He stood at Checkpoint Charlie as a 23-year-old lieutenant and looked straight into the face of communism. What he saw on the other side of that wall — the fear, the gray decay, the cameras, the people too frightened to meet his eyes — never left him. Forty years later, Lt. Col. Allen West says he is watching the same darkness creep across his own country. And he is asking the question every American should be losing sleep over: why are we falling for it?
On United Patriots Uprising with Gary Binford, West — combat veteran, former congressman, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel — sees America’s siege through the eyes of a soldier who has walked the ground where freedom died. He has seen East Berlin. He has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has buried friends. When a man like that warns you the enemy is already inside the gates, you do not change the channel.
Watch the full interview. Then ask yourself whether you have been a citizen — or a spectator.
What you are about to hear is not a campaign speech. It is a battlefield report from a man who knows exactly what we stand to lose.
The Wall He Walked Behind
West does not theorize about tyranny. He has stood inside it.
“We went from West Berlin over to East Berlin,” he told Binford, “and what I saw over there sent chills down my spine.” He describes a young paratrooper in dress greens watching people who were “afraid to look at us, definitely afraid to speak to us,” trailed by the East German Stasi, surrounded by surveillance cameras and rundown buildings — “the opposite of freedom and liberty.”
One side of the wall was lit up and alive. The other was “depression and despondency.” That contrast burned into him a lesson he says America has forgotten: the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The first is the promise of a free people. The second is the lie that has emptied every nation that swallowed it.
“I never thought that we would have that happen here,” West said. And yet here we are.
This is where the believer must pay attention. West roots America’s founding not in politics but in the Creator. “In America, the creator God is the one that endows us with those unalienable rights — and that’s God with a big G. But what we see right now is government with the little G trying to challenge God with the big G.” When the state tries to take God’s place as the giver of rights, it is not merely bad policy. It is idolatry with a flag on it.
Why a Free People Forgets
Binford pressed the hard question. We have seen East and West Germany. We can see North and South Korea right now — one side blazing with light, the other swallowed in darkness on every nighttime satellite map. We watched Cuba and Venezuela collapse. So why is America falling for the same con?
West’s answer is one every Christian parent should write on the doorpost. “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We don’t teach civics. We don’t teach history.”
Then he reached for Scripture — and not as decoration. He pointed to Joshua’s farewell in Joshua 24:15: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” The generation that crossed into the Promised Land swore they would never forget what God had done. But turn one page into the book of Judges and you read the tragedy: “And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD” (Judges 2:10). They forgot. They fell down and worshiped the false gods of the nations around them.
That is the warning West is sounding. We have failed to pass the torch of liberty — and of faith — from one generation to the next. “When you create a void, something’s going to fill that void,” he said. What has rushed in to fill ours is a cultural Marxism that sets us against one another along the fault lines of race, sex, and class. The empty hands of a generation that was taught nothing have grabbed hold of the only thing offered to them.
West points to the wreckage of the family as the clearest evidence. Born in a segregated Atlanta hospital in 1961, he recalls that, in his boyhood, roughly three-quarters of black households had two parents. Today he estimates that figure near 24 percent — and warns the same collapse is now spreading into Hispanic and white communities. “This has been an intentional, purposeful endeavor,” he says, part of what he calls the long, slow march of Marxism through “every single aspect of our society.” The family is not collapsing by accident. It is being dismantled on purpose, because a people without strong families is a people without defenses.
The Red-Green Axis
Here West names a threat most pulpits will never touch. It is not only Marxism marching through our institutions. It is Marxism in unholy alliance with Islamism — what he and Binford call the red-green axis.
“You forgot to throw in one additional thing,” West told Binford. “It’s the Islamists as well.” He sees two revolutions converging — the ideological long march through schools, media, and even churches, and the physical violence erupting in the streets. He points to a president who has survived multiple assassination attempts, and to Charlie Kirk, shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University where he was speaking on political issues.
West does not flinch from the spiritual core of it. On Iran, he refuses the secular frame entirely. “This is a spiritual battle because they see it as a spiritual battle. They call us the great Satan for a reason.” He explains the theology that Western diplomats willfully ignore — that the regime’s clerics await the return of the hidden twelfth imam, the Mahdi, who they believe will usher in global Islamic dominion through a cataclysmic event. “And what do you think a nuclear device is?”
That is why West argues the mutually-assured-destruction logic that kept the Cold War cold does not apply here. A regime that believes a cataclysm summons its messiah is not deterred by the threat of cataclysm. He warns that Iran has been at war with America for nearly fifty years — from the 1979 hostage crisis, to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 Americans through its proxy Hezbollah, to the explosive penetrators that maimed and killed U.S. troops in Iraq. “When they chant death to America, you should believe them.”
West also charges that the Obama and Biden administrations “enriched Iran by the tune of some $18 billion,” recalling the pallets of cash flown to Tehran in the middle of the night. The cash transfer is a matter of record — the Obama administration transferred $1.7 billion to Iran in 2016, the first $400 million delivered as cash on pallets the same day Iran released four American prisoners. The administration characterized it formally as the settlement of a pre-1979 arbitration claim for Iranian funds plus interest, not as a gift or ransom. West’s larger $18 billion figure is his own accounting, not a single documented payment, but his point stands: American leaders sent cash to the nation the U.S. State Department has named the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism every year since 1984.
The alliance is not abstract to him. West names sitting members of Congress — Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — and argues that, in his view, some of their public statements and symbolic gestures in support of groups like Hamas cross the line into sedition. He believes free speech must be protected, even speech he despises. But he never imagined, he says, that America would take seriously elected officials who openly embrace the ideologies that killed a hundred million people in the last century, or that our universities and media would hand them a platform and decline to challenge them. He even turns the irony on Antifa, whose name claims opposition to fascism: a movement that beats people for saying things it does not want to hear is, West notes, displaying the very nature of fascism it pretends to fight.
Quit You Like Men
What grieves West most is not the enemy without but the surrender within. “It has even crept into our churches,” he laments — pastors going soft, a faith reduced to a feeling. He singles out the popular ad campaign with a sharp word: “God is not there to get us. No, we better get Him.”
That is the heart of it. West embodies something our culture has spent two generations dismantling — the man who stands his ground. Not a bully. Not a brute. A protector. A man who walks toward the danger because someone has to, who counts truth as high ground worth holding. “When you have truth on your side, it’s kind of like being on high ground. You’ve got plenty of food, you’ve got plenty of ammunition — you shouldn’t surrender.”
Scripture has a phrase for this. “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13). The word “quit” here is not what it sounds like to modern ears — it has nothing to do with giving up. It comes from the same root as “acquit,” and to “quit you like men” means to acquit yourselves, to conduct yourselves with the courage expected of grown men. The Greek behind it, andrizesthe, is a single word: be courageous, be manly. Paul commands it of the whole church. And it is precisely what has gone missing — men who will stand fast, who will not be moved, who understand that retreat is not an option when the wall is being breached. Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other (Nehemiah 4:17). He did not choose between building and defending. He did both, because a man of God does both.
West will not fight on defense. “You have to go on offense. You can’t win on the defense against this very virulent, very vicious ideology.” He is right. And the question that lands on every Christian man reading this is simple: where is your sword, and why is it still in its sheath?
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
West closes with Benjamin Franklin’s famous answer to Mrs. Powel in 1787, when she asked what kind of government the founders had given the nation: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The keeping is on us. “Each and every one of us has an inherent responsibility to maintain this constitutional republic,” West says. Be better informed. Study to show yourself approved — and yes, he quotes 2 Timothy 2:15 deliberately. Be engaged at every level, from the school board to the White House. He is disgusted that a recent Dallas County election drew barely eight percent turnout. “Freedom requires you to be engaged, and freedom requires you to accept that responsibility and hold elected officials accountable.”
So here is what you do — not someday, this week.
- Watch the full interview above and send it to one man in your life who has gone passive. Not to shame him — to wake him.
- Find your next local election — school board, city council, county bond — put the date in your calendar, and vote in it. The eight-percent turnout West condemns is built one absent Christian at a time.
- Read the entire Declaration of Independence aloud with your family before the 250th anniversary. West is right that many of Jefferson’s grievances are happening again. Your children should be able to name them.
- Take up the duty you have been avoiding. Lead the family devotion. Run for the open seat. Say the hard true thing in the meeting everyone else is afraid to say. Quit you like men.
West stood at Checkpoint Charlie and saw what waits on the other side of the wall. The mercy is that we still have a wall, and still have time to man it. The battle is real — but so is our God, who removes kings and raises them up (Daniel 2:21), who has never once lost control of history, and who calls His people not to win every earthly fight but to be found faithful when the King returns.
On Memorial Day, West reminded us it is not a happy day, but a day to honor “those who made the last full measure of devotion.” They kept the republic for us. The only question left is whether we will keep it for our children.
Key Takeaways
- Lt. Col. Allen West walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin and saw communism firsthand — “the opposite of freedom and liberty.”
- West warns the real divide today is not Republican vs. Democrat, but classical liberalism vs. Marxism and its offshoots.
- He grounds American rights in “God with a big G” — and warns that government is trying to reverse that order.
- Citing Joshua 24 and Judges 2, West says we failed to pass the torch of liberty and faith to the next generation, creating a void Marxism filled.
- The “red-green axis” — Marxism allied with Islamism — is West’s name for the converging ideological and physical threat.
- On Iran, West insists it is a spiritual battle: the regime awaits the Mahdi, summoned by a cataclysmic event, making nuclear deterrence theory dangerously inadequate.
- West charges that past administrations enriched Iran; the documented core is the 2016 cash payment delivered on pallets.
- He laments that cultural surrender has “crept into our churches” and calls men to go on offense, not defense.
- His closing charge echoes Franklin: a republic, “if you can keep it” — and the keeping requires engaged, informed, courageous citizens.
- Hope rests in God’s sovereignty over the rise and fall of nations, not in any political outcome.
Resources
Full interview: Available at RadioInfluence.com, YouTube, Rumble, GodFamilyAndCountry.tv, the Rose Unplugged Media Network, AmericaFirstWarehouse.com, YourNews.com, OBBNetworkTV, WeSeeMedia.com, and the Queens Village Republican Club.
Lt. Col. Allen West: Executive Director of the American Constitutional Rights Union and the Committee to Support and Defend. Host of the Steadfast and Loyal podcast. Author of three books, available through his website and major retailers.
Gary Binford Archive: United Patriots Uprising at Radio Influence — over 200 episodes including Ben Carson, Charlie Kirk, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Mike Lindell, Bishop E.W. Jackson, Pastor Jack Hibbs, and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
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