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Correction on Levin
Correction: I said about Mark Levin’s September 19 radio presentation that he was blaming “racial egalitarians” for the crisis. Listening again to the program tonight, I realize that Levin said nothing about race. I thought he was talking about race, but he only spoke about the left’s agenda to expand home ownership to poor people, which (understandably, given the true context of this issue) I “heard” as black and Hispanic people. The correction changes nothing of substance, since Levin in reality is talking about giving loans to people who didn’t qualify for loans under traditional procedures, to “people who were bad risks,” and those people were overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. More to the point, the people who pushed, and the federal laws that required, these changes talked explicitly about the need to expand home ownership to racial minorities, and attacked as racist those lending institutions that failed to provide such mortgages. But Levin, for all his burning outrage about the left’s lies and cover-ups and false attacks on Wall Street, says nothing about the left’s agenda to equalize Americans by race, which is what this was all about. My criticism of Levin for his avoidance of the core issue of race takes nothing away from the value of his cogent and fiery explanation of how the financial institutions were pushed into these insanely irresponsible lending policies by leftist egalitarianism incarnated in federal law. Which, furthermore, doesn’t mean that I accept his thesis that leftist egalitarianism was the sole cause of the disaster.
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