Tony Lyons: “Judge people by what they do, not by what they say”

On the MAHA Media Hub, Tony Lyons takes issue with the American left and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is trying to co-opt MAHA .

[Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, introduced the September 9 MAHA Media Hub with the words below.]

Welcome to the MAHA Media Hub, and welcome to the MAHA Revolution. I’m Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action.

There was a fascinating story this week. AOC reached out, in her way, toward the MAHA movement. She said people are getting screwed, and she’s right about that part. She meant screwed by the big corporations, by Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma – the companies poisoning the American public, capturing our government agencies, and working every corrupt angle they can find to maximize profits at the expense of your health. She says she’s on the same page as MAHA. She says she believes what we believe and wants to help us fight these forces.

And I want to take that seriously for a moment, because if it were true, it would be wonderful. But here’s the problem. You judge people by what they do, not by what they say. And what AOC does, over and over, is attack the very people actually trying to fix the problems she describes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)

Think about it. If she truly believed what she says, she’d be praising the work Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Oz are doing right now – uncovering more fraud, waste, and abuse in our health system than anyone has in a generation; improving school lunches and hospital food; reforming the GRAS system; improving the quality of the food that can be purchased with SNAP benefits; encouraging medical schools to teach nutrition; promoting regenerative farming; and lowering drug prices. She’d be cheering them on. Instead, she attacks them.

If she truly wanted to take on the system that defrauded the American people, she’d stop defending the people who built it and ran it; the Faucis, the officials who presided over the failures that gave us a chronic disease epidemic that is, by the way, eighty-five percent preventable. She attacks Big Pharma with one breath and defends their products with the next. She is not our ally. She is just another double-talking politician, who is preparing to run for president on a platform of lies, slogans and propaganda.

And it’s the same trap the whole modern left is caught in. They say they stand for the American worker, then back policies that undercut American workers. They say they want to fight the big corporations, then side with those corporations when it comes to censoring the people online who dare to criticize them. They don’t believe in a free market place of ideas. They don’t believe in medical freedom – and medical freedom is the single best counterweight we have to the censorship and the propaganda these corporations use to protect themselves. Take away medical freedom, and you’ve handed Big Pharma the whole game. As Martin Luther King said, “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.” We have certain inalienable rights and medical freedom is one of them.

And here’s the sharpest contradiction of all. AOC says Bobby Kennedy is ‘dangerous’ because, she claims, he doesn’t care about infectious disease. But look at the actual numbers. Infectious disease, as tragic as every case is, takes a very small number of American lives. Chronic disease is the real killer - the kind of disease that is manufactured by Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Ag. There are something like 1.2 million deaths a year connected to our food system alone. These companies are, in a real sense, poisoning us on purpose, addicting us to things that will kill us. She and her whole corrupt party want you focused on the fear of infectious disease while ignoring the thing that’s actually filling our hospitals. That’s not her insight. That is a Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag talking point — the same sort of thing as calling someone an “anti-vaxxer” to shut them up, to discourage research and innovation. That’s the mentality that justifies the status quo and a system engineered to make us and keep us sick for profit.

You want to see the contradiction in one clear example? Take glyphosate. She says she wants to protect the public from it – great! She says corporations should never get a liability shield that protects them at the public’s expense – I agree completely. But then, in the most profitable and insidious industry of all, pharma, she suddenly supports exactly the kind of liability shield she condemns everywhere else. Big Pharma has the most actual criminal convictions and settlements of any group of companies in American history; that’s not a slogan, that’s from court records. So why, in their single, most profitable business, are we suddenly supposed to trust them completely? If you won’t give glyphosate makers a liability shield, you can’t hand one to the vaccine makers or the processed food makers. Either you’re against corporate immunity or you’re not. She wants it both ways.

So what’s really going on here? I think it’s simpler than it looks. This is about the midterms, and it’s about her own ambitions. She recognizes something true, something important – MAHA is reshaping the American electorate. Because there’s only so long you can defraud people, only so long you can make American families and American children sick, before they revolt, before they just won’t stand it anymore. And that revolt is happening right now. When you look at the polling, something like eighty-five to ninety percent of Americans are tired of being fed ultra-processed food, tired of their government supporting big companies, and are done trusting the institutions that failed them. That’s not fringe. That’s the country. AOC sees that popularity, our revolution, and she wants to co-opt it. But it just won’t work.

You cannot lead a revolution you are actively fighting. She consistently chooses partisan politics over people. She has not crossed party lines in a single case to defend American families over these corporations. Not one. She claims to hate the corporations, yet she protects the entrenched interests and the very oligarchs she says she’s fighting. Again, if she believed half of what she says, she’d be thanking Donald Trump for bringing Bobby Kennedy in to take on these industries. Instead, she attacks the only people with the courage to fight.

So let’s judge people by what they do. That’s all I ask. And by that measure, the choice in front of this country could not be clearer in the midterms. We are heading in the right direction and we need to support Secretary Kennedy and the administration so we can get the job done. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, AOC is hacking at the branches of evil, but Bobby Kennedy is striking at the root.

On today’s show we will be joined by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Brigham Buhler, Dr. Bethany Hall-Long, Dr. Eric Berg, Mollie Englehart and Russell Brand.

First up we have Peter Navarro. He is one of only three senior White House officials who remained with President Trump from the 2016 presidential campaign to the end of his first term in office.

He is serving as a Senior Counselor to the President for Trade and Manufacturing. Peter is a noted China scholar, a sought-after public speaker, and an award-winning professor emeritus at the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of several books. His latest, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison, is set for release next month and it’s a fantastic book. Welcome Peter.

[Wednesday’s full MAHA Media Hub is viewable here after 12pm Eastern on September 10.]