By Charles Murray
My high school world history teacher taught us about the Russian Revolution. However, she left out some very interesting details that have parallels in modern American history.
When Czar Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, 1917, political authority passed to a temporary central government known as the Provisional Government that began planning elections. The radical-left Bolsheviks, later known as Communists, staged a coup d’état in Petrograd in November, overthrowing the Provisional Government. In spite of the Bolshevik coup, the election for the Constituent Assembly still took place in late November. The Bolsheviks LOST the election, 420 assembly seats to only 225. The elected delegates arrived in Petrograd in January 1918. Lenin called for new elections and ordered troops to disperse a crowd of perhaps 50,000 who marched in support of the Assembly. The soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, killing at least eight. The next day, the Bolsheviks closed the Assembly permanently and claimed absolute power. The “Red” Russians (Communists) began killing “White” Russians and solidifying their power through terror, starvation, and labor camps. Historians estimate that the Bolshevik revolution ultimately resulted in the deaths of perhaps 60 million people. The history lesson is that if leftists lose an election, they will seek other ways of obtaining power.
The radical-left in the US has tried to overturn inconvenient election results twice in recent years. The first time was in the 2000 election when George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore. Leftist lawyers flocked to Florida to change the results through the courts. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Disgruntled leftists have staged countless protests; conservative political figures have been harassed in public; the biased media expresses opinions rather than reporting news; the “deep state” began a campaign of endless lies and “fake news” to disparage the election results; and recently, it was revealed that former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe confirmed to CBS News that the Justice Department had talked about removing President Trump under the 25th Amendment based on unsupported allegations that Trump won the election because of “the aid of the government of Russia.”
Liberal Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson “Well, if that’s true, it is clearly an attempted coup d’état.” The 25th Amendment was passed to be used in a scenario where the president is incapacitated because of a medical or psychological incapacity. If for any other reason a president is deemed unfit to serve, the process of impeachment must be used. But leftists don’t like that because they don’t have the votes. Even if they manage to impeach the president in the House, without proof of conspiracy or other high crimes and misdemeanors committed while in office, they don’t have the votes in the Senate.
The radical-left has become increasingly bold in recent years. Will they stage a violent coup like the Bolsheviks? This is unlikely because of the foresight of the Founding Fathers who guaranteed “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” The radical-left understands this, and that is why they have worked tirelessly to overturn the Second Amendment. Nancy Pelosi has said that if President Trump can declare national emergency to stop illegal immigration by building a wall, then a future Democrat president can declare a national emergency to ban private ownership of firearms. If this were to happen, I predict that the radical-left will learn what Admiral Yamamoto reputedly said after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done today is to awaken a great, sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
