Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 2, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

54:40

Are Liberals Willing to Join Conservatives to Save the US? | Mark Levin | POLITICS | Rubin Report

Participants

Main voices

dave rubin

10:56

mark levin

42:47

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to get to that, but you bring up a very fascinating point to me.
		Your liberal friends.
		You know, your dyed-in-the-wool liberal or your mainstream liberal, they have made what we're dealing with possible.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Because they've never stood up against it.
		And now they're being threatened by it like everybody else.
		Some of them see it.
		Bill Maher and some of these other people.
		Naomi Wolf, although she's not a liberal, she's a radical.
		But nonetheless, they see it.
		Even Glenn Greenwald sees it.
		He's a leftist.
		People are saying, go, uh-oh.
		Yeah, uh-oh.
		You remember, Stalin went after Trotsky.
		These people are not nice.
		I mean, Mao wiped out all of his lieutenants.
		This is the way it goes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a lawyer, a best-selling author, and a broadcasting
		legend, Mark Levin.
		Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		David, it's a great honor to be with you.
		You know how much I admire you.
		Thanks for having me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm thrilled to have you here.
		What do you consider yourself first?
		Because you've written, what, like 800 best-selling books?
		I mean, New York Times, number one, they couldn't have been happy about that.
		I mean, what really are you sort of first?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		You know, my attitude about this is I use every platform I possibly can to advance the cause of liberty and constitutionalism and unalienable rights since I was a kid.
		So I moved into radio first, which I enjoy the most.
		I love to write because it really gives me time to think about things, you know, to really focus, think things through.
		It's not a fast-paced like radio and so forth.
		And, of course, television.
		I like to because a lot of people are very visual.
		Unfortunately, they have to look at this as punim, as we say.
		But nonetheless, I try to use all these formats to do exactly the same thing in a different way.
		And I think our country is in desperate need of as many Paul Revere's and Thomas Paine's as possible.
		So that's my attitude.
		I don't really know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, you are one of the Paul Reveres, and I wanna get into some of the stuff that you've been ahead on, because you've been kind of warning about what's happening forever.
		But let's just back up for a sec, because I realized this morning, as I was doing a little research, I actually don't know that much about your childhood.
		And I sense you strike me as sort of, you were conservative at five.
		Is that possible?
		Is that right?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, it started in a log cabin.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		With the guy behind you, I suspect.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		No, that's correct.
		Look, here's the thing.
		I never liked authority.
		It's a funny thing.
		I never liked authority.
		I didn't like classrooms.
		I didn't like how strict they were.
		I was beyond it.
		I was ready to do my own thing as a kid.
		I was ready to read my own books, check history.
		We didn't have the internet and so forth.
		And that's exactly what I did.
		And I didn't understand why I had to do stupid things, just because that was the regiment that I had.
		And so I think that had a sort of an intellectual or philosophical effect on me unwittingly.
		And as I got older, I really did distrust what people were telling me.
		Not that I was paranoid or anything.
		It's like I wanted to check it.
		I wanted to, I wanted to make sure I agreed with it.
		And sometimes I'd say, well, what is that all about?
		I don't agree with that.
		What about this?
		And my general philosophy is live and let live.
		That's pretty much my general philosophy and get out of my face.
		That's, that's, that's pretty much it.
		And, uh, it's gotten a little bit more complicated since then, but, um, I think I was a libertarian at a very young age and more of a libertarian conservative.
		And then I kind of coined this phrase or made it public again, which is constitutional conservative 20 years ago, I said, because I was referring to the constitution all the time.
		But yeah, we would, uh, around the dinner table, around the breakfast table, I have two brothers and my parents.
		We were very talkative.
		We would debate the issues.
		And I'll tell you something, Dave, none of us were liberals, even though we're all Jewish.
		And so none of us were liberals.
		My father, who passed away, my mother who passed away, my father told me he voted for Goldwater in 1964.
		Now, how many Jewish people do you know who voted for Goldwater in 1964?
		And I said to him, Dad, why did you do that?
		And he said, and I'll quote him, I knew all the bullshit they were saying about Goldwater couldn't be true.
		So I voted for him.
		And that was kind of my attitude at a young age.
		And, uh, and you know, and then you add meat to the bone.
		You start reading philosophy and history, which I, I can't tell you how many books I've read of, um, economics and that sort of thing.
		And you develop a, you know, a way of living and a way of thinking.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let's dive a little deeper on that, because you mentioned sort of libertarian to conservative to constitutional conservative.
		What was it?
		As you know, I've sort of brought the phrase classical liberal back, and that was what my book was about.
		And people always say to me, well, Dave, is there any really meaningful distinction between classical liberal and libertarian?
		So actually, let me start with that.
		Do you see any meaningful distinction, or have the labels and words all become sort of muddled in modern times?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, they can be.
		But they're in the same, they're in the right area.
		In other words, not right philosophically, in the correct area.
		You know, I've always... Libertarian, conservative, libertarian, conservative, conservative, libertarian.
		It's like Scalia and Thomas.
		They both wrote opinions.
		Sometimes they would agree, sometimes they would disagree.
		But the way they approach the issue is what is key.
		What is it that drives your thinking?
		What are your principles behind your thinking?
		And so I was once asked, I think it was by Ben, as a matter of fact, on his show, he said, when you interpret the Constitution, do you do it from a libertarian point of view or conservative point of view, or how do you approach it?
		I said, well, libertarianism and conservatism are philosophies.
		Interpreting the Constitution is interpreting the Constitution.
		That is, you're not supposed to bring a philosophy to it.
		You're supposed to try and discern what the framers meant and what the words meant at the time.
		So I don't get into this.
		Am I conservative, liberal, libertarian?
		When I interpret the Constitution, it's the Constitution.
		So why do I call myself a constitutional conservative?
		I have many libertarian beliefs.
		But I call myself a constitutional conservative because of the thinking and the arguments and so forth that people understand that went behind the Constitution itself.
		The debates over we don't want a mob, we don't want a monarchy, we don't want these things, we don't want direct democracy, we don't want factions.
		What do we want?
		We want a republic.
		And they developed the most fascinating, and I hope lasting, republic that man has ever created.
		So, are there differences?
		Well, of course there are differences.
		Libertarians fight with conservatives all the time.
		You know guys like Hayek and Mises, they had no stomach for conservatives.
		At least the Austrian school.
		On the other hand, Milton Friedman did.
		He's one of my great heroes.
		And so we're gonna argue over libertarian versus conservative.
		I'm fine.
		We're gonna argue over Americanism versus Marxism.
		That's a whole nother story.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think we're going to be okay on whatever the marginal libertarian conservative differences are, so let's put that aside.
		But you know, every way that you just sort of answered that question, what sort of sat beneath it was you have great reverence for the founding documents, for the founders, for our history, and it seems to me we live in a time Where that is just, I mean, you actually said hope.
		That was meaning that you hope that these things will still matter.
		But we, in essence, live in a time where we're erasing all of that at a rapidly increasing pace.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I'll get into this a little bit.
		I've been thinking about this too.
		We are, and why is that?
		Why is it that the world we're told in America now has begun 1619 and not 1776?
		Critical race theory, critical immigration theory, the attack on capitalism with the
		degrowth movement, the climate change movement, all these things, what are they?
		Why did they kind of just spring up in the last 20, 30 years, and especially our focus this year and last year?
		And the reason is, and I'm going to use the word, these are Marxist-based ideologies.
		If people understand Karl Marx, They understand his writings.
		They understand his background.
		I've studied him very very thoroughly for a project I'm working on.
		He was a journalist.
		People don't even know he was a journalist.
		He had many articles that appeared in the New York Sun.
		He was a classical liberal for a period of time.
		And then something happened.
		He saw things and he abandoned it.
		And then he developed his ideology really based on Rousseau and Hegel and those guys.
		And he just he just moved it towards materialism.
		And he just, um, he was an angry man.
		He was a poor man.
		He always relied on his lawyer father and his friend Engels to subsidize him.
		Um, and I think to my, and by the way, people don't realize for 30, 40 years after he died, nobody cared about Marx except American progressives who were fixated with him.
		Um, but all that said, I, uh, I'm of the attitude that with the early progressives, Dewey, Wilson, Crowley, all these guys and more, they said, basically, we need to change education in America.
		It's not enough to teach mathematics and history and English without a social construct, without an understanding and putting it in a cultural perspective.
		And that's what they did.
		They fundamentally altered public education, which became bigger and bigger.
		And then they altered colleges and universities.
		You know, back then, as I Recall about 6% of the population graduated from college.
		Today it's about 34, 35%.
		And so they felt as elites and so-called intellectuals, that is where they can make the biggest change.
		And they have.
		They have fundamentally altered the way at least half the country looks at this country.
		And as you know, Marx wanted a clean slate.
		So our history is to be attacked.
		Our history is to be degraded.
		Our history is to be rejected.
		So whereas somebody like me and you, we look at our history, and ancient history, and all history, in order to try and figure out what is mankind about?
		Where should we be?
		Are we doing the right things?
		Does this make sense?
		They don't.
		So Antifa, Black Lives Matter, leftist period, they attack American history, they reject what the framers did, I'm going on here a little bit, Dave, but you know it's interesting.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, I'm with you.
		Well, you're talking about the slow march through the institution.
		So what do you do then?
		So if we're at that strange place now and, you know, 35% of the kids that now go to college, so now you've got 35% as opposed to 6%, what do you say that was just a couple decades ago in essence?
		Well, that's an awful lot of brainwashed people coming out of these schools.
		What do you do in an age of social media and in an age of, you know, a culture war?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		We have to begin to use the left's tactics against the left.
		I believe this very strongly.
		I never used to believe this.
		I used to preach free market capitalist.
		I still believe in it.
		All these other things, and they're very, very important, but tactically, We're going to have to get active.
		We're going to have to do things we've never done before because Marxism is a constant revolution.
		Conservatism or constitutional conservatism is a stand in place.
		And so they're always on the move and we're always on defense if we're doing anything at all.
		I look at it with the Democrat and Republican party.
		It's not a precise parallel, but the Democrat party is always breaking windows.
		The Republican party is always sitting in rocking chairs, you know, just watching it.
		And so this has to change.
		Now I can't control the Republican party.
		Um, and I think that's why a lot of people like Trump because wittingly or not, he would break windows when they would break windows and wow, there's a guy finally who's, who's fighting for these things.
		But also, um, I think more and more of us in our individual lives are going to have to become activists.
		I don't mean violent activists, I mean activists.
		In everyday things that we do, where we choose to buy things, when we talk to neighbors, form groups to go to school boards, do all these sorts of things, start pressuring our legislatures, where we have friendly legislatures, to pass laws like they do in Florida to address big tech We need to be on offense.
		We need to bring litigation.
		We need to throw as much against them as they throw against us and do everything we possibly can.
		I mean, the nation was founded by men who took a very activist role in their lives.
		They were pushed to a point.
		And of course, the difference between the Marxists that we deal with now and us is they want to destroy our society.
		You know, that's interesting.
		The French Revolution, they wanted to destroy their society.
		The Russian Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, they all wanted to destroy their society.
		The American Revolution wanted to preserve our society and change the government.
		What's happening here is we're up against street Marxists or mobs or whatever you want to call them that want to destroy our society and are demeaning our society as the CRT folks, you know, we're White dominant society, so everything related to it is bigoted and racist, which is so absurd.
		And I just think we need to stand up and say enough.
		We need to push back.
		Everybody has a different role in this life.
		Some people are electricians, some are bus drivers, some do what we do and so forth.
		But all of us in some role in our life, whether it's our purchasing power, whether it's school board meetings, churches, synagogues, We've gotta speak up, we've gotta be heard, and we've gotta organize.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's what I keep telling people.
		Nobody's coming to save us except us.
		That really is it.
		How worried are you, though, that with, you mentioned big tech, that with the acceleration of information, that by the time, say, we get to the midterms, the amount of destruction that these guys will be able to do, whether it's packing the courts, changing the electoral college, Immigration, I mean, the litany of things that I know you're worried about, that it will be too late, that in some ways that the founding documents won't even be able to stand up to it because there is a wash coming that seems oddly unstoppable.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		It's a great point.
		A lot of the firewalls in the Constitution have been breached.
		It's been a long time coming.
		I've written about it over the course of 20 years or so.
		They've been breached by the courts, they've been breached.
		And so comity, You know, C-O-M-I-T-Y.
		That sort of thing used to exist, you know?
		You run an election, you lose, all right, I lost.
		Now there's another election coming.
		Now the game is, I lost an election, I never intend to lose an election again.
		And your question is, do we have time?
		I don't know.
		But we need to fight like hell.
		Because I can't, I don't know what's going to happen in two years, five years, in six years.
		I know what'll happen.
		If they win and we lose, it's going to be a totally different country and people are going to be sending their kids through indoctrination mills and all kinds of terrible things are going to happen in this country where people probably still don't believe it's possible.
		It's possible.
		It's happening.
		And that's one of the key things.
		People need to understand this isn't theory.
		This is reality.
		It is here and now.
		This is going on.
		This is repression that's taking place.
		People, it can't happen in America.
		It can happen anywhere.
		And we've had these firewalls in place.
		Many of them have been breached.
		Many of them are controlled by the wrong people.
		And so that's the reality.
		And we have to push back and do everything we possibly can.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is the fundamental problem that the firewalls only work if we can sort of agree that the rules are the rules, and now we're fighting something that doesn't agree that there are rules, or that the rules were set up by evil, patriarchal, racist, whatever you wanna call it?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		You hit the nail on the head.
		Freedom without virtue doesn't, you know, it's not freedom.
		And that was exactly what the founders said.
		You can't just have freedom.
		You have to have people who are going to follow the rules.
		You have to have people who are going to have integrity.
		You have to have people who don't want to burn down the place.
		You know, so you have an election, fair election.
		You win, you lose.
		Okay, next election.
		It's not, I'm going to change all the rules to make sure I win.
		And if you don't agree with me, you're a Jim Crow racist.
		So the Democrats have decided to take on the posture and the substance of the most radical elements within the party.
		And that's why you sit, you know, you watch this Chauvin case and you watch the riots and everything, and you watch either the silence of the Democrats or the celebratory tone of the Democrats.
		And even though Black Lives Matter and Antifa aren't official wings of the Democrat party, In many ways, they're the useful idiots of the Democrat Party and vice versa.
		They feed off of each other.
		The Democrats need to stir the pot.
		They want their base to be angry.
		They want their base to coalesce around them.
		They want to use the opportunity to change the country, whether it's the voting system, whether it's the immigration system, whatever it is.
		And that's exactly what they're doing.
		And so when you hear what Biden said a couple of days ago after the verdict, You know, this shows America's systemically racist.
		I'm going, who the hell are you talking to?
		What do you mean America's systemically racist?
		I'm not chauvin.
		I don't even know what the hell you're talking about.
		You don't even know what you're talking about.
		40 years ago, you were a white supremacist.
		Now, today, you're telling us we're all... He's a very evil man who's always been about Joe Biden and so forth.
		Then I watch Kamala Harris get out there and say the nation's systemically racist.
		I don't need to tell you, but to underscore the point, there are millions of people trying to get into this country.
		They're not coming from Sweden.
		They're not coming from Norway.
		They're coming from Central and South America.
		They're coming from Africa.
		They're coming from the Far East.
		They're coming from Asia.
		These are minorities.
		These are people of color.
		By the millions, they want to come into the United States because we're systemically racist?
		I mean, how absurd is this whole debate?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		"And Mark, none of them are leaving this country."
		It's a very confusing thing.
		Wait, let's back up to Biden for a second because I still have a couple friends who are liberals
		that will still talk to me, mostly privately.
		They won't talk to me publicly anymore.
		But a lot of them kept saying, "Don't worry, Dave," after the election.
		"Don't worry, Biden is the firewall."
		They didn't go crazy Bernie.
		They didn't go crazy Elizabeth Warren.
		Biden will stand up against this stuff.
		And now that Trump is gone, it will be easier for us good liberals to fight the wokesters.
		Well, in the few months since this has all happened, I have watched these people fold like a wet paper bag.
		Did you have any illusions that Biden might stand up to some of this stuff, or did you just fully believe that he was gonna go down this route no matter what?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wanna get to that, but you bring up a very fascinating point to me, your liberal friends.
		You know, your dyed-in-the-wool liberal, or your mainstream liberal, they have made what we're dealing with possible.
		Because they've never stood up against it.
		And now they're being threatened by it like everybody else.
		Some of them see it, Bill Maher and some of these other people, Naomi Wolf, although she's not a liberal, she's a radical, but nonetheless, they see it.
		Even Glenn Greenwald sees it, he's left with.
		People are saying, go, uh-oh.
		Yeah, uh-oh.
		You remember Stalin went after Trotsky.
		These people are not nice.
		I mean, Mao wiped out all of his lieutenants.
		This is the way it goes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, they're not just coming for Levin anymore.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Now they're looking at me, yeah.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		The French Revolution, Raspierre, he went after everybody and then he got the axe.
		So the revolution is a nasty piece of work.
		But we still don't have the liberals.
		They're either completely silent or they just think this is another cycle we're going through and so forth.
		We'll all come out of it just fine.
		We need the liberals.
		We need to unite.
		We need to have people who aren't them.
		The Marxists are trying to destroy this country.
		We may have Disputes over this little issue or that little issue, but if you love this country put the damn disputes aside We've got to unite against this they are attacking every aspect of the Bill of Rights our unalienable rights they are attacking businesses they're attacking Minorities they're attacking private property rights.
		They're attacking our free speech They're attacking freedom of assembly go down that list and it's happening very very fast as you point out as for Biden Wait, can we just stay on that for just one second?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because I'm fascinated by this.
		And as you know, I wrote a book defending liberalism, but do you think that there is a fundamental flaw in liberalism that has stopped these people from doing that?
		Because that's the uncomfortable conclusion that I've come to at this point.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		To me, the flaw is, look, what you did was very brave, but you can live with yourself.
		You said, you know what, I'm over here.
		But there's too much weird stuff going on over here.
		I don't agree with all this.
		It's too weak.
		We're losing this, we're losing that.
		I gotta move over to some extent with these other guys who get it.
		I don't have to agree with them on everything, but fundamentally, they're civil libertarians.
		I'm a civil libertarian.
		I believe in civil rights.
		I believe in individual liberty.
		That's what I believe in.
		The left believes in group this, group that.
		Even liberals.
		We don't even see the ACLU anywhere anymore.
		Where the hell is the ACLU?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They're in on this now.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's not that we don't see them, they're in on it, yeah.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		And that's the thing.
		So to me, what liberals, traditional liberals have done is they've made it easier for the hard left, the Marxist left.
		They've helped pave the way for them.
		And I think some of them don't know what to do about it.
		It's like, well, I don't really want to say that the 40 years I've lived, are flushed down the toilet.
		On the other hand, these other guys are kind of ugly over here.
		I don't know whether I want to join them, you know.
		And they're gonna get rolled over with the rest of us if they don't stand up.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's odd, I haven't found you people that scary since I've joined you.
		Nobody's that, they always warn me that Levin, Shapiro, Glenn Beck, these are scary people.
		Prager, very scary, and yet- We're very easy.
		Yeah.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		We really are.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, do you think that there is something connected to belief that plays a role in all of this?
		I've sensed that with my liberal friends that come from a more purely secular position on this, that their underbelly is just too soft.
		It's too sort of, we accept everything, so yeah, we'll kinda go down the road to hell with ya.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, you get it from faith.
		I get it from somewhere else.
		If you don't believe in existential truths, and if you don't believe in... Look, the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, is there a problem with the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments?
		I don't think so.
		Well, those are the fundamentals, really.
		When you write them down, that's the fundamental.
		You look at the Declaration of Independence, the reason why that document is so incredible, these men, they knew about Judeo-Christian history, Many of them were practicing Christians.
		These men knew all about the Enlightenment, the Reformation.
		They studied it.
		They studied Aristotle and Cicero and you name it.
		They knew.
		They were well-educated men.
		And they put together this Declaration of Independence.
		They put everything on the line.
		Everything on the line.
		So look at that Declaration of Independence.
		Abraham Lincoln cited the Declaration over and over and over again during the Civil War.
		And one of the things he said The country's founders who could write such a document and leave it to their progeny to fix this issue of slavery were magnificent men.
		And Abraham Lincoln did more for black people than any other human being ever in the United States.
		Ever.
		Ever.
		He loved this country.
		He embraced the Constitution.
		He was disgusted by Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in his ruling in the Dred Scott case.
		But he always defended the Constitution, defended the founders, making the point, we wouldn't even be here as a country, but for what these men did.
		Flaws and all.
		And they told us, we can't fix this issue of slavery, but our children and grandchildren are going to have to.
		Because endowed with what?
		Endowed with our rights, unalienable rights that applies to every single human being on the face of the earth.
		You know, when Jefferson originally drafted the Declaration, there were five drafts.
		He put a provision in there that the British were forcing slavery on the colony, which they were.
		They abolished slavery, but they're extremely active in the slave trade.
		They were making money off it.
		We had borders that were very porous.
		We couldn't really, and they kept moving slaves, selling slaves into the United States.
		And one of the things That Jefferson had said in there, even though he'd been a slave owner, he said this is one of the reasons.
		And some of the southern states blocked it.
		So, you know, something like that.
		They embraced the Declaration.
		They knew they couldn't resolve the slavery issue.
		They eventually did resolve the slavery issue.
		Like no other country on the face of the earth, no other country had a civil war over slavery.
		We did.
		And when you listen to people today, it's as if none of this ever happened.
		But what I was going to say is this about Biden real fast.
		We can come back.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Getting older, so my memory pops around.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're doing just fine.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're doing fine.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Biden has always been a nasty piece of work.
		When he came into the Senate, he coddled up to James Eastland and John Stennis, two old Southern racist segregationists.
		Eastland was even a plantation owner, who said the most horrific things about black people.
		Biden called it up to these guys.
		Biden opposed busing.
		A lot of people opposed busing, including black people who didn't want their kids bused 25 miles in each direction.
		But Biden's language was different.
		He used the language of the racist.
		He talked about he didn't want his kids going into these jungles and so forth.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The racial jungle, that's what he said.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		The racial jungle.
		He would say the kinds of things that the racists would say.
		And then later, he was tough on crime.
		You know, I was the author of the crime bill he used to say.
		Of course, he doesn't say it anymore.
		I don't have a big problem with that crime bill, by the way.
		Crime went way down, but that's a whole other story.
		Then he shifts his position because he sees that's not popular.
		And now, you know, he wants to be bigger than FDR and Obama and Johnson.
		And that's all he cares about.
		Biden is a very dumb guy.
		He's an egomaniac.
		He's always wanted to be bigger than really his capabilities.
		That's why he plagiarized as a young man.
		That's why he stole words from Robert Kennedy and Neil Connick when he was running.
		Back then, we actually had standards, so that knocked him out of the running for president.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, people don't know that he plagiarized, and that actually got him to step down from the Democratic primary.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's, I think, like, 88 or so.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Today, it would be like, who cares?
		So he's always been that way, but he's always been for Biden.
		And that's what you're seeing now.
		Biden didn't give any indication that he was going to be like to the left of Bernie Sanders.
		Every piece of radical legislation, radical executive order, radical policy that he can put in place, he's putting in place bar none.
		Bar none, I feel like we're getting hit in a thousand directions here with this guy.
		It's not really ideological.
		It is a personality flaw.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But do you think he's driving it at this point?
		That's the part that I can't figure out.
		It's like, I don't think he really believes in all of this stuff.
		You know, I also think he has cognitive problems and a whole slew of other things, but it's like, who, this is what everyone asks me all the time.
		Well, who's the driver of all of this radical leftist stuff?
		It's obviously not 47 years in government Biden.
		Is it, is it Obama?
		Like who's behind the thing, do you think at this point?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		You know what?
		I think it's all that.
		I think he's, look at his staff.
		Look at the people throughout the government.
		It's like pick the craziest bastard you possibly can for every one of these positions.
		You want a guy at the treasury overseeing the guns?
		Then pick the biggest anti-gun guy.
		You want somebody looking at civil rights?
		Well, pick a woman who hates white people and goes on and on about white people and so forth.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Mark, we got a gay guy doing transportation.
		Come on, that's qualification enough, isn't it?
		Come on.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Look, there's two departments they always give the guys they don't care about.
		Transportation and HUD.
		But here's the thing.
		I think he's told them who he wants to be and what he wants to do.
		I don't think he's there working in the weeds and all this stuff.
		I think they've given him this stuff and he's happy to sign it.
		I think he's there over legacy.
		He wants to create a legacy for himself.
		And he'll do almost anything to do it.
		And that's what he's doing.
		And he's also, by the way, we haven't touched on it, he's creating enormous dangers overseas.
		He's always been an incompetent.
		When it comes to that and other things, you know, he sat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, sat on the Judiciary Committee, two of the important committees, and he's been so wrong so often that I am very worried that before he goes, we're going to be in some kind of war, if not with China, with Russia.
		I think Iran's going to have nuclear warheads.
		I think this world's going to be an absolute disaster and mess because of him and because of the people he's appointed.
		So this is a very serious time.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Indeed it is.
		All right, let's shift.
		I could actually just do history, even getting away from politics, I could do history with you for hours, but let's- Happy to do it.
		Let's shift a little bit from some of this because I wanna talk about the big tech portion of all of this because you've been very outspoken, but not only outspoken, you actually put your money where your mouth is in that you are not on Twitter anymore.
		You actually tweeted out, I'll read it for everybody, we'll put the tweet up, on January 8th, You wrote, I have suspended my own Twitter account in protest against Twitter's fascism.
		I ask all my followers to join me now on Parler and Rumble.
		Obviously a couple of days later, Parler's servers were blown up.
		They are now back, at least on the App Store temporarily.
		But you're not happy about this.
		You are wary of centralized power, whether it comes from the government or from big tech.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		I left Facebook and I left Twitter.
		But I spent six weeks telling everybody on Facebook and Twitter, I'm leaving, the end of the year, here's where you can find me.
		So I wasn't foolish enough to cut my throat and to do Facebook and Twitter favors until I was ready to do what I wanted to do.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		So we have over five million followers on Parler now.
		We're starting to build up Rumble.
		We have, what, five, six hundred thousand over there.
		I believe in entrepreneurship.
		I thank goodness, thank God that we have these other platforms that are willing to compete.
		I am not going to participate in the fascism that is being demonstrated by these oligarchs.
		I'm just not going to do it.
		They started giving me the scarlet letter over and over and over again.
		I go, what are you doing?
		Well, this third party, well, they pick the third parties, their left wing third parties, they're not I said, you know what, I'm not going to participate in this.
		You're stealing the data from millions of people who follow me, and I'm telling millions of people to unfollow you.
		Now, some do and some don't, but they've come over to these other platforms.
		And I feel the position I'm in, I can help some of these other platforms.
		I'm not an investor in any of them, not that there'd be anything wrong with it, but I'm not.
		I tell my folks, look, and this is what I was talking about when we opened the show, you got to put your money where your mouth is.
		We can't just talk about these things.
		I'm not opposed to other people staying on there because they need them and they want them and they want to build up what they, everybody's, like I said, everybody has their own role.
		My role is, as I told you earlier, get the hell out of my face.
		You're going to, you're going to start giving me a scarlet letter every time you disagree with me.
		I'm done with you.
		It's that simple.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so what do you think the role of government is related to big tech?
		This is where the libertarian beliefs that I have have been really pushed to the end.
		You know, it always comes down to, okay, so build your own internet.
		And it's like, well, what should the government do?
		I mean, I don't think government regulators wandering into Google are gonna do anything.
		I've heard more liberty-minded people say, well, at the very least, break them up, use some antitrust.
		Generally, I don't think the force of government is gonna do much good at all.
		I mean, is there anything that you think can be done here?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		There's several things.
		I don't know how effective, but it's worth trying in my view, and I think they're principled things.
		Number one, in 1996, as part of the Communications Act legislation, they got a special privilege, which should be taken away.
		There's no reason why they should have immunity as a public platform.
		from lawsuits based on what other people post and based on what they post.
		Nobody else gets that except the media.
		And that was a perverse New York versus Sullivan decision in the 1960s.
		That's not in the constitution either.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you worried though, if you took 230 away from them, that in essence, they would just start censoring everybody because they would say, hey, whoa, we're suddenly liable for all this stuff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So now it's actually gonna increase censorship at some level.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		They'd also face 10,000 lawsuits, which have no hope of winning right now.
		So I think they'd have to say, you know what?
		Um, we either go out of business or we let everybody on there and that's their defense when they go to court.
		Your honor, we can't keep track of all this stuff because that's the thing.
		If you're going to act like you can, then you have responsibility on your hands.
		If you say to the court, We can't keep track of all this.
		We are in effect a public forum.
		And so we can't possibly be responsible for all these things.
		I think they'd have a better shot at it.
		My problem is this.
		It's not free market.
		Not only do they get this protection, they are an appendage of the Democrat Party.
		And so they've made this abundantly clear.
		How do we know?
		We know through their censorship who they support and who they don't.
		We know what Zuckerberg did with $400 million.
		To help the Democrats in Democrat areas of the country where they put money in, grants, gave them the front groups.
		The front groups work with the local governments to get out the vote.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Mark, they fortified the election.
		That's what they told us.
		This was to fortify it.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		They fortified their party.
		And to me, we can't pretend that's not happening.
		So much of our speech now has to be funneled through big tech.
		I mean, they invite us on these sites.
		Since 1996, people come on, they're friended, they're followed, they're stealing our data, they're making billions and billions of dollars from it, and they are controlling our speech.
		And they're controlling our speech because in 1996 they were given a pass.
		And here's the other thing, being a libertarian and all, there's a lot of things that could grow out of this that we can't possibly know or even imagine right now.
		So if they really want to be part of the marketplace, then they got to play with all the other boys and girls out there who don't have these protections.
		And then let's see how they do.
		And maybe they'll break up on their own.
		And maybe something will come and replace it.
		Right now it's an oligopoly with protection.
		So there's no way to know.
		So my attitude is this isn't an issue of free markets.
		I'm not trying to spin this.
		I've thought about it a lot.
		These people are denying us liberty.
		Who are these people?
		And why are they doing what they're doing?
		And so, when you politicize this thing, and you put ideology in this thing, and then you go around banning people and censoring people, and as I say, you know, putting a scarlet letter on these people, that's a whole different ballgame.
		If they were honest and fair about all these things, I could care less.
		But they're not.
		Brent Bozon and his group are keeping track of all these people who are being hammered.
		It's so obvious what's going on.
		So my attitude is, you got a special protection, remove it.
		Whatever happens, happens.
		Things can grow out of it.
		Entrepreneurs can develop out of it.
		And look, even Parler.
		They tried to destroy Parler.
		And they've even threatened them now.
		Apple says, you meet our standards or you're out of our store.
		So they're blackmailing them.
		I don't think we can have that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I'll give you another silver lining that I've been telling people about all this, which is that as these companies go further woke, go further left, they're bringing in these diversity and inclusion departments.
		And in essence, they're going to hire based on quotas as opposed to hiring the best engineers and the best managers.
		And thus that over time will also cause them to collapse.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		You know, uh, You would hope so, but that could be a long time from now.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		So you never know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I didn't say how fast, I just said... Yeah, right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's a little bit of a silver lining.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		You know what's interesting?
		They know more about us than we know about them.
		They know everything about us.
		They have access to everything we've ever written on their platforms.
		Access to anything we've ever purchased.
		They share the information with each other.
		They have third-party data collectors that do exactly the same thing.
		1996, nobody imagined such a thing.
		So it's a different entity now.
		And I'm not one of these who say, you know, we broke up Exxon, so we, or Standard Oil, so we had to break up these guys.
		I'm one of those who says if the antitrust laws apply, use them.
		If the states need to come up with laws like Ron DeSantis in Florida, federalism, use them.
		They've picked a fight with us.
		We didn't pick a fight with them.
		It's like the rest of these corporatists.
		We are just going about our business.
		They're running around putting labels on us because the Democrat Party wants them to put labels on us, and that's exactly what they're doing.
		They picked this fight.
		We didn't pick this fight.
		We got to fight back.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		When you see guys like Ron DeSantis do the, you know, big tech bill that he just signed or, you know, now he's signing this, I forget exactly what they're calling it, but this basically making a stronger distinction between protesting and rioting.
		He's doing a bunch of bills that I think, you know, for sane people sort of makes sense.
		That must sort of make you feel validated in, oh, federalism does kind of work.
		And in a weird way, the crazier that Biden and the federal government gets, it actually is bringing some of the states back to the roots and back to the way it was supposed to be.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly right.
		And you know, I'm one of the early advocates of convention of states.
		This is a movement to use article five of the constitution, the second amendment process to get our constitution back.
		The Constitution has been amended over and over and over again through the back door, through court decisions, through legislation, through regulations.
		It's being shredded.
		And, um, and that would include the Bill of Rights and separation of powers.
		These are our protections.
		And so I've been saying, I wrote a whole book on it, the Liberty Amendments.
		Originally I was against it.
		And then I said, wait a minute.
		As I study it more, the framers were for it.
		That's why it's in the Constitution.
		And the states signed off on it.
		That's why it's there.
		And so I've been arguing that we already live in a constitutional convention where the left controls what the Constitution says over and over again and is changing it.
		And I've heard a lot of, some objections to it where people say, well, if you have a convention, anything can happen.
		They don't understand the process.
		No, anything can happen.
		It's like, first of all, you have to have 34 states sign off on it, legislatures.
		That's not easy.
		We have 14 right now.
		Then you need 38 states to ratify.
		So it's not like somebody's going to sneak something through or anything like that, or you can have a rump convention.
		And not only that, under the rules, we've studied this, it has to be focused on a few issues.
		And the states and the state legislatures, not even the governor.
		Send the delegates.
		And that fire alarm was there and it was put there by George Mason two days before the end of the Constitutional Convention.
		He said, and I paraphrase but accurately, what do we do if Congress becomes oppressive?
		The only out for the states is a revolution.
		We've got to provide something.
		And so this was what was proposed.
		This state convention process.
		Madison was originally hostile to it.
		But then he embraced it.
		You know when he embraced it?
		He embraced it when states started to nullify laws.
		He embraced it when states were thinking of breaking off before they actually did.
		And he pointed to that.
		And he said, rather than destroy the Union, Look at this.
		We have Article 5.
		You guys, we can get back together.
		It's just the states having a meeting.
		We can get back together, have a discussion on what it is we want to change, rather than burning down the whole Republic.
		So in a letter in particular, he embraced what he had opposed as a way of trying to stave off the disintegration of the Union.
		So it's very important.
		I don't know how much luck we're going to have, but I told you before, every front, we got to confront our friends.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so it's interesting because we have these options in front of us to save some of this stuff, but you know, look, I'm here in LA, I'm in California, it is beyond imagination, governed the wrong way, and hopefully we're gonna recall Newsom, but knowing this state will bring in someone who's even worse.
		But what do you do in a case, because you said disintegration, which is the phrase our friend Ben Shapiro uses, what do you do in the case if, okay, California just keeps going off the deep end, keeps spending, keeps doing everything wrong, then the good people of Texas, the good people of Florida in particular, who vote properly, have balanced budgets, don't have income tax, make sensible laws related to policing, and all of the rest of the stuff, I could see them all becoming extremely resentful of having to bail out those loony Californians every now and again.
		I cannot believe this is the position I find myself in at this point, you know, relative to five years ago, but I get it now.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		The more the civil society collapses, the more the constitution frays.
		And so I worry about these things.
		I mean, The left is pushing so hard, their foot is so far down on the gas pedal.
		There's going to be a reaction one day.
		I don't know what it's going to be.
		I don't know how it's going to be.
		I'm sure it's not going to be pretty.
		But people are going to say, all right, the hell with this law-abiding stuff.
		The hell with this comedy stuff.
		The hell with the civil society.
		They're destroying my schools.
		They're destroying my kids' education.
		They're destroying my job with open borders.
		Representative government is a joke.
		They're taking half of my income.
		I've had enough.
		I don't know if that'll cause states to break away again.
		I don't know what the role of law enforcement will be in the military.
		I don't know.
		But I am deeply concerned that the Democrats have no idea how many fuses they're lighting with their official and unofficial relationship with these Marxist entities, including within their own ranks.
		It's very concerning.
		You're going to have the law of the jungle.
		You lose the civil society, that's it.
		You talk about California.
		You know, I lived in California very briefly.
		And the governor was Pete Wilson.
		And you had Duke Major.
		And of course you had Ronald Reagan.
		Those guys couldn't get elected today if their lives depended on it.
		I remember George H.W.
		Bush won California when he ran for president on Reagan's coattails.
		And I also remember, this isn't that long ago, and I also remember Uh, experts so-called saying it's going to be a long time until the Democrats can win back the presidency and they would show they can't win California.
		They can't win Texas.
		They can't win Florida.
		They can't win.
		So they can't win.
		So what are the Democrats do?
		Okay.
		We're going to open the spigot, no border.
		We're going to change.
		We're going to change this state and what Pelosi from San Francisco wants to do.
		Take California and apply it to the entirety of the rest of the state.
		That's where she gets her mindset.
		You know that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's literally what she's saying.
		You're not making that up.
		I mean, that's what she's telling us.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		And if they do that, it's over.
		We can't win.
		You know what?
		One party rule is a very dangerous thing.
		It's a dangerous thing because people don't like it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So as somebody that's been doing this for a couple decades longer than I, how do you stay sane throughout this?
		Because I think we're also watching so many people become, and there's many reasons for it relative to lockdowns and losing their jobs and the general disarray and chaos, but just people are depressed.
		You know, when I do my daily show, I always make a point of trying to not be alarmist, not be hysterical, end on a positive note, tell them that this isn't everything, but in a weird way right now, it's starting to become everything, even though we don't want, you know, our salvation is not through politics, and yet it's at our doorstep.
		How have you managed to kind of not go bananas as someone that's been warning about it, and then it still keeps coming?
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		Well, some people think I have.
		Who knows?
		But that said, sometimes I gotta walk away from it.
		I'm almost done a book I'm writing on.
		It's very difficult.
		And I say to my wife, I can't, I gotta step away from this for two days.
		It's just too depressing.
		When I do my radio show, I wear my emotions on my sleeve.
		Yeah, why are you passionate?
		Why are you this?
		I said, well, because I don't work for NPR.
		I'm a real human being.
		You know, I do what I do.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		But it is difficult, but people need to find solace and family.
		They need to... One of the things I do, you know, they say misery loves company.
		It's so true.
		I think about those men who fought at the Revolutionary War and how they suffered.
		And I think about things that other human beings have gone through, like the Holocaust, or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, or D-Day, or the Korean War, which was a horrific war that never gets talked about, or the Vietnam War.
		I think about these things that other human beings have gone through, and they've gone through a hell of a lot more than I have.
		And so, That helps me mentally focus.
		It also helps me fight.
		Because I say, if these people are going to put their lives on the line, or if they're going to die, and their ancestors have to speak up on their behalf, then we have to do something more than whine and complain about these things.
		Look at this country.
		This is such a fabulous country.
		It's such a diverse country.
		You know, I've talked to so many people.
		I've interviewed so many people.
		And Shelby Steele in particular, something he said to me just rings every day so true.
		You're free.
		You are free.
		Do whatever you want to do with your life.
		Nobody's stopping you, except you.
		And you don't know what to do with your freedom.
		You're free.
		Now, in how many countries can you say that?
		Very few.
		And when you look at how we send our men and women off to war to defend people who look differently than us, who have different religions than us, in some hellhole somewhere, for whatever the reason is, and then you call Americans Systemically racist.
		This is blasphemy.
		This is appalling.
		When you look at this country, where we have the highest rate of interracial marriage in our history, over 20%, when you look at the diversity in our police forces, the diversity in our military, the diversity in our public figures and acting and so forth and so on, when you look at millionaires and billionaires of all colors, The idea that this country is systemically racist, we embrace a capitalist system.
		The capitalist system is incapable of racism.
		It's literally incapable of racism.
		I give this example.
		Let's say I go to a diner.
		Let's say somebody else goes to a diner, and they're a bigot.
		And they get eggs and bacon and milk and whatever it is.
		They don't know who owned that chicken farm.
		Put them in a black family.
		They don't know where that bacon came from.
		They don't know.
		So he may be a bigot, but capitalism is not bigoted.
		And capitalism and liberty go hand in hand.
		It doesn't mean you can't have capitalism and tyranny, like you have quasi-capitalism and heavy-handed tyranny in China.
		But for liberty, you have to have capitalism.
		And this is very, very important to understand.
		So when there's an attack on capitalism, it's really an attack on private property rights, liberty, Your intellectual and physical labor, it is an attack on you.
		So I look at this country, and I say to myself, these people who keep calling it systemically racist, there's really two kind of people who do this.
		It is the self-anointed or self-proclaimed elite, or it's the sort of Marxist ideologue in the street.
		The vast majority of people in this country, I don't care if they're black or they're brown, they're not pining for Marxism.
		They're not pining to eliminate the cops.
		They don't hate the United States military.
		So that is a positive.
		Just think that most of the people, we can get to them, we can explain things to them, I think most of them will still be with us.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think that was Mark Levin's opus.
		You took us out beautifully.
		I'm going to ask you to stick around.
		So we're going to do one thing for my Locals exclusive.
		I'm going to ask you what Mark Levin does for fun.
		So I'm going to let you think about that for about 10 seconds.
		I'm going to thank you for doing the show.
		We're going to link to all your, everyone knows where you are and who you are and all that good stuff, but we're going to link to all that below.
		And I just want to tell you, it's really an honor and a pleasure.
		And I hope we can do this in person one of these days.
mark levin ▲ ● ▼		That would be great.
		And the honor and pleasure is mine.
		You are absolutely terrific.
		Thank you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
		And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here.

▲