'Levin' on education, American Marxism

close

Video

Levin: Time to 'push back' against teacher unions, cameras should be in every classroom

'Life, Liberty & Levin' host details how people can take back education

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," July 18, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America, I am Mark Levin. This is LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.

And here we are in original Levin Studio. We're pleased to be here, but most of all, I am pleased to have Pete Hegseth with me. How are you, my brother?

PETE HEGSETH, FOX NEWS HOST: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. What an honor.

LEVIN: Same to you. Always. It's my honor.

Ladies and gentlemen, Pete and I agree this country is not at the precipice looking in the abyss. We are in the abyss trying to claw our way out of it, and we want to have this special hour to talk with you about what we can do about it and where we are, and how we got here.

And so, rather than me doing a one-hour monologue, I thought who best to discuss this with me, that is "American Marxism" than Pete Hegseth.

Pete, thank you for coming, my friend.

HEGSETH: Well, thank you. I am beyond humbled to be here.

LEVIN: No, it's my honor.

HEGSETH: And I'll tell you this, Mark, when "American Marxism" arrived in my mailbox, I got the embargoed copyright. You can ask my wife, it was like Christmas for me tearing through this thing.

LEVIN: Thank you.

HEGSETH: Phenomenal read and it couldn't be a more important moment for all the reasons you state. I've had that same feeling that we are not looking at the abyss, we are in the middle of it, surrounded. And you use the word "Marxism" for the first time in a title in your book.

And if I may, I am going to dive in for a second to a portion on "FOX and Friends," I talked about how I'd would like to ask a hundred questions. Now, I want to ask you a thousand, and we only have an hour which is why people should get the book.

But in Page 251, you're talking about Washington reading Paine's word at Battle of Trenton, and part of what you say is, "Our challenge today, (I think speaking of 1776) is just as crucial and urgent and in many ways more complicated. We did not ask for this confrontation, but it is here and in truth, like early days of the Revolutionary War, we are losing. Most of the country has been caught flatfooted and remains unengaged."

This book feels like your attempt to get people un-flatfooted and leaning forward. How do they do that?

LEVIN: You know, Pete, first of all, the problem is, I sound self-serving when I tell people, please read the book. So, if you buy the book, just pass it to somebody else and have them pass it to somebody else or go to the library or something like that.

Because as you know, there is a lot in the book, and it is not intended to overwhelm, it is intended to explain.

How do we do that?

First of all, whether it is a political operation or a military operation or a business plan or anything else, we need to know who our enemy is. Now, I don't say political adversary, I don't say opponents, these are people who want to take down this country and they are well along the way.

We see this, it is not just critical race theory, it is so many other aspects of our institutions, our traditions are under attack, things that you never believed in your lifetime you would hear or see are in Executive Orders or being pushed in these massive Omnibus Bills that Congress is pushing.

You turn on the television, you hear this propaganda where the media is basically the mouth piece for these various movements. I said, I've got to look into this.

You know, I have written a lot of books, and this does not smell right. I used to call this statism. I've called it progressivism. The truth is, it is Marxism.

These are hybrid forms of Marxism. These are Americanized forms of Marxism tailored to our country, tailored to our system.

So, it is not pure Marxism in every technical sense, but it is Marxism.

Black Lives Matter is a perfect example.

HEGSETH: Yes.

LEVIN: These are Marxists, they say they are Marxists that founded it. You read their original mission statement, they are filled with Marxist arguments. It is anti-American. It is anti-Semitic. It is anti-capitalism. It is like the so-called Green New Deal. It is not a green new deal or climate change, which used to be, you know, climate cooling or climate warming, climate change. They finally found a phrase that they feel they can use to mask --

HEGSETH: Sufficiently ambiguous term that it covers everything.

LEVIN: Exactly. This is an anti-capitalist de-growth movement, which is exactly why the first act that President Biden took was to shut down an oil pipeline, which wasn't causing pollution or anything else.

So, of course, they are going to attack energy. Energy is what provides and serves the engine of our economic system. It makes everything else possible in this country.

You control energy, you control the so-called environment. You control the budget, you control the constitutional system, you control everything.

So what can we do about it? I have an entire chapter on what I think you can about it.

HEGSETH: That's what I love about this.

LEVIN: Yes. The first six chapters are explaining or going into every one of these movements. Where do they come from? What do they stand for?

I think it's bulletproof. In other words, if you're attacking me for calling this Marxism, then you need to attack these professors, these scholars, these intellectuals, because I cite them. There's over 400 endnotes.

I quote them, I comment on what they're doing. And we need to know who these people are and we need to know what they're doing in order to be able to deal with them.

HEGSETH: There's a -- I started with, "What do we do about it?" Because I think that's part of what makes this book so special and different. It's not just problem identification. It's here's how we, as patriots need to do something about it with direct references and direct opportunities to do it.

So, kudos for giving that next step. And I think for folks out there watching, that's yet another reason to get it because you can be engaged and this does feel like other books you've written, it could be the beginning of a movement, of a reckoning in this country.

But there's something in reading it about Marx. What is it about that philosophy that has been so enduring when it constantly promises heaven, but delivers hell? It persists nonetheless now in American form, why?

LEVIN: It's a very good question. I've thought about this, and I discussed it a little bit in the book. There have been so many books written about Marx, including my books have talked about Marx, too.

I think there's a couple of reasons for this. I think as a general matter, there are two groups that are attracted to Marx -- people who do not take responsibility for their own lives. So, they can blame society. They can be viewed by themselves as victims, as oppressed. So, there's really no personal responsibility or personal accountability. They have no real connection to society.

And so, they project that on to us -- people. So, people who are successful, need to be dragged down. People who are happy need to be sad; people who are productive, need to be less productive --

HEGSETH: Sheer destruction.

LEVIN: Sheer destruction. And that's what Marx is about -- destroy what is, destroy what was, reject the past history, because it's all -- it's all anti-humanism. The world begins today.

HEGSETH: Yes.

LEVIN: And then there's another group -- power hungry people, fanatics who use liberty to destroy liberty. And these are diabolical people, and many of them are tenured professors, other than our mouthpieces on television and radio. Some of them are elected from the State of Vermont, you know, people like that, and they think they know how a country should work, despite all the examples of how horrendous and inhumane Marxism and its offshoots have been, a hundred million dead and God knows how many billions enslaved, you know, it just wasn't done the right way.

HEGSETH: Is that it? Is it the hubris of they just didn't get it right, we're going to do it right this time?

LEVIN: I just think it is fanaticism. You know, before the show began, we talked about how it's anti-God, anti-faith. They don't see a higher power. They see government as the power and it is all about power.

When you look at the Democratic Party today, it reflects this ideology, strongly and aggressively. It's all about power. They don't want to change the voting laws, because the concerned black people can't vote. I don't know where all these people are, who couldn't vote. Where are they? What are their names? Where are their lawsuits? They have their voting rights.

HEGSETH: They'll never give you the right answer.

LEVIN: No, there aren't any. In the United States, it's easier to vote than any other country on the face of the Earth. So, they'll use race, they'll use racism and so forth. But what is it? What is the Democratic Party trying to do?

It's trying to have permanent control. It wants to turn red states into blue states. If you nationalize the election process, then you nationalize the power of the Democratic Party. Does the Democratic Party care about the country? No.

Now why do I say that? It attacks the economic system. It attacks the independence of the judiciary. It wants to pack the Supreme Court, pack the United States Senate. It likes the Electoral College when it wins. It wants to destroy it when it loses. Open borders. The only explanation for open borders is twofold. One to import Democrats. We know two thirds of the people who come over the southern border, if they become citizens vote Democrat.

HEGSETH: Unless they're coming from Cuba and they might vote Republican.

LEVIN: That's right, and that really demonstrates the outrageous inhumanity of their ideology. It's all about power and politics.

Joe Biden doesn't care about what's going on in the border. He doesn't even take the time to go down to see what's going on, on the border, to see if his policies are working. He pretends they are not.

When you look at the attack on our economic system and our energy system, what's that all about? Is that --- does that make sense? Because clean air, clean water? We the cleanest air and cleanest water of any industrialized society on the face of the Earth.

This isn't about polar bears. This is about restructuring our society, so the centralized government and the bureaucracy and the Democratic Party are in control. If this is not an American form of Marxism, then what the hell is it?

HEGSETH: How did -- it seems like it cascaded so rapidly. There were patriotic Democrats at the forefront just decades ago that were made, you know, Bill Clinton making the argument the era of big government is over. He was no conservative, but he was also no Marxist.

Has it been an absolute acceleration in the last couple of decades? Is this just the tip of an iceberg they've been working on for quite some time? How did we get here so fast?

LEVIN: It's both. They're cleansing their party. They're purifying their party. That's what they do.

Now, unlike other regimes, where they actually go out and kill people who disagree with them within the party, Stalin was very good at that. Mao was very good at that. Castro -- they're all good at that. Pol Pot.

I'm not comparing us to that. I say it's American Marxism. But they're cleansing the party. So, you have like a couple of so-called moderates in the Senate. They're not even moderates. They don't know what they are. You have Sinema, you have Manchin. They're trying to drag them into the system.

You notice that. There's -- I can't even think of a time when the Democratic Party wasn't marching in the same direction, where all the members aren't marching in exactly the same direction. It's really rare when it when that doesn't happen.

You had people run for the House who claim to be moderates, they all voted for Pelosi, they all stepped in line. They all voted to impeach Donald Trump twice, pretty much, other than one.

So, to answer your question, it's been building for decades and decades, but it's come to a head now. And one of the reasons I think it's come to the head is because year after year, the indoctrination in colleges and universities, you see what's happened in journalism, journalism has changed completely. It's always been liberal, but now it's out of the closet.

People you see on CNN and MSNBC, and even on the big networks would never have made it 30 to 40 years ago. You would have had responsible executives, who would have said, okay, look, cut it out. I know, we feel this, and I know this is our way, but we're destroying our brand as a free press.

So, we do not have a free press, we have a free opinion, if you're a leftist. But we don't have a press. We have propaganda mills, and that's why I spent a lot of time with the book also talking about "The New York Times."

HEGSETH: If you would, maybe when we come back, we can dig into that -- the education piece which you write about extensively, the media, and then some of the key players that were involved in that, too.

There are some names that people will know, there's also some names, as I'm reading it, I'm learning for the first time.

LEVIN: You bet.

So, we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. This isn't so much about "American Marxism," the book, it's about American Marxism the problem we have in this country, and having the guts and the willingness to call it what it is, and to explain what it is, and to defend our liberty.

Because we've reached a point -- we've reached a point where we're going to either live in a free society or we're not.

And I want to thank Pete for being here. Pete Hegseth. So you take it away.

HEGSETH: Amen, thanks for having me. And you do call it what it is and you name names as well. And you get into Chapter Three, "Hate America, Inc.," really about the classroom, and I see some names I recognize: John Dewey, others that as you get into Chapter Four, Herbert Marcuse, that's more into race and genderism.

But when you look at how they infiltrated America's classrooms, it feels like that has been central to what the left and the Marxists have been -- how they've been able to take over our institutions.

LEVIN: John Dewey was one of the original cabals of intellectual progressives, as they named themselves and enormously influential. He destroyed public education. He went to Moscow in 1928 when Stalin was in full form and he observed the classrooms and he observed what was going on and he liked it.

And he said, this is very, very good, because we're teaching our children not to be individuals or individualistic, but to but to support a common interest, support the communal, and Stalin was doing a fantastic job of this.

And he comes back to the United States. HE brags about it, he writes a piece in "The New Republic" and interestingly enough, Pete, one of the people who -- well, several of the people who liked what John Dewey was writing were all of these school administrators, and so he wrote prolifically.

John Dewey's impact affects our schools today and actually affects journalism today. And he rejected the Declaration of Independence. He rejected the Constitution. All the early so-called progressives --

HEGSETH: The founder of America's Public Schools Systems.

LEVIN: That's right.

HEGSETH: Rejects the Declaration of Independence.

LEVIN: The founder of its destruction. Yes, they all do.

HEGSETH: Its destruction.

LEVIN: And I'll tell you why, because the Declaration of Independence makes abundantly clear that this nation was founded on a belief of God and faith. You cannot be a Marxist or Marxist Light, a progressive and believe in faith, in God, because your faith is in government. Your faith is in man and only certain men, only yourself and people who agree with you. That's one of the reasons why the First Amendment is under attack and free speech is under attack.

Marxist don't want debate. They don't want ideas. They're self-righteous. They're self-aggrandizing. They wish to impose their attitude on people. It's the same with education.

We talk about academic freedom. There is no academic freedom. It's more indoctrination today than ever before, and people, oddly thanks to the virus, who are watching the classrooms on their monitors, sitting next to their kid or looking over their shoulder, suddenly became familiar with critical race theory because they saw what their kids were being taught.

It was like, "Oh, my God, what is going on in this classroom here?" Or transgenderism has become a movement. You're teaching my eight-year-old about transgenderism. You're teaching my eight-year-old that if they're black, that they have no hope, because they're black. And racism, teaching a white kid that they have no hope of because of all that has occurred in the past, and it's their fault and so forth.

This is the sort of thing John Dewey would be very proud of, the early progressives are proud of, and let me ask you this. Do you know of a single prominent Democrat who has criticized this? Joe Biden has signed Executive Orders supporting critical race theory.

Why? Why? Because they're the American form of Marxists. They are not "progressives" quote-unquote, they're not Democratic socialists. They're not all these ambiguous terms that they assign to themselves. They conduct themselves the same way.

They're not as aggressive. You know, they're not as complete. I didn't call the book Marxism. I called it American.

HEGSETH: Other institutions are used to wield that power, whether it's our media, whether it's social media, universities, but nonetheless, opponents will be silenced or marginalized.

LEVIN: Well, because if you look at the Democratic Party today, you look at the media today, you look at academia today, they're not promoting freedom, and they are promoting the opposite. They're not promoting debate, they are crushing debate. They don't believe in the constitutional system where you win some and you lose some, and play by the rules, they want to destroy the constitutional system.

And if you read what these people write, and if you read what these people say, it's no surprise.

My view is, I'm trying to make the American people aware, everybody can't read Marcuse, and Marx, and Derrick Bell, and all of these people. Unfortunately, I've had to read them, and hundreds of others.

HEGSETH: How many citations in this book, by the way, Mark?

LEVIN: Over 400. This book could have been 800 pages long with a thousand. I said, who the hell is going to read that? I won't even read it, so ...

HEGSETH: Well, but as you mentioned things, it brings to mind other aspects of the book that you unwind. Actually, the idea of who silences people, that's Chapter Two, "Repressive Mobs." You create mobs and the outrage that's there amongst the acceptable thinking of the age, and then you enforce it. But you go back to all these professors, it's always a new Professor with a new theory, and there's a number of them, you just rattled a few of them off.

And then they sort of throw it whether it's critical theory, the precursor to critical race theory. That's a theory. It never has to be proven that it works, but it is some -- it's a new progressive theory to perfect ourselves, does it -- are they ever held to account for whether or not their theories are effective?

LEVIN: No. Look at the war on the cops. We heard about defunding the police, then slashing their budgets. We saw it with our own two eyes. We saw what these Democrats did in these cities. We saw that Joe Biden sat there on his hands.

We saw Kamala Harris supporting it openly. We see the Democratic Party and the Marxist wing of the Democratic Party, which is becoming the Democratic Party. They promoted this sort of thing. It actually happened.

And now, they are blaming Republicans for not voting for trillions of dollars in government spending and reorganizing our society and our economy, because some of that money could have been used to help cops, let me remind people of something.

The issue with the cops wasn't whether or not there was enough money. They slashed the budgets.

In New York, they took over a billion dollars away from the cops. So, it wasn't if the Republicans don't vote at the Federal level they'll give us money, they won't have enough money for the cops. They took the budgets they had for the cops, and they slashed them.

So you see the consequences of this American Marxist movement. BLM pushed this. AOC pushed this. The Democratic Party embraced it.

We have dead people, they have blood on their hands, and what do they do? They blame somebody else.

We need to confront this. We do know exactly what we're confronting. We need to use the proper words. We need to start unraveling this piece by piece, and that's the point of the book.

This book isn't just a book about me. There's nothing about me in this book. This book isn't a book about theory. There's theory in here to break it down. This book is about, hey, folks, let me tell you what's going on, a little deeper than the surface level. We see things, we talk about things then we kind of walk away from it.

When we walk away from this, we're walking away from our country, our children and our grandchildren.

This is a call for action. This is a cause for alarm, and I don't know how else to do it other than radio, TV and this book.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JON SCOTT, FOX NEWS CHANNEL ANCHOR: Welcome to "FOX News Live." I'm Jon Scott.

Family and community members have gathered in New York City to remember Eric Garner on the seventh anniversary of his death in a police chokehold. Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold as police tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes.

Pantaleo was fired, but no criminal charges were filed. Garner's dying gasp of "I can't breathe" became a rallying cry among police reform activists.

The largest wildfire in the U.S. right now has torched more forest landscape in Oregon. The destructive fire just north of the California border is now in more than 476 square miles, an area about the size of Los Angeles.

Erratic winds are feeding the blaze creating dangerous conditions for firefighters. Some 2,000 people have been evacuated.

I'm Jon Scott. Now back to LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.

LEVIN: Welcome back, folks. Thanks for being with us. I consider this a very, very important program not because it's about my book, but it's about American Marxism. We need to spread the word.

Each and every one of you need to be the Paul Reveres out there. That's our strength. We have strength in numbers and communities and neighborhoods, church groups and temple groups, baseball fields and so forth. That's who we are -- red blooded Yanks, Americans. That's our strength.

And speaking of red blooded Americans, Pete Hegseth, thank you, sir.

HEGSETH: That's why I love coming to the bunker, Mark, you're a true believer. From the moment we got in here, we've been talking about this stuff, and so much we can't get into all of it.

We're going to get to journalism in a moment because that section fascinated me. But first, critical race theory. It's everywhere. We hear about CRT, you dissect where it comes from even critical theory. Why did the left feel like it needed to use race in America to pursue their goals?

LEVIN: Because the Marxist has decided to use whatever they possibly can in America, a free country. And so they look for things to exploit. And so race is beautiful to exploit in this country, given our history, given the battles we have from the Civil War all the way up, and so, they developed this theory, Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, a guy by the name of Derrick Bell and he stole it or modified it from a Marxist by the name of Marcuse who came out of Berlin, the so-called Franklin School, and they developed critical theory, which started in our law schools.

And the critical theory basically says, all law is written by the dominant culture. So, victims, those who are oppressed, minorities, they can't get a fair break because the dominant culture writes the law, and so the law is unjust.

HEGSETH: So critical theory says everything that exists needs to be torn down. Because they are Marxists.

LEVIN: That's exactly right. And so Bell took this Harvard Law -- Harvard Law, let's apply this to race. And so everything in this society has to be seen through the lens of race, and when you look through the lens of race, he says, what you see is white supremacy, a white dominant society from the very, very beginning.

So, our economic system, our legal system, our culture is built on this white dominant, white supremacy model. And so either you reject it or you acknowledge it, but it has to be destroyed. So, these are what I call these American Marxist movements that have been spawned from Marxism.

Marcuse could not understand how it is that Hitler was able to rise and the communists were not after the Weimar Republic fell, and he was a communist. So he flees Berlin, comes to the United States and spews his Marxism, wrote many books.

He was a tenured professor in at least three Ivy League colleges, where he pushed this agenda. He trashed America every step of the way, and his writings, particularly one of his books, caught the eye of people who we now call the New Left -- from the New Left movement, Students for Democratic Action, the Weather Underground, he is considered the Founding Father of the New Left Movement, but he is also the Founding Father of critical theory, which is the basis of critical race theory.

So when Joy Reid goes on TV and brings in Kendi or these others, Kendi candy and the others didn't invent these ideologies. They are making millions and millions of dollars off of promoting this ideology and pretending that they don't know what the history is.

I know what the history is. It's like Patton in North Africa when he defeated Rommel, and he said, "Rommel, I read your book." Well, I read Marcuse's books. I read what Bell wrote. And you know, when the great Thomas Sowell was on to Bell. He had no respect for him. He thought he was an intellectual lightweight.

Bell's ideology was considered fringe at the time, not to be taken seriously; now, it is being taught to our elementary school students and others. It is an anti-American, anti-capitalism, pro-Marxist ideology. And if anybody doesn't believe it, read it, because they tell us this.

Now they're trying to play games with their propagandists in the media at MSNBC and CNN. This is what the Republicans are doing. They don't want to teach slavery.

Who doesn't want to teach slavery? They don't understand. We, Republicans eliminated slavery.

HEGSETH: Yes.

LEVIN: It was the Democrats who promoted slavery.

HEGSETH: But these names like Marcuse and like Bell, most people, myself included with Bell, never heard of him. And you talk about in the book how they are happy with that view. They are happy to be in the backgrounds.

And then they enter the classrooms and then -- did they just have an understanding that through -- in the Army, we'd call it a train the trainer approach, but you're training the next generation, they go further with it, you recede in the background and then they take it to the fore.

So, has their plan always been to go from the university level down and use our openness and tolerance as a society against us?

LEVIN: For some of them. The faculty in these universities are incestuous. They are responsible for hiring each other. In a book, I wrote "Plunder and Deceit," I went back and I looked at the faculty are involved in hiring people who they know from the same university. So, it's very incestuous. You get this propaganda, you get this indoctrination. That's why we really don't have academic freedom. So, some of them are that way.

But there's also a woman who I quote there who is iconic in the Marxist or Neo-Marxist movement as I call it -- and she wrote a lot about how we teach Marxism in our colleges, Americanizing how we do this. And so --

HEGSETH: And somewhere in the open, you provide those examples.

LEVIN: Some of them are in the open, some of them or not, but here's the deal. Every human being is imperfect, every society is imperfect. What Marxism does is it creates the fantasy of a perfect world where everybody is equal, and after the Russian Revolution, Lenin famously said, okay, Marx tells us how to take over. He doesn't tell us how to rule. How are we going to get this worker's paradise?

And so in order to get the worker's paradise, you have to kill people, you need to destroy people. You need to destroy their careers. You cannot have free speech. You cannot have competition. You cannot have open debate.

If you're going to compel people to live in a society, all kinds of individuality, and thinking, all that kind of stuff has to go. We see it playing out today in Cuba. These are police states. It is a fancy ideology and a fancy name for tyrants and totalitarians.

These are police states, and that is exactly what's being proposed in this country. The Biden administration is going door-to-door trying to force people to get vaccines, we've never done this in this country. The Biden administration wants Big Tech to monitor texts to see if people are putting out information with which the administration disagrees.

The Biden administration is working with a compliant Facebook and Big Tech to do what? To silence anybody who doesn't agree with government policy. It is happening now in front of us. Now, we can talk about it. We can bang the pots and pans. But one of the reasons I wrote this book is that's not enough. That's key, we need to know exactly what's going on.

We've got to put away the facade that this is just liberalism or leftism or social activism. Call it what it is, make sure our fellow citizens, at least have an opportunity to know what it is, and then do something about it.

This is where we fail. We don't do anything about it, which is why I put the last chapter in the book.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. The topic with my friend, Pete Hegseth is: How do we save the country from American Marxism? And what is American Marxism? And what do we do about it?

You're on.

HEGSETH: I'm on journalism. You hit it head on here. You talk about two phrases that I was not all that familiar with before public journalism and pseudo-events. They tell us a lot.

LEVIN: I'll give you an example of pseudo-events right now. There are three books right now that are hate Trump books that are filled with gossip and quotes General Milley said this and General Milley said that. These are pseudo-events.

That is, why are news departments is talking about three books that are trashing a former President of the United States? And unfortunately, we all fall into this because there's juicy stuff in there. We want to talk about it.

HEGSETH: Sure.

LEVIN: We want to get our hits. We want to get our ratings. What are we going to do about it? Nothing.

And this is part of the problem, the media in this country. What are the media in this country? We do not have an objective press in this country, and there is reason for this and I have a whole section in the book. And I wrote an entire book on this, but this is not that. It's called public journalism.

Now, what is public journalism? It sounds so sweet like progressivism. Yes.

HEGSETH: Great. Yes.

LEVIN: Yes. It's the same thing as progressivism. It's the same thing as this American Marxism.

There was a time ago where journalists sought to be objective, the journalists sought to provide the news. You can't be perfectly objective. I mean, there's some subjective view that goes into picking what the news is, but that's different. At least you're trying to do the right thing. They've given that up.

If you watch Chuck Todd on Sunday shows or George Stephanopoulos or you look who they hire as news people, mostly Democrats, but definitely leftists. It's abundantly clear that the last five years, Donald Trump exposed it completely. They exposed themselves completely, they're still doing it completely. The way they cover up for Biden, the way they push the Marxist or Democratic Party radical agenda.

They never talk about what it is exactly that the Democrats are proposing when it comes to the vote that is destroying the voting franchise is what they're proposing. So, there is an entire ideology that has been at work for decades, and still is, it's called public journalism. And what it means is we journalists are citizens, too, and we can't just report on what's going on.

We have to provide a context for it. Remember Dewey about the schools, you can't just teach Math and Science. There's got to be a social agenda. They love Dewey. They talk about Dewey. He has an enormous influence in journalism schools today as he does in education schools today.

And the point is, it's an excuse for advancing the radical agenda, which is why almost to a man and woman, they've tried to destroy Donald Trump. They bad mouth his supporters. They tried to destroy Ronald Reagan and bad mouth his supporters.

They're silent, if not celebratory with the Democratic control of the House and the Senate. They promote AOC who is really a nobody, who knows nothing. They promote her as the face of a movement.

HEGSETH: It's a perfect pseudo congresswoman.

LEVIN: Pseudo congresswoman. Really. She is really irrelevant, but -- and so you will not find, as I've said before, a penny's worth of difference between the mass media today and these various positions and policies of these spawned Marxist movements in America.

HEGSETH: Is that because they teach public journalism at journalism schools? So, when you come out, you're trained to say, we've got to create the context.

LEVIN: That is a big part of it. But the newspaper business, the media business has obviously embraced all of this, these corporatists have embraced all this as they have in their own boardrooms. So, this is what they want to promote.

There are no conservative hosts on CNN or MSNBC. There are there are no objective hosts. They are all of the radical bend. So the point is, they're pushing an agenda. They're taught to push an agenda. They come out of the Democratic Party for the most part pushing an agenda. That's one of the reasons the country is in such horrific shape.

HEGSETH: Absolutely.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back. And welcome, Pete Hegseth.

HEGSETH: Thank you. As we talked about in the break, we could talk about this all day. There's so much in here. Mark, I want to go back to the solutions though. Because we mentioned they are in there, a couple of examples. People watching. What can they do?

LEVIN: Ten thousand words on solutions. Now, I'm not the expert on solutions, but they are Mark's ideas. I've been an activist 40 years. I've served on a School Board. There are a lot of people out there who are already doing a lot of things. But my goal is to galvanize us, to rally us, to network us, so we have a national movement, as we do with the Tea Party member of the Reagan Revolution, to the Trump Revolution, or however you want to talk about it.

The colonists early on, this is how they communicated with each other. They communicated in the written word, Thomas Paine in his long pamphlets, 47 pages long of the American Crisis, and it spread from dinner table to dinner table, from pub to pub, school to school, and that's exactly what I'm hoping will be done here.

As an example, and obviously, I can't run through all of them. Let's take a look at our public schools. We own these schools. They're called public schools, they're government schools. We pay the salaries, we pay the medical care and the pensions. We pay the dues, ultimately, for the unions.

We pay for the classrooms. We pay for the building. We pay for the administrators, and we have no say whatsoever. We're not even sure what's going on in these classrooms, and they won't tell us.

We have a teachers union that is clearly part of the American Marxist movement.

HEGSETH: Absolutely.

LEVIN: They've announced that regardless of what parents think, they are pushing critical race theory, they are pushing the transitioning model, they're pushing whatever the hell they want to.

So, I have argued, thanks to a caller into my radio program that one of the things we need to do is have cameras in the classroom. Cameras in the classroom. We had cameras in the classroom, all through the virus. That's how people saw what was going on and were shocked.

If cops wear cameras, we have cameras on cop cars. If many courtrooms in the country have cameras, then why shouldn't we have them in the classroom?

HEGSETH: We pay for them.

LEVIN: We pay for them.

HEGSETH: It's our kids.

LEVIN: We own it. Now, the unions will fight it, but to hell with the unions. What else should we do? Do we know what's in the teachers' contracts? No. Why don't we? We need to FOIA that information.

Do we know how teachers are hired? No. Well, why don't we?

Do we know how teachers get promotions? No. Well, why don't we?

Do we know how textbooks are chosen and put in our classroom? How seminars take place? What kind of training our teachers get? I'm saying it's time for us to put them on their heels, use the Freedom of Information Act, use these legal groups across the country or local litigator, let's get in there. Let's find out what's going on. Let's push back against the union.

And what about these unions? The NEA and the AFT. When I was President of Landmark Legal Foundation, we filed complaints, I.R.S. complaints against the NEA because the NEA is nothing but a political institution and an appendage of the Democratic Party that's pushing all these American Marxist movements.

Well, let's challenge them. Let's challenge their tax status. They're not doing what they say they do.

We can take quotes from Randi Weingarten who heads the AFT. We can go on their website at the National Education Association, use their words and make these filings. You can do this from your desk.

I'm saying everybody --

HEGSETH: You show people how to do it.

LEVIN: And I give links, I explain how to do it. I just don't say go do it, and that's the goal. That's the last chapter, the Action Chapter. My wife, Julie, calls it the pushback check.

HEGSETH: Absolutely. You just mentioned education. But you talk about corporations, climate, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, rioters, law enforcement. So, if education is not your thing, there's going to be an arena in which you can get involved.

LEVIN: There's a lot we can do with corporations. We don't have enough time to talk about it. But you know, they do have shareholder meetings. We don't go to them, the other side does. And there's other things we can do about corporations.

What about sporting leagues? There's things we can do.

HEGSETH: Of course.

LEVIN: We still have the ability to exercise our freedom, to speak to each other, to network, there's so many things we can do and I'm hoping we will do many of them and that's in the last chapter.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Welcome back, America. I want thank you, Pete Hegseth for all your help.

HEGSETH: Thank you. Absolutely. And I've got one final question for you, Mark. Before I do, I would be remiss if I didn't look into the camera and say, this is a book everybody needs to get. I've read your other books. You never mince words, but to be the leader and on the forefront, as you are, to say we have to call it by its name.

And only by calling its name are we able to then truly identify it and truly do something about it, otherwise we're playing patty cake. And that's what we've been doing so long. Well intention on a lot of levels, even the way I've argued things in the past.

So, to see a book that says this is what it is, this is what you need to know about it. Here's who is responsible about it, and then you could do some -- what you can do about it is incredibly refreshing.

Because the hammer and sickle with the flag on it in the back is scary, but it is here. And we have to do something about it.

So Mark, with the book out, and with the wonderful reception it's gotten. What do you -- what are you hoping for?

LEVIN: First of all, thank you.

HEGSETH: Of course.

LEVIN: For what you've done in the past for the country, and what you're doing now. You're a great voice for liberty.

I'll put it succinctly. There's hundreds of thousands, there's millions of us who are concerned about where this country is going. There are hundreds of thousands of you already who have bought the book. We need to spread the word. We need to explain what's going on beyond the surface level, beyond soundbites.

We can do this. We are smart. We are the American people, whether you're an electrician or a plumber, or a trucker; whether you build homes, whether you're a painter, whether you're a lawyer or a doctor or everything in between, we are red blooded Americans.

I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. I don't care if you're libertarian or moderate. None of that matters.

If you love America, and you want to save America and you care about your kids and future generations, we must galvanize and rally.

I don't know how else to say it.

If you love your country, then stand for your country. Thank you, Pete.

HEGSETH: Mark, thank you.

LEVIN: We'll see you next time on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.

Content and Programming Copyright 2021 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2021 VIQ Media Transcription, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of VIQ Media Transcription, Inc. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.