Pre-Adamites

After wandering into more socio-political topics than I was initially ever intending to talk about here, I decided to return to one of my early flagged topics: the possibility and nature of pre-Adamite people.  Quite possibly, as happened to me, you see the very term and scratch your head.  Huh?  What in the world is a pre-Adamite person and where in the world did such an idea come from?  This is actually somewhat curious, however, as the question was once a big one that many members of the Church seemed to be concerned about, and it even prompted an official statement from the First Presidency to the General Authorities of the Church.  This question is also inextricably tied up with the question of evolution, so I'll have to address that somewhat too.  Before we really begin, let's establish some context.

First off, as James Talmage said, there is no conflict between science and religion when both are clearly understood; if there is apparent conflict, it is due to our own incomplete and imperfect understanding of one or the other (or even both.)  That said, there are limitations to both sets of knowledge with regards to this particular question.  Religion has not attempted to answer definitively with any level of detail what exactly encompassed the creation, and I think any attempts to wring a detailed history of the world by literally reading the Genesis account of the creation such as the Ussher chronology are wrong-headed from the get-go.  The answer from God appears to be some form of "that is not important to your salvation, so details have not been revealed."  Also, it stands in (occasionally, apparent) contrast with science, which means that it becomes a means whereby to try the faith of Man.

Evolution, on the other hand, is a bit more tricky.  Sure, there is a strong, decades-long scientific tradition of the model of evolution being the explanation given for the peopling (and inhabiting by both plants and animals, for that matter) of the earth.  However... things are not as simple as they seem.

A few interesting examples: the credibility of the scientific industry overall has undergone a rather withering fire for anyone who's been paying attention to it.  Although I could discuss this at length, to do so, I'd need to dig out a lot of old sources that I've read but not really tracked; rather, let me point you merely to a summary here, and an even more scathing one in the book reviewed here.  And here's one specifically regarding evolution itself.

But maybe that's getting a little ahead of ourselves.  Despite it's ascendancy, evolution as a model suffers from a number of crippling flaws, notably:

• The second law of thermodynamics states that natural systems become more chaotic over time, not more structured and organized.  Evolution posits the opposite.
• Few scientists understand the statistics involved.  While they handwave away the unlikeliness of evolution by saying that clearly it did happen, in reality, no rational mathematical model can possibly give us the complexity we see over the time frame that we see.  That mathematics would require an order of magnitude (or more) more time for evolution to have produced the result that we see today.
• This is even worse with the abiotic genesis of life from some "primordial soup."  There is no satisfactory scientific explanation for the genesis of life from not-life organic elements.  And again; the statistical odds of not-life becoming life is astronomically more difficult than most scientists realize or admit.
• Hybrid species in the fossil record are rare, and usually unconvincing, except in a very macro, big picture way.  As an example; Archaeopterix lithographica is often held out as a transition between dinosaurs and birds; however, it's also clearly too derived in a number of characteristics to be ancestral to later birds.  It's therefore a "close cousin" of a completely unknown and unconfirmed ancestor to birds.  This kind of ghost transition fossil story is commonplace; the actual transition fossil is almost uniformly unknown.  There's even a modification to the theory of evolution that purports to explain why there is no clear fossil evidence for evolution: punctuated equilibrium.  All of this merely says that there is no significant "hard evidence" of evolution in the fossil record.
• Experiments have been conducted with fruit flies, bombarded with mutagens to supposedly replicate the effect of millions of years of evolution.  None of these has ever produced anything like a new species.
• In fact, the very notion that mutation is beneficial and can result in speciation, especially prompted by vacant ecological niches, is a just-so story that has never been observed or explained satisfactorily.  And it trips over its own feet to some degree; mutation isn't caused by ecological vacancies, so what exactly prompts rabid speciation and diversification when ecological vacancies exist is not explained at all.
• The complexity of various organs, such as the vertebrate eye, or a bird's wing, which have hundreds of working parts that all interact together to fulfill a single function, has no explanation.  There are handwavy attempts to suggest that "half a wing" or a "partial eye" confers some evolutionary benefit, thus prompting transitional features to exist, but these are handwavy just-so stories.  The reality is that these complex structures have to have been designed in coordinated fashion in order to even exist.  This is, again, a failure of most scientists to truly understand statistics and probability; c.f. the just-story which is actually statistically impossible of millions of monkey and millions of typewriters and Shakespeare.
• The same is true for intracellular enzyme interactions, or for that matter, other complex symbiotic interrelationships.
• Biological models, as referred to in the link above, are continually debunked by genetics, requiring tweaks to the theory of evolution until it is a hopelessly complex model that rests on an unproven foundation, and is therefore very unlikely to actually end up being true.

While it isn't really my purpose in this post to debunk the theory of evolution by natural selection (TENS for short), it is important for this post that I point out and establish, at least at a very high level, that TENS is very poor science, and if it weren't for inertia and politics within the scientific community, it almost certainly would have been discarded decades ago, and we'd either be talking about a new standard model, or at least be in search of one.  The reality is that we are desperately in need of a new model that better explains the data that we have, because evolution doesn't do so.  Young earth creationism doesn't either, which is the other obvious alternative in the public sphere, so we do not have a model that actually fits the data well currently, unless it lurks out there in the fringe realm of pseudo-science.  

One day, the edifice protecting evolution from sufficient criticism to bring the model down will break through the political forces aligned to stop such criticism from gaining steam and some alternative, whatever it may be, will be presented.  Then again, maybe it won't happen until further light and knowledge is revealed to Man.  TENS has evolved into the counter-argument against religion; an atheistic, secular humanist dogma.  As I said, neither the "standard" religious model of young earth creationism nor the atheist natural selection model are realistic or believable, and both are contradicted by a wide variety of evidence, but the presence of the model of evolution has been a very effective tool for Satan in leading people astray from their faith because of the weaknesses in young earth creationism, and the suppression of details about the weaknesses of evolution.  As I said earlier, and as Bro. Talmage said decades ago, there is no conflict between science and religion when both are properly understood.  However, neither are properly understood today; science gives us a visibly unworkable model with no alternatives, and religion declines to answer the question in any detail at present (although curiously, there are ways in which using time dilation observed by theoretical physics can actually—believe it or not—salvage and reconcile the Bible narrative with observed scientific observations about age.  But that doesn't take away from the fact that the creation narrative that we have is incredibly light on details, and almost certainly deliberately so on the part of God, or Moses, or both.)  For now, what is required is faith that more details on the how will be forthcoming at some future date, possibly in the Millennium, or in our life to come as we learn and grow more following the Resurrection.  From D&C 101: 32 Yea, verily I say unto you, in that day when the Lord shall come, he shall reveal all things— 33 Things which have passed, and hidden things which no man knew, things of the earth, by which it was made, and the purpose and the end thereof— 34 Things most precious, things that are above, and things that are beneath, things that are in the earth, and upon the earth, and in heaven. From the Religion 301 manual (an Institute, or BYU class): How was the earth created? The Lord has not yet revealed how the earth was created. All we know is that it was created by God.  (That quote from D&C 101 will apply quite well to all kinds of mysteries in astronomy and astrophysics that also are clumsily patched up with a secular, areligious scientific dogma, but that's a discussion for another time...)

Nor is my purpose to present an alternative model.  I personally favor a model that has many of the "noble and great ones" involved in the creation, as described in Abraham 3 as a learning and training exercise, to prepare the world for the coming of Man, and that the various stages of life as seen in the fossil record are more like the model years of a car than what is described in TENS.  But that's merely my own speculative pet theory and without a greater understanding of what the purpose of such an activity may be, it's hard to pin it down as only one of many potential models that could fit the available data.  But we shall indeed see.  As Bruce R. McConkie once wrote (and with the caveat that McConkie wrote a lot of stuff that was clearly merely his opinion, learned though it was); emphasis mine: When, during the Millennium, the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon is translated, it will give an account of life in the premortal existence; of the creation of all things; of the Fall and the Atonement and the Second Coming; of temple ordinances, in their fullness; of the ministry and mission of translated beings; of life in the spirit world, in both paradise and hell; of the kingdoms of glory to be inhabited by resurrected beings; and many such like things. As of now, the world is not ready to receive these truths. For one thing, these added doctrines will completely destroy the whole theory of organic evolution as it is now almost universally taught in the halls of academia. For another, they will set forth an entirely different concept and time frame of the creation, both of this earth and all forms of life and of the sidereal heavens themselves, than is postulated in all the theories of men. And sadly, there are those who, if forced to make a choice at this time, would select Darwin over Deity.

Some of the speculation of pre-Adamites came about a hundred or more years ago as Charles Darwin's TENS theory was first breaking across the world, in particular with regards to the age of human and hominid fossils, and the very existence of "early man" in general that seemed to contradict the Adam and Eve narrative.  Given the many weaknesses of TENS, it's possible that the reason for the idea is somewhat mitigated, although it would also require that one believe that the half-life of Carbon-14 and radiocarbon dating is flawed science; a more difficult premise to accept, as I know of no challenges of any significance to the rationale of radiocarbon dating.  So what exactly is the idea of pre-Adamites, and what happened to the idea that it's kind of dropped out of the consciousness of the membership of the Church?

Obviously, science still teaches us that the longevity of the human race is a good deal longer than as described in Scripture.  According to research, anatomically modern humans have existed since about 200,000 years ago, out of a diverse selection of "archaic human" groups such as Neanderthals, Heidelburgians, Denisovans, Ergasters and Antecesors, etc. go back a million or more years, and guys like Homo erectus and Homo habilis go back almost 3 million years, before which their ancestors were supposed to have been the chimpanzee-like Australopithecus.  Now granted; you need to get the details on a lot of this research.  What is presented to us as a done deal with complete skeletons of unambiguous interpretation is often quite far from that in reality; while nothing as grotesquely false as the Piltdown Man hoax is evident, I firmly believe that without the underlying context of TENS, the data that we have on these so-called early humans could and would be interpreted very differently than they are today.  A few fragments of bone does not a convincing man-ape hybrid make unless your model requires man-ape hybrids, after all, and very few of these specimens are known from more than a few fragments of bone.  Most of the skulls that you see pictures of are reconstructions based on a bit of braincase attached to some brow ridges, a separate find of some jaw bones from a similar locale that is referred to the same species, and the rest is filled in via comparative anatomy.  There's a joke physical anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists make that you could fit all of the pre-Modern human remains that we have today in a single shoe box, and still have room for the shoes.  That's an exaggeration, but it's funny because of the underlying truth behind it.  But even if you disregard the entire reconstruction of primive, ape-like species like Homo habilis, you still have anatomically modern humans that extend an order of magnitude earlier than Adam could possibly have been extended.  It is very difficult to envision even an unliteral reading of the Scriptural account that has Adam and Eve running around 200,000 years ago.  And yet we have skeletons that date that old, and no reason to doubt the veracity of the dating. 

In addition to that, here's a small roundup of some quotations from The Brethren:

• In a Memorandum from the First Presidency to the General Authorities (mentioned above) issued in April 1931, it says: Both parties [i.e., Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and B. H. Roberts] make the scripture and the statements of men who have been prominent in the affairs of the Church the basis of their contention; neither has produced definite proof in support of his views... Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. Our mission is to bear the message of the restored Gospel to the people of the world. Leave geology, biology, archaeology and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church. We can see no advantage to be gained by a continuation of the discussion to which reference is here made, but on the contrary are certain that it would lead to confusion, division and misunderstanding if carried further. Upon one thing we should all be able to agree namely, that presidents Joseph F. Smith, John Winder and Anthon Lund were right when they said: "Adam is the primal parent of our race." 
• Elder James Talmage wrote, of the same debate: Involved in this question is that of the beginning of life upon the earth, and as to whether there was death either of animal or plant before the fall of Adam, on which proposition Elder Smith was very pronounced in denial and Elder Roberts equally forceful in the affirmative. As to whether Pre-Adamite races existed upon the earth there has been much discussion among some of our people of late. The decision reached by the First Presidency, and announced to this morning's assembly, was in answer to a specific question that obviously the doctrine of the existence of races of human beings upon the earth prior to the fall of Adam was not a doctrine of the Church; and, further, that the conception embodied in the belief of many to the effect that there were no such Pre-Adamite races, and that there was no death upon the earth prior to Adam's fall is likewise declared to be no doctrine of the Church. I think the decision of the First Presidency is a wise one in the premises. This is one of the many things upon which we cannot preach with assurance and dogmatic assertions on either side are likely to do harm rather than good. 
• Hugh Nibley, in an article titled "Before Adam" wrote, among other things: Do not begrudge existence to creatures that looked like men long, long ago, nor deny them a place in God's affection or even a right to exaltation—for our scriptures allow them such. Nor am I overly concerned as to just when they might have lived, for their world is not our world. They have all gone away long before our people ever appeared. God assigned them their proper times and functions, as he has given me mine—a full-time job that admonishes me to remember his words to the overly eager Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me." (Moses 1:31.) It is Adam as my own parent who concerns me. When he walks onto the stage, then and only then the play begins. 

This opens the door to the possibility; maybe even the probability of pre-Adamite men, given those quotes and the archaeological record.  But that of course answers nothing of what in the world they are doing spiritually and where they fit into the Plan of Salvation.  Here's a few other Scriptures and quotes that some have used to build up (admittedly very speculative) concepts about pre-Adamites and where they may fit:

• D&C 45:54: And then shall the heathen nations be redeemed, and they that knew no law shall have part in the first resurrection; and it shall be tolerable for them.
• There are also many who believe that the term "replenish" in the phrase "multiply and replenish the earth" is to be taken literally; i.e., the earth needs to be refilled as it was emptied from a former full state.  Elder Orson Hyde said in the Journal of Discourses: The world was peopled before the days of Adam, as much so as it was before the days of Noah. It was said that Noah became the father of a new world, but it was the same old world still, and will continue to be (in the future), though it may pass through many changes.

If any such pre-Adamites existed, then there are basically three potential outcomes that I'm aware of, with little to recommend any of them other than speculation. 

1. Adam and Eve were the father and mother of the lineage of people who received the first dispensation of the gospel, and as such are the father and mother (in a spiritual, and figurative sense) of all men.  Their presence alone at the head of the family tree of all humanity is not to be taken too literally in this interpretation.  Although I do not favor or agree with this interpretation, there are at least some traditions that support it; Adam and Eve are mentioned in the Pearl of Great Price (and in other sources) as interacting with other people who remain unnamed.  I presume that they are meant to be their own offspring.  There are also persistent (apocryphal if not actually outright mythological) references to a first wife of Adam's: Lilith.  Even the statement above from the Presidency to the Brethren leaves open this possibility; it states that Adam is the primal parent of our race, not the sole parent of our race.  In general, I don't support or agree with this position myself, but I can, by squinting really hard, see how it could maybe fit in with what we know.  Certainly it seems that most the Brethren have never really believed it, but many Christian scholars outside of our faith believe in something like this.  (Many others see the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall as symbolic rather than literal, and many even in the Church believe this, although I believe that this is not in harmony with what we know of Gospel doctrine.)
2. There was a theory that I haven't heard much about, but which apparently was earlier somewhat popular, that a large number of people in the War in Heaven were reluctant, or afraid of the mortal trials, and entered into some kind of "plea bargain" or negotiated state where they would inherit only a Terrestrial (at best) glory but would live outside of the dispensations of the Gospel and not be subject to Celestial law.  Although prior to hearing about this notion, I had assumed statements like Joseph Smith's reference to "the heathen of ages that never had hope," in Times and Seasons to refer to merely conventional heathens who died without ever hearing of the Gospel, some have seen statements like this as evidence for this plan, as is the verse from D&C section 54 noted above.  If a terrestrial eternity was "tolerable" to these heathen nations, could they have bargained for just such a plan rather than being tried according to a fuller, celestial law?  If so, it certainly makes sense for them to have lived before Adam's time, because Adam was given the celestial law, as were his descendants and the whole earth from his time until the end; even those who lived during the Apostasy or in cultures where they never heard of Christ will be taught the gospel in the spirit world and have the chance to accept it and thus gain the benefits of a celestial exaltation.
   
   Although I don't see any reason to say that this notion can't be true, neither do I see any reason to suspect that it is.  Every statement used to support it can equally be made to support another interpretation that does not involve pre-Adamic peoples that merely were apostate, not in some putative negotiated, plea-bargain spiritual status.  The only things that recommend it are the fact that it does, at least, offer an explanation for human skeletons found by archaeologists that are almost certainly way too old to post-date Adam and Eve, and hey, at least it's a really interesting just-so story.
3. Orson Hyde and some other Brethren in earlier days of the Church seemed to believe in entire Dispensations of the Gospel that were born, came to fruition, and were finished prior to the Dispensation of Adam; i.e., Adam and Eve are the parents of our cycle, but that earlier cycles of humanity may well have existed on the Earth, lived their lives, had the Gospel, come to fruition, etc. and been then cleared to make way for our cycle once they were done.  The quote given above from Hugh Nibley seems to be concurrent with this belief.
   
   The reasons for this idea to be attractive are, again, it explains the existence of archaeological finds and radiocarbon dates associated with them, and at least a few of the early Brethren seemed to believe it.  And as Bro. Nibley said, our Scriptures allow for the possibility; by which I presume he means that they don't say anything that would contradict it, although they also say nothing that would support it either.
4. Adam as the Father of our race does not mean that he's the father genetically, but spiritually, i.e., there was no dispensation of the Gospel on the Earth until the Gospel was revealed to Adam after his Fall and expulsion from isolation in Eden.  This could, conceivably mean that there were other people on the Earth at the time of Adam and before, but that lacking the Gospel, History, as they say, starts with Adam and the revelation of the Gospel to him.  In this scenario, being the posterity of Adam could just as well mean that our ancestors received the Gospel from him as that they were born of him.
5. Before leaving off theories entirely, here's another idea that some in the Church believe.  They apply this more to dinosaurs and other extinct life-forms and whatnot than to old people skeletons, but the concept is the same: i.e., that the matter used to create the Earth may have been leftover from some other earth and that fossils and other finds that seem to predate the Biblical record seem to do so because they existed earlier on another earth, not on ours.  There are several reasons, I believe, to reject this idea:
1. The creation of the earth, as best understood by science, is not a cold creation.  The accretion of material would have generated a great deal of heat and pressure and any such relics from whatever former earth that they are the detritus of would have been destroyed as part of the process of the formation of our earth.
2. We are given to understand from multiple sources that the spiritual fate of the world is to be perfected and "resurrected" to a degree of glory itself, not merely the people who lived on it (see D&C 88:17–20; 130:8–11; 77:1; 29:23–25; 43:32).  If this is true, it doesn't make sense that the "bones" of one earth would be used to make another, since those other earths presumably have the same fate as ours; i.e, to receive their own celestial glory and be perfected; not to be torn apart and recycled.
3. This would be true of the actual fossils and skeletons as well; if the world on which they lived had its Dispensation and came to its fullness of times, thus freeing its matter up to be used to make our earth, why haven't those creatures or men who lived on it been resurrected themselves?  And if they have been resurrected, why are their remains still hanging around?
   
   You can possibly twist this into a salvageable theory by positing that the Judgement Day of our world is actually the Judgement day of all worlds, and therefore all of those resurrections and celestial glories are yet to have happened.  All in all, I think this theory requires too much special pleading... although honestly, I suppose all of these theories require special pleading.

That's really kind of the takeaway, though—as interesting as all of this is, there really isn't any reason to believe any of it.  The only reason I can think of to even entertain these ideas are 1) they're curious and interesting at least, if nothing else, and 2) if you need some kind of rationalization or justification in your mind to accept the apparent contradiction of what we think we know about archaeology and what we think we know about Gospel doctrine.   Finally, you can add 3) it was obviously a preoccupation of some degree to some of the earlier Brethren of the Church, which means that it's not just some wild, crackpot idea, but something that our elders took seriously, which at least implies that we might, if we're so curious, do so as well.

Personally, I don't require any such justification, and I'm comfortable suggesting that there are a number of things that I don't know or understand, but will in the fullness of times.  So for me, I don't really take any of these theories seriously, or believe in any of them... although I will point out that I also can't see any reason to suggest that they can't be true; just that I don't see any reason to suggest that they should be true either.

All in all, I find them merely an interesting historical footnote; a folk belief, if you will, that briefly had a heyday before the Brethren decided specifically to no longer address it and it faded away as an important question to the membership of the Church.

What next for Liberalism?

Quoted, with some slight edits, by me (originally by "Bixxy Noodles" and "Heartiste") for some added context, but mostly to make the language more polite so that the content can be of use with a different audience as well as for it's 'core' original audience. The tl;dr summary could almost be a quote from Ayn Rand, "We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.": "The Trumpslide and the dawn of collateral empowerment of Heritage America has supercharged three stereotypical neuroses of the Left, pushing them to the brink of mass psychosis and mental breaks with reality. These neuroses are cognitive dissonance, narcissistic rage, and psychological projection.

Cognitive dissonance is a major problem in our over-scaled society. The information control systems (education-media complex) used by our governing order to manage the people and keep them in line lead directly to the people adopting a lot of conflicting and wrong beliefs in order to adapt to the system and get by. The indoctrination of these conflicting beliefs happens mostly in education, while the purpose of the major media has been to reinforce them via The Narrative™ and provide a vehicle for the management of any cognitive dissonance which does arise.

This election has been a case study in this dynamic. The regnant orthodoxy demands that its partisans believe all sort of incompatible and false things: everyone is equal except white males, sodomy is normal and healthy while traditional marriage is rape, debt is money, and way too many other examples to list. Because of the constant, competing cognition these nonsensical and contradictory beliefs generate, the people who hold them are in a nearly constant state of emotional disequilibrium. They are temperamentally brittle, and easily perturbed into emotional outbursts as their cognitive dissonance essentially causes their brains to lock up and blue screen.

The old media narrative control system evolved specifically to mitigate this problem. By dramatically narrowing the Overton Window and ruthlessly deprecating everything outside of it, the amount of contradictory stimulus and information generating dissonance was reduced. They also provided mantras or catechisms as tools for people to use to insulate themselves from dissonance: extremist!, racist!, conspiracy theory!, dangerous!, insane!, etc.

The advent of the internet undermined and out-maneuvered this control and management system, to the point where now we've almost gotten to the point where the only people still using the old media are the ones who need it most to manage their dissonance problems.

When there is no direct threat or stimulus generating dissonance, their attitude is what I like to refer to as 'aggressive complacency' or 'belligerent apathy.' They are comfortable in their bubble and aggressively reject, ridicule, or ignore anything that might endanger it.

This was on display everywhere over the past eighteen months, on both the establishment left and establishment right, as well as the major media gas-lighting the whole nation right up to the end (and beyond at CNN).

When aggressive complacency fails to insulate and cognitive dissonance occurs when conflicting and false beliefs run smack into cold, hard realities, you get strong emotional reactions. Now, a psychologically-healthy person will generally respond to cognitive dissonance emotions by recognizing something is wrong and adjusting their beliefs and behavior to adapt. What we’re seeing with these meltdowns is a long way from psychologically healthy. Light years away.

What it does resemble, quite closely, is narcissistic rage.

Narcissistic rage occurs when the narcissist perceives he is being personally 'attacked' by someone else. Grandiose self-worth, vanity and entitlement are basic characteristics of this disorder; when these are challenged it often leads to narcissistic rage. Narcissistic rage is a reaction to 'narcissistic injury'—a perceived threat to their self-worth or self-esteem. Their rages can be of two types: explosive or passive-aggressive. The explosive rages are just as they sound—explosive, volatile outbursts which may be verbal, physical, or both. The passive-aggressive rages are exhibited as withdrawal into a sulky, silent treatment as the means to punish the offender.

Our prevailing culture has strongly encouraged leftist partisans to closely associate the beliefs with their personal identity and self-worth. e.g. 'I am a good person because I hate racism and vote for Hillary Clinton.' This naturally leads to the narcissist’s flip-side of the equation: 'Anybody who opposes these beliefs is an evil, bad person.'

The recent meltdowns we’re seeing are a perfect storm of these two dynamics. In the one hand, we have a belief system so contradictory and out of touch with reality, that a situation in which reality has contradicted it has generated mass cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, the people experiencing that dissonant emotion are treating it as an existential threat to their personal identity and self-worth, so they can’t respond in a healthy manner and are instead freaking out.

Reality has forced the equalitarian Marxoid bubble-dwellers to grapple with their amplified and aggravated cognitive dissonance. This unfamiliar threat to their cortical stability results in a narcissistic self-protection cascade; essentially, race and sex equalitarians feel like they are under physical attack (even when the attacks are only verbal expression of alternate opinions) and that their worth as human beings is questioned and found wanting.

The one liberal neurosis I would add is psychological projection, which is universally evident in liberal mental gymnastics, and never more so than now, when they are being undermined and subverted to a degree that they haven’t experienced in generations by an unleashed force of impertinent politically incorrect opinions that they can no longer hand-wave away. Psychological projection, like narcissistic rage, is the liberal’s emotional defense to cognitive dissonance. When the real world won’t align with one’s cultivated virtue-world, and one’s beliefs and actions are exposed as the menace to healthy society they are, then psychological projection becomes an ego emollient that spares the liberal any need for self-reflection, or even self-awareness. When one can readily project one’s personal malevolence (intended or coincidental) onto a perceived enemy, a release from guilt and shame is achieved.

Furthermore, psychological projection has the added benefit of opening a pathway for liberals to recommit to their virtue signaling and slandering of non-liberal realists. If you have tricked yourself into believing your foes are the scumbags that you really are, then you can return to the pleasure of feeling smugly moralistic.

So what does all this mean for the nascent rebellion against political correctness and its concurrent denial of observable reality? When cultural Marxists are experiencing acute cognitive dissonance and narcissistic rage, the correct response is to...

Increase the voltage!

'Conservatives' had it all wrong from the get-go, which is why they failed to conserve anything from our budget, our culture, or even the women's bathroom. You never give emotionally breaking enemies an inch. Feed a rabbit a blade of grass, and he’ll pop out ten more rabbits to devour your lawn. When the rabbit warren is on the edge of annihilation, you put foxes in holes and wipe out every last one of them. Metaphorically, of course, by completely frying their ability to bunker their egos behind a wall of narcissism and projection.

Eventually; the only solution is for them to abandon their anti-American beliefs, because you've walled out and blocked any escape hatch or bolt hole into which they could flee and keep their bizarre beliefs intact."

Election data

Well, I have to admit that in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, one of my pet theories has taken a bit of a blow.  Not that it's been proven wrong, but it has been shown to be, perhaps, less important than I thought it was.

First, let me establish a ground rule.  The platform and agenda of the current Democrat Party is both anti-American and evil.  I'm taking this as a given, but let me at least take a moment to frame it at a high level.

Firstly, the philosophical premise of the Democrat party, at least currently (it's long ago gone a complete reversal of the populist, freedom and limited government and states' rights party of Andrew Jackson) is based on literally non-American ideas: the collectivist approach of "general will" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which was an important component of the Jacobin element of the violent savagery of the French Revolution.   It's an important pillar of Socialist and Communist thought ever since, combined with the collectivism of Karl Marx; an Ashkenazi Jew (albeit from a family that had converted to Lutheranism) from Germany.  Democrats eschew many of the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.  Freedom of religion is routinely curtailed in a twisted backward interpretation of the separation of Church and state clause to almost completely obliterate religion from any kind of public sphere, freedom of association is trampled on with anti-discrimination laws (the gay cake baking and wedding flowers incidents, for that matter, not only violate the 1st Amendment, but also the 13th), freedom of speech is routinely suppressed via "hate speech" laws and casual censorship.  It's a running joke that the Democrats hate the 2nd Amendment and wish to repeal it (many have openly called for that; others are more subtle and merely want to cripple it while leaving the fiction up that it stands.)

Their big, authoritarian, re-distributionist government ideal, which in many ways has already come to pass is a dramatic curtailment of our freedom; the Founding Fathers started the Revolutionary War over much less—and is a repudiation of the entire point of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.  And more recently, their open and blatant corruption and cronyism is little better than a banana republic.  At an even more existential level, their constant propaganda against heritage America and white Americans is just the icing on the cake; after everything that they've already managed to enact, they hardly even need to bother slagging us in dialog anymore; it's just piling on.  Now that they actively agitate for white ethnic cleansing of our own country, however, it's reached a fever pitch.  As Barack Obama said near the beginning of his first term, their goal is to "fundamentally transform America" and despite just an incredibly load of sophistry to try and apologize and rationalize that, there is no other way to see it other than that they reject America as it is and want to make it into something... well, fundamentally different.

Their evil is just as blatant as their anti-Americanism; their support of abortion, of nation-building abroad and red-lines and belligerent posturing against global rivals for power (otherwise known as genocide of Third World brown people) in places like Syria, Libya, the Ukraine and more is both literally murderous and tyrannical.  Their staunch and unrelenting war on Christianity, their embrace of psychologically damaged ideas like homosexuality, transexuality, and their intent on shoving it in everyone's faces and forcing them to celebrate it, their indoctrination of children into the evils of big government, the abandonment of self-restraint or responsibility, sexual perversion, and more, the notion that anyone seems them as anything other than anti-American and evil is difficult for me to personally fathom.  But since it's not, here's a few statements from the prophets that bear repeating.  Keep in mind that Heber J. Grant was a very staunch opponent of Roosevelt in the 30s, almost taking it as a personal insult that the members of the church supported his "neo-socialism" and belligerent pro-war stance in Utah, and wrote several letters to the editors of Deseret News condemning that political doctrine.  David O. McKay stated that Communism was considered "the greatest satanical threat to peace, prosperity, and the spread of God's work among men that exists on the face of the earth."  Ezra Taft Benson was even more explicit, comparing "socialism-communism"—a label that he used deliberately to ensure that his meaning wouldn't be mistaken when Leftists changed their labels and pretended to be a different ideology because of a few superficial details—was an extension of Satan's plan in the pre-existence and that if any member of the church held such beliefs and had "second guessed" their first estate, they were in dire need of repentance.

Many leftist members of the church, especially those who were fans of Bernie Sanders, have tried very hard to minimize these statements and write them off as merely "the opinions" of various leaders of the church (all of the leaders of the Church for as long as we have recorded opinions of any of them on such issues, as a matter of fact) rather than doctrine.  This may be true; because of the perversion of the 1st Amendment which prevents churches from commenting on political issues at risk of losing it's protected "Church" status with the IRS, the Church has very carefully maintained political neutrality officially.  But their are so many applicable doctrines of the church that are at odds with the platform of the Democrat party that it's ridiculous to assume that it could be anything other than a massive rejection by the Church, by its doctrine, by it's leaders, and by the Lord himself, of the platform of the Democrats.

The implication here might be that the Republicans are, however, the part of Americanism and good.  This is not the case at all.  The Republican Party platform is dominated by the neo-conservatives, former Democrats who fell out of favor with the Democrat party when the platform started migrating away from war-hawk FDR style Democrats and got more heavily invested in the sexual perversions, women's lib, civil rights, and "invite the world" rather than the older "invade the world" (the neo-cons embrace both.)  Democrats have since become hawks again; or rather, they are hawks when their own leaders are agitating for war (Obama, both Clintons, etc.) but pretend to be for peace when Republicans agitate for war, but the reality is that the Republicans are made up of Democrat elitists who merely feign a few social conservative positions to exploit the votes of conservatives.  They rarely manage to do anything about these professed conservative positions while in office, but they can give them lip-service during election seasons like nobody's business.

And that's the real crux of it; it's the electorates that tend to favor the Republican party that is pro-America, pro-freedom, and pro-traditional, Christian values, not the party itself.  And the electorate is pretty fed up with the betrayals of their party officials as this recent election made quite clear.  The Democrat electorate, on the other hand, gets more of what they want in their party's platform; their disgust with their candidate this time around had more to do with her open corruption and cronyism than with her doctrine or platform.

So, although it's an imperfect and no doubt controversial metric, it's a "good enough" model to suggest that supporting the Democrat candidate for president is an act of anti-Americanism, pro-big government, and pro-tyranny while supporting the Republican candidate is an act of pro-Americanism, pro-limited government, and freedom.  One could certainly argue that other parties (Constitution party, Libertarian party, etc.) better model this than the Republican party, but the fact that everyone knows nobody can possibly win from those parties means that their de facto support is very limited, even if support for their doctrines may be high.

My pet theory is that the 19th Amendment and women's suffrage was the end of Americanism and freedom from tyranny.  Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler all courted the woman vote and embraced women's suffrage, because they knew that they could convince women to hand over authority to them.  Voting trends and exit polls have consistently shown that women favor big government and limited freedom, especially younger, unmarried women.  It's my belief that these voters see big government as a kind of ersatz daddy/husband figure and because they are, by nature, more compliant and subservient than men, they are perfectly willing to lay their freedom on the altar of big government.  Women's suffrage is therefore, the long, slow, fatal wound that killed our democracy.

And yet... in the wake of the most recent election, I'm forced to conclude that it is not as much of a factor as I thought.  Look at the following data compiled by CNN.  This is the relevant section:

White voters, including women, gave large majorities to Trump vs Hillary.  This is also true if you break down the age of the voters; in all age brackets, white voters gave a majority, or at least a plurality of votes to Trump vs Hillary.

The data presented does not break down the data by race, sex and age bracket, and I suspect that millennial white women may have been the exception here, although again, I can only suspect, because the data is now shown.

On the other hand, what is very, very clear is that diversity is a much greater threat to America than women's suffrage.  Non-Americans do not vote in America's interest.  Once you pass the white rows, every other row goes to Hillary in big numbers; the black vote especially.  Being an American is not merely a function of having American citizenship, American paperwork, or even of having been born and lived your whole life in America.  American is an ethno-cultural designation, and the fact that vast hordes of non-Americans live in America and even have American citizenship does not make them Americans; their identity is to something other than being American.  And, they clearly represent a threat to American institutions such as our cultural, legal and political traditions.

Post election

I've seen a lot of post-election commentary. Here's mine, with apologies to the various guys here and there that I've paraphrased or even copied and pasted portions of this from:

Liberals (and foolish "conservatives") in Defeat: Healing, unity, give him a chance, open mind, blah blah blah.

Liberals in Victory: Put down that 32 oz. drink, get over here, abort my baby with your own hands and at your own expense, pay for my 400 gazillion foreign friends' lunches, bake a cake for my underage daughters' lesbian wedding and don't you dare complain about it, you racist homophobe, or we'll drag you through kangaroo courts until you're ruined! Complaining about having to support all of us from cradle to grave, and having to continually act against your conscience simply so we can display our narcissistic vindictiveness is a sign of white privilege! If it weren't for you, all the polyamorous Guatemalan trannies would have wonderful lives of happiness, health and fabulous financial success, so until you all die out, you will gibsmedat.

No. Liberals don't do magnanimous defeat. Crocodiles don't do respect. You can't train and domesticate cockroaches or tapeworms. There are no white flags in a snake pit. It is a miracle that we won this election. We should not gloat, for that is to pretend that the Lord has not given us a break, and spared us from the fate we deserve for our willful blindness and obtuseness thus far. He has shown us mercy and given us a chance to prove that we will finally do His will, and stand up for truth and justice, rather than continue to make pacts with evil, vesting the Liberal Satanic Freak Show with perpetual rights of free action against us. We must stop promising beforehand never to gain victory over the Satanic Tranny Pedos of Color death cult, by accepting the Liberal premise that a final victory against them would be a violation of their human rights. It's about time we faced up to the fact that pretending that error and tyranny has rights, is what has led to the societal environment where Satanic Tranny Pedos of Color Death Cults are no longer outlandish.

We will not get another chance to end this (more or less) peacefully. I am no longer interested in tolerating or being peaceful with these creatures. I do not hate them, but I oppose them and what they stand for.  I will happily forgive them if they repent, but I will harbor no delusions about them if they do not. They beg for tolerance when they are down; if they gain power again, they will finish us. There will be no healing, no unity, until the cancer is removed. We are still at a point of existential crisis. America is on the verge of an irreversible change that will cause it to cease to be America. We've been given one, final straw to grasp at to prevent that inevitability from happening. For decades, anti-American would-be tyrants have eroded the Constitution, attacked our values, our legal protections, the very essence of Americanism, and dishonestly told us that doing so was somehow American(!) and while they were at it, they quietly built up a budding super-majority of anti-American foreign voters who would give them ballot box invincibility.

But they played their hand just a little bit too soon. They didn't quite have the super-majority that they thought that they had yet, and America woke up and saw a hint of what they were up to, and gave them a so far very mild rebuke.

Now there's talk of pretending like, "Aw, shucks, you got me, now go back to sleep and pretend like nothing's wrong again," while they get back to work finishing the job that we caught them at red-handed. I thoroughly and completely reject that paradigm. Now is not the time to make peace again with the enemy, stick our heads back in the sand, go back to sleep, only to find out that our freedoms and our birthright will be stolen right out from under us when we wake up again. Now is the time to roll back the danger, excise the cancer, discredit and defeat the forces of anti-Americanism for good so that it will not haunt us again election after election until there's no way to peacefully turn it back ever again and our only recourse is violent, bloody civil war.

Ezra Taft Benson's words during the peak of the Cold War are even more true now then they were when he spoke them, for the enemy has become more subtle, taken on a fairer face, and has infiltrated the very elect of God. "Never before has the land of Zion appeared so vulnerable to so powerful an enemy as the Americas do at present. [...] So, I say with all the energy of my soul that unless we as citizens of this nation forsake our sins, political and otherwise, and return to the fundamental principles of Christianity and of constitutional government, we will lose our political liberties, our free institutions, and will stand in jeopardy before God.

No nation which has kept the commandments of God has ever perished, but I say to you that once freedom is lost, only blood—human blood—will win it back."

Washington delenda est. Deus vult.

The Case Against the Candidacy of Evan McMullin

A lot of members of the church have been excited about the candidacy of Evan McMullin; mostly because they are unenthused by the other candidates in the race, and secondly, because they identify personally with him, since he's a member of the Church (which is hardly a good reason to vote for someone.  After all, so is Harry Reid.)  McMullin's candidacy is a reaction to that of Donald Trump; he's a guy who—even in his own position statements, tweets, and almost everything that he says—can't help but compare his position to details of Trump's; hardly the behavior of a bold leader.  In addition to that, McMullin represents a continuation of the status quo, wherein FDR style Democrat-Socialists masquerade as "neoconservatives" and apply a Pied Piper song with a handful of conservative viewpoints on a handful of social issues about which they accomplish nothing whatsoever other than steal conservative votes from candidates that are actually conservative.  (Seriously; is the pro-life contingent of politicians ever going to do anything at all about abortion, for instance?)  Many in the church are very comfortable in the status quo, and don't wish it to change.

In my opinion, this is extremely foolish.  To be fair, few are any good at predicting the future based on trends, data, and interpolation of the past so maybe it's not fair to expect them to do so, but it is vital to avoid the pitfalls of the future.  Because of the dearth of this skill, most people believe that the present conditions are unlikely to change significantly.  Few saw the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the late 80s; the USSR appeared strong and powerful.  Overnight, it disappeared.  In retrospect, the structural weaknesses that led to that result made it seem inevitable.  But nobody really saw it before it happened.  The break-up of what was considered one of the Great Powers, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, similarly had structural fault lines and flaws that made its eventual dissolution inevitable; yet few saw it coming before it happened.  The same with the end of the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and more.

In fact, in America, we have the exact same structural flaws impacting us:

• An artificially buoyed economy based on credit instead of actual productive utilization of hard resources.
• An out of control immigration policy that has led to growing ethnic and cultural schisms of non-assimilation, which cannot be papered over because the scale of folk movement is a population invasion the likes of which is completely unprecedented in the historical record.
• Domestic, ethnic based terrorists (BLM, La Raza, CAIR) not unlike the Black Hand which led to the violent conflict following the July Crisis of 1914.
• The complete breakdown of virtue, confidence and morality in our host American culture.  (In part, prophesied in D&C 45:27 And the love of men shall wax cold, and iniquity shall abound.)
• Vast numbers of unemployed, which are papered over with numbers games by the offices of the federal government that are meant to report on that, propped up temporarily by a massive welfare state which in turn contributes significantly to...
• The vast theft of the wealth of Americans by every level of government from the local to the federal.  When you look beyond income and property tax to all of the taxes that are embedded in the price of things we buy, the average American gives 45% of his income to the government.  Above average earners can pay as high as 60%.
• An incredibly Byzantine bureaucratic administrative state at the local, state and federal level which actively works against the American people, and who's only purpose is to sustain itself.
• An incredibly unstable world environment that, contrary to oft-expressed belief, is not sustained by the US; the US has, in fact, been the single biggest contributor towards destabilizing it.  Check out this list, and then do some research on each individual listed item if you're not already familiar with it.  The list is a heavy indictment of our foolish and irresponsible foreign policy of creating conflict everywhere we go.

Indeed, not only are we in an obviously unstable and unsustainable environment, the likes of which have only ever prevailed right before times of great conflict and realignment (the Great Depression, the World Wars, the dissolution and break-up of Empires) but we have had it prophesied that such will happen!  Also in D&C 45, although it's not the only place that says this, 26 And in that day shall be heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the whole earth shall be in commotion, and men’s hearts shall fail them, and they shall say that Christ delayeth his coming until the end of the earth.

The belief that the status quo is a good thing that ought to be preserved is not only in direct contradiction with the scriptures, several talks given in our recent General Conference which referenced those scriptures, but it also defies any analysis of history, economics, social sciences, or even common sense.  It is an irresponsible and feckless lack of situational awareness.

Knowing what's coming, our only chance to minimize the damage to our families, our nation, and ourselves through the coming hard times are to recognize the dangers and take actions that minimize their impact.  This ought to the goal of any faithful member of the church, but in order to do so, one must be aware of what is coming, understand those causes, and be able to evaluate proposed solutions to them in that light.  In my opinion, few in the Church (or in America overall, really) are capable of doing so, because they are just going along, believing that 2 Nephi 28:21 applies only at the individual level, or possibly to the Church, and not to the nation, or they simply don't think much on this concept at all.  And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell.  

To minimize the damage caused by the inevitable consequences of the problems mentioned in the bullet points above, there are a number of issues that are political rather than merely spiritual that absolutely have to be addressed (the spiritual ones I am not going to address, because they will not be resolved at the ballot box regardless.)  And this doesn't mean a focus on doomsday preparation either, of course—although following the prophets counsel on being prepared, learning self-sufficiency, storing up needed supplies, etc. remains in effect and remains wise counsel, of course.  What it really means is that we should be educated and informed on the issues and that should be the basis of our involvement in our community and our government, and the focus of our hopes with regards to elections (to the degree that such can actually meaningfully change the course of a government gone out of control—a prospect about which I remain somewhat dubious.)  In creating a triage of sorts for what the most urgent concerns are, I think the following make the cut as not only absolutely essential but also requiring urgent and immediate action.  I've also compared Evan McMullin's position on them to what I believe his position should be.  Needless to say, he comes up significantly wanting, due to his own lack of situational awareness, and his oblivious distortion of perception, which is probably an artifact of his deep embeddedness in the Beltway bubble.

• Political correctness.  Our society, in allowing cultural Marxist thought, including political correctness (a concept which comes to us—literally—from Leon Trotsky via Chairman Mao) has reached the point where the freedom of speech is curtailed, not necessarily by active government intervention (although there's a fair bit more of that than most people realize) but rather through a kind of crowd-sourced police state action where you can be unemployed on a whim, cast out of society, and lose your friends, your family, your livelihood and almost anything else—legally.  (Read the magnificent little book SJWs Always Lie for a great discussion on what political correctness does to us—and how to combat it.)  Political correctness is a plague on our society, because it makes discussion of most of the rest of the issues "out of bounds" which means that no other solutions can have a fair shot at implementation.  This is also the vehicle by which our morals and values have constantly been attacked; from the minimization of marriage and family in our society to the acceptance of gender-confused public bathrooms; all of that is due to political correctness.  The first thing that any leader needs to do is to be capable of withstanding and even dismantling the edifice of political correctness.  Ironically, being "nice" is probably the last thing that will help here; Mitt Romney was, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice guy.  But being tagged with that ridiculous war on women rhetoric and his "binders of women" comment being mocked out of context, and most especially, his complete inability to regain control of that narrative and point out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of it meant that his candidacy sunk and he lost.  Sure, it wasn't the only reason that he did so, but his inability to show any kind of courageous leadership in combating the evils of political correctness was a major cause for his loss.  Can you imagine Elijah worrying about what the Israelites would think of him for heckling the priests of Baal?  Or Captain Moroni worried about his "tone" when writing to Ammoron or Pahoran or Zerahemnah?  Verdict: Whatever you may think of Donald Trump personally, he has done more to destroy political correctness than any other American since the advent of that pernicious doctrine seized America's thought.  McMullin's own candidacy is, at least partially, a rejection of Trump's rejection of political correctness.  At best, McMullin does nothing for political correctness.  At worst, he strengthens its tyrannical stranglehold on American thought and speech.
• Immigration and globalization.  There is a persistent propaganda myth that has been spread throughout American historical indoctrination that "we are a nation of immigrants."  This is historical nonsense.  We are a nation of British settlers who established a culturally British nation on the shores of a new continent that was largely depopulated when we found it.  The population at the time of the Revolutionary War was 85% British, 9% Low German, and about 3.5% Dutch—all very culturally similar peoples that originated within the Hajnal Line.  The remaining 2.5% was made up of an handful of French Huguenots and a few other European groups.  Those census records don't count the black population, of course, which in reality, should be about 20% of the total Colonies population.  The Preamble to the Constitution states: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.  In truth, our indiscriminate immigration policy has jeopardized literally every single one of the purposes of the Constitution, but most especially the section bolded; as Americans, we are literally giving away our birthright, our country, our prosperity, and our once-peaceful communities for a bowl of pottage.  The Founding Fathers were under no delusions that approach the mythical "Magic Dirt Fallacy"—the notion that stepping foot on the "magical" soil of America instantly turns anyone from anywhere in the world into a freedom-loving, civic-minded individualist suffused through and through with American values—that has gripped American thought in more recent years was true.  They certainly didn't believe it.  Benjamin Franklin warned against the lack of cultural cohesion that unrestrained German immigration would lead to, Alexander Hamilton knew that unrestrained immigration threatened the fragile accords of freedom, because culturally distinct immigrants didn't understand the cultural context necessary to protect it.  John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a signor of the Declaration of Independence, said: "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people.  A people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.  This country and this people seem to have been made for each other."  The Founding Fathers knew that freedom was fragile, and that the importation of large numbers of immigrants who did not understand how to create or maintain it, but who only came for "opportunity" (i.e., so they could get richer easier) was the slow suicide of the nation.  The very first act of the very first session of the very first Congress after the creation of that body by the signing of the Constitution was the Naturalization Act of 1790, and very strict controls on immigration lasted for almost two hundred years when the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid it and opened the floodgates to socialist minded Third World, uneducated peasants—"huddled masses" and "wretched refuse" indeed, to use Emma Lazarus' apocryphal redefinition of what America is.  This may have been good, certainly, for those individuals, but it has not been for America.  Indeed, the lust for cheap labor has been the undoing of America from the beginning; from the African slaves, to the Irish indentured servants (a fancier term for a slightly more limited type of slavery) to the wave of Chinese immigrants, to the invasion of Hispanic day laborers, Indian white collar workers and now most recently Moslem "refugees", the import of large numbers of immigrants who resist even the illusion of integration has devastated the native economy, broken down community harmony, and established fault lines of ethnic tensions that are nearly indistinguishable from those that brought ruination to the Ottomans, the Soviets, the Austrians and for that matter, even the Romans, and ushered in the end of their own multi-ethnic, "diverse" empires. To make matters worse, as Ann Coulter has predicted and pointed out numerous times, another side effect of this is that the Left is close to having a completely undefeatable super-majority, where non-Americans living here in America and granted paperwork and citizenship by a government that does not care for Americans will overturn the actual will of actual Americans by force of numbers. Verdict: No politician with the exception of Jeff Sessions, Dave Brat, Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan have ever addressed this issue in a way that actually serves the public interest of the American people, and of them, none have ever gotten any traction.  It took the candidacy of Donald Trump to force the Beltway Delusional Bubble to finally even acknowledge that this is a problem, although they've largely done so in a condescending, patronizing way that suggests that they don't think the concerns of their constituents merit serious consideration.  McMullin's own approach seems to be indistinguishable from the mainstream Republican one.  Secure the border (whatever exactly that means), grant an aw, shucks citizenship to all of the illegal and legal immigrants who are living here now, and "reforming" the H1-B visa program.  There are few details on his position on what exactly he will do, but a lot of virtue signaling.  I have to interpret that to mean a continuation of the disastrous status quo of the 1965 swindle in Congress (when passed, it was promised that the tear-up of nearly 200 year old immigration law would not impact the demographic make-up of the country.  What a terrible lie that's been proven to be.)  The very policies that have destabilized peace in our country and tacitly allowed the looting of our wealth by foreign bandits who live off of our largesse (and our welfare system) all for the marginal benefit to the profit margin of big business cronies are exactly what he proposes to continue. The same rules that apply to households apply when scaled up to the national level: peace and harmony are promoted by a healthy respect for boundaries and property rights, and if my neighbor continuously wanders through my house uninvited and takes things from it that he wants, that will lead to conflict that will eventually boil over into likely violence.  McMullin's position on this issue is a complete failure of situational awareness.  I've lumped globalization in with this; much more can be said about the concept of trade agreements that ship work over-seas too, but they are both subsets of the same issue, really—the looting of the wealth of our nation for the benefit of a handful of well-connected elite, that also gives a marginal benefit to the Third World who get our jobs—albeit at fire sale rates.  McMullins' position on trade, specifically the TPP, and his "let them eat cake" solution of "more affordable education" for displaced workers who may or may not be endowed with the native intelligence, quite honestly, to do anything with more education, is even worse than his wishy-washy "doesn't actually say anything other than typical Establishment conservative platitudes" position on immigration.
• War.  I am honestly appalled at the level to which America has stooped to interfering in the affairs of other nations.  The level of hubris and arrogance required to do so is astonishing; the morals of anyone who thinks that the literal murder of countless thousands of combatants and non-combatants alike in wars that are unnecessary and serve no American interest—again (common theme here) except for the financial interests of a few well-connected cronies—are not only suspect, they stand condemned.  We are today literally on the brink of war with Russia for the first time since the end of the Cold War (a conflict from which we learned nothing, apparently)—and for what?  To defend our right to overthrow the governments of and invade the Ukraine and Syria because in our smug self-righteousness, we've decided that their stable and democratically formed governments aren't sufficiently servile to us, and don't pay us sufficient tribute?  The long, sad history of America's quite frankly evil and iniquitous belligerence and destruction of the prospect of peace all across the face of the globe is too complicated to detail much here, but it's fair to say that no war that we've fought since the Mexican-American war of 1846 was justified.  Literally 170 years of conflict should have been actively avoided.  McMullin's policy statements are thoroughly infused with his commitment to continue this endless cycle of pointless, needless conflict and slaughter.  He's openly in favor of saber-rattling against Russia, his signature issue, to the extent that he has one other than "I'm Mormon and mostly polite" is that America's role as "global enforcer of our will across the world" is indefensible.  I'm extremely disheartened most especially by this.  The immigration issue described above is a folly of looking "beyond the mark" with regards to a badly misinterpreted and over-interpreted parable of the Good Samaritan, but the issue of prosecuting global nation-scale bullying and war-making as an essential component to Americanism passes absolutely no ethical or moral guideline that I can think of other than "might makes right."  It is one of the greatest evils of the modern age, and McMullin is completely and thoroughly on board with not only perpetuating it, but even escalating it.  It's one thing to realize that prophecies tell us that wars, rumors of wars and "the whole world" being in "commotion" is going to happen; it's quite another to agitate specifically to cause those things to happen and to make them worse than they otherwise would be.  His interpretation of both our foreign policy and our history is suffused with the nonsense of our historical indoctrination.  I said earlier that it's much too complicated to really dig into the weeds of these issues, but I cannot highly enough recommend that anyone who wishes to truly understand where our country has gone wrong, or rather, where our country's government has gone wrong in defiance of the will of the people, read the von Mises published book Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom.  You can buy it as an actual book from Amazon, but you can get it for free as a pdf or epub from the von Mises Institute.  At 830 pages, it still is only a primer and a bare foundation for the long process of unpacking a more honest interpretation of the history of America, but I highly recommend it anyway as a place to start, and I strongly encourage you to read every word of it, including the remarkable appendices.  If you're more or less unaware of the subject matter, it's astonishingly eye-opening and potentially even life-changing (at least with regards to your politics) if you are somewhat aware, it's still a great collection of the details.
• Supreme Court justices.  The Supreme Court has been one of the greatest opponents to the freedom of the American people, and the degree to which perverse and corrupt Supreme Court justices have managed to legislate laws out of thin air in defiance of the Constitution, and come up with interpretations of the Constitution that literally mean the exact opposite of what the document says is another sordid and sad example of the march of Lucifer's plan from the pre-existence upon the face of the earth, and the establishment of step-by-step tyranny.  In truth, a more thorough re-evaluation of this issue is required, but the short-term triage solution is to make sure that Justice Scalia, as well as the two likely spots that will need to be filled in the next 4-8 years, are filled with freedom loving justices that will actually respect the intent of the Constitution, rather than spit upon it.  That said, I can't find on McMullin's page anywhere where he lays out his plans for Supreme Court nominees, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that this is an issue where he'd do alright by America.

Not that that helps.  With a complete failure on three of the four most important issues that are in a state of crisis in America right now, he is a complete failure of a nominee.  His whole schtick is that he's a "man of principle" by which what he really means, of course, is that he's going to nobly concede the moral high ground to the Left and not even be willing to address the issues, because it's not polite and it causes the "Right" in America, which has been beaten and conditioned by the Left worse than Pavlov's dogs, to fall on their fainting couches at the very notion of suggesting that the American government should serve the needs of the American people.  If he's a man of principle, his principles are all of the wrong ones; particularly his stated intent of prosecuting a foreign policy based on bullying, pointless, needless bloodshed and warfare, and the continuation of the de facto American global empire where our interests and desires are prosecuted by every supposedly sovereign nation across the globe... or else.

To make matters even worse, his entire stated strategy is another example of the kind of hubris and arrogance that has made Americans all over the country rise up and state, "Washington delenda est."  By using an electoral parlor trick to take the election out of the hands of the voters—his oft-stated and very clear intent if he can win enough electoral ballots to do so, which is extremely unlikely—and give it to the hands of the treasonous Beltway elite that have created most of the problems that we already face, in order to appoint some President from among the three top candidates in electoral votes, so guess what; he hands the election to Hillary anyway.  He's making the biggest blunder of situational awareness that I can imagine.  That quite likely would literally spark a Revolutionary War 2.0 (or a Civil War 2.0, if you'd rather call it that).  The fact that he's so completely clueless and steeped in the Beltway Delusional bubble that he can't see the frustration and "I've had it" attitude that America has with Washington and these kinds of procedural tricks that they constantly use to erode one freedom after another from the American people—now, he wants to eliminate the whole notion of meaningful elections!—is more than just tone-deaf.  It's actively treasonous.

No, McMullin is not a man of principle, as near as I can tell.  Voting for him is not "voting your conscience."  It's voting in ignorance or blissful willful obtuseness for a continuation of the failed policies that have brought America to the very brink of unimaginable crisis.  He may well be a "nice guy" with an impeccable public record (to the extent that he even has a public record) who's never said a rude word to anyone in his life.  But he's dead wrong, his positions are not principled or even righteous, they are arrogant and wrong.  And he's milking an opportunity to increase his public profile tremendously.  Maybe he's so caught up in what he's doing (a la Glenn Beck) that he actually thinks that he's fighting the good fight for righteousness.  In fact, I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he does in fact believe in what he's running on.  But if I extend to him that courtesy, I must extend the same to Harry Reid, who openly admits to lying on the floor of the Senate to keep Mitt Romney from winning the election four years ago.  Being a man of principle doesn't mean that your principles are right, or that your positions are right, or that you deserve the highest office in the land.  McMullin is wrong on all three.

Ephraim and Judah, Part I

This will be a bit of a lengthy post (or even two), with shades of religious, social and even political overtones.  It might even be seen as somewhat controversial, but I think it's well grounded in both scripture and observation.  To get around to this topic, I'll have to also establish a lot of context, and while I'm doing so, I'll eventually end up answering one of the very first topics that I outlined as one I wanted to discuss: what happened to the Lost Tribes?  That's actually incidental to what I really want to talk about, though.  What prompted this was a discussion on Facebook, where I referred to Ben Shapiro as a chickenhawk, who is constantly agitating for America to get involved in wars in which no American interest is served at all, in service to Israel.  In this, Shapiro comes from a long tradition of Jewish American politicians, pundits and other "people of influence" who clearly have divided loyalties; or rather; their true loyalty, in spite of their citizenship and paperwork, is more to Israel than to America.  A friend of mine had what I interpret as a knee-jerk, yet not unpredictable reaction against this, jumping to the conclusion that I had effectively turned my back on Israel, decided that we should let it burn, breaking our alliance with it, and essentially ushering in the End Times, or at least making them much worse then they arrive.

Like I said, this is a controversial topic, and one that is so because there is a long history of manipulative guilt-tripping with which we have spent our entire lives being indoctrinated.  In addition to exploring the ramifications of Ephraim and Judah, I will also be forced to evaluate the nature of the relationship between the two today and question whether or not it is a healthy one.  And as a quick foreshadowing of my conclusions, keep in mind that in Isaiah 11:13 it certainly suggests that up until the very Last Days, Ephraim shall envy Judah and Judah shall vex Ephraim.  That's still an ongoing issue right now.

Some Historical Context
While there were, of course, 12 tribes, a casual perusal of the blessings given to each of the 12 sons in Genesis 49 (or the reiteration of them spelled out in Deuteronomy 33) certainly suggests that Joseph and Judah most certainly get the blessings that make them relevant historically, while the others in most respects, do not.  The rivalry between Judah and Ephraim, as the more prominent portion of Joseph, came to a head fairly early, and the nation of Israel was divided into the Northern Kingdom of Israel, largely led by Ephraim, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah, led by—as you can imagine—Judah.  Already at this point, the other tribes, while present in the area, had faded from political and historical prominence.  The heirs of Solomon (who was of the Tribe of Judah himself) had styled themselves, as the Lord warned that they would, as potentates that taxed their subjects grievously.  Ephraim, already showing themselves (and this will be interesting later) unable to bear the burden of monarchical tyrants, rebelled and established their own kingdom.  Most of the rest of the Tribes flocked to them.

Some modern scholarship suggests that this political division may have been preceded by a vast cultural difference that grew out of the more urban, "sophisticated" core of Judah and its kings as opposed to the more rural, farm-steading and home-steading North (this is also a pattern that is shockingly consistent many centuries later.)  Be that as it may, the North Kingdom, as well documented in the Old Testament, due to wickedness and meddling in the affairs of greater empires around it, found itself effectively destroyed.  Assyria in several waves, sacked the kingdom, deported many of its citizens, and essentially demolished it as an independent polity.  As many have pointed out, this does not mean that literally every single Israelite citizen was carted off to Ninevah or elsewhere.  Some interesting scholarship suggests that no more than about 20% of the population was deported by Assyria, and that many in fact fled south and were assimilated into Judah; Jerusalem experienced a swelling of its population at that time.  Even if considerably more of the population was moved, there was still undoubtedly a not insignificant number of Israelites who stayed.

But certainly enough of Israel was carried off that they were later able to become lost to history and the knowledge of their kin, and became the so-called Lost Tribes.  Judah, of course, was also famously conquered and its citizens carried off, this time by the Babylonians who inherited the mantle of the Assyrians.  In this case, however, the Jews did not lose sight of their identity, nor become "lost" and later under the aegis of Persian kings, they returned to Judea, and rebuilt the temple, and reestablished their nation.  They were later expelled from their homeland again in the time of the Romans, most decisively by Hadrian who prompted their ultimate diaspora by renaming Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and renaming the entire province of Judea Syria Palaestina, and banning Jews from living there.  It's not my purpose to try and summarize the long Jewish diaspora, though, or explore (much) in the way of how it came to come to an end of sorts with the establishment of the modern nation of Israel and its call of aliyah to all Jews—many of still live in exile, although it certainly appears from scripture that Israel is the homeland assigned by God Himself to the Jews and that's where they're expected (eventually) to go.  Just because I'm not summarizing it, though, doesn't mean that it isn't pretty well known.  The Jews were never "lost" and they have, in fact, reestablished their nation on its native soil once again.  They appear to have maintained a high degree of social and political cohesion for the most part, and they even appear to have done a decent job of maintaining genetic and ethnic cohesion throughout their Exile, so the Jews are not only self-aware of who they are, but so is everyone else.  The same cannot be said for Ephraim (and the rest of the tribes, for that matter) so the next section will be exploring where the Lost tribes may have gotten off to.  It's clear from the blessings given to them and the prophecies concerning them that having them just disappear never to be heard from again is not the destiny of the tribes of Joseph.

But first a small digression.  The ethnic group that calls itself the Samaritans were a remnant of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh and some other Hebrew elements, particularly some of the Levites.  This group was formerly relatively populous, but are now nearly extinct.  For the most part, they've either assimilated into either the modern Israeli ethnic grouping, or have assimilated into neighboring Muslim populations.  Many were also killed during an uprising against the Byzantines, in who's territory they lived.  When the Jews returned from their first exile under the protection of the Persians, they looked in askance at the Samaritans, who's confessional tradition had diverged somewhat from their own.  They also saw them as hybridized with non-Hebrew natives, or even as not Hebrew at all (the pejorative Cuthim designation was meant to imply that they were merely Arameans from nearby Kutha who had moved into the depopulated land of Israel and were aping some of the traditions of the Jews.)  Ezra famously did not allow them to aid the returned Jews in the building of the temple, or even of Jerusalem itself.  There were probably good reasons for this; reasons which our own culture has largely forgotten—the Jews had managed to maintain religious and cultural continuity and had been sharply chastened for mingling with outsiders which had introduced traditions, religions, and temptations which were sharply at odds with their divinely inspired and guided worship of Jehovah, with disastrous consequences.  The Jews had been very explicitly instructed not to develop a pluralistic society, and were under no illusions that something equivalent to the cultural Marxist mantra of "Diversity is our strength" was true; they knew that homogeneity and strict adherence to tradition was their strength.  Diversity had very nearly been their complete and total downfall.

The Lost Tribes
"We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the Earth; and that the Earth will be renewed and receive its paradisaical glory."

Article of Faith #10, among many other scriptural references, clearly refer to separate bodies of Israelites other than the Nephites/Lamanites and the never-lost Jews.  The extended metaphor of the olive tree by Zenos recounted in Jacob 5 refers to at least three groups, corresponding to the Jews, the Nephites/Lamanites, and another anonymous group of Israelites that have been separated from the main body.  We also know that Christ visited another group of Israelites other than the Jews and the Nephites; in 3 Nephi 15-16, he refers to visiting the Lost Tribes.  In various sources, some of them apocryphal (but also in the Doctrine and Covenants, section 110, for example) it speaks of the Lost Tribes having gone north.  The apocryphal book of Esdras says, "These are the ten tribes which were led away captive out of their own land in the days of Josiah [Hoshea] the king, which (tribes) Salmanassar the king of the Assyrians led away captive; he carried them across the River, and (thus) they were transported into another land. But they took this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a land further distant, where the human race had never dwelt, there at least to keep their statutes which they had not kept in their own land. And they entered by the narrow passages of the river Euphrates. For the Most High then wrought wonders for them, and stayed the springs of the River until they were passed over. And through that country there was a great way to go, (a journey) of a year and a half; and that region was called Arzareth. There they have dwelt until the last times."  2 Kings and 1 Chronicles also agree with this in broad strokes, and in Jeremiah 23 it states; "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, The Lord liveth, which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;  But, The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land."

In D&C 133, Joseph Smith wrote the following, from the Lord: "They who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence.  And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep. … And they shall bring forth their rich treasures unto the children of Ephraim, my servants.  And the boundaries of the everlasting hills shall tremble at their presence.  And there shall they fall down and be crowned with glory, even in Zion, by the hands of the servants of the Lord, even the children of Ephraim.  And they shall be filled with songs of everlasting joy."  Without getting ahead of myself, I'm going to posit that that prophecy has largely already come true.

If the Lost Tribes went northward, where did they go?  While I like some of the old romantic notions that some early members of the church believed of a Hollow Earth or the Lost Tribes living at the North Pole, naturally, I don't actually believe it.  Therefore, the Lost Tribes are not still lost out there somewhere; they had to have lost their identity, assimilated into some other population, forgotten who they were, become genetically, culturally and linguistically swamped, and now we know what's left of them by some other name.  In spite of that, the Lord does not forget the covenants made to the House of Israel, and even those who are descended so remotely from Israel that there is no genetic marker that can be identified by science, are yet subject to the covenants made by the Lord unto his distant ancestor.

This makes our search for the Lost Tribes both easier, and yet more difficult.  We don't expect to find genetic clues (or we would have already) or any hint of a a "pure" Hebrew population in the historical record, because they don't exist.  But it means that whatever solution we do find has to be, by its very nature, somewhat speculative.  In the past, people often looked for the former; actual remnants of Israel that remained "pure".  Among these was a movement called British Israelism, which posited that the British were literal descendants of the Lost Tribes.  Sadly, it has been scientifically refuted, but only because the hypothesis was actually incorrectly stated.  If, instead of trying to identify various historical populations as the "Lost Tribes" one assumes that various historical populations inherited a minute element from the Lost Tribes, which eventually through intermarriage, spread the legacy of the Covenant with Abraham more widely through the population, you can get the seemly contradictory (yet not really) notion that many nations of the Gentiles could actually be Covenant People—subject to the covenant through their descent, thin enough to not appear in genetics, but not forgotten by the Lord—more widely throughout the population.

But before we get too far; let's get into some of the speculation and interpretation that has gone on with this subject over the years.  The British Israelism movement was the most developed of these, and articulated much of what went for theory in those days of the Lost Tribes eventual destination and identity.  It was very popular to assume that the Scythians/Saka were the Lost Tribes at one point.  This is both unlikely and unnecessary.  The Scythians and Saka (two reflections of the same name) are quite well known to history, and we even know a fair bit about their language—an eastern dialect of it known as Khotanese Saka is quite well known, and the Ossetian language spoken in the Ossetian region on the Russian/Georgian border is the sole living example of it.  It is, unsurprisingly, not a Hebrew language, but an Iranian one, and shows no signs of having even a Hebrew substrate.  Their archaeology, linguistics and genetics all point to a Pontic-Caspian steppe origin for the Scythians.

The British Israelists also were big fans of the Cimmerians; a slightly more anonymous blip on the historical record.  Nobody knows for sure who the Cimmerians were, although it's mostly believed that their origin was also on the steppe.  They have been proposed as an Iranian tribe, a Thracian tribe, or even a kind of "missing link" between the Thracian and Iranian peoples.  The Cimmerian label has been applied to all kinds of archaeological cultures from the northern Middle East with very little regard for any way in which they might be related to the Gimirri or Kimmeroi mentioned by the Assyrians and the Greeks respectively, which are (perhaps without merit) been conflated together and Anglicized as Cimmerian.  They seem to have been briefly important wandering barbarians who conquered and otherthrew the Phrygian and Lydian kingdoms.  After only about ten brief years, Cimmerian power was broken due to a combination of plague and the forceful response by new Lydian king Alyattes II, and they completely disappear from the historical record.

There isn't really any good reason to associate the Cimmerians with anyone other than one of many wandering early Indo-European tribes; probably of a Thracian or Iranian ancestry, except for the completely unscientific and poor parallels drawn by some (in defiance of any kind of systemic comparative linguistic method, I might add) between their name and both the Cimbri and the Cymry; the former a tribe of northern barbarians of possibly either Celtic, Germanic or both extraction, the latter being the Welsh name for themselves.  Because of this completely coincidental kinda sorta similarity in name, the British Israelists have looked at the Cimmerians as their possible ancestors, and because of a kinda sorta geographic proximity, they have associated the Cimmerians with the Lost Tribes.  Ultimately, this is a line of inquiry that goes absolutely nowhere.  As a literary aside, however, this was briefly popular at the time Robert E. Howard was writing.  His most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian was meant to be a kind of prehistoric/fictional analog to the Celts, and he believed at the time he wrote that in the Cimmerian/Cymric connection and that the historical Cimmerians were proto-Celts; hence he borrowed their name to apply it to his famous fictional barbarian.

There is, however, a clue that is both irrefutable and also very important for our search; the revelation given from the Lord to Joseph Smith both as a reference in 2 Nephi 3 and in the Joseph Smith Translation add-ins to Genesis 50 where it is very explicitly stated that Joseph Smith himself was a literal descendant of Joseph of Egypt.  Since Joseph Smith is more naturally seen as a fairly typical member of the race of British settlers who made up the vast majority of the American nation at its founding, this would seem to imply that among the British there was at least a thin strain of Ephraimite descent.

Some other evidence seems to also support this.  For one thing, the prophecies of the gathering of Israel, starting especially with Ephraim, who's role is the prepare the way for the Second Coming of the Lord (according to D&C 133, and various other sources) suggest that much of the very early growth of the Church was to take place among the actual descendants of Ephraim.  And who were the early converts to the Church?  In America, they were overwhelmingly among ethnic Americans.  America, at the founding of the nation, was of 85% British ancestry, about 9% German ancestry, and 3.5% or so Dutch ancestry (which completely eviscerates the notion that America was a propositional nation based on ideals and theory rather than a completely traditional nation based on shared cultural, linguistic and ethnic bonds—but again; let's not get ahead of ourselves quite yet.)  The other major contributor to the early church membership was European missions, which were especially successful in the British and Scandinavian countries.  This is circumstantial, yet oddly pointed, evidence that among the Germanic peoples of northern Europe in particular was concentrated a high degree of inheritance of Ephraim.  And even today, in America at least, if you see a member of the church, there's a pretty good chance that said member has either a British or Danish last name and a northern European physical appearance.

Dr. Terry Blodgett, a linguist at Southern Utah University, has proposed that Grimm's Law, the sound shift that separated the Germanic languages specifically from its sister-languages in the greater Indo-European family, can be rather remarkably explained as the absorption of a Hebrew stratum.  In addition to the Grimm's Law sound shift that "created" Germanic from some generic Indo-European dialect that was probably operating in a geographical setting not too far removed from wherever we first lose sight of the Lost Tribes, he points out that numerous other explanations that can be explained as linguistic borrowing from Hebrew appear, including several sounds and pronunciations that would have been foreign to Indo-European, the vast reduction of the inherited Indo-European case system to a more simplified one that more closely resembles that of Hebrew, and a number of words.  It's long been noticed by linguists that Germanic vocabulary is only about two thirds native Indo-European in origin; Blodgett makes a case that you can create cognates with at least some Hebrew words.

Dr. Blodgett's work is, as far as I know, unpublished in mainstream linguistics journals, and it stands alone, without the type of peer review or peer critique that such theories usually are subject to.  However, the idea that Germanic evolved from undifferentiated dialects of Indo-European under the influence of formerly non-Indo-European speakers who spoke a "broken Germanic" is hardly a new one.  As of right now, his work can at best be seen as the first glimmering of smoke, which should indicate to others looking to find research projects where there might be a fire.

Keep in mind; according to LDS doctrine, none of the Germanic peoples is required to be a literal descendant of Israel excepting Joseph Smith himself.  Just because the shoe seems to fit and it makes a nice story doesn't mean that it's true.  Because the blessings of the covenant apply to those who are adopted into Israel by means of joining the Church and receiving their Patriarchal blessings equally as those who are born to the birthright, nobody has to be an actual descendant of Ephraim (again; except for Joseph Smith.)  But it certainly does seem likely that some descendants of Ephraim did make their way into northern Europe and got seeded throughout the Germanic population.  They were (eventually) culturally, linguistically, and genetically swamped and there is as of yet no known archaeological signature of them, and yet the Lord does not forget his covenants even if those to whom he made them do.

This scenario has a few added benefits: they fit additional prophecies.  In Genesis 49, Jacob's blessing to Joseph says that his descendants shall be particularly numerous (he is a fruitful bough) who will expand beyond the traditional inheritance of Israel (who's branches run over the wall).  In verse 26, it even talks about Joseph being separated from his brethren and his descendants spreading to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills; language that will look familiar if you read D&C 133 again.  Deuteronomy 33, which restates Jacob's blessings to his sons, also refers to the Land of Promise destined to belong to Joseph in the "ancient mountains" and "lasting hills" as well as being separated from his brethren.  It also talks about his numerousness compared to the other tribes: "the tens of thousands of Ephraim and ... the thousands of Manasseh."  Joseph Smith eyed the West from Nauvoo often, and he, Brigham Young, Orson Hyde and many other early leaders of the church explicitly made a connection between the "everlasting hills" referred to in Isaiah, Deuteronomy and the Doctrine and Covenants with the mountains to the West of North America.

Combining D&C 133, Deuteronomy 33, Genesis 49, the 10th Article of Faith and the JST of Genesis 50, it's not hard to see that you can already fit historically known events into those prophecies.  If the Germanic people bear the covenant of Ephraim, or at least some portion of the Germanic people do, then they have indeed come out of their countries to the North to the land of their inheritance "over the wall" in the New World; the land of ancient mountains and everlasting hills, gathered unto the Church of God to build the New Jerusalem on the American continent. They have made a highway in the midst of the great deep as their ships sailed from Europe to America. That is the fulfillment of prophecy, an integral part of the gathering of Israel, and the prophecy of the return of the Lost Tribes... or at least the first wave of them.

It's curious that Patriarchal blessings in the church tend to support that as well.  My father, who is a Patriarch, mentioned off-hand to me once that it is extremely unusual; almost beyond the Pale, to see at this point anyone with a lineage other than Ephraim, Manasseh (fairly common in the American Indian and South American population of the church) or Judah.  Does this mean that more is yet to come, or that the other tribes have been pretty much simply absorbed, subsumed or assimilated into those three?  Unsure.  I actually suspect the latter.  Have you seen the birthrights of, say, Simeon or Rueben?  Plus, the way population genetics works at high time depths means that shared ancestry becomes almost inevitable.

What does this mean?  Well first, it's important to keep in mind that the blessings of the covenants made by the Lord to Israel are primarily spiritual in nature, though, not genetic.  Since shared ancestry being inevitable means that practically everyone is descended from, say, both Ephraim and Judah at the same time, the birthright, or Patriarchal lineage to which one belongs is not decided by genetics.  Or at least not solely.  So merely finding genetic descent, if it can be done, doesn't mean that there is spiritual descent.  But it does mean that there can be.  What do I mean when I say that shared ancestry is inevitable?  This is an interesting theory of population genetics.  Let me demonstrate, if I can, via example.  Everybody's family tree is branching.  Every person has two parents.  This means every person has four grandparents.  And sixteen great grandparents.  As you backwards in generations, the number of ancestors that you have increases exponentially.  From a mathematical standpoint, you will soon find that you have more ancestors in a given time from than there were people alive.  This is obviously nonsensical.  Family pedigrees have to start to fold in on each other.  An interesting study published in Nature a couple of years ago showed via genetic sampling that this folding effect means that everyone living in Europe today is descended from the exact same ancestors 1,000 years ago as everyone else living in Europe today.  Mathematically, the folding of ancestors means that you get to the point where you literally cannot find a person who left a single descendant in Europe 1,000 years ago who won't eventually get teased out as one of the lines in the pedigree of every person living in Europe today.  When people talk about their descent, what they really mean is who managed to transmit their culture and maintain enough prominence that as ancestors they stand out more than other ancestors.

This is a bit of an odd counter-intuitive conclusion, but it also means that if Joseph Smith is a direct descendant of Joseph in Egypt, then so am I.  So is everyone else who's ancestry is British, for that matter.  Even if there's no genetic evidence of it; given that he's a single ancestor from several thousand years ago, his DNA has obviously been swamped by all of the other ancestors, and therefore becomes invisible to later analysis; only the Lord can perceive it.

I have quite a bit more to talk about this subject; especially with regards to the more recent interactions between Ephraim and Judah, but we have to first establish the above; i.e., that the descendants of northern Europe, especially the Germanic peoples who joined the Church and their kin, are what I mean when I refer to Ephraim.  I am accepting the notion, which is admittedly somewhat speculative, that the American nation and the founder nations from which the American settlers came, can be seen as interchangeable with Ephraim to at least some degree, when referred to in the scriptures.  But more to come in Part II.