All is Well in Zion

2 Nephi 28:21: "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."

A number of members of the Church (and much of the American western states in general) are highly supportive of the candidacy of Ted Cruz, because he's a "True Conservative™."  To that, I always ask: what is it exactly that he seeks to conserve?  It's not the Constitution.  If it weren't for the courts' bizarre mangling of the language of the Constitution in a manner obviously against the express wishes of its authors, he wouldn't even be eligible to run as a natural born citizen.  He isn't interested in preserving the right of free speech; he was quick to jump on the obviously dishonest band-wagon of blaming Trump's so-called "violent rhetoric" for inciting mob violence on the part of left-wing agitators funded by George Soros' moveon.org for the express purposes of "brownshirting" Trump's rallies and intimidating his supporters.

He's not interested in conserving our people or our freedom or our peace.  The hawkish statements of Cruz towards Russia and the Middle East are genuinely frightening.  His foreign policy resembles that of Woodrow Wilson, a proto-fascist busy-body who wanted to be involved in everyone else's nation-building efforts; after he joined in on the nation-destroying efforts of WWI, despite no threat to the US and no compelling interest for us to participate in that sad affair.  As we saw with Wilson's naive and self-righteous nation-building in the Weimar Republic, and as was repeated with George W. Bush's nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan after we overthrew their governments for no good reason, all that that does is foster more and more warfare.  Ted Cruz has said that we should kill the Ayatollah of Iran if they continue to pursue nuclear programs, he's agitated for belligerency towards North Korea and Russia.  The Founding Fathers clearly warned us against getting involved in "entangling alliances" in the words of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson saw our geographical isolation as essential to preserving our peace.  Ted Cruz wants to conserve none of that in favor of an interventionist nation-building, self-righteous Woodrow Wilson-esque military adventurism that will put Americans into harm's way needlessly.

He's not interested in conserving our industry and prosperity or national sovereignty.  His opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal is a pedantic nitpick; he's publicly stated support for the idea if only it were worded slightly differently.  He's bought into the Washington dogma of "free" trade and its benefits for everyone, even though sound economic analysis and the obvious results of decades of it under NAFTA have shown that "free" trade obviously isn't free, and the bill was routed to the American people.  Entire industries have left our country, leaving economically devastated wastelands throughout much of America as a result.  It's no secret that the Japanese auto industry hails the TPP as a wonderful development, and that the American auto industry is lobbying furiously to oppose it.  The TPP will gut the American economy.  Business elites and the politically connected will benefit, as will those who can afford to move vast sums of money around in futures markets.  Everyday American workers will find its effects devastating, as they already have with similar "deals" with other regions, such as Mexico.

He's not interested in preserving our culture, traditions or way of life.  In spite of the fact that 1 in 5 people in America today is an unassimilated alien or the child of such, Ted Cruz is on record as recently as a few months ago saying that he wants to increase temporary work visas by 500%.  In spite of the fact that the IT industry, and more and more other fields such as accounting, medicine and engineering are swamped with foreign aliens who have displaced high-performing and well-trained Americans because they can be paid less, leaving STEM degreed Americans laid off and looking for work without success, he wants to bring in more.  Despite the fact that laid off Disney employees are literally breaking down into tears in front of Congressional hearings at being laid off after their best performing years ever—and forced to train their foreign replacements if they want any kind of severance package—Ted Cruz's "conversion" to economic and cultural nativism is extremely recent and unconvincing, and is more a reaction to Donald Trump's success than anything else.

Ted Cruz wants to send Americans to die in foreign wars that advance no American interest, he wants to send industries out of America, he wants to replace Americans in America, and remake our country into one that our parents wouldn't even recognize, he wants to put Americans out of work, and remake our economy into one in which elitist enclaves rule over virtual serfs.  In the Preamble of the Constitution, a document that in LDS theology is claimed to have been divinely inspired, it states that, "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 Ted Cruz's America, none of that would apply.  Our Union is no longer voluntary, as diverse America has been colonized and conquered by Yankee totalitarian dogma that owes as much to Trotsky as it does to Jefferson.  Justice is failed, when our courts legislate oppression and suppression of the First Amendment from the bench.  There is no domestic tranquility in a multicultural America; the myth of the melting pot, where aliens don't melt or assimilate drives uncertainty and conflict across the country.  The common defense is a laugh, since the military is spent in foreign adventurism to secure the interests of a globalist cabal of soi-disant elitists.  And the blessings of Liberty are being taken from the posterity of the Founding Fathers to subsidize vast invading hordes of Islamic would-be conquerors and Hispanic socialists who are here for what they can raid from our once prosperous people and send home to their families at our expense.  Literally every facet of the Constitution would be failed by Ted Cruz, the supposed "strict Constitutionalist."

In this, he's of course, not alone.  Almost everyone in Washington (with the possible exception of Senator Jeff Sessions and Representative David Brat and a handful of others) have run on a variation of this platform for decades.  Not only that, he's literally and figuratively in bed with the corrupt banking industry who's abuse, enabled by cronyist politicians in Washington, was responsible for our housing bubble and resultant economic debacle a few years ago—his wife is a VP for Goldman-Sachs, and G-S has partially funded his campaign via undisclosed but since discovered loans.

I say again; what exactly does Ted Cruz want to conserve?  See, that's the big problem with the conservative movement; they're just like the liberals except a little bit behind.  What they are wanting to "conserve" today was radical Leftist extremism yesterday.  As the scripture I quoted above says, "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."  This is the same analogy as the frog in the pot of boiling water.  The water has slowly been heating up to the point where the "conservatives" of today are as much a part of the radical left as FDR's New Deal or Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.  They've long since left behind what were once radical totalitarians of the Whig party in the time of Lincoln, or the Federalists of Alexander Hamilton.  There is nothing recognizable of America in the so-called conservative movement.  America that was is dead and gone.  And the radical Left that is in their place is, as President Benson and President McKay both warned us repeatedly, nothing more than a reflection of Lucifer's plan in the pre-existence; the surrender of our agency for the false promise of security and safety and the glory of narcissistic, egotistical leaders.

This is why I no longer consider myself any kind of conservative, and consider the label of "True Conservative™" or the claim that only Ted Cruz is one, or that Donald Trump isn't, to be absurd.  I'm an alt-right neo-reactionary.  I don't want to conserve anything.  I want to restore what was taken from us.

And this is why I've come around to support the candidacy of Donald Trump.  I don't really like Donald Trump.  His public persona is, admittedly, not very likable.  And as a self-described ethnic Texan and somewhat of a Southern Nationalist, I don't find the idea of voting for a blow-hard Yankee from NYC very attractive.  However, the characterizations of Trump as an authoritarian combination of Hitler and Voldemort into a single candidate is both absurd, unfounded, and insulting to the intelligence of the person to whom you're attempting to make that argument.  Donald Trump is the only candidate who recognizes that the invasion of America by a population movement that makes the Völkerwanderung that destroyed Rome look like a handful of traveling tourists is the certain death of America.  He's the only candidate who realizes that "free" trade if America is the sucker and none of our trading partners deals with us in good faith just means that we're subsidizing their growth at our own expense.  He's the only candidate who recognizes that if America is ever to be restored, the crowd-sourced police state of cultural Marxist political correctness must be completely destroyed, and the dishonest propaganda of the mainstream media must be exposed.

He's not our savior.  He's not Captain Moroni.  He's not the Founding Fathers reincarnated.  He is, however, the only candidate who's even saying some of the right things, and he's the only candidate who's attempting to fight the overt and obvious enemy among us.  Donald Trump is merely the first stage of a Restoration of America.  He may fail.  He may not even be sincere (although I suspect that he is.  One aspect of his personality that is actually somewhat likable is that with Donald Trump what you see is what you get, and what I see is a genuine affection for our country and a genuine frustration with what's been done to it.)  Donald Trump is wrong about a great many things, and he will make many mistakes, I have no doubt.

But my prediction—and don't mistake prediction with endorsement, because I very much hope that this does not come to pass, although I fear that it will—is that if Donald Trump cannot set the country on its way to restoration by putting American interest first in the eyes of the government of America, if Donald Trump cannot restore some modicum of honesty by destroying political correctness and the lies of Lucifer's plan that have been spread by the Frankfurt School which has thoroughly poisoned our academic industry, then what follows Donald Trump will be much more violent and much less pleasant.  America already tried to work politely through the system to restore our country.  This was the Tea Party movement, which was mocked, marginalized and smeared and slandered in the media and elsewhere, until some Republicans realized that they could hijack the movement to further their own careers (hello again, Ted Cruz.)  Since the Tea Party movement failed, as Kurt Schlichter said in his column, the astoundingly out of touch Washington elite in the Republican party, who ignored and treated with contempt their own base, made the rise of Donald Trump inevitable.  But contrary to the hyperbolic rhetoric, Donald Trump is no radical.  He's no extremist.  His positions are the spittin' image of what just about any Democrat would have said several decades ago, and any Republican even a few decades longer.  His positions are less extreme that what was actual policy of Dwight Eisenhower.  For the most part, what he's proposing is that America actually execute and follow existing law that's already on the books.  Remember what I said earlier about "conservatives" marching ever to the Left, just a little bit slower than the Democrats?  "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."

If Donald Trump fails; especially if he fails because of the games and corruption of the Establishment, but also if he fails because he proves to be false, then the electorate, already impatient and angry at years of constant betrayals and back-stabbings from the treasonous federal government that sees us as nothing more than pawns to their own careers, will reasonably and correctly assume that fixes from within the system will not work.  After the failure of the Tea Party movement to actually change anything about the trajectory of the country, Donald Trump is the Hail Mary pass by America to save America from our government.  As Mike Huckabee said, it is a revolution with ballots, not bullets.  But if ballots can't change the self-destructive direction our country is headed, then what comes next?

I'm afraid of the answer.  If the Establishment weren't a pack of short-sighted morons who can't see beyond their immediate self-interest, they would be terrified of the answer as well, instead of being panicked by the prospect of a Trump presidency.  What comes after a failed Trump candidacy is much more frightening than Trump basically reliving the Eisenhower years.

You want to see extreme?  Trump isn't calling for the tearing down the buildings of the IRS, the BLM and the EPA and salting the earth on which those buildings stand.  Trump isn't calling for the immediate repatriation of all resident aliens in America, by force if necessary.  Trump isn't calling for the immediate recall of all American troops (and most federal agents regardless of agency) and stationing them on the southern border with a gun and orders to shoot anything that makes a move from Mexico, even if it's just a jackrabbit.  Trump isn't calling for the building of a gallows every 100 yards along the entire 60-some odd mile stretch of the DC beltway and hanging some traitorous Washington politician or bureaucrat for treason from every one.  Trump isn't calling for "Washington delenda est!"  But to many of his supporters, even those are not extreme positions.

Captain Moroni, during his years of warfare against both the Lamanites and the treasonous kingmen, marched against and put to death huge numbers of traitors in the Nephite ranks no less than three times in order to preserve and restore the freedoms that the Nephites had traditionally enjoyed.  Mormon, in his compilation of the records, spent an inordinate amount of time transcribing the details of that short period of time; skimming over vast swathes of years in which other things happened.  Why did he do this?  As President Benson said in the most celebrated of his messages to the body of the Church, from the pulpit of General Conference in October 1986, "The [...] reason why we must make the Book of Mormon a center focus of study is that it was written for our day. The Nephites never had the book; neither did the Lamanites of ancient times. It was meant for us. Mormon wrote near the end of the Nephite civilization. Under the inspiration of God, who sees all things from the beginning, he abridged centuries of records, choosing the stories, speeches, and events that would be most helpful to us."  We were meant to know about Captain Moroni's actions.  We were meant to know that that is the end to which we must be willing to go to secure our freedoms.  And I believe it was meant as a warning that we may have to do the same, if we cannot change the trajectory of our nation.

2 Nephi 28:21: "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."

Be vigilant.  Be informed.  Be cautious.  But be steadfast in the defense of "...our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children."  Don't seek out conflict, but don't be afraid of it either.  In the last days, the wheat will be separated from the tares, and we will need to decide where we stand.

New focus—or perhaps admission of lack of focus

Well... I have yet to make even one post of the series that I initially created this blog for.  That's OK.  I've got plenty of other stuff to talk about that is gospel related.  I'll leave the plans in place—eventually I'll get to them—but in the meantime, I've got a few other things to talk about.  Chalk it up to it being an election year.