Regarding the Capitol Hill situation with Trump supporters yesterday, I think the first point we should acknowledge is that we as members of the Church support the rule of law, and these people broke several laws, so they should be punished. They definitely will be. The FBI is already involved, and the people who invaded the Capitol building will go to jail, in some cases for a long time.
It is worth noting that at least some of the people involved definitely were NOT Trump supporters, and may have been Antifa/BLM supporters. Here are some articles you may not have seen on SOME of the people who invaded the Capitol who were apparently not Trump supporters:
But conservative members of the Church must face the fact that even if there were some Antifa false flag infiltrators, it is simply a fact that the majority of the bad actors WERE Trump supporters. And this is not good by any standard.
Conservative members of the Church have always had an uneasy relationship with the populist elements of the Trump message, and in this case we can see why. I discussed that in detail in this recent post here:
It is clear that the Trump populist message is not in line in many ways with what many LDS church members believe on important issues. But I would point out that the Democrat party is not in line with what most LDS Church members believe on even more issues. And Libertarians (and I say this as a liberty Republican myself) support many things we as Church members do not believe in. So, LDS Church members often feel politically homeless. With the Republican party going through yet another political evolution, LDS members may end up feeling more homeless than ever.
What the media will NOT be talking about, however, is WHY the 73 million-plus Trump supporters voted for him and why they are so upset with the results. The first step toward peace is sympathy, and Trump supporters are getting very little of that these days. This is a dangerous position for progressives and anti-Trump people to take. Trump supporters feel they are being backed against a wall with no escape. They are mocked by all of the dominant groups in society, and if they try to express their feelings on Facebook or Twitter they are censored. I would recommend, at least as a practical measure, that the political winners try better to understand where Trump supporters are coming from.
There are significant claims of voter fraud that have not been addressed. It is simply not good enough to say the claims are all conspiracy theories. When you look at the evidence, there are claims in six states that should be looked at. I am not saying the claims are all valid, but the political process does not allow for these claims to be studied in detail.
Conservatives are now facing a future where Democrats may have gotten away with widespread voter fraud and will continue to use these tactics for the foreseeable future. The legality and appropriateness of widespread use of mail-in ballots needs to be discussed. Do we really believe this is how people should vote? The process for monitoring mail-in ballots and assuring their validity was extremely poor in many if not most states. Remember that Republicans can do mail-in ballot fraud too, so we will be heading to a future where all elections are called into question unless we address this issue.
Sadly, part of being a conservative member of the Church is the inevitable sense that things will fall apart eventually, and personally I have been feeling this way since the 2000 election and Bush v. Gore. And of course 9/11 in 2001 solidified that feeling. As I re-read the Book of Mormon this year, I felt that I was feeling the same things that Mormon and Moroni felt as they watched their civilization devolve into chaos. We are getting a little taste of that happening before our eyes. The good news is that we know the ending will be happy, with the Savior returning and wiping away the tears from every face. But in the meantime, it seems like the world is spinning out of control before us, and that is not a good feeling at all.