Conservative talker Mark Levin hammered the Biden administration for its heavy-handed approach to dealing with COVID-19 and all of the variants during an appearance on FNC’s “Fox News Primetime” on Thursday.

Levin told Fox News host Pete Hegseth that former President Donald Trump had done a better job taking on the bureaucracy in the development of the vaccine. That included Anthony Fauci, who Levin said represented the bureaucracy.

Partial transcript as follows:

HEGSETH: Mark Levin, the great one, host of ‘Life, Liberty, & Levin’ joins us. Now, he is also the author of the multiple times over best-selling book ‘American Marxism’. Mark, thanks so much for being here. You’re the guy a lot of us look to kind of put the parts together and connect the dots. So, you’re seeing this new variant. They’re telling us to brace for it. Yet, the initial indication is that it’s mild, as I mentioned, and it feels like we may be seeing a rerun of something. Are we off on that?

MARK LEVIN, HOST, ‘LIFE, LIBERTY, & LEVIN’ & AUTHOR, ‘AMERICAN MARXISM’: No. As a matter of fact, I would ask this, why isn’t the federal medical bureaucracy focused on curing cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease, heart attacks and diabetes and these diseases that kill millions and millions of Americans every single year? Fauci had a press conference, as you know, yesterday, because they found one case, a guy in California, one case, and that’s – it is “extremely mild”, according to the South African expert on this. And by the way, she is not only their top doctor but she actually practices medicine, unlike Fauci hasn’t practiced it in half a century. This is really getting outrageous.

One other thing on this, Pete, the only thing this administration does in response to this virus or the so-called variants, is the iron fist. If they come up with a new vaccine, if they come up with a new therapeutic, all of these were developed in the Trump administration. Trump believed in science. He pursued science. He fought the red tape of the bureaucracy. The red tape of the bureaucracy is led by people like Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci gives a press conference about masks, about getting in fetal positions under the desk again, about Thanksgiving, about Christmas. I don’t need Anthony Fauci giving us commentary on human society. What is it exactly that Anthony Fauci brings to the table when it comes to his supposed expertise? Exactly–

HEGSETH: Getting it wrong.

LEVIN: –nothing, absolutely nothing. If you heard that press conference yesterday, it was all about police state tactics. It was all slush. He didn’t give us any information that we didn’t already know, thanks to this South African doctor and so forth. Here is the answer on the variant so far, don’t give it a second thought. Now, South Africans aren’t. I don’t believe in life too.

HEGSETH: Are you concerned, though, that while we may not give it a second thought, the Democrats are happy to use it as a second attempt to say we need universal mail-in voting. We don’t – we can’t check IDs. People can’t come to the polls safely. That’s what happened when legislatures were usurped through emergency powers and states across the country in 2020. What do you think they might be willing to do in 2022?

LEVIN: Of course. You’re 100% right. The Democrat Party is pushed by this American Marxist ideology and I’ll continue to say it no matter what. It’s not a socialist ideology. That’s an economic ideology. They believe in that too. But, it’s worse than that. Everything they propose is about centralized government, centralized power. We’re talking today about the potential government shutdown for a day or two. You think the sky is falling, right? Most of us are not affected. The Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid checks go out, the military continues to be paid. It’s about 17% of the government, I was once told by a former Speaker of the House who is named Paul Ryan, shall be nameless. That said, you shut down our economy for a year and that’s righteous. That’s righteous. That’s OK because we need to protect the people.

You shut down the damn government for 14 minutes and you think the sky is falling. That’s what it’s all about. That tells you everything you need to know. And yes, they are poised with all kinds of police state tactics. They’re firing people. People are losing their pensions. They’re losing their medical care. They’re critical race theory in the United States military, with indoctrination and so forth. They want to destroy the voting system. That’s what HR one is all about, the centralization of the voting system to take all the barriers off of voting and so forth and so on. So, whether it is this virus or some other phony crisis or something else, the fact of the matter is they’re going to use it. When it comes to the vaccine, Fauci didn’t develop that.

HEGSETH: No.

LEVIN: The Democrats opposed it. That was developed under Trump and with the private sector.

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