Syndicated radio host and bestselling author Mark Levin spoke to over 1,000 “fellow patriots” on Sunday night at his “favorite place,” the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Levin signed copies of, and discussed his youth-focused book Plunder and Deceit: Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future.
He described this new project as a collection of pamphlets like those distributed during the pre-revolutionary period in America. Each one provides information on a topic such as radical environmentalism, illegal immigration, social security, education, Obamacare, national security and more. Each section is aimed at providing facts to equip Americans and help articulate the impact of a Leviathan-like government on the younger generation.
“We’re Americans, we don’t surrender our country, we don’t surrender our children and our grandchildren to the left and to big government and their destructive forces,” Levin told the energetic crowd. He began explaining that this project is intended to move away from the usual platitudes.
“When is the last time…when is the first time our kids were discussed when we discussed immigration? How can it be that illegal immigrant kids are dreamers? Nobody talks about our kids as dreamers.”
“What is the impact on kids that go to college and graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)?”
Levin cited U.S. Census Bureau statistics: “Almost 30 percent of young people who graduated in these majors can’t get jobs in those positions and yet you will hear politicians including conservatives say we need tens of thousands more of these H1B visas to bring in more and more people who have these skills. But we have people who have these skills too.”
“Silicon Valley among others, they want to pay them at a very cheap price,” he said, backing his claim up with Census Bureau reports showing income in STEM fields having been flat since 2007.
“Meanwhile we have $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.”
He points to two perspective groups: the parents and the grandparents, and the ’40 years old and under’ contingent.
“Do you want to live in freedom and prosperity?” he asks of the younger generation. “If you don’t, then you can continue to vote this way and support this way and follow what your Marxist professors tell you and what Hollywood tells you and so forth, but you’re going to be the poorest generation in many generations.”
Levin suggests this generation could participate in “prudential, civil protests.”
“The private sector isn’t your enemy. Capitalism isn’t your enemy. Big government is your enemy.”
“I don’t think millions of people are suddenly going to change overnight,” he remarked.
In the pre-revolutionary period, how did people communicate? “They communicated with pamphlets. I mean, Thomas Paine’s pamphlets had an enormous impact on this country. Believe it or not they would read pamphlets about John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu. They were very well read. They didn’t have TV and all the rest; they didn’t have distractions.”
“They read about the reformation and the enlightenment. They read about representative government. This stuff interested them.”
Levin referred to the late President Ronald Reagan, in whose administration he served: “We cannot expect the political parties or TV networks, cable networks or media or academia or any of these others to do our work for us. It’s got to be from the bottom up. It’s got to be families. It has to be the grassroots. It has to be communities, churches, synagogues and I want us to get back to that.”
“Think about the left. They never give up,” said Levin. “For a hundred years they wanted national healthcare. They finally got it, a hundred years later.”
The New York Times-bestselling author went on to encourage the crowd, “My attitude is, I don’t give up hope. I think the hour is late. But I don’t give up hope that we, as parents and grandparents, press our case, tens of millions of us, we will have a bigger effect than any college or university, any media out there, if we stick to it and we push it.”
He gave the example argument, “If the minimum wage is pushed up to $15 an hour, do you realize your kid’s going to lose his job? Because most people on minimum wage are not middle class, middle aged people. There are young kids, first jobs, part time jobs who are unskilled or low skilled. Particularly in our urban areas that means all those kids are not going to get jobs. They’re not worth $15 an hour in terms of productivity.”
Levin went on to discuss several of the other subjects covered in his book of pre-revolutionary-style pamphlets including some of the poignant arguments and tools useful to combat the deceit of the left.
The event was live streamed on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library website.
Tickets for Levin’s Sunday evening event sold out 11 minutes after going on sale, a record for any author at the library according to the evening’s moderator.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana