Today at the Iowa National Security Action Summit, an event organized by right-wing conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson delivered a vague speech about how divisive political rhetoric is undermining the country’s security.

Naturally, when a member of the audience told Carson that there is a “strong anti-American spirit that is undermining everything that we stand for” within the Obama administration, Carson told him that he was “absolutely right.”

Carson said that even before President Obama took office, the U.S. government was turning against the American people and recommended that people read far-right author W. Cleon Skousen’s book “The Naked Communist.”

As Alexander Zaitchick notes, Skousen argued that a cabal of wealthy globalists bent on creating a one-world government has infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“This has been going on long before this administration, though, this has been going on for 30, 40, 50 years, it’s called the progressive agenda,” Carson said. “There’s a book called ‘The Naked Communist ‘ by Cleon Skousen, it was written in 1958, and it goes through the agenda they have here to fundamentally change our country, and I recommend that book because you would think it was written last year. But I believe that this is well orchestrated and the thing that they need in order to finally achieve their goal is for people with common sense to keep their mouths shut. And that’s what we can’t do, we have to stand up for what we believe in.”