Will Mark Levin Denounce Trump for Refusing to Condemn Tucker Carlson?
Tone-policing has its limits.
After Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with the self-described white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes in late October, the neoconservative talk host Mark Levin insisted that everyone must now denounce Carlson and that anyone friendly with Carlson should also be denounced.
Levin doubled down on this during his recent speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference mere days after the Fuentes interview.
“I just know what you are,” Levin said, targeting Carlson. “You platform these people. You deceive your audience. You lie to your audience. You become a full-blown, out-of-the-closet Jew-hater. And if you’re a Jew-hater, you’re a Christian-hater. And they demonstrated that.”
Levin said Carlson must be canceled.
“Anyway, what do you mean we don’t cancel people?” Levin roared.
“We cancel stuff all the damn time,” he went on. “Hitler admirers, Stalin admirers, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters, you’re damn right we’re going to cancel them and deplatform them. It’s called the market system.”
No one should be friendly with Carlson, Levin insisted. He wasn’t alone in making such proclamations at this conference.
“They don’t have a lifetime job like a bureaucrat who we’re going to protect,” Levin observed. “And if they’re your friend, there’s something wrong with you.”
On Sunday, a reporter asked President Donald Trump about his old friend Tucker Carlson and the Fuentes interview.
“You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump said. The president said he “didn’t know much about” Fuentes but that, if Carlson wanted to interview him, “people have to decide. Ultimately people have to decide.”
Is Mark Levin going to follow through on his words and denounce Trump?
It’s a serious question. Because what Levin does, or more importantly, doesn’t do, is revealing.
Chances are low that Levin condemns the president. What the veteran radio host really wants is to cast Carlson out of MAGA so that neoconservatives like himself, along with hawkish Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, can hopefully have greater influence with Trump and help define, or redefine, his movement.
At bird’s-eye view, this is a showdown over who gets to define MAGA—Israel Firsters like Levin or America Firsters like Carlson —as much as any terrible things Fuentes has said.
That’s no dismissal, much less defense, of some of Fuentes’ genuinely hateful rhetoric. But there is a larger context here, especially regarding foreign policy, that cannot be ignored.
Prominent hawks didn’t try to talk Trump out of picking J.D. Vance for his vice president for nothing.
In fact, in his Republican Jewish Coalition speech, Levin also named-dropped top “America First” MAGA alumni Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as all being part of the same evil and antisemitic cabal he seems to believe Carlson leads.
Levin told the audience, “How are we going to attack the Mamdanis and the Talibs and the Omars and the Sanders and the rest of them when in our own house this poison is spreading? We’ve got to take care of business. We can fight the enemy on the other side.”
He continued wrapping himself in the flag: “But the problem is, the more daunting problem, the more complicated problem is when they’re in our house and they’re trying to take over our house and they’re burning down our house and they’re destroying America First and they’re destroying MAGA and they’re destroying the Republican Party, which means they’re destroying the country.”
“Either speak up and stand out, but don’t be a pretender,” Levin demanded.
Does Mark Levin believe the president is a pretender?
Trump said “people have to decide” what to think of Carlson’s interview, and some have decided that it really wasn’t what Levin and others portray.
When I watched it, I saw the most popular conservative figure outside of Trump having a discussion with a young man who had genuinely awful views who has amassed a large audience, primarily of other young men.
Carlson could have simply ignored him or screamed “antisemite!” as Fuentes’s audience continued to grow, but instead he did something different—something arguably better and perhaps even necessary.
As Carlson’s friend and journalist Megyn Kelly put it, “Tucker, I think, was trying to reach this young man as maybe only Tucker can. He’s got a very similar audience of young men to say, ‘We don’t do collectivism on the right. It’s evil. We don’t put whole groups of people into categories and then demonize them because we have a problem with one or two. It’s unholy.’”
Carlson told Fuentes that the notion of “collective guilt”—key to racism, antisemitism, and also anti-Palestinian bigotry—was inherently evil and un-Christian. President Ronald Reagan once said “we do not believe in collective guilt” at another controversial event at Germany’s Bitburg cemetery where Nazis were buried.
Nazis can’t hear this about collective guilt enough.
Kelly would add, “And if you watch that interview that he did with him, I personally am convinced it was about Tucker trying to reach Fuentes, not Tucker trying to launch Fuentes in a bigger and more profound way onto the national scale.”
That’s certainly what I saw. Kelly noted that Carlson treated his interviews with controversial macho-man Andrew Tate and Iran’s president in the same way, in his own style.
The independent journalist Glenn Greenwald had a similar take, “The claim that Tucker didn’t ‘push back’ on any of Fuentes’ views is the byproduct either of not having watched the interview and/or extreme dishonesty. Most of it was about their differing views and argumentation.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was also criticized for not denouncing Carlson. After Trump also refused to do so, he posted on X, “So will Trump also be denounced as a ‘coward’ and ‘woke right’ by all of the people who called me and Megyn Kelly that for refusing to disavow Tucker?”
It’s a good question—especially for Levin.
It should be noted that Levin himself recently revealed that Carlson had agreed to a debate with him on this subject at a future Turning Point USA event, the conservative youth group founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Levin refused and instead called Carlson a Nazi. Again.
Kirk was murdered by a suspect who reportedly thought the conservative activist was a hateful person. Before his death, Kirk was often called a Nazi by the left.
Levin now obviously calls Carlson a Nazi because Carlson met with a Nazi in the hopes of making that person less Nazi. Say that three times fast.
Maybe a debate really is what’s truly needed at this point.
Kelly thinks so. She also worries that Levin calling Carlson and others such extreme names is the most dangerous part of this, “I know Tucker and Ben [Shapiro] both. They are both under serious threats. To be honest, I am too. This is a very volatile time….”
“So just put a f***ing lid on it, f***ing Mark Levin,” Kelly said angrily. “Because I guarantee you. The wrong people listen to that and we could have another powder keg on our hands, and you don’t want that.”
She has a point. What was also going through the minds of the people eager to fire their weapons on Trump, considering the extreme names he has been called?
Kelly wasn’t done with Levin: “Just have a debate like a man. On principle. And why don’t you show up at the Turning Point event and debate him? Just debate him. That would be so good for this conservative movement you claim to love so much.”
It could be good for the conservative movement. To turn down the temperature. Debates and discussions can do that. Carlson seems to think so.
Levin apparently does not. He seems most interested in his neoconservative philosophy that had dominated the right for most of this century to still have legs after Donald Trump is gone. If that means calling other conservatives extreme names, he’s more than happy to do it.
Levin won’t denounce this president. Mark Levin needs Donald Trump.
The post Will Mark Levin Denounce Trump for Refusing to Condemn Tucker Carlson? appeared first on The American Conservative.
