"Why Censorship Never Works"
A tribute to Tony Lyons, publisher of SKYHORSE books, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of "The Real Anthony Fauci"
In the early nineties, while visiting my then professor, Roger Scruton, on his farm in Wiltshire, he told me about his adventures in the 1980s, working as a conduit of forbidden literature from the West into Prague, where it was translated and produced as SAMIZDAT—that is, literature created in secret by tiny, underground presses and then distributed by hand from reader to reader.
At the time he told about Samizdat, the necessity of such an enterprise struck me as outlandishly bizarre. How, I wondered, could the beautiful, literate, and cultured city of Prague fall into the hands of such tyrannical philistines? Surely, I thought, this could NEVER happen in the United States.
Thirty years later, what was unthinkable became a reality. The same sort of tyrannical philistines who ran Czechoslovakia during the Soviet period infested American institutions of academia, government, and yes, even New York City trade publishing.
Reviewing Roger’s book, Notes from the Underground, about Prague in the eighties, Daniel Mahoney wrote of the novel’s character, Bob Heilbronn:
Heilbronn could only think (much like contemporary mainstream ‘political science’) in superficial terms about democracy versus dictatorship. . . . He failed to see what Havel had taught in his great dissident essays: everyone was complicit in the web of lies at the heart of ideocratic despotism. External coercion was matched by an inner tyranny that suffocated the soul and humankind’s natural moral conscience.
Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel understood that tyranny is not only imposed from the top down, it is widely embraced by the majority of people who crave to conform and to signal their ideological virtue. The subject of ideological conformity and the subversion of reality is a major theme in my latest book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, also published by Tony Lyons.
The descent of an intellectual culture into vulgar, childish, stultifying conformity has been happening right before our eyes in the United States. This is why the New York Times is now largely a waste of wood pulp. This is why so much of New York City trade publishing is apparently more interested in ideological conformity than reality.
For those of us who still love true intellectual and literary culture, thank God we have Tony Lyons, the proprietor of Skyhorse Publishing. When no other major New York house would even consider publishing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Tony Lyons had the vision and courage to publish it and promote it in the face of it being blacklisted by all trade industry publications and book reviews.
The following year, when I wrote my first book with Dr. Peter McCullough— The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex — Tony brought it out in a handsome hardcover with a Forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with whom he has a longstanding friendship. Both men are Classical Liberals, dedicated to defending free speech.
Tony just published an essay titled “Why Censorship Never Works” on the occasion of Anthony Fauci’s diaries being published. As Tony notes:
Those [Anthony Fauci’s] diaries confirm, point for point, exactly what Bobby Kennedy wrote [in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci]. 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.
Please take a few minutes to read the full essay, published on The MAHA Report, by clicking on image below, and please like it and share it with your friends.
Censorship, when wielded by those who command the levers of narrative, media, and institutional authority, is not merely effective—it is indispensable to the preservation of power. By curating the boundaries of acceptable discourse, the ((establishment)) does not merely suppress dissent; it reshapes reality itself for the masses, ensuring that only those perspectives aligned with its interests achieve prominence. The controlled erosion of public trust in alternative viewpoints, achieved through the systematic marginalization of inconvenient truths, does not eliminate opposition so much as it fragments it—leaving the populace adrift in a sea of doubt, too disoriented to coalesce around any meaningful resistance.
Moreover, the beauty of modern censorship lies in its subtlety. It need not banish ideas entirely; it need only taint them with the stain of controversy, the whiff of disrepute. A well-placed label—misinformation, conspiracy, fringe—is often enough to ensure that even the most valid critiques are met with skepticism, not solidarity. The result? A citizenry that, while not silenced, is paralyzed—uncertain not only of the truth, but of the likelihood that others share their convictions. Inaction, after all, is the most reliable ally of the status quo.
I'm rarely envious of anyone, but for a moment there I envied you the opportunity to have Roger Scruton as your professor. What a great privilege!