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.
