‘Beneath Sheep’s Clothing’: Communism’s Capture Of America

Authored by Rudolph Lambert Fernandez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”

The narrator continues, “This history is now suspiciously missing from America’s public school systems.” Therein lies a tale.

This documentary shows how socialism-communism that’s failed somewhere keeps trying to reinvent itself elsewhere, typically prioritizing rights over responsibilities.

For example, yes, source-country citizens have a right to emigrate. But host nations owe their own citizens managed, meaningful immigration. Source countries also have responsibilities to ensure their citizens aren’t compelled to emigrate, just as those emigrating must be bound by host-nation norms, not enforce theirs.

Introspection requires humility and courage; the film mentions two people who showed both. Manning Johnson fell under communism’s spell, then found his Christian upbringing and critical thinking at odds with communism’s self-destructive mass hypnosis. Bella Dodd did likewise.

There’s a misconception, critical race theory critic James Lindsay suggests, that Karl Marx put forth an economic doctrine. In truth, he put forth a totalitarian “religion” that forces people to remake themselves into what they’re not. Fuller treatment of this theme can be found in Lindsay’s podcast.

Communism in the Classroom

In Behling’s film, Lindsay addresses parents. He says the communists are “coming for your kids, your kids are the revolution for them.” They’ll get around to brainwashing children, but they must ensure parents can’t “brainwash them first.” Once a “politics of oppression” has entered the classroom, it’s easier to mobilize students as activists, as they were mobilized for COVID-19 hysteria and lockdowns, Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestine, or anti-Israel protests.

Lindsay, Behling, and educator Cari Bartholomew lament how America’s K-12 school education terms nearly everything “systemic”: racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism. Being “woke,” is being awake to these supposedly self-perpetuating hegemonies and denouncing them.

This requires finding solutions through oppressor-oppressed binaries. And it’s racial minorities, radical feminists, and LGBT figures who get to decide who’s oppressed, who’s oppressing, and what the solutions are.

The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child framework envisages schools caring for all of a child’s needs, relegating parents to redundancy, and undermining moral values and church authority. It schools children to complain, blame, feel entitled, and prioritize their feelings over everything and everyone else.

Education theorist Henry Giroux’s “praxis” in the late 20th century was to get radicals tenured as professors and shape teachers unions around Marxist agenda and conformity. But Lindsay says, it wasn’t until the 21st century that socialism-communism powered ahead, contorting America’s institutions around victimhood and self-loathing.

“Common Core” curriculum, effectively erased (and revised) much of American history, dumbing down academic standards, enforcing a device-led conformity around “content.” Journalist Alex Newman says it’s not education but “behavioral training,” much like the physiologist Ivan Pavlov who trained his lab dogs to develop compulsive responses to stimuli.

Behling explains, “A dumbed-down populace led by emotion and accustomed to the constant, instant reward of dopamine hits for clicking the right boxes? It’s easier to control than a rugged, skeptical, critically thinking populace.” It’s why too many parents took too long to question film, TV, or on-campus shows for preschool children featuring gender-bending characters.

Why is a culture of grievance attractive? Behling admits this is because oppression happened. But the socialist-communist playbook marries truth to a lie. It pretends that Marxist solutions, such as reparations or redistribution of private property, will restore for the oppressed the rights of their past, by absolving them of their responsibilities in the present.

Critic of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Lisa Logan warns of how “Transformative” SEL encourages schoolteachers to teach “power dynamics,” to make white children learn that they’re “privileged,” that supremacy is so ingrained that they have “implicit bias.” Their very skin informs their racism.

Teachers emotionally blackmail children, holding them accountable for things they can barely understand, coercing them into becoming allies (and activists) for sundry causes. Trouble is, cognitive dissonance results when children are schooled on beliefs that destroy familial, religious, and cultural beliefs their parents try to inculcate at home.

Transformative SEL medicalizes schools, pathologizing disagreements, critical thinking, and religious or spiritual traditions. Social workers, psychologists, and curricula from organizations such as Planned Parenthood have introduced Comprehensive Sexuality Education, discussing sexuality, identities, and puberty blockers in classrooms, rather than age-appropriate sex education.

Newman cites a 2023 Boston Middle School Youth Risk Behavior Survey that asks children how many sex partners they’ve had, offering up to six options, the lowest being “never” and the highest being “6 or more people.” Other questions are equally depraved. The point is to normalize deviancy in children whose brains aren’t developed enough to judge for themselves what’s normal and abnormal for a child.

First, democracies must shed complacency. Implied in the film, socialist self-destructiveness shows up in the unlikeliest places; socialist democracies aren’t immune because they’re democracies.

India’s nationalist-Hindutva state and party ideology, for instance, demands conformity as proof of patriotism, labeling lack of it as treason. Ignoring the diversity of India’s nearly 30 states, the federal government floods public life with conformity slogans.

Implied is the notion that, if the prefix “One Nation” announces policy, whatever practice follows must also be “one” and adopted unquestioningly: one religion, one election, civil code, language, curriculum. Or one email server.

Second, democracies must recognize that “equity” from the socialist-communist diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook is a trick. It’s made to sound like more or better equality. It’s neither. It is instead, as Lindsay says, “An administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so citizens are made equal.”

A New Wrapper

It’s socialism in a new wrapper. It undermines diversity, imposing a dull sameness. Behold the tyranny of pronouns. Far from inclusive, it excludes, as Mao’s in-or-out-groups once did, naming those deserving of state and party commendation and shaming, blaming, and punishing those deserving of condemnation.

Third, Lindsay suggests, fights for religious liberty must accompany those for individual liberty. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “Only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” Yes, Christ’s call was to be as gentle as doves. But Lindsay wonders, whatever happened to Christ’s other call, to also be as wise as serpents?

Finally, those who care about democracy must speak up, act, and work for family stability and trust as the best antidote to a cult. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. Lindsay admits that fear holds people back; they fear ostracism and losing their jobs, friends, and family.

But he insists, the truth matters more. Love for our children and the world we leave behind matters more. Mom Army founder Seak Smith recalled the savagery of Cambodian communism. She now devotes her energy to supporting (or opposing) bills that protect (or endanger) children, through lobbying and litigation.

When Ronald Reagan railed against similar evils in his 1964 speech, he didn’t use the word “communism” once. But he did use the word “socialism” five times, hinting at a war with “the most dangerous enemy.” Aptly, Behling’s film has his voiceover calling for conviction, courage, clarity, character: “There is a price we will not pay … a point beyond which they must not advance.”

You can read Part 1 of this two-part commentary on “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” here and watch the documentary here.