Levin: Oprah’s Speech Wasn’t Great, It Was ‘Grotesque’

While Oprah Winfrey’s fellow celebrities, Democrats and #TimesUp supporters uniformly praised her speech at the Golden Globes Sunday — and hoped aloud that it will prove to be her unofficial announcement that she’s running in 2020 — conservative author and talk show host Mark Levin was not impressed. In fact, he thought Oprah’s speech was downright “grotesque.”

On his radio talk show Monday, Levin led into a segment by playing a clip of Winfrey’s speech in which she compared horrific Jim Crow-era crimes with modern day America.

“This is grotesque,” said Levin of Winfrey’s conflation of two vastly different eras and circumstances, a move he described as a “distraction” from the seedy reality of Hollywood, which many of the people applauding her helped to perpetuate.

“What happened was horrific, please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Jim Crow was horrific. Slavery was horrific,” he said, before laying out his point.

“How do you tie this today to men?” he asked. “Why don’t they name the list? Why wasn’t it on the screen last night — a rolling screen of the men in Hollywood who’ve molested or harassed women in Hollywood? How come they didn’t have the guts to do that? It’s not all men. It has nothing to do with the Civil Rights era. It has to do with modern day Hollywood, where there ought to be a crime tape around that town.”

“I don’t know who wrote this for Oprah Winfrey; I don’t know if she wrote it herself, but it’s a really clever attempt at a distraction — of not taking responsibility, that Hollywood community, for the conduct of its actors, and in some cases its actresses,” he said. “This has nothing to do with Jim Crow, nothing to do with NAACP.

“And if in fact it’s time to speak truth to power to these men, why didn’t they do it?” he continued. “Why did it take a story about Weinstein to begin to unravel the yarn ball here? And Oprah Winfrey goes to the microphone like she’s making some profound statement. She made no statement about the problem that persists. In a left-wing town controlled by Democrats, controlled by Hollywood, controlled by their producers, their directors, their actors, their actresses … and she talks about Jim Crow, not Harvey Weinstein, who she was fast friends with.”

After playing another clip from her speech in which she declares, “I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon,” Levin gave her some alternate remarks (transcript via RightScoop):

Why didn’t she say:

“I’m standing here before you today Hollywood and you should be embarrassed of yourselves. You should all be embarrassed of yourselves to be part of a community that tolerated decades of debauchery, decades of sexual molestation, decades of sexual harassment. And there are many of you in the audience who knew who the perpetrators are and were and never came forward, in order to protect your careers or promote your careers. And you may be sitting next to many the victims of the very men who you protected. That is a disgrace!”

Now that would have been a SPEECH worthy of a presidential wannabe. But no, no. Instead we hear about Jim Crow and the NAACP. Which is fine, but has nothing at all to do with what’s taking place today in Hollywood. Nothing. Nothing.

What she should have told girls watching there is NOT to stand by while other girls are being molested and harassed because you want to become famous. Because you don’t want to rock the boat. Because you don’t want to challenge the Harvey Weinsteins of the world.

No she didn’t say that.

Listen to Levin’s response to Oprah’s speech here.