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July 29, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
29:16
“On Power”: A Blueprint for Liberty vs. Tyranny - July 29th, Hour 2
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Hour two, Sean Hannity.
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There's no doubt that the books, the great one my dear friend Mark Levin has written, are impactful, influential, and I would even argue many of them will be studied for decades to come.
I don't care if it's men in black talking about unelected judges that will legislate from the bench.
We see weaponization and what Democrats can't get done electorally, what they can't get done legislatively.
They race to liberal courts.
They go judge shopping.
We've talked often about that.
Another one, Liberty and Tyranny, would be one that I think will be read decades and decades from now.
Ameritopia would be another one.
American Marxism would be another one.
The Democrat Party hates America would be another one.
And the one that Mark has just written, it's out today for the first day in bookstores all around the country, is right up there with all of his top best-selling books.
And it's called On Power.
And I decided I didn't want to race through this book because it is so relevant.
It's ripped right out of the headlines that we're living today.
All of these new developments through declassification by Tulsi Gabbard, more to come with John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, about what the Democrats have done, how they have abused Donald Trump and abused the people that voted for him, how they orchestrated a phony Russia hoax, how they had validated the authenticity of a very real laptop.
Nobody ever examined it.
They pre-bunked it for an entire summer, meeting weekly with big tech companies, knowing the story would drop because they knew Rudy Giuliani's then attorney, Bob Costello, had a copy of it.
It does drop.
They won't confirm to big media that reached out to them, social media companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey at the time running Twitter, who said, is this the Russian disinformation about Hunter and Joe you were warning us about?
Or is this real?
Meaning Hunter's laptop, they had validated its authenticity in March of 2020.
That would be putting cinder blocks on the scales of an election.
So his new book is called On Power, and it is ripped from today's headlines.
Great one.
Welcome to the program.
It's been a while.
How am I?
Thank me.
God bless us.
Well, you look great.
On radio guy to the other.
How can I look great on radio?
It was great to see you.
It was fun over the weekend because I got to interview you on your show, Life, Liberty, and Levin.
I got a lot of positive comments on it.
I haven't seen the ratings yet.
I hope they were through the roof.
Yes.
The issue of power, I mean, we see a power struggle, both the Republican Party, Democratic Party, they have coalitions.
But we see within the Democratic Party that the radicals in that party have taken over.
Jasmine Crockett, the squad, Grandpa Bernie, AOC, Pocahontas, now this guy, Momnani.
And what you write about power, and when you apply it to the headlines of today, you said throughout history, from ancient civilizations to modern Western republics, power has been used to both oppress and to liberate, to reward and to exploit, to destroy and to build.
Monarchs, dictators, elites who impose tyranny seek to consolidate power, stripping freedom from individuals to maintain control over societies.
They use force and deception to ensure that their rules remain unchallenged, claiming to act in the name of the common good while stripping individuals of their freedoms.
That is a powerful paragraph.
Let's start there.
Well, you know, Sean, I take this word power and I divide it into positive power, and you're talking there about negative power because I got to thinking, what was the Revolutionary War really about?
You know, we talk about it very superficially, the Declaration.
What does that really mean?
We talk about that at a very surface level.
And I got to thinking, it's overpower because liberty without rights is nothing.
Rights without power don't exist.
And so God is the sovereign.
God gives his children sovereignty over government, over society.
That's us, we the people.
And that's where our government comes from.
Our country comes from.
That's what makes it so unique, fused with the Enlightenment.
What's the Enlightenment?
That power needs to check power, that you need three branches of government.
Again, we don't want mobocracy, pure democracy, and we don't want dictatorships, centralized power.
And look at the beautiful Constitution, the Declaration of the Constitution.
You and I and our audiences are having to spend our lifetimes to defend it against what?
Against negative power, against individuals who reject all of this.
They reject the Enlightenment.
They reject the Judeo-Christian belief system.
That's what makes America unique, even from other Western democracies, certainly from radical Islam, certainly from communism.
Communism attacks the whole basis for the American founding.
It is incompatible.
Marxism, this guy, Mandami, all of them, Bernie Sanders, what they're preaching is incompatible with Americanism and our experiment.
Same with radical Islam, which believes in not freedom of speech and ideas.
They reject the Enlightenment.
They reject it all because that political Islam has never gone through the Reformation.
They reject the Enlightenment, and their scholars talk about destroying the West.
So they have fused.
And the Democrat Party represents this negative power.
Now, they're not yet, you know, genocidal in that sense.
So it's a soft negative power.
They believe in what I call authoritarian democracy.
We vote, but it has less and less meaning.
We have a democracy, really republic, but it has less and less meaning.
They spend their entire existence trying to get around the Constitution, trying to destroy its firewalls, trying to destroy our culture.
You and I, our listeners, we defend all these things.
So I got to thinking, Sean, let's figure out a better way to discuss this.
Let's get to the nub of the matter.
And the battle, the battle today of the people you mentioned and us, it's over power.
That's what it is.
And so I take that term and I try and explain it and unravel it.
We saw the worst of negative power, and then I'll get to positive power in a minute.
We can go back, for example, in the last century.
And I don't care if you're talking about Mao in China and Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Germany and Mussolini and Tojo in Japan.
And you combine it all together.
And we lost well over 100 million human souls in the name of some ism.
I wrote about in Live Free or Die, socialism and its history of failure, and it's a little bit different because that last century, when you talk about death and destruction, that is the nth degree that it can go to.
And then you have different degrees of whatever manifestation, whatever name you put on it, socialism, statism, communism, Marxism.
It's all one and the same in many, many ways.
And what I was trying to point out is you always have these incredible promises that will never be fulfilled.
You end up poorer than when you started, and then you calculate how much of your freedom you gave up in the name of false security.
And when you get to the positive side of power, which you go into in great detail, you talk about our framers.
You talk about God, and you spend a lot of time on God in this book.
You talk about our Constitution and how they understood that strong societies are born not from force, by consent of the governed, and societies building these checks and balances, fair elections, and the preservation of individual rights, but they will only thrive in that environment.
So you have two competing forces here.
But let me be clear.
I'm not proselytizing in this book, as you know.
I'm not even good at it.
I'm explaining what the founders of our country did, what they believed.
Let me give an example because you make a very good point.
Faith, the Judeo-Christian belief system.
People don't have to be Jewish.
They don't have to be Christian.
They don't have to believe anything.
They could be agnostic.
They can be atheists.
They can be Buddhists and Hindus, Muslims, whatever you want.
But just understand, this country is tolerant.
This country embraces representative constitutional government.
This country believes in debate and free speech and freedom of association.
Why?
Because of the way it was created with the Judeo-Christian faith fused with the Enlightenment.
Who's the Enlightenment?
Locke, Montesquieu, people like that.
How do I know I'm right?
Because our founders said so.
Most of all, Jefferson said so.
And so the point is that that's the kind of society we created.
Marx attacked our Declaration of Independence.
He attacked individual free will.
He attacked the idea of unalienable rights.
Woodrow Wilson, the first of the intellectual progressives, I call them American Marxists, a president who's based on modern-day Democrat Party belief systems.
He rejected the Declaration of Independence.
He wrote such.
He was an American Marxist, progeny from Marx.
FDR rejected, rejected the Declaration of Independence.
FDR comes up with what he calls the second Bill of Rights.
What is it?
It's literally plagiarized from Stalin's 1936 Constitution.
And they have all these beautiful words and phrases, Sean, like this Mondami.
I'm concerned about affordability.
He's not concerned about affordability.
He supports open borders, massive debt, inflation, redistribution of wealth, which kills wealth.
He wants to take the means of production from whom?
The guy that owns the pizza parlor, the plumber who has a little business, the means of production, that's your labor, intellectual and physical.
It's a constant war against the sovereign as the individual, your own circle of liberty.
It's a constant war on we the people, we the sovereign, which is why they're endlessly centralizing government, coming up with governmental answers.
And the Democrat Party is a power-hungry party.
Look, and honestly, we're not power-hungry.
We fight for power, positive power.
They fight for negative power to lord over us, to have power over us.
This is the big distinction.
And I think it would help us if we make this distinction rather than talking platitudes to younger people and other people to explain.
Do you really want this kind of authority in your lives, telling you what to do day in and day out?
Now, some of our fellow citizens do.
Okay, that's their problem.
But I don't believe most Americans, or at least a majority of Americans, are ready to go in that direction if it's explained and debated properly.
All right, quick break.
We'll come right back more with the great one.
Mark Levin is brand new book out today, bookstores around the country.
It's called On Power, also on Amazon.com, Hannity.com.
You definitely want to get this book.
You want to read it.
Get a copy today.
And it goes deep and hard in the paint in all the underpinnings of every philosophical and political battle we have on a daily basis.
More with the great one on the other side as we continue.
All right, we continue now with Mark Levin.
The great one, his brand new book out today.
It's called On Power, Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores all around the country as of today.
Reagan famously said that freedom is but one generation away from extinction.
I think we came perilously close in this last election from maybe getting to the point of no return.
Maybe that's an overstatement, and maybe you disagree with that.
I don't know how we would have come back with four more years, maybe eight more years of open borders and the radical Green New Deal and taxpayer-funded sex change operations for illegals and convicts and feminine products and grade school boys' bathrooms and taxpayer-funded college education and the Green New Deal, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't know if these policies were implemented, how you ever unravel them.
And that's a great point.
You see, here's the deal.
Most of these autocracies, as you say, call whatever ism you want.
They don't rely on majority rule.
They rely on rule.
If they win one election, they seek to make permanent changes.
The Democrat Party has made what they hoped were permanent changes through immigration, lack of assimilation, to destroy the status quo, the American culture.
They don't even talk about the American culture unless they're attacking it.
1619 Project, attacking our history.
CRT, attacking our Bill of Rights.
The Constitution, they said, written by a bunch of white slave owners, while they wave around the Constitution, but they hate it because the Constitution believes in power-checking power.
That's the genius of the Constitution, right there.
Power-checking power, which is why I decided there's not enough focus on this issue of power.
The Democrat Party is power-hungry.
They want centralized power.
They want to lord over us.
They don't believe in the sovereignty of the individual.
They don't believe in the sovereignty of we the people.
So it's absolutely crucial that we start going on the offense rather than playing defense.
So this guy talks about affordability in New York.
Really?
So where has Marxism ever provided affordability?
Empty shelves, economic dislocation, impoverishment, but what else?
The growing iron fist of a police state that gets involved in every aspect of your life.
That's what he stands for.
That's what they stand for.
And that's what we need to explain.
All right, we'll take a break.
We'll come back more with the great one.
Mark Levin's brand new book is out.
It's called On Power, just released today.
It's in bookstores all around the country.
It's on Amazon.com.
It's on Hannity.com.
All right, we continue with the great one, as I call him, Mark Levin.
We're talking about his new book.
It's called On Power.
It's in bookstores all around the country starting today.
It's on Amazon.com.
We have it up on Hannity.com.
I want to drill a little deeper into a couple of chapters you have on this book.
And that's negative power and positive power.
I never thought we'd get to a point in a free America where the government would want to tell us what cars we can and cannot drive, but we were getting very close.
I never thought we'd get to a point that the government would tell us what stoves we can and cannot use.
Never thought they'd want to pick and choose our refrigerator and freezers and washers and dryers or tell us that we can't use plastic straws anymore.
They wanted us to use paper straws.
But that's negative power.
Define this, explain this, extrapolate on this.
Any government that has the power to tell you what kind of straw to use has enormous power way outside of our constitutional republic, that's for sure.
And that's the point, which is this.
Negative power is about coercion.
It's about conformity and uniformity.
It is about re-engineering human beings.
It is about rejiggering society.
It is about turning the culture inside out.
It is antithetical to everything that the revolution was fought for and our Constitution was ratified for.
This whole idea is imported from Europe.
It is a Marxist mindset, as Von Misi says, and I quote him in the book, a great Austrian economist, which is we all talk and sound like Marxists now.
You can even hear some of the populace hear, well, we ought to give this group this and this group that.
Okay, great.
But what is that?
It's not liberty.
It's redistribution of wealth by force.
Now, there needs to be some of it.
There needs to be some taxation.
There needs to be some level of a centralized government.
But positive power embraces that kind of power for the purpose of promoting what?
A civil society.
What do the Democrats want to do?
They seek to destroy the civil society.
What do Marxists seek to do?
Destroy the civil society.
What do these fundamentalist Islamists seek to do?
Destroy the civil society.
The French Revolution, about the same time as the American Revolution, was a war on society.
The American Revolution was never a war on society.
It was a war on a far-off monarchy that would not allow representative government.
Representative, concentral government by the people, the sovereign, we, we have unalienable rights, we have free will.
That's the point of the Declaration.
That's the point of the founding.
And yet, at every turn, whether it is Marxism or Islamism, or frankly, the Democrat Party, what I call soft negative power, they are trying to seize from us our God-given liberty and rights.
They're trying to seize from us the American experiment.
And what I'm saying is we need to start explaining this as a battle over power.
The Democrat Party takes its identity, sadly enough, but true, from the Communist Party in a soft negative power way.
They are about empowering the Democrat Party at all costs, and it has a poisonous cancer effect.
Let me give you an example.
Wokeism.
What is wokeism?
Wokeism is basically a communist construct.
What is it?
We are going to impose new words on you.
We're going to take old words and redefine them.
We're going to take the nuclear family and destroy it.
We're going to take science and pretend it's science when it's not science.
We're going to do all these things.
Why?
For thought control, for conformity.
We don't want the sharing of knowledge.
We don't want the sharing of information.
We don't want a healthy republic.
We want a thought-controlled republic of sorts in which we impose our views through propaganda and so forth.
It is about controlling your mind, controlling the people.
Look what happened during the pandemic.
How quickly the Democrat cities and Democrat governors kicked into action.
Immediately, your liberty was attacked.
Immediately, your mobility was attacked.
Immediately, everything the nation was found on became subject to government rule.
And that's exactly what the Democrats believe in.
Just listen to how they speak.
And so this battle for the future needs to be properly defined.
We need to go on offense.
This is a struggle over power.
Ours as individual, ours as the sovereign people, versus them who wants to lord over us.
Explain and contrast it to positive power.
You spend a lot of time on that.
Well, positive power is this.
Look at the Bill of Rights.
That's positive power.
Why?
It protects the individual.
Those 10 amendments to the Constitution are all about protecting the individual.
All of them.
You have due process rights.
You have to get warrants.
You have the right to bear arms.
You have a right to exercise religion, but nobody has a right to impose the religion on you.
You have a right to free speech and freedom of association and so forth and so on.
The government can't impose outrageous fines on you, outrageous jail terms on you.
The Ninth Amendment really, to me, is an embodiment of the Declaration, Individual Liberty.
The 10th Amendment says, hey, power has to check power.
We are not creating an all-powerful centralized government.
In fact, we're creating a centralized government powerful enough to actually do things, but not to devour the society, to devour the society.
Negative power is about devouring the society through government, through a relative handful of individuals, masterminds of the ruling class.
This is why if you listen carefully to Bernie Sanders, he goes on and on about eliminating billionaires, eliminating this, get rid of capitalism, because all of that challenges them.
As an example, billionaires.
What do we care if there's one billionaire or 100,000 billionaires?
How does that affect you and me, Mr. and Mrs. America?
Not in the least.
We live better today, whether you're a plumber, electrician, a doctor, a cop, a firefighter, than any king and queen lived 100 years ago.
We have more access to more food, to housing, to transportation, to more than any king or queen could have dreamed.
Or, for that matter, Mao or Stalin or any of the rest of them.
Why?
Because of positive power, because of the emphasis on the individual, because of the emphasis on we, the people, the sovereign.
Communism or Marxism, radical Islamism, economic socialism are completely incompatible with the sovereignty of the individual and the sovereignty of the people.
So this is why I say we need to make this a battle, a tug of war over power.
We need to go on offense.
When some jerk who's 33 years old, who has this massive wedding in Uganda, but comes back here and preaches Marxism and Islamism and anti-Semitism, that guy needs to be confronted.
It's not enough to expose his hypocrisy.
It's not enough to say, oh, he'll chase out business.
He'll do all those things.
But people need to understand.
Mr. and Mrs. America need to understand that he's at war with you.
He wants to steal from you your God-given rights, your ability to improve your lot in life, your ability to live the lifestyle you want to live.
And he, some 33-year-old know-nothing, like Castro, who was a 29-year-old know-nothing.
They wish to impose their will on you.
And one of the things in the book I talk about that I hope we'll get to is the use of language.
The use of language.
Yes, sir.
Because you have a whole chapter on language, and that's what it's called on language.
You know, many years ago, Mark, I read, it was sort of like a pamphlet, but it was fairly comprehensive, and it was a synthesis of Russian mind control techniques.
And the way you express it in the book is that there is a power of language and a power over language.
And you said for the tyrant, positive speech in the form of free speech is the gravest threat.
And then you said, conversely, and to underscore the point, free speech is requisite to all other freedoms.
And language control is mind or thought control.
If you look at the foundational aspects of wokeism or groupthink, isn't it all rooted in this battle over language?
And it really is a battle over language.
100%.
You look in all these.
Well, look, look at the Democrats.
The whole wokeism idea, as I mentioned, is a way to control communication.
Look, the way you improve a society is if free people are communicating with each other, sharing their knowledge, sharing policy ideas, sharing their thoughts, sharing their experiences.
Okay, great.
What do you need for that?
You need free speech.
You need these channels of free speech.
And you need it especially when the nation is challenged, like during COVID or whatever.
What did the Democrats do?
What did Biden do?
They shut it down as fast as they could.
Why?
As we now know, and as many of us knew before, control, control.
It's interesting.
I went back and looked at Liberty and Tyrion and I said, often situations like that pandemic, even though the pandemic hadn't happened, are used for the government to seize power.
And what did they do?
They seized power.
From whom?
From the sovereign, from the people, from the individual, who they said couldn't make decisions on their own.
So they've elected politicians who have exactly no experience in science, no experience of any kind in anything for the most part.
Many of them have been lawyers.
Many of them are very wealthy people, but they don't know anything about anything.
And they decide we're going to seize control.
We're going to make this an issue.
We're going to determine what stores will be open, whether churches and synagogues can be open, whether you can go in public parks.
That was frightening.
That is a lesson to us.
And again, it's a reminder.
What is this battle over?
Our power versus their power.
The Democrat Party has thrown in with the authoritarians.
The Democrat Party is about authoritarianism.
And the people running against Mandami and the rest, this is what they need to explain.
Hello, this guy is a wannabe Marxist dictator.
This guy is an authoritarian.
This guy's trying to steal your liberty.
What do we fight wars for?
What do our men go into war for carrying the American flag?
Redistribution of wealth?
The control of the means of production by the government?
No, no.
We fight for our system of government.
We fight for our sovereignty.
We fight for our liberty.
That's what we fight wars over, not what the Democrat Party is trying to transition this nation into.
The Democrat Party is the American Marxist Party, is the radical Islamist party.
It is not the party of the individual and prosperity and success and merit.
All right, quick break right back.
We'll continue more with the great one, Mark Levin.
His brand new book is out on power.
It's on Amazon.com, Hannity.com.
And as of today, bookstores all around the country.
Up next, our final roundup and information overload hour.
All right, we continue with the great one, Mark Levin.
We're talking about his brand new book just released today in bookstores around the country.
It's called On Power.
You know, when you look at individual rights, I mean, what it really comes down to is are Americans are they willing to embrace freedom?
And with freedom comes responsibility, and with freedom comes choice, and with choice comes consequences for one's choices in life.
And to me, it really all comes down to the individual and the types of decisions they all make in their lives and whether or not they live under a governmental system that allows that choice.
Our governmental system on paper allows that choice.
Although you do have, from time to time, politicians pop up that want to even control the means of production, like in the case of Mamdani, and doesn't even want civil society by defunding and dismantling the police and no bail laws and replacing police with social workers and everything in between.
Oh, and taxing rich, wider neighborhoods more.
We have about a minute left, Mark.
We're exactly right.
And people need to ask themselves, why in the hell would I surrender my personal liberty, my family's liberty, my choices, my hard work?
Why would I surrender it to some punk politician who's running around and making these obtuse promises?
You need to compare something with something.
What they do on the left, what the Marxists do and so forth, is they make impracticable and impossible promises.
Compare something to something.
Well, great one, another masterpiece.
It's called On Power, The Great One, Mark Levin, in bookstores as of this very day.
You can stop by any bookstore around the country.
Also, if you want, you can get it on Amazon.com.
We have a link on Hannity.com.
And, of course, another number one bestseller, guaranteed.
Great one, Mark Levin.
This is right up there with all your great books.
And I'm certain that these books will be studied likely decades and decades from now.
We appreciate your time, sir.
No, I appreciate you greatly.
You're a wonderful, wonderful friend and broadcaster.
And I really hope people will read this and share it with their kids so we can make sure that we confront this enemy properly.
God bless you, my friend.
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