When Jackie Gleason was dubbed "The Great One," it was an appreciation of his comedic talents. It isn't clear what Sean Hannity meant when he bestowed the same title on Mark Levin. Utterly--even relentlessly--humorless, Levin has no talent, comedic or otherwise. He does still manage to be a big joke but one suspects Hannity didn't have that kind of allusion in mind. In a sane world, Mark Levin would be treated as the clownish buffoon he is--a malignant gnome, a fringe crackpot, a toxic demagogue who, with his comically high-pitched voice, screeches his irrational fury against anything decent, liberal and American. In this one, he's a popular radio talk-show personality, a bestselling author, a host of his own Fox News show and hailed by the right as a great legal and constitutional scholar. In this one, those things go together.
Reviewing one of Levin's awful books, NPR's Annalisa Quinn characterized his style perfectly: "Levin speaks in the unmistakable tenor of a man experiencing road rage or shouting at a customer service representative." For one so often treated by his rightist peers as an "intellectual," Levin's major, nearly sole, product--and certainly his only consistent one--is just an endless stream of irrational bile driven by absolutely brainless hatred in the fascist style that has unfortunately come to dominate American rightist commentary.
A 2017 "Short Guide To Mark Levin" by Media Matters provides a good, compact overview of his work. Levin is an advocate for racial profiling by police, a climate-change denier, a batty conspiracist. He has compared marriage equality for LGBTQ Americans to drug use and incest. He described then-president Barack Obama as "a Marxist ideologue" who suffers from "narcissistic personality disorder." Obama was elected with 78% of the Jewish vote, but Levin described American Jews who contributed to Obama's campaign as "the worst of the worst" and "self-haters" who "despise their own country."[1] Levin said Obama was "the greatest threat the Jews face... since the 1930s" because he was "arming up the Islamo-Nazis in Tehran" with nuclear weapons. In the real world, of course, the Iran nuclear deal launched under Obama would have prevented Iran from reactivating its long-dormant nuclear weapons program but it was scrapped by Donald Trump, the president Levin adores. When Curt Schilling wrote a tweet comparing Muslims to Nazis, Levin replied, "there's nothing controversial about the Curt Schilling tweet." When a Confederate-flag-waving white nationalist murdered black churchgoers in South Carolina, Levin was furious that politicians who pointed out the racial aspect of the crime--the thing that motivated it in the first place--were, as he put it, "dividing" a nation that was united in condemning the massacre. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THE CONFEDERATE FLAG HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS?!"
Like many contemporary rightist trolls, Levin is fond of comparing Democrats, progressives, liberals to the far-right--white nationalists, Nazis, fascists. He compared supporters of the Affordable Care Act to "brownshirts." He has said Black Lives Matter is "the equivalent of the KKK." When Obama criticized a media environment in which misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories thrive, Levin bizarrely tweeted "Obama finds fascism appealing." His assessment of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "Nancy Pelosi's politics comes as close to a form of modern-day fascism as I’ve ever seen."[2] Perhaps the cake-taker in this regard is his February 2020 appraisal of Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Senator then running for president. Positioning himself as a hero speaking difficult truths, Levin set all of history aspin, saying journalists were
"giving Bernie Sanders a pass on his deep-rooted anti-Semitism... I'm telling you the truth. And the kind of people Bernie Sanders is pulling around him could come out of the Third Reich. THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID IT! The way these people talk and the things that they say. SOMEBODY HAS TO HAVE THE GUTS TO POINT IT OUT! SOMEBODY HAS TO HAVE THE GUTS TO SPEAK OUT! Even though I'm condemned left and right, TOO DAMN BAD! People always say [of the Holocaust], 'Why didn't anyone say anything?' WELL, I'M SAYING IT! The man leading the Democrat Party right now is embracing an Islamo-Nazi mentality when it comes to the Jewish state. He hates America! Every proposal he has is not merely to fundamentally transform one institution or another, IT'S TO BURN THEM DOWN TO THE GROUND! THAT'S MARX! THAT'S ENGELS! THAT'S HEGEL! And that's ALINSKY! And it's Bernie Sanders! I'll say it!" (all emphases his)With no one to explain to his listeners that it wasn't Jews and social democrats like Sanders or Marxists who either ran the Third Reich or carried out the Holocaust, with no one to cover the actual policy of the actual Third Reich toward all of those groups--the very horrors Levin was invoking and trying to weaponize here--Levin's career proceeded apace, without so much as a hiccup from the audience he's attracted. "[I]t's the Democrat Party that's always been the home of the white supremacists, and the neo-Nazis, and the Klan," Levin shrieks, after having spent years sycophantishly promoting Donald Trump,[3] a man whose dismal "politics" very literally earned him enthusiastic endorsements from the Klan and an endless array of other open fascists and neo-Nazis.
Levin himself, meanwhile, promotes actual fascist themes. The major preoccupation of the American fascist subculture for a couple of decades now, for example, is the notion of "white genocide," also known as the Great Replacement, the idea that liberals, Jews, liberal Jews or fill-in-the-blank with the far-right boogeyman are involved in a conspiracy to import non-white and/or non-Christian immigrants--described as "invaders"--from the developing world into the U.S. in order to change its racial make-up. Levin has promoted the Great Replacement, raving that "the agenda of the Obama administration" was to "change the racial makeup of the United States of America... with importation of millions and millions of people from the Third World." The central theme of Levin's commentary on public affairs is, in fact, fascist: eliminationism. As described by Oklahoma City University professor Phyllis Bernar, eliminationism suggest or outright states that one's political opponents are "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised--either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination--in order to protect the purity of the nation."[4]
Like most of today's rightist demagogues, Levin ubiquitously describes anything left of his own views as "socialist," with no more effort to understand the concept (he routinely affixes the label to even views he also compares to the far-right). Conservative opportunist--but Democrat--Joe Biden is said to have "a radical socialist agenda." In February, "the Democrat Party is now America's Socialist Party." In July, "It can no longer be said that the Democrat Party is not Marxist, the only debate is how deep its Marxism runs." Of the Democratic party, "the party of slavery and now violent Marxism must go if there's to be freedom, law and order, and a real future for our country."[5] America's colleges and universities are "the source of anti-Americanism and Marxism" and should be defunded! The Green New Deal, aimed at developing alternate energy sources, is "old time Marxism." Clintonite-right President Obama is an advocate of "dime store Marxism." It isn't enough to call Bernie Sanders, the advocate of the kind of democratic socialism found in every other advanced, industrialized nation, a socialist; he's no less than "Bolshevik Bernie." Three months after Sanders conceded the 2020 presidential race to Biden, Levin outlandishly asserted the Democratic party is "now effectively controlled by Marxist Bernie Sanders."
Like most major rightist media figures, Levin did the party-line flip on "national security" matters when the Bush Jr. administration gave way to the Obama administration (this writer covered it at the time). When Bush's illegal NSA surveillance program was revealed to the world, Levin was beside himself that anyone would dare criticize such measures--totally dismissed any constitutional and/or civil liberties concerns and all but accused critics of these measures of wanting terrorists to kill Americans. From his National Review blog[6] in May 2016:
"I honestly am appalled at the arguments I hear against our intelligence activities in the face of an enemy who has already infiltrated our country and unleashed attacks from within, killing thousands of our fellow citizens. I get the impression that too many do not take this war seriously.The Bush administration had carried out these policies without even a legalistic pretense but when exactly the same policies were continued--with a legalistic pretense--under Obama, Levin offered a high-profile example of the commitment to principle and intellectual rigor that characterizes his work. Appearing on Fox News in June 2013, he squealed:
"The NSA intercept program shouldn't be controversial. The Constitution and precedent make clear that the president, especially during war-time, can intercept enemy communications, including if those communications involve U.S. citizens within the United States. It is absurd to argue otherwise.
"And now, we're supposed to be offended when the government data-mines third-party phone records. This doesn't involve eavesdropping, but merely running these millions of phone numbers and tens of millions of phone contacts through some kind of computer analysis.
"This has nothing to do with the Fourth Amendment. The case law couldn't be clearer. And those who demand judicial oversight do so not because they want or hope the courts will affirm these intelligence-gathering methods, but because they oppose them and hope some activist court will kill them.
"Disarming as this enemy plots against us, even where the Constitution doesn't require it, is a perverse view of civil liberties. It's not the lawyers in the courtrooms who are challenging or will challenge these basic intelligence gathering practices who are protecting our civil liberties. It's the soldiers, spies, intelligence analysts, and law enforcement, led by a president with the guts to face down this enemy, who are doing so.
"Is not life the most important of civil liberties? These intelligence programs are trashed without any curiosity as to whether they've prevented any attacks and saved any lives. The hostile responses are largely knee-jerk and lack any kind of context. The arguments are abstract and descend into fear-mongering. While I'm all for philosophical debates, how about a little more reality when it comes to fighting and winning this war--a real war against a horrific enemy."
"We have the elements of a police-state here, and I'm not overstating it... [S]ome of my brothers and sisters in law enforcement, prosecutors, are saying, 'Look, look, this is permitted. We need to be able to go through and match--' Wait a minute. You don't throw a whole net on the entire country and everybody's phone numbers and check the duration and see if you can come up with some overlaps. That's not law enforcement! That’s not how national security work! I don't care what the hell the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we, the private citizen!"...a particularly delicious argument given that, during the Bush Jr. administration, Levin had argued that Americans don't even have a right to privacy:
"If you look in the Constitution, ...you will find no general 'right to privacy'... and for good reason: It's not there... [T]he right to privacy... has no constitutional basis and no tangible form."That's from Levin's book called "Men In Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America," which, among other things, makes the Orwellian argument that expanding liberty restricts Americans' "liberty"--the liberty to take away the liberty of other Americans.[7] This is one of Levin's long-running themes.
Levin poses as a great defender of freedom and insists that liberals should more properly be called "statists," but he's chronically inconsistent, often completely incoherent, when it comes to matters of freedom and tyranny. A basic fact: Levin has rarely met a dictatorial policy serving an end he supports that he's unwilling to endorse. Conor Friedersdorf in Forbes writes about how Levin insists liberals see rightists as enemies of the state yet very cavalierly endorses the extrajudicial murder, by the government, of American citizens merely because the government has designated them "enemies of the state"--the most extreme extra-constitutional power that could ever be asserted. For months now, Levin has been urging Trump to use the Insurrection Act to "put down" Black Lives Matter demonstrators protesting against policy brutality, describing them as "traitors" and "the enemy."[8]
Levin is big on calls to "put down" those with whom he disagrees. February 2019:
"[T]he Democrat Party... needs to be slammed down, and it needs to be slammed down now. The next Democrat president of the United States must be impeached... [I]t's the only way we're going to stop them."Indeed, Levin--again, in common with contemporary right-wing commentators--describes Democrats as an existential threat to America and Americans. June 2017:
"The enemy is on the move, Islamo-Nazis are on the move, the Russians are on the move, the Chinese are on the move, the North Koreans are on the move, the Iranians are on the move, and the Democrats are on the move. Let me ask you this question: Who threatens our country more? Who threatens our country more? The Iranians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, or the Democrats?"In September, Levin spun a ludicrous conspiracy theory wherein the inept Democratic congressional leadership is actually made up of shrewd schemers who were "pushing the mail-in vote" not as a public safety concern in the face of the covid-19 pandemic but so they can "burn down this country like they've burned down their cities."
"It just shows you how diabolical and how evil the Democratic party is. And how diabolical and evil their media are."Uh huh. When, at a presidential debate, Trump (for the umpteenth time) refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power--one of the bedrocks of a liberal democracy--Levin treated this as if it was heroic, describing the electoral process as corrupt--corrupted by Democrats, of course--and any commitment to abide by its outcome as "surrender."[9]
Recently, Levin has been insisting that "the left" has been waging a war on the constitution. On last night's edition of "Life, Liberty & Levin,"[10] he returned to this:
"I see a war on the constitution by the left and the Democrat party. Before this election, they were talking about stacking the Supreme Court and packing the Supreme Court. Before this election, they were talking about adding 4 Democrats forevermore in the United States Senate. They were talking about eliminating the filibuster rule, which isn't in the constitution but certainly is compatible with the notion of the great deliberative body. They've talked about war on the electoral college."
The reference to "adding 4 Democrats forevermore" to the Senate actually refers to extending statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. Now, boys and girls, what do all of these things have in common? Constitutionally, congress controls the number of justices on the Supreme Court (Article III, section 1). New states can be admitted to the U.S. under the New States Clause (Article IV, section 3). The filibuster was established via the Senate's constitutional power to establish its own rules (from Article I, section 5) and can be changed or eliminated the same way. Article II, section 1 establishes the electoral college; Article V establishes the process for amending the constitution by which changes to the college can be made.
The short version: What "constitutional scholar" Mark Levin collectively characterizes as a "war on the constitution" by "the left" is, in fact, nothing more than some people arguing in favor of a series of reforms via constitutionally-established processes. Somehow, this constitutes a "war on the constitution" but--because it's never enough, is it?--Levin's own argument for opening up the entire document to revision via a constitutional convention--offered in his 2013 book "The Liberty Amendments"--does not.
--j.
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[1] Levin has also called comedian Jon Stewart a self-hating Jew for Stewart's defense of human rights.
[2] In 2019, Levin repeatedly called Pelosi a "fascist" based on her decision to revoke an invitation to "President" Trump to deliver the State of the Union Address while Trump kept the government shut down, "accusing her of 'destroying' a 'long-held tradition' because she doesn't
want Trump to give the speech with 'pomp and circumstance.'" As Media Matters reports, Levin was singing a very different tune in 2014, when he urged Republicans to "boycott [Obama's] State of the Union... so half of the House floor,
because that's where they meet, is empty."
[3] During the 2016 primaries, Levin was a NeverTrumper, but once Trump became the Republican nominee, he said he would be voting for Trump and very quickly became one of Trump's most sycophantish media supporters, which he has remained to this day.
[4] Levin can be very on-the-nose with this sometimes; he's repeatedly referred to Nancy Pelosi as "the Pelosi cancer," press outlet Mediaite as "another cancer," and "statism"--a word Levin says is the accurate description of all of modern liberalism--as "the cancer of statism."
[5] Like so much of what he says, Levin's "commentary" on socialism is a direct lift from no less than the Third Reich. Compare the above to Adolf Hitler, who, in "Mein Kampf," explained that "the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated." He called for "the destruction of Marxism in all its shapes and forms," a policy he implemented when he rose to power.
[6] Levin's National Review blog is long-gone but there's an archived copy of this here.
[7] Of that particular book, Dahlia Lighwick, writing in Slate, notes that "no serious scholar of the court or the Constitution, on the ideological left or right, is going to waste their time engaging Levin's arguments once they've read this book."
[8] Levin follows the rest of right-wing media is falsely portraying overwhelmingly peaceful protests against police brutality as nothing but a bunch of rioting and looting. Then, he says things like this:
"It's the Democrats, it's the Marxists, it's Black Lives Matter, antifa. They are the ones that have been rioting, looting, burning with the support of the Democrat Party... America hates the Klan and the neo-Nazis, and America has to learn to hate Black Lives Matter and antifa with the same amount of resolve because all these extremist organizations hate the country and are trying to destroy us from within."
And urges vigorous government action to back up that hate.
[9] Levin's Trump sycophancy arguably doesn't reach the creepy level achieved by his reactionary contemporaries Sean Hannity or, particularly, Lou Dobbs but it's a contender. In October 2019, he had this to say about Trump: "I will say this about our president: while he's been president, there hasn't even been a hint of scandal. Not a hint." In reality, of course, Trump's presidency has been nothing but an extended scandal, one of the most corrupt the U.S. has ever seen. This author wrote a book-length treatment on the subject.
[10] In that same episode, Levin complains that states continue to count the vote in the presidential election, arguing that doing so creates chaos and uncertainty. "They're still counting votes now. They're still counting votes now because chaos seems to be the objective. The more chaos you can create, the more uncertainty you can create."
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UPDATE (18 Nov., 2020) - In every previous presidential contest for decades, the winner of the election is informally dubbed the president-elect until inauguration but when Trump lost, right-wing figures took this tradition, one that predates most of them and has never been treated as in any way controversial, and tried to turn it into some kind of unique outrage, another example of the oppression to which rightists are subjected. Levin has been one of them, fuming at the media for "claiming Biden is president-elect when not a single state has certified electors." Levin has never lived through a presidential election in which this didn't happen but when it happened after this one, he tweeted the press was "ignoring the Constitution" by granting Biden the title.
On his 15 Nov. Fox show, Levin asserted that Joe Biden "is undermining our constitutional system and is sounding very much like a dictator." How did Biden do this? By saying he is president-elect after winning the election and, in fact, becoming president-elect. Like every one of his predecessors. Former president Barack Obama had appeared on 60 Minutes and criticized Trump for undermining democracy by refusing to concede the election after losing it. Levin fired back:
"Obama is undermining democracy, Biden is undermining democracy, their whole damn party is undermining democracy and it's about time the damn media in this country pay attention to what the hell going on."...which is a fascinating assertion, given that it's Levin himself who, since two days after the election, has been agitating for Republican legislators in swing-states to ignore the constitution, Supreme Court precedent and their states' own laws on the apportionment of presidential electors--the entire "constitutional system"--by simply throwing out the election results and declaring Trump the winner.
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