“Liberty gives people who oppose liberty — evil people – the freedom to destroy it.”
That’s radio and Fox News host Mark Levin’s take on why free societies are attacked by those who, like leftist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, would take freedom away. Levin, while stuck in a hospital bed for two months after tearing his Achilles tendon clean through, says he had a lot of time to think about liberty. “I realized, well, liberty without rights means nothing. And rights without power mean nothing.” So, laid up in the hospital, he wrote another book.
Levin joins The Drill Down to talk with hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers. That book, “On Power,” just rocketed to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in its debut week.
“As an author myself, I can tell you that Mark is one of those people who actually writes his own books,” says Schweizer. “There are lots of celebrities out there that pawn it off on somebody else.”
He had two ideas for a book, on power and on drugs, Levin says. “But since I don’t take drugs, I decided on power. So, there you go.”
As Americans, we think of the Declaration of Independence as a statement about liberty and rights. Levin’s insight is that “what the revolution was really fought over was power. Who gets to make decisions about what?”
“The Founders fused Judeo-Christian ethics with the rationalism of the Enlightenment,” he says. He notes that the Federalist Papers frequently reference Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment political philosopher who is considered the source of the separation of powers theory that forms the Constitution’s checks and balances.
“So that’s what I was thinking about [in the hospital] when I tore my tendon 100%, was staring at the ceiling and I needed a wheelchair just to get to the restroom,” Levin quips.
Applying that to the latest political news of President Trump putting Washington, DC’s police under federal control, Schweizer asks Levin about how power flows, where the federal city is concerned. “Trump’s looking at this, saying ‘under federal law, I have the power for 30 days, (possibly longer) to control the police force there. I have the authority over the National Guard. I will back up the police force with the National Guard. We’re going to put an end to crime here.’”
“He has every right to do it,” Levin says. Congress has every right to do it, and they’ll decide who has the power to do what. But the DC government exists only because Congress allowed it to exist, not like the rest of the country, where it’s from the bottom up – the towns came first, then colonies, then the states that created the national government. The national government created the District of Columbia,” he says. “Positive and negative power.”
Trump’s wide use of executive orders has been challenged repeatedly in the courts, which Levin believes are out of control.
“You have a judiciary that is out of control, and a massive bureaucracy that is not in the Constitution, but which is basically a massive legislature except without people voting for it,” Levin says. “Then they tell the executive branch, ‘you have no authority over this branch that we created and stuck in the executive branch that’s making laws,’ no authority over the personnel, no authority over policy,’ which is what these judges did.”
Schweizer and Eggers ask how freedom gets misused when it has the power to take the freedom of others away. Levin echoes the late Justice Antonin Scalia and says the constitution written for Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union was wonderful, except that all the power to enforce its promises was held in one hand.
“You have a guy like Mamdani, who will destroy the city and destroy liberty by using the vote, little-d democracy, and liberty. This is the problem that folks like us and most of your viewers and listeners have, which is — we want liberty. We want ordered liberty. But how do we prevent evil people from taking advantage of it, expanding their liberty and their power by destroying ours? I tried to discuss this. It’s not usually mentioned, but I try to discuss this in the book.”
Asked about the move of the Democratic Party towards an open embrace of socialism, Levin reminds American voters to judge them not by what they say they will do, but by what happens every time around the world where they have been given power.
He also complimented the show’s hosts. “First of all, I’ve done a hundred interviews, and you guys are doing a great job, if I may say.”
For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.
Read the full article here