Lt. Col. Allen West encouraged young conservatives this week to study texts that both support and oppose the United States’s founding principles, arguing a rounded education makes for a stronger intellectual champion.
“You are coming here so that you could be armed,” the former congressman said during an address at YAF’s 47th National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C., “you could be prepared, you could have the intellectual capacity and capability to go back and defeat their arguments.”
He argued that Gen Z conservatives are at the forefront of an ideological war, urging conference attendees to prepare themselves intellectually to push back on what he called the Democratic obsession with socialism.
Such intellectual preparation, West said, would involve studying the country’s foundational documents as well as pro-socialist and progressive commentaries.
West urged students not to limit their studies only to conservative ideas, arguing that without a strong understanding of opposing ideologies, they would struggle to defend their values.
“You have to read the Communist Manifesto,” West said. “Why? Because there are ten planks to the Communist Manifesto that are manifesting itself right now in the United States of America.”
He pointed to New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, arguing his support for socialist-adjacent initiatives, such as government-run grocery stores similar to those in Venezuela, is further proof that the far-left refuses to learn anything about the history of socialism.
Venezuela “was once one of the most prosperous nations in the Western Hemisphere,” West said, “and then Hugo Chávez comes along and takes the oil and gas industry and brings it under government control.”
“And what happens next?” the retired lieutenant asked. “People go into zoos and kill animals to be able to eat.”
This is not an exaggeration. West was not trying to be funny.
Socialist policies are less about philanthropy and more about raw power, West said, adding the language of socialism, with all its paeans to “the people,” is little more than a façade for government control.
Socialists say they do what they do for the people, West said. Yet, he continued, socialists’ efforts always lead to economic collapse and widespread suffering because socialism is ultimately about a total state monopoly on power and wealth, not the expansion of freedoms and liberty.
“We have got to break it down in just simple terms for people to understand,” West told young conservatives this week. “Do you really want someone to control every aspect of your life? Free is not freedom.”
Drawing inspiration from the American War for Independence, West urged his audience to study philosophers such as John Locke and Frédéric Bastiat, saying they’re essential to understanding modern conservatism.
“It was Thomas Jefferson who read John Locke when he wrote our Declaration of Independence,” he said. “Conservatism is really what John Locke talked about in his classical liberalism, but we have allowed the other side to take that word ‘liberal’ away from us.”
Finally, West called on students to return to their campuses ready to confront dangerous obsessions with socialism with a strong mindset that says, “I will not surrender. I will not relent. I will not cower away.”
Alannah Peters is a reporter studying journalism at the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.
