so if there were. Shanghai might be a model. A longtime Harvard epidemiologist just wrote an op-ed explaining that we should all be grateful for the atrocities the Chinese government is committing in Shanghai tonight because they are "in everyone's interest." A health security expert told CNN Shanghai is an inspiration to the world leaders. "The legacy of Shanghai will see a return to mass lockdown for larger cities in the near to medium term." If you watch carefully, you can see all of this taking shape. Why wouldn't it be taking shape in this country? We have midterm elections coming and the ruling party is predicted to be in tough shape. So they are doing something about it. The city of Philadelphia authorities announced a return of an indoor mask mandate. Is there science to justify this? Philadelphia has a seven-day average of two Covid deaths. Two in a city of 1.5 million people over a week. Of course, when your strategy is "Covid zero," two dead from Covid is more than enough to justify another mass quarantine. According to s report tonight the Biden administration plans to bring back its lunatic vax mandate for federal employees and, of course, the mask mandate remains in effect for all commercial air travel in the country but not in Nancy Pelosi's private plane, despite no scientific evidence that works. But you must obey anyway and they are making sure. At Love Field in Dallace, two robots known as security control observation towers, Scott for short, scanned the crowd to make sure that everyone is in compliance. Now with facial recognition software, the robots could know exactly who the disobedient are. We're just beginning to see the outline of the repression that Covid has made possible. And if you want to see what the future looks like, look at China and shiver.