https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/tony-lyons-on-war-of-the-worlds-12-august-2023/
Tony Lyons is the co-chair and co-founder of American Values 2024. Lyons is the publisher of Skyhorse Books, and he’s published recent works by Woody Allen, Lake Bailey, Norman Mailer and Robert F Kennedy Junior and his book, The real Anthony Fauci.
He’s called the US publisher who picks up canceled books by other publishers, which is something we can get into. We’re going to dig into the RFK Junior campaign shortly. Tony, hello, and welcome to the show.
George Eliason: Can you tell us a little bit about American Values 2024.org?
Tony Lyons: Yes. So American values 2024.org is a SuperPAC that was formed to support Robert F Kennedy Junior in his bid for election in 2024.
George Eliason: I’ve been hearing a lot of things about the funding, on this. It’s just from what I hear, it’s just been amazing. and July was supposedly out of the world. And, what what was it you picked up on? Was it $9,000,000 in July alone? Am I right with the numbers?
Tony Lyons: The total that we’ve raised so far. I believe is about $16,500,000.
George Eliason: And that’s incredible.
Tony Lyons: Yes. So that’s come from both Democrats and Republicans and it sort of shows how Bobby Kennedy is able to heal the divide in this country and really speaks to people on all sides who recognize that the country is really in trouble and who want to see a leader who’s going to focus on the things that are important to them.
And I think that what they recognize is that on both the right and the left, in the past, and currently, that US politicians have been really focused on protecting big corporations and their profits and that the country has just become corrupt.
I think that people really want to have a politician who will fight for them and who will focus on things that are important to them, like jobs, inflation, peace, freedom, and they’re not seeing that.
They’re seeing their freedom taken from them. And they’re seeing censorship used by government agencies against them to protect these big corporations who are funding governments on every side.
There was a recent New York Times story that said that as much as 75% of the FDA’s budget comes from the companies that it’s supposed to be regulating. And that’s true of so many government agencies now that they’re actually funded by private corporations. And private corporations don’t do that because they’re trying to help the government or because they care about the people of the United States.
They do it because they believe that it increases their profits. And I think that that’s true and that when you have a system of government where the corporations are so intertwined that they’re kind of merged with the government agencies so that their people from those companies are embedded in the government.
And that’s just one side of it. Then you’ve got the other side, which is just incredible lobbying. So, every Congressperson is just so heavily lobbied and needs the money so badly to be viable in their political races that it’s just hard to see that there’s any room left for protection of the American people, for their health, for their welfare, for their ability to cover their own basic needs.
And we’re at a time when something over 50% of the people in the United States don’t have $1000 to handle some emergency. I mean, they don’t have $1000 in the bank. And you think about that. This is the richest country on earth and you know more than 100,000,000 people don’t have $1000.
It’s just unconscionable and it just shows that we haven’t had leaders that care about the middle class. So, I think that what they want and what they need is a politician like Bobby Kennedy who doesn’t have any conflict of interest, who’s going to go to Washington to try to solve their problems and not to do anything else.
Not to back up corporate partners, not to make more money for himself, not for any reason other than to solve problems.
George Eliason: Now, what you just described in terms of government, the intertwining of business and government, it actually has a name, and it’s scary because it’s fascism.
Tony Lyons: Exactly. And so, to have a country where so many people are proud of their freedom. and where they look at other countries and they say, well, that’s a fascist country. That’s a socialist country.
That’s a communist country. But it’s hard for them to see that it’s happening to them.
And it’s been so gradual and so subtle that if you’re not an actual direct victim of say, censorship or, even things like de-banking, which are becoming a real issue in that if you disagree with a government agency or if you have political views that a big corporation doesn’t like, they can chip away at your rights.
They can make it difficult for you to have a bank account, have a credit card, get a loan, even if you qualify in every other way other than your political views,
So that’s a really scary thing that we could be heading towards this really scary fascism with all the modern technology tools. I mean, these tools would be the envy of any dictator in history.
I mean, the ability to just cut people off, the ability to track people, the ability to censor people on every major means of communication, all the big tech platforms.
These kinds of tools were never available in the past. And the ability to use bots and AI to track people, to censor certain combinations of words so that you can really control what most people believe is true.
You know, even really smart people. It’s just it becomes so difficult now to get the truth on a whole raft of subject matter that you really have to fight to get the truth.
You have to go and listen to alternative sites and podcasts And, you know, while that’s possible, it’s a lot of work. But the amazing thing is that millions and millions of Americans are actually doing just that.
So, you see some of these shows where the mainstream TV show has you know, even the very biggest ones have two or three million viewers, but then you have a podcast like Joe Rogan that might get, you know, 13,000,000, -14,000,000 viewers. So, there is some push back.
And I think that’s a lot of the reason why Bobby Kennedy has a chance and why people are starting to recognize that he’s the politician who’s really going to get things done. And that it’s so important that you look at politicians and look for their conflicts of interest, and look at what they’ve done in the past. Not what they say, not what they promised they’re going to do.
I mean, Donald Trump talks about draining the swamp, but he went to Washington and he didn’t drain the swamp. He talked about making the intelligence agencies smaller, but he didn’t actually do that. He talked about gutting the deep state and the government agencies and trying to make them really work for the people of this country, but he didn’t do that.
There’s no question that if Bobby Kennedy goes to Washington, that if he becomes president, he will do that. He will make sure that the government agencies work for the people of the United States and not for big corporations.
George Eliason: Why did Bobby Kennedy wait so long to run for office? He must have seen all of this developing.
Tony Lyons: He wasn’t waiting. He’s been involved in hundreds of lawsuits where he’s been trying to hold government agencies and big corporations’ feet to the fire and make them pay. He’s been involved in some gigantic lawsuits. You know, he was one of the lawyers on the team that sued Monsanto for Roundup that has been and is causing cancer.
And he won a $70,000,000 judgment that resulted in very large numbers of people coming forward and suing for the harm that glyphosate in Roundup has caused. And there’s so many other stories of that where people are getting hurt by products that have not been well researched that have been green lighted by corrupt agencies.
He’s been fighting those battles for the American people. And so, the question is, what’s the best way to use your talent and to use your skills. He believed for the last few decades that the best way that he could do that was through the courts, but he’s seen now that that’s not enough.
You know that there are people doing that. He was one of the main people and there are lots of others and they’re winning these big judgments, these big settlements, But in the end, things are not going in the right direction and you can see that by looking at all different sides of the country.
You can see that our foreign policy is still geared towards being in these wars, these endless wars all around the world that drained 100 billion, if not trillions of dollars, out of the economy in the United States. And that all of these different policies are not geared to helping the people of this country.
I think that what happened was Bobby Kennedy realized that the only way he was going to really make change that would benefit America, that would change the course of history is to become president.
And I think that he’s right that there’s only so much that can be done through the courts.
But that’s been a great experience and he knows more about the inner workings of government agencies than anybody because he’s been suing them. He knows the thinking of the big American corporate structure because he’s been suing them for decades. So, I think he has all the tools that he needs to go to Washington with and really change around how this country works.
George Eliason: I want to step back a little bit and talk about this censorship. It definitely runs into what you said earlier about Trump not having the ability to fix this. And it shows how deep RFK is going to have to go to get this done.
Now he’s spoken a lot about, against the censorship that’s going on, and he’s been a real advocate of free speech. All of this started with the Obama administration pushing the 2012 Smith-Mundt Act revision.
That is what took away the civil protections from Americans.
And it made it legal for the government to wage information war through the government, contractors, and lobbyists.
And this all built up to Russiagate, to the COVID lockdowns because of the information war with that, to everything going on today and what’s happening with Robert Kennedy.
I think the first political use (military grade Information Ops) in the US was against Bernie Sanders. And today, it’s all the same people doing it.
Now, we know this is being run out of is an office in the State Department. Today, it’s called the USAGM. Up until December 2016, it was called the Board of Broadcasting Governors. They run RFE/RL, etcetera, and what happened is the guy that wrote that revision to the Smith-Mundt Act, Mathew Armstrong, was the only permanent member on that board and he was the government official working with the friendly contractors that set all this up.
If Robert Kennedy reviewed that, and what I’m saying is a lot. I realize, okay, this may be new, so I’m not asking you to put words in his mouth.
But if stopping this dead in its tracks and making all of this illegal again, all it took was revising that one Act to its pre-2012, incarnation, could he get a Congress to do that today?
Tony Lyons: So, I think it’s be tough. But, I think that one of the hallmarks of fascism is the ability to sort of have a monopoly on truth and to control the message. And to use propaganda and censorship to control people. There’s no question that’s going on. And there’s no question that Bobby really has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on with censorship and propaganda in all areas.
So, I think that he would do more than anybody else to understand how it works and make sure that it stops. I think the main thing is that he would become president and he would immediately, and he said this many times, he would immediately shut these programs down. Because these programs are illegal. They’re unconstitutional. And, you know, they, in any case, in any way you view them are against the basis of what it is to be.
George Eliason: The problem with this particular one, when it was the BBG, was because it’s a State Department entity. It was under the president’s control. It was the president’s domain. It’s diplomacy. In December 2016, when they revamped it into the USAGM, they took it out of the president’s control and put it under Congress control. It’s now outside his wheelhouse.
That’s the fight he has to deal with. Do you think he could manage enough cooperation from a Congress that is actually not even looking to govern anymore? A lot of these people, and we’re talking about Republicans and Democrats, they’re looking to rule.
And it’s exactly what you’ve been describing. And they’ve made this fight, this difficult. I’m not asking for definite answers because this is something that needs to be looked at, and that’s how I approach the question.
But, will you look to see if this was what it took and if you don’t get this done (revert Smith-Mundt), you don’t fix the problem. And it amounts to getting it done what I just described. Would he take on that fight? Because that would probably take his entire administration to clear this up.
Tony Lyons: I view it differently. When you talk about all the same people working to take down Bernie Sanders, and those being the same people who are working so hard to take down Bobby Kennedy, I think that you have to recognize that Bobby Kennedy isn’t Bernie Sanders. He’s been standing up against the most corrupt people on the planet for decades.
And I think that he goes to Washington and he convinces people that these changes have to be made. And he speaks directly to the American people, whether it’s some kind of you know, daily fireside chat where he’s just alerting the American public to the way things are working.
Or the way things aren’t working, but the way that they’re being screwed by their government. And I think that when large numbers of people understand that, he will then be able to develop the political power to get things done.
That there will be lots of Congress people who recognize that their political careers are going to be over if they don’t start to work with Bobby Kennedy, to work with the president to change some of these things that are done quietly, that are done in secret, and that are done without the knowledge of the American public so that most people believe that they have much more freedom than they have.
Most people believe that their government is doing more for them than they actually are. Most people would be shocked by the degree to which the government is just working for a handful of gigantic corporations. at the expense of the American people.
And when Bobby Kennedy tells people as president day after day what’s going on, and tells people who the roadblocks are, and who the people are who are getting in the way of their prosperity, their freedom, their ability to have a hopeful future, then I think you’re going to see change. And, sure it’s going to be hard. You know, it’s not going to be just winning the election.
It’s going to be having a president who’s going to fight, who’s a real fighter, and who’s not going to quit till he sees this change.
George Eliason: But from where I’m sitting, even just going into the office. He’s setting up a fight with the Democratic party itself. Their refusal to have open debates, their refusal to even basically acknowledge his candidacy. Now, you have been on Joe Rogan and you can get your message out. This is a good thing today.
And, you said that, but does this hurt or enhance his candidacy during the 2024 cycle?
Tony Lyons: So, I think that, what you’re going to see with Bobby Kennedy is that he is up for this challenge and that the American people, even if you look at polls, while they’re being fooled more and more, they’re recognizing that their lives are getting worse and that their government isn’t doing the job that they’re supposed to be doing.
And so, I think that you are going to see people just unwilling to accept that. And you’re going to see them demanding their politicians start being honest to them. So, if you really have an honest president, even something as simple as a president saying that they’re going to disclose all of the documents that have to do with the JFK assassination, and you look at that, and they keep promising to do it, but nobody does it.
So, each time for whatever reason, you see that they back down, and you know if they’re backing down to powerful government agencies, you know, that’s pretty shocking that we haven’t had a single president with the guts to tell the truth to the American public.
I mean, it’s six decades after the assassination of JFK. Can’t we know the truth about what happened? There’re still thousands of documents that haven’t been disclosed. And, you know, if there’s one thing that you can be 100% sure of, Bobby Kennedy is going to disclose those documents and we’re going to know once and for all what is contained in those documents.
We’re going to get a sense of why they’ve been hidden from us for all of these years. So, I think that even something like that will start to restore trust in our government. That we have somebody who’s going to come out and tell us the truth about the important things.
And really try to work towards solving problems and try to unite Congress people on the left and right, to try to unite the people in in all different parts of this country who have just totally different views right now of what the truth is, of what the proper direction for the future is, but I think that’s not necessary. It’s possible there are more things that unite us.
I think Bobby Kennedy says that time after time that there are more things that unite us than that separate us and if we have a president who focuses on those things, people just want basic things.
So the fact that the price of groceries has been skyrocketing and that the government isn’t doing anything about it, that a Democratic president who runs on increasing services to poor people and the middle class, in a short span of time is actually cutting benefits, and is having a situation where inflation is rampant, where the inflation of basic things that people need, whether it’s food, or access to medical, products or, any of the things that they really need, those prices are just skyrocketing.
And, you know, for a Democratic president to be doing that and not even discussing it, not even getting on television and describing to the American people what his plans are to make their lives better is something that ought to shock people.
And I can tell you that Bobby Kennedy would do that right away. He would recognize that those are the things that are really important to people that they want. Like I said before, they want reasonable prices for basic things that they need.
They want an end to this rampant inflation. They want an end to the corruption that’s leading to just incredible government waste. Whether it’s in this country or all around the world, fighting these endless wars.
They want to bring the soldiers home and they want to bring our focus back to rebuilding this country and making it a place that works for the American people that we can be proud of and that we can become one America with, you know, basic shared values.
And even if we disagree on some fundamental things, I think that what you see with a president like Bobby Kennedy is somebody who’s willing to have that dialogue and willing to discuss anything with and to create a government that is not excluding people.
George Eliason: If we look at 2016, the American electorate was introduced to a new concept called the superdelegate. If Joe Biden brings that out again, I’m not so sure I understand the idea that one delegate is worth 100 delegates, but no one knew about them until Hillary Clinton might lose the primaries against Sanders. How difficult will the primary be if they start the shenanigans again?
Is there a way to cut this in the bud before we get started? How does this work?
Tony Lyons: Clearly, this is going to be really tough because clearly what’s going on is that the Democratic Party has become absolutely corrupt, and they’re going to just use every tactic to try to thwart democracy that they don’t want.
They don’t want the American people to get real information about their candidates because they’re afraid of what people might choose. So, when you see the attacks on Bobby Kennedy in just the last few weeks, you know you see the desperation. They recognize that their candidate, Joe Biden, can’t actually inspire people.
He can’t actually debate Bobby Kennedy. He can’t make arguments that would win in the marketplace of ideas.
So, they have to then use propaganda, targeted propaganda and censorship to try to control Bobby Kennedy’s message to fool people into believing that he’s somebody different than who he actually is. So, what he actually is, is an incredibly smart, incredibly honest, and effective person to protect the people of this country.
And then they come out with stories that He’s an anti-Semite, for example. And they get 100 members of Congress to sign a document trying to censure him at a censorship hearing. So, you know, those kinds of desperate tactics. I mean, there is not a shred of truth to the false claim that he’s an anti-Semite.
And anybody who knows him, anybody who’s worked with him, over many years, and I’m one of those people, I’ve known him for more than 12 years, and I can tell you that is just targeted propaganda.
So, they are using every bit of power they have to fool the American public just like they did with Bernie Sanders. And, you know, Bernie Sanders voters didn’t reward them for that. And now, you have Bernie Sanders voters who are still out there and you have Bobby Kennedy voters who are very passionate and who believe Bobby Kennedy. This is not 2,000,000 people or 5,000,000 people.
This is 250 or 300 million people. So, if the Democratic party continues to act in these dishonest ways, in these fundamentally corrupt ways, they’re going to see that come back to bite them, and they’re going to lose the election.
And, you know, if Bobby Kennedy is the candidate for the Democratic party, he will win the election. they’re going to have to wrap their heads around that idea that they can continue their corrupt policies, they can continue this targeted propaganda, this incredible censorship that takes all these different forms, or they can embrace a candidate that the American people will come to love when they hear the true story of who Bobby Kennedy is.
They will come to love him. They will vote for him. They will benefit from his presidency, and he will beat Donald Trump.
George Eliason: I wanted to ask one more question. I was actually surprised because, you know, I knew that he was in environmental law. He was an active attorney. I didn’t realize that he actually has a long history with foreign policy.
I thought that’d be his weak point, but it goes back to, I think 1974 when he first started writing about this. Can you quickly outline what some of his foreign policy positions are on a country by country basis?
Tony Lyons: So, that’s a little complicated to do in short time that we have, but I can tell you that, you know, he recognizes that we as a as a country have gotten involved all of these wars, whether it’s in Ukraine, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan without any clear vision of what we want the outcome to be except supporting the military industrial complex. Not to get specific things done, not to really fight terrorism, not to really help freedom in these countries, not to defend the rights of people in these countries. but to, make more weapons, to get more power, to extract money, whether it’s for oil or for other natural resources, and that ultimately these kinds of policies fail. They’re not good for the planet. They’re not good for people in those countries. I mean, if you care about the environment, you shouldn’t want us as a country, bombing other countries.
What could be worse for the environment than using modern weapons to bomb other countries? All of the jet fuel in the in the bombing of Iraq, of Syria, of Afghanistan, all of these wars, and all of these resources going into these wars is draining money from the American public. Is draining resources from the planet, is a crushing blow to the environment.
So, the only people benefiting are the manufacturers of these weapons and the government officials who are closely tied to the manufacturers of these weapons.
When you think of foreign policy, you have to think of why we’re getting involved in all of these things and what the benefit to anybody is.
So, I think that Bobby Kennedy has been a student of it. And when I look at his views on Ukraine, they’re so much better researched than any other politician that I hear who’s talking about these issues. And they’re so nuanced that he believes that the invasion is a bad thing, of course.
He believes that Ukrainians getting killed is a terrible thing and that we should be protecting against that. But that the best way to protect that is that if you really care about Ukrainian lives, and if you really care about the environment, and if you really care about the American public and the Ukrainian people, and the people all around Europe who are suffering because of it, then you want to have solutions and you want to be willing to negotiate.
And Bobby Kennedy has always been good at negotiating through all of his years as a lawyer fighting these gigantic corporations and government agencies. He has learned how to negotiate well, and he will do that as president.
And he will make deals in complicated situations just like his uncle did. And, you know, that’s what diplomacy is. That’s what governing really is. It’s not trying to just destroy other countries. It’s not trying to just fool people into doing the things that you want them to by censoring them through propaganda. It’s by trying to come up with practical solutions that benefit everybody.
And so that I think is what Robert F Kennedy Junior’s foreign policy would be centered on. He would try to find common ground with countries all around the world so that we no longer had the senseless and endless wars.
George Eliason: We’ve had Tony Lyons. He’s the cochair and co-founder of American Values, 2024, and the owner of Skyhorse Publishing. now we can find you, and it can support the Kennedy campaign at American Values 2024.org. Where else can people find you, Tony?
Tony Lyons: They can find me personally at skyhorsepublishing.com. or they can find me on Instagram @tonylyonsisuncertain. And the reason that I picked that is that I think that We always need dialogue and debate, and we always need the ability, you know, to see things from multiple sides so that we can make the best decisions.
And so part of the way to do that is to fight censorship and propaganda because it’s censorship and propaganda that make it impossible for people to make good decisions, either on who to choose as a politician or what to, you know, do in their personal lives what to put into their bodies, you know, what to believe. you know, so it’s so important that we have we’ll debate.
And we need Bobby Kennedy to debate Biden. We need Bobby Kennedy to debate Donald Trump. and we need the American people and people all around the world to have a sense of who these people are, what they believe, not just the propaganda that their teams put out. but, you know, real answers and we need to see what they would do, what each of these candidates would do to make people’s lives better.
