Tony Lyons: On Breaking Free From a Culture of Fear and Coercion

MAHA Media Hub host, Tony Lyons, reflects on the Orwellian ‘group speak’ during the pandemic that weaponized fear to coerce Americans to allow public health officials to make decisions for them.

[Tony Lyons delivered the below remarks on August 26, 2026, in his introduction to the MAHA Action Weekly Media Hub, which he hosts.]

Welcome to the MAHA Media Hub and welcome to the MAHA revolution. I'm Tony Lyons, President of MAHA Action.

I want to talk today about safety and fear, and about what is actually dangerous and what will actually make us safer. Because, for the last 50 years, the people in charge often got those two things exactly backwards. They weaponized our fear to convince and to coerce us to make terrible decisions about our health and to allow them to make decisions for us.

Henry Miller once said that “one’s destination is never a place but a way of seeing things.” And that’s what we’re trying to do. This is a cultural journey, just as much as it’s a political one.

We’re here to unlock doors that were deliberately locked, to unleash ideas that were censored, to turn back on the things that were shut off. And, understand, none of this happened by accident. It was done on purpose and it was done for profit.

We want to help every American regain their health freedom, not for some theoretical reason, but because we believe in something simple: that you can make better choices for yourself and for your family than the government or big corporations or the media can make for you. That the free market of ideas and full transparency will produce better health outcomes. And, honestly, that’s an easy case to make because we’ve spent three times the money for a generation. We trusted the science, we trusted the experts, and we came up empty-handed, trapped, sick, in every sense of that word.

Now, why do I say this is a cultural fight first? Well, as Andrew Breitbart famously put it, “politics is downstream from culture.” Lasting change doesn’t start with a law. It starts with values, with stories, with what people are willing to believe. And de Tocqueville said the same thing 200 years ago – that the best laws in the world can’t hold up a nation against its own habits and manners, but that good customs, good habits, good ways of doing things, traditions, can survive even the worst laws.

So, if we want to change the system, we have to change the culture first. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Let me remind you how they use fear against us, because we should never forget it. During Covid, the talking heads, the public health officials, even the late night comedians, all chanted the same line. “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” Sounds like 1984. Klaus Schwab said nobody would be safe until everyone was vaccinated. Bill Gates said, and I quote: “You don’t have a choice; normalcy only returns when we largely vaccinate the entire global population.” And Kathy Hochul, the Governor of New York, stood up and claimed to speak for God, telling her audience that God wanted them vaccinated. Think about that. And asking them to become her vaccine apostles.

Even Dolly Parton, even the incredible Dolly Parton, said, “Don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot – because once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late.”

So, if you were unvaccinated, you were the problem in their eyes. You couldn’t be trusted. You didn’t belong in polite society. Don Lemon even called people who did their own research “idiots.” Sean Penn said being unvaccinated was like pointing a gun in someone’s face. Some said that the unvaccinated should be denied even basic healthcare. And Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “screw your freedom.”

And they coined the phrase, “the pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

And here’s the thing they never want you to remember: It was all a lie. They told you the vaccine would stop the virus dead. Rachel Maddow said the virus stops with every vaccinated person. Fauci said that if the virus gets to you, you stop it. The CEO of Pfizer said that their vaccine was not 99% effective, but 100% effective at preventing Covid. Geraldo Rivera called it bulletproof.

And then every single one of them, of course, caught Covid, many of them more than once. And meanwhile, Fauci himself knew the shot did not prevent infection or transmission.

They shamed you, they fired you, they cut you out of society for refusing to comply with a promise that they knew wasn’t real. And they built a whole campaign around five simple words. “Don’t do your own research.”

The New York Times wrote that doing your own research is linked to conspiracy theories. CNN said that it heard America’s Covid response. Forbes said you must not do your own research when it comes to science. MSNBC said you can’t do your own unless you’re a scientist. Think about how insane that all is.

In what other area of our lives are we told that seeking out information is dangerous? Questioning authority is what free people do. It’s what people who believe in science do.

So, they didn’t have the facts on their side. They were afraid of what we might find out. So they demanded trust and they demanded obedience. And now we know some of what they were hiding. Senator Ron Johnson, who’s been going through all the emails that have come out from Fauci, put it bluntly: They lied through their teeth to the American public. The officials whose entire job was to watch for safety signals weren’t doing their job. And when they did see something, they covered it up. They kept repeating – “no red flags, no safety signals” – while people were being harmed. As Johnson said: people died or were permanently disabled because they were denied the information they needed to make their own decisions about their own bodies.

The head of pharmaceuticals at Bayer even said, and I’m quoting him directly, “If we had surveyed people two years ago, would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body? We would have probably had a 95% refusal rate.” Think about that: 95% wouldn’t have done it. Let that sink in. So if they were told in plain English, they would have said ‘no.’

So, we developed over time a culture of coercion. And that’s what we’re fighting. We don’t need to rebuild trust in this country. We need to re-build to regain our freedom, to rebuild the marketplace of ideas where free speech is possible. And that will lead to better health outcomes.

Here’s why I’m hopeful: accountability is finally coming and the culture is finally turning. Just this week, another name in this story resurfaced. That’s Poul Thorson, the CDC researcher whose early 2000s studies were used for years to tell the whole world that there could not possibly be a link between vaccines and autism. Well, he’s expected to plead guilty on September 1. He was indicted on 22 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and theft for diverting more than a million dollars in grant money meant for autism research into his own pocket. For years, even after his indictment, his work was used to prop up the narrative that all vaccines are safe and effective. Not because there’s real science backing up that statement, but because we’re supposed to trust people who we know, even when we know they committed serious crimes, that they lied to us, that they censored us, they propagandized us, and they stole from us.

And even now the censorship hasn’t stopped. It’s just gotten quieter. This week, the top news apps buried every story about Fauci’s own private concerns over miscarriage risk and the Covid shot. Apple and Google News wouldn’t surface them, but they had no trouble promoting stories attacking President Trump’s executive order on the childhood vaccine schedule.

Same playbook as before. Bury what’s inconvenient and amplify what increases corporate profits.

But it’s starting to fail, and that’s the point. Calley Means said it perfectly: anyone hoping to just go back to normal, to the normal of saluting the institutions that told us to shut up and trust the science – that’s never coming back. That’s never going to happen.

There’s a sledgehammer coming to the old medical system, and the American people are the ones swinging it. And here’s the best part. While the old guard is busy burying stories to boost their profits, this administration is busy building something. Just this week, Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Brooke Rollins rolled out a new plan called Harvest to Hallways, and it goes right to where health actually begins – our kids and the food we put in front of them at school. For years, we’ve made empty promises about serving healthier food in schools, but we’ve ignored the obvious problem. As Secretary Rollins put it, a lot of our school cafeterias don’t even have ovens anymore. So, of course, they can’t cook. They were rebuilt to do nothing but reheat ultra-processed foods shipped in from the big food companies that are poisoning our children. This new plan doesn’t just hand down another meaningless directive. It invests in real kitchens, in scratch cooking, in buying fresh food from local farmers, and in the research to prove that it works. As Secretary Kennedy says, every school meal should make a child healthier. Think about that. More fresh produce. More real protein, less added sugar, and less ultra-processed junk food. And American farmers will be connected directly to the schools in their own communities.

That’s the whole MAHA idea in one program. Healthy culture starts upstream, before chronic disease, before drugs. And there are few better places to start than the school cafeteria. That’s the destination, not a place – a new way of seeing the world. Real safety built on truth and transparency and your right to choose for yourself. That’s what MAHA is fighting for. And that’s a fight that we are going to win.

On this week’s show, we have some incredible guests who are really on the front lines of trying to change the culture – helping people in this country do their own research into what will make them healthier, and bringing real food into our classrooms and our kitchens and hospitals – and working at every level to make America healthier.

Today we’ll be joined by Jack Posobiec, Steve Kirsch, Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, Dr. Bob Sears, Mary Holland, Dr Eric Berg, Russell Brand, and Anthony Constantino.

[Wednesday’s full show will be available on YouTube on August 27, after 12pm Eastern, here.]