I grew up as a TBM mormon in the 70's and 80's. My father was into conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. Now I understand more of the reasons why after watching this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwWO60WkWo

I wasn't born a racist, I was raised as one. It took me until my mid 20's when I figured that out and many years after that to walk back all of the damage that my racist upbringing did to my decision-making processes.

Those views didn't come from nowhere. They were from the mormon hierarchy. I felt that I had the backing of my religion when I made statements like "Blacks shouldn't marry whites".

Watching the video explains a lot about my upbringing. Halfway through the interview Matt Harris holds up a book called "Conspiracy" and I recognized it because my father had a copy.

What a great interview and so much insight into some of the origins of the mormon far-right and the conspiracy traditions.

Thank you for that. It deserves to be linked in the thread on Mormonism and conspiracy theories as well as standing on its own.

praydude Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wasn't born a racist, I was raised as one.


We weren’t raised as racists, but my brother became one when he started hanging out with MORmON teens in the mid 80’s and joined TSCC.

He and his pals threw cotton balls out in a black teacher’s yard so that she would “know how it felt to pick cotton.” They thought this was hilarious. They were also picked up by the police while trying to sneak into a white supremacy group’s nearby compound. There were other things too, like he also ranted and raved about a guy he hated who was of Native American descent. I didn’t get it at the time, but now of course I know that he was a “Lamanite.” In fact, it took me a long time to connect all the dots that linked his nascent racism and shocking bigotry to Mormonism.

I’ve long suspected that ETB perpetuated the racist attitudes that were supposedly fixed in 1978.

Please watch the interview when you've got some time. I know it is long but WOW that interview explains a lot when it came to my childhood and early adult years.

Perhaps my parents were more far right than most TBM's. They did visit the Bundy ranch after all.

People are not born racist. Like religion, it is how first their parents, and later their friends, train them.

Agreed. One of the best Mormon Stories in the series. This really helped me understand where my extended family gets their radical beliefs from.

Praydude just applauded two interviews on Mormon Stories explaining how Ezra Taft Benson pushed Mormonism from the center-right of the American political spectrum towards the far right.

A major theme in the biographical discussion is conspiratorial thinking: namely, the supposed alliance between Moscow, American communists, Jews, the advocates of equal rights for black people, and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Benson brought out the latent conspiracy-theory predilections evident in the BoM, with its secret combinations and Gadianton Robbers; in early Mormon history's fascination with Masonry, Andrew Jackson, and an evil Washingtonian cabal that worked against the Church; and such intra-Mormon cabals as the Danites, the Council of 50, and the various levels of secret temple rites. He brought these up to date in the 1960s and thereafter.

The church leadership tried to shut Benson up, but he had tremendous influence and his legacy lives on. We see it in the Bundy farces, some of the Intermountain West militias, the Vallow case, the Lafertys's behavior, Brian David Mitchell, Julie Rowe, the Westover clan, Glenn Beck, and the tendency of Mormons to distrust progressives nationally and government power in general. We also see the legacy in the willingness of ex-Mormons to embrace politically-oriented conspiracy theories. Witness, for instance, the several times that the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Israel has appeared on this board.

When a man is an apostle or prophet, he casts a long shadow.

I lifted that post from the Conspiracy thread. I add here another insight that Harris interview provided: the role ETB played in transforming Mormonism into the deep red constituency it is today.

According to Harris, Utah voted in favor of FDR all four times he was elected as well as for Truman in 1948. That was five consecutive presidential elections. In 1952 a slight majority went for Eisenhower, very possibly because ETB was slated to be the Secretary of Agriculture; and in 1956 Ike won handily. In 1960 Utah supported Nixon with a tiny margin before voting very strongly for Johnson in 1964. So from 1932 to 1964 Utah voted for Democratic presidential candidates twice as often as for Republicans.

It was in the mid-1960s when everything changed. One factor was the Civil Rights Movement, which violated at the sensibilities of Mormon scripture. Another would soon be the rebellion of young people against the "establishment," which along with the Civil Rights agitation, represented a challenge to that Mormon shibboleth: authority. But behind this was ETB, constantly claiming that Jews, blacks, communists, and Moscow were all working together: coming from an apostle who openly promoted the John Birch Society and its Mormon allies, he gave transcendent meaning to the chaos in American society.

So Mormons have not always been die-hard Republicans. That trend really didn't emerge until the late 1960s, which is a surprise at least to me.

You’re not paranoid if they actually are out to get you.

What?

So Nixon's "Southern strategy" to flip racist Dixiecrats brought racist mormons along for the ride.

I think that Benson isn't the only culprit in turning the mormons hard right. Mark Petersen was also guilty, an extreme law & order type who couldn't bring up J. Edgar Hoover without prefacing his name with "great American"; and Ernie Wilkinson, not a GA but who turned BYU into a right-wing echo chamber of indoctrination that is only now just beginning to show the occasional crack.

I don't think the Southern Strategy was a major factor among Mormons. The impression I got from the interview was that it was the chaos, the anti-war protests, the demonstrations in the streets, and the drumming of ETB and a few others.

Regarding Peterson and Wilkinson, the interview says a number of noteworthy things. It turns out that McKay, Lee (of all people) and even Smith and Kimball all tried to shut ETB up. Surprisingly, Peterson was among those who tried to get him to knock off the politics lest he alienate potential converts in the US and abroad. And while Wilkinson too was an ally, he was ordered by the FP not to follow ETB's advice to set up a John Birch Society club or a Free Men Club and in fact not even to publish transcripts of ETB speeches at BYU.

So the impression I get (based solely on the interview) is that ETB was uniquely important in the process.

Too bad all my net access is via cellular. I don't have the data to watch 9+ hours of video. Sounds fascinating, though.

I liked the interview as well, it helped me define more clearly what a right wing radical is. And what they did that was clearly wrong. What struck me most is that the Birchers (Which the Bensons were apart of) had the idea they could adopt communist strategies to win, namely distribute fake news (conspiracy theories) to gain political points. But it didn't work. I suppose it's because people expect more honesty from the Right than from the Left.

The interview also brings out the idea of "watchman on a tower" that was used to inflame the crowd for political results, which was a motive of many of Bensons speeches.

> What struck
> me most is that the Birchers (Which the Bensons
> were apart of) had the idea they could adopt
> communist strategies to win, namely distribute
> fake news (conspiracy theories) to gain political
> points.

Where in the interview did it say THAT?


------------------
> But it didn't work. I suppose it's because
> people expect more honesty from the Right than
> from the Left.

Oh yeah, that's reasonable. Muslims were coming to the US to rape white women, bad hombres were coming from Mexico to rape white women, COVID is a hoax and will be gone in a few days--no, by April; no, by the summer; no, it's already gone; we defeated it. There are good people on both sides. The election is corrupt--well, it will be unless I win; mail-in ballots are corrupt except when my family and I do it. All that's true, right? Right? Right.


The interview did NOT say that Wilkinson and ETB were trying to manipulate public opinion. You made that up. THEN you go on to say that the left is manipulating opinion today.

Stick with the quadratic equation. That's where your judgment gets as close to reasonable (not very) as anything you say.

Hey, you forgot "THOSE people are moving to the suburbs to lower the property values of white women, aka suburban housewives, until I stopped them."

Not only did our Dear Leader defeat Cory Booker's invidious campaign to infiltrate low-income people into the white and delightsome suburbs, he also got those pure and delightsome suburban women's lazy husbands back to work so they can resume their bridge games and debutante balls.

misplaced. Oops



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2020 06:33PM by Brother Of Jerry.

What is interesting to me about all of this is just how political talking about ETB can get. I know that on this board we are supposed to keep politics out BUT ETB was a VERY political figure! He infamously said at the BYU devotional that it was not possible to be a Democrat and a faithful member of the morg.

So yes, there is a lot of political twist to these discussions and what happened to the church with ETB's influence.

Even as people leave the cult they still hold onto many of these political views. To that I say "Well...everything else the church told you was a lie, so perhaps your political views could use some re-examination."

In my experience the church did shape me into a right-wing republican. I was that way for many years even after I left the cult.

It is impossible to disentangle Mormonism and politics. Mormonism is a religion with the greatest of public ambitions, both in regard to specific policies and in the eschatological determination to form a global government. In addition there is the cult mentality, the deference to (righteous) authority--which is always a marginal element but now a profound element of contemporary politics.

Unless we limit our discussion to the Nursery, politics cannot be walled off from Mormonism. ETB just provides more evidence that it has always been that way, from JS to BY and then to polygamy and the temple curse against the US and finally to the endorsement of right-wing politics from WWII onward. Thus it has always been, thus it continues to be.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45228584?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

This is a 27 page article from Dialogue by Gary Bergera, about Ernie Wilkinson's lead up to and run for the US Senate from Utah in 1964. It gets pretty deep into the weeds, but will give you a good background on ETB and the Mormon hierarchy mid-20th century.

Incidentally, Ernie, though a good Republican and president of BYU, lost to Dem. Frank Moss. There was a time when Dems pretty regularly got elected to statewide office in Utah. The two main courthouses in SLC are named after Scott Matheson and Frank Moss. Cal Rampton was also a D Governor, though I don't know if anything is named after him. Anyway, once upon a time.....

ETA: Utah DOT building, Dept of Public Safety, the Salt Palace Convention Center, and a boardroom at the state capitol are all named after Cal Rampton. I need to pay better attention. :-/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2020 06:36PM by Brother Of Jerry.

It is remarkable that Mormonism turned hard right in the late 1960s but was previously neutral or even Democratic. That's an insight from the ETB interview, part two, that was something of a surprise to me.

I can still see all the books on the bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom in the 70s. I spent so much time in there—-loved looking through the encyclopedias and set of children’s knowledge books that I’d give anything to have today. And I loved my mom’s collection of the old Relief Society Magazines. But I remember all the Cleon Skousen Books. I thought he was a General Authority because my dad had more of his books than any other. There was also a book called Mormonism and Negroes, or something like that, the McKonkie books, and some book about the last days that was full of the old mormon conspiracy theories. But that bookcase explains a lot about my father and his over-the-top weird thinking. He was very educated but so incredibly gullible. I’m looking forward to listening to that interview.

My Dad was similar. When I was watching the interview i gasped when I saw Dr Harris pull out the book titled "Conspiracy?" My dad had that book as well. My dad had tons of the Skousen books. I remember that as the years wore on my dad had sort of a club among older church members who all were fans of books like these.

My family lived in San Diego North County and my parents later moved to Nevada because "Satan won control over California". My dad fully expected the United States government to fall and the Mormon church would rise up and fill the void.

All of that was supposed to happen 15 years ago.

Well, my dad is dead now. We had a falling out and I didn't talk to him for the last 10 years of his life.

I still thank Benson for getting me off the fence. He, personally, got me to leave the cult that plagued five generations of ancestors. And we all lived happily ever after. The end.

Thanks, ETB!