Review: ‘Plunder and Deceit’ by Mark Levin

Mark Levin has done the nation a great service. He wrote a new book. It’s called Plunder and Deceit: Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future.

As an investigative author, I spend my time combing through troves of data, reams of financial transactions, and stacks of inter-governmental communiqués, all in an effort to unearth fact-patterns of self-dealing and cronyism, malfeasance and graft. My work is zoomed in, specific, granular.

The conservative movement needs its sleuths. But what I love about Levin’s Plunder and Deceit is its philosophical breadth and panoramic sweep. Powered by intellectual titans like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and James Madison, Levin urges young people to embark upon the creation of a “New Civil Rights movement,” one that snaps the manacles of statist power and embraces an intellectual and economic freedom that excites and animates the moral imagination.

Best of all, Levin respects young readers enough to shoot straight with them: the road to serfdom is breezy; the march to liberty painstaking. Yet, as he reminds us, the fruits of the latter far eclipse the former.

“It is the nature of younger people today to passively live and let live and conform to their second-class standing; or worse, if inspired, to unite around distractive or self-destructive causes,” writes Levin. “But the right cause now is nothing short of self-preservation. And there can be no doubt that the New Civil Rights movement and new generation of activists, which must challenge the tyranny of the status quo, will be met with entrenched resistance, resulting in unease, discomfiture, risk, and ridicule. This is a small price to pay for freedom and justice.”

Amen!

With the Constitution always as his guide, Levin explains to “the rising generation” why the nation’s founding bedrock document is precious and rare. As President Ronald Reagan put it, in the constitutions of most governments, “the government tells the people of those countries what they’re allowed to do. In our Constitution, ‘We the People’ tell the government what it can do.”

That’s a difference worth fighting for and protecting. Levin’s book shows us how.

Authentic, sagacious, and written in a philosophical tenor that sometimes soars to operatic heights, Plunder and Deceit is an important work to be read by all and bequeathed to America’s rising generation.