Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Skyhorse Publishing President Tony Lyons to the newsmaker line to discuss Big Tech’s censorship of the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entitled The Real Anthony Fauci, now a movie.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line now, one of my new heroes, Tony Lyons, who is the founder and president of Skyhorse Publishing. Good morning, Tony.
Lyons: Hey, good morning. Thanks so much for having me on.
Leahy: We are delighted to have you on here. You’ve done a lot of great things in publishing. Tony. Your latest book on The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one million copies sold despite all the attempts to censor and hit it. How have you become so successful in this, Tony?
Lyons: Yes, I mean, there is no secret sauce to this. It’s more just that we’ve been working incredibly hard to kind of get around the censorship, and the censorship has just been unprecedented. I’ve been in publishing for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.
The control that the government has over newspapers, magazines, Big Tech platforms, is just incredibly strong. They’re just anything that contradicts the government narrative on COVID just gets shut down immediately.
Leahy: Crom has a question for you, Tony.
Carmichael: Tony, can you give us a couple of specifics on what the government did to try to shut down this book or to keep you from getting information that you’re entitled to?
Lyons: Sure. So one of the things that they did was they clearly pressured all of the Big Tech companies to not allow any advertisements for the book. So they have a definition of misinformation as anything that contradicts a public health official.
So we’re supposed to live in a democracy. We’re supposed to be able to have dialogue and debate in this country. And they tell and threaten all the Big Tech platforms, telling them that they can’t accept advertising and that they should use every tactic they can to make it more difficult for people to find this kind of information.
So I can tell you all the types of things that they did. One, there are something like five different ways that you can advertise books on Amazon. All of those were shut down for this specific book.
There was a notation at the top, sending people to the CDC website. When there were positive likes on positive reviews, they took those down. So there are something like 95 percent positive reviews for this book on Amazon, with more than 21,000 reviews.
But they kept taking all the likes down from the good reviews and leaving all the likes down for the bad reviews. So they just really got kind of into the details of how you make it less likely that people will find something.
So one of the other things that they did was they played around with the search algorithms. So, normally when a book is selling at this kind of pace, more than a million copies, it would come up all the time, any time you search for anything in any way similar, any other author who was friends with the author or had a similar point of view.
So this book never shows up in search other than if you search for the actual author or the actual title. So all of these kinds of things. So, this book is not misinformation. It’s just a different perspective. It’s got 2,194 citations.
It claims that Dr. Fauci has been corrupt over his 50-year career, that he has incredible financial entanglements, and Dr. Fauci has been able to wield the power of the government to shut down any dissent. And that’s sort of like a microcosm of what’s been happening in this country in all kinds of ways.
It’s almost against the law to disagree with a government perspective. And it’s really shocking, and it’s something that we all really need to fight against.
Leahy: Did the publication of this book cause Dr. Anthony Fauci to retire?
Lyons: Definitely. It’s always hard to know what’s going on in somebody’s head, but if you look at the facts, Dr. Fauci never addressed any of the allegations in this book. What he did was, he organized and was clearly behind this program to minimize that message.
So if he had better answers to any of the things that were claimed in this book, he had all the power to kind of come out and make those arguments. But he didn’t do it. And he didn’t do it, I believe, because he just couldn’t do it, because he actually did do all of these things. His decisions to ignore early treatments, to lie about the efficacy of vaccines on national television, and all of these different steps.
These are serious allegations, and they may even rise to the level of criminal activity that resulted in, potentially, people dying because of his specific statements and actions. So that’s what I think happened here.
And I think that it’s happened to thousands of doctors and scientists and lawyers who have disagreed with the decisions that were made over the last couple of years.
Leahy: I was just going to follow up on that. There is a new documentary film just out based on this book, right? Are you involved in that documentary film, or how did that come about?
Lyons: Yes, definitely. We licensed it to this incredible filmmaker, Jeff Hayes, and it came out about four days ago. It’s a spectacular document of this period, and it follows the book very closely and even goes further in some ways, but it is very easy to understand, to comprehend, and it makes the points that are so important to make at this time, that this book was incredibly well-researched.
That blind faith in authority is not science. That, you know, no one person represents science. Science is about disagreement. It’s about dialogue. It’s about having a thousand different intelligent voices wrestling with issues.
So this is such an important document. I think that if there’s any documentary that people watch this fall, they should watch this as a way to see the corruption that sort of seeped into our government and that is the next big fight that we all have, which is to separate the special interests from government and this collusion between them.
Leahy: We have a story about it at The Tennessee Star and all of our Star News Network outlets in all 11 states that have websites, by our own Peter D’Abrosca. New documentary The Real Anthony Fauci. The movie had 125,000 viewers on the first day. That’s what I would call success.
Lyons: Yes, definitely. But it did that even though – I was speaking to the producer of it, and it was getting shut down on platform after platform and they were sort of wheeling and dealing to try to find places where they could keep it live.
Anybody who wants to see if they can go to therealanthonyfaucimovie.com, they can still download it for free because it is free for the first 10 days.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Tony Lyons” by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
