Comeuppance: Mark Levin eviscerates Alex Knepper

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Alex Knepper is a Vichy Republican blogger who writes at the Frum Forum (natch) and, until quite recently for NewsReal Blog, until David Horowitz fired him. Many of Gov. Palin's supporters know Knepper from his two years of incessant Sarah-bashing at the now defunct website Race 4 2008. Young Alex made the mistake of attacking Mark Levin's book in an astonishingly ignorant op-ed and duly gets his comeuppance from the best-selling author, talk show host and constitutional attorney on Levin's Facebook notes page:

I don't know Knepper because he has never written anything or done anything of merit that I can discern. But he, like a handful of other pseudo-intellectuals, seek to take down aspects of my classic, Liberty and Tyranny, by misrepresenting it.

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Knepper's critique -- posted at the Atlantic by the disreputable and tedious [Conor] Friedersdorf , who sniffs the internet for anti-Levin posts (or anti-Steyn, or anti-most conservative thinkers) like a dog in heat -- is yet another example of ignorance and distortion. Among other things, Knepper writes:

"Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, and their allies offer us a program. Levin's manifesto Liberty and Tyranny, for instance, begins with a bullet-point agenda of what constitutes conservatism in the year 2010, complete with demands concerning taxes, immigration, and the welfare state. It's incredible that anyone could miss the point so utterly. How did conservatism, which positioned itself as an anti-ideological strain of thought, transform into a bullet-point ideology ready to cast out anyone who isn't a True Believer?"

He also cites to numerous philosophers for the proposition that conservatism is a disposition not a program. I do wonder if he has actually read the philosophers he lists. Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Friedrich Hayek wrote extensively not just about disposition but the best and worst forms of welfare, taxes, commerce, etc. Thomas Sowell, whom he also cites, does so every week.

Applying disposition to societal policies is what we do, all of us, wittingly or unwittingly. And yet, Knepper goes out of his way to misrepresent what I actually wrote, even though it's in print for anyone with basic reading skills to digest.

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The book is much more sophisticated than Knepper's ability to comprehend. Or maybe he just didn't read it, which is more damning. Apparently he finds it un-conservative to explore conservatism on a philosophical and principled level and then apply conservatism to a political agenda in current times. Moronic.

It's not for nothing that Sean Hannity calls Levin "The Great One."

- JP