Radio host Mark Levin doesn't think media mogul Oprah Winfrey understands "what it's like to live in a country that really is brutally racist." Is he sure of that?

Last week, Oprah gave an interview to BBC during which she dared to say that racism fueled some of the criticism against President Obama. Members of the right-wing media responded with predictable outrage. Here's what Mark Levin said:

"Oprah Winfrey has no idea what it's like to live in a country that really is brutally racist... I'm not talking about older people who lived through segregation and those other horrible events, because obviously they do."

Oh? Winfrey was born in 1954, just a few months before the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools are unconstitutional. Here are just a few of the things she lived through:

  • October 1962: James Meredith became the first black man allowed to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Students responded by sending death threats to Meredith, rioting for days, attacking National Guardsman and killing a foreign journalist. Oprah was eight years old.
  • June 1963: Civil rights hero Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. Oprah was nine years old
  • September 1963: Four young black girls were killed in a racially-motivated terrorist bombing at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. Oprah was nine, just a few years younger than the victims.
  • June 1964: Three American civil rights workers—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner–were murdered by the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Oprah was 10 years old.

  • March 1965: The Selma to Montgomery marches took place in Alabama. Oprah was 11.
  • April 1968: Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Oprah was 14.
  • April 1976: A white teenager attacked a black lawyer and civil righs activist with the American flag in Boston. Oprah was 22.

(We could, obviously, go on, and on, and on—up to and including the death of Renisha McBride two weeks ago.)

Levin attempted to defend the U.S.:

"We have spilled Yankee blood in every hellhole in this world, most of it the third world...We are a good people. We are a tolerant people. We are humane. I'm sick of people trashing us.”

And he said Oprah was "too stupid" to know the difference between attacking racism and defending liberals.

"I find [Oprah] despicable. Not because she's black, not because she's a woman, but because she's despicable."

Levin himself was born in 1957.