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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Charlie Kirk and Dr. James Lindsay Expose How Communism Already Infiltrated America Through Wokeism
Charlie Kirk sits down with Dr. James Lindsay to discuss his new documentary Beneath Sheep's Clothing and the alarming connection between modern wokeism and Soviet-era communism. Lindsay argues that Kamala Harris represents the most advanced stage of communism America has ever faced, pointing to her rhetoric on equity, her father's Marxist background, and her use of language that mirrors Soviet ideology. Drawing parallels between DEI initiatives and Stalin's 1920s programs, Lindsay makes the case that communism isn't coming to America, it's already here. The conversation explores how communist ideology targets the family, church, and private property, and why Americans must learn to recognize Marxist language disguised as progressive values. Lindsay shares his rules for defeating domestic communism: get discerning, get involved, and be gentle but firm.
Beneath Sheep's Clothing: A Documentary Exposing Communist Infiltration
Charlie Kirk opens the conversation by highlighting the enthusiastic response to Dr. James Lindsay's new documentary film, Beneath Sheep's Clothing. An attendee in Albuquerque approached Kirk with evangelical fervor about the film, describing it as essential viewing. Lindsay explains that the response since the film's release has been overwhelming, with people messaging him that the film "is going to save the Republic" and that "everybody has to see this."
The documentary, directed by Julie Beiling and available on Salem Now, draws direct parallels between what happened in Soviet Union churches and schools and what Americans are witnessing today with woke ideology. Lindsay emphasizes that the film's message is clear: communism is not coming to America—it's already here. The high-action, high-production-quality documentary aims to reach audiences in a way that books, shows, and interviews cannot, making the communist threat visceral and undeniable.
Julie Beiling brings unique credentials to the project. She holds a double master's degree in Russian literature and Russian history, and as a Mormon missionary, she served in Russia immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Her firsthand experience picking up the remnants of Soviet life gave her insight into how 70 years of attempting to hammer Christian belief out of the Russian people ultimately failed—virtually all Russians retained their Christianity in private. Her vision was to document the religious persecution of Russians during the Soviet era and compare it to current trends in the United States.
What Does It Mean to Be Woke?
Kirk plays a clip of Kamala Harris repeatedly using the term "woke," saying "everybody needs to be woke" and discussing who is "the wokest or woker." He asks Lindsay to connect the dots between being woke and communism for those who might see them as unrelated concepts.
Lindsay breaks it down simply: "Woke" means awakened—but awakened to what? According to Lindsay, being woke means waking up to the belief that the world is made of systems of oppression, an oppressor versus oppressed dynamic. This might manifest as economic (rich versus poor), racial (white versus people of color), sexual (male versus female, normal versus sexually deviant), or any number of other divisions.
Lindsay then takes the analysis to its source: the very first page of the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx in 1848. Marx stated that the entire movement of history is the conflict of classes, presenting examples like slave owner versus slave, or as he summarized it, "oppressor versus oppressed." When people are manipulated into waking up to believing that society is organized around oppressor versus oppressed dynamics and that the oppressed must transform society to a new socialist, anti-racist, or feminist model, they are dealing with Marxism.
Lindsay has spent the past five years of his career documenting that virtually everything seen in woke ideology comes straight out of communism, repackaged to attack the soft spots of the West. Americans are particularly vulnerable to this repackaged communism because it doesn't announce itself as such—it arrives wearing the language of liberation and justice.
Is This Election a Referendum on Communism?
Kirk frames the upcoming election as properly understood as a referendum on the American genre of communism. Lindsay agrees, noting that he has been thanking Vice President Harris for putting the national conversation about communism front and center. The Harris-Walz ticket is, in Lindsay's assessment, a clearly Marxist ticket. When Elon Musk said so on Twitter, the response was telling: critics claimed Musk "doesn't understand communism"—which Lindsay reads as almost a signature confirmation that it is communist. He predicts that in a few weeks, the narrative will shift to "of course it's communist and here's why it's a good thing, here's why maybe we do need a little more communism."
Kirk asks Lindsay whether he would advise President Trump to directly call Harris a communist in a debate. Lindsay responds with an unequivocal yes, emphasizing that Trump needs to be able to explain why, using the oppressor versus oppressed framework from the Communist Manifesto. Kirk expresses a concern that some Americans might dismiss such language as right-wing hyperbole, but Lindsay counters that people are seeing things they've never seen before. More importantly, it's true—Harris is a communist, and every time people hear her name, they should think "communist Harris."
Equity Is Not Equality: Kamala Harris Echoes Soviet Doctrine
Kirk plays a clip of Harris explaining the difference between equality and equity: "Equality suggests often everybody should get the same thing, well that often assumes everybody started out in the same place. As opposed to equity, which is everyone should end up in the same place." Harris goes on to say that not everybody started in the same place, so "some people need more so we all end up in the same place."
Lindsay identifies this as Harris repeating a doctrine from the early 1920s Soviet Union. His recent deep reading of Lenin and Stalin, inspired partly by his work on the documentary, revealed that one of the second most important programs in the Soviet Union according to Stalin in 1923 was what we would today call DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
In Russian, this program consisted of three components: diversity, actual equality (what they called equity instead of using the term equity), and indigenization. Lindsay notes that these impossible-to-pronounce Russian words can be verified in Google Translate. "Actual equality" meant exactly what Harris just described—not just economic equity but also cultural equity. Indigenization involved using various nationalities and ethnic groups of the Soviet Union, bringing them in and showing them that their real expression of citizenship would be through socialism.
What Americans are hearing from Kamala Harris is essentially a repackaging in modern English of what was a Soviet project considered of highest or second highest priority a hundred years ago.
The Three Targets of Communism: Family, Church, and Property
Kirk notes that the goal of communism requires first eliminating the family, church (or religious life), and private property. He asks Lindsay to explain how wokeism or communism aims to eliminate or deteriorate the family.
Lindsay clarifies that the reason communists target family, religion, and property so eagerly is because what they're actually after is the soul, which they seek to transform into being communist. Family, church, and property are the things that protect the soul from this transformation.
The family grounds a person in who they are, providing an indigenous identity rooted in family values. Communists must split people away from their families, just as any cult would, so that individuals no longer have their family-based identity. This is accomplished by feeding people doctrines that position them as part of the new vanguard of history, moving history forward, while their parents are polluted with old values. This was the "smash the four olds" campaign in China's Cultural Revolution, and the same approach was used in the Soviet Union.
Today, children are being "hopped up" on new visions of racial equality (rejecting the "bad old racist" ways of their parents) and new visions of gender and sexual identities that their parents won't understand. These ideologies drive wedges between children and parents. Lindsay points to laws in Minnesota, California, Washington, and other hard Democrat states where the state can now intervene and actually remove children from parental care if parents don't affirm what their children are being taught at school.
Even at a lower level, Common Core math—which "nobody in the world understands at all"—made it so parents couldn't do homework with their kids. The bonding experience of a mother or father helping with difficult math homework is gone because parents aren't allowed to use their methods. The whole idea of Common Core is that there's a new math that parents can't be involved in, forcing children to turn to the state for understanding.
The Subversion of the American Church
Kirk notes that Lindsay has done extensive commentary on the church and that the film addresses this topic. He asks about the state of the American church and the best way to excommunicate woke communism from the church and from religion.
Lindsay explains that the experiments of the Soviet Union and China taught communists that it doesn't work to try to smash religion out of people, especially in the Christian West. Even with the most brutal force—such as in the Pitesti prison in Romania—they couldn't force people out of their faith. Instead, the strategy shifted to subverting beliefs by setting up a false church that teaches communist doctrine as though it's Christianity.
The solution, according to Lindsay, is to be discerning. Pastors leading churches must get very clear on what is required to be biblically grounded and biblically accurate in their faith. It's their responsibility to teach and shepherd their flocks accordingly, not to have an "anything goes Christianity" where everything's about soft affirmation and "you do you" or "who am I to judge" or "live and let live."
Rules for Defeating Communists in Domestic Politics
Kirk asks about Lindsay's rules for defeating communists in a domestic political sense, particularly when facing an overwhelmingly powerful communist political operation.
Lindsay's first rule is simple and biblical: get discerning. People must be able to pull apart manipulated language so they understand that when communists use words like "democracy" or "inclusion," they don't mean what most people think. When they use words like "transform" or "transformative," red flags should go up. People need to clarify and demystify themselves from the misuses of language that communists use to reorganize society without people realizing it.
After getting informed, people must get involved. They have to get off the couch, figure out what their talents are, and get started. But Lindsay adds that when Jesus in Matthew chapter 10 sends his disciples out, he doesn't just send them to be discerning—he tells them to be gentle. Facing a "very scary beast of a machine," and looking at how quickly the UK has flipped into totalitarianism, Lindsay warns that going out without remembering what gentleness looks like will simply be used as a pretext to stamp down resistance and take more power, accelerating society's spiral. Americans must be clear, active, smart, and gentle—firm but gentle, not tolerating the intolerable but not being pushed over.
Show, Don't Tell: The Power of Evidence
Kirk highlights a simple principle he learned from Lindsay: the significance of showing, not telling, when fighting communists.
Lindsay emphasizes this is crucial. He can sit and tell people things, but if he doesn't show them, it lacks impact. This is why he wanted to play the Russian words through his phone during their conversation—to show, not just tell. When he can show people Stalin's document declaring DEI-like programs as the second most important aspect of the party, or show Herbert Marcuse's 1960s writing about a "repressive tolerance" or "liberating tolerance" regime that supports the left wing and crushes the right wing, or show Paulo Freire's book "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" where he writes about going through woke consciousness as "a literal rebirth, a personal Easter" and declares that "the Easter of commemorative rhetoric—in other words, Christian Easter—is dead with no hope of resurrection," it changes everything.
When people see the drag queen in front of children rather than just hearing that maybe it happened, when they see the horror on the child's face, they understand what's going on. When they see the quote from queer theorist Kevin Kumashiro in his paper "Against Repetition" saying the goal is to lead children into an emotional crisis and structure the environment around them to resolve it productively, they realize nobody could possibly be making this up.
You Must Be Unburdened by What Has Been
Kirk plays a clip of Kamala Harris repeatedly saying variations of "what can be unburdened by what has been." The clip from Kirk and Lindsay's conversation at the Believer Summit has been seen well over 10 million times, with Kirk asking Lindsay: Is this word salad or Marxism?
Lindsay's response is unequivocal: "It's Marxism. That is in fact not at all word salad. It's a Marxist incantation." The phrase means seeing the possibility of a world that's unburdened from its own history, which is exactly what Mao Zedong did when he launched the "smash the four olds" campaign—the four old characteristics of Chinese society. They were going to make a new China unburdened by what had been in China's past. This is what the Soviets and Bolsheviks did when they took over Russia—they were going to make the new Russia, the new man, so people could become unburdened by what has been and see what could possibly be in terms of a socialist utopia.
When Harris says this, Lindsay assumes that given her father was a Marxist, she knows exactly what she's saying. He doesn't buy her "idiot Valley speak shtick" one bit. He believes she's far more smart and savvy than conservatives have given her credit for, and she is an outright Marxist, which is clear in her language.
The Coconut Tree and Historical Materialism
Kirk asks Lindsay about Harris's famous coconut tree comment: "You think you fell out of a coconut tree?"
Lindsay identifies this as a Marxist sentiment too. The whole idea of Marxism, as Marx himself stated in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," is that men make their own historical conditions, but they don't make them as they please—they make them according to the historical conditions present in the system they're in. Marx said the weight of all past generations "weighs on the brains of the living like a nightmare."
Falling out of a coconut tree means you didn't come from nowhere in the time you're in—you came into a world built off of an entire historical tradition, an entire transformation of history. You have to pick up where you are and go forward. According to Lindsay, almost everything Harris says is Marxist.
The coconut tree statement ties into the Marxist belief that you are not a sovereign individual with your own agency, choices, and action. Instead, it's about deconstructing colonialism, getting rid of racism or white supremacy. You exist in a historical context, in what Marx called your historical conditions. These conditions are the product of society and tend to brainwash people to reproduce them. But it's possible to wake up and avoid your social production—what's called the theory of social production or social reproduction. You can avoid being dragged through reproducing history generation after generation by awakening to the fact that there's an oppressor-oppressed dynamic and you are part of the oppressed. You have an insight into how society is not fair, not socialist, and denies our social nature or anti-racist nature or queer nature. Then you can "do the work"—the same work the hammer and sickle were supposed to do in Soviet Russia or China—to transform society into a new socialist utopia.
How to Find the Film and the Call to Action
Lindsay urges everyone to see Beneath Sheep's Clothing, available at beneathsheepsclothing.movie (all written as one word) and on Salem Now. He encourages people not just to watch it but to share it on social media and with friends. More importantly, he asks people to get their left-leaning or Democrat friends to watch it because this isn't a question of left versus right or Republican versus Democrat—this is America versus communism.
Americans need to wake up as many people as possible. Lindsay notes they're hearing from many Democrats and traditional leftists right now who are saying "wait a minute, communism's not good." These people need to have the dots connected, and the film does exactly that.
Kirk closes with a stark warning: If Kamala Harris, the current vice president, becomes president, it will be the most advanced communism has ever come in the history of the country. Communism is not coming—communism is here. She is a communist, and communism is on the ballot.
