Democrats’ ongoing attempts to nullify the 2016 presidential election via impeachment of President Donald Trump is closer to a “communist revolution” than “civil war,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) while guest-hosting Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight alongside host Rebecca Mansour.

“I was quoted earlier today saying on the House floor something about civil war,” Gohmert said. “Well, it’s not a civil war that Republicans are engaged in. It’s the Democrats, but what is a better description than civil war is actually … a communist revolution.”

Gohmert continued, “Next thing you know you’ve got Trotsky over convincing the soldiers to support the Lenin of the place, and then boom, you have what people think will be a benevolent dictator and get things back on track and restore people’s rights, but you’ve just lost everything, that Caesar has now crossed the Rubicon, you’ve lost your republic, the little experiment in self-government, and now you’re dealing with a dictator.”

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Hostility towards religion is central to communist ideology, noted Gohmert, reflecting on his time in the Soviet Union as an exchange student when he observed state-mandated displaying of portraits of Vladimir Lenin in churches and other houses of worship.

Gohmert stated, “Dostoevsky said the problem with communism is not an economic problem. The problem of communism is the problem of atheism, and it reminded me of when I was an exchange student for a summer at the Soviet Union … two, three hours from Moscow. At that time in the real Soviet Union, there was only one recognized Christian seminary, and that was the Russian Orthodox, [in] a place called Zagorsk, … [Within] a multistory building [at the seminary], they had a huge painting of Lenin [above which was written], ‘Lenin is with us.’ So you may be turning into this Christian seminary, but what you need to know is it isn’t God, it’s Lenin who is with us, and that is one of the problems of communism, is atheism.”

Left-wing ideology is predicated on an illusion of humanity’s perfectibility through state power, noted Gohmert.

“Whittaker Chambers said, ‘If I rejected only communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical, because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility,'” remarked Gohmert.

Mansour pointed out that Whittaker Chambers saw the fight against communism as much more than just “one economic theory against another.” Christianity was central to the defeat of the Soviet Union, Mansour explained.

“The pebble that started the avalanche that destroyed the Soviet Empire started in Poland with the Solidarity movement and with the Poles, basically a very religious people, demanding [freedom of worship],” Mansour said. “It started in their churches. It started with John Paul II going to Poland [in 1979], and the crowd chanting, ‘We want God.'”

Mansour recalled Pope John Paul II’s famous visit to Poland in June 1979, when he returned to his homeland for the first time after becoming pope. The communist authorities in Poland could not prevent the new Polish pope’s visit or stop him from holding a large outdoor Catholic mass. “But they were terrified of it,” Mansour explained.

“They realized all these crowds were going to [attend Pope John Paul II’s mass], and people were going to feel unafraid to go there,” she said.

Mansour recounted the story of how the communist authorities banned news stations from showing the size of the crowd attending the papal mass in Poland.

“They had order the news stations to only have a medium-close shot on the Pope the entire time,” she explained. “But people could still hear the huge crowd in the background. So even if they didn’t show the crowd, [television viewers] could hear it.”

Pope John Paul II’s message to the crowd was “Be not afraid,” Mansour said.

She noted that Polish dissidents talk about that papal visit in 1979 as being the moment “when they suddenly realized we don’t need to be afraid. Look at how many of us there are here.”

“It is no coincidence that the Solidarity movement rose up out of that [papal visit],” she said. “People took to the streets saying, ‘We won’t be afraid.’ And what happened? The crackdown. We saw it in December 1981 when the Soviets rolled their tanks into Warsaw and tried to do exactly what totalitarian regimes always do to shut down a people’s movement.”

Mansour linked the Soviet Union’s suppression of Solidarity in Poland with communist China’s suppression of the democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

“It’s what they’re doing in Hong Kong right now, and what they did in Tiananmen Square in 1989,” she said. “It is stomping on the spirit of the people. It’s no coincidence to me, also, that many of the Hong Kong protesters are Christians. You see it. You see them singing prayers and hymns.”

Communist states cannot abide competing loyalties among their subjects, Mansour explained.

“When you get down to it, when a person is praying, when a person is in that spiritual spot, whatever your religion is — whether it’s the Uighur Muslims who are being forced into concentration camps or it’s the Christians in China who are seeing their churches bulldozed — what it is is that a surveillance state, a totalitarian state, can’t touch you when you’re in that place, when you’re praying,” Mansour said. “That’s where they can’t observe you. They can’t control you. It was the same thing with the Soviets.”

The Bible Western freedoms are predicated on the Bible, observed Gohmert. “[Whittaker Chambers said], ‘Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom, the soul dies. Without the soul, there’s no justification for freedom.'”

Gohmert drew from a 1913 letter in which Vladimir Lenin wrote, “Every religious idea, even flirting with the idea of God, is unhonorable vileness of the most dangerous kind.”

“You can’t have communism with allowing belief in God. It has to be supplanted,” Gohmert added.

Gohmert later clarified his aforementioned comments regarding civil war as reported by “liberal media.”

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“[On] my using the term ‘civil war’ … I made clear I don’t want a civil war,” Gohmert remarked. “I will not participate in a civil war. I don’t have any plans. I hope and pray that never happens, but as a historian said, guns are involved in the last phase. … Whether you say the Democrats have been engaged in a civil war, Republicans certainly haven’t, but Democrats have been.”

Gohmert concluded, “I think it is better to characterize it as [a] communist revolution. That’s what they’re about, and whether you want to call it progressivism, socialism, communism, that’s what they’re about, and we’re already seeing … communism’s hatred of religion, and specifically Christianity. It’s a threat to what has always been an American way of life.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.