Tony Lyons: Why Censorship Never Works

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man the government tried to censor, is now the head of HHS. 'The Real Anthony Fauci.' the book they tried to censor, sold over a million copies

By Tony Lyons

[Tony Lyons, President of MAHA Action and host of the weekly MAHA Media Hub, introduced Wednesday’s show with the below words – just hours after Sen. Rand Paul’s hearing with former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci.]

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

Today, I want to tell you a story I know better than anyone, because I lived it. It’s the story of a book that a whole lot of powerful people did everything in their power to make sure you would never read — The Real Anthony Fauci.

Let me start with the man himself, in his own words. Over the weekend, Senator Rand Paul released more than a thousand of Anthony Fauci’s diary entries and you’d think a man at the center of the deadliest health crisis in a century would focus on the lives lost, the families destroyed, the decisions that kept him up at night. That’s not what’s in there.

On a day in the spring of 2020, with global deaths mounting and Americans terrified, here’s what Fauci found worth writing down: “Big front-page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering.”

“It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country, and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”

He bragged that the entire Secret Service corps was coming over to chat him up, waving him through the gate without even checking his ID. He kept a running tally — not of the dead, but of his television hits, proudly logging that he’d done all five Sunday shows in a single morning. Pure vanity.

Secretary Kennedy put it best this week: the starkest impression you get reading these diaries is the massive dichotomy between what Fauci was saying privately, behind closed doors or in his journal, and what he was saying publicly about where Covid really came from, about how deadly it actually was, about how well those vaccines really worked. And it goes higher than that: Senator Paul and others believe the record shows Fauci, along with Deborah Birx, didn’t just mislead the American people — they misled the President of the United States himself.

And this is not just history. Today, Anthony Fauci finally had to sit in front of Senator Rand Paul and the rest of that committee, with Paul as chairman, and answer for it. This is the same man, someone on Joe Biden’s staff, preemptively pardoned hours before he left the White House. You don’t hand out a blanket pardon to a man who has nothing to hide. Predictably, Anthony Fauci pleaded the 5th, and refused to answer even a single question.

And here’s why all of this matters today. Those diaries confirm, point for point, exactly what Bobby Kennedy wrote. This was never a story about honest scientific disagreement. It was about one man using the power of government to enforce orthodoxy and crush dissent. Anybody who didn’t give complete blind faith to the so-called experts got marginalized, vilified, demonized, and censored. Kennedy lived it himself: he pointed out that Covid almost certainly came from the Wuhan lab, and Instagram erased him, millions of followers gone overnight, for so-called misinformation.

That is the identical playbook they ran against The Real Anthony Fauci. But it didn’t work. The book sold 1.4 million copies despite epic censorship, shadowbanning, and bookstores and libraries across the country refusing to carry it.

Let me take you back. Bobby Kennedy came to me with a manuscript he’d poured himself into — sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the better part of a year. It is the most meticulously researched book I’ve ever seen — twenty-one hundred and ninety-four citations, vetted by doctors, scientists, and lawyers, carrying a blurb from a Nobel Prize-winning virologist. This was a Kennedy, a man who could have had an easy life, risking everything – not for money or power or fame, to tell the American people that the most powerful health official on the planet was not who they’d been told he was.

I published it because I could see where this country was heading. Suddenly only one acceptable answer to every question — the government, a handful of big corporations, and Dr. Fauci wanted to control what we thought, what we read, and what we put into our own bodies. They wanted blind faith in authority. And blind faith in authority is not science. Real science is skepticism, curiosity, the freedom to question. But instead of debating anyone who dared ask a question, they shamed them and punished them. Deplatformed them. De-licensed doctors. Doxxed, defunded, and gaslit them. They built a “disinformation dozen” and went after people one by one. And when it came to Bobby Kennedy, they set out to destroy his reputation, hurt his family, lie about his record, and paper the country with hit pieces.

They used words like “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “dangerous” as Big Pharma talking points of captured government agencies, meant to shut the conversation down before it starts. We don’t ostracize different perspectives in the MAHA movement — we welcome disagreement, and we let the marketplace of ideas decide what’s true. Books should be dangerous, disturbing, uncomfortable, thought provoking. And at the beginning of Covid, when we were being bombarded with propaganda from every direction, The Real Anthony Fauci was exactly the kind of book this country needed.

What happened next? A total media blackout. The best-selling book in America, and not one review in a single major newspaper. Nobody would interview Bobby about it. When we tried to buy an ad — and understand, newspapers normally chase me down, begging for ad dollars — The New York Times turned us away. They ran it by a division I’d never once heard of in twenty-seven years of publishing, called, I promise you I’m not making this up, “Standards Management.” And Standards decided the book, and a blurb from a Nobel Prize winner, was misinformation.

And it didn’t stop there. YouTube took down a videotaped book signing. Amazon shadowbanned it. Twitter refused to promote it. Chain stores kept it invisible, buried in the back, while every other bestseller was stacked to the rafters. Independent stores refused to carry it or even take special-orders. And the New York Times bestseller list ranked it number seven, in a week when it outsold every book in the country, selling ninety-two thousand copies, behind their very own “1619 Project,” which sold thousands less.

Fauci at that moment was arguably the most powerful man on Earth, making the rules for the entire planet — telling every one of us whether we could work, eat in a restaurant, or send our kids to school. He could have walked onto any network and brought any expert he wanted. So why was he so afraid to sit across from Bobby Kennedy and debate him? Why not go through those citations and tell us which ones were false? Because when you have the facts on your side, you argue. When you don’t, you censor. Dialogue is how you build trust. Censorship is what you reach for when you’re afraid of what a fair fight would reveal.

And here’s the part they never understood: it didn’t work. It never works. We put together a team, and we went on every radio show, every podcast, every program that would have us, dawn to dusk. And the book caught fire. When Americans see something’s been banned, scrubbed off YouTube, refused by the Times — they think, what are you so afraid of me seeing? Every act of censorship became an advertisement.

In the middle of all this, The New York Times ran a big, bold editorial warning that “America has a free speech problem”— that Americans were losing the right to speak their minds without being shamed or shunned. The most powerful censor in the country, lecturing the rest of us about censorship. This was 1984 incarnate.

But here’s the good news. The man they tried to silence during Covid is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The book they tried to bury sold over a million copies. And the accountability they spent years running from is finally coming. Reading that book was once called an act of rebellion. Well — the rebellion won.

On today’s show, we’re featuring some of the heroes who helped fact check The Real Anthony Fauci — the doctors, lawyers, researchers, and scientists who spent months reading and researching. We’ll be joined by Mary Holland, J.D., CEO of Children’s Health Defense; physician and medical freedom activist Dr. Meryl Nass; biostatistician and epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff; and Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Senior Research Scientist at MIT. And you’ll hear from other free-speech warriors: Steve Bannon, Sayer Ji, bestselling author John Leake, and Congressman John James of Michigan.

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