Mark Levin

Mark Reed Levin, one of three boys, was born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family,[12] and grew up in Erdenheim as well as Elkins Park. His father, Jack E. Levin (1925–2018), was the author of several books.[13] He graduated from Cheltenham High School after three years in 1974.[14][15] Skipping his senior year of high school, Levin enrolled at Temple University Ambler and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Political Science in 1977 at age 19.[16][15] Levin won election to the Cheltenham school board in 1977 on a platform of reducing property taxes.[15] In 1980, Levin earned a J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law.[17]

Levin worked for Texas Instruments after law school.[15] Beginning in 1981, Levin served as an adviser to several members of President Ronald Reagan's cabinet. Levin began at ACTION, the federal agency that oversaw VISTA and other volunteer agencies, before serving as deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education and deputy solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior.[18][19][20] He eventually became the associate director of presidential personnel and ultimately chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese.[18]

After leaving the Reagan administration, Levin practiced law in the private sector. In 1991, Levin joined public interest law firm Landmark Legal Foundation, which specializes in constitutional law, advocating for free enterprise, and limiting governmental power.[21][22][23][24] At Landmark, Levin served as director of legal policy and the foundation's Washington-based Center for Civil Rights before becoming president in 1997.[20][25][18] Under Levin's presidency, Landmark Legal filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in 2000 alleging that the National Education Association, the largest teachers' union in the U.S., did not disclose spending on political activity in Internal Revenue Service documentation.[26] Landmark Legal also filed similar complaints with the United States Department of Labor in 2002 regarding NEA and political activity; by 2006, the NEA and smaller American Federation of Teachers had filed new documents with the Labor Department revealing over $100 million combined in political action spending.[27]

Following Freedom of Information Act requests in August 2012 of documents that would show if Environmental Protection Agency officials sought to delay regulations until after the 2012 presidential election, federal judge Royce Lamberth ruled in 2015 that although Landmark Legal did not establish that the EPA acted in bad faith, the EPA either carelessly or intentionally neglected Landmark's FOIA request.[28] Lamberth previously ruled in 2013 that the EPA might have attempted to evade Landmark's FOIA request.[29]

In 2001 the American Conservative Union awarded Levin its Ronald Reagan Award for his work with Landmark Legal.[30][31] Politico reported in 2014 that Levin received a salary of more than $300,000 per year as president of the non-profit Landmark Legal Foundation, whose donors include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and ExxonMobil.[32] In 2018, Levin stepped down as president of Landmark Legal but remained on its board of directors.[33]

Levin speaks at the 2011 Defending the American Dream Conference hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

Levin began his broadcasting career as a guest on conservative talk radio programs. For many years, he was a frequent contributor of legal opinions to The Rush Limbaugh Show, where Limbaugh referred to him on-air as "F. Lee Levin",[34] a tongue-in-cheek reference to the defense attorney F. Lee Bailey. He was also a contributor to The Sean Hannity Show and eventually got a radio slot of his own on WABC, initially on Sundays beginning in 2002, then in the timeslot following Hannity's program in 2003. Cumulus Media Networks began syndicating The Mark Levin Show nationally in 2006. Hannity nicknamed Mark Levin "The Great One."[19][35][36]

Levin has participated in Freedom Concerts, an annual benefit concert to aid families of fallen soldiers, and uses his radio program to promote aid to military families.[37] Levin is also involved with Move America Forward, a charity that sends care packages to soldiers serving overseas.[38]

On February 11, 2016, Levin signed a ten-year contract extension with Westwood One, which will take his show through 2025, its 19th year.[39]

On November 16, 2018, he was inducted to the National Radio Hall of Fame.[40]

Since 2014, Levin has been the founding editor-in-chief of Conservative Review, a multi-platform online television network that later merged with Glenn Beck's terrestrial network TheBlaze in 2018 to form Blaze Media. Programs airing on the network include Levin, Roaming Millennial, Truth Be Told, Allie, In the Woods with Phil, Kibbe on Liberty, Louder with Crowder, America Bolling and more.

In November 2017, Fox News announced that it had signed Levin for a weekend show titled Life, Liberty & Levin to air on Sunday nights at 10:00 p.m. Eastern beginning in February 2018.[41] According to a pre-debut network news release, the program will explore "the fundamental values and principles undergirding American society, culture, politics, and current events, and their relevance to the nation's future and everyday lives of citizens."[42]

Levin authored the 2005 book Men In Black: How The Supreme Court Is Destroying America, in which he advanced his thesis that activist judges on the Supreme Court (from all parts of the political spectrum) have "legislated from the bench". Commentary magazine's Dan Seligman wrote that Levin asks readers "to identify with 'originalists' who look to the text of the Constitution and the intent of its framers, and to reject the 'activists' who construe the Constitution broadly and are more concerned with getting to their own 'desired outcomes'".[43] Slate magazine's Dahlia Lithwick wrote that "no serious scholar of the court or the Constitution, on the ideological left or right, is going to waste their time engaging Levin's arguments once they've read this book".[44]

Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish is a non-fiction work written by Levin in 2007 about his experience of rescuing a dog named Sprite from a local animal shelter.[45]

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto was released in 2009, and became a #1 New York Times best seller for eleven of twelve weeks,[46] as well as No. 1 on Nielsen BookScan and No. 2 on Amazon.com's list of bestselling books of 2009.[47] The book includes discussion of a variety of issues that, according to Levin, need to be addressed in the United States. In Liberty and Tyranny Levin repudiates the use of the term "progressive" to describe "modern Liberals" and instead argues a proper term should be "Statist". Liberty and Tyranny has sold over one million copies according to Threshold Editions, the book's publisher.[48] Andrew C. McCarthy, in The New Criterion, wrote, "Levin offers not so much a defense as a plan of attack" against "America's Leftist ascendancy".[49] Other reviewers critiqued the book as "analysis utterly useless in understanding more than half of the American political landscape" while opining that "Levin resorts to the same old misinformation to sell his brand of conservatism".[50][51]

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America was released in 2012. In Ameritopia, Levin discusses the origins and development of both the modern day conservative and liberal political philosophies, the latter of which he refers to as "statist", through the works of some of the leading figures in American history.[52][53] Included are commentaries on works by Plato, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville.[54] Conor Friedersdorf's review, published in The Atlantic, criticized the text's argument that statism is based on utopianism,[54] and Carlin Romano, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote that "Ameritopia is really Ameritastrophe. It's disastrously bad from beginning to end."[55]

The 2013 book The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic suggests eleven new Constitutional amendments. The book debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list.[56] Hans A. von Spakovsky of National Review Online called the book "required reading for conservative bloggers".[57] Ana Marie Cox, writing in The Guardian, said the book "contains some radical notions about a complete overhaul of the US constitution, but to debate the specifics of their merits is to ignore the larger insanity of the project" while noting "the ludicrousness of his specific 'fixes' and the near-impossibility of achieving them".[58] In The Washington Times, Tenth Amendment Center Executive Director Michael Lotfi criticized Levin's idea as "the bullet to a loaded revolver pointed at the Constitution".[59] Also in The Washington Times, Richard W. Rahn wrote, "If 'The Liberty Amendments' can help foster a national debate about which corrective actions, including constitutional amendments, are needed to increase liberty and prosperity, Mr. Levin will have performed a great national service".[60] Hoover Institution fellow David Davenport wrote in Forbes that Levin's book used "weak arguments".[61][62]

Levin authored Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future in 2015,[63] and Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism in 2017.

Levin and Ted Cruz at the 2017 CPAC conference

Levin's Unfreedom of the Press, which was released on May 21, 2019, became the number one best-selling book on Amazon.com three days before its official release, as a result of pre-order sales. Unfreedom of the Press also became a New York Times #1 best-seller on June 6, 2019, in the combined print & e-book nonfiction and hardcover nonfiction categories.[64][65][66] Lloyd Green was critical of the book in The Guardian writing that the book "...is not exactly fan fiction but it can get ahead of itself when discussing the special counsel’s conclusions, ending up sounding like the 'fake news' the author and Trump both purport to abhor."[67] Annalisa Quinn wrote in NPR online that "Along the way, [Levin] looks at The New York Times' inadequate coverage of the Holocaust (full disclosure: I write freelance pieces for the Times), and touches on a handful of clear problems in American media, from the often poor distinction between reporting and opinion to the distorting incentives of the Internet." Quinn continued, "But the book is largely filler. Quotations and paraphrasing make up the majority of the book's central chapters. Lengthy and irrelevant block quotes from historians about, say, colonial printing practices... give the book the air of a padded student essay."[68] Quinn also wrote, "[Levin] conducts no interviews, presents no original research, and visits no newsrooms", and "When Levin does offer his own analysis, it can approach parody."[68] On June 8, 2019, Levin appeared on C-SPAN2's Book TV to discuss Unfreedom of the Press, "in which he argued that the press has lowered its standards in providing objective and trustworthy journalism."[69]

A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of "outrage". The study looked at 10 prominent radio and television programs, known for incendiary discourse on political matters, and scored content on the basis of whether it used "emotional display", "misrepresentative exaggeration", "mockery", "conflagration", "slippery slope", "insulting" or "obscene language" and other factors, finding that Levin was the radio host who engaged in the most outrage. The study found that he utilized "outrage speech or behavior at a rate of more than one instance per minute."[5] In How Democracies Die, Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write that Mark Levin was among the popular right-wing talk radio hosts who "helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse" in American politics, and contribute to the erosion of democratic norms.[70]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mark Levin.

• The Mark Levin Show official website
• Landmark Legal Foundation
• Levin TV at YouTube
• Appearances on C-SPAN