In response to Crowe:

I don't have time to go through the wall of text at the moment, but I should have stated very clearly that I am 100% aware of "everyone" being a singular pronoun and the implications of that. Everything I've learned does point to "is" being correct on the surface. I posted this thread to see if anyone could explain to me why my intuition says this has to be some sort of exception. I would never write or say "the books that everyone is talking about", I would use "are" even if incorrect. The example I posted is from a real life sentence I encountered and the firestorm that started because of it.

Also, you are 100% wrong about multiple nouns, even if singular. I literally remember a given example of this in an English course: "Anyone and everyone are invited." or "Anyone and everyone are welcome." -- those are widely used enough to the point that I'm guessing most people reading this have encountered them.

Secondly, you completely ignored the reworded version of the sentence that makes the problem myself and others are having more clear.