From the “pot calling kettle black” files

Mark Levin, former rational human and Reaganite, has used his X account to promote a post claiming that “Nick Shirley says he has proof” that Marjorie Taylor Greene was “bribed” to turn against Donald Trump. I don’t know who Nick Shirley is, and I don’t know why Marjorie Taylor Greene really turned against Trump. But I do know that Mark Levin, who used to be a fairly intelligent and principled constitutional conservative, is now an unprincipled idiot, a typical effect of the brain-sucking monster known as the Trump cult. As Thomas Massie, along with many, many other people — including Nick Shirley himself, whoever he is — has pointed out, the story Levin was citing to undermine Greene’s epiphany about Trump was a deliberate falsehood from a satirical website. The story was a joke, but Levin wanted so badly to believe it that he didn’t take twenty seconds to verify its context and authenticity before reposting it as legitimate news. Funny isn’t it? I mean, Mark Levin, of all people, jumping the gun to smear another person’s sudden change of political allegiance, in defiance of all former principles and statements, as nothing but a cynical cash grab. The only difference between Levin’s sell-out in 2016 and the one he has tried to pin on Greene in 2026 is that the story about her is an openly avowed falsehood, whereas we really do have all the proof we need in Levin’s case.

If even one member of any Democratic president’s family had been seen to profit materially, however indirectly, from his or her family connection to the White House, all of the millions of people who have sold their souls to Trump would have been crying “Corruption,” and trying to squeeze every last drop of outrage out of it. Today, with Trump and his entire family raking in millions on a seemingly endless string of shady business deals with shadier global players, many of those deals directly tied to political favors of national security significance, the cultists remain sanguine and silent while the rest of the world gapes in awe at the Trump mob’s brazen defiance of every rule, written and unwritten, about using the power of the presidency of The United States of America as a crowbar to open the doors of sleazy financial opportunism.

For years, Republican voters lamented or decried the left-leaning bias of the mainstream news media — even after their own right-leaning faction of the mainstream had come to dominate the airwaves, which you might think would have vindicated the conservative belief in the free market’s ability to sort things out in the realm of ideas. Today, however, these same voters whoop and holler with excitement, or at best sit by smugly and without concern, as a president claiming to act on their behalf uses federal agencies, unveiled threats of legal action or regulatory assault, and the White House bully pulpit to strong-arm the mainstream media into compliance with his aims, or at least into censoring any voices of serious dissent against his Republican administration. In effect, this administration is using goon tactics to enforce a version of the old “Fairness Doctrine” that Republicans used to argue was a tyrannical abuse of government power and a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. That old argument is still valid. All that has changed is the souls of those Republican voters. Just their souls. Nothing important.

For a review of my very literal use of the term “the Trump cult,” you may begin here.