Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of Ame

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

Postby admin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 11:43 pm

Part 2 of 3

LAND TITLES FROM THE UNITED STATES, OR DIRECT FROM GOD?

One extremely important area of conflict between the Washington government and the Deseret theocracy was over the issue of land ownership and land rights. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between Mexico and the United States ending hostilities on February 2, 1848, the Territory of Utah and surrounding states had been ceded by Mexico to Washington. That meant that the land titles and deeds granted by the Deseret administration during the first years of settlement were not valid. Accordingly, when federal officials arrived in Deseret for the purpose of beginning the process of surveying the land, they were subjected to extreme harassment. When the first federal surveyor entered Utah Territory, the Mormons saw this as an attempt by the United States government to assert authority over land which they held on perpetual lease from God. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 49)

Agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs found in 1851 that the top Utah officials had "no sympathy or respect for our government or its institutions," and could be "frequently heard cursing and abusing not only the government, but all who are American citizens." One official concluded that the Mormons would try to prevent the United States from "peaceably extending her laws over the territory."

At the same time, an awareness of the alliance between Mormons and the British Empire was common in the population at large. Mormons were overheard saying that "they did not fear the United States. If they needed help, they can easily get it from England." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 56)

Not content with harassing federal officials and making their work impossible, the Brigham Young regime in the early 1850s also began promoting armed attacks on pioneer wagon trains transiting the Utah Territory, both by inciting the Indians to hostile action, as well as by having Mormons carry out the attacks themselves. Rumors soon abounded that white men, evidently Mormons, were joining in Indian attacks on pioneer wagon trains. The Mormons told the Indians "that it was all right to kill American soldiers, but not Mormons." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 64)

In 1853, Captain John W. Gunnison of the United States Army was killed, presumably by Indians, while doing surveys for the proposed transcontinental railroad, which would most likely pass through Utah. There were many questions as to whether the Mormons had incited the Indians to carry out this murder.

"THOSE DAMNED AMERICANS"

Among the Mormons, the term "American" was a sign of contempt. In one typical incident, a group of Mormons attacked a dwelling because they had heard that there were Americans inside. The Saintly assailants demanded to know from the homeowner "what he was doing with those damned Americans about his house." [141] (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 72)

Among the Indians, however, "The American" often had positive connotations. This is especially the case with Garland Hurt, an energetic Indian agent who did much for the federal cause, and who must be seen as one of the unsung heroes of the Utah Territory. Hurt worked especially with the Ute people, whom the Mormons had systematically antagonized. The result was that, just as brother Brigham was sending out his emissaries, disguised as missionaries, to recruit the Indian tribes for war, at least one federal official was preventing an important Indian nation from being goaded into conflict by the Mormon Saints. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 72)

THE CRISIS OF 1855: BRIGHAM MOBILIZES FOR TOTAL CIVIL WAR

In February 1855, President Franklin Pierce attempted to appoint a territorial governor to take the place of Brigham Young. In response to this, Brigham Young began the first phase of his plan for secession. During these months, he would hide behind the slogan of "sovereignty," a word which in our own time often has a similar subversive intent.

Brigham Young in 1855 therefore set out to accentuate and radicalize the existing tendencies and institutions of Mormondom, with a view to mobilizing the Utah Territory for total war against the United States. He was, in fact, executing an articulated strategy: he was willing to accept statehood and entry into the Union, but his first choice was existence as an independent, sovereign nation. Brigham Young was prepared to call attention to his landmark decision with special rhetorical fireworks. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 73)

BRIGHAM: GATES TO HEAVEN CLOSED TO GENTILES AS OF 1855

Brigham Young proclaimed a revelation according to which salvation was no longer available to the Gentiles, meaning the Americans and all other non-Mormons. The word went out that "the day has come to turn the key of the Gospel against the Gentiles, and open it to the remnants of Israel, the people shouted, Amen, and the feeling was such that most present could realize, but few describe." [142] Young's pronouncement in effect consigned the Gentiles to damnation, through the proverbial outer darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. From this he also derived the consequence that "the time had come to reject the colonial government Congress had imposed on God's kingdom." If Washington continued to deny Deseret the status of a sovereign state within the Union, then the obvious result would be a completely independent nation striking out on its own. [143]

MORMONS INCITE INDIAN WARS

Contemplating these events, one inevitably feels a sense of the grotesque disproportion between cause and effect. Here, for example, the mere act of a US president naming a territorial governor for Utah who happens not to be one of the anointed Mormon Saints is enough to cause cataclysmic effects in heaven, ruling out a future possibility of salvation for hundreds of millions of "Gentiles." How could this apocalyptic event be triggered by the routine actions of one Franklin Pierce, president of a nation of the middle rank at best? What kind of a religion was this? Was it a religion at all, or a thinly veiled pretext for theocratic secessionism? Brigham Young and his associates were indeed radical subjectivists who thought the drama of salvation revolved around them.

To enhance the possibilities of a military alliance with the "Lamanite" Indians, who were considered a lost tribe of Israel, Brigham ordered his missionaries out with orders to teach them farming, instruct them in the Book of Mormon, and teach them polygamy in practice by marrying Indian women. Eventually the red men could become "white and delightsome," like the good angels who fought on the side of the Mormon Jesus, according to the time-honored Latter-day Saint formulation. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 74) Notice that the Mormon concept of saving the Indians includes forcing them to become white.

The Mormon hierarchy also organized in 1855 a conference of missionaries who would enter into communication with the main Indian tribes of North America, with the obvious implication of inciting them against the US federal government. In this continent-wide mobilization, one hundred and sixty Mormon missionaries went out, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi, soon to be followed by more. They made contact with the principal Indian nations, including Delawares, Cheyennes, Cherokees, Kiowas, Comanches, Wacos, Witchitas, Lakotas, Choctaws, Moquis (Hopis), Mojaves, Nez Perces, Goshutes, Shoshones, Utahs, Paiutes, Omahas, Flatheads, Navahos, Shawnees, Bannocks, and Creeks. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 74)

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Brigham Young also mobilized what amounted to a collectivist war economy in Deseret. Modern Mormons claim to be the true apostles of the free market, but Brigham Young -- alone in North America at the time -- relied on a command economy using centralized planning and coercion. All important economic decisions involving the application of resources were the prerogative of the Mormon Moses. He claimed in 1867 that he had been called by God "to dictate affairs in the building up of his Zion," and that this gave him the totalitarian power to determine everything, "even to the ribbons the women wear." [144] One is reminded of the Soviet planners who wanted to control economic activity "down to the last bolt."

The Mormon statist war economy was fed by tithing. It was also fed by usury, with a rate of 12% interest per year being charged on the money the church had advanced to overseas converts making the journey to Deseret. For this reason, historians have seen many in the Mormon rank-and-file as having "the status of indentured servants." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 80)

During the 1850s, an entire popular literature grew up around the theme of "Escape from Mormondom." Contributors included women like Ann Eliza Webb Young, who had managed to escape their marriages to Brigham Young and other Mormon bigwigs, plus European travel writers, Christian moralists, and muckraking social reformers. One wellknown contributor was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who later began his famous Sherlock Holmes series with the story centering on the same theme. Brigham Young became the villain of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first entry in the Sherlock Holmes series; this was A Study in Scarlet, the story of two unhappy Mormons, John Ferrier and his daughter, who escape from Deseret.

1856 REPUBLICAN PLATFORM VS SLAVERY AND POLYGAMY, "TWIN RELICS OF BARBARISM"

Brigham Young was thrown into a state of complete frenzy in the summer of 1856 when he received word of the first Republican national convention, which had occurred in June in Philadelphia. Here John C. Fremont of California, the Pathfinder of the West, had been nominated for president. The Republican platform also included the following provision:

Resolved: That the Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign powers over the territories of the United States for their government; and that in the exercise of this power, it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy, and Slavery.


Brigham Young was apoplectic. Although Fremont was defeated by Buchanan in the November 1856 election, in 1858 the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives with a platform that would have made it impossible for states to join the Union without prohibiting both slavery and polygamy. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 87) This turned out to be the doom for Brigham Young's fallback option of forcing the United States government to protect polygamy in the same way that the Slave Power was making the federal government protect black chattel servitude.

The Republican stance on these issues was also tactically astute. The Mormon apostle John Taylor realized that the Republicans had now succeeded in attaching not just slavery but also polygamy to the Douglas-Democratic slogan of popular sovereignty or squatter sovereignty. Taylor saw that the Republicans had successfully "introduced opposition to Polygamy, as well as to Slavery, [as] twin relics of barbarism, which had thrown 'the onus of protecting & sustaining both onto the Democratic party.'" Taylor complained that this maneuver was a "mean dastardly act, in good keeping with other political moves of the present day; it is greedily swallowed by religionists of all parties ... polygamy is shook at the Democrats as one of the institutions which they must defend, in conjunction with slavery.'" (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, pp. 87-88) Brigham Young's only consolation was that the sporadic fighting in Bleeding Kansas was getting worse. Clearly, Brigham Young was hoping to see the short-term fulfillment of Joseph Smith's apocalyptic Civil War Prophecy, itself an early fruit of the cooperation of the Mormon Church hierarchy with British intelligence.

THE MORMON ""REFORMATION" -- BRIGHAM YOUNG'S REIGN OF TERROR

In the summer of 1856, Brigham Young proceeded to whip the population of Deseret into a paroxysm of apocalyptic and theocratic frenzy. He did this by unleashing the so-called "Mormon Reformation," which has a number of features in common with the Anabaptists of Muenster in the 16th century, with Robespierre's Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, and with Chairman Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was a chance for the Mormon hierarchy to cultivate a war psychosis or war hysteria among its subject population, and also to systematically eliminate any possible leaders of some possible future challenge to the absolute leadership of Brigham Young and The Quorum of Twelve.

Once again, Brigham Young stressed the messianic function of the kingdom of God, and in the process explicitly embraced the notion of terrorism. He announced that God's Kingdom was supposed to be "a terror to all nations." Mormondom had been divinely appointed to "revolutionize the world and bring all under subjection to the law of God, who is our law giver." [145]

BLOOD ATONEMENT -- FOR CRIMES OF AMERICANS AGAINST MORMONS

Brigham Young also thought it proper at this point to introduce a theological concept, one which was once again totally alien to the tradition of Christianity. For Christians, the crucifixion of Christ on Calvary was a sacrifice which, because of the sinless and divine nature of the victim, fully atones for the scenes of mankind, no matter how monstrous they may be. The grace accorded to humankind by Christ's self-sacrifice is infinite, and any denial on this point amounts to outright blasphemy. But Brigham Young now put forth the doctrine that Christ's atonement is implicitly not enough, and that for certain heinous sins and crimes, "Blood Atonement" is required. Not surprisingly, many of the crimes he had in mind were crimes against Mormons, and the sinners he wanted to punish were very often none other than the American people.

Brigham offered the following concise summary of blood atonement in his sermon of September 21, 1856: "There are sins that can be atoned for by an offering upon an altar as in ancient days; and there are sins that the blood of a lamb, or a calf, or of turtle doves, cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man." [146]

Blood atonement became the centerpiece of a phase of acute hysteria about the Mormon creed. The grand inquisitor of the Mormon Reformation was Jedediah M. Grant, whom we have already encountered. The New York Times described Grant as "a tall, thin, repulsive looking man, of acute, vigorous intellect, a thorough-paced scoundrel, and the most essential blackguard in the pulpit." His nickname was 'Brigham's Sledgehammer."' [147]

The inhabitants of Utah were subjected to an inquisition in which they were interrogated on 13 questions about their possible sins. They were grilled about their contributions to public sanitation. They were interrogated even about whether they managed to take a bath once a week. Brigham Young ordered that all the Mormon Saints be baptized, and demanded that girls over twelve start attending lectures on the importance of polygamy and the submission of plural wives, very much in the spirit of Chairman Mao's rectification and reeducation campaigns.

DANITE AND SHENPIP DEATH SQUADS PURGE THE RANKS OF THE SAINTS

Grant, in his role as Brigham's Torquemada, told the worst offenders that they should come forward and voluntarily arrange for their own capital execution. He told the worst offenders among the Mormons that they ought to go and confess to Brigham Young, who would then appoint a firing squad to execute them. If they paid the price of blood atonement now, they might still have some hope of getting into heaven. Utah traditionally offered death row inmates the choice between hanging and shooting, in deference to Brigham Young's idea that shedding your blood now might increase your chances to get into heaven later, assuming you were in the blood atonement category. The executioners would obviously be drawn from the ranks of the Danites, [148] and might include the Exterminating Angels, sometimes called Shenpips.

A few years later, Brigham Young Jr. confessed, not in public but in his diary entry for December 15, 1862, that the Reformation instituted by his father had been a "reign of terror." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 95)

THE HAND-CART HECATOMB: BRIGHAM YOUNG'S GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Just as Mao used the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 to divert attention from his failures like the Great Leap Forward, so Brigham Young was able to use a smokescreen of fanaticism to cover up his own logistical blunders, most notably the great handcart tragedy of 1857. Seeking ways to promote an immediate wave of mass migration into Deseret on the cheapest possible basis to get ready for the imminent conflict, Brigham Young had ordered that newly converted Mormon adepts arriving at the Mississippi or Missouri River points of debarkation that served the overland trails west should not be provided with expensive wagons with oxen or horses, but rather with cheap wooden handcarts. These often resembled rickshaws. Each handcart was supposed to carry 400 to 500 pounds of baggage. Logistical support was limited to one wagon and three yokes of oxen for each 20 carts or 80 to 100 people. This was insufficient for food, clothing, and tents, and it was a recipe for disaster. [149]

Nevertheless, the Brigham Young personality cult generated paeans of phrase for this idea

Oh, our faith goes with the hand-carts,
And they have our hearts' best love;
'Tis a novel mode of traveling,
Devised by the gods above.
And Brigham's their executive.
He told us the design;
And the Saints are proudly marching on,
Along the handcart line. [150]

But in 1856, a party of immigrants from England, Wales, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries arrived late, and then had to wait for their handcarts to be manufactured. Two parties started the trek from Florence, Nebraska in August rather than in the spring. When they arrived at Laramie, Wyoming, it was found that Brigham Young had failed to honor his promise to provide the necessary food stocks for the rest of the trip. Handcarts began to break down, rations were cut by 25%, and the starving Saints began eating their supplies of axle grease to stay alive. A blizzard then arrived from the north, leaving the immigrants stranded. Out of about a thousand Mormons in the two hardest hit companies, some 210 died.

Brigham Young did everything possible to escape responsibility, despite the fact that logistics was supposed to be his strong point. The idea of using wooden hand carts had been totally his own, and they implemented it despite the warnings of other senior Mormon leaders. He had skimped on the accompanying wagons, and had failed to provide food stocks and emergency help along the way.

Brigham Young was widely blamed in Salt Lake City, and he lashed out in rage at his critics: "if any man or woman complains of me or my counselors, in regard to the lateness of some of this season's immigration, let the curse of God be on them and blast their substance with mildew and destruction, until their names are forgotten from the earth." [151] Modern-day political observers are reminded of the attitude of the Romney campaign towards its critics, which can be summed up as the same "the public be damned."

One wretched woman survived Brigham Young's handcart fiasco, only to lose her life when she had second thoughts about polygamy. She committed suicide on Christmas day by cutting her throat. The Mormon authorities were not interested in clarifying this tragic case, but the loyal American Indian agent Garland Hurt investigated. Hurt discovered that the victim had "come with the handcarts and been told that she would be denied subsistence and denounced as a prostitute if she did not become the polygamous wife of the man with whose family she was living, and the fatal razor was brought to its relief." [152]

It was in these same dark weeks of the winter of 1856-57, with the handcart tragedy and the Reformation hysteria providing the backdrop, that the Brigham Young clique carried out new steps on the path to secession.

In December 1856, the Legislature of Utah Territory met in Fillmore, and quickly voted to move the territorial capital back to Salt Lake City, where it could be more easily defended. One observer of its proceedings found that the wind of theocratic secessionism and rebellion against the United States had reached hurricane force. The Mormons wanted independence, and they were willing to court a confrontation with the federal government to get it. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 103)

Brigham Young railed against the few loyal United States officials in the territory, including Surveyor General Burr, Garland Hurt, and Federal District Judge William W. Drummond. These he vilified as "dogs and skunks." [153]

MORMONS ENDORSE NULLIFICATION DOCTRINE

Building a case for a declaration of independence or sovereignty, the Utah territorial legislature began voting a series of raving resolutions pledging to "resist any attempt of Government Officials to set at naught our Territorial laws, or to impose upon us those which are inapplicable and of right not in force in this Territory." [154]

They then passed a long resolution addressed to President elect James Buchanan, in which they recited all the injustices that had been afflicted on the Mormons starting from their foundation. Their major complaint was that American presidents had appointed Utah territorial officials "who seek to corrupt our community, trample upon our rights, walk underfoot our laws, rules and regulations, who neither feared God nor regard men and whenever checked in a mid-career, threaten us with death and destruction by United States troops." [155]

John M. Bernhisel was Utah's territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress in Washington, and tried to make the case for Utah's statehood to the new President Buchanan shortly after his inauguration, but Buchanan told them to submit these documents to Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson. Thompson declared that the Mormon version of nullification was nothing less than "a declaration of war." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p.106)

MORMONS IN OPEN REBELLION

At about the same time, Surveyor General Burr wrote urgently to Washington: "The fact is, these people repudiate the authority of the United States in this country, and are in open rebellion against the general government." [156]

More reports came to the White House from Federal Judge Drummond about Mormon destruction of judicial records, American citizens imprisoned without due process of law, Brigham Young's suborning of juries, the Gunnison murder on orders from the Mormon Saints, and the assassination of Federal District Judge Shaver through poisoning.

Meanwhile, the Reformation was still in full swing, and a Mormon bishop and his gang of Danite retainers castrated one man for alleged sexual misdeeds. This prompted a discussion among the sons of Brigham Young, which the patriarch concluded by prophesying "that the day would come when thousands would be made eunuchs 'in order for them to be saved in the Kingdom of God."' [157]

BRIGHAM YOUNG SEES SEPARATION OF UTAH FROM KINGDOMS OF THIS WORLD

Brigham Young escalated his rhetoric, challenging his Salt Lake City audience to embrace the cause of secessionism and an independent Mormon theocratic empire. In his sermon of August 2, 1857, the Prophet intoned: "The time must come when there will be a separation between this kingdom and the kingdoms of this world, even in every point of view. The time must come when this kingdom must be free and independent from all other kingdoms. Are you prepared to have the thread cut now?" [158]

With many reports of a full-fledged Mormon insurrection converging on Washington, pressure mounted on the feckless and treacherous President James Buchanan to do something. The Mormons had considered Buchanan a friend, just as they had positively evaluated Millard Fillmore and Stephen Douglas, since all of them accepted the Democratic Party doctrine of squatter sovereignty, which the Mormons thought would allow polygamy to be continued perpetually. Buchanan's Secretary of War was John B. Floyd, who used his term in office to do everything possible to facilitate secessionism and rebellion. Some historians think that Floyd encouraged Buchanan to send a force into Utah because he expected the expedition to be a fiasco, and estimated that it was sure to drain the federal treasury in the process. Some have seen the motivation in the lucrative contracts that might be distributed.

Purely political factors clearly played a part. The Republicans had scored significant gains in 1856 by tying the albatross of polygamy around the neck of the Democratic Party. Now, Democrats were looking for a way to put some distance between themselves and the Mormon Saints. US Senator William Bigler wrote to Buchanan that "there is a good deal of honest indignation in the country against the conduct of the Mormons. The universal sentiment seems to demand the assertion and maintenance of the political authority of the general government over the territory, regardless of their peculiar institution. They may convince the world that a man in that country may have more wives than one; but it will be difficult to show that it gives him a right to reject the executive officer of the law." [159] At this point, Buchanan alerted 1,500 US troops to be ready to move into Utah.

JUNE 1857: STEPHEN DOUGLAS CONDEMNS THE "TREASONABLE, DISGUSTING, AND BESTIAL PRACTICES" OF MORMONDOM

On June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas, who was getting hammered as the defender of slavery and polygamy in the territories, also called for military action to reassert federal authority in Utah. Douglas declared that 90% of the Mormons were foreigners, aliens who rejected US citizenship. The Mormons, he said, considered Brigham Young and his regime superior to the federal government, which they hoped in the long run to subvert. The Mormons were goading the Indians into warlike acts, even as the Danites crushed internal dissent. Douglas denounced the Mormon power, declaring: "Should such a state of things actually exist as we are led to infer from the reports, and such information that comes in an official shape, the knife must be applied to this pestiferous, disgusting cancer which is gnawing into the very vitals of the body politic. It must be cut out by the roots, seared over by the red hot iron of stern and unflinching law." Douglas wanted to abolish the Utah Territory altogether by repealing the 1850 act of Congress which had created it. This was because the Mormons were "alien enemies and outlaws," unfit to be citizens of the Territory, and even more unfit to be citizens of a state. Douglas warned that "to protect them further in their treasonable, disgusting, and bestial practices would be a disgrace to the country -- a disgrace to humanity -- a disgrace to civilization, and a disgrace to the spirit of the age." Douglas wanted Brigham Young and his retainers to answer for any crimes they have committed in courts in Iowa, Missouri, or California. [160]

Heber Kimball replied that Douglas was trying to get elected president, which was certainly true, and that "he will go to hell," which remains to be determined. [161]

MAY 1857: ONE THIRD OF US ARMY DEPLOYED TO QUELL MORMON REBELLION

One of Brigham Young's sources in New York City reported that the US Army supreme commander, the Whig General Winfield Scott, had ordered Brevet Brigadier General William S. Harney along with his command of twenty-five hundred officers and men to occupy a line along the Oregon Trail from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Laramie. With this order, which was issued on May 28, 1857 Scott had committed about one third of the officers and men of the entire United States Army to dealing with the Mormon threat. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 130-2)

At this time, the majority of Mormons were convinced that the apocalypse would occur during their lifetimes. Brigham Young cannily exploited this belief structure for his own political gain. "This is the kingdom of heaven -- the kingdom of God which Daniel saw," Young sermonized. "This is the kingdom that was to be set up in the last days." If US troops came into Utah, Brigham Young considered that an aggression which he would meet with armed force and with the weapon of secessionism: "I shall take a hostile move by our enemies as an evidence that it is time for the thread to be cut. I think that we will find three hundred who will lap water, and we can whip out the Midianites." [162]

BRIGHAM YOUNG PROCLAIMS SECESSION TO CHEERING MORMONS

This is also what Brigham Young was writing in his own private diary, where he recorded on August 11, 1857: "Fixed my detirmination [sic] not to let any troops enter this territory ... And unless the Government assumes a more pacific attitude, to declare emigration by the overland route Stopt. And make every preparation to give the U.S. a Sound drubbing. I do not feel to be imposed upon any more." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 139) According to an eyewitness, on August 16, 1857, Young had stated in a speech in the temple that Utah was now a separate and independent territory, owing no allegiance or obedience to any laws but their own. Mormon bigwig George Brown Bailey later wrote that "This people came out and declared their independency of the United States from this very time ... The Presidency put it to the people wither [sic] they would maintain it to the last and it was carried by unanimous vote of uplifted hands and a shout of Yea which made the place echo." [163]

Young's actions depended on a kind of primitive doublethink which he constantly practiced. One aspect was to pledge support for the Constitution at the same time that he plotted insurrection. Here is how Brigham's doublethink sounded in that fateful August of 1857: "The United States had turned mob & were breaking the Constitution of the United States & we would now have to go forth & defend it & also the kingdom of God ... If General Harney Came here with an armey [sic] to destroy this people we would destroy him & his armey [sic]." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 141)

If the United States Constitution no longer applied to Utah, and the writ of the US federal government no longer ran, what exactly was going to take their place? Brigham Young fell back on Joseph Smith's slogan of "theodemocracy," which the original Prophet had cooked up for his 1844 presidential campaign. Clearly, theodemocracy was simply a way to sugarcoat theocracy, a concept which has never been popular in the United States. Theodemocracy, it turned out, meant a totalitarian regime with no opposition.

MORMON THREAT TO DESTROY US CITIES

When US Army Captain Stewart Van Vliet arrived in Salt Lake City to attempt to negotiate with the Mormon regime, Brigham Young greeted him with a tirade full of threats against the federal government:

'''The intention of the Government is to destroy us & this we are determin[ed] they shall not do. If the government of the United States [persists] in sending Armies to destroy us in the name of the Lord we shall Conquer them .... And even should an Armey of 50,000 men get into this valley when they got here they would find nothing but a Barren waste. [Washington] must stop all emigration across this Continent for they Cannot tread in safety. The Indians will kill all that attempt it. ... If the Government Calls for volunteers in Calafornia [sic] & the people turn out to come to destroy us they will find their own buildings in flames before they get far from home & so throughout the United States." [164]


Did Brigham Young really possess a terrorist network capable of carrying out such a massive retaliatory strike against American cities? Were the Danites and Shenpips really that powerful? We do know that Nauvoo Legion officer John L. Dunyan was making similar threats in the same timeframe, telling a Mississippi traveler that, if the US Army tried to march into Mormon territory,

"every city, town and village in the States of California, Missouri and Iowa should be burned immediately -- that they had men to do this who were not known to be Mormons!" (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 147)


Thus, a century and a half before September 11, 2001, the Mormon chieftain was openly threatening to destroy American cities. What links might there be between the nightmare vision of Brigham Young's threats and the tragedy of 9/11? Up to now, many had imagined that no political force inside the United States could have been the author of 9/11, but this opinion clearly needs to be revised in light of threats the Mormons actually made. It should be added that the other significant force talking about burning New York City around this time was the British Admiralty. [165]

Another name enters into Romney and Bain Capital and that is Frank Morse who served as an attorney for Howard Hughes. Morse was also on the board of directors of Summa Corporation, a company William Gay controlled. Later, Morse had as his client Saudi Arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi “In the 1980s and 1990s, as a partner in the law firm Sandler, Rolnick & Morse, Morse served as Chief Legal Advisor for Adnan Khashoggi in the United States and Europe. Morse was responsible for complex litigation and business transactions for Khashoggi, personally, and for Khashoggi's Triad Group of Companies” Wikipedia Traid Group worked with high ranking members of the Mormon Church in building a complex in Salt Lake City. Khashoggi sold a Venice, Florida Airfield to Mormon Bishop Wally Hilliard. Hilliard trained two of the 9/11 pilots at the Venice air field.

-- Romney links to Death Squads, Hughes and Nixon Corruption, by Debbie McCord Skousen


The rules of engagement given to the United States Army for the Utah deployment were to respect all inhabitants, to shoot only in self-defense, and to assist federal officials in the implementation of applicable law. This was, in other words, anything but a punitive expedition on the order of Sherman's March to the Sea. Nevertheless, Brigham Young found it politic to exaggerate the federal presence into a nightmare. On September 15, 1857, the Prophet decreed the distribution of a proclamation of martial law addressed to the "Citizens of Utah" which he had ordered printed up.

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S INSURRECTION PROCLAMATION OF SEPT. 15, 1857

According to this remarkable document, the Mormons have been "invaded by a hostile force, who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction .." [166] For the Mormon Saints, as a result,

"Our duty to our families requires us not to tamely submit to be driven and slain without an attempt to preserve ourselves. Our duty to our country, our holy religion, our God, to freedom and liberty, requires that we should not quietly stand still and see those fetters forging around, which are calculated to enslave and bring us into subjection to an unlawful military despotism, such as can only emanate (in a country of constitutional law) from usurpation, tyranny and oppression."


Brigham Young, despite the fact that he was a private citizen and religious leader and not a government official in any way, did not hesitate to act in the name of the United States:

"Therefore, I, Brigham Young, Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory of Utah, in the name of the people of the United States in the Territory of Utah,"


Brigham Young then proceeded to create a regime of martial law that included the following points:

"First -- Forbid all armed forces of every description from coming into this Territory, under any pretense whatever.

Second -- That all the forces in said Territory hold themselves in readiness to march at a moment's notice, to repel any and all such invasion.

Third -- Martial law is hereby declared to exist in this Territory, from and after the publication of this Proclamation; and no person shall be allowed to pass or repass, into or through, or from this Territory without a permit from the proper officer.


This proclamation was Utah's functional equivalent of the South Carolina ordinance of secession of December 20, 1860. Utah was acting as an independent country, hostile to the United States.

In a crescendo of provocation, Brigham Young thus announced that special safe conduct passes, like those issued by the infamous Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution or the internal passports of the USSR, would be required for all persons wanting to cross the borders of Utah Territory.

He followed this on September 18, 1857 with a general order to the Mormon troops recalling how "many and deep were the scars which the knife of the legalized assassin had inflicted upon us ... God will avenge our many wrongs to guard the portals and bar the entrance of the polluter." Special vigilance was demanded of the armed forces to guarantee the faithful execution of Brigham Young's commands and to "to see that the requirements of the Proclamation are strictly carried out."

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S SIEGFRIED LINE TO KEEP US FORCES OUT

The main access to Salt Lake City from Colorado and points further east was Echo Canyon. Here the Mormon Saints constructed a line of fortifications. Because the Mormons lacked competent military engineers, the trenches they built would have been highly vulnerable to assault. The Mormon breastworks "were accessible from the rear and so exposed that army sharpshooters might easily have picked off the defenders."167 The trenches were also vulnerable to artillery attack. This is where Miles Romney the younger wanted to fight against the United States, and where his elder brother George was part of the garrison. Although these earthworks were not formidable, they nevertheless psychologically intimidated some federal officers who were already tending towards defeatism.

From a geostrategic point of view, Brigham Young's attempt to cut transcontinental communications posed a dire threat to the federal union. The transcontinental telegraph was still several years in the future, but it would go through Salt Lake City. The famous Golden Spike which completed the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point in May, 1869 was also located in Utah. Among wagon routes, the Oregon Trail and Spanish or Mormon Trail passed through southern Idaho and Utah, both areas controlled by the Mormons. An insurrection in Utah and Southern Idaho would cut off communications between the East Coast and California, creating a grave danger that the Golden State might be subverted and detached from the Union. There was a secessionist constituency in Southern California, which came out in the open in 1860-61, so this danger was anything but academic.

In addition, if the Mormons could successfully block the overland wagon trails, then the great western migration of the American people would be stopped. In the summer of 1857, California newspapers were reporting that the number of people traveling west overland was between 25,000 and 30,000, which they estimated to be the highest level since 1853. What would be the fate of these numerous pioneers if Brigham Young were to succeed in his attempt to make Utah a zone of exclusion? Clearly, many of them would perish.

BRIGHAM YOUNG ORDERS WAGON TRAINS TO STAY OUT OF UTAH

A further complication came from the Mormon strategy of attempting to use the Indian tribes as irregular auxiliaries in shutting down westward migration through the Intermountain West. Brigham Young tried to scapegoat the Indians and use them as a pretext for his actions, lamenting that American atrocities against the Indians were stirring up Indian violence in his bailiwick. Therefore, the Americans must "stop traveling through this country," and desist from their "outrageous treatment" of the Native Americans. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 143)

At the same time, Brigham wanted God's help in getting the Indians to fight and die for the cause of the Mormon Saints: "We pray our Father to turn the hearts of the Lamanites even the sons of Jacob unto us that they may do thy will & be as a wall of defense around us." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, pp. 156-57)

THE MORMON SAINTS MASSACRE THE BAKER-FANCHER PARTY FROM ARKANSAS

At this point, a column of US forces was moving through Wyoming, spread out over several hundred miles. It was now under the command of Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who would shortly join the Confederate States of America and be killed during his attack on the Union Army commanded by Ulysses S. Grant at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, in the battle of Shiloh in the spring of) 862. Johnston deployed his forces poorly. Cavalry was essential for fighting Mormons on horseback, as well as for warding off attacks by mounted Indians. But instead, Johnston had his infantry at the front of the column and his cavalry fought to the rear, where they could not be effective.

Brigham Young now caused the massacre of 140 peaceful Arkansas Travelers, including men, women, and children, in the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. This horrendous event stands still today as the third largest politically motivated terrorist attack in American history, ranking after 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. It is a case of unprovoked violence against peaceful civilians by the Mormon Danite militia under the control of Brigham Young. Understandably. the Mountain Meadows Massacre has been a cause of acute embarrassment for Mormon, pro-Mormon, and anti-American historians. They have therefore attempted the classic maneuver of blaming the victims, alleging that the Arkansas Pioneers had mistreated the Indians, poisoned water wells, created friction with the Saints, or otherwise stirred up trouble. These are ludicrous and morally bankrupt subterfuges that are hardly capable of obscuring the fundamental responsibility of Brigham Young and the Mormon Church for these deaths.

The Arkansas wagon train had set out in the spring of 1857, long before Brigham Young had issued his order to close the borders of Utah. The travelers came from a group of families -- the Fanchers, Bakers, Camerons, Joneses, Dunlaps, Mitchells, Huffs, Tackitts, Millers, and Woods -- from Northwest Arkansas. These were prosperous settlers, and were accompanied by a considerable herd of cattle. These were truly innocent passersby, most or all of whom could have had virtually no knowledge of what was awaiting them in Utah until they had come in contact the Mormons. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 156)

BRIGHAM YOUNG TO THE DANITE COMMANDER: "PITCH INTO" THE ARKANSANS

Brigham Young preferred to orchestrate atrocities indirectly. Signed orders to commit war crimes were not his style. Historians have never found a piece of paper from Brigham Young that would finally establish his guilt for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But to look for such documents is to misunderstand the leadership style of the Mormon Prophet. King Henry II of England, in the winter of 1170, is supposed to have exclaimed before his court, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" The priest in question, St. Thomas Beckett, was soon assassinated in Canterbury Cathedral by killers who were seeking favor with the English sovereign. Brigham Young preferred to operate in precisely this fashion.

In the late summer of 1857, Brigham Young conferred with Mormon Bishop John D. Lee, his adopted son, a top leader of the Danites, and also a member of the secret Council of Fifty, the explicitly political body which Joseph Smith had created to advance Mormon power on this earth. The Mormon Prophet asked: "Brother Lee, what do you think the brethren would do if a company of emigrants should come down through here making threats? Don't you think they would pitch into them?" Visiting the site where the Mountain Meadows Massacre would shortly occur, Brigham had pointed out to Lee that the "Indians, with the advantage they had of the rocks, could use up a large company of emigrants, or make it very hot for them." [168] "Use up" was Brigham's usual euphemism for slaughter. It was practically an engraved invitation for a major atrocity.

The Mormon Prophet also telegraphed his intentions to the world at large, slyly warning the Gentile or American overland travelers that they were in immediate danger from the Indians: "'I now wish to say to all Gentiles send word to your friends that they must stop crossing the Continent to Calafornia [sic] for the Indians will kill them'" (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 161) But the killers would be Mormons, not Indians.

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S GRAIN EMBARGO AGAINST AMERICANS

The intentions of the Fancher-Baker party were entirely peaceful, but there was friction with the Mormon Saints because Brigham's followers had decided that they owned every inch of land in the Utah Territory. A conflict arose because "the nature of the terrain and Mormon communal land-use patterns made the large cattle herd and its need for forage a point of dispute over who owned the land -- Uncle Sam or the Almighty?" (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 166) The Mormons were forbidden to give or sell any food to the United States Army or to the Arkansas Travelers. Young commanded them that not even a kernel of grain ... "be sold to our enemies." [169]

On September 1, 1857 Young met with the leaders of the Pahvants and Paiutes. The details of this conference are still a secret, but Brigham wrote in his diary that he could "hardly restrain them from exterminating the' Americans.'" [170] This looks like a cover story invented after the fact.

On the morning of Monday, September 7, 1857, a group of Mormon riflemen accompanied by a small screening force of Indians opened fire on the Arkansans as they prepared breakfast. The Pioneers circled their wagons, threw up earthworks, and returned fire with their Kentucky rifles. Some of the Indian screening force were killed. The Mormons realized that if they attempted a frontal assault, they could eventually overwhelm the Arkansans, but only at the cost of heavy losses to the Saints. Instead, from the Mormon point of view, a stratagem of deception was in order to convince the Arkansas people to give up their guns and deliver themselves into the hands of the Mormons, who would then slaughter them. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 173)

DANITES: "EMIGRANTS MUST BE DONE AWAY WITH"

The Danites conferred about what to do. One of the leaders, Colonel Dame, insisted that there must be no delay while waiting for further guidance from Salt Lake City. Said Dame: "I don't care what the council decided ... My orders are that the emigrants must be done away with." [171] The Mormons were able to convince the Arkansans to give up their weapons and accept a Mormon escort out of the territory. Each Arkansan male was flanked by an armed Mormon. There ensued the greatest peacetime massacre of Americans in the entire 19th century.

The Arkansas Travelers and their armed Mormon guards walked along a path which was surrounded by brush on both sides. At the signal from one of the Mormon leaders, each of the armed Saints turned and shot the disarmed Arkansas man walking next to him. Mormon men with their faces painted, accompanied by a few Indian allies, emerged from their hiding places in the bushes to kill the women and children at close range. The vast majority of the killers were Mormons, and not Paiute Indians. Older children begged for their lives, but they were killed if the Mormons estimated that they were old enough to give a credible account of what had occurred, and would thus be able to testify against the murdering Mormon Saints. [172]

The Mormons were anxious to hide their monstrous guilt from the world, so they took care to kill every adult and even the older children, leaving alive only the infants and toddlers who would not be able, they thought, to tell the story of how the Saints had committed this monumental atrocity. The last to die was a girl aged between ten and twelve, whom the Danites judged to be old enough to tell the story. A total of seventeen children survived. Later, with characteristic Mormon aplomb, the Southern Utah Saints -- some of whom had taken part in the killing -- who had taken these children in, presented the United States government with a bill for $7,000 for child care services rendered. In the event, they got $3,500." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 343)
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

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Part 3 of 3

MORMON COVER STORY: ARKANSANS POISONED INDIAN WELLS

After the killing, a consensus among the perpetrators was quickly reached regarding a plausible cover story for the atrocity. The killers swore each other to secrecy, and pledged to maintain the fiction that the slayings had been the work of the Indians. To provide a plausible motive for such Indian violence, they also concocted the accusation that the Arkansas Pioneers had antagonized the tribes by deliberately poisoning some of the wells along the way. These interlocking components have furnished a cover story which has provided the matrix for Mormon apologetics about the Mountain Meadows Massacre for more than a century and a half. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 177) Mark Twain was one of the first who accused Brigham Young of ordering the killings. Official Mormon historiography continues a massive cover-up on this point.

The Los Angeles Star published an initial account of the massacre on October 10, 1857, and for the rest of October the issue was the subject of many articles in California newspapers. On November 9, 1857 the Cleveland Daily Herald published an account of these events. This was followed by the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 12, and the New York Times on November 17, 1857. [173]

On the 28th of September, Lee visited Brigham Young and reported on the slaughter. Young told him to keep silent, and attempted to blame everything on the Indians. The Mormon Prophet later said this to Lee about the Mountain Meadows Massacre: " ... the company that was used up at the Mountain Meadowes were the Fathers, Mothe[rs], Bros., Sisters & connections of those that Muerderd the Prophets, they merittd their fate, & the only thing that ever troubled his was the lives of the Women & children, but that under the circumstance [it] could not be avoided." [174]

Many of the dead had been thrown into a ravine and covered with a thin layer of dirt. Coyotes and other predators soon swarmed over the pile of bodies. In May of the following year, Assistant Surgeon Charles Brewer of U.S. Army found masses of women's hair, children's bonnets, such as are generally used upon the plains, and pieces of lace, muslin, calicoes, and other material, part of women's and children's apparel." [175]

MORMON REVENGE FOR ROMNEY ANCESTOR PARLEY PRATT WAS A FACTOR

The Washington Times Insight Magazine, reviewing Will Bagley's earlier book, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, notes that Bagley "puts blame for the massacre squarely on the shoulders of one of the most revered LDS leaders, Brigham Young" and also implicates "most of the adult males living in Southern Utah at the time." [176] In an interview with Insight, Bagley stressed that "just prior to the Mountain Meadows siege, a highly regarded Mormon leader, Parley Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas -- the very region where the Fancher wagon train formed up. His assailant, a jealous husband, was hailed as a hero in Van Buren, Arkansas, and never faced charges for the murder. Rage over the Pratt murder was just one log on a big fire. [177]

Bagley is convinced that the Church of Latter-day Saints has been organizing a cover-up of these events. He is especially concerned about the lack of source material, since "so little authentic material about the massacre survives that it suggests a concerted official effort to eliminate any mention of the subject in Mormon annals." Instead, the researcher finds: "a maze of duplicity built by men who lied to protect their very lives."

Bagley also believes that the Latter-day Saints have hidden the key documents in their archives: "I'm convinced they have access to a wealth of evidence that will back my interpretation, specifically minutes of key meetings of the Mormon hierarchy." Relatives have also done their part, destroying records that would embarrass or indict their ancestors or the Mormon Church. One wonders if this applies to Romney's transition director Mike Leavitt, or to US Senator Mike Lee, both of whom are lineal descendents of Mountain Meadows war criminals.

History Professor Wayne K. Hinton of Southern Utah University, by contrast, prefers to impeach the conduct of the Arkansans. The deaths were "unwarranted, but can be explained mainly by the fears and anger of the Mormons at the expectation of violence against themselves." He sees the Baker-Fancher party as a "rather unruly group ... [whose] members abused Indians, killed livestock and stole and destroyed property." [178]

MORMON COVERUP OF THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

Insight writer John Elvin cites the case of Morris Shirts, a descendant of one of the Mormons, who claims that "all of the adults and older children were slain in battle." Elvin is justifiably indignant and explains: "Slain in battle? About half of those who were shot, butchered or clubbed to death (more than 50 in number) were children. The kids -- alive, dying and dead -- were tossed about like rags by their attackers, according to some surviving accounts, while their parents and guardians, including 30 women, were executed at point-blank range after having surrendered. Army investigators arriving later on the scene found nothing left but scattered bones and tufts of hair. They tried their best to bury properly such remains as were left by coyotes, wolves and other scavengers." [179]

To explain the massacre, Bagley goes back to Brigham Young's strategy, which had brought him to the brink of war with the United States. The Mormon Prophet was telling his followers: "We have borne enough of the oppression and hellish abuse, and we will not bear any more of it." Bagley also recalls that the "doctrine of blood atonement is denied by some Mormons, but there is substantial evidence that it was a practice from the beginnings of the movement and that Young espoused it, preaching that the killing of enemies was for their own good, "'the way to love mankind' by sending the sinner heavenward." [180]

Brigham Young wanted a test case which could illustrate his ability to stop all overland travel through Utah and environs. Everything was carefully planned well in advance. In this endeavor, he was more than willing to commit an act of terrorism to deter and dissuade parties of pioneers that were still flowing across the Great Plains and towards Utah. He wanted to show that no future transcontinental telegraph or railroad could be maintained without his permission. Most importantly, Young saw it as part of a dialectic of secessionism involving Confederate slaveocrat forces, California separatists, and others. His was an offensive strategy, and not just the defense of Deseret.

THE BUNGLED FEDERAL ADVANCE TOWARDS UTAH

Secessionists everywhere were undoubtedly heartened by the immense logistical problems encountered by the United States Army in attempting to reach Salt Lake City. The future Confederate Albert Sidney Johnston was appointed commander of the federal forces in September 1857. Given his mentality, he could hardly be expected to conduct a vigorous repression of secessionism. About one third of the United States Army was now spread out over the Oregon Trail from the Missouri River almost to the gates of Utah. The supply train and the infantry were in the vanguard, and the cavalry brought up the rear. This disposition was totally counterproductive. Because the advance was so slow, leading Mormons began gloating. Apostle Heber C. Kimball, part of Brigham Young's leadership clique, predicted that his own harem could deal with the federals, boasting: "I have wives enough to whip out the United States." [181]

BRIGHAM YOUNG WANTS KANSAS VIOLENCE TO ESCALATE, HOPES FOR JOHN BROWN

The conclusion reached by historians Bigler and Bagley was that Brigham Young was hoping for an additional flare-up of violence in Kansas that would force the U.S. Army to be sent in and tied down far away from Utah. If this diversion of American forces were to materialize, the Mormons would be able to hold out indefinitely in their intermountain fastness: "The border war over slavery in 'Bleeding Kansas' would lead, he believed, to the breakup of the Union, as Joseph Smith had prophesied. 'If we can avert the blow for another season,' Young added, 'it is probable our enemies will have enough to attend to at home without worrying about the Latter-day Saints." [182] But Brigham Young's hopes may have embraced a conflagration far larger than just Kansas.

Brigham Young generally operated with an excellent intelligence picture, and the hypothesis here is that he benefited from information passed to him by high-level British sources. In addition, Brigham Young's agents read all the transcontinental mail that was going to California, gleaning much from US government documents. The abolitionist firebrand John Brown, who was famously leading an armed struggle against the proslavery border ruffians in Kansas, was deployed by a group of leading Boston bankers, and it would be surprising if the British were not aware of some of Brown's intentions. Brown was already famous for having engaged the border ruffians in a small-scale pitched battle at Osawatomie in August, 1856.

DID BRIGHAM YOUNG JUMP THE GUN ON THE HARPER'S FERRY RAID?

Brown's backers were bankers known as the "Secret Six," and they included the wealthy Tappan interests. Part of John Brown's operation was Hugh Forbes, a British military officer. Forbes later leaked word of John Brown's intentions to certain US Congressmen, and might also have informed the government in London. In the fall of 1857, Brown was in Kansas recruiting men for his plan to attack the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. If the well-informed Brigham Young had gotten wind of any of this, he might have assumed that John Brown would strike the US government during the spring of 1858. The goal of the Harpers Ferry operation was to detonate a generalized slave rebellion and insurrection across the South. Since the southern states were likely to demand the use of federal resources to protect slavery, such a crisis might have immediately precipitated secession, in which case Brigham Young's perspective would have been proven realistic. In the event, John Brown's raid did not occur until October 16-18, 1859. Perhaps Brigham Young had let his consuming rage against the United States cloud his judgment, leading him to get too far out in front of the coming wave of secessionism.

Brigham Young cynically told US Army emissary Captain Van Vliet that he wanted to keep the federal forces out in the wilderness during the fall and winter of 1857-58, and even force them to retreat to Colorado or beyond. "Either way, it would hold up the army's advance for at least eight months and allow enough time for the fighting over slavery in Kansas to spread to other states, forcing Washington to turn its attention elsewhere." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 188)

BURN GRASS, STEAL HORSES AND LIVESTOCK, BURN WAGONS, POT SHOTS

At this time, California newspapers estimated that the Army of the Mormon Saints could mobilize some 10,000 fighters, and that the Mormons would seek to incite 50,000 Indians to fight for their cause. Brigham Young and his advisers developed a two-stage plan. During the first stage, any federal forces entering Utah Territory or other areas where the Mormons had a strong presence would be subjected to a comprehensive campaign of harassment, sabotage, and scorched earth. In this outer zone, Mormon tactics would include burning grass, stealing horses and livestock, destroying supply trains, and keeping the troops up all night with pot shots and other noise. But Young also traced an inner line of defense, which included the eastern approaches to Salt Lake City through Echo Canyon, and the northern approaches to the Mormon capital through Soda Springs, Idaho. If federal forces attempted to break this inner line of defense, the Mormons would engage them in pitched battle.

Initially, it looked like the Mormons were succeeding in inciting the Cheyenne to attack American pioneers, with one incident claiming the lives of four men from Arkansas. But, towards the end of September, the federals found that the Shoshone or Snake Indians camped along the Green River wanted an alliance with the Americans against the Mormons. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 207)

BRIGHAM'S ECHO CANYON EARTHWORKS A FAILURE

By now the vanguard of the federal forces under Colonel Alexander was within striking distance of Echo Canyon, where the Mormons had erected some earthworks. In the following year, after the crisis was over, federal officers took the opportunity to inspect the fortification that was supposed to be so formidable. One U.S. Anny Captain reported that the Mormon trench line "could have been turned easily by 500 troops." [183]

But Colonel Alexander was thoroughly intimidated by the supposed earthworks, and turned north, away from the Mormon capital. In retrospect, the federal vanguard would have had an excellent chance of forcing its way into Salt Lake City with a coup de main, thus calling Brigham Young's secessionist bluff. At the same time, the Mormon Nauvoo Legion would have attempted to prevent the federals from passing through Echo Canyon. One of Brigham Young's henchmen commented "They seem determined to force their way into the city anyhow, and we know no other way than to fight and destroy them." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 209)

BRIGHAM YOUNG & CO INDICTED FOR TREASON -- FOR THE THIRD TIME

In order to further slow the federal advance, the Mormons now carried out the greatest feat of military prowess in their history. On October 4-5, 1857 the Danite cavalry commander Lot Smith made a surprise raid to destroy 76 US wagons containing the logistics needed to keep the federal expeditionary force in the field for two months. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 212) As the New York Times recently summed up this raid, "in early October, within a span of 24 hours, Smith and around 45 mounted militiamen captured and burned 76 Army supply wagons containing $1 million worth of food and clothing." [184] This feat continued to edify Mormon audiences for the next quarter century, allowing them to express their anti-American animus.

Lot Smith had a cakewalk because the US cavalry had been relegated to the tail end of the marching column, hundreds of miles in the rear. Colonel Alexander complained: "The want of cavalry is severely felt, and we are powerless on account of this deficiency to effect any chastisement of the marauding bands that are continually hovering about us." [185]

The medium-term result of the Lot Smith raid was that Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Daniel H. Wells, Lot Smith, and other Mormon leaders were indicted for violence and treasonable acts. Some of them had already been indicted for treason in Missouri, and then in Nauvoo, so they were in danger of becoming three-time losers. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 215) Additional treason indictments were also later issued against Joseph Taylor, William Stowell, and others. Taylor had blundered into a U.S. Army camp carrying orders signed by Wells. In the meantime, Young was putting out the word that any mountain man who showed signs of going over to the federals should be immediately liquidated.

MORMON PROPHET BRIGHAM YOUNG ORDERS THE DANITES TO KILL US TROOPS

Brigham Young now issued a direct military order to his armed retainers, instructing them to shoot to kill American soldiers. If the US troops come any closer, Brigham Young specified, "let sleep depart from their eyes and slumber from the eyelids, both day and night, until they take their final sleep. Pick off their guards and sentries & fire into their camps by night, and pick off officers and as many men as possible by day." [186]

"With us it is the kingdom of God or nothing," Brigham Young raved. [187]

In early November, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston wrote to Washington of the Mormon Saints that "They have with premeditation, placed themselves in rebellion against the Union.'" The Mormon regime, he judged, was "utterly repugnant to our institutions." Since this was now an insurrection, Johnston concluded: "I have ordered that wherever they are met in arms, that they be treated as enemies." [188] Giving up any hope of entering Salt Lake City in 1857, Johnston now attempted to concentrate his forces at Fort Bridger in western Wyoming, and secure supplies to be able to survive the coming winter. One part of the US column lost 3,000 cattle, horses, and mules because they could not be fed.

The Mormons now established a red line at the western edge of Fort Bridger. If the federals tried to advance beyond that point, Brigham Young ordered the Danites to start "pitching into them." In that case, the Mormon Prophet added, the US forces "could at once be surrounded with an overwhelming force and be used up or compelled to surrender." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 230)

During this phase, Brigham Young also considered the option of moving the entire Mormon community northwards, into Idaho, Oregon, or what is now British Columbia, which was created precisely at this time to try to keep the Mormons out. The Russian ambassador in Washington, Edward de Stoeckl, asked President Buchanan if he thought the Mormons would try to invade Russian Alaska. Buchanan replied that he did not know, but that he would be glad to get rid of the Mormons under any circumstances." (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 231)

In the meantime, the Mormons were committing a new massacre, which with six dead was on a scale smaller than Mountain Meadows, but which was still horrific. This was the Aiken party from California, whom the Mormons accused of being US espionage agents. Brigham Young's in-house Danite assassin William A. Hickman "used up" the last of this group in late November.

MORMONS USE POISONS AGAINST INDIANS

Given the accusation by Mormon apologists that the Arkansas Baker-Fancher party had poisoned the Indian wells, it is worth pointing out that the Mormons had made poisoning Indians into an exact science. The Indian chief called Walker, who had been in conflict with the Mormons a few years earlier, died mysteriously one day after the visit of a Mormon missionary. On another occasion, Captain William McBride of the Nauvoo Legion wrote to an associate: "'We wish you without a moment's hesitation to send us about a pound of arsenic .... We want to give the Indians' well a flavor .... A little strickenine would be of fine service, and serve instead of salt for their too fresh meat." [189] Brigham Young may have tried to poison the U.S. Army with a shipment of salt, but Colonel Johnston refused to accept it.

Because their lucrative business of selling overpriced supplies to pioneers passing through Utah had been interrupted by Brigham Young's blockade order, tax receipts and user fees for the Mormon-owned ferries were now plummeting, creating a cash crunch for the Brigham Young regime. The Mormon Saints responded by gearing up their habitual practice of counterfeiting. Joseph Smith had been accused of counterfeiting, and accusations against the Mormon Saints that they were engaged in printing phony bills were rampant during their early decades. One of the top Mormon counterfeiters was a man named McKenzie, who engraved the plates used to produce the fake bills. The Mormons developed a plan to counterfeit up to $1 million in fake U.S. Treasury drafts to be circulated in California. Brigham Young quickly made up the shortfall by printing his own money, calling it "Deseret scrip.''' (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 274)

The Mormon rebellion, now in full swing, became one of the central topics of the State of the Union address sent to Congress by President Buchanan on December 8,1857. Buchanan was doubtless responding to the same kind of political pressure which had moved Stephen Douglas to condemn the Mormons, but this nevertheless remains an authoritative statement suggesting that the Mormon rebellion of 1857-58 had an intrinsic importance which few American history textbooks come close to recognizing.

1857 STATE OF THE UNION: BRIGHAM YOUNG HOLDS ABSOLUTE POWER OVER CHURCH AND STATE, COLLECTIVIST ECONOMY

Buchanan started with a quick overview of the recent history of Utah Territory. The central fact here was the overweening power exercised by Brigham Young, who had now attained a position of absolute temporal and spiritual power. Buchanan referred in passing to Brigham Young's economic dictatorship as well:

Brigham Young was appointed the first governor on the 20th September, 1850, and has held the office ever since. Whilst Governor Young has been both governor and superintendent of Indian affairs throughout this period, he has been at the same time the head of the church called the Latter-day Saints, and professes to govern its members and dispose of their property by direct inspiration and authority from the Almighty. His power has been, therefore, absolute over both church and state. [190]


This was far too much power for anyone man. Brigham Young's increasing authority remained unchecked because of the authoritarian mentality of the Mormons in Utah, Buchanan argued.

BUCHANAN: PEOPLE OF UTAH BELIEVE IN BRIGHAM YOUNG WITH "FANATICAL SPIRIT," "COLLISION" LIKELY

Because of the Mormons, Utah had become a mono-confessional Territory. The decision for peace or war with the United States was now in the hands of the Mormon Moses, and all signs pointed to an early conflagration:

The people of Utah almost exclusively belong to this church, and believing with a fanatical spirit that he is governor of the Territory by divine appointment, they obey his commands as if these were direct revelations from Heaven. If, therefore, he chooses that his government shall come into collision with the Government of the United States, the members of the Mormon Church will yield implicit obedience to his will. Unfortunately, existing facts leave but little doubt that such is his determination.


BUCHANAN: NO "GOVERNMENT IN UTAH BUT THE DESPOTISM OF BRIGHAM YOUNG"

The totalitarian Mormon power had either driven all federal officials out of the Territory, or else made it virtually impossible for them to carry out their duties:

Without entering upon a minute history of occurrences, it is sufficient to say that all the officers of the United States, judicial and executive, with the single exception of two Indian agents, have found it necessary for their own personal safety to withdraw from the Territory, and there no longer remains any government in Utah but the despotism of Brigham Young.


BUCHANAN: RESTORE CONSTITUTION AND LAWS IN UTAH BY MILITARY FORCE

Finally recognizing the seriousness of the situation, Buchanan had dispatched new appointees, accompanied by military units:

This being the condition of affairs in the Territory, I could not mistake the path of duty. As Chief Executive Magistrate I was bound to restore the supremacy of the Constitution and laws within its limits. In order to effect this purpose, I appointed a new governor and other Federal officers for Utah and sent with them a military force for their protection and to aid as a posse comitatus in case of need in the execution of the laws.


BUCHANAN: OPINIONS, NOT ACTIONS, PROTECTED BY FREEDOM OF RELIGION

Buchanan was careful to point out that he did not intend to interfere with the religious beliefs of the Mormons, but that overt acts were subject to applicable laws, and did not acquire immunity simply because of the claim that they were religiously inspired:

With the religious opinions of the Mormons, as long as they remained mere opinions, however deplorable in themselves and revolting to the moral and religious sentiments of all Christendom, I had no right to interfere. Actions alone, when in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, become the legitimate subjects for the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate.


BUCHANAN: "ACTS OF HOSTILITY" LEADING TOWARD "OPEN REBELLION" BY SAINTS

Buchanan had delayed sending troops for as long as political expediency allowed, so he had a kind of sincerity in asserting that sending the Army had been his least preferred alternative. But now rebellion loomed:

... a hope was indulged that no necessity might exist for employing the military in restoring and maintaining the authority of the law, but this hope has now vanished. Governor Young has by proclamation declared his determination to maintain his power by force, and has already committed acts of hostility against the United States. Unless he should retrace his steps the Territory of Utah will be in a state of open rebellion.


BUCHANAN: BRIGHAM YOUNG'S WAR PREPARATIONS

In retrospect, Buchanan pointed out, Brigham Young could be shown to have been preparing for war with the United States over a prolonged period. He was capable of protracted guerrilla warfare in the mountains. As evidence, Buchanan cited the reports of Major Van Vliet:

There is reason to believe that Governor Young has long contemplated this result. He knows that the continuance of his despotic power depends upon the exclusion of all settlers from the Territory except those who will acknowledge his divine mission and implicitly obey his will, and that an enlightened public opinion there would soon prostrate institutions at war with the laws both of God and man. "He has therefore for several years, in order to maintain his independence, been industriously employed in collecting and fabricating arms and munitions of war and in disciplining the Mormons for military service." As superintendent of Indian affairs he has had an opportunity of tampering with the Indian tribes and exciting their hostile feelings against the United States. This, according to our information, he has accomplished in regard to some of these tribes, while others have remained true to their allegiance and have communicated his intrigues to our Indian agents. He has laid in a store of provisions for three years, which in case of necessity, as he informed Major Van Vliet, he will conceal, "and then take to the mountains and bid defiance to all the powers of the Government."


BUCHANAN: "FRENZIED FANATICISM" OF MORMONS HAS CREATED "FIRST REBELLION" IN US TERRITORIES

The sad bottom line, Buchanan observed, was that -- courtesy of the Mormon Saints -- the United States was now forced to deal with the first rebellion to take place in any of its territories. Immediate and decisive action was required -- although the Buchanan administration was proving incapable of precisely this. Buchanan warned that

... no wise government will lightly estimate the efforts which may be inspired by such frenzied fanaticism as exists among the Mormons in Utah. This is the first rebellion which has existed in our Territories, and humanity itself requires that we should put it down in such a manner that it shall be the last. To trifle with it would be to encourage it and to render it formidable. We ought to go there with such an imposing force as to convince these deluded people that resistance would be vain, and thus spare the effusion of blood. We can in this manner best convince them that we are their friends, not their enemies.


BUCHANAN: FOUR REGIMENTS NEEDED TO SUPPRESS MORMON "INSURRECTION"

Although the Panic of 1857 was continuing to disrupt federal finances, Buchanan asked for four new regiments to be used to suppress the insurrection in Utah:

In order to accomplish this object it will be necessary, according to the estimate of the War Department, to raise four additional regiments; and this I earnestly recommend to Congress. At the present moment of depression in the revenues of the country I am sorry to be obliged to recommend such a measure; but I feel confident of the support of Congress, cost what it may, in suppressing the insurrection and in restoring and maintaining the sovereignty of the Constitution and laws over the Territory of Utah.


The head of the Democratic Party, and a supporter of the Jeffersonian theory of enumerated powers under the constitution, had thus been compelled to take action. The Democratic party doctrine of popular sovereignty or squatter sovereignty in the territories was revealed as bankrupt, for it had allowed a growth an alien theocratic power on national territory.

Brigham Young replied by claiming that Congress had no more power to govern territories than it could govern states. But, in Article Four of the Constitution, the Congress is given the final say in the governance of all US territories: "The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States .... " This is the Territorial or Property Clause. Needless to say, Article Four of the U.S. Constitution was anathema to Brigham Young, since it also contains the requirement that "the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," which obviously rules out the Mormon theocracy.

Brigham Young tried to create a right of rebellion for territories that were being trampled on by the Congress. When Washington acted "clearly without the pale of those authorities and limitations, unconstitutionally to oppress the people, it commits a treason against itself, which demands the resistance of all good men, or freedom will depart our Nation."191 (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 264) Brigham Young's crank reading of the Constitution foreshadows equally fantastic readings of that document put forward by reactionary antigovernment libertarians in our own time.

BRIGHAM YOUNG WANTS TO INCINERATE THE US ARMY

But by January, 1858, even the inefficient Buchanan administration was marshaling its forces to curb the Mormons. General Winfield Scott got the war Department to approve his plan of sending 3,000 regular troops into Utah in the springtime. Like other dictators facing long odds, Brigham Young began to look around for secret weapons (Wunderwaffen) he could use to redress the balance in his favor. One of these was apparently a kind of napalm or liquid fire being developed back in Nauvoo, Illinois by Uriah Brown, one of just three non-Mormons who were members of the secret Council of Fifty, the explicitly political board which Joseph Smith had established as part of his plan for world conquest. Uriah Brown wanted to create a system of napalm mines in Echo Canyon to burn up the advancing federals. But the promised secret weapon failed to materialize. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 267)

The Utah territorial legislature approved a lengthy list of Mormon grievances for Buchanan and the Congress. It culminated with the demand to "withdraw your troops, give us our CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, and we are at home." [192] But theocracy was explicitly forbidden by the Constitution, and no right of polygamy has ever been found there.

Facing the prospect of a new federal effort against him in the spring of 1858, Brigham Young fell back on the option he had been preparing to move the Mormons north and west. American mountaineers, however, were out looking for food supplies for the US garrison cooped up in Fort Bridger, and their attention was attracted by the 300 cattle and 40 horses concentrated at a Mormon outpost called Fort Limhi (today Lemhi) on the border between Idaho and Montana. Because of accumulated grievances against the Mormon Saints, some 250 of the Bannock and Shoshone Indians of the area joined in the to the just authority of the Federal Government. If you refuse to accept it, let the consequences fall upon your own heads."

Buchanan's offer of amnesty found one very influential taker right off the bat: this was none other than the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young, who, after all of his bluster, bombast, and bloodcurdling threats, cravenly accepted the offer coming from the notoriously weak Buchanan. After much negotiation, US forces marched through Salt Lake City on June 26, 1858. The streets were utterly deserted, except for small groups of Danite militiamen armed with clubs and pistols, who had been given orders to bum the city under certain circumstances. The federals did not permanently occupy Salt Lake City, which turned out to be a serious mistake. Instead, they crossed the Jordan River and proceeded southwards some 40 miles, and stopped at Camp Floyd. Since the mission of these troops was to assist federal officials in executing the laws of the United States, especially in regard to Utah territorial government in Salt Lake City, the location of Camp Floyd was already an act of appeasement and capitulation.

US ARMY WANTED "EVERY DAMNED MORMON HUNG BY THE NECK"

The US Army showed commendable discipline in avoiding clashes with the Mormon plug-uglies. Colonel C. F. Smith commented that "as far as the army was concerned, it 'would like to see every damned Mormon hung by the neck."' [197] (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 324)

Three US officials were now playing prominent roles. One is Alfred Cumming of Georgia, soon to be a secessionist, who was appointed governor of Utah Territory by Buchanan. Cumming shows the path of cowardice and appeasement in his dealings with Brigham Young. The Mormon Prophet did not hesitate to threaten this federal official with insurrection. On one occasion, Brigham Young growled to Governor Cumming, "Toe the line, and mark by the law, and do right or I shall crook my little finger, and you know what will come then." [198] Cumming was trying to convince Colonel Johnston that there was no need for the U.S. Army to march through Salt Lake City.

Having been encouraged by Democratic Party politicians to mediate the dispute, the Philadelphia political fixer Thomas L. Kane also arrived in Salt Lake City. Kane was notable for an uncanny ability to ignore the polygamy and other illegal activities carried out by the Mormons. According to Bigler and Bagley, Kane did everything possible to muddy the waters concerning Brigham Young's direct personal responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Kane had studied in Great Britain and in France, and was a correspondent of Thomas Carlyle's protege Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as of Horace Greeley. So it is not so surprising that he lacked a moral compass. In any case, his overall impact on the situation in Utah was deplorable.

JUDGE CRADLEBAUGH SCORES MORMONS AS TOOLS AND DUPES OF TYRANNICAL DESPOTISM

One loyal, effective, and energetic federal official was John Cradlebaugh, who became the federal judge of the second District of Utah Territory. Cradlebaugh set out to punish the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, along with the killings of former Mormons seeking to leave the territory, as well as travelers crossing through Utah. His work was sabotaged at every turn by Mormon juries acting to sabotage the law under orders from their tyrant ruler. In response to one such incident on April 12, 1859, Cradlebaugh confronted the Mormons with their moral depravity:

"'You are the tools, the dupes, the instruments of a tyrannical Church despotism. The heads of your Church order and direct you. You are taught to obey their orders and commit these horrid murders. Deprived of your liberty, you have lost your manhood, and become the willing instruments of bad men. I say to you it will be my earnest effort while with you, to knock off your ecclesiastical shackles and set you free." [199]


Judge Cradlebaugh was reprimanded by Washington doughfaces for his efforts to bring justice to Utah. Cradlebaugh was an American hero who went on to Congress and later fought with distinction during the Civil War. But, as long as the Mormons controlled the probate courts, and the probate courts had original jurisdiction in most cases, justice was doomed to miscarry.

BRIGHAM YOUNG AUTHORIZES MURDER: SAVE THE SISTER'S SOUL BY CUTTING HER THROAT

Governor Cumming, responding to persistent newspaper reports that many women were being held in the Mormon territories against their will, offered to assist any of them who needed help to exit the territory. Very few came forward. John Stuart Mill and others concluded from this that the Mormon women were reasonably content. But one documented case may suggest what was actually happening. Mormon bigwig Milo Andrus had eleven wives, but one of them began objecting to polygamy, and was observed planning to escape. Andrus asked Brigham Young how she should be dealt with. Young reportedly replied that "the only way to save the sister's soul was to cut her throat." While the woman was on her knees begging for her life, Andrus cut her throat from ear to ear and held her in an iron grip until she ceased to struggle. [200]

By the summer of 1858, the Buchanan administration in Washington was thoroughly dominated by dough face, subversive, and outright secessionist forces. Buchanan was not interested in investigating the Mountain Meadows Massacre, or other Mormon atrocities. He now ordered that the U.S. Army should not assist the federal courts in enforcing US federal laws. He sent a message to Colonel Johnston warning him that he could not use troops in support of the federal judiciary without permission from Governor Cumming.

And since the soon-to-be secessionist Cumming was determined to appease Brigham Young, this meant that Utah was doomed to relapse into theocratic anarchy. The Danites had not been broken up, women were still being kidnapped and terrorized, and murder went unpunished. Most important, Brigham Young was free to continue his preparations for secession.

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S CONTEMPT FOR MEDICINE AND SCIENCE

The eastern press pointed out that, under the theocratic dictatorship, Utah had no public schools whatsoever, and only a few church schools which could not serve the existing population. Much of this was due to the Mormon Moses himself, who "disliked education and feared educated men." Brigham's views about medical doctors remind us of the comic characters who appear in Moliere's plays, which were written almost two centuries earlier. Young "believed diseases were demonic possessions curable only by exorcism, said he had not allowed a doctor into his house for forty years, and insisted Salt Lake City had no illness until doctors, too lazy to work like others, arrived and made people ill so they might make a living treating them." (Hirshson, pp. 245-46)

Public awareness of the Mountain Meadows Massacre grew slowly. The New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley visited Utah in the summer of 1859. During his trip, Greeley got the first interview Brigham Young ever conceded. Brigham told Greely he believed in the devil, but not in the existence of the Danites. Setting a Mormon pattern which persists until our own day, a Mormon Prophet, who was also a multimillionaire, gave a lowball estimate of his own personal fortune at a mere $250,000, and accompanied this by underestimating the size of his personal harem at a mere 15 wives, when the reality at this time was more than three times that figure. [201]

HORACE GREELEY: MORMONS ROBBED, MAIMED, KILLED

Greeley also investigated the stories of Mormon atrocities. In an important article, he wrote: "Do I, then discredit the tales of Mormon outrage and crime -- of the murder of the Parishes, the Mountain Meadows massacre, &c., &c., -- where with the general ear has recently been shocked? No, I do not. Some of these may have been fabricated by Gentile malice -- others are doubtless exaggerated -- but there is some basis of truth for the current Gentile conviction that Mormons have robbed, maimed, and even killed persons in this Territory, under circumstances which should subject the perpetrators to condign punishment, but that Mormon witnesses, grandjurors, petit jurors and magistrates determinedly screen the guilty. I deeply regret the necessity of believing this; but the facts are incontestable." [202]

Mormon atrocities also attracted increasing attention. When a man who was suing Brigham Young for $25,000 was shot to death by three Danites on the eve of his day in court, the New York Times condemned the Mormon power, writing that the outrages in Utah went far beyond "anything to be found within the jurisdiction of any civilized government on the globe. In saying this, we have Algeria, the Punjab and the Caucasus directly before our mind's eye. We take into account the turbulence of the Kabyles, the restless activity of the Nena Sahib, the ferocity of the Sikhs, and the cut-throat propensities of the Circassian mountaineers. And yet we assert that the United States possesses inhabited territory, occupied by a competent force of its troops, within a month's march of a frontier inclosing thirty millions of law-abiding citizens, which, for disorder, insecurity, bloodshed, contempt for the law and its officers, beats anything of the kind which either France, England or Russia can produce." [203]

FAILURE OF THE BUCHANAN ADMINISTRATION TO QUELL THE MORMONS

The entire purpose of sending a garrison to Utah was thrown out the window by the cowardice and stupidity of Buchanan, Floyd, Johnston, and other federal officials. This meant, that when secession boiled over once again a few years later, the insurrectionary theocracy of the Mormons would be intact and combat-ready, still capable of threatening the future existence of the United States during the ordeal of the Union.

_______________

Notes:

128 Brodie, p. 297.
 
129 Ann Eliza Webb Young, chapter XIX.
 
130 Hirshson, p. 130.
 
131 Bigler and Bagley, page 49.
 
132 House Documents, Otherwise Published As Executive Documents: 13,h Congress, Second Session, p.125.

133 Joseph Smith, History of/he Church, VI:365, online at Wikipedia article on "Theodemocracy."
 
134 Elder Jedediah M. Grant, "The Power of God and the Power of Satan," Journal of Discourses, Vol. II, pp. 10-16.

135 "Proclamation of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To all the Kings of the World; to the President of the United States Of America; To the Governors of the Several States; And to the Rulers and People of All Nations." in Brigham Young, Messages of the First Presidency, Vol. I, p. 257.
 
136 Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, p. 28.
 
137 David L. Bigler, "The Elephant Meets the Lion: Gold Rush Conflicts in the Great Basin," Trails Symposium, April 14, 1999, Salt Lake City.
 
138 Ibid.
 
139 New York Times, "The Outrage at Salt Lake," December 3. 1851, online at truthandgrace.com.
 
140 "The Mormons: People and Events: Brigham Young (1801-1877)," online at pbs.org.

141 Garland Hurt to Brigham Young, October 31, 1856, "Letters from Nevada India and Agents,"  1856, Nevada History, The Nevada Observer, online at nevadaobserver.com.
 
142 David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: the Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847- 1896 (Spokane WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1998), p. 93.
 
143 Bigler and Bagley, page 74.

144 Brigham Young, "Discourse," February 3, 1867. Journal of Discourses, 11:298.
 
145 Journal of Discourses, IV, p. 41.
 
146 Journal of Discourses, IV, p. 54.
 
147 Hirshson, p. 155.

148 The Danites, a militia founded by Joseph Smith in Missouri, were the sons of Dan. "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that bites the horse's heels, so that his rider shall fall backward." (Genesis 49:17)
 
149 Hirshson, p. 153.

150 Hirshson, p. 153.
 
151 Hirshson, pp. 153-155.
 
152 New York Semi-Weekly Tribune Vol. VIII. No. 1332, online at 19th Century Mormon Newspaper Index.

153 Bigler and Bagley, page 105.
 
154 Edward Williams Tullidge, Life of Brigham Young, p. 280, online at books.google.com.
 
155 Ibid.
 
156 William Alexander Lynn, The Story of the Mormons, p. 805, online at books.google.com.
 
157 Jerald and Sandra Tanner, "Mormon Blood Atonement: Fact or Fantasy?", online at Recovery from Mormonism.
 
158 Journal of Discourses, V:12, p. 98b.
 
159 Hirshson, p. 168. 
 
160 Ibid.
 
161 Ibid. 
 
162 Journal of Discourses, V:21, p. 99b.
 
163 Journal of George and Elizabeth Bailey, August 22,1857, online at stayfamily.org. 
 
164 Scott G. Kenney, ed., William Woodruff's Journal (Midvale UT: Signature Books, 1983), vol. 5, pp. 96-97.
 
165 See "Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Bum Boston and New York," in Webster G. Tarpley, "Wrap the World in Flames," tarpley.net.
 
166 Brigham Young, Utah Governor, "Proclamation by the Governor: Citizens of Utah," broadside, Salt Lake City, 1857, online at law2.umkc.edu. 
 
167 Hirshson, p. 172.
 
168 "History of the Mormon Rebellion," The United Service, Vol. IV, no. 5 (November 1890), p. 451.
 
169 Jon Karkauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, p. 216, online at books.google.com.
 
170 Everett Cooley, ed., Diary of Brigham Young, 1857 (Salt Lake City, 1980), p. 71. 
 
171 Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, p. 132.
 
172 See Bigler & Bagley, p. 175; Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, pp. 130-133. 
 
173 See mountainmeadows.unl.edu.
 
174 Cleland and Brooks, eds., A Mormon Chronicle: the Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848 - 1876 (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1955), Vol. Ii, p. 314, May 30, 1861.
 
175 Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, p. 226-7.
 
176 John Elvin, "The Madness at Mountain Meadows," Insight on the News, 19:3, January 21, 2003.
 
177 Ibid. 
 
178 Ibid.
 
179 Ibid.
 
180 Ibid. 
 
181 Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, p. 19.
 
181 Journal of Discourses, Vol. V, p. 229 
 
183 Martineau, "Seeking a Refuge in the Desert," p. 250.

184 John G. Turner, "The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War," New York Times, May 1, 2012.
 
185 Report of the Secretary of War, War Department, Washington, December 5, 1857, p. 30. 
 
186 Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, p. 182.
 
187 John Taylor, "The Kingdom of God or Nothing," Journal of Discourses, Vol. 6. p. 18.
 
188 House Documents, Otherwise Published As Executive Documents: 13th Congress, Second Session. p. 46. 
 
189 Michael Eugene Harkin and David Rich Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment, p. 314.
 
190 James Buchanan, First Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, December 8,  1857, online at The American Presidency Project.
 
191 The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star, vol. 20, p. 237, online at books.google.com.
 
192 Ibid. vol. 20, p. 254, online at books.google.com. 
 
197 "Camp Floyd," Deseret News, October 28, 2005.
 
198 Van Wagoner, Complete Discourses at Brigham Young, 5: 1882, July 7, 1861. 
 
199 Edward Wheelock Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, p. 227, online at books.google.com.
 
200 Jesse Augustus Gove, The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858: Letters of Captain Jesse A. Goff to Mrs. Dove and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), pp. 283-284, online at books.google.com. 
 
201 Horace Greeley, "Two Hours With Brigham Young," in An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York: C. M. Saxton, Barker and Co., 1860), pp. 209-16.
 
202 Horace Greeley, "The Mountain Meadow Massacre -- Popular Sovereignty," New York Tribune, August 4, 1859, online at mountainmeadows.unl.edu. 
 
203 New York Times, September 29, 1859.
 
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

Postby admin » Mon Jul 16, 2018 8:17 pm

Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER V. BRIGHAM YOUNG AGAINST THE UNION: THE MORMON SAINTS DURING THE CIVIL WAR

"The number of their wives their lusts decree;
The Turkish law's their Christian heresy." [204]


The wave of secessionism threatening to break up the American federal union which Brigham Young had hoped for in 1858 finally arrived in late 1860 and early 1861. Since the Mormon theocracy and Brigham Young's personal dictatorship had foolishly been left intact by the feckless Buchanan administration, Brigham Young now had a second chance to establish his Inland Empire of Deseret as the United States broke apart.

Brigham Young attempted to use Confederate secessionism for his own purposes. And during the Civil War, the Mormons were in a thinly disguised united front with the slaveocrats in Richmond, Virginia. Both were serving a geopolitical design developed by such British strategists as Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, and William Gladstone. [205] Partly to facilitate this coordination, Brigham Young kept his son and political heir apparent, Brigham Young, Jr., in London during 1862 and 1863, the decisive years of the secession crisis.

British grand strategy against the United States included a four-pronged envelopment carried out by the Confederacy, by British troops in Canada, by the French army in Mexico, and by the Mormon Danite and Nauvoo Legion forces, perhaps supplemented by Indians, in the Intermountain West.

E. B. Long correctly notes that "The American Civil War, 1861 to 1865, can be and often is studied without reference to the vast western frontier, thus giving an incomplete account of that struggle. And central to the American West during the Civil War is Utah Territory. The story of this region ... received scant attention in Civil War histories and only a little more in volumes on the American West." [206] Many who know the story of the Gettysburg and Vicksburg campaigns in great detail know little or nothing about the Civil War in the Intermountain West. But events west of the 100th meridian exercised an important influence over the course of the hostilities, and even a cursory glance reveals that in this theater of operations the Mormons represented a threat to the United States that was no less than that posed by the Confederates.

DESERET AS A BRITISH GEOPOLITICAL GAMBIT AGAINST THE USA

Within the framework of the policy universe thus defined by the British Foreign Office, Brigham Young planned to use the Confederates, and they cordially reciprocated this intention. The Confederate strategy was to strike out west from Texas and attempt to secure control of the New Mexico Territory, meaning the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona. "Confederate leaders were ambitious to acquire even greater areas. The Territory of New Mexico extended west from Texas to California. This prize, if secured, would place the Confederacy almost on the Pacific Ocean ... it was of major importance for the Confederacy to acquire New Mexico." [207]

The goal of this strategic thrust was to plant the Confederate flag on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in California. "With the Pacific slope in their possession through conquest or by alliance with a Western Confederacy, the world would be open to the Confederates, making an effective Union blockade impossible. It would provide an opportunity for Confederate cruisers and privateers to prey upon Union commerce, and it would afford an excellent chance to develop Asiatic trade." [208]

If the Mormon Saints were located astride the essential American lines of communication between the Missouri River and California, they were also sitting on the right flank of the planned Confederate March to the Pacific.

BUCHANAN AND FLOYD PULL OUT US FORCES, RE-OPEN DOOR TO UTAH SECESSION

As a result of the Mormon Rebellion of 1857-1858, a small United States garrison had remained in Utah Territory, and was located about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, on the west side of the Jordan River, in an Army post named Camp Floyd. During the last phase of the Buchanan administration, Secretary of War Floyd (after whom this camp was named) carried out an orgy of treason, doing everything possible to weaken the United States and transfer military assets to the Confederacy.

In May 1860, Secretary of War Floyd ordered the partial closure of Camp Floyd and removed more than half of its troops. As one historian points out, this garrison had failed to enforce federal law in Utah, but it did provide a powerful stimulus for the economy, which even ungrateful Mormons could not fail to notice. According to the New York Tribune, "Many persons who, two years ago, did not possess the first half of an animal now boast of ox teams and mule teams; while the numerous Mormon belles and dames literally revel in calicoes and crinolines -- all these furnished, too, through the overflowing generosity of the good old uncle." (Hirshson, p. 254)

Here we can see a clear harbinger of the ideological hypocrisy of many so-called red states, which benefit out of all proportion from the US federal budget through corporate welfare and defense spending, even as they issue ideological manifestoes against the evils of big government.

MORMONS GET OVERTURES FROM CONFEDERATES AND PACIFIC SLOPE SECESSIONISTS

Whitney's History of Utah (1893) "claimed that Brigham Young rejected overtures from the Southern Confederacy and from a group which proposed a Pacific Slope Federation .... " [20]9 But having been burned once before, in 1857-58, the Mormon Prophet had learned that it was unwise to take an exposed position in the expectation that help would be arriving from elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the Confederate leaders thought they could count on at least the benevolent neutrality of Utah, since the Mormons would never do anything to help sustain the Union. Instead, "it was assumed by the Confederate leaders that the Mormons in Utah would readily accept allegiance to almost any other government than back in Washington." [210]

As we will see, Union General Patrick E. Connor thought that Brigham Young was waiting for either the military collapse of the Union forces, and/or military intervention by Britain and France. Until that time, the Mormon Prophet would take a low profile and let the Confederates weaken the Union and do his fighting for him.

MORMONS CONTROLLED OVERLAND TRAILS, TELEGRAPH LINES, RAIL ROUTES

The danger posed by the defection of Utah from the Federal Union was a very serious one: "Had Utah, in its key position on the overland route, seceded at the outbreak of the Civil War, a danger risking east-west cleavage could have compelled the federal government to expend considerable money and manpower to reroute the telegraph, mail, and stage lines." [211]

The Salt Lake City area was widely considered to be the hub of the Intermountain West, and with good reason. "Utah was located, by an accident of geography, astride the principal communication lines between the eastern and western states. Across its land went the great and vulnerable emigrant roads, the Overland Trail to California, the Pony Express, stage lines, the telegraph -- all becoming even more vital when Civil War came and the southern routes were disrupted. Utah, it was generally held, would likely be crossed by the first transcontinental railroad. Salt Lake City was the only major city between far western Missouri and California." (Long, p. 3)

Whether it was really an accident that Brigham Young had decided to utter his famous proclamation, "This is the place!" only when he reached Salt Lake City remains to be determined. If the entire Mormon project in the Intermountain West had been inspired to some degree by British intelligence, it would have made sense to locate the Mormon Zion where geography would allow it to have the greatest effect.

Brigham Young had originally planned to carve out even larger swaths of territory for his Mormon Inland Empire. But, as soon as the Confederates had left the Congress in Washington, the Republican majority in March 1861 carved the Nevada Territory out of Utah in an attempt to cut the Mormon New Jerusalem down to size.

CONFEDERATE INVASION OF NEW MEXICO, 1862: VALVERDE

At first, the Texas-based forces of the Confederacy invading New Mexico seemed to be gaining the upper hand. The Confederates won a victory at the Battle of Valverde near the Rio Grande in New Mexico on February 21, 1862. In the wake of this Union reverse, Texas troops swarmed over much of New Mexico and Arizona: "The Confederate campaign had reached its zenith. The major portions of New Mexico and Arizona were now under Southern control. The capital, Santa Fe, and most of the towns of the Territory were dominated by the conquerors .... The military fortunes of the Union forces in the Intermountain West, on the other hand, were at their lowest ebb .... Finally the federal government and the commanding generals in the middle West were becoming conscious of the seriousness of the Confederate invasion of New Mexico .... " [212]

The next step for the Confederates would have been to push northwards into Colorado, thus cutting the Union lines of communication between Kansas and California without any assistance from the Mormons. The Confederates, however, proved incapable of penetrating into Colorado.

GLORIETA: COLORADO DEFEATS TEXAS FOR CONTROL OF NEW MEXICO

The Confederates soon became overextended, and their triumphal march through New Mexico lasted little more than a month. A decisive change in the New Mexico situation was brought about by the influx of capable units of Colorado volunteers on the Union side. In a rapid reversal of fortunes, the Confederate forces suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Glorieta, southeast of Santa Fe, on March 26-28, 1862. This encounter is variously remembered as the Gettysburg of the West, or the Waterloo of the Confederates in New Mexico. In this battle, Colorado defeated Texas. The decisive moment at Glorieta came when Union forces, in a daring flanking maneuver, destroyed upwards of 80 Confederate wagons with all their contents, while spiking one artillery piece. Utterly bereft of food, ammunition, clothing, and blankets, the Confederates began a long retreat towards El Paso.

There is some evidence to suggest that the public statements by Brigham Young had become more bellicose after the Confederate success at Valverde, but then became somewhat attenuated when news of the Union victory of Glorieta arrived in Salt Lake City. Brigham Young's potential for strategic blackmail was further diminished by the Battle of Bear River in January 1863, in which Union forces under Patrick Connor defeated a large party of Indians. The Mormons had been counting on the Indians to tie down and harass federal forces, but after this engagement, the Indian violence subsided and the Mormons were left high and dry.

MORMONS IGNORE LINCOLN'S CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

After the fighting began at Fort Sumter, President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops from state militias to be placed under his command to deal with the rebellion. Brigham Young never dreamed of responding to this call, and it seemed a foregone conclusion all around that the Mormons would do nothing for the United States. (This was also the case when conscription began in July 1863 -- the Mormons contributed nothing, and Mitt Romney and his sons -- even though they profess themselves leading warmongers today -- are all chickenhawks with no military service.) However, the authorities in Washington did send a personal request to Brigham Young, even though he was no longer the territorial governor of Utah, to contribute Lot Smith and his cavalry to an effort to secure overland travel and communication through Utah against possible interference by marauding Indians. Brigham Young was obviously glad to do this, since it was a way for him to seize control of the overland trails and Pony Express routes. A few months later, Brigham Young ended this cooperation. This brief episode was the only participation of Utah Territory in the American Civil War. The Mormon Saints looked at the great national struggle as outside spectators -- they acted as what they were, a separate nation.

BRIGHAM: "I WILL SEE THEM IN HELL BEFORE I WILL RAISE AN ARMY FOR THEM"

Young was grudgingly willing "to furnish a home guard for the protection of the telegraph and mail lines and overland travel within our boundaries," but he refused to furnish either money or manpower to defend the Union. "1 will see them in Hell before I will raise an army for them," he blustered in late 1861. "With the exception of Lot Smith's company, Utah raised no volunteers for the Union Army, and the Territory's Mormon population eschewed displays of wartime patriotism." [213]

According to a recent article in the New York Times, "Young decided that the Mormons would sit out the Civil War. He saw the conflict as God's punishment of the United States for its past mistreatment of his church, especially its failure to protect Joseph Smith, the Mormons' founder who was murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844. In Young's view, the war was a prelude to the 'winding-up scene,' the end times in which American society would collapse under the weight of divine judgment and Mormons would save the Constitution, welcome the return of Jesus Christ and participate in his millennial reign." [214]

The New York Times author concludes that "Young was careful to tread the line between dissent and treason ...." [215] Quite the contrary: by his conduct during the Civil War, the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young entered deeply into treason for the second time. This can be shown in some detail.

On February 10th, 1861, less than a week after the creation of the Confederate States of America with seven states participating, Brigham Young addressed the Saints in the Tabernacle, posing the question: "Is the form of the Government ruined? Has its form become evil? No! but the administrators of the Government are evil. As we have said many times, it is the best form of human government ever lived under; but it has as corrupt a set to administer it as God ever permitted to disgrace his footstool. There is the evil. Can they better the condition of our country? No! they will make it worse every time they attempt to do so." (Saints and the Union, p. 19) This was the usual Mormon doublethink: the Constitution was divine, but the officials staffing the federal government were radically evil, and the only answer was a militant Mormon theocracy.

BRIGHAM YOUNG: "THERE IS NO MORE A UNITED STATES"

Brigham Young and his associates had been nourished for almost three decades by Joseph Smith's 1832 Civil War Prophecy. Now that they saw the Union breaking up, the Mormon leaders were manic with gloating and Schadenfreude. Abraham Lincoln they regarded with open hatred, not least because of his mentor, Henry Clay, whom the Mormons accused of being part of the assassination of Joseph Smith. Brigham Young made clear that he considered the United States a doomed nation: "There is no more United States. Can they amalgamate and form a government? No. Will they have ability to form a government and continue? No, they will not ... and if a state has a right to secede, so has a Territory, and so has a county from a State or Territory, and a town from a county, and a family from neighborhood, and you will have perfect anarchy .... What will King Abraham do? I do not know, neither do I care. It is no difference what he does, of what any of them do. Why? God will accomplish his own purposes, and they may do or not do, they may take the road that leads to the right, or they may take the road that leads to the left, and which ever road they do take they wish they had taken the other .... 'Mormonism' will live and God will promote it." (Saints and the Union, p. 19)

Brigham Young viewed the breakup of the US Federal Union as irreversible and irrevocable; it was an act of the Almighty. According to this analysis, "God has come out of his hiding-place, and has commenced to vex the nation that has rejected us .... It will not be patched up -- it never can come together again -- ... in a short time it will be like water spilled on the ground, and like chaff upon the summer threshing floor, until those wicked stewards are cut off. If our present happy form of government is sustained, which I believe it will be, it will be done by the people I am now looking upon in connection with their brethren and their offspring." [216]

RICHARD BURTON ON THE DANITE ESPIONAGE SYSTEM

The political situation of the Mormon home front was the subject of a profile drawn up in the middle of 1860 by the British intelligencer Richard Burton. Burton was impressed by the State Law and order maintained in Salt Lake City, and above all the pervasive surveillance maintained by the Danite political police. Burton recorded that "Gentiles often declare that the Prophet is acquainted with their every word half an hour after it is spoke .... There is no secret from the head of the Church and State; every thing from the highest to the lowest detail of private and public life, must be brought to the ear and submitted to the judgment of the father confessor-in-chief (Young)." [217] The Danites were as oppressive as the Venetian Council of Ten.

Brigham Young's machinations against the United States were doubtless facilitated by the large part of his subject population which had never wanted anything to do with this country. According to one estimate, "by 1860 about a third of the population was from Great Britain, with a sizeable contingent of Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, plus those born in America, primarily from New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and the Midwest." (Saints and the Union, p. 23)

BRIGHAM INFORMED OF FT. SUMTER IN ADVANCE -- BY GOD OR BY LONDON?

On January 23, 1861, with secession claiming one slave state after another, Brigham Young was described as being in high spirits, specifically because of the tragedy now impacting the United States: "The President is unusually cheerful, the present distracted state of the affairs of the U.S. following so soon after their wicked attempts to root up the Kingdom of God, and afflict his saints inspires the President with strong hopes for the prosperity of the cause of God .... " (Saints and the Union, p. 24)

As usual, Brigham Young was operating from a remarkable intelligence picture. He seems to know certain events were coming before they occurred. On January 28, Young shared a revelation that "the news from the States would be extremely interesting about the middle of next April." (Saints and the Union, p. 24) When the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina harbor in the night of April 12-13, 1861, some of those who remember this prophecy might have been astounded by the Mormon Prophet's charismatic gifts. More likely is that he had been familiarized with the approximate timetable of Southern secession by emissaries of the British imperial "Red Horse," which had excellent sources inside Scottish Rite Freemasonic circles in and near the Confederates' seats of power.

According to Brigham Young's Office Journal, the Mormon Prophet "knew the reason why this Government was in trouble, they had killed Joseph Smith and they would have to pay for it as the Jews did in killing Jesus .... The President further remarked there is no union in the North or in the South -- the nation must crumble to nothing. They charged us with being rebels and rebels they will have in their Government. South Carolina has committed treason, and if Prest. Buchanan had been a smart man he would have hung up the first men who rebelled in South Carolina." (Saints and the Union, p. 25)

The historical record shows that the Mormons were not in the least distraught about the terrible conflict which was now beginning. On the contrary, they felt a deep sense of satisfaction that the prophetic powers of Joseph Smith were being vindicated, and they looked forward eagerly to the suffering which they were about to witness visited on their tormentors, both Unionists and Confederates. Historians agree that Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy of 1832 provided the conceptual framework for the thinking of Brigham Young and other Mormons during the war of 1861-1865.

MORMON GLEE OVER AMERICA'S DOOM

The Deseret News, the only newspaper published in Utah Territory, and the party organ of the Mormon Saints, stressed on March 6 and again on April 24 that the federal union was doomed. (Saints and the Union, p. 26) Brigham Young recommended a policy like that of Mao Tse-tung during the 1950s -- go to the top of the mountain and watch the Tigers fight. At the Church Conference in Salt Lake City in April 1861, Brother Brigham gloated about the good fortune of the Mormons under his administration; 'We are not now mingling in the turmoil of strife, warring, and contention, that we would have been obliged to have mingled in had not the Lord suffered us to have been driven to these mountains -- one of the greatest blessings that could have been visited upon us ...." [218]

Mormons generally cultivated a millenarian or chiliastic (latter-day) outlook which held the end of the world as perpetually imminent. Towards the end of the same April 1861 oration, Brigham prophesied apocalyptic events which would redound to the advantage of the Mormon Saints: "Shame, shame on the rulers of the nation! I feel myself disgraced to hail such men as my countrymen .... The whole government is gone; it is as weak as water .... Mobs will not decrease, but will increase until the whole Government becomes a mob, and eventually it will be State against State, city against city, neighbourhood against neighbourhood, Methodists against Methodists, and so on .... It will be the same with other denominations of professing Christians, and will be Christian against Christian, and man against man; and those who will not take up the sword against their neighbours must flee to Zion. Where is Zion? Let us be prepared to receive the honourable men of the earth -- those who are good." [219] Brigham Young was illiterate, but note the British spelling used by his secretaries, most of whom were foreigners. The Mormons still professed their theory that it was the exclusive prerogative of the Saints to name the territorial officials of Utah. The Constitution said different, and the Mormons professed to revere the Constitution as divinely inspired, so this was another example of their usual subversive doublethink.

As always, Brigham Young placed the Mormon peculiar institution of polygamy in the center of attention as the hallmark of his faith: "The time is coming when the Lord is going to raise up a holy nation. He will bring up a royal Priesthood [the Pratt-Romney family?] upon the earth, and he has introduced a plurality of wives for that express purpose, and not to gratify lustful passion in the least. ... I never entered into the order of plurality of wives to gratify passion." [220] It would be more accurate to say that Brigham Young regarded polygamy as an instrument of power -- be it his power over individual women, or his power to bind the Mormon community to gather in contradiction to the outside world.

ANTI-AMERICAN TIRADES FROM SAINTS JOHN TAYLOR AND HEBER KIMBALL

The opinions of the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young represented the compulsory doctrine of the State of Deseret, but Brother Brigham was not alone in professing these subversive and anti-American sentiments. John Taylor, born in Britain, married to at least seven women, and destined to take the helm one day as third First President in Brigham's stead, lashed out at the United States on April 28, 1861, just two weeks after Fort Sumter: "The people of this nation [the United States] are evidently bent upon their own destruction, and they are full of enmity, and hatred, a war and bloodshed. To all human appearance, it would seem that they will not stop short of the entire destruction of this great nation." As usual, Taylor put the grievances of the Mormons at the center of the moral universe, alleging of the United States that "they have neglected righteousness, justice and truth for years that are past and gone; they have allowed the honest, the virtuous, the just, and the true hearted [i.e., the Mormons] to be abused and afflicted and they have winked and mocked at their sufferings; and not only so, but they have unblushingly used their force and strength to bring about the destruction of God's people .... " (Saints and the Union, p. 30)

And then there was Heber Kimball, Brigham Young's top adviser, who had forty-three wives, and who could always be counted on for a ranting anti-American tirade. Speaking in the tabernacle on April 14, 1861, Kimball pontificated that "in this country the north and south will exert themselves against each other, and ere long the whole face of the United States will be commotion, fighting one against another, and they will destroy their nationality. They have never done anything for this people, and I don't believe they ever will. I have never prayed for the destruction of this government, I know that dissolution, sorrow, weeping, and distress are in store for the inhabitants of the United States, because of their conduct towards the people of God [the Mormons]." [221] As for the prophecy that the United States would never do anything for Utah, Kimball struck out completely: the transcontinental telegraph would arrive soon, and the transcontinental railroad would soon follow. The Mormon rhetorical tradition, like the libertarianism that is based on it today, simply ignores reality.

Kimball's bad temper may have been made worse by the fact that he had built his large personal harem based on quantity rather than quality. In 1869, after Kimball had died, "the New York World's Utah correspondent noticed Kimball's widows at the theater and commented: 'I do not think that I ever saw a homelier collection of women anywhere.'" (Hirshson, p. 188)

Thanks to the Pony Express, and soon to the transcontinental telegraph, the reading public of Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia heard every word of this slanderous abuse. As E. B. Long notes, "This flow of highly colored rhetoric together with long-standing suspicions undoubtedly caused much of the Gentile wariness and hostility that bordered on perceiving the Mormons as treasonous." (Saints and the Union, p. 31)

MORMON SCHADENFREUDE AS AMERICA BLEEDS

With four more states having seceded from the Union in response to Lincoln's call for volunteers after the firing on Fort Sumter, and with a bloody civil war looming, Brigham Young celebrated every day. According to his Office Journal of May 1, 1861, the Prophet was "pleased with the news which showed more and more secession, and each party was preparing for war, thus giving the Kingdom of God an opportunity of being established upon the Earth." (Saints and the Union, p. 31) Note the connection between American disaster and the coming of the Kingdom of God. The Mormon Saints plan was to play the role of the tertius gaudens -- the laughing bystander -- while the Union and the Confederates bled to death, all in conformity with Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy of 1832. This mood of gloating pervaded the entire Mormon establishment. As The Deseret News, the Mormon Pravda, complacently wrote on May 22, 1861, " ... while peace reigns in Utah, civil war, with all its horrors prevails among those who earnestly desired to see the soil of these valleys crimsoned with the blood of the Saints." [222]

BRIGHAM YOUNG SEES LINCOLN AS "SUBJECT TO THE INFLUENCE OF A WICKED SPIRIT"

Using his habitual jargon of aggression and slaughter, the Mormon Prophet's Office Journal recorded his view that "Old 'Abe,' the President of the US has it in his mind to pitch in to us when he had got through with the South ... Pres. Young was of the opinion the sympathy of the people for the South was in case they should be whipped, and the northern party remain in power he thought they wanted the war to go [on so] both parties might be used up." (Saints and the Union, p. 36)

Young reserved special venom for Abraham Lincoln, the US president who most successfully frustrated the Mormon strategic designs. In August 1861 Brother Brigham told his office staff that "Abraham was a pretty good man, but he acted as he would rather the Kingdom of God [Deseret] was out of the way; he was not the man to raise his voice in favor of Joseph Smith when his enemies were persecuting him, he with many others had assented to the deaths of innocent men, and through that he is subject to the influence of a wicked spirit." [223] Lincoln served in the Illinois legislature between 1834 and 1842, but he was a lawyer practicing in Springfield, Illinois during the final 1844 events around Joseph Smith in Nauvoo.

According to Brigham Young's Office Journal of September 16, 1861, the Mormon Prophet, still elated over the Confederate victory at Bull Run in June, was making it known that "he would be glad to hear that Gent. Beauregard had taken the President & Cabinet and confined them in the South." (Saints and the Union, p. 41)

Whether through divine revelation or intelligence reports from his correspondents, the Prophet was by the end of the year focused on the impending conflict between Deseret and the United States. Brother Brigham, "warm" about his frictions with Washington, was more than six months ahead of the news when he repeated that "he had no disposition to respond to the calls of a government, that had to lately shown their bitter hostilities against us, not alone by sending an army, but by burning the remnant of their arms rather than we should possess them, he felt like contending for our rights, and we were as well prepared to meet a million of the United States soldiers as 10,000, he believed now that an army was on the way to us." (Saints and the Union, p. 41)

Brigham wrote to Mormon President George Cannon in Liverpool, England on November 15, 1861, pointing out that the new transatlantic telegraph had been cut near the Utah border in the neighborhood of Fort Bridger, Wyoming. But he stressed that, thanks to Mormon administration, "While strife and bloodshed are wasting the States, we continue to enjoy the rich blessings of peace, in whose various occupations, according to localities and season, the people are most industriously occupied." [224]

From April 1860 to the fall of 1861, the news arrived in Salt Lake City primarily via the Pony Express. But on October 17, 1861 the transcontinental telegraph line from the East reached Salt Lake City. Within a short time, this line would be extended on to San Francisco.
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Part 2 of 3

BRIGHAM USES THE NEW TRANSCONTINENTAL TELEGRAPH FOR PROPAGANDA

Brigham Young immediately began exploiting the transcontinental telegraph for propaganda purposes. On October 18, 1861 -- only the second day that the telegraph was functioning -- he informed the president of the telegraph company in Cleveland that "Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and the laws of our once happy country, and is warmly interested in such useful enterprises as the one so far completed." [225] In reality, Utah had done none of these things. This telegram from Brigham Young was pure deception, designed to create the fictitious picture of a loyal Utah in the minds of the people in the Midwest and East. And it worked: many observers, perhaps unfamiliar with the Mormon theory that the Constitution meant whatever they want it to mean, were momentarily duped by Brigham Young's meaningless gesture.

For years the Mormons had been seeking to get Deseret admitted to the Union. If they had succeeded in doing this without addressing the issues of polygamy and of the Mormon theocratic regime which was focused on preserving plural marriage, they could hope to practice polygamy indefinitely -- although, as it turned out, the 14th amendment was soon to prevent the states from sanctioning such monstrous abuses. In the fall of 1861, President Lincoln had named a new slate of territorial officials for Utah, none of whom were Mormons or natives of Utah. Lincoln chose John W. Dawson of Indiana as territorial governor, replacing the secessionist Cumming who had fled to join the Confederacy.

Dawson had no illusions about the difficulty of the task he was taking up. While still in Washington, he wrote to Secretary of the Interior Caleb Blood Smith on October 26th, 1861 that the Mormons, " ... though they are professedly loyal to the constitution and obedient to the laws of the United States, they nevertheless, from the nature of their domestic institutions & from past causes of embittered feeling between them & the gentiles ... are inclined to independence which may approximate rebellion should federal authority & arms prove in any considerable degree ineffectual during the existing war in maintaining our national colors beyond disputed boundaries.''' (Saints and the Union, p. 54)

In early December 1861, Governor Dawson was ambushed and badly beaten while traveling east, forcing him to flee. Dawson said that they were Mormon Danites, and there is every reason to credit his account. Writing to Lincoln from Ft. Bridger, Wyoming on January 13, 1862, Dawson pronounced the Mormons disloyal, and explained the reason they were demanding statehood: "The whole purpose of these people is to gain admission into the Union on an equal basis & then the ulcer polygamy will have a sovereign protection .... The horrid crimes that have been committed in this territory & which have gone unpunished, have no parallel among civilized nations." [226]

BRIGHAM YOUNG SLIMES LINCOLN AS "CURSED SCOUNDREL"

On December 10, 1861, Brigham Young was still propounding the Mormon doublethink theory of the U.S. Constitution: "I do now, and always have, supported the Constitution, but I am not in league with cursed scoundrels as Abe Lincoln and his minions who have sought our destruction from the beginning. Lincoln has ordered an Army from California, for the order has passed over the wires. A senator from California said in Washington the short time since that the 'Mormons' were in the way and must be removed. Lincoln feels that he will try to destroy us, as Buchanan was unable to do." (Saints and the Union, p. 50) Note that the Prophet was tapping President Lincoln's telegraph messages.

While claiming that he supported the U.S. Constitution, the Mormon Prophet refused, as always, to defend the constitutional order against secessionism. In instructing Utah's territorial delegate about the course to pursue in Washington, Young told him: "I also wish you, if the question arises whether we will furnish troops beyond our borders for the war, to tell them no, but that, if necessary, we are ready to furnish a home guard for the protection of the telegraph and mail lines and overland travel within our boundaries, upon such terms as other volunteer companies employed by the Government." (Saints and the Union, p. 51) When, in 1862, the US Army asked Young (a private citizen) to allow Lot Smith's cavalry to be used as needed, including outside the territory, "Young tersely refused, and Utah's only military contribution to the Civil War came to an abrupt end." [227]

At the beginning of 1862, the Mormons organized a Utah State convention for the purpose of once again demanding admission to the Union on their own terms -- with polygamy, with theocracy, and with the Danites all still intact and functioning. The Deseret News, Brigham Young's house organ, pointed out that if the request for statehood were to be denied once again, then the obvious recourse for Utah would be to declare itself an independent nation. The paper wrote: "in the event of the request for admission into the family of States should be refused, they feared not the consequences of throwing off the Federal yoke and assuming the right of self-government, of which they have so long been deprived .... " (Saints and the Union, p. 63)

In spite of all of this verbiage, the Mormons were hoping that the Confederacy would cripple the power of the federal union, which posed the more immediate threat to Zion. Young Informed W. C. Haines in London on February 25, 1862 that "The South at this time is being worsted. The sympathies of our brethren are divided some for the Union and some for the South, but the South gets the greatest share." [228] In the following month, Young conferred with his principal advisor Heber C. Kimball and inveighed once again against "the wicked course the American Nation has taken with this people," since the federal government was "running into despotism .... The President observed that Abraham Lincoln was a sagacious man, but believed he was wicked." [229]

MORRILL ACT OUTLAWS POLYGAMY IN US, 1862

One of the leading nation builders in Washington was Congressman Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, a leading exponent of the American System of political economy who successfully advocated the Morrill Tariff, a protective system which finally placed the United States on the necessary road to becoming the premier industrial power of the world. He was also a great promoter of the transcontinental railroad, at that time the greatest civil engineering project in human history. The Morrill Act or Homestead Act was one of the great land reforms of the modern world. Morrill was also responsible for the provision which specified that some of the proceeds from the sale of public lands would go to finance the state land-grant colleges, which were tasked with instruction in agriculture and mechanical arts. Morrill also played a role in the creation of the National Academy of Sciences. It is not surprising that this champion of human progress also judged it essential to mobilize the power of the federal government against the barbaric relic of polygamy.

On April 8, 1862, Morrill introduced a House bill "to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories of the United States, and for other purposes, and to disapprove certain acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah." (Saints and the Union, p. 71) Mormon polygamy would endure officially for almost 3 more decades, and unofficially continues to this day, but, with the Morrill Act of 1862, the handwriting was already on the wall for the demise of the Mormons' hallmark practice.

BRIGHAM YOUNG STANDS FIRM FOR POLYGAMY

On July 6, 1862 Brigham Young responded to Morrill with a speech delivered in a place called the Bowery, which was a shelter with a roof made of tree branches, but no walls. The Mormon Prophet tried to argue that polygamy had to be respected because it was divinely ordained. He asserted that "monogamy, or restriction by law to one wife, is no part of the economy of heaven among men." He mocked the hubris of the U.S. Congress, which was blasphemously attempting to "dictate the Almighty in his revelations to his people .... Why do we believe in and practice polygamy? Because the Lord introduced it to his servants in a revelation given to Joseph Smith, and Lord's servants have always practiced it." [230] Later in the day, he returned to the same theme, preaching that "the world is at war against the truth and against those who propagate it." (Saints and the Union, p. 78)

Naturally, many religions make sweeping absolute claims and demand that their revelations be respected. But the experience of Western civilization, starting with the wars of religion in the 16th century in particular, was that the needs of public order and the avoidance of civil war require that the demands of all faiths, without exception, be judged according to enlightened reason of state.

Despite the sweeping power explicitly given to the Congress in the Constitution to manage the affairs of the territories, Brother Brigham could not give up his mantra that the territories were supposed to be immune from congressional interference. He wrote to one Mormon elder in San Francisco on July 17, 1862 that the "Congress has no Constitutional right to pass such an act as the one against polygamy, except for the District of Columbia, but the Constitution is an instrument of writing that of late seems to be very readily disregarded when interfering with partisan purposes.'" (Saints and the Union, p. 78)

In another appearance in the Bowery on August 31, 1862, Brigham Young once again reminded his audience of Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy of 30 years before. Abraham Lincoln, he noted, had told Horace Greeley that his main object was to save the Union, but Brother Brigham was very skeptical. In Brigham's view, Lincoln's actions all converged on the realization of Joseph Smith's prophecy. In the meantime, the Mormons had to push on with the creation of the "Kingdom of God." He urged his followers to proceed "onward and upward." Mormon salvation would be accompanied by American disaster, he opined: "Our course is onward to build up Zion, and the nation that has slain the Prophet of God and cast out his people will have to pay the debt. They will be broken in pieces like a potter's vessel; yes, worse, they will be ground to powder." [231]

MORRISITES REJECT POLYGAMY, REBEL AGAINST BRIGHAM YOUNG

Like all modern gnostic sects based on alleged direct revelation, Mormonism contained inherent structural elements of instability and was constantly plagued by factions, defections, split-offs, and schisms. The mechanism for producing these disturbances was built into the Joseph Smith narrative. If Joseph Smith had enjoyed extra-scriptural revelations coming directly from God, and if oracles had indeed not ceased, then what was to prevent a dissident Mormon from declaring himself a prophet and starting a faction fight? This is exactly what happened in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1862. Among the Mormons was a certain Welshman named Joseph Morris, who claimed to be receiving revelations and communications direct from God. In fact, Joseph Morris claimed that his line to God was better than Brigham Young's. Already in the late 1850s, these divine messages convinced Morris that polygamy was not part of God's plan. (Saints and the Union, p. 90) Salt Lake City was full of impoverished and disgruntled victims of Brigham Young's regime of exploitation and oppression, so this new prophet was able to assemble a following known as the Morrisites. In mid-June, 1862, armed Morrisites seized control of Brigham Young's favorite public stage in the Bowery and engaged in firefights with the Danites. Morris was murdered by the Danites, but his movement went on. Before long, the Church of Jesus Christ of Saints Most High, generally known as the Morrisites, had seized Kington Fort on the Weber River, 35 miles north of Salt Lake City. Soon there were gun battles between Morrisite and mainline LDS gunmen, and Brother Brigham had to unleash his judicial apparatus through the probate courts to put some of the heretics in jai1.

PATRICK CONNOR, LIBERATOR OF UTAH AND FATHER OF UTAH MINING

But now, shortly after the passage of the Morrill Act, a worthy American antagonist of the Mormon secessionist Brigham Young finally appeared on the scene. This was Colonel Patrick Connor, born Patrick O'Connor on S1. Patrick's Day in 1820 in Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland, and then transplanted to New York City. Connor, an officer of the regular army who had fought in the Mexican War, was selected to lead a regiment of California volunteers into Utah for the purpose of securing the transcontinental telegraph and the Overland trails. "California Volunteers for Salt Lake," headlined the Deseret News of June 25, 1862, naming Colonel Connor as the commander of the Third California volunteers, which had already arrived in Stockton, California on May 31. Connor was destined to become the "Liberator of Utah" and the "Father of Utah Mining." [232] The Roman Catholic Irishman Connor represented a Union Army which, as destroyer of slavery and polygamy, and as bringer of the land reform contained in Justin Morrill's Homestead Act, was a revolutionary force on this planet.

Connor was a far more formidable figure than the secessionists like General Albert Sidney Johnston and Governor Cumming or the doughfaces and appeasers of Mormondom like the Kanes of Philadelphia, with whom the American Moses had generally been dealing up to this point. Connor was a Stephen Douglas Democrat evolving into a Lincoln Republican, and above all he had Brigham Young's number. Thanks to Connor, the Mormon Prophet's scheming and subversive intrigue were now destined to be contained.

Connor benefited first of all from his essentially realistic appraisal of the Mormon power which was then current among US Army officers stationed in California. One of these was Major James H. Carleton, who wrote to Pacific Headquarters in San Francisco from a camp near Los Angeles on July 31, 1861, giving a profile of the Salt Lake City Saints. Carleton had studied the Mormons in the area of San Bernardino, California, which Brigham Young had destined to be part of the Inland Empire. Accordingly, he knew what he was talking about. Major Carleton informed the Army:

"Nearly all Mormons are foreigners. Among these are Welsh, English, Norwegians, Swedes, some Germans, and a few French. They are evidently of the lowest and most ignorant grade of the people in the several countries from whence they have come. Mixed in with these are a few low, unprincipled Americans. The most intelligent and crafty of these, commencing with Brigham Young, are the directors and rulers of the whole mess ... their government is solely a hierarchy, and notwithstanding, in theory, they are assumed to be a population obedient to the laws of our common country, practically they scorn and deride, and set at defiance all laws that interfere with their safety or interest, save those promulgated by the great council of the church." [233]


Connor was able to verify and confirm this profile as his forces marched through Nevada to Fort Church. Here, on August 3, 1862 he reported to San Francisco: "I find since entering this Territory that there are many sympathizers with the Southern rebels along our entire route; but while they are loud-mouthed brawlers before our arrival, are very careful in the expressions of such sentiments during our stay at any point. Still, they are known and can be identified as open and avowed secessionists." [234] Unlike so many of his predecessors, Connor understood what he was dealing with. At this point Connor's Utah column had 850 infantryman, with six artillery pieces, plus 50 teams and wagons, with each wagon weighing 23,000 pounds.

COLONEL CONNOR TO THE MORMON SAINTS: "ENOUGH OF YOUR TREASON"

Connor had a simple and effective plan of action: he would take up a fortified position above Salt Lake City and "say to the Saints of Utah, enough of your treason." [235] He also had a long-term strategy for undermining the Mormon theocracy: "Connor was quick to see that bringing in Gentile [i.e., American] miners would afford an opportunity to secure an economic footing in the great basin and break the Mormon monopoly." The Union force in Utah, made up to a significant degree of ''miners in uniform," was well suited to be the vanguard of this effort. [236]

The obvious path to economic development in the Intermountain West was mining, to exploit the vast mineral wealth of this huge land area. But Brigham Young, ever the sectarian thinker, was opposed to mining because it would inevitably mean the ingress into the land of the Saints of many American Gentile working people. In the choice between economic development and sectarian-gnostic purity, the Mormon Moses chose the latter. Patrick Connor therefore represented the economic future of the West, in contrast to Brigham Young, who had a Malthusian anti-development policy lurking behind the slogans of the Mormon faith.

CONNOR: SALT LAKE CITY FULL OF "TRAITORS, MURDERERS, FANATICS, AND WHORES"

With his army now well advanced on the road to Salt Lake City by September 1, Connor traveled ahead in civilian clothes to reconnoiter the situation in Salt Lake City. The Mormons knew who he was, but they did not interfere with him. Based on what he was able to learn, Connor once again reported to Army headquarters in San Francisco on September 14, 1862. He wrote:

"It will be impossible for me to describe what I saw and heard in Salt Lake, also as to make you realize the enormity of Mormonism; suffice it, that I found them a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores .... The people publicly rejoice at reverses to our arms, and thank God that the American Government is gone, as they term it, while their prophet and bishops preach treason from the pulpit. The Federal officers are entirely powerless, and talk in whispers for fear of being overheard by Brigham's spies. Brigham Young rules with despotic sway, and death by assassination is the penalty of disobedience to his commands. I have a difficult and dangerous task before me, and will endeavor to act with prudence and firmness." [237]


Albert Sidney Johnston had been content to march his forces through the streets of Salt Lake City one time, and then to disappear from view at Camp Floyd, on the west side of the Jordan River 40 miles south of the Mormon metropolis. This was one of the things that rendered the Floyd-Johnston mission so impotent, and Connor had no intention of repeating such a feckless maneuver.

During his reconnaissance trip, Connor had identified a much better place to post his men. This was a small plateau or bench land three miles northeast of Salt Lake City, surrounded by timber and sawmills, where hay, grain, and other produce could easily be purchased. Here Connor intended to create Fort Douglas. Connor received requests from the few federal officials hanging on in Salt Lake City to post his men as close as possible to the Mormon Mecca. General Wright in San Francisco approved Connor's plan, saying that this position was "most eligible for the accomplishment of the objects in view" since it sought "a commanding position, looking down on the city, and hence has been dreaded by the Mormon chief." (Saints and the Union, p. 102) Pressing resolutely ahead, Connor with his small force reached the old Camp Floyd on October 17, and crossed the Jordan River on the following day.

CONNOR WARNS DANITES HE WILL ENTER SALT LAKE CITY "IF HELL YAWNED BELOW HIM"

According to the San Francisco Bulletin, Connor now sent word to Bill Hickman, the infamous assassin and the head of the Danites, that the US Army intended to "cross the river Jordan if hell yawned below him." (Saints and the Union, p. 109) This message had its desired effect. Although Hickman had reportedly been taking bets that no federals would ever pass the Jordan River, the Brigham Young regime, despite all of its bluster, now ignominiously backed down, just as when Albert Sidney Johnston's force was finally approaching in 1858. Brigham Young, it would seem, had the psychology of a bully, eager to attack the weak, but equally anxious to avoid a clash with those who would not capitulate. Connor had bested the Mormon Prophet with a decisive show of strength that proved him to be an aggressive and determined commander. Compared to Connor, Brother Brigham was blowing smoke.

As Connor and the Californians paraded through the streets, there were only large crowds of gawkers looking on in sullen silence. "There were none of those manifestations of loyalty that any other city in a loyal Territory would have made." [238]

In a recent evocation of these events published in connection with the Romney campaign, the New York Times recalled that Connor warned that persons nourishing "'treasonable sentiments in this district ... must seek a more genial soil, or receive the punishment they so richly merit.' He bivouacked his men on a plateau overlooking Salt Lake City from the east, only three miles from Young's principal residence." [239] The Mormons began quarreling with everything Connor did, including his decision to name the new army post after Stephen Douglas, whom the Saints still resented because he had called their signature practice of polygamy a disgrace to humanity and to civilization.

OCTOBER 22, 1862: US TROOPS ENTER SALT LAKE CITY AS BRIGHAM BACKS DOWN

On the same day that federal troops arrived in Salt Lake City, The Deseret News proclaimed the contempt of the Mormons for President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had just been issued in preliminary form. As could be predicted, the party organ of Mormonism based its rejection of emancipation on a frivolous argument that the move was unconstitutional. The Deseret News wrote: "We demand to be informed whence the President derives his power to issue any such proclamation as he has now published. Not from the Constitution surely, for it is in plain violation of some of its leading provisions ... He is fully adrift on the current of radical fanaticism. We regret for his sake, we lament for the sake of the country, that he has been coerced by the insanity of radicals, by the denunciation of their presses, by the threats of their governors and senators." (Saints and the Union, p. 106) In reality, Lincoln was forced to limit the Emancipation Proclamation to areas that were in insurrection against the United States, where it could be justified as a war measure. That fact had certainly not escaped the more judicious of the Mormon Saints. But these observers could also see that the abolition of polygamy might someday be proclaimed in a similar form, especially should the Saints start a secessionist insurrection of their own. On the last day of 1862, the Deseret News branded the Emancipation Proclamation, which would become operative on January I, 1863, as "this ultra measure," and predicted it would help only the Confederates. (Saints and the Union, pp. 117-118)

The San Francisco Bulletin had sincerely expected the Mormons to resist with armed force the entry of the United States Army into their metropolis, and this paper was still justifiably indignant. Now the paper stressed that Mormons and Confederates were both operating on the same immoral plane, declaring that "if our troops are to march on the United States territory wherever Government sends them, then those who resist their march, because of polygamy, are as really traitors as those who resist because of slavery, and are to be dealt with as such." [240]

THREAT OF "GULF STREAM OF BAYONETS" TO END MORMON ABUSES

The San Francisco Bulletin also commented that the small American garrison was vastly outnumbered by Brigham Young's 8,000 Mormon main force troops and reserves of perhaps 50,000 more. Brother Brigham could indeed wipe out the federal garrison, wrote the Bulletin, "but Young could expect within two or three years that the federal government 'could flood his valley with regiments, and sweep it with a gulf stream of bayonets.'" (Saints and the Union, p. 110)

Brigham Young, having failed to keep the federal troops out, was now concerned to limit any fraternization between them and his subject populations, since this might lead to an erosion of his ideological control. He therefore augmented his system of surveillance and spying. According to one Mormon summary, the Prophet "considered it important that some regulations should be made in each ward of this city by which the people might be kept from association with the troops that have come into our city. To this end he recommended that the Teachers of the several Wards should be constituted policemen to look after the interest of the people ... that if these Teachers become suspicious of any person in their Wards they should watch them day and night until they learned what they were doing and who frequented their houses. If they found any of the sisters going to Camp, no matter under what pretence, they should cast them forth from the Church forthwith." (Saints and the Union, p. 112) The contemporary Austro-Hungarian Empire had the Bach system, with its standing army of troops, its sitting army of bureaucrats, its kneeling army of priests, and its creeping army of spies, but Bach had nothing on Brigham Young. Brigham did find time to establish guidelines for Mormon price gouging in selling supplies to the American garrison.

CONNOR: BRIGHAM BETTING ON US DEFEAT, FOREIGN INTERVENTION

Late 1862 and the spring of 1863 was the time of the greatest and most sustained danger of British and French intervention on the side of the Confederacy, and Connor accurately estimated what Mormon intentions were. He wrote at this time to army headquarters in San Francisco:

"I am reliably informed that the so-called President Young is making active preparations indicating a determination on his part to oppose the Government of the United States in the spring, provided Utah is not admitted into the Union as a State, or in case of a foreign war or serious reverse to our arms." [241]


Britain and France were proposing to intervene in the second half of 1862, and then once again in the summer of 1863. They were deterred by the firm stance of the Russian Empire on the side of the Union, and then by the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But if things had gone otherwise, Brigham Young would have activated his plan for secession and rebellion.

Connor could also see that the Mormon strategy was now to deliberately cut the transcontinental telegraph in hopes that the federal garrison would have to be scattered across hundreds of miles in order to protect the wires. The Mormons were also facilitating Indian attacks on pioneers. He so informed the Army in San Francisco: "I am creditably informed and believe that the Mormons have instigated the late attack by Indians on the telegraph station at Pacific Springs in order to draw my forces to that point. Mormons also, in the northern part of this valley, encourage depredations by the Humboldt Indians by purchasing of them property of which massacred immigrants have been despoiled by giving them in exchange therefor powder, lead and produce." [242]

Governor Harding was a new Lincoln appointee, but he had showed some doughface tendencies in publicly regretting that the presence of the Army in Salt Lake City had been deemed necessary. But now even Harding was learning in Brother Brigham's hard school. Harding wrote to Secretary of State William Seward in Washington in late August of 1862 that he now understood that the Mormons were disloyal to the government of the United States: "Brigham Young and other leaders are constantly inculcating in the minds of their ... audience who sit beneath their teachings every Sabbath that the Government of the United States is of no consequence, that it lies in ruins, that the prophecy of Joseph Smith [The Civil War Prophecy] is being fulfilled to the letter." Once both the Union and the Confederacy are decimated and exhausted, "then the Saints are to step in and quietly enjoy the possession of the lands and all that is left of the ruined cities and desolated fields and that 'Zion is to be built up' not only in the valley or the mountains but the great centers of their power and glory, is to be in Missouri, where the Saints under the lead of their prophet, were expelled many years hence." [243]

On September 3, 1862, Governor Harding went to hear Brother Brigham's speech in the Bowery, and reported back to Secretary of State Seward that the theme of his sermon had been: "Nothing I can say can save the Government of the United States. It could have been saved if the people had accepted Joseph Smith for their President." (Saints and the Union, p. 120)

Around this time, the Mormon chief put out a contract on the life of Colonel Connor. Connor revealed in 1886 that "Bill Hickman told me a half hour after it occurred that Brigham had promised him a thousand dollars if he would send a ball through my brain and lay the murder to the Indians. I don't believe that those men [the Danites] were butchers by nature, they were fanatics in their belief that they could not be saved if they would not obey any order of the prophet, right or wrong." (Hirshson, p. 262)

LINCOLN'S MAN HARDING CONFRONTS THE UTAH RUBBER-STAMP LEGISLATURE, DEC. 10, 1862

Governor Harding addressed the territorial legislature on December 10, 1862. This Utah territorial assembly was a rubber stamp parliament of an extreme type. It generally met only one day a year, and mechanically voted up every measure which Brigham Young and his lieutenants demanded. Harding started off by reproaching the Saints for their lack of patriotism: "I am sorry to say that since my sojourn amongst you I have heard no sentiments, either publicly or privately expressed, that would lead me to believe that much sympathy is felt by any considerable number of your people in favor of the government of the United States, now struggling for its very existence ..." [244]

As was inevitable, Harding then addressed the question of polygamy, wherein the Mormons were totally exceptional and isolated, and which he characterized as an "'anomaly throughout Christendom .... I lay it down as a sound proposition, that no community can happily exist with an institution so important as that of marriage, wanting in all those qualities that make it homogenial with institutions and laws of neighboring civilized communities having the same object." [245] Harding was especially concerned about the way in which Mormon polygamy also induced incest and polyandry: "That plurality of wives is tolerated and believed to be right may not appear so strange; but that a mother and her daughters are allowed to fulfill the duties of wives to the same husband, or that a man could be found in all Christendom who could be induced to take upon himself such a relationship, is, perhaps, no less a marvel in morals than in matter of tastes .... No community can long exist without absolute social anarchy unless so important an institution as that of marriage is regulated by law." [246] This is the sound proposition which Ron Paul called into question during the 2011-12 Republican presidential debates with his proposal to deregulate marriage.

HARDING: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM COVERS BELIEFS, NOT OVERT CRIMINAL ACTS

Harding agreed that liberty of conscience, the freedom to worship, and freedom of religion had to be maintained. He pointed out that "when religious opinions assume new manifestations, and pass from the condition of mere sentiment into overt acts, no matter whether they be acts of faith or not, they must not outrage the opinions of the civilized world, but, on the other hand, must conform to those usages established by law, and which are believed to underlie our very civilization." Harding called for elections by secret ballot, abolishing the practice of making each voter sign his paper ballot. (Saints and the Union, p. 122-3) The legislature railroaded 20 measures, but Harding vetoed 14 of them. The Mormons refused to print the governor's message, as had been customary in the past.

MORMONS SEE ATTACK ON POLYGAMY AND INCEST AS "'TOCSIN OF WAR"

The Mormon leaders were apoplectic. One wrote that Harding's speech "was a toxin of war, and was considered a very offensive document, it was interpreted as an open and gratuitous insult on the part of the Executive." [247]

Back in Washington, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio got the U.S. Senate to print a thousand copies of Harding's speech. The Committee on Territories on February 13, 1863 concluded that "the customs which have prevailed in all our other Territories in the government of the public affairs have had but little toleration in the Territory of Utah; but in their stead there appears to be, overriding all other influences, a sort of Jewish theocracy, graduated to the condition of that Territory. This theocracy, having a supreme head who governs and guides every affair of importance in the church, and practically in the Territory, is the only real power acknowledged here, and to the extension of whose interests every person in the Territory must directly or indirectly conduce.'" (Saints and the Union, pp. 123-124)

This report went on to outline how the Mormon theocracy functioned, with special attention to the Mormon doublethink theory of the Constitution which is still circulating in our own time. The report stated:

"Contrary to the usages of the whole country, the affairs of this Territory are managed through church instrumentalities, and no measure is permitted to succeed in the Territory which will, for one moment, conflict with the interests of the church; in other words, we have here the first exhibition within the limits of the United States of a church ruling the State .... Another opinion -- the subject of both public and private teaching -- is that the government of the United States will not and ought not to stand. They make a difference between the Constitution and the government of the United States; to the Constitution they claim to very loyal, but to the government they owe no particular allegiance. '" (Saints and the Union, p. 124)


The report also established that "Polygamy of the most unlimited character, sanctioning the cohabitation of a man with the mother and her daughters indiscriminately, is not the only un-American thing among them." [248]

US WINS BATTLE OF BEAR RIVER, JANUARY 29, 1863, CLOSING MORMON NORTHERN OPTION

In late January 1863, Connor and some 300 of the Californians went on an expedition northwards from Salt Lake City. On January 29, Connor won a decisive victory attacking a fortified Indian village which had been the source of attacks on the Overland Mail and on local settlers. This was an event of considerable strategic importance, since it deprived Brigham Young of the "Lamanite" allies he was constantly seeking to incite against the US forces and against American pioneers. In the evaluation of historian Ray C. Colton, this "victory completely broke the power of the Indians in northern Utah and Southern Idaho and conveyed a threat to them which was never necessary to repeat." [249] General Halleck in Washington promoted Connor to the rank of brigadier general. Governor Harding saw the hand of "secret agents of the church ... employed to form a league for a common safety and a common purpose." He told Washington that the Mormons had kept in close contact with the fortified camp dispersed by Connor. [250]

With the latest Mormon request for statehood under consideration in Washington, Connor used his reports to call attention to the abuses by the Mormon regime. On February 19, 1863, he wrote to San Francisco: "I can only allude briefly to the frequent and flagrant violations of the law and the audacious interference with its operations. The law for the prohibition of polygamy is daily violated under the very eyes of the Federal courts by citizens and members of the Mormon Church, who are composed chiefly of the very lowest class of foreigners and aliens." (Saints and the Union, p. 148) In Connor's view, the mentality and outlook of the Mormons had not changed. He observed that "The people, from Brigham down to the very lowest, are disloyal almost to a man, and treason, if not openly preached, is covertly encouraged and willful and infamous misrepresentations as to the intention of the Government toward this people constantly made under the guise of heavenly revelations." [251]

BRIGHAM STILL HOPING FOR THE CHANCE TO SECEDE

Connor warned his superiors once again that Brigham Young was still betting on either a catastrophic defeat of the Union, or foreign intervention, most likely by the British and French. He repeated that Brother Brigham "only awaits a serious reverse to our arms, or a foreign war, to break out into open rebellion, and if I understand the significance of his preparations; they mean rebellion and nothing else. '" Connor was certain that the only thing saving Brigham Young from the righteous anger of the American people was the fact that their attention was fixed on military operations in the East and Midwest. Otherwise, the calls for massive action against Utah would have become overwhelming: " ... if the crimes and designs of this people were known and understood by the people of the United States as I understand and know them, it would cause such a burst of indignation as would result in the utter annihilation of this whole people." [252]

It was now very likely that 1863 would prove to be the decisive year for the Confederacy. But this battle was being fought on a broader scale. In January 1863, the British Mazzini networks were able to foment a rebellion in the Polish and Lithuanian regions of the Russian Empire. There was immediately talk of French and British intervention. If this had occurred, war between the Russian Empire and the Anglo-French was a likely result. Given the political dynamics existing in the world at that time, it was then quite possible that a Russo-American alliance might have found itself in conflict with London, Paris, and Richmond. Once again, Brigham Young's grasp of the larger world dynamics was impressive, and highly suggestive of high-level intelligence sources in the British Isles, where his son was a missionary at this time, and had a number of well-informed correspondents.

On March 3, 1863 Brigham Young and his retainers organized a mass meeting in the tabernacle in Salt Lake City to protest the speech recently delivered by Governor Harding to the Utah Territorial Legislature. Brigham Young's rhetorical stance was now that he supported the transcontinental telegraph and the transcontinental railroad, and wanted to defend them from unprincipled saboteurs in the Washington administration. Since Brigham Young was eager for the lucrative contracts associated with these infrastructure projects, there was some truth in this pose. Brigham Young was met with a thunderous ovation, and he quickly warned Governor Harding that if he thought his bread was buttered, "there was poison underneath" -- a typical Mormon theme. The Mormon Moses alleged that "there seems to be a secret influence existing, among a class that I do not know what others call but that I call Black-hearted Republicans, against the Pacific railroad and the overland mail route and telegraph line .... If a military government can be established in this Territory, it is universally believed that the people of Utah would not bear it. [Cries of 'No"] There [in Utah] it is expected that the telegraph wires would be severed, the mail be stopped, and the free travel across the continent put an end to.'" (Saints and the Union, p. 152) In other words, moves to enforce federal law against the church hierarchy would lead to acts of domestic terrorism, for which the federal themselves would have to be held responsible. Brigham harped on the theme that federal officials were "trying to break up civil government in Utah and set up a military despotism, and woe be to that man who undertakes to introduce despotism in Utah; in such an attempt they will then learn who is Governor (great applause) .... '" (Saints and the Union, p. 153) For the moment, the Mormon theocracy was still intact.

By now, Brigham Young was attempting to censor the accounts and transcripts of his public tirades which were telegraphed to American newspapers on the East and West coasts. He wanted to be able to use his demagogy to whip his followers into a frenzy, but at the same time he realized that the backlash against this rhetoric might become dangerous to him. He began harassing newspaper reporters, some of whom in those days knew shorthand and often recorded his speeches verbatim. As part of the new public-relations strategy, he often ordered the Deseret News to tone down his remarks.

BRIGHAM YOUNG: LINCOLN'S MAN IN UTAH A "N****R WORSHIPER"

But Connor was able to report passages from Brigham Young's March 3 speech which did not show up in the published versions. Connor informed the Army in San Francisco that Brother Brigham had launched a bitter personal attack on Governor Harding, against whom he railed in these terms: "This man, who is sent here to govern the Territory -- man, did I say? Thing, I mean; a n****r worshipper. A black-hearted abolitionist is what he is and what he represents -- and these two things I do utterly despise." [253] The March 3 mass meeting passed resolutions demanding the ouster or resignation of Governor Harding.

GOV. HARDING: IF DANITES KILL FEDERAL OFFICIALS, UTAH WILL BE RAZED

When a committee of Mormon leaders went to Governor Harding's office and delivered the resolutions calling on him to resign, he replied in kind. Harding told the delegation that if they killed him, Union forces would massively retaliate and destroy the Mormon metropolis: "I, too, will prophesy if one drop of my blood is shed by your ministers of vengeance while I am in the discharge of my duty, it will be avenged, and not one stone or adobe in your city will remain upon another. Your allegations in this paper are false, without the shadow of truth." [254] Governor Harding was evidently learning to reciprocate the language of threats which he had heard so often from Brigham Young.

A few days later, Brigham Young launched the next step in his spring 1863 propaganda offensive. On March 8, he delivered an oration entitled "The Persecutions of the Saints. -- Their Loyalty to the Constitution." Here he was at pains to refute the growing and widespread awareness that he was preparing anti-American moves in the military sphere if the campaigning season of 1863 were to result in serious defeats for the Union. The Mormon Moses complained that the Saints were "objectionable to our neighbors. We have a warfare .... We are accused of disloyalty, alienation, and apostasy from the Constitution of our Country. We are accused of being secessionists. I am, so help me God, and ever expect to be a secessionist from their wickedness, unrighteousness, dishonesty and unhallowed principles in a religious point of view; but am I or this people secessionists with regard to the glorious Constitution of our country? No." [255]

MARCH 1863: BRIGHAM YOUNG RAGES AGAINST EMANCIPATION; DEATH PENALTY FOR INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was now in full force, the war aims of the Union now included the extirpation of slavery, and this Brother Brigham found to be simply intolerable. He attempted to paint Abraham Lincoln as an abolitionist: "The rank, rabid abolitionists, who I call black-hearted abolitionists, have set the whole national fabric on fire. Do you know this, Democrats? They have kindled the fire that is raging now from the north to the south, and from the south to the north. I am no abolitionist, neither am I a pro-slavery man; I hate some of their principles and especially some of their conduct, as I do the gates of hell. The Southerners hate the negroes, and the Northerners worship them; this is all the difference between slave-holders and abolitionists. I would like the President of the United States and all the world to hear th is. Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot." [256]The deeply rooted racism of Mormon theology was clearly reflected in this philippic. Despite what Romney claims, these policies have only been changed at the level of regulations, but never at the level of the Mormon sacred texts from which they derive.

Since the arrival of Connor and the Californians, Brigham Young's home had been organized as a fortress. The house was surrounded by high walls, and scaffolding was erected on the inside to provide firing platforms for the garrison. A Mormon observer with a telescope stationed on the roof of Brigham's house (maintained by Miles Romney) permanently monitored what was happening at Camp Douglas. Ammunition was being manufactured. Brigham's home was heavily guarded, especially at night, and might have had as many as 300 sentries during times of tension. The raising of the flag over the domicile of the Mormon Moses was the signal for thousands of Danite militia to come running.
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

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Part 3 of 3

DANITE MOBILIZATION OF MARCH 9, 1863: A MORMON WAR PROVOCATION?

On March 9, 1863, Brigham Young ran his emergency warning flag up the flagpole over his house, and a phalanx of 2,000 armed Mormons soon surrounded the premises. The Mormons alleged that they had picked up signs that Connor was going to try to arrest Brigham Young and round up some of his lieutenants. Connor denied that he had any such plan. Instead, Connor wrote to San Francisco that the Mormon emergency mobilization had been designed as a provocation to get the U.S. Army to initiate hostilities. Connor's intelligence estimate was that "the late armed display was a mere ruse to frighten the proscribed Federal officers from the Territory; or else they desire to have a conflict with the Government, and are endeavoring to provoke me into inaugurating it. The latter I believe to be the real motive, however Brigham Young may try to disguise the fact." [257] The Mormons duplicated this stunt on March 12.

Connor told the commanders in San Francisco that the federal anti-polygamy legislation was universally ignored. In addition, non-Mormon residents were subjected to systematic discrimination and denied the equal protection of the laws. And, despite the illusions of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle, it was extremely difficult for residents to get out of Deseret. Connor reported: "The law against polygamy is a dead letter on the statute books. Brigham Young has lately violated it, and boasts that he will have as many wives as he desires, and advises his people to pursue the same course. American citizens (who are not Mormons) can not hold real estate in the Territory, and those who undertake to do so are abused and threatened, their property stolen or confiscated by the Mormon courts upon a charge manufactured for the occasion. I have applications daily from people of the Mormon faith who desire to leave the Territory, and who say they cannot do so without protection from me, as they fear they would be arrested, their property taken from them on some trumped up charge, and probably their lives taken." [258]

The Danite mobilizations of March 9 and March 12 had been duly reported by journalists present on the scene, and these reports created a furor, especially in California. In Washington, the mood in Congress was that if the Mormons wanted Utah to be admitted to the Union, they should hold a constitutional convention to prohibit polygamy in the future state constitution. One bill in the House of Representatives offered Utah immediate admission if slavery and polygamy were both banned, but the Utah territorial delegate objected. Other bills put forward during 1863 would have mandated the popular election of judges in the probate courts -- which Brigham used to prevent Mormons -- including himself -- from being punished. There was also a failed bid to fight polygamy by giving women the right to vote. (Saints and the Union, p. 167)

The Mormon defensive posture now depended on further attempts to incite the Indians against Connor and the Californians. (Saints and the Union, p. 174) Connor still lacked enough cavalry for his needs. After clashes with the Indians, Brigham Young attempted to exercise his purely personal authority over them, writing to the recalcitrant tribes: "I have always been your friend and have endeavored to do you good, and you must abide my command." [259] This was the voice of the theocratic dictator, not of the territorial governor.

Connor tried to create humanitarian corridors so that refugees from Brigham Young's regime could exit the Territory without risking the loss of their lives and property. With the help of some residual Morrisites, he created a safe zone north of Salt Lake City in Idaho Territory. On November 20, 1863, the US Army at Camp Douglas began publishing the first daily newspaper in the territory, The Union Vedette. This paper featured extensive coverage on mining and natural resource issues, and engaged in lively polemics with the Deseret News. Brigham Young's mind control was correspondingly diminished.

DESPOTISM AND FANATICISM OF THE MORMON REGIME

On June 24, 1863, on the eve of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Connor once again sent to San Francisco a comprehensive profile of conditions in Utah Territory. His fundamental objection was, once again, to the Mormon theocracy:

"The world has never seen a despotism so complete, so limitless, so transcendent, controlling not alone the outward and internal civil polity of the Territory, but entering into all the details of everyday life and the minutia of the domestic economy of each individual, as exhibited in the construction of the Mormon Church .... Of that church Brigham Young is the acknowledged head and recognized despot. Upon his will alone depend as well the acts of public officials as the course, temper, and feeling of the humblest member of his flock. Fanaticism can go no further than it has in this case." [260]


Contempt against the American government by the Mormon hierarchy was openly proclaimed, Connor pointed out, with "striking and undutiable evidences of hatred to the Government, disloyalty to the Union and affiliation and sympathy with treason in the East and savage massacre and plunder all around and about us." He called attention to the Sunday "harangues" by the Mormon prelates, always full of "flippant expressions of disloyalty and vulgar threats against the Union," interspersed with "mock tears and sneering lamentations" whenever there was a federal defeat. [261]

Connor reiterated his accusations that Indian attacks on the Overland Mail were systematically fomented by Mormon agents. They also complained that he never received warnings from the Mormon authorities about the military operations of the Indians; this he attributed to the "insidious and damnable" Brigham Young. [262]

LINCOLN: FROM "ONE WAR AT A TIME" TO "I PROPOSE TO LET THEM ALONE"

During the Trent affair several years earlier, Lincoln was confronted by Secretary of State Seward and other members of his cabinet who thought that a war with Great Britain would help reunify the country. Knowing that Britain's Lord Palmerston was eager to intervene in the side of the Confederacy, Lincoln had ruled out this possibility. He summed up his policy with the famous "one war at a time" dictum of November 8, 1861. This meant that the captured Confederate diplomats Mason and Slidell would be turned over to the British, and the crisis defused.

In the spring of 1863, President Lincoln told Brigham Young's hand-picked territorial delegates that matters between Washington and Salt Lake City "had come to a pause, a stand still, that there was no immediate danger of an outbreak, and therefore he thought it was best to let things alone." (Saints and the Union, p. 168)

Now, in the hour of maximum danger to the Union, with Grant besieging Vicksburg, and Lee's army on the march in Maryland and Pennsylvania, Lincoln sent a back channel message to Brigham Young through T. B. H. Stenhouse, the editor of the semi-official Deseret News. Asked by Stenhouse what he was going to do in regard to the Mormons, Lincoln replied simply "I propose to let them alone." The president went on: "Stenhouse, when I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down, it was too hard to split, too wet to bum and too heavy to move so we plowed around it. That's what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if you will let me alone I will let him alone."263 In the framework of Lincoln's policy what now followed was a prolonged stalemate between Connor and Brigham Young.

The well-known writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow was passing through on July 4, 1863, and noted that the Mormons kept replacing "Union" with "Utah" in the patriotic speeches of the day. He also composed a quick profile of Brigham Young, whom he compared to "Louis Napoleon, plus a heart." Agreeing to some extent with Carlyle, Ludlow found that "Brigham Young is the farthest removed on Earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self devotion to the altar of the Devil." [264]

Connor used the new Union Vedette newspaper to highlight mining activity in the Territory, stressing the potential for gold, silver, copper, lead, and other minerals. He was sure that an influx of "Gentile" miners would be the key in the long run to building a pro-American counterweight against the theocracy. Brigham Young was vulnerable on this point. In 1849, the Mormon Moses had warned: "if anybody comes here discovering gold and distracting my people, sure as the Lord that is, I'll cut that man's throat." (Saints and the Union, p. 213)

MORMONS PLOT GREENBACK PANIC TO INTRODUCE BRITISH GOLD STANDARD

Checkmated for the moment in their plans for armed rebellion, the Mormons fell back on economic sabotage against the Union war effort. One of their ploys reveals an ideology obsessed with gold and silver, just like Andrew Jackson and the Locofoco Democrats before them and the Ron Paul Austrian libertarians in our own time. On July 9, 1864 Connor warned the Army in San Francisco about a "persistent effort on the part of a few merchants and traders doing business in Great Salt Lake City to institute a forced change in the currency of the territory, viz, from national Treasury notes [greenbacks] to gold coin." Connor wanted to arrest those fomenting "so unpatriotic and suicidal a policy." Connor was concerned that the planned money panic might "disseminate among us suspicious people the opinion that the government was fast going to pieces, and its pledge securities little better than blank paper. The efforts of bad men among them to sneer at the importance of the government and depreciate it in any manner would be furthered, and our great nation become a byword and reproach among a deluded community, already deeply inoculated with enmity and disloyalty towards it." Connor saw the danger of a monetary coup in which "a very few disloyal and greedy merchants, owing and neither feeling any allegiance to nor regard for the nation, may consummate a most disastrous stroke in the forcible change of the currency." [265] The Deseret News was hyping a greenback depreciation of hyperinflationary proportions in order to bring on this coup. (Saints and the Union, p. 237) During the 19th century, the world gold market was controlled by London, and proposals for a return to the gold standard were thus automatically proposals to submit to the political dominion of the British Empire.

Here we can see clearly that the belief structure and rhetoric of the modern gold-obsessed Austrian school libertarians of the Ron Paul ilk, closely allied to the Romney campaign, owe a great deal to the example of Brigham Young, "a man hardly second in disloyalty and evil intent to Jefferson Davis himself." Connor responded by establishing a provost guard in downtown Salt Lake City.

The news from the East was now about the great battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, accompanied by reports of heavy casualties on both sides. This was the last chance for the Confederacy, whose hopes depended entirely on the crisis of defeatism gripping the northern states on the eve of the November 1864 presidential election. Brigham Young, as usual, coordinated his actions according to a sophisticated intelligence picture that included all of these factors.

Connor tried to alarm his superiors on July 13, 1864 with a warning that "encouraged by the unfavorable news from the east, the Mormons are assuming a very hostile attitude. They have about 1,000 men under arms and are still assembling, and threaten to drive my provost guard from the city; alleged excuse for armed demonstration, the presence of the provost guard in the city." [266] By some strange coincidence, Brigham Young had decided to mount this demonstration at exactly the same time that the Draft Riots had broken out in New York City. (Saints and the Union, p. 238)

But Sherman took Atlanta, Sheridan defeated Early in the Shenandoah Valley, and Lincoln's election victory was soon followed by the destruction of Hood's Confederates before Nashville at the hands of George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga and now the Sledgehammer of Nashville. By the beginning of 1865, the military situation of the Confederacy was most dire. As a result of these developments, Brigham Young and the Mormons adopted a lower and lower profile as the day of reckoning at Appomattox approached. But the Mormon Moses was still defiant, growling in January 1865 that "If General Connor crosses my path, I will kill him." [267]

The capitulation of the Confederacy in April 1865 was a devastating defeat for Brigham Young. Reflecting the new political realities, the Mormons put on a show of mourning the death of Lincoln; the choice comments Brigham Young might have made behind the scenes are not reported. The Mormon Moses had already consigned Zachary Taylor and James K. Polk to the Inferno.

The Danites kept killing and maiming. Salt Lake City was constantly plagued by violent crimes arising from conflicts involving polygamy. In April 1866, a man dared to marry the polygamist wife of a Mormon who was serving as a missionary in Europe. He was soon assassinated. The incident came to the attention of General William T. Sherman, now serving as the army commander in the West. Sherman pledged to protect all persons "regardless of religious faith .... Those murderers must be punished, and if your people resort to measures of intimidation those must cease," Sherman pointedly warned Brigham Young. (Hirshson, p. 270)

BRIGHAM YOUNG? "HIS DAY IS OVER"

With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the U.S. Army acquired the ability to reinforce its presence among the Saints in short order. A senior US officer commented at the time to the New York Herald, "We used to have some anxiety about Utah. That is over. In forty-eight hours we can pour in all the troops wanted. There need be no more uneasiness about the rebellion of Brigham Young. His day is over." (Hirshson, p. 280) Brigham Young had claimed he was welcoming the railroad, and indeed he tried to make money off the construction contracts.

The notoriously ignorant and provincial Brigham Young could have learned something from the great Italian statesman Count Cavour, who had written an essay about the critical role of railroad building in national unification and in bringing modern culture and civilization to backward areas. As it turned out, the railroad became a potent weapon against the barbarism of Utah. Stanley P. Hirshson pointed out that "in Salt Lake City the railroad killed plural marriage. There a Mormon woman heard from outsiders how the world despised her. Peeking into store windows, she saw eastern finery a husband might be able to give one wife but not two, three, or four. Handsomely dressed Gentile women constantly reminded her of her plight." Hirshson, p. 324) At the same time, polygamy was placed under increased national and international scrutiny, since, thanks to the new transcontinental railroad, writers and reporters from all over the world, plus Gentile Americans, including the top leaders of the federal government, visited Salt Lake City and its environs." The railroad also interfered with Brigham Young's long-standing policy of preventing the denizens of Zion from fleeing: "If the railroad came in, it also went out. Dodge described how one of Young's daughters tried in October 1868 to reach the Union Pacific's track and the East." (Hirshson, pp. 280-81)

BRIGHAM'S SON JAILED IN ENGLAND; HIS GRANDSON CONVICTED OF MURDER IN NEW YORK

Brigham Young had always expected that his son Brigham Jr. would be his successor. But scandals enveloped the career of the Mormon Dauphin. According to John D. Lee of the Danite intelligence, Brigham Jr. had been put in jail in England, and $26,000 was misdirected from the perpetual emigration fund to secure a cover up of his activities. Then, in February 1876, one of the crown prince's daughters fled with a Gentile. Brigham Jr. had to go to court to get her returned to him. (Hirshson, p. 321)

Brigham Young's grandson was William Hooper Young. In 1902, this grandson was sentenced to life in prison in Sing Sing by a New York City court. He was convicted of stabbing a woman to death, and then dumping her body in the Jersey Meadows. The Mormon theory that polygamy produced superior individuals seemed to be in trouble. (Hirshson, p. 325)

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, NEW YORK TIMES: RURAL POLYGAMY REDUCES WOMEN TO SLAVERY

The outside world had always been horrified by polygamy. Already in 1859, the New York Tribune's correspondent was reporting that "No where else on the Continent of North America are white women to be seen working like slaves, barefooted, in the field. It is notorious to all here that large numbers of Mormon women are in a state of great want and destitution, and that their husbands do not pretend to provide them even with the necessaries of life:" (Hirshson, p. )32) The New York Times pointed out in 1877 that a poor farmer with half a dozen able-bodied wives automatically possessed a loyal low-wage workforce, allowing him to act as overseer or superintendent. The women were disciplined with a whip. "Farmers with four, five, six or more wives are numerous, and it is among these people that polygamy has its greatest strength. Polygamy in Utah, especially among the rural population, is nothing more nor less than slavery, and its popularity arises almost wholly from its profitableness. It is the system of the South twenty years ago, with more lines of parallel than many of us might suspect." (Hirshson, pp. 323-324) The twin relics of barbarism turned out to be closely linked in practice.

ENGLISH AND WELSH GODBEITES REBEL AGAINST BRIGHAM'S CALVINIST-SCOTTISH-SCANDINAVIAN REGIME

A significant challenge to Brigham Young's power emerged in 1869, when Brigham Young's anti-American propaganda campaign finally boomeranged. Deseret had always depended heavily on converts coming from abroad. The self-identity of Mormons was the LDS Church, and they did not in the least consider themselves Americans. This distinction was kept alive by Brigham's constant tirades against the United States. But this meant that there was no national identity the immigrants could assimilate to. Therefore, the new Mormons kept whatever nationality they brought with them. In a climate of growing American nationalism during and after the Civil War, Brigham Young's American recruits were becoming fewer and fewer. But the Mormon Moses estimated that three out of every four American converts had defected. Other Mormon estimates put this figure as high as five out of six. This meant that Brigham Young's inner circle of Calvinists from New England, New York, and Ohio had to reach out to other groups to stay in power. Brigham Young leaned especially on Scots, and on Scandinavians from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. This policy offended the Welsh and especially the English, who complained that despite the fact that they were the biggest single national group in Deseret, they were represented in the supreme councils of the Church by only one important figure, John Taylor. This situation led to a factional revolt for which a prominent spokesman was William S. Godbe, an Englishman. The Godbeites were excommunicated, but a number of very prominent Mormons, including the editor Thomas B. H. Stenhouse and his wife Fanny, joined the schism, going on to write influential books about Mormonism. (Hirshson. p. 292 ff.)

BRIGHAM YOUNG: PRESIDENT GRANT A GAMBLER AND A DRUNKARD

In April 1869, Brigham Young allowed himself a rage-filled outburst against the government in Washington: "Who goes to the White House in these days? A gambler and a drunkard. And the vice president is the same. And no man can get either office unless he is a gambler and a drunkard or a thief. And who goes to Congress? You may hunt clear through the Senate and House, and if you can find any men that are not liars, thieves, whoremongers, gamblers, and drunkards, I tell you they are mighty few, for no other kind of men can get in there." (Hirshson, p. 279) With this intemperate rhetoric, Brigham had made an enemy out of President Grant.

Grant never forgot Young's insults. In November 1869 Brigham Young, Jr., opened up the wounds by commenting to the Philadelphia Morning Post: "Undoubtedly Grant has great abilities as a commander in the field, but his political abilities, we think, consist simply in knowing how to hold his tongue." As for Congress, Brigham Jr. opined that it contained the most "dissipated set of men anywhere." (Hirshson, pp. 303-04)

BRIGHAM YOUNG BUSTED FOR LEWD AND LASCIVIOUS COHABITATION

Grant was a Methodist, and the Methodists were the denomination that suffered most from Mormon recruiting, including in England. Some Methodist clergyman who were influential with the President wanted to go after Brigham Young, either for lewd and lascivious cohabitation, or for bigamy. They also wanted investigations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and various assassinations carried out by Brigham's personal hitman, Bill Hickman. Grant appointed a group of tough federal officials for the territory. In 1871 a group of leading Mormon saints were indicted for lewd and lascivious cohabitation. Others were incriminated for killings committed during the Mormon war of 1857. Then, on October 2, 1871, Brigham Young himself was indicted for lewd and lascivious cohabitation with 16 of his wives. Brigham discussed with his top lieutenants whether he should resist with an armed uprising, or with a scorched earth policy to destroy irrigation ditches, burn buildings, and then flee en masse to Mexico. Brigham Young decided to surrender to the authorities, secure in the knowledge that Utah juries were always controlled by the Mormon Saints. Armed gangs of Mormons tried to intimidate the court, but two companies and federal soldiers caused them to disappear.

When P. T. Barnum passed through, the Mormon Moses asked him: "Barnum, what will you give to exhibit me in New York and the eastern cities?" Barnum's answer was: "Well, Mr. President, I'll give you half the receipts, which I will guarantee shall be $200,000 per year, for I consider you the best show in America." (Hirshson, p. 279)

NO STATEHOOD FOR UTAH IF POLYGAMY IS KEPT

The Mormons continued to press for statehood, while insisting that polygamy remain intact. The New York Tribune spoke out in 1872 against admitting the polygamist theocracy to the Union. This paper warned that "To throw the political and judicial machinery of Utah (or Deseret) into the hands of the Mormon leaders would be to give a hierarchy of morbid fanatics powers which would drive from the country every 'Gentile' person, and build up in the basin of Great Salt Lake an impregnable State, intolerant of all non-Mormon influences, governed by a hierarchy hostile to ordinary immigration, and infested with a secret system of priestly espionage which is at variance with the spirit of our institutions.'" (Hirshson, p. 309)

On the other side were the Mormon hardliners, who spoke through the Deseret News, which editorialized that: 'It is not consistent that the people of God should submit to man-made governments. There is but one true and perfect government -- the one organized by God; a government by prophets, apostles, priests, teachers, and evangelists; the order of the original Church, of all Churches acknowledged by God.'" (Hirshson, p. 309)

Statehood for Deseret, commented an observer familiar with Utah, meant Young as governor, George Smith as lieutenant governor, and Wells as head of the Supreme Court. This Gentile asked: "What chance would a man like me have for justice with Mormon Danites as constables to arrest, and Mormon Elders as Magistrates to bind over; a Mormon Bishop as Circuit Judge to try, and a Mormon Supreme Court High Council to appeal to -- presided over by High Chief Justice, President, Lieut. Gen. Daniel H. Wells -- a cruel and remorseless bigot who knows as much of law outside of Mormonism as Red Cloud does of Blackstone's Commentaries?'" (Hirshson, pp. 309-310)

Congress had already struck down the Utah law which had incorporated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and giving the Mormons the power to perform and regulate marriages in the territory. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 353) In 1874, Congress passed the Poland Act, which stripped the Mormon-dominated probate courts of their original jurisdiction in most cases, and thus deprived them of the civil and criminal powers bestowed by Utah lawmakers. At about the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court voided the territorial law that had granted such jurisdiction. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 358)

Then, on January 6, 1879 the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Morrill Act of 1862, allowing the ban on polygamy in the territories to stand. Many polygamous marriages were automatically dissolved, and their offspring declared illegitimate. Henceforth numerous Mormon patriarchs would be convicted, joining the ranks of what the Saints like to call "polygamous martyrs.'" (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 361)

Brigham Young and his favorite wife Zina Huntington kept predicting disaster for the hated United States. They foresaw a second civil war to bring about the collapse of the federal government. So far, the second civil war has not occurred. These were variations on a theme by Joseph Smith, who had prophesied that in 1866 -- the year of two sixes -- United States would be swimming in blood. He foresaw another disaster for 1890. (Hirshson, p. 326)

IGNORANCE AND BACKWARDNESS OF MORMONDOM

Brigham Young had tried to build his New Jerusalem on the foundation of ignorance and backwardness. Perhaps this is unavoidable for tyrants. The New York Times pointed out in 1869 that "there is not a free school in Mormondom ... The result is a general lack of intelligence, except among the leaders, and the intelligence they possess is by no means of the highest order. The newspapers, of which there are several, are very guarded, and give the most meager accounts of everything." Brigham Young wanted totalitarian control, and not the inquiring mind, and as a result he "made Utah the thinking man's graveyard." (Hirshson, p. 322) The Latter-day Saints like to compare themselves to the people of Israel, but a comparison of Mormonism and Judaism shows that while the Mormons placed a much greater emphasis on proselytizing and recruiting, they neglected education and had contempt for learned individuals. This intellectual backwardness and contempt for science still hangs like a heavy pall over the American Intermountain West.

Finally, in order to obtain statehood, the Mormon hierarchy announced a new revelation, which was made public on September 24, 1890. Mormon president Woodruff claimed he was putting an end to polygamous marriages among the official LDS Church. At the same time, the theological justification for polygamy was reaffirmed, and loyal saints were reminded that when they took their places as gods ruling over planets, polygamy would be the order of the day. The Fundamentalist Saints, with their center of gravity in the backward regions of southern Utah and northern Arizona, have never stopped practicing polygamy; their most recent leader of note has been Warren Jeffs, currently serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary.

Utah finally became a state on January 4, 1896.

The post-Civil War reforms had been more effective in driving Mormon abuses underground than in ending them. Important elective offices in the state of Utah are still preponderantly controlled by representatives of the Mormon hierarchy, and even by the descendents of participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. In many ways, the Mormon Insurrection of 1857 and the subversive campaign of Brigham Young during the Civil War have never ended. On the contrary, after a long march through the institutions, a representative of these values is now within striking distance of seizing the White House.

MORMON THEOCRACY STILL INTACT IN UTAH

As of 2002, Mormons "constituted 63% of Utah's population Virtually all statewide elective offices, from the governor down, are held by Saints the state legislature is overwhelmingly made up of white Mormon Republican males. Three fourths of the state judiciary is Mormon. The entire United States Congressional delegation from Utah is Mormon. School boards, city councils, municipal agencies, and mayors offices are dominated by Mormons." The editor of the Salt Lake Tribune summed it up thus: "The fact is, we live in a quasi-theocracy. 80% of officeholders are of a single party, 90% of a single religion, 99% of a single race, and 85% of one gender." [268] The constitutionally mandated separation of church and state is much neglected in Utah. The majority of public junior high schools and high schools have an in-house Mormon seminary which serves for religious studies. This is the Mormon tradition, and it is therefore difficult to imagine that a Romney cabinet would look like America. It might well look more like Utah, where Salt Lake City may well be the most lily-white city on the planet.

In 1875, John D. Lee was charged with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but this trial ended in a hung jury. In the following year, he was put on trial once again, and this time the Mormon Church chose to hang him out to dry. He was sentenced to death, and he chose the firing squad. In an autobiography and numerous interviews and statements given to the world press in the last months of his life, Lee accused Brigham Young of ordering the killing, and portrayed himself as a scapegoat. Just before his execution, he called on his family and friends to leave vengeance to God. Nevertheless, until the end of his life, Brigham Young had to maintain a large security detail and was constantly accompanied by bodyguards. (Hirshson, p. 316 ff.)

By the mid-1870s, Brigham Young's health was in decline. This was when he called on the Romneys to help build his winter palace in St. George, Utah. Common parlance was that the Mormon Moses was "just well enough to sit up in bed and get married now and then." (Hirshson, p. 315) Brigham Young died on August 23. 1877. He was succeeded as Mormon Prophet by the Englishman John Taylor.

MORMON LONG MARCH THROUGH US FEDERAL INSTITUTIONS

Before his death, Brigham Young had succeeded in getting one of his sons, Willard, appointed to the US military Academy at West Point. President Grant later swore that if he had known about it, he would have blocked Willard Young from entering the Academy. Perhaps Brigham Young was already thinking about a long march through the institutions which would allow the Mormons to bore into the US federal government from within. If so, they have succeeded admirably.

Brigham Young established another important precedent. Young admitted in 1863 that he had in 1837 bought a "fine tavern establishment" in Auburn, New York, which was still his property. In Nauvoo, the Saints consumed large quantities of rum, whiskey, brandy, wine, and beer. In December 1843, Joseph Smith was given a liquor license by the Mormon-controlled city Council of Nauvoo so he could serve drinks in his hotel. In Utah, the head of the LDS Church, Brigham Young, always dominated the liquor trade. Rival distillers were systematically driven out of business. Brigham Young was the founder of Las Vegas, and we can see here the foreshadowing of the heavy Mormon involvement in gambling and prostitution, especially in Nevada. (Hirshson, p. 284-6) Today, Utah produces Five Wives Vodka and Polygamy Porter for polygamist Saints who want to tipple.

_______________

Notes:

204 From a royalist propaganda sheet of 1643, targeting pro-polygamy writings of the poet John Milton and other backers of Oliver Cromwell. (Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 130)
 
205 For the geopolitics of the American Civil War, see Webster G. Tarpley, "'Back the World in Flames' -- The US-Russian Alliance That Saved the Union," April 11, 2011, Tarpley.net.
 
206 E .B. Long, The Saints and The Union (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. xi.

207 Ray C. Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 3.
 
208 Colton, p. 4.

209 Colton, p. 180, n. 12.
 
210 Colton, p. 9.
 
211 Colton, p. 180.

212 Colton, p. 40.
 
213 John G. Turner, "The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War," New York Times, May 1, 2012.
 
214 Ibid.

215 Ibid.
 
216 Journal of Discourses, 8:81.

217 Richard F. Burton, City of the Saints (New York: Harper, 1862), p. 224, online at books.google.com.

218 Journal of Discourses, vol. 9. p. 2.
 
219 Journal of Discourses, vol. 9. p. 5.

220 Journal of Discourses. vol. 9. p. 36.
 
221 Journal of Discourses. 9:11.

222 Saints' Herald, vol. II, p. 116, online at books.google.com. 
 
223 Brigham Young Office Journal, August 13-21, 1861, cited by Michael T. Griffith, Abraham Lincoln, the Mormons, and the Civil War: An LDS Perspective on "Honest Abe", online at mtgriffith.com.
 
224 Arrington, American Moses, p. 272, online at books.google.com; also available on DailyPaul.com, April 17,2012, with comments revealing an ample convergence of Mormons and Paulbearers/Paultards in their hatred of Lincoln. 
 
225 D. S. Spencer, "Utah and Telegraphy," Genealogy Trails.com.
 
226 John W. Dawson to Abraham Lincoln, January 13, 1862, online at truthandgrace.com.

227 John G. Turner, "The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War," New York Times, May 1, 2012.
 
228 "Today in Mormon History," Feb. 25, 1862. today-in-mormon-history.blogspot.com.
 
229 More Musings of a Miniature Man. swinson I 979.blogspot.com.

230 Sandra Tanner, "LDS Leaders Still Believe There Will Be Polygamy in Heaven," online at  utim.org.
 
231 Journal of Discourses, vol. 9, p. 368.
 
232 Brigham D. Madsen, Glory Hunter: a Biography of Patrick Edward Connor (Salt Lake City UT: University of Utah press, 1990), pp. 273-276.
 
233 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII- Correspondence, p. 1055. 
 
234 "US Army Operations in Nevada and Utah Territories, 1862 (July-December)", Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I. vol. 50. Part 2, p. 48, online at Nevada Observer.com.
 
235 Colton, p. 186.
 
236 Colton, p. 186. 
 
237 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part 1, Chapter LXII-Correspondence, p. 119.
 
238 Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, p. 281. 
 
239 John G. Turner, "The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War," New York Times, May 1, 2012.
 
240 Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, p. 278. 
 
241 Official Records of the War of the Rebel/ion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII-Correspondence,  p. 257.
 
242 Charles Griffin Coutant, History of Wyoming, chapter XXX, online at rootsweb.ancestry.com.
 
243 Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869 (1988), p. 292, online at mormonthink.com. 
 
244 Cannon and Knapp, Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913), p. 331.
 
245 Catherine van Valkenburg Waite, The Mormon Prophet and His Harem; or, An Authentic History of Brigham Young, His Numerous Wives and Children (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), p. 89, online at books.google.com.
 
246 Waite, The Mormon Prophet and His Harem; p. 90.
 
247 Waite. The Mormon Prophetl1nd His Harem, p. 84, online at Internet Archive.org.
 
248 Waite, The Mormon Prophet and His Harem, p. 94.
 
249 Colton, p. 166. 
 
250 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII- Correspondence, p. 315.
 
251 Ibid., p. 319.
 
252 Ibid. 
 
253 Waite, The Mormon Prophet and his Harem. p. 101.
 
254 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII-Correspondence, p. 373.
 
255 Journal of Discourses, 10:25.
 
256 Ibid. 
 
257 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII-Correspondence, p. 371.
 
258 Executive Documents/or the Senate of the United States, Congressional Serial Set, Issue 2679. p. 158. 
 
259 Mormon Wiki, June 15, 1863.
 
260 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part 2, p. 491 ff. 
 
261 Ibid.
 
262 Ibid.
 
263 "Abraham Lincoln," Mormonthink.com. 
 
264 "Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Wikipedia.
 
265 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part II, p. 889. 
 
266 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. 50, Part I, Chapter LXII-Correspondence, p. 901.
 
267 John G. Turner, "The Mormons Sit Out the Civil War," New York Times, May 1, 2012. 
 
268 Lawrence Wright, "Lives of the Saints: at a Time When Mormonism Is Booming, the Church  Is Struggling with a Troubled Legacy," New Yorker, January 21, 2002.
 
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

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Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER VI. POLYGAMY, ANTI-AMERICANISM, AND OTHER ROMNEY FAMILY VALUES

"The system of the subjection of women here [Utah] finds its limit, and she touches the lowest depths of degradation."

-- Susan B. Anthony, letter from Utah, 1871.


"Among my great-grandparents, we had at least two who were polygamous."

-- Mitt Romney to Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker, 2002


"Christianity ... is a perfect pack of nonsense ...the Devil could not invent a better engine to spread his work than the Christianity of the nineteenth century."

-- LDS President John Taylor. [269]


"I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the Faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs. Some believe that such a confession of faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it," said Mitt Romney during his 2008 campaign. [270]

The first Romney to belong to the Mormon Church was a carpenter from Lower Penwortham, near Liverpool, England. This was Miles Archibald Romney, who, along with his wife Elizabeth, had been converted by Mormon missionaries preaching in their town square in 1837. Miles and Elizabeth Romney, the great-great-grandparents of the Mitt, became some of the very first converts to Mormonism in the British Isles. Naturally, at this point, nothing was being said about polygamy. By 1841, the Romneys took advantage of the immigration system set up by Brigham Young to make the journey to Nauvoo, Illinois. Miles A. Romney was a skilled worker, a carpenter and builder. He was quickly named master mechanic and put in charge of building the Nauvoo Temple. Joseph Smith's collectivist administration granted the Romneys a small stone house, where Elizabeth would soon give birth to a boy named Miles Park Romney, who arrived on August 18, 1843. Within less than a year, Joseph Smith had been assassinated, but the Romney family stayed behind for a time to finish work on the temple. The Romneys were too destitute to proceed directly to Salt Lake City as part of the wagon trains organized by Brigham Young. Instead, they had to join a group of impoverished Mormons living in places like Burlington, Iowa and St. Louis, Missouri while Miles the elder attempted to accumulate the resources necessary for the journey west. After four years of this nomadic existence, the family was able to begin a 1300 mile trek to Salt Lake City. Here Miles Romney was immediately put to work on the Salt Lake City Temple.

During the Utah War of 1857-58, George Romney, the eldest son of Miles A. Romney and Elizabeth, joined a Brigade of Mormon Danite militia preparing to hold a line of trenches blocking passage through Echo Canyon, the principal route for forces arriving from Colorado and further east. George Romney was thus ready to take up arms and wage civil war against the United States Army units under General A. S. Johnston sent by President Buchanan to put down Brigham Young's attempt at theocratic secession. George's younger brother Miles Park Romney wanted to join the Danites in the Echo Canyon trenches, but Mormon authorities ordered him to remain in Salt Lake City. [271]

Mitt Romney usually avoids discussing any of these topics, particularly polygamy and treason. But Mitt had said, concerning these events, "they were trying to build a generation out there in the desert, and so he [Miles P. Romney] took additional wives as he was told to do. And I must admit I can't imagine anything more awful than polygamy." [272] This is the same fictitious argument peddled by Glenn Beck, who describes polygamy as a practical response by the Mormons to a demographic crisis caused by having so many men killed by persecuting mobs. In reality, Mormon polygamy was started by Joseph Smith and his inner circle in the early 1830s, probably before any Mormons were killed.

So this is doubletalk. Romney has told us that he loves his Mormon faith, which is the faith of his fathers. A central aspect of the Mormon creed, especially after the 1850s, is the open practice of polygamy by the entire Mormon community, including the rank-and-file. The GOP candidate, we fear, is talking out of both sides of his mouth. After the I890s, the practice of polygamy was supposed to be limited to the afterlife, but it was continued surreptitiously.

HANNAH HOOD HILL ROMNEY: A VICTIM OF POLYGAMY AND ABANDONMENT

Miles P. Romney was a Mormon true believer and fanatic of the Latter-day Saints. He was also a hard-line polygamist. When Miles P. Romney turned 18, Brigham Young ordered him to get married as soon as possible. Miles P. Romney chose Hannah Hood Hill, a recently arrived 19-year-old woman from Toronto, Canada. Shortly after Miles had married Hannah, he was ordered by Brigham Young to become a Mormon missionary in Britain. Hannah Romney had to support herself as a washerwoman, drudging "all day from sun up to sundown for a dollar." [273] She could have sued Miles Romney for child support, but the Mormon-controlled probate courts would of course have thrown out her case.

The unfortunate Hannah Hood Hill Romney (1842-1929), who was thus forced to accept polygamy and menial labor, wrote a memoir in which she described the difficulty of sharing her husband with another woman. Mitt discussed the case of Hannah with Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker in 2002: "She talks about how she and her husband wept together when he was asked by Brigham Young to marry another woman," Romney said at that time, and added: "My great-grandmother prepared a room for this new wife and knitted her a rag rug. Brigham Young ultimately asked him to take five additional wives. It was the great trial of the early Mormon pioneers." Romney told Wright that when his father ran for President his friends kidded him that there wouldn't be enough room in the White House for a family gathering. "My dad had something like two hundred and thirty-two first cousins," Romney said. [274] The moral of this tragic story in Romneyland: too bad for poor old Hannah. If the status of women is one of the best barometers for the progress of civilization, the Mormons surely qualify as barbarians.

MILES P. ROMNEY SLANDERS UNITED STATES FOR BRITISH SAINTS

When Miles P. Romney got to Britain, he penned a savage attack on the United States government under the headline "Persecution" for The Millennial Star of October 1864. Miles P. Romney attempted to portray the Mormons exclusively as victims of evil forces in America: "Many, now, wonder why it is that we are so despised," Miles wrote. "Many likewise, will argue ... that if we had the Truth we would not be so despised by the great majority of mankind." But Miles argued that "from the earliest ages of the history of man, Truth and those who strictly adhere to its principles have been unpopular." [275] Miles P. Romney thus comes across as self-righteous and focused on the sufferings of Mormons, not of slaves, while ignoring the greater suffering caused by the Civil War as a product of the same principles of secessionism this young Romney embraced.

In another article, Miles P. Romney wrote: "The Lord has said that his people should no longer be driven from their homes; they are now in the 'secret chambers of the Lord,' and they are living in peace and safety, while their persecutors are suffering death and destruction. The judgments of the Almighty have overtaken the wicked; the American Republic has met with punishment for the rejection of the testimony of the servants of God, and the same awaits every other people who persecute the Saints of God and repent not of their sins, for thus the Lord has spoken through his servants. Then why not take warning by the history of the past?" [276]

"The Saints have a form of godliness, and enjoy the power thereof this causes the ministers to feel quite uncomfortable, because they know their old crazy, shattered craft is in great danger of being wrecked, and, likewise, that finally the Saints will take the lead in the fashion ... [Utah's] brave sons are taught from their infancy to respect and protect female virtue as they would with their lives. Hence, the wicked and corrupt, because their deeds are evil, do not like the Society of the people of God .... Here again that we are out of fashion, which causes the wicked and corrupt to despise us as they did Jesus and his humble followers." [277]


October 1864 was a time when American patriots were fighting under Grant before Petersburg, under Sherman in Georgia, under Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and under George Thomas in Tennessee. It was just a few weeks before the decisive election of November 1864, in which a defeat for Abraham Lincoln would have meant the destruction of the Union. It was at this time that Romney's ancestor, Miles P. Romney, whose portrait hangs in the foyer of Mitt Romney's palatial home in Belmont, Massachusetts, chose to attack the United States from abroad. How much of the treasonous spirit of Miles P. Romney lives on in his great-grandson Mitt?

Miles P. Romney returned to Utah in October J 865, and Hannah Romney was granted a brief interlude of happiness. This ended in 1867, when Brigham Young ordered Miles to join the ranks of the polygamists by taking a second wife. "Brother Miles, I want you to take another wife," the Prophet said. Like any normal woman, Hannah Romney fell into despair: "I felt that was more than I could endure, to have him divide his time and affections. I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow .... If anything will make a woman's heart ache it is for her husband to take another wife, but I put my trust in my heavenly father and prayed and prayed with him to give me strength to bear this trial .... 1 was able to live in the principle of polygamy and give my husband many wives." The wretched Hannah was forced to prepare a room for her husband's new concubine. [278]

MILES P. ROMNEY A HOUSE SERVANT FOR BRIGHAM YOUNG

The tyrant Brigham Young then ordered his slavishly loyal retainer Miles P. Romney to sell his home in Salt Lake City at the drop ofa hat, and move his family to the town of St. George in desolate Southwest Utah. The reason was that Brigham Young wanted to create a kind of winter palace for himself in the St. George region. Miles A. Romney, despite his advanced age, accompanied his son and took part in the building projects: "the Romneys were also hired by Young to help build this winter home in St. George. Father and son took on the task with zeal, constructing one of the era's most lavish residences in Utah, an adobe and sandstone dwelling with high ceilinged rooms and an elaborate porch painted red and green." [279] The Romneys can thus be seen as family retainers for the hardened traitor and secessionist, the anti-American Brigham Young.

In the meantime, the inevitable tragedy of polygamy was playing out in the Miles P. Romney household. Hannah wrote that his second wife "was very jealous of me. She wanted all my husband's attention. When she couldn't get it there was always a fuss in the house. [Miles] being a just man, didn't give way to her tantrums." [280] This second marriage soon ended in divorce.

Politicians in Washington were now attempting to enforce the federal laws outlawing polygamy, and one such measure passed the House of Representatives. Miles P. Romney and four other Mormon leaders produced a statement in 1870 declaring that "the antipolygamy bill... is an act of ostracism, never before heard of in the Republican government and its parallel hardly to be found in the most absolute despotism, disenfranchising and incriminating as it does, 200,000 free and loyal citizens, because of a particular tenet in their religious faith." This same reasoning could have been used to defend widow-burning or human sacrifice, both mandated by existing religions. Friends and puppets of the Saints made sure this bill never passed the Senate. [281]

Hannah gave birth to Gaskell Romney, the grandfather of the current Republican candidate. Two years after that, Miles became acquainted with Catherine Cottam, considered the prettiest girl in St. George, and decided to add her to his harem. The two were married in Salt Lake City on September 15, 1873. Poor Hannah recalled that she had to "do my duty" even "if my heart did ache ... many nights I would cry myself to sleep." [282]

In 1877, the elderly Miles A. Romney was seriously injured at the age of 70 while doing construction work at the Mormon Tabernacle of St. George, Utah. His son, who had now acquired a reputation as a wino, responded by adding a third wife.

MILES P. ROMNEY SENT TO ARIZONA TO PRACTICE POLYGAMY

At this point, the theocratic dictatorship of the Mormon Church had a new brainstorm. A new attempt would be made to create Mormon communities throughout the Great Basin, replacing those which had been liquidated by Brigham Young in 1857 when he called back all the isolated outposts to prepare for war against the United States. At this point, the Romneys were ordered to leave everything they had built a second time and trek some 400 miles southeast across the Colorado River to St. John's. Arizona.

Polygamy as a political issue now became the dominant question in the lives of Romney and his family in Arizona. The federal government was attempting once again to suppress polygamy, now under a new statute, the Edmonds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882, which was backed up by federal marshals. Local newspapers called for action, including violent action, to expel the polygamists in their midst. Romney worked with Mormon Bishop David Udall, of another well-known Mormon political family, to defend the relic of barbarism. Romney edited a newspaper called the Orion Era, which battled the anti- Mormon organ, The Apache Chief The latter paper attacked Miles P. Romney as "a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk, with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard." [283]

MITT ROMNEY'S GREAT-GREAT UNCLE GEORGE JAILED FOR POLYGAMY

Around this time, Miles' elder brother George, who had become a top Mormon official in Salt Lake City, was arrested under the federal anti-polygamy law and spent six months in prison. It was a special federal prison in Detroit, Michigan for polygamy offenders. Miles Romney sent two of his three wives into hiding in the mountains of New Mexico. He was also accused of lacking proper title to the land they occupied. Miles P. Romney had to flee to avoid arrest, and Mormon leaders ordered him to proceed to Mexico to create a new Mormon colony where the practice of polygamy could continue. In April, 1885, Miles P. Romney expatriated from the United States and fled into Mexico. He had no idea that he would never return. In Romney family values, polygamy trumped patriotism.

When given a choice between loyalty to the United States and loyalty to the principle of polygamy, Miles P. Romney immediately chose polygamy. Miles P. Romney stopped running when he reached the banks of the Piedras Verdes River, where he founded Colonia Juarez, where he and one wife lived in a hut. By 1890, the polygamist settlement was prospering.

MORMON LEADERS CLAIM TO END POLYGAMY ONLY UNDER THREAT OF EXPROPRIATION

But then, on September 24, 1890, first President William Woodruff of the LDS, realizing that Utah could never join the Union as long as polygamy was practiced on a vast scale, officially and formally repudiated the practice. The Mormon First President had undergone a miraculous revelation, perhaps having something to do with the fact that the United States government was now proposing to confiscate all the assets of the Latter-day Saints, considered as a society devoted to polygamy. It was something similar to the present day Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RlCO), but it had been specifically designed to wipe out "plural marriage." "I now publicly declare that my advice to Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriages forbidden by the law of the land," read this proclamation. [284] Romney took refuge in a quibble about whether the reference here was to the laws of the United States or to Mexico, where the suppression of polygamy was much less energetic. In 1897, disregarding the directive of the first presidency, Miles P. Romney, by now aged 53, married yet another wife, a wealthy widow named Emily Henrietta Eyring Snow. At this point he had four wives and 30 children.

ROMNEYS LEAD MORMON POLYGAMIST COLONY IN MEXICO

Miles P. Romney was by 1897 the leader of an autonomous fundamentalist/polygamist community in defiance of the directives of the official Mormon Church -- a situation not unlike that of polygamist theocrat Warren Jeffs, who was recently sentenced to life in federal prison.

At the same time, the 1890 Mormon church decree directed against polygamy was more of a public relations gesture than an actual prohibition. So many Mormons stayed in polygamous marriages and contracted new ones that the church hierarchy realized that a backlash from the federal government might soon ensue. Therefore, a decade and a half after the first ban on polygamy, a second one was solemnly promulgated. But the second ban did not stop the First President of the Latter-day Saints, by now the Prophet Joseph Smith's nephew Joseph Fielding Smith, from continuing to live in polygamy and from continuing to induct more wives into the harems of other Mormon Saints.

Lawrence Wright recalls that "When Congress demanded that furtive polygamists be rooted out, Joseph F. Smith, who was a nephew of the founder and had become president of the Church, issued a Second Manifesto, in 1906, in which he declared that anyone who participated in the practice would be excommunicated. Nonetheless, Smith himself continued to perform secret plural marriages." Another antinomian First President caught lying! In any case, starting in 1933 Church President Heber J. Grant began yet another campaign to convince the American public that the Mormons had turned away from polygamy. [285] After the death of Heber J. Grant in 1945, Mormon First Presidents have no longer practiced polygamy in public.

MITT ROMNEY 2004: POLYGAMY A LEGITIMATE "RELIGIOUS BELIEF"

Mitt Romney presents a sketch of these events in his 2004 book, Turnaround, obviously written to assist his gubernatorial and later presidential ambitions. The remarkable thing about this account is that the word "polygamy" never once appears, despite the fact that the peregrinations of the Romney family were dictated by the need to flee United States law enforcement in order to maintain this relic of barbarism. Instead, as a good Mormon boy, Romney tries to portray his ancestors as victims: "theirs was a life of toil and sacrifice, of complete devotion to a cause. They were persecuted for their religious beliefs but they went forward undaunted." [286] We are not told that the issue was not simply a belief, but the institution of polygamy, which has been alien to Western civilization for two millennia. The implicit idea is that the claim of a mountebank like Joseph Smith trumps the public laws of the United States.

MITT ROMNEY 2010: US BAN ON POLYGAMY IS "RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION"

In Romney's more recent 2010 campaign biography, written with his eyes exclusively on the White House, this same conception prevails. Here he dispenses with Miles Senior and Miles Jr., and goes directly to his father George. "My father." writes Romney, "knew what it meant to pursue the difficult. He was born in Mexico, where his Mormon grandparents had moved to escape religious persecution." [287] How interesting that Mitt Romney in the year 2010 still regards federal efforts to suppress polygamy as a form of religious persecution. Will he demand that reparations be paid to the long-suffering Mormon Saints for the federal tampering with their peculiar institution?

At the same time, Romney is uncomfortably aware that his family choice of polygamy over loyalty to the United States may create a problem. In Turnaround, he tries to get around this issue by stressing that the mere fact of fleeing to Mexico carried no hint of anti-Americanism: "despite emigrating, my great-grandfather never lost his love of country. He had an abiding loyalty to America and a deep interest in politics." [288] Why, Romney tells us, Miles Jr. was even a Democrat, and a supporter of Grover Cleveland, the president who turned over control of the US public debt to J.P. Morgan acting for the City of London! Surely it would be evidence of anti-Mormon bigotry if we were to read disloyalty into Miles Junior's repudiation of the United States, including during the Civil War, when national existence itself was at stake. Here again we see the typical 19th century Mormon pattern of loud protestations of constitutional loyalty, combined with betrayal of the nation in practical actions.

Gaskell Romney, the grandfather of the current candidate, had gone to Salt Lake City for the usual course of Mormon indoctrination. In 1895, he married Anna Amelia Pratt, the granddaughter of Parley P. Pratt, one of the stars of the first generation of Mormon leaders. Pratt had married 12 wives, and had been selected by Joseph Smith as an apostle to the British. Parley P. Pratt was also the Paris of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, since it was his carrying off of an Arkansas woman (the Helen of Troy of this tragedy) which had provided Brigham Young with the pretext for the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. It is thanks to this connection that the Romneys joined the ranks of Mormon royalty. [289]

NEW YORK WORLD (1870): THE PRATTS (ROMNEY'S FAMILY) ORIGINATED MORMONISM

Edward Tullidge, in an article published in the New York World on September 25, 1870, paid tribute to the central importance of Parley Pratt in shaping the entire Mormon project. "Parley and Orson Pratt stand out incomparably beyond their compeers. They were not so much society builders as Brigham Young, but they were far more apostolic. Indeed, Brigham has grown out of such men as the Pratts. It is questionable if Brigham has made 20 converts in all his life .... Orson and Parley Pratt have directly or indirectly converted 20,000 to Mormonism. Ask the people what brought them into the church, and you would hear from every direction Parley Pratt's 'Voice of Warning,' or 'Orson Pratt's Tracts,' until it would almost seem to you that the Pratts had created the church. Indeed, the best part of Mormon theology has been derived from them, and so it may be said that they also, to a great extent, originated Mormonism." [290]

Romney's pride in having Parley P. Pratt as an ancestor is prominent down to the present day. In Romney's ghostwritten campaign biography Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games, Romney introduces this key figure thus: "my ancestors were Mormon pioneers who made the arduous journey across what was then Indian Country to the Salt Lake Valley. The precipitous mountain pass that led the pioneers down into the Salt Lake Valley and still is the route of access from the east on Interstate 80, was first explored by my great-great grandfather, Parley P. Pratt. He had worked a road up along 'Big Canyon Creek" as an act of speculation when his crop failed in the summer of 1849. He charged tolls to prospectors making their way to California at the height of the Gold Rush and even had a Pony Express station commissioned along his pass." Already here, the pattern of speculation and privatizing public resources is clear to be seen. But these are the least of Parley P. Pratt's abuses.

According to the official Romney family historiography, Gaskell chose not to follow his father down the traditional Mormon path to polygamy. We are told that, despite the fact that the entire purpose of the Mormon colony in Mexico was to cultivate polygamy, Gaskell was content with a single wife. This question must remain open for the time being. In 1907, Gaskell and his wife Anna became the parents of George Wilcken Romney, the future president of American Motors, Governor of Michigan, and father of the current Republican presidential contender. The Romneys by now were wealthy ranchers.

ROMNEY CLAN WANTED TO STAY IN MEXICO, BUT PANCHO VILLA DROVE THEM OUT

The Romney clan had made their final choice to abandon the United States forever because polygamy was more important to them. The Romneys might never have returned, had they not been driven out by the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution broke out when the armies of Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata rebelled against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Pancho Villa's northern army soon took over the state of Chihuahua, and began to carry out a land reform in a country in which 95% of the land had been owned by 5% of the population. The revolutionaries were understandably not impressed by the assurances of neutrality offered by the Mormons, who counted as very rich farmers and had gotten along very nicely with the tyrant Porfirio Diaz. Revolutionary forces demanded that the Romney family contribute their guns and their horses. Gaskell's half brother Junius refused to cooperate, saying that he "would die before ordering our people to give up their arms." [291] Within a few days, 2,300 of the 4,000 Mormons who had resided in the polygamist colony were fleeing north towards Texas.

The remark by Junius Romney just cited illustrates once again the fanatical Mormon reliance on deadly force which has gotten them into so much trouble, again and again and again. The constant harping on killing and vengeance which we observe in so many Mormons from Joseph Smith on down is of course totally alien to Christian doctrine. The Mormon insistence on armed militia and private armies carrying out the policies of the theocracy has repeatedly generated a military backlash from those around them. Who lives by the sword will die by the sword, but the Mormons have never been able to learn this lesson. Armed struggle against the United States was implanted in the early Mormon DNA, and has never been removed, as we can see in southern Utah and northern Arizona even today.

GEORGE ROMNEY ACCUSES PANCHO VILLA OF THE POLITICS OF ENVY

George Romney later wrote of these events in his campaign autobiography, The Concerns of a Citizen. Here we can see that George Romney was infected by the same obsessive materialism that we find in his son Mitt -- a materialism which is of course rooted in the doctrine of the Mormon Church, where God and Jesus are supposed to be material beings just like human beings, rather than existing as spirits. This is, after all, the church where Joseph Smith promised Heber Kimball, one of his acolytes, an estate bordering his own in heaven.

Looking back at the Mexican Revolution from Michigan in 1968, George Romney whined that his family had to be considered among "the first displaced persons of the 20th century." This reflects astounding ignorance and concern with one's own problems while ignoring much more serious difficulties faced by others. The first displaced persons of the 20th century may well have been the Afrikaners or Boers of South Africa, who were put into concentration camps by the British colonialists. There was also the war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire starting in 1911 -- a war which took place largely in what is today's Libya. George Romney ignored all of this, in order to nurse his own grievance -- a typical Mormon stance. Elsewhere in this book, George Romney presents himself as a member of the most persecuted religious minority in the history of the United States.

According to George Romney, the Mexican Revolution was based on envy. He wrote: "I was kicked out of Mexico when I was five years old because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people ... became prosperous." George Romney also alleged that "the Mexicans thought if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn't work that way, of course." [292]

The notion that any principled objection to the outrageously inequitable distribution of income in the United States represents sheer envy has of course become a staple of the Romney for President campaign. The unprecedented income disparities in this country have destroyed any illusions of upward social mobility, leaving the United States with a more rigid class system than any country in Western Europe with the sole exception of the oligarchical paradise, Great Britain. But for Mitt Romney, this topic is taboo -- except in "quiet rooms."

George Romney also reflects a racist spite against the Mexicans who wanted a land reform. He implies that the Mexicans were too backward to administer the farms created by the Mormons after their confiscation and land reform had been carried out. This must be considered the politics of greed.

MITT'S COUSIN PARK ROMNEY: MORMON CHURCH IS "AN AMERICAN CULT"

One prominent dissident in the Romney clan is Mitt Romney's second cousin, Park Romney, who warns that the Mormon Church is "an American cult." Park Romney warns against putting cousin Mitt in the White House. His reason is that "obedience to the leadership of the Mormon Church is part of the covenant of the temple ordinances to which Mitt Romney is absolutely a party." [293] Park Romney also says that the LDS authorities carry on "brainwashing."

After scorning and reviling the United States government for decades, and swearing to exact revenge from the American people, the Romneys now demanded that the US government make good some of their losses. Thanks to this lobbying, the Congress established a $100,000 relief fund for Mormon refugees. Even under these conditions, the Mormons hesitated to commit themselves to a future in the United States. The El Paso Herald of October 25, 1912, reported that Gaskell Romney and his family, including son George, had fled to Los Angeles "until it is safe for his family to return to the colonies." But the Mexican Revolution would go on, and there would be no return. Gaskell moved to Salt Lake City, and -- doubtless with a little help from his fellow Mormon Saints -- rebuilt his fortunes. Then came the Great Depression, and the Romneys were not immune.

Gaskell proved as tenacious in attempting to extract payment for damages from the Mexican government as his grandson Mitt has shown himself tenacious in seeking the presidency. In 1938, Gaskell, a reactionary Republican, prevailed in the lawsuit Gaskell Romney v. United States of Mexico, and was able to collect $9,163. [294]

GEORGE ROMNEY JOINS ALCOA, PART OF NAZI CARTEL SYSTEM

George Romney attended George Washington University in Washington, DC, and went to work for US Senator David Walsh, a Democrat of Massachusetts. George Romney then traded on this Senate connection to get a job with the Aluminum Company of America. George Romney was soon a lobbyist for Alcoa.

The Aluminum Corporation of America was controlled by the Mellon, Davis, and Duke families. Alcoa was part of the Nazi-dominated world aluminum cartel, and it attempted to keep its cartel arrangements in force as long as possible. According to George Seldes, "by its cartel agreement with I. G. Farben, controlled by Hitler, Alcoa sabotaged the aluminum program of the United States Air Force. The Truman Committee heard testimony that Alcoa's representative, A. H. Bunker, $1-a-year head of the aluminum section of the Office of Production Management, prevented work on our $600,000,000 aluminum expansion program. Congressman Pierce of Oregon said in May, 1941: 'To date, 137 days or 37-1/2 percent of a year's production has been wasted in the effort to protect Alcoa's monopolistic position .... This delay, translated into planes, means 10,000 fighters or 1,665 bombers." [295] George Romney was a flack for these pro-fascist policies. Alcoa was a part of a massive sitdown strike by US corporate executives between May and October 1940, aimed at sabotaging Roosevelt's defense preparedness program, and logistical support for the survival of Great Britain.

In the words of US Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941: "If America loses the war it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America."

GEORGE ROMNEY AS FLACK FOR PRO-FASCIST SABOTEURS AT GM AND FORD

George Romney then became the chief of the Detroit office of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, a post which he held during all the years of World War II. He thus represented the big car companies. Who was George Romney working for in his new job?

One leading figure was Henry Ford, the notorious anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer whose portrait for many years hung behind Hitler's desk in the Brown House, the Nazi party headquarters in Munich. Hitler had gotten money from Henry Ford even before his abortive 1923 beerhall putsch. Ford was the owner of his own German automobile company, the Ford-Werke of Cologne, which rapidly converted to serve the Nazi war economy. In the United States, Ford was supposed to create a bomber plant at Willow Run, Michigan, but his approach was so incompetent that bomber production did not begin until the middle of 1943.

Henry Ford later hired a notorious Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, who had been the main spokesman of the America First Committee of Roosevelt haters and fascist supporters.

George Romney was also working for General Motors, which at this time was controlled by the Dupont family. Dupont had important cartel arrangements with I. G. Farben. Irenee Dupont was a notorious admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. Top GM official Alfred P. Sloan was a notorious reactionary who funded anti-union and pro-fascist groups like the Crusaders, the American Liberty League, and the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. General Motors was tied to Nazi Germany because of its ownership of the Adam Opel AG car company, which had reconverted to making tanks and trucks for the Nazis

ROMNEY'S BOSS KNUDSEN OF GM SAW HITLER'S GERMANY AS "MIRACLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY"

General Motors President William S. Knudsen told the New York Times on October 6, 1933 that Hitler's Germany was "the miracle of the 20th century." General Motors was responsible for the Los Angeles tank arsenal, a factory which failed to produce any complete armored vehicles until May of 1943. General Motors was also the main contractor for the M-7 tank, a project which was simply abandoned because of failures and delays.

Seldes notes: "The Big Three of the auto industry, General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, refused to convert to war production, refused to expand plants, refused to give up civilian production, insisted on government cash and business as usual, thus delaying war production of tanks, guns and planes while labor offered excellent war plans." [296] Despite World War II, George Romney thus found a way to remain loyal to the anti-American tradition of his Mormon forebears. How he managed to avoid military service is another interesting question.

George Romney was then hired by Nash Kelvinator Corporation, which later merged with Hudson Motor Car Co. to become American Motors Corp. American Motors later absorbed Studebaker Packard.

GEORGE ROMNEY BACKED PRO-FASCIST BUCHMANITE IDEOLOGY OF "MORAL RE-ARMAMENT"

George Romney was also deeply interested in the international movement known as Moral Rearmament, also known as Buchmanism, after its American founder, Dr. Frank Buchman.

Seldes describes Buchman as "a notorious fascist, who had endorsed Hitler many years ago, and who made an excellent living getting money from big business men to preach a 'philosophy' of appeasement to labor. Everyone was to cooperate, there were to be no strikes, the lion and lamb were to lie down together." Among strong backers of Buchman, Seldes lists the notoriously stingy Henry Ford, plus SS boss Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess (number three in the Nazi hierarchy), the reactionary publisher Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, William Randolph Hearst, Harvey Firestone, George Eastman, and other super-rich businessmen.

JEWISH WAR VETS CONDEMN MORAL RE-ARMAMENT AS FASCIST, ANTI-SEMITIC

The Jewish War Veterans of the United States, at their national convention, unanimously approved a resolution stating:

"Whereas, Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman, founder of Moral Rearmament, also known as the Oxford Group Movement and Buchmanism, is also the author of the expression, 'Thank God for Hitler. ... ';

Whereas, Buchman has been exposed in the British Parliament;

Whereas, Dr. Guy Emery Shipler, leading Protestant editor, has exposed the Buchmanites as largely anti-Semitic;

Whereas, Dr. Buchman has cooperated with leading Buchmanites in all enemy nations, notably Himmler, the arch murderer in Nazi Germany, and the leading Japanese war makers;

Whereas, when the call to fight Nazi-ism came in both Britain and America the Buchmanites claimed exemption from the draft saying they were really a religious movement;

Whereas, both in Britain and America public officials have denounced Buchmanites as draft dodgers, and force them to register;

Whereas, in general, the Moral Rearmament movement may be described as fascist, subsidized by native Fascists, and with a long record of collaboration with Fascists the world over;

Therefore, be it resolved by the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, that they join in denouncing Buchmanism, the Oxford Movement and Moral Rearmament as Fascist in viewpoint, as un-American, and as a menace to the world's war against the common enemy of mankind." [297]


One wonders whether George Romney used his support for Moral Re-Armament and Buchmanism as a means of escaping the draft.

Buchman told a gathering in East Ham Town Hall, London, on May 29, 1938: "The Crisis is fundamentally a moral one. The nations must re-arm morally. Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life." These ideas were later the basis of the 1965-2000 musical spin-off operation called Up with People, which featured relentlessly banal singing productions by clean-living, straight-arrow young people. Up with People was prominent during the last years of the Cold War, after which it lost its corporate funding, and was designed to counter communism and socialism on the one hand, and the hippie subculture on the other. The internal life of the group was built around reactionary politics, with a definite cultist overtone involving arranged marriages. The affinity with Mormondom is quite evident.

Seldes sums up:" ... Moral Rearmament was pretty well discredited when its founder, Reverend Dr. Frank N. P. Buchman, was publicly quoted as thanking God for Hitler." [298]

GEORGE ROMNEY'S 1968 WHITE HOUSE BID BASED ON MORAL RE-ARMAMENT

George Romney's personal papers from the 1920s to 1973 are available for scholars in the Michigan Historical Collections in the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan. According to the overview available online, about 15 boxes of George Romney's correspondence deal with either Moral Rearmament directly, or with Governor Romney's Governor's Ethical and Moral Panel which he set up in order to promote these ideas.

In his role as liberal Republican governor of Michigan, George Romney came under attack from labor unions, which tried to expose him with a pamphlet entitled "Who is the Real George Romney?" One of the themes was that Governor Romney deliberately misled voters, showing that he had talked on the stump of Michigan's need for 100,000 new jobs, but later prevaricated that he never promised to create these jobs. [299]

When George Romney ran for president in 1967-68, he assumed the profile of a stern Buchmanite moralist calling his fellow citizens to account for their multiple failings. He announced that the problems of the United States were due to rampant godlessness, and to public immorality. He lamented the decline of religious belief, and of virginity. He warned against a disintegration of the family which was robbing the American people of their wholesome traditional values. George Romney was at the same time very vague about the issues. He suggested that the solution to these problems was to be found in personal responsibility, and in traditional American principles. The remedy would have to start in the home. His campaign, he said, was designed to be an appeal to conscience that could begin a crusade. But he did say that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired -- the traditional Mormon line. Like father, like son.

Some concluded that George Romney felt that his actions were ordered by God, and that his opponents were necessarily the Devil's disciples. The New York Times noted in 1965 that Romney's critics saw him as a "sanctimonious, intractable, egotistical tyrant." [300]

"At a Romney campaign stop in San Francisco, a black teenager turned to her boyfriend and said 'That Romney, he's a pretty cool governor.' The answer was, 'He belongs to a church where you ain't got no soul.'" A black woman in Atlanta asked Romney how he could feel comfortable in the racist Mormon Church, but he was unable to reply.

The New York Times Magazine commented that "the impromptu speech in which Romney is most completely at ease is the inspirational appeal, with its stress on the divinely inspired nature of American government and the sure ability of every individual to achieve happiness and success through faith and good works." Like father, like son.

GEORGE ROMNEY PREACHES STOICAL ACCEPTANCE OF DEATH TO VIETNAM G.I.S

Time magazine described Romney's trip to Vietnam, noting his tendencies to "lecture the troops" and "even to preach." Incredibly, Romney recommended "stoical acceptance of death on the battlefield." In the holiday spirit at a Christmas dinner at Cu Chi, Romney told the G.I.s "we have to lose ourselves for others. Some have to lose lives young and some when we are older." A black Marine asked Romney, "Is the governor letting Negroes into his church yet?" Perhaps this incident can help us understand why Mitt Romney's speech to the Republican national convention was so utterly devoid of compassion for wounded veterans and their suffering families.

Many accounts attribute George Romney's failure to take the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 to his complaint that he had been "brainwashed" by the U.S. Army during his Vietnam trip, but in reality Romney was hurt more by his vagueness and lack of specific programs on current issues, even racist practices of his Mormon Church, and his sanctimonious piety, which some saw as hypocrisy because of the interests it served.

MITT ROMNEY COVERS UP LDS OLYMPIC CORRUPTION

The sharp contrast between self-righteous moralism and corruption can also be observed in Mitt Romney's career. One key example is Romney in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Our thesis here is that Romney was called in to carry out a cover-up benefiting Governor Mike Leavitt and top officials of the Mormon Church.

In his earlier campaign biography, Turnaround, Mitt Romney admits that he was personally acquainted with Tom Welch, the dominant figure of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, both leading Mormon Saints, were indicted in US federal court for a systematic campaign of bribery of Olympic and foreign officials in order to secure the 2002 Winter Olympics for Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake City boosters had been edged out for the previous 1998 Winter Games by Nagano, Japan, and they attributed this to the bribes and expensive gifts, including laptop computers, which were distributed by the Nagano backers to officials of the International Olympic Committee and others. So, the Salt Lake City committee decided to fight back with systematic bribery.

Their chosen vehicle was an entity calling itself the National Olympic Committee Assistance Program, which was to "provide tuition, travel, and lodging expenses to athletes and coaches from third world nations" -- in itself a legitimate practice allowed as humanitarian aid under Olympic rules. But when the payments were made to relatives of Olympic officials who were not athletes or coaches, the line into bribery had been crossed. Investigation revealed "nearly $400.000 in payment for education and 'athletic training' made to 13 people, six of whom appeared to be relatives of voting IOC members." The countries involved were primarily in Africa and in Europe, and included Mali, Cameroon, Swaziland, South Korea, Finland, and the Republic of Congo. Three African voting members of the International Olympic Committee had received direct bribes. [301]

Romney was obviously called in to make sure that Welch and Johnson were made the scapegoats for behavior which in all probability involved high officials of the State of Utah like Governor Mike Leavitt, the City of Salt Lake, and the Mormon hierarchy itself. (This pattern recalls Brigham Young's 1877 use of John D. Lee as his own scapegoat for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.) In fact, Welch and Johnson always contended that they were acting with the complete approval of higher-ups. As Romney writes, "It has always been Jim's and Dave"s assertion that other members of the board knew of the suspect payments being made from the fund, including the governor."302 This means Mike Leavitt, public apologist for polygamy, active in covering up the actions of his ancestor Thomas Leavitt in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, and today the boss of Mitt Romney's transition team. A local television station noted that "Welch and Johnson feel powerful leaders. like Governor Mike Leavitt and Salt Lake Olympic President Mitt Romney, have orchestrated a campaign to make Welch and Johnson scapegoats for the scandal." [303]

CORRUPTION CHARGES IN LDS OLYMPIAD THROWN OUT BY MORMON JUDGE DAVID SAM

According to Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker, "the United States Attorney's office indicted two of the Salt Lake committee's leaders, David Johnson and Thomas Welch, both prominent members of the Mormon Church, on bribery and other charges. It was expected that their trial might implicate other leading members of the Mormon establishment, including Michael O. Leavitt, the governor of Utah. [In August 2001] the federal judge in the case, David Sam, who was also a Mormon, threw out the key charges, calling them an 'uninvited federal intrusion' into the state's affairs." The Mormon judge Sam dismissed the entire case in November 2001. [104]

Welch and Johnson escaped conviction. What happened to them reminds us of how Brigham Young shifted exclusive responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre to John D. Lee, the only person to be executed for that crime. In the 2002 Winter Olympics scandal, Mitt Romney made sure that none of the bigger Mormon fish were caught in the net. The close alliance between Mitt Romney and Mike Leavitt which we see on display today was actually forged in the midst of a cover-up of Olympic proportions which saved not only Leavitt, but unknown bigwigs of the antinomian Mormon Saints.

Romney has always harped on the openness and transparency of his efforts in regard to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. However, the main document archive left over from that event has always been strictly closed to reporters and researchers. As of this writing, Romney is promising that these documents will be released before November 2012. However, insiders have admitted that this archive is already "pretty well scrubbed," with "all legally privileged or confidential information" already long since destroyed. [305] In particular, all internal documents were destroyed in 2002. [306]
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

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Part 2 of 2

MORMON FRATERNIZATION WITH THE NAZIS

George Romney, as we have seen, was incapable of taking a strong anti-fascist stance, and was profoundly influenced by the pro-Nazi appeasement rhetoric of the Moral Rearmament Movement. In these tendencies, George Romney was not acting alone, but mirrored the general orientation of the Mormon Church, which saw its cooperation with the Nazis based on appeasement.

Around 1930, Germany had a larger number of Mormon Saints than any other country except the United States. It was estimated that there were 12,000 Mormons in Germany. Total LDS Church membership was estimated at 670,000 in the year 1930. [307]

The ideological affinities between Mormonism and National Socialism are easy to see. Both belief systems had a strong racist component, with the white race classified as axiomatically superior, while black people were viewed as structurally inferior. The Mormon perspective of making the Lamanite Indians become "white and delightsome" had a certain appeal to the devotees of National Socialist blood and soil thinking. The Mormon notion of eternal progression with the final goal of becoming a God was not so different from the concept of the Nietzschean Superman or Ubermensch.

From the very beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933, the Mormon Church was singled out for privileged treatment. After the Nazi seizure of power, most religious organizations except the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Reformed (or Calvinist) churches were dissolved. The Nazis terminated 34 religious denominations and sects, with special attention for religions that were considered American cults, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Anabaptists, and Seventh-day Adventists; the Baha'i movement was also prohibited. The Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted with special ferocity, because they refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and refused to serve in the armed forces.

1933: DESERET NEWS LAUDS HITLER, GOEBBELS FOR "WORD OF WISDOM"

During the first year that the Nazis were in power, the Mormon Saints signaled from Salt Lake City that their goal was to cooperate with the Nazis. A favorable portrayal of the new Nazi regime is contained in the article "Mormonism' in the New Germany" by Dale Clark, published in the December 9, 1933 LDS Church News, published in the official The Deseret News. [308]

Clark starts off by reassuring his readers that the Nazis have not interfered with Mormon missionary work, and by stressing the affinities between the LDS and the NSDAP: "The rise of the Hitler movement in Germany caused a great many to fear that religious activity in missionary work would meet with disastrous opposition. Since the National Socialist party had come to power a few sects have been prohibited or restricted, but activities in the' Mormon' Church have been carried on about the same as before. As a matter of fact, a number of interesting parallels can be seen between the Church and some of the ideas and policies of the National Socialists."

The Mormons were not interested in these "few sects (which) have been prohibited or restricted," be they Jews, radical Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, or others. None of them is mentioned in the article. The Mormons, as always, were relentlessly focused on their own persecution narrative, to the total exclusion of suffering by other groups.

Clark reports that the Nazis consider their introduction of fast days to finance their Winterhilfe cold weather charity campaign as an example of Hitler's organizing genius, but also comments that this is merely what the Mormons have been doing all along: "it was just another application of the effective method that has been in use in the "Mormon' church for decades. The author particularly admires the Nazi Winterhilfe because it "has the important purpose of developing that spirit of sacrifice that is so being stressed in the new Germany, and also of creating more of a feeling of unity and brotherhood through voluntary mutual help."

DESERET NEWS: HITLER LOVES CLEAN LIVING, NO ALCOHOL OR SMOKING

The Nazis also seemed to be respecting some of Joseph Smith's prohibitions, the author points out: "there is another noticeable trend in the 'Mormon' direction. It is a very well-known fact that Hitler observes a form of living which 'Mormons' term the 'Word of Wisdom.' He will not take alcohol, does not smoke, and is very strict about his diet, insisting on plain and wholesome foods, largely vegetarian."

This article promotes the cult of personality around Hitler which was being fostered by the National Socialists. Concerning the Nazi leader, we read that:

"As a specimen of physical endurance Hitler can easily take his place along side the athletes who are usually taken as classic examples. His 14 year struggle which brought him to power in Germany put him to a terrific physical strain. Besides the great responsibility there has been trials and conflicts, and campaigning so strenuous that it has required his attention night and day, many times making it necessary for him to travel great distances by auto or plane, catching up on his sleep underway to fit him for the multitudes who would gather to hear him wherever he had time to stop."


Since church organizations in Nazi Germany had to deal with propaganda and Culture Minister Joseph Goebbels, Clark was careful to ingratiate himself with this Nazi bigwig as well. Goebbels was touted as being another follower of Joseph Smith's prohibition of alcoholic beverages: "a lady who has had several dinners that Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the conqueror of Berlin, attended told me that the rich assortment of liquors on hand were never there for his benefit. It was always necessary to serve him nonalcoholic drinks."

Our Mormon author was deeply impressed by the rise of clean living in Nazi Germany, as shown in the examples of Hitler and Goebbels: "These two colorful leaders of the new Germany, in the gigantic struggle for political supremacy, have needed capable bodies and clear brains and have trained like athletes. Their very popularity is making intemperance more unpopular. The fact that they are worshipped may be one big reason for a growing dislike for smoking and drinking in Germany today." The author does not mention that Ernst Rohm, who at the end of 1933 was still leading the SA Brownshirts, was a notorious morphine addict -- a foible he shared with other top Nazis.

The campaign against smoking has been supplemented by a decline in the use of cosmetics, the article points out: "posters from youth organizations fighting the use of tobacco have actually appeared on the street. The same movement has even extended itself to the use of cosmetics and its effectiveness may be seen by the fact that a woman recently told me that the slump in the cosmetic business was the cause of her losing her job."

This 1933 article expresses special satisfaction about the shared interest of Mormons and Nazis in the question of genealogy, which had increased in Germany because of the Nazi demand that individuals prove their status as members of the "Aryan" race. And because of this new interest, the Mormons were:

"... finding that at least one branch of their church work has received its greatest boon since Germany's adoption of Hitlerism. It was always difficult for genealogical workers to get into the archives of the recognized church to trace back family records. When the pastor learned of the intention, access to the records was often denied. Now, due to the importance given to the racial question, and the almost necessity of proving that one's grandmother was not a Jewess, the old record books have been dusted off and stand ready and waiting for use. No questions are asked. In fact some of the Saints instead of being refused by the pastors now have received letters of encouragement complimenting them for their patriotism. All genealogical workers who are interested in tracing back family history in Germany should take advantage of the present unusual opportunity." [309]


The German magazine of the Mormon Church, Der Stern, advocated a line of resignation and cooperation with the Nazi regime. In 1935, Der Stern stressed that Utah Senator Reed Smoot, a leading Mormon, had always been part of the fifth column friendly to Nazi Germany. LDS Church President Heber Grant visited Germany in 1937, and told the 12,000 Mormons living there to stay where they were, to keep the commandments, and to work for the greatest possible cooperation with the regime so the church would remain intact and missionary activity continued.

VOLKlSCHER BEOBACHTER, APRIL 1939: MORMONS, NAZIS HAVE MUCH IN COMMON

To symbolize the cordial relations between the Mormon Saints and the Nazi regime, Alfred C. Rees, the president of the West German Mormon mission, was allowed to contribute an article to the Volkischer Beobachter, the official national daily newspaper of the Nazi party, on April 14, 1939. The article, entitled "Im Lande der Mormonen" -- "In the Land of the Mormons," stresses the deep affinities and history of friendly relations between Nazi Germany and the Mormon Saints. Notice that the title of this article does not refer to the United States, but only to the land of the Mormons.

April 1939 is very late in the day. Hitler had re-armed, had re-militarized the Rhineland, had absorbed Austria through the Anschluss, had seized control of Czechoslovakia in two separate phases, had carried out the Krystallnacht pogrom of November 1938, and was loudly signaling his intention of attacking Poland. The main British pro-appeasement group, the Cliveden set, had become disillusioned with Hitler in March 1939.

Keele and Tobler summarize the Rees article as follows:

In their eagerness to coexist with the (Nazi] government, American officials of the German Church resorted to public relation efforts ... Probably the clearest example of this tendency is an article by West German Mission President Alfred C. Rees entitled "In the Land of the Mormons." The article appeared in a special issue of the Nazi Party organ Der Volkische Beobachter dated April 14, 1939. In the Editor's Preface to the article, President Rees is called 'the representative of the Church in Germany,' who 'paints for our readers a portrait of Mormonism today, a church which views the New Germany with sympathy and friendship.' Whether President Rees originally wrote the article in German or not, the language of the piece abounds in such loaded terms as Volk and Rasse (race), and a picture of Brigham Young bears the caption, 'Fuhrer der historischen Mormonenpioniere.' [Leader of the Historic Mormon Pioneers] But the significance of these linguistic gaffes is magnified by hindsight. More disturbing is the way President Rees blatantly parallels Mormonism with Nazism. As Rees warms to his topic, Mormonism begins to sound like a fulfillment of Nazi teachings, providing "the practical realization of the German ideal: 'the common good takes precedence over the individual good.'" Rees concluded by assuring his readers that "Mormons are people who put this healthy doctrine into action." Reading articles such as this, it would have been easy for a German Saint to mistakenly conclude that the seal of official Church approval had been placed on the Nazi regime." [310]


According to Keele and Tobler, some of the Mormon Saints in Germany were convinced that Hitler was an instrument of Divine Providence, since he was hastening the arrival of the millennium.

DESERET NEWS APPEASES HITLER, 1939

The Mormon appeasement line in regard to Hitler in the official publications of the Church was deeply disturbing to Fawn Brodie. She criticized the editorial position of the Deseret News, the official Mormon Church newspaper in Salt Lake City. "If the Deseret News is careful not to offend [Nazi] Germany, and I gather ... that it is falling backwards on the attempt, it is my guess that first of all the Church is afraid of complete banishment." [311] By the time Fawn Brodie wrote this in June 1939, even Sir Neville Chamberlain had been forced to condemn Hitler in public, but the Mormons held fast to their appeasement policy. Angry that the Deseret News was intent on appeasing the Nazis, and failed to condemn Nazi persecution of Jews, Fawn Brodie wrote her uncle, "I can just hear the good brethren ... at home saying -- 'of course the persecution of the Jews is terrible but God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform."' [312]

One German Mormon who did distribute leaflets calling for the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi Regime was Helmuth Hubener, who died a martyr at the age of 17 in 1942, tortured and beheaded. Hubener's story is included in the 1969 novel by Gunther Grass entitled Local Anesthetic (Ortlich betaubt). Hubener was excommunicated by local Mormon authorities before his death. Hubener's branch president was a fanatical Nazi who played Hitler's speeches on the radio for all the local Saints to hear.

The first major condemnation of Nazism by a religious leader was that of Pope Pius XI in 1937 with his encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (With burning consternation).

According to reports on the Internet, Mormon recruiting in Germany after World War II was relatively successful, since former Nazi supporters could be converted by stressing that Mormonism was a "white" religion which aimed at the racial transformation of dark skinned peoples. According to one of these accounts, "former Nazis saw in Mormonism a spiritual version of Hitler's policies."

EZRA TAFT BENSON: RACIST MORMON PROPHET (1985-1994) AND THE VIETNAM WAR

Ezra Taft Benson has been noted for his reactionary politics and his support of the rightwing extremist John Birch Society. Benson served as US Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. During this time, he made a significant contribution to the onset of the Vietnam War.

During the 1950s, the leading US expert on land reform was the agricultural economist and researcher Wolf Ladejinsky, who had worked with General MacArthur in Tokyo between 1945 and 1954 on the highly successful Japanese land reform which, for the first time in history, had broken the power of absentee landlords and established prosperous family farmers. He had also been active in mainland China under the KMT Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, and later helped design the landmark land reform carried out under Chiang's auspices in the Republic of China on Taiwan, which was one of the indispensable components of the Taiwan economic miracle. He also worked in India.

Ladej insky was land reform adviser to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam between 1955 and 1961. He was a Jew born in the Ukraine in 1899, who had studied with Rexford Tugwell at Columbia University and who became an anti-Communist New Deal Democrat. He was described as "no typical bureaucrat, but an impassioned reformer," [313] and was according to author James Michener "Communism's most implacable foe."

Ladejinsky's career was sabotaged by the reactionary Mormon Ezra Taft Benson, who revoked his security clearance, and had him fired from the post of agricultural attache in Tokyo. Benson grotesquely slandered Ladejinsky as a "security risk" and alleged without any proof that he had been a member of two Communist front organizations. Ladejinsky was quickly hired in 1955 by Harold Stassen of the US Foreign Operations Administration to work on land reform in South Vietnam. President Eisenhower was questioned about this matter, but did not offer a forceful defense of Ladejinsky. Since it was clear to all that Ladejinsky did not enjoy the full support of Eisenhower and the entire US government, he was unable to implement this program in South Vietnam. If this land reform had succeeded, the root causes of the later Vietnam War could very well have been eradicated. So perhaps we can thank the reactionary racist Mormon Prophet Ezra Taft Benson for some of the suffering of the Vietnam War.

BENSON: "CIVIL RIGHTS A TOOL OF COMMUNIST DECEPTION"

Benson's racism has been documented by his grandson, Steve Benson, who writes: "In the mid-1960s, I was in junior high school. It was a time when the nation was being rocked by the tumultuous struggle for civil rights .... During those uncertain days, I remember my grandfather telling me that Dr. King was a tool of the Communist conspiracy and urging me to read John Birch Society literature on King's supposed true nature and Communist-inspired agenda." [314] Ezra Taft Benson's daughter was a "card-carrying Bircher."

By the I960s, Ezra Taft Benson was already planning for race war: "He reassured white patriots, however, that even "if Communism comes to America ... the Negro represents only 10 percent of the population. In any all-out race war which might be triggered, there isn't a chance in the world that Communist-led Negro guerilla units could permanently hold on to the power centers of government, even if they could capture them in the first place. "' [315]

Ezra Taft Benson wrote of Martin Luther King: "The man who is generally recognized as the leader of the so-called civil rights movement today in America is a man who has lectured at a Communist training school, who has solicited funds through Communist sources, who hired a Communist as a top-level aide, who has affiliated with Communist fronts, who is often praised in the Communist press and who unquestionably parallels the Communist line. This same man advocates the breaking of the law and has been described by J. Edgar Hoover as 'the most notorious liar in the country.'"

In a letter to Mormon hotelier J. Willard Marriott, Ezra Taft Benson argued that "Martin Luther King had been affiliated with at least the following officially recognized Communist fronts," three of which he then went on to list. In the same letter, he coldly warned Marriott that "the Communists will use Mr. King's death for as much yardage as possible." Steve Benson also recalls: "'A year later, in another letter to Marriott, my grandfather continued his attack on the dead black minister, writing that 'the kindest thing that could be said about Martin Luther King is that he was an effective Communist tool. Personally, I think he was more than that.' ... My grandfather's hate-filled utterances directed at Rev. King brought like-minded rank-and-file LDS bigots out of the woodwork, rallying to his anti-Communist/anti-civil rights cause." Ezra Taft Benson published a pamphlet entitled: "Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception."

Steve Benson notes that Ezra Taft Benson"s extremism was an embarrassment, but it was a viewpoint shared by many other top Saints: When Mormon Apostle Mark E. Petersen spoke on "Race Problems-As They Affect the Church" at the BYU campus in 1954, he stated the following: " ... if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory."

Mormon racism was pervasive: "Some time before the 'revelation' [allowing blacks to enter the Mormon priesthood] came to chief 'Prophet' Spencer Kimball in June 1978, General Authority Bruce R McConkie had said: "The Blacks are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man's origin, it is the Lord's doings." [316]

The Mormon explanation for the decision to abandon open racism is this: "We are told that on June 8, 1978, it was 'revealed' to the then president, Spencer Kimball, that people of color could now gain entry into the priesthood. According to the church, Kimball spent many long hours petitioning God, begging him to give worthy black people the priesthood. God finally relented." [317]

In addition to their other racist and reactionary policies, the Mormon Church is also anti-labor, anti-worker, and anti-union. They are determined to keep Utah as a "right to work" or more accurately a union-busting or scab state where organizing for collective bargaining is practically impossible. The LDS Church has meddled blatantly in politics in order to secure these results: "As recently as 1965, church president David O. McKay wrote letters to the 11 Mormons in Congress urging them to vote against the move to repeal section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which authorizes state right to work laws." [318]

POLYGAMY: A NEW FRONT IN THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON WOMEN

"And if he had ten virgins given them to him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given it to him; therefore he is justified."

-- Joseph Smith's 1831 revelation on polygamy, Doctrine and Covenants, section 132, verse 62.


The official leadership of the Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints held fast to the Joseph Smith -- Brigham Young tradition of polygamy until 1890. At this point, polygamy was repudiated under the First Presidency of Wilford Woodruff. Woodruff had waited until the last possible moment, awaiting the outcome of an appeal before the US Supreme Court of a law which disenfranchised the Mormon LDS Church and threatened to destroy the religion altogether. Starting in the 1880s when the handwriting was on the wall, hard-line polygamists gravitated to southern Utah and northern Arizona, giving rise to the de facto theocratic communes of Hillsdale, Utah, Short Creek, Arizona, and Colorado City, Arizona. The latter two communities are located in Mohave County, where prosecutions against polygamists were attempted from the 1930s to the 1950s. According to the Los Angeles Times, there were some 30,000 polygamists in the United States west of the Mississippi at the beginning of the 21st century.

The most famous polygamist of the modern age may be Warren Jeffs of Hillsdale, Utah, leading light of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Warren Jeffs is now serving a life plus twenty years sentence in Texas after being convicted on child sex abuse charges. Jeffs has clearly been sacrificed to protect more important polygamists. At the same time, depraved libertarians are taking up the polygamy issue as a question of human rights -- on the side of the polygamists.

In the summer of20 12, Kody Brown and his four wives (Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn), all of them members of the Apostolic United Brethren and all of them stars of the TLC cable channel series Sister Wives, were in court before US District Judge Clark Waddoups to argue their case that the Utah anti-bigamy law, which might subject them to criminal prosecution, should be overturned. In Utah, bigamy is a third-degree felony carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison. The policy of the Utah Attorney General's Office is that the state will not prosecute consenting adult polygamists unless other crimes are being committed.

The Sister Wives series represents a major propaganda initiative by pro-polygamy forces, designed as an effort to humanize the horrors of plural marriage, in much the same way that The Sopranos served to humanize the Mafia.

However, Utah does not openly accept that polygamy amounts to the exercise of religious freedom. "It is not protected under religious freedom because states have the right to regulate marriage," according to Paul Murphy, the spokesman for Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. [319] Brown and his four Sister Wives are represented by Jonathan Turley, known to cable TV viewers as a constitutional law professor from George Washington University in Washington, DC who supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton a dozen years ago and then made a left turn under Bush. Turley's argument is based on a US Supreme Court ruling striking down a Texas sodomy law, based on which he argues that private intimate relationships between or among consulting adults are protected by the Constitution.

The notion that polygamy could be restored in the United States in the 21st century may appear to be an absurd contention, but a combination of right wing libertarian anarchists and left wing permissive social liberals is acting today to resurrect this relic of barbarism. Polygamy is attempting to make a comeback by attempting to establish false analogies with gay marriage or the abolition of sodomy laws. According to Jane Schacter, constitutional law professor at Stanford University: "in many ways, the movement for the rights of polygamists is just not advanced enough to the point where the claim is going to seem legitimate to the courts." She added that there is "much more acceptance of gay couples, of homosexuality in general," while polygamy "opens up a whole can of legal worms that is not really opened with the same-sex marriage issue," especially because polygamous households so often involve underaged girls. [320]

In Canada, British Columbia has been practicing a policy of not prosecuting polygamists for the past 20 years. The toleration of polygamy under the cover of religious freedom began under the left-of-center New Democratic Party. A spokeswoman for the Utahbased group Tapestry against Polygamy (TAP) criticized this Canadian neglect, pointing out that women trapped in polygamous marriages suffer appalling abuse. "Polygamists are every bit as bad as the Taliban in the way they treat women. They use them as property, they barter and trade them and they force them into marriages at very young ages." "Some polygamists demand that the women have a child per year." [321] TAP attempted to intervene at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 to call attention to the "dirty little secrets" of polygamy in places like Utah and British Columbia.

According to journalist Frank Stirk, Canada has its own polygamist Mormon theocracy in British Columbia: "in the rural area near Creston, B.C., is the 1,000 member Bountiful commune, an affiliate of a fundamentalist Mormon sect which split from the LDS Church after it renounced polygamy in 1890. Bountiful's leader is Winston Blackmore, reputed to have 30 wives and 80 children. In 1992, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recommended charges under section 239 be laid against Blackmore and Elder Dalmin Oler. But Attorney General Colin Gabelmann decided not to prosecute, after being advised that the law banning polygamy is invalid. Gabelmann also said polygamy is a 'social problem' ...." [322]

Another Canadian commentator, Susan Martinuk, predicted that "it won't be long before polygamy is viewed as a legitimate marital state in our tolerant nation." Canada may thus emerge as a world magnet for polygamists, setting the social condition of women and children back by decades or centuries.

REACTIONARY SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO WINKS AT POLYGAMY

Arizona, another part of Brigham Young's Inland Empire, also has a large polygamist population. Here, as in Utah, polygamy is outlawed by the state constitution. In 1953, law enforcement officials launched a midnight raid on the polygamist community at Short Creek, with hundreds of children being separated from their polygamous households and dozens of men indicted for bigamy and statutory rape. [323] About 20 girls between 11 and 15 years of age had been forced into polygamous unions with older men. Some 26 men later pleaded guilty on charges of unlawful cohabitation, and were given sentences of one year's probation at Mohave County Superior Court. The 40 women and 160 children were taken into protective custody by the family court in Phoenix. Two judges agreed that the welfare of the children was in danger, so the mothers and children were sent to live with Mormon families in various parts of Arizona. But this ruling was struck down by the Arizona appeals court in 1955, and this finding was upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court. How many Mormons sat on these courts? In any case, the polygamist community of Short Creek was soon restored to its status quo. After that, the elected officials of Arizona basically stopped all enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws. [324]

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, has become nationally famous as the new Bull Connor for his policies of racial profiling. Arpaio is a Romney supporter and has been endorsed by Romney. But the widespread practice of polygamy in Arizona, including Arpaio's immediate jurisdiction, is a topic scorned by Arpaio. Despite the obvious multigenerational association of the Romney family with polygamy, many journalists are also ignoring this topic, leaving it to Internet readers like this one to make the obvious connection concerning Sheriff Joe: "Why isn't he cracking down on all the polygamist Mormon communities that live in Arizona at or near the Utah border? In case Arpaio doesn't know it, polygamy is illegal in the United States, and so is child abuse." [325]

POLYGAMOUS MORMON THEOCRACIES IN UTAH AND ARIZONA TODAY

In reading about the monstrous abuses of Brigham Young's Mormon theocracy in Utah Territory -- justly labeled as a "strange system of terrorism" by President James Buchanan, many readers no doubt find it unbelievable that such an outrageous system had ever existed on the territory of the United States. But there is considerable evidence that just such a reign of terror persists in parts of the old Mormon Inland Empire down to the present day.

The localities in question are Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona (formerly called Short Creek), both controlled by the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), whose most famous member is none other than the felon Warren Jeffs. These towns, where some 10,000 polygamists are reported to have settled, have notoriously denied American citizens the equal protection of the laws, making it difficult or impossible for them to own or rent housing, receive protection from the police force, or enjoy their fair share of public services. As a recent blog entry reports,

In what is certainly a novel approach, the Department of Justice has sued two polygamist towns for religious discrimination against non-members and expelled members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). This includes "denying non-FLDS individuals housing, police protection, and access to public space and services". The joint lawsuit is against neighboring Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, which are controlled entirely by FLDS members.


According to Bob Morris, a former two-year resident in nearby Cedar City, Utah, law and order means nothing to these Mormon theocratic polygamists:

I once mentioned to someone raised in Utah that I thought hiking near polyg ("polyg" is Utah slang for polygamist) areas could be dangerous. He smiled and said, "They'd never find the body." A garbage truck driver told me he drove to remote polygamist encampments once a week. The men drag the trash bins out to the public road and stand with rifles to ensure he doesn't enter their land. [326]


According to John Doherty of Phoenix New Times, "Colorado City polygamists have thrived in the remote enclave beneath Canaan Mountain about 240 miles by highway from Mohave County's administrative center in Kingman. Prominent polygamists live in huge homes ... that house plural 'wives' and children." Colorado City is located in the so-called Arizona Strip, cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon.

The Colorado City Police Department is by all accounts controlled by polygamists. Most of the cops are reported to be polygamists, including Chief of Police Roundy. One of the main perpetrators whose case has come to light is Dan Barlow Jr., the son of Dan Barlow Sr., who was for many years Mayor and Fire Chief of Colorado City. After molesting five of his own daughters for 10 years, the younger Barlow was given a sweetheart plea bargain of one felony count of sexual abuse and was sentenced to 120 days in the county jail. The district attorney cited the wishes of the community -- where many are polygamists themselves -- for the lenient treatment. But the Mohave County Superior Court reduced the sentence to time served plus seven years probation. All in all, Barlow served 13 days in jail. Colorado City, Arizona, is a company town, and Mormon fundamentalism is the name of the company.

ORRIN HATCH, SENATOR FROM KOLOB: "POLYGAMISTS ... ARE VERY FINE PEOPLE"

In 2003, US Senator Orrin Hatch, while attending a town meeting in the town of St. George in southern Utah (once the home of the Romney family), was confronted by anti-polygamy activists who demanded that he condemn this practice. The activists came from the group called Help the Child Brides. Responding to demands that he do something about polygamy and child abuse in the twin polygamous towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, Hatch lamely responded: "I'm not here to justify polygamy. All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me evidence of children being abused there and I'll get involved -- bring the evidence to me." Hatch declined to "sit here and judge anybody just because they live differently than me. There will be laws on the books, but these are very complicated issues." [327]

POLYGAMY DATING WEBSITES

Internet links include one labeled "Polygamy Dating -- find women to join your family!" One website asks, "Are You Seeking a Polygamist Relationship? Join Polygamy Dating Today and Explore the Polygamist Lifestyle. Search for Others, in Your Area, We Share the Same Ideals and Beliefs and Connect Instantly Right Now!" The site goes on to laud "Polygamy Dating, a Hidden Lifestyle with Ancient Roots." Here we read: "If the idea of polygamy strikes a chord in you, if you like to share your man with other women, or you are a man that can handle many women, then join our polygamy singles club and start meeting others that share the same lifestyle. We won't get into why polygamy is attractive to many people, but it is. Whether it satisfies an ancient need to be part of a group, or some other inexplicable need, you be the judge. There are, of course, polygamists from various traditions, Christian, Muslim, and some of them that are none of the above. We welcome polygamists of all faiths and backgrounds, recognizing that polygamy has long traditions in various parts of the world and is still widely practiced in many countries."

JANET NAPOLITANO SOFT ON POLYGAMY

The willingness to tolerate polygamy among Utah and Arizona elected officials especially is thoroughly bipartisan. As Attorney General and later as Governor of Arizona, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano distinguished herself for her craven failure to come to grips with polygamy. One press account of almost 10 years ago stated: "Arizona leaders -- from Governor Janet Napolitano down -- have also given the polygamists a virtual free pass by refusing to enforce the laws to protect children when local officials failed to do so. Instead, Arizona's political leaders have mostly ignored the abuses in the remote town [Colorado City] while emphasizing instead the clean-cut image promoted by Colorado City's leaders." [328] And further: "Among the charges made against Napolitano is the allegation that she was Attorney General, Napolitano opened a criminal investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, welfare abuse, school fraud and weapons violations. But the timid probe has been conducted primarily from Phoenix, with very little on the ground work in Colorado City, and has resulted in no arrests .... In an interview with New Times recently, Napolitano expressed frustration with the Colorado City situation, but continued to offer no solution. So far, she has ruled out another state raid to stop the wholesale sexual abuse of young girls -- which, sources say, she fears might result in a violent confrontation. She told New Times she fears for the safety of any state workers sent to investigate the Mormon fundamentalists' apparent misuse of public money for schools and welfare."

GOVERNORS BABBIT AND SYMINGTON REASSURE THE POLYGAMISTS

Napolitano's "record on this issue has been abysmal," wrote New Times. Her main excuse was that she was unable to find witnesses willing to testify. And Napolitano is not alone. During recent decades, two Arizona governors, the Democrat Bruce Babbitt [later Clinton's Secretary of the Interior] and Republican J. Fife Symington III publicly declared a policy of hands off polygamy. They "publicly assured fundamentalist Mormon leaders that the state would not interfere with their unique religious lifestyle." Colorado City has traditionally practiced the bloc voting under strict orders from polygamist bosses which was pioneered by Joseph Smith in Missouri and Illinois, and later perfected by Brigham Young in the Utah Territory.

One firm prediction which can be made concerning the policies of a Romney administration is that polygamy would experience an unprecedented resurgence in the United States and beyond. We have already seen that Mitt Romney thinks that the suppression of polygamy amounts to religious persecution, while probable White House Chief of Staff Mike Leavitt thinks that polygamy is covered by religious freedom. Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch, the two senators from Kolob, are on the same line, as is the Utah state government. The Ron Paul libertarians are also determined to deregulate marriage and replace it with the law of the jungle. With so many top officials determined to tolerate polygamy, it is bound to experience exponential expansion. With this, the Republican Party will have come full circle, from opposition to polygamy as a relic of barbarism in 1856 to a vehicle for the covert promotion of this monstrous practice.

In the words of anti-polygamy activist Penny Peterson, in Arizona, "to get away with the rape of young girls, all you have to say is you're a polyg."

_______________

Notes:

269 Journal of Discourses, vol. 6, p.167.
 
270 Kranish and Helman, p. 31.

271 Ibid., p. 37.
 
272 Ibid., p. 36.
 
273 Ibid., p. 37.

274 Lawrence Wright, "Lives of the Saints," New Yorker, January 21, 2002.
 
275 Kranish and Helman, pp. 37-38.
 
276 Miles P. Romney, "Persecution," Millennial Star, October I, 1864, p. 629, in Thomas Cottam Romney, Life Story of Miles P. Romney (Independence MO: Zion Publishing, 1948), pp. 34-40.

277 Miles P. Romney, '''You Had Better Be Out of the World Than Out of the Fashion,'" Millennial Star, Vol. 26, p. 694, in Thomas Cottam Romney. Life Story of Miles P. Romney (Independence MO: Zion Publishing, 1948), pp. 34-40.
 
278 Kranish and Helman, pp. 38-39.
 
279 Ibid., p. 39.
 
280 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
 
281 Ibid., p. 40.
 
281 Ibid., p. 41.

283 Ibid., p. 43.
 
284 Ibid., p. 46.
 
285 Lawrence Wright, "Lives of the Saints," New Yorker, January 21, 2002.
 
286 Turnaround, p. 9.

287 Mitt Romney, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010), p. 5.
 
288 Turnaround, p. 9.
 
289 Mitt Romney and Timothy Robinson, Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004), p. 2.

290 Hirshson, p. 323.
 
291 Kranish and Helman, p. 48.
 
292 Tom Mahoney, The Story of George Romney: Builder, Salesman, Crusader (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 53-54. George Romney, The Concerns of a Citizen (New York: G .P. Putnam and Sons, 1968), pp. 263-267.

293 Dana Milbank, "Meet Mitt Romney's Cousin," Washington Post, February 2, 2012.
 
294 Kranish and Helman, p. 49.

295 Seldes, Facts and Fascism. p. 262. 
 
296 Seldes, Facts and Fascism, p. 262. 
 
297 Seldes, 1000 Americans, the Real Rulers of the USA, pp. 217-218. 
 
298 Ibid., p. 216.
 
299 Kranish and Helman, p. 24.
 
300 Dennis L. Lythgoe, "The 1968 Presidential Decline of George Romney: Mormonism or Politics?", BYU Studies, pp. 219-241., online at scribd. 
 
301 Turnaround, pp. 23-26.
 
302 Turnabout, p. 28.
 
303 KSL-5 TV, February 8, 2001.
 
304 Lawrence Wright, "Lives of the Saints: at a Time When Mormonism Is Booming, the Church Is Struggling with a Troubled Legacy," New Yorker, January 21, 2002. 
 
305 Washington Post, July 23, 2012.
 
306 Yahoo, August 5, 2012.
 
307 For the following, see Douglas F. Tobler, "The Jews, the Mormons, and the Holocaust," online at WebRing.com.
 
308 Online at exmormon.org.
 
309 Two Mormon scholars comment: "Hitler enjoyed at least as much popularity among German  Saints as he did among the population in general. His apparent dynamism and self-confidence  seemed to show a way out of the chaos and weakness of the Weimar years. Moreover, as 'good  Germans,' the Mormons were acutely aware that Hitler had risen to power through legal  channels ... Some Church members even saw Hitler as God's instrument, preparing the world for  the millennium. Superficial parallels were drawn between the Church and the Nazi party with its  emphasis on active involvement by every member ... The vital importance of' Aryan' ancestry  gave new significance to genealogical research. And the Fuhrer himself, the non-smoking, nondrinking  vegetarian who yielded to no one in his desire for absolute law and order, seemed to  embody many of the most basic LDS virtues." Alan F. Keele and Douglas F. Tobler, "The  Fuhrer's New Clothes: Helmuth Huebner and the Mormons in the Third Reich," Sunstone, v. 5,  no. 6, pp. 20-29. 
 
310 Alan F. Keele and Douglas F. Tobler, "The Fuhrer's New Clothes: Helmuth Huebner and the Mormons in the Third Reich," Sunstone, v. 5, no. 6, pp. 20-29
 
311 Fawn M. Brodie to Dean Brimhall, June 14, 1939, Brimhall Papers, Special Collections, Marriott Library; quoted at exmormon.com.
 
312 Fawn M. Brodie to Dean Brimhall, 14 June 1939; Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), online at WebRing.com. 
 
313 Wikipedia article on Wolf Ladejinsky.
 
314 Steve Benson, "Ezra Taft Benson: Mormonism's Prophet, Seer, and Race Baiter," July 20, 2005, exmormon.com.
 
315 Steve Benson, "Signs of the Un-True Church," mormoncurtain.com, January 23, 2008. 
 
316 Mormon Doctrine, pp. 526-527. See Steve Benson, "After 'The Speech': 10 Top Extreme Beliefs of Mitt the Mormon, Kooky Candidate from Kolob," Mormon Curtain, December 10, 2007.
 
317 Freerepublic.com; see also Mormon Coffee.
 
318 Hewitt, p. 223. 
 
319 Brian Skoloff, "'Sister Wives' Family Back in Court to Challenge Utah Bigamy Law," AP-Salt  Lake City Tribune, July 25, 2012.
 
320 Fox News, July 25, 2012.
 
321 Frank Stirk, Christian Week Canada, March 5, 2002.
 
322 Ibid.
 
323 Tim Molly, "It's a Felony, but Polygamy Isn't Prosecuted in Arizona," Associated Press, August 12, 1998. 
 
324 Jim Dougherty, "Eyes Wide Shut: from Governor Janet Napolitano down, Arizona Authorities Have Protected Polygamous Sexual Predators With Their Indifference," Phoenix New Times, August 7, 2003.
 
325 Robin Ferruggia, Huffington Post comment, July 18, 2012. 
 
326 Bob Morris, "Justice Department Sues Polygamist Towns in Utah and Arizona." Politics in the Zeros, June 26, 2012 at http://polizeros.comI20 12/06/26/justice-department-sues-polygamisttowns- utah-arizona/ 
 
327 Casper Star Tribune, April 18, 2003.
 
328 Jim Dougherty, "Eyes Wide Shut: from Governor Janet Napolitano down, Arizona Authorities Have Protected Polygamous Sexual Predators With Their Indifference," Phoenix New Times, August 7, 2003.
 
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

Postby admin » Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:57 am

Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER VII. BISHOP ROMNEY'S ATTEMPT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE

"A member of the white boys' club"

-- Joseph Kennedy, 1994


Mitt Romney served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. During these years, he was also preparing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, and then for the White House. During the 2008 Republican primaries, Romney was given a bitter lesson about what a weak candidate he was. Over the entire primary season in that year, Romney was able to get only a little bit more than 22% of the Republican votes -- slightly less than half the votes garnered by his victorious rival, Senator John McCain. Despite Romney's ability to obtain generous campaign contributions from his plutocratic Wall Street friends and Bain Capital partners, he was only able to do slightly better than the populist preacher Mike Huckabee, who was notoriously under-funded. Huckabee claimed to be the candidate of the Sam's Club Republicans, and not of the country club set. Romney obviously represented the latter. But Romney also had the backing of Limbaugh, Hannity, the Mormon Glenn Beck, and a number of other reactionary radio voices.

In 2007, Romney kicked off his effort by raising $23 million, in the first quarter, more than any Republican, and almost as much as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The cochair for finance of the Romney campaign was plutocrat Meg Whitman, the boss of eBay, who had worked together with Romney at Bain Capital. During early 2007, Romney got more money from Wall Street than any other candidate in either party. By the end of2007, Romney had raised almost $63 million for his campaign.

In the first Republican poll of 2008, Romney seemed to be in the lead, but he was surpassed by Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses, where Romney had organized using the vapid slogan "Ask Mitt Anything," and had won the Ames straw poll. Such strength as Romney was able to demonstrate mainly depended on the notorious block voting behavior of the Mormons. Romney was able to win a Wyoming caucus thanks to his LDS backing, but this was widely ignored. After losing in New Hampshire, Romney secured an absolute majority of 51% in the caucuses in Nevada, another LDS stronghold. In addition to his strength in the Mormon-dominated Great Basin, Romney would also call Michigan and Massachusetts his home states -- the first because his father had been governor there, and the second because of his own governorship. Romney won the 2008 Michigan primary by 9%. But, the Bishop posted a weak fourth-place finish in the South Carolina primary, and was beaten by McCain in Florida 36% to 31%.

On February 2,2008, Romney prevailed in the Maine caucus with 52% of the vote. And Super Tuesday, February 5, Romney was the winner in Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah. But McCain won Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Oklahoma -- all in all a more important group of states. Romney failed to gain traction and was forced to drop out of contention on February 7, 2008, having outlasted Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Rudy Giuliani. In quitting, Romney made a strange and sanctimonious speech saying that he wanted to "stand aside, for our party and our country ... in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." Exactly why Romney chose or was forced to drop out at this point remains something of a puzzle.

2008 GOP PRIMARY HOPEFULS ALL HATED ROMNEY

Political observers noted how Mitt Romney was personally hated by his Republican rivals. Huckabee accused Romney of practicing underhanded techniques of voter suppression, and called Romney "presumptuous and arrogant." During one debate, Huckabee conceded that Mormonism might be a religion rather than a cult, but then asked: "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" (The answer is that they do.) But already in January 2008, Ron Paul came to Romney's defense, saying: "One thing I'm a little bit afraid of is that they might be doing that for religious reasons, and I don't like that."

But for McCain, Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and their staffs, Romney was an object of scorn. "Within the small circle of contenders, Mr. Romney has become the most disliked ... the almost visceral scorn directed at Mr. Romney by his rivals has been overshadowed .... ," wrote the New York Times, quoting Huckabee's campaign manager Ed Rollins' remark: "What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process." Front runner John McCain and his handlers were described as "irked by what they perceive as misleading attacks and Mr. Romney's willingness to say anything to be elected. 'He doesn't play by the same rules the rest of us do,' said Charlie Black, a senior McCain strategist." [29] Having made a hard reactionary turn to pander to the GOP's crazed petty bourgeois base, Romney had become a sanctimonious hypocrite.

According to one GOP operative, ''The degree to which the other campaigns' personal dislike for Mitt Romney has played a part in this campaign cannot be underestimated." Ann Marie Cox found that "while sharp words have been exchanged between practically every Republican candidate at one point or another on the campaign trail, the aversion to Romney seems to go beyond mere policy disagreements. It's also a suspicion of what they see as his hypocrisy and essential phoniness -- what one former staffer for Fred Thompson called Romney's 'wholesale reinvention.'" According to one Huckabee adviser, "what Romney has done is attack people for positions they once held. That annoys people. And he uses his own money to do it, which rubs it in." Romney criticized McCain for views on campaign finance reform which he once endorsed himself, attacked Huckabee for tax increases which were indistinguishable from Romney's fee hikes, and faulted all his fellow Republicans for the very same softness on illegal immigration which he once shared. And, he paid the price by being targeted for many acrimonious tirades in the GOP debates. [330]

Romney's 2008 experience, in short, showed that he had grave problems as a candidate -- problems that no amount of money might ever be able to heal. Nevertheless, Romney and his LDS backers wanted the presidency. What was to be done?

George H. W. Bush had once solved similar problems by arranging scandals to eliminate his most formidable opponents early on: Gary Hart had fallen victim to such machinations. But Romney chose another route. During the 2012 primaries, it was also evident that the militant reactionaries and proto-fascists of the "Tea Party" had shifted the GOP terrain in ways that might make Romney's victory even more difficult. This meant that an elaborate apparatus had to be constructed to shape the 2012 GOP outcome in ways favorable to Romney.

ROMNEY'S 40% CEILING IN THE 2012 GOP PRIMARIES AND CAUCUSES

In retrospect, we can see that the 2012 version of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had a ceiling of about 40% across-the-board in the Republican caucuses and primaries. In Southern states where evangelical Protestant voters, especially Baptists, were dominant, Romney's ceiling went down to 30% or even less. Here was the essence of Romney's problem. If the best he could do was about 40%, that left 60% of the vote which might conceivably coalesce around a single rival -- as it turned out, the clerical authoritarian Santorum. The post-Tea Party Republican Party had a country club wing of almost 40%, plus a Sam's Club and Born Again Christian faction which added up to almost 60%.

ROMNEY'S SOLUTION: WINGMAN OR STALKING HORSE CANDIDATES

The only way to prevent this was to make sure that the anti-Romney vote remained fragmented. It was not enough to hope for this; Romney had to guarantee that his opposition would remain divided.

Romney needed wingmen -- stalking horses to protect each of his flanks. These stalking horse candidates had to be weak enough so that they would be structurally incapable of outgrowing their assigned roles and taking the nomination away from Mitt. At the same time, they had to be strong enough to lock up 10% or 15% of the vote, as needed, to make sure that this support would never go to a serious candidate actually capable of eliminating Mitt from the race. The Mormon combine also had to make sure that the wingmen had money and resources to do their assigned job.

ROMNEY'S LEFT WINGMAN: COUSIN JON HUNTSMAN, MORMON BILLIONAIRE

The Bishop needed one wingman on his moderate flank -- the quarter from which he had been defeated by McCain in 2008. This was less likely in 2012, but Romney's inherent weakness dictated an excess of caution to ward off a McCain, a Donald Trump, a Giuliani, or a Bloomberg. If any candidate with this profile got into the race, they would have to compete for votes with Romney's left wingman. This turned out to be Romney's billionaire Mormon cousin Jon Huntsman, who played the part of the classic liberal Republican. Huntsman served as a foil for Romney, supporting cap and trade, endorsing anthropogenic global warming, and embracing a series of other issues which made Romney look more reactionary, and therefore more electable for Republicans, by comparison.

Nobody should have been fooled by this, since Huntsman was none other than Romney's cousin, and, in addition, a leading Mormon. Both Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are descendents of Parley P. Pratt, a Mormon polygamist whose celestial attentions for an Arkansas woman he wanted as his twelfth wife led to his own death and set up a quarrel which contributed to the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which 140 peaceful Arkansas travelers going to California were massacred by Brigham Young and his secessionist Danite militia.

During the campaign, Huntsman told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News: "I believe in God. I'm a good Christian. I'm very proud of my Mormon heritage. I am a Mormon." Jon Huntsman is the son of Jon Huntsman Sr., a billionaire businessman and the boss of Huntsman Corporation, a global chemical company with 12,000 employees and revenues in excess of $9 billion. He served as Deputy US trade Representative in the George W. Bush administration, and then as governor of Utah between 2004 and 2009. After that, he was made US ambassador to China by Obama.

As it turned out, Huntsman played a relatively minor role during the primaries. He came in third in the New Hampshire primary with 17% of the vote, trailing Mitt's 39% and Ron Paul's 23%. But some of Huntsman's New Hampshire votes might have gone to Newt Gingrich, who in the event got only 9%. And it may well be that Huntsman's presence deterred other moderate candidates from entering the field and thus posing a potential threat to Romney. Huntsman inherited the liberal Republican media constituency which had previously belonged to McCain, and the fact that this support was no longer up for grabs may have scared off a candidate coming from the Trump- Giuliani-Bloomberg area of the GOP.

ROMNEY'S RIGHT WINGMAN: RON PAUL, NEO-CONFEDERATE FREEMASON

Mitt Romney, as we have seen in detail, represents the reactionary and racist Mormon political establishment, a social formation which has always been subversive against the United States. Ron Paul, by contrast, must be considered a creature of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Right of Freemasonry. Paul's father was a Freemason. Paul's wife is a member of the Eastern Star, the ladies' auxiliary of the Freemasons. Paul's daughters were members of the Rainbow Girls, the girls' Masonic organization. Ron Paul's son Rand was a member of the freemasonic NoZe Brotherhood at Baylor University, where he harassed a young woman in the notorious "Aqua Buddha" incident.

We recall that, in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln was confronted by several secessionist forces. One was the slaveocrat Confederate States of America, dominated by the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite Freemasons. These later variously morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, the Redeemers, and the Dixiecrats. This is the racist and reactionary tradition of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Albert Pike, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott. Ron Paul has privately denied that he is a Freemason, but he is associated with a fraternity which is traditionally considered an inner elite above and behind the Freemasons. In this context, Ron Paul appears as a modern dough face in the tradition of Caleb Cushing and James Buchanan, northern men with slaveocrat principles.

The other secessionist threat was Brigham Young and his Mormon Saints. If the Confederate soldalesca had succeeded in their 1862 or 1863 invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and especially if the British and French had intervened on the side of the Confederacy, Brigham Young would have joined the Confederates in secession, opening up a second front which would have caused potentially fatal difficulties for the Union. The United States might have been broken up into a multitude of petty, squabbling, impotent, racist, oppressive entities.

RON PAUL'S DEREGULATION OF MARRIAGE MADE TO ORDER FOR MORMON POLYGAMISTS

The convergence of Mormon Saints and Dixiecrats has deep roots. Mormon theology holds black people in contempt, and this view is shared in practice by the neo- Confederate Freemasons of the Ron Paul type, as seen in many articles of his racist newsletters. Worthy of note are also Ron Paul's sallies in favor of the total deregulation of marriage. Paul wants each state to decide what constitutes a marriage, and he recommends that the states ought to accept whatever any church or religious organization chooses to call a marriage. This solution he calls "liberty across the board." [331] Such an approach would clearly take us back to Brigham Young's Deseret, thus opening the doors of Hell. It would allow the legalization of polygamy, polyandry, and instant divorce, rolling back centuries of legal progress in affording protections to women and children.

And who, pray tell, might be interested in Ron Paul's bid for allowing states to define marriage according to their own criteria? Perhaps the polygamists of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, and other areas might be interested in taking up Paul's offer. As we can see, the alliance of Romney and Paul was directed against the elementary prerequisites of human civilization as we have known it.

The deal between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul was denounced by the present writer on Twitter and on World Crisis Radio during the first week of January 2012. It was finally reported in a minimalist version by the New York Times on February 16, 2012, in an article by Richard A. Oppel Jr. entitled "Amid Rivalry, Friendship Blossoms on the Campaign Trail." Here we read that "in a Republican presidential contest known for its angry rivalries, the Romney-Paul relationship stands out for its behind the scenes stability. It is a friendship that, by Mr. Paul's telling, Mr. Romney has worked to cultivate. The question is whether it is also one that could pay dividends for Mr. Romney as he faces yet more setbacks in his struggle to capture the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination."

Fraternization between the Mitt Romney and Ron Paul campaigns goes back to the 2007- 2008 cycle, and kept going into the 2012 contest. As the same New York Times piece reported, "When Mr. Paul's campaign jet broke down last year in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Mr. Romney's wife offered to let Mr. Paul, and one of his granddaughters stay the night at their summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee. When Mr. Romney arrived later, he offered his jet to take them home to Texas. Mr. Paul, not wanting to impose, was grateful but declined both offers." Santorum complained that Ron Paul and Romney were colluding against him, noting that "their commercials look a lot alike, and so do their attacks."

The deal between Romney and Ron Paul was also backed up by some very significant financial power. During this year's meeting of the Bilderberg group in Chantilly, Virginia at the end of May, it became evident that the Bilderberg financier elite of the NATO countries preferred a Romney presidency. Because of Romney's weaknesses as a candidate, helping Romney to win necessarily involved support for Ron Paul. Because Ron Paul's fascist austerity was just what the Bilderberg group wanted to propagate in any case, they found it relatively easy to support Romney's right wing man.

ANARCHO-CAPITALIST PETER THIEL OF BILDERBERG STEERING COMMITTEE, RON PAUL'S FINANCIAL ANGEL

A leading member of the Bilderberg group's steering committee is now Peter Thiel, a right wing anarchist or anarcho-capitalist. Thiel made money initially on PayPal, and then became one of the early investors in Google. He may therefore be implicated in the debacle of the Google initial public offering, but that is another story. Thiel's great project in life is to build offshore floating colonies outside the territorial waters of any country, where, in a juridical vacuum, all kinds of practices can be promoted which are illegal in the United States and other countries. On these offshore anarchist islands, there would be no laws against narcotics, no minimum wage, no child labor laws, and none of the norms of modem civilization. Thiel wants to build such a colony off the coast of California, so he can compete with Silicon Valley, but outside the reach of the California and US labor laws. Needless to say, there would be no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security, no unemployment insurance, and so forth. In promoting this project, Thiel has worked together with the former Google engineer Patri Friedman, the grandson of crackpot Chicago school economist Milton Friedman, who specialized in dumbing down the Hayek-Mises Austrian economics for US business school consumption. Thiel's name has also been linked romantically to that of Patri Friedman, but the two have lately had a falling out.

Thiel, according to Federal Election Commission reports, has contributed $2.6 million to Endorse Liberty, the principal Super PAC supporting Ron Paul's presidential candidacy. It is clear that Thiel fully supports Ron Paul's role in spewing the ideological poison of Austrian libertarianism and in making genocidal austerity presentable in polite society. He is also backing Ron Paul because this is the way to procure the nomination for Romney. Some protesters at this year's Bilderberg meeting seemed to think that the elitists and plutocrats assembled there held some kind of grudge against Ron Paul. Quite the contrary: the Bilderberg elite has provided millions of dollars to support the Ron Paul wingman presidential campaign, and Thiel is a leading example. The Bilderbergers generally support Romney, who made a semi-secret visit to their gathering.

Peter Thiel represents the kind of predatory young wolves who are now emerging as the dominant force inside the Bilderberg group. Leading Bilderberg figures like David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger belong to a generation which is gradually leaving the historical stage. Thiel and his ilk are bidding to replace them, and Ron Paul is a part of their strategy for duping the younger generation.

PRO-RON PAUL SUPER PAC LOCATED IN THE MORMON MECCA

Endorse Liberty was created in December, 2011. Some details about Endorse Liberty indicate the way in which the Romney-Ron Paul alliance actually works. Endorse Liberty happens to be headquartered in the Mormon Mecca of Salt Lake City, and not in Lake Jackson, Texas or some other location closer to Ron Paul's political-administrative center of gravity. Endorse Liberty is run by political operatives Jeffrey Hartman, Stephen Oskoui, and Abe Niederhauser. Hartman, of Provo, Utah, supported Romney in 2008 but then switched to Paul. The fourth key figure at Endorse Liberty is Ladd Christensen, a longtime business associate of Jon Huntsman, Sr. Christensen helped the elder Huntsman, a top Mormon, to create the Huntsman chemical concern back in the 1970s. The elder Huntsman thus emerges as the Mormon link between Romney's right wing man, Ron Paul, and his left wing man, Jon Huntsman, Jr. [332]

Five relatives of Mitt Romney, or at least five persons whose name is Romney, endorsed Ron Paul in early 2012. These included attorney Ty Romney of Great Falls, Montana; Travis Romney of Spokane, Washington; Chad Romney of Boise, Idaho; Jarrod Romney of Salt Lake City; and Troy Romney, also of Salt Lake City. [333]

RON PAUL RUNS INTERFERENCE FOR ROMNEY IN GOP DEBATES

No fewer than twenty debates among the Republican presidential candidates stretched across most of the year 2011. The one constant of all of these debates was that Ron Paul consistently ran interference for Romney. The basis of Ron Paul's technique was to start from an evaluation of who the most dangerous adversary for Romney was in a given situation. A study by Think Progress showed that Ron Paul had attacked Bachman once, Cain four times, Rick Perry four times, Gingrich eight times, and Santorum 22 times. But Ron Paul had never but never assailed Romney. Not reflected in the study was the critical timing of Paul's attacks, which generally came at moments when Romney was already under fire, and his bitter rivals were trying to gang up on the Bishop to administer a knock-out blow. Because of the animus against Romney, there was often a grave risk that the entire Republican pack would join in tearing down the assumed front-runner. [334]

For example, in the October 18, 2011 GOP presidential debate, Rick Perry began criticizing Romney for his Massachusetts individual mandate health plan, which he referred to as "Romneycare." Ron Paul immediately went into action, counterattacking the Texas governor: "First off, you know, the governor of Texas criticized the governor of Massachusetts for 'Romney care,' but he wrote a really fancy letter supporting 'Hillary care.' So we probably ought to ask him about that."

When the actual voting began, Romney's more urgent need was for a wingman on his right flank. Here, Romney had to make sure that reactionary candidates like Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, and Cain could never get more than 40% of the votes and become competitive with Romney. The ideal choice was still Ron Paul. The hope was that Ron Paul could attract between 10% and 15% of Republican voters, thus making sure that these votes would be taken off the table and put into a deep freeze where they could never benefit a candidate with a serious chance of winning. Ron Paul would lock up this 10% to 15% and essentially take it off the table.

Ron Paul proved able to fulfill this function. In the primaries and caucuses of the early states, Romney racked up slightly less than 41% of the votes. Ron Paul provided decisive help by attracting a little over 11% of Republicans. This configuration allowed Romney to win all but four of the contests between the Iowa caucus on January 3 and Washington State on March 3. Romney was significantly helped in the Iowa caucuses by hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads attacking Gingrich that were paid for by Ron Paul.

RON PAUL DEFENDS ROMNEY FROM NEWT AND PERRY ON BAIN LOOTING

In the South Carolina primary campaign, a firestorm of criticism engulfed Romney because of the predatory activities of Bain Capital in looting manufacturing companies and then shutting them down, destroying jobs, lives, and communities in the process. Newt Gingrich touted a movie about the Bishop called When Mitt Romney Came to Town, featuring the testimony of working people victimized by Romney and his asset-stripping cohorts from Bain. Rick Perry denounced Romney as a "vulture capitalist."

Gingrich pointedly asked on Fox News: "Is it fair to have a system, is it right, is it the kind of country you want to live in, to have a system where somebody comes in to take over your company, take out all the cash and leave behind a wreck, and they go off to a country club having a great time and you go off to the unemployment line?"

Ron Paul immediately sprang to Mitt's defense, using his odious Austrian school ideology to justify Romney's unscrupulous methods. "I think it's a big distraction," said Paul. "And they are picking up on this and those who are condemning him for it, I think, are arguing like Democrats ... the principle of restructuring is a good thing in the marketplace," he continued. Notice Paul's structural inability to come to grips with the reality of looting and layoffs, which are destroying the US economy.

Focusing on Gingrich, who had sold influence to Freddie Mac for $1.6 million under the guise of historical consulting, Paul ranted: "For conservatives to come forward and say restructuring is bad, I think there is a big difference if you are restructuring in the free market and you are doing a positive thing versus somebody who may have taken money from Freddie Mac." [335]

RON PAUL SAVES ROMNEY FROM MICHIGAN AND OHIO DEFEATS

Another important contest was the February 28 Michigan primary. It was widely felt that Michigan was one of Romney's home states, and that he therefore had to win there. In the event, Romney outdistanced Santorum by 41% to 38%, a relatively narrow victory. The decisive margin for Romney was evidently provided by Ron Paul, who got 12% of the Michigan vote. If Ron Paul had not been in the picture, Santorum might well have received enough of those ultra-reactionary votes to win. Ron Paul had declined to campaign personally in Michigan, but did commit significant resources to running anti- Santorum television ads. This behavior documents how he was functioning as Romney's wingman, rather than as a serious candidate in his own right. Amazingly, Ron Paul's fanatical supporters were generally unable to understand this swindle.

Newt Gingrich had won South Carolina by 12 points over Romney, largely on the strength of his aggressive performance in the debates. Romney was anxious that this not be repeated in nearby southern states where Gingrich's name recognition was still quite high. Newt's home state of Georgia was scheduled to have a Republican candidates' debate during the run up to Super Tuesday, and the Romney campaign did everything possible to get this debate canceled. But the Romney camp also feared the perception that they were afraid to stand up to Gingrich in a debate. In so doing, they were assisted by Ron Paul, who took the same line and provided them with precious cover. The Georgia debate was canceled.

Ron Paul had an opportunity to mobilize his reactionary base through a triumphal appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference of the American Conservative Union (CPAC), held in Washington on February 11, 2012. Ron Paul had won the CPAC presidential straw poll in 2010 and 2011. But in the midst of the 2012 primaries, he declined the invitation to appear, saying that he was too busy campaigning. This was a subterfuge so obvious that even the densest among his stupefied libertarian stoners became uneasy. As for the CPAC 2012 Straw poll, even with Ron Paul sabotaging his own support down to 12%, Romney came in with an anemic 38%, Compared to 31% for Santorum. If Paul had appeared, Romney might have come in third.

On Super Tuesday, Romney scored about two points below his expected 40% ceiling, but thanks in large part to an 11% showing by Ron Paul, Romney was able to win six states while losing four. Here the big event was Ohio, where Romney narrowly defeated Santorum by 38% to 37%. Once again, Ron Paul's vote total of9% was one key reason why Santorum was unable to win, since many of his votes came from ultra-reactionaries who would have gone to Santorum over Romney.

RON PAUL WRECKS HIS OWN VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN TO HELP ROMNEY

The Virginia primary was an interesting case to illustrate Ron Paul's role as Romney's wingman. Here Gingrich and Santorum had been thrown off the ballot for technical infractions, and this decision had been upheld in the courts. Virginia was therefore a rare case of Romney against Paul one-on-one, with no other important candidates on the ballot. Because of the danger that Paul might inflict a humiliating defeat on Romney, with serious consequences for the Republican nomination, the Paul campaign proceeded to sabotage their own support in every conceivable way. It was political hari-kari, for the benefit of Romney, and ultimately for the benefit of little Rand Paul.

Veterans for Ron Paul had organized a rally and march on the White House in the District of Columbia on February 20, but this event was pointedly snubbed by the Ron Paul campaign, which refused to send any speakers or representatives, or to offer encouragement or support in any form. The disaffection of Adam Kokesh and other veterans who had been supporting Paul escalated in the wake of this betrayal.

The local commentator "DC Dave" Martin notes that "Virginia represented a perfect storm for Paul. And what did he do? He did as close to nothing as he could possibly do and still call himself a candidate. In fact, what little campaign he mounted seemed to be directed entirely towards testing the loyalty of his band of long-suffering followers. These followers -- and these followers alone -- were given what can only be described as a meager, pitiful show of a campaign while the general public, all those people out there thirsting for someone they can believe in and waiting to be wooed, weren't even given that."

According to DC Dave, there was no visible Ron Paul campaign in Virginia for weeks on end, and there was no television or radio advertising. Paul did make one campaign appearance about a week before the primary, but this was not publicized in the press. Ron Paul's single event in Virginia was held in a ballroom near the infamous Springfield Mixing Bowl, site of the worst rush-hour traffic in the entire region. Despite this, people were told to arrive between 6 and 6:30 p.m., the height of the rush hour. The seating capacity was too small, and parking was impossible to find.

As DC Dave argues, "a real campaign with a genuine candidate for president, would have rented a larger facility such as the easily reached 10,000 seat Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, and the rally would have been announced far and wide. In fact, had Paul been serious about winning Virginia, with any sort of publicity at all he could have easily filled basketball arenas in all of Virginia's population centers in a series of rallies. We may contrast that with Mitt Romney, who might be able to fill a good-sized restaurant, but only if he buys all the drinks." [336]

Romney became slightly weaker in the mid-March primaries and caucuses, with an average of 35% support during this phase. Despite lack of funds, Santorum was able to match Romney's results with a 35% showing of his own. One reason was that Ron Paul's support had shrunk to only 3%. But Romney still took seven out of 10 contests, largely because his opponents Gingrich and Santorum were low on cash.

In the April primaries, Santorum collapsed to 25% and Gingrich to 9%, while Mitt Romney pulled away with 53%, winning all the contests. But again, Ron Paul's 12% helped make this possible in Wisconsin, where Romney defeated Santorum by 43% to 38%. Gingrich dropped out on March 27, and Santorum quit on April 10. Even so, Santorum remained competitive in some states, such as Nebraska. In Oregon, a candidates' debate on Pacific Northwest regional issues had been scheduled in advance of the primary there on May 15, but Romney wanted that canceled, as usual. Once again, Paul obliged in working to sabotage this debate, which was called off.
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

Postby admin » Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:57 am

Part 2 of 2

RON PAUL'S GOAL: WIN ENOUGH DELEGATES TO BUY LITTLE RAND PAUL A PLACE ON THE GOP TICKET

Ron Paul was thus perfectly suited to become Romney's wing man or stalking horse to guard his constantly threatened right flank. By 2012, Ron Paul was a perennial presidential candidate looking for a last hurrah, and especially concerned about the nepotistic political patronage needs of his own extended family. Paul was especially concerned to provide for the future of his mediocre, racist son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul's fondest wish was to win enough convention delegates to make his support for Romney indispensable in getting the Bishop the 1,144 votes needed to go over the top at the Tampa convention in August. In that scenario, the vice presidential slot for Little Rand would be the quid pro quo exacted to get the Paulbearer delegates to vote for Mitt.

Ron Paul was frequently called an incorruptible candidate, but this applied as little to him as it did to Maximilian Robespierre, the author of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Ron Paul was in reality one of the most corrupt and duplicitous of all the candidates.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Ron Paul was among the champion nepotists in Washington. During the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, Congressman Ron Paul dished out salaries and/or fees to six of his own relatives, the most of any member of Congress in either party. These relatives received a total of $304,599. Family members also received reimbursements of$47,421. The relatives involved included Paul's daughter Lori Pyeatt, his grandson, his daughter's mother-in-law Nora Leblanc, his granddaughter Laura Paul, his granddaughter Valori Benton, his grandson-in-law Jesse Benton, and one other relative. In addition, his campaign committee reimbursed the congressman, his wife Carol Paul, his son Rand, his son Robert, and several other relatives, and furthermore sent money to his brother's accounting firm. Ron Paul's leadership PAC, called Liberty PAC, dispersed money to the congressman and his brother's accounting firm, and also paid Paul's daughter a salary. The brother in question is Wayne A. Paul, the owner of Paul, Phipps and Company accounting firm. [337]

But that was back in 2008-2010. By early 2012, it was widely reported that Ron Paul had a grand total of 61 relatives on his congressional office, PAC, presidential campaign, and other payrolls. And this count was limited to nepotism centering on Congressman Ron Paul. In 2011, Little Rand Paul, taking advantage of his father's national fundraising base, had entered the Senate representing Kentucky, and was doubtless building up a nepotistic empire of his own, even as his father strove to get him on the national ticket.

One egregious case was that of campaign manager Jessie Benton, resented by the libertarian True Believers as an incompetent mediocrity. Jessie Benton was married to Ron Paul's granddaughter, and by May 2012 had received over $322,000 from Liberty PAC, plus $264,000 from the Ron Paul presidential campaign, for a grand total of $586,616. [338]

RON PAUL: ANARCHO-CAPITALIST CRACKPOT

Ron Paul's personal ideology was a jumble of von Hayek, von Mises, and the Austrian or psychological school of economics, which had been created in its modem form mainly by the London School of Economics and by David Rockefeller to oppose the American School (Hamilton-Carey) and the German School (Friedrich List) of economics. Ron Paul was also an admirer of the Russian neofascist novelist Ayn Rand (after whom Little Rand was named), and of the anarcho-capitalist crank Murray Rothbard.

When Senator Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney for president at the beginning of June 2012, just after Romney had made a secret visit to the Bilderberg group meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, many Paulbearers were deeply disappointed. But the lesson of this was not just that Ron Paul and Rand Paul were scoundrels, nepotists, and deceivers. Austrianism and libertarianism represent a synthetic ideology, based on the economics of David Ricardo with a strong infusion of the radical subjectivism of Ernst Mach, fostered over the years by Lionel Robbins and his colleagues at the London School of Economics, financed by David Rockefeller, and systematically promoted by the Mount Pelerin Society, one of the most sinister ideological organizations of the past hundred years. For most people, to choose libertarianism is indeed to choose self-destruction.

Some candidates run for president because they want to win and have a real chance to win. Other candidates run because they delude themselves they can win, even though this is exceedingly unlikely. Then there are candidates who are aware that they probably cannot win, but who are focused on spreading ideological poisons throughout the body politic. Independent candidate John Anderson represented this third class of ideological spewers in 1980. This is the other role Ron Paul plays today.

"RESTORE AMERICA": RON PAUL'S PLAN FOR GENOCIDAL AUSTERITY

In October 2011, Ron Paul's campaign website published Restore America, his program to cut $1 trillion from the US federal budget in one year, on the way -- Paul claimed -- to balancing the budget within a single presidential term. Paul's trillion dollars in cuts were ten times more concentrated than what was being attempted by the Super Committee or Twelve Tyrants enacted as part of the Satan Sandwich enacted to settle the debt ceiling confrontation of August, 2011. This would represent about 27% of the US federal budget. According to my estimates, this meant that Ron Paul's austerity plan was at least twice as severe as the devastating cuts implemented by the German "Hunger Chancellor" Heinrich Brining between 1930 in 1932, which had destroyed the German political and economic institutions, opening the door wide to Hitler. Ron Paul would thus represent the most radical austerity that any modern industrial or postindustrial society had ever experienced.

Ron Paul had often told his supporters that he wanted to cut military spending on foreign wars and foreign bases in order to "take care of our people here at home." The Restore America Plan allowed citizens to see exactly how he intended to take care of them. Although the entire federal budget was to be cut 27% in the first year, the Pentagon budget would be cut by only 15%. Ironically, this was the cut that was already baked in the cake, without any input from Ron Paul. Obama was embracing a Pentagon cut of about 8%. And, because of the failure of the Super Committee or Twelve Tyrants to agree on a plan of their own, another cut of seven or 8% was already in the works. That meant that Ron Paul was not adding any military spending cuts of his own on top of what was already in the works.

Instead, the duplicitous libertarian Leprechaun took dead aim at the old, the sick, children, women, the disadvantaged and defenseless, seeking to largely wipe out the frayed US social safety net. On the chopping block would be the Women Infants Children Program (WIC), designed to provide high protein meals to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants. This program has been highly effective in reducing cognitive impairment because of insufficient protein consumption during gestation and the first months of life. Ron Paul demanded that WIC be cut by 33%, more than twice what he wanted to cut out of the Pentagon.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) represents the largest expansion of health coverage for children since the enactment of Medicaid in the mid- 1960s. Ron Paul wanted to cut S-CHIP by 44%. Ron Paul also demanded 35% cuts in Medicaid, which provides medical care for poor people but also protects the middle class by paying for nursing home care.

Most brutal of all was Ron Paul's plan for Food Stamps or SNAP -- the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program of the US Department of Agriculture, a New Deal program started around 1940 under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Food Stamps now serve almost 50 million Americans. These 50 million people are the most at risk in our society. According to recent studies, many of them are in dire poverty. They cannot get welfare payments, because what previously existed as welfare -- Aid to Mothers with Dependent Children under the Social Security Act of 1935 -- had already been destroyed by Bill Clinton as part of his 1996 reelection campaign. As many noted at the time, that was the worst thing that Clinton ever did. Real unemployment in the United States today amounts to about 30 million, and if we add in dependents, we get back to that same 50 million ball park. They have no jobs, and most of them have exhausted the 99 weeks or usually far less of unemployment benefits granted them under existing law. This is also the part of the US population that has no medical care.

PELLAGRA PAUL SPARES PENTAGON, ATTACKS 50 MILLION US DESTITUTE

So what does Ron Paul want to do about these 50 million Americans, people who are in every way on the brink of the abyss? He wants to stab them in the back by cutting Food Stamps by 63%. According to chef Mario Battali, who lived on food stamps for a few weeks recently, this program gives the average recipient in the New York City area about $150 per month to buy food. This comes down to about $1.50 per person per meal. It is already next to impossible to achieve good nutrition for so little money, as Battali has pointed out. Ron Paul would bring us down to between 50¢ and 60¢ per person per meal. That kind of a diet is a one-way ticket to rickets, pellagra, and scurvy. The congressman has already been jeered as Pellagra Paul on the Internet.

Most importantly, the proposal to cut 63% out of the food stamp allowance of 50 million at risk Americans will kill people. How many hundreds of thousands, how many millions of Americans must lose their lives for the greater glory of the crackpot Austrian school? Here we see the real function of the Ron Paul campaign. In the 1940s or 1950s, proposals like the one advanced by Paul might have gotten their bearer a one-way ticket to a mental hospital. But, if they were taken seriously, the response could well have been, "Nazi go home!" But now, thanks to Paul and others, proposals for genocide against the American people were presentable, respectable and acceptable -- at least in the Republican Party -- as the basis for polite discussion. Ron Paul had earned his pay. He had consolidated a massive moral and intellectual degradation of the American people, to the point where a Republican audience would seriously entertain demands for mass death of fellow Americans.

Nor was this all. Ron Paul wanted to wipe out the Davis-Bacon Act, which guarantees union wages on federal construction projects. Both Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who claimed to be partisans of states rights, wanted to force all states to become right-to-work states. They were eager to trample on states' rights if they could bust unions in the process. Under Ron Paul, the Bush tax cuts would remain. There would be no capital gains tax and no estate tax on plutocrats. The corporate income tax would be cut to 15%. There would be no tax on foreign profits. All of these measures would benefit plutocrats, but there was no specific tax relief whatsoever for the average American wage earner.

Ron Paul wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy. Critical scientific research would cease to exist. There would be no more Department of Housing and Urban Development. There would be not even the pretense of low-cost public housing. The Department of Commerce, the Weather Service, and efforts to promote exports would go to zero, as would the Department of the Interior -- the national parks. The Department of Education would cease to exist, and with it would disappear the Pell grants and Stafford loans, the only way most poor kids can hope to go to college. Total federal employment would be cut by 10%, meaning half a million new jobless. Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia would become depressed areas, and many others would join them.

RON PAUL WOULD END US EMERGENCY FOOD AID, LEAVING MILLIONS ABROAD TO STARVE

In addition to inflicting genocide against the American people, Ron Paul also wants to impose genocide abroad. He would do this by wiping out all US foreign aid, to the tune of between $50 and $60 billion. Much US foreign aid is used for meddling in other countries, but this is not the whole story. The United States still provides about 57% of all the emergency food aid in the world. Every year, the United States Food for Peace program distributes 2.5 million metric tons of food aid worth about $2.6 billion to about 44 countries. In places like Somalia, South Sudan, Kenya, Bangladesh, in Haiti and Pakistan after recent natural disasters, this food aid unquestionably saved lives. Under Ron Paul, it would end, and all these people would die.

Ron Paul's austerity program has been presented here in some detail, precisely because this document is of more than retrospective interest -- quite the contrary. The Ron Paul austerity plan gives us an idea of the crushing cuts which are to be imposed during the early months of the next presidency -- regardless of whether the president is Obama or Romney. This effort is already under way, with the hysterical propaganda about the fiscal cliff and the need for a grand bargain during the lame-duck session in December 2012, or immediately thereafter. Ron Paul is serving the ruling financier elite by circulating this plan in the guise of his demagogic "Liberty Agenda" to convince his myrmidons and dupes to fight for it, or at least to neutralize any resistance they might otherwise offer.

Ron Paul supporters often have the mentality of scabs, of strikebreakers. Among them there are many disgruntled war veterans looking for scapegoats, and operating with a right-wing anarchist world outlook. These characteristics take us back to Italy and Germany between the world wars to the emergence of fascist movements.

SENATOR RUBIO: MORMON APOSTATE, OR CRYPTO-MORMON?

The flaw in this elaborate intrigue, at least from the point of view of Ron Paul and Rand Paul, became clear when Romney was able to clear the hurdle of 1,144 convention votes on his own power. Ron Paul had been eager to sell his pathetic duped delegates to Romney in exchange for getting little Rand on the national ticket, but now Romney no longer needed them. Rand had begun endorsing Romney in the last week of May, and became totally explicit during the first week of June. But Romney appeared to be looking elsewhere -- to the austerity ghoul Paul Ryan, to the Bonapartist General David Petraeus, to Governor Christie (the Garden State Goring), or to Senator Marco Rubio.

The obvious difficulty with Rubio was that he had also been a Mormon. Rubio's campaign autobiography, An American Son, reveals that the Florida senator and his cousins were all baptized into the Mormon Church. "We were in the Mormon church I guess by the time I turned eight," Rubio told David Muir of ABC News on June 18, 2012. Rubio attributes his joining of the Mormon Church to his mother, who was supposedly looking for a family-friendly environment and found it in the LDS Church. At this time, Rubio was living with his family in Las Vegas, Nevada, and became a fan of the musical group, the Osmonds. Rubio claims that he returned to the Roman Catholic Church by the time he was 12 or 13. " ... in our lives and our family in Las Vegas, we have a large extended family of cousins, second cousins and others who are still part of the LDS Church," Rubio added. The question remains: should Rubio be considered a Mormon apostate, or rather regarded as a crypto-Mormon?

AYN RAND DEVOTEE AND BIRCHER PAUL RYAN, ROMNEY'S VEEP PICK

By early August of 2012, Romney's incorrigible ineptitude, his obsessive secrecy, and the incompetence of his tight Boston clique of advisors had put his presidential campaign on the path to decline. The Wall Street Journal and other citadels of hard-line reactionary politics continued to criticize him for excessive moderation and insufficient fighting spirit. The rightist harpy Laura Ingraham shrieked on her radio program that "Romney's losing!"

This widespread disaffection with Romney created the danger that the militant right-wing extremists so important to the Republican base would come to regard Romney's efforts with indifference or lukewarm commitment, giving Obama the margin of victory.

Romney had considered a number of vice presidential candidates. One was Senator Rubio, but Rubio's 10 years of affiliation with Mormonism might focus excessive attention on an issue which Romney was anxious to avoid. General David Petraeus of the Pentagon and the CIA would add background in foreign policy, but this option did not pan out, perhaps because Petraeus did not want to be subjected to the degrading ordeal of a presidential campaign -- or perhaps he wanted to be appointed to national office at some future time. Rand Paul was eager for the vice presidency, but he already had acquired a deserved reputation as a right-wing extremist of the DeMint-Lee-Toomey school in the Senate, and this would surely attract criticism. Ron Paul had wagered everything on the hope that Romney would need extra delegates to reach the GOP magic number of 1,144 convention votes, but Romney had sufficient delegates in hand. Therefore, the main reason to choose Rand Paul had disappeared. Senator Portman from Ohio might have helped to win a critical Electoral College mega-state, but Portman was just another white bureaucrat like Romney for most voters. Governor Pawlenty, although a solid reactionary, was similarly bland. Condoleezza Rice would have attracted attention as a black woman, but she was not extremist enough on abortion and other social issues to please the Limbaughs and Hannitys.

Romney therefore chose Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chief ideologue of Schachtian austerity of the House Republican caucus. Ryan was the main author of the House Republican "Path to Prosperity" program, which would abolish the existing Medicare program, replacing it with a voucher which would fall far short of the real cost of health insurance for elderly recipients. In effect, Ryan wanted to shift the risk for future increases in medical costs off the federal budget and onto the backs of low income seniors. It amounted to the utter destruction of Medicare as it had existed since 1965.

Medicare has been one of the most successful programs in world history in reducing the rates of morbidity and mortality among people over 65. Ryan wanted to destroy these benefits, because they were hated by right-wing ideologues, and because his wealthy backers did not want to be taxed to keep somebody else alive. Ryan had learned the art of the deceptive euphemism, and called his demolition of Medicare "premium support," a dodge designed to befuddle gullible old people.

Along with the end of Medicare went massive tax cuts for the rich, even as taxes on working people and the middle class went up. Ryan also wanted to privatize Social Security, turning it into a system of private accounts. Here again, the risk is shifted from the government to the hapless elderly. Colossal commissions would go to the Wall Street brokers executing orders for the system.

Reactionary commentators like Bill Bennett and Peggy Noonan tried to tout Ryan as a serious intellectual, a man of ideas, a deep policy thinker sincerely concerned with the future fate of the United States. In reality, Ryan represented the reactionary petty bourgeoisie of the American Midwest. In a word, he was George Babbitt out of the pages of Sinclair Lewis's famous novel -- but without any of the openness to the issues of working people which Babbitt showed during at least one phase of his life. Ryan's approach is that of a small-town or suburban Chamber of Commerce booster, relying on cracker barrel cliches and Friedmanite or Rothbardesque slogans to defend unjustifiable privileges and status claims for the wealthy. Ryan was a classic philistine.

PAUL RYAN'S WIFE FROM A PRO-WALLACE RACIST CLAN

Four years ago, I argued that, while Obama was attempting to hide many things about himself and his wife, much could nevertheless be learned about this candidate by looking at the woman he had chosen to marry. That was true then, and it is true now in regard to Romney and Paul Ryan. Ryan's wife is Janna Little Ryan, who comes from a well-to-do family holding energy interests in Oklahoma. Janna's grandfather was Reuel Little, an active supporter of the racist Governor George Wallace of Alabama in his 1968 bid for the presidency, and a co-founder and stalwart of Wallace's racist American Party. Reuel Little, a lawyer and rancher of Madhill, Oklahoma, was the American Party's candidate for governor of Oklahoma in 1970.339 If Little family values live on in Jana, then we have learned something important about Ryan's view of race relations. Governor Wallace came close to making an explicit alliance with Mormondom: Quorum of Twelve member Ezra Taft Benson, also a committed racist, seriously entertained the idea of running for vice president on Wallace's ticket. [340]

When Michael Leahy of the Washington Post attempted to reconstruct some of the contacts that had led up to Romney's decision to tap Ryan as vice president, he found that the congressmen most able to talk about the Ryan-Romney relationship were Mormons serving in Congress. One of Ryan's biggest supporters for the veep nod was Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a leading Mormon. Chaffetz was so eager to get Ryan on the national ticket that he "sent an endorsement note to Mike Leavitt, the former Utah governor and a Romney campaign official thought to be a possible White House Chief of Staff in a Romney administration." Readers of this book know about Leavitt. Another advocate of a Romney-Ryan ticket was Republican Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona, who in late 20 I0 urged Ryan to attempt a coup d'etat against John Boehner to become Speaker of the House. Flake, now a candidate for Senate in Arizona, clearly regarded Ryan as the most reactionary figure who would still be able to defeat Boehner. Ryan emerges from this article as a special friend of the Mormon caucus in the House. [341]

RYAN'S ROOTS IN THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY, A MORMON-KOCH BROTHERS FRONT

The matrix for Ryan's ideology is not hard to find. While Ryan represents Democrat Les Aspin's district in the Chicago suburbs, if we look a few hundred miles to the north, in the town of Appleton, Wisconsin, we find the headquarters of the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is of course the archetypal reactionary organization of post- World War II America. It was founded in 1958, the year after the death of the scoundrel Senator Joe McCarthy -- another Wisconsin institution -- to keep right-wing extremist ideas at the center of national attention. It was funded by Fred Koch, the father of the two reactionary Koch brothers whose political meddling has attracted so much interest in recent years. It uses the classic trick which we have observed in Joseph Smith and in Brigham Young of idolizing the U.S. Constitution, while vilifying and condemning every aspect of the United States government and its personnel. It claims to support the Constitution, but in reality the Constitution it is talking about turns out more often than not to be the Confederate Constitution of 1861. It is racist, xenophobic, anti-labor, and anti-women.

For several decades after its founding, the John Birch Society was a laughingstock, as seen in the movie Dr. Strangelove, in Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip, and in the songs of Bob Dylan and the Chad Mitchell Trio.

Skousen's father was Royal Pratt Skousen, quite possibly a relative of the same Pratt family to which Mitt Romney's grandmother belonged, or the son of Pratt admirers. At the age of 10, Skousen moved to Colonia Juarez in Mexico, the same town from which Gaskell and George Romney had fled 14 years before. Skousen then served as a Mormon missionary in Great Britain, the country so often visited by members of the Mormon elite. Skousen's rather tenuous connections to the United States did not prevent him from later assuming the profile of a chauvinist super-patriot -- just like Romney.

Skousen then got a law degree at George Washington University, where FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had also studied. The Mormons, as noted, have always maintained a large faction inside the FBI, as well as in the CIA and other government agencies. Skousen then became the chief of police of Salt Lake City, serving in this post for four years. Skousen was for many years professor in the religion department at Brigham Young University, where he retired in 1978.

SKOUSEN METHOD: SLIME CRITICS AS COMMUNISTS

Although like Ezra Taft Benson he may never have been a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, Skousen was one of the favorite authors of the JBS rank-and-file, and was also one of the most effective defenders of Bircherdom against attacks. His method was simple: anybody attacking the John Birch Society was ipso facto a communist. An example of this was his pamphlet, "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society." Later, during the 1970s, when the Mormon Church was increasingly criticized for its policies of excluding blacks by refusing to ordain them into the priesthood, Skousen wrote another screed, this time entitled "The Communist Attack on the Mormons." Here he argued that those demanding the abolition of this racist exclusion were "distorting the religious tenets of the Church regarding the Negro, and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions" -- thus playing into the hands of the world Communist conspiracy. When the Mormon leadership caved to the pressure to desegregate in 1978, that was followed by a directive telling Mormon organizations to stop pushing Skousen's writings.

When Georgetown Professor Carroll Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope (1966), made an important contribution to the understanding of how the ruling Anglo-American financier oligarchy actually functions, he was targeted for harassment by the FBI and various networks, including the Mormon Mafia. Skousen contributed to the distortion of Quigley's ideas so as to make it easier for establishment pundits to dismiss them. Skousen also accused Quigley of being a part of the conspiracy he was describing, and thus, by implication, a communist.

Skousen was at pains to defend the Mormon Church against any and all criticism. Edwin Brown Firmage, Law Professor at the University of Utah, commented that Cleon Skousen taught "right wing fundamentalism with a constitutional veneer. ... How anyone can prove that civil rights and welfare are unconstitutional is beyond me. For [Skousen's] people, 'constitutional' is just a right wing buzzword." [343]

Skousen demanded the full reactionary program of total deregulation, no minimum wage, no unions, no laws against discrimination, no public lands, no national parks, no direct election of Senators, no federal income tax, no estate tax, and no division of church and state. He also wanted to end the Federal Reserve System, but by abolishing it completely he would have increased the power of the Wall Street banks. He was hostile to Social Security, and wanted to replace it with a system of individual retirement accounts -- exactly the plan embraced by Paul Ryan. Another example of his views in a current Mormon political figure is the demand by Utah Senator Mike Lee that the child labor laws be abolished, allegedly because they are unconstitutional.

Cleon Skousen's nephew is Joel Skousen, who carries on the same traditions today. Joel Skousen is an entrepreneur of survivalism, which he calls "strategic relocation," dispensing advice for those obsessed with future apocalyptic events. Skousen claims that the best place to be a survivalist is in the Intermountain West of the United States. He praises Utah and Idaho as the two most reactionary and refractory states, where federal encroachment meets with the most vigorous resistance. By coincidence, these are also two Mormon fiefdoms.

Joel Skousen handles his fellow Mormons with kid gloves. In an Infowars interview of January-February, 2011, he gravely discussed the positive potential of the raving crackpot Mormon Glenn Beck, seeking strategies to save poor Glenn from the clutches of the insidious globalists. In the same interview, Skousen adamantly protested that Mitt Romney, unlike Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, is NOT part of "The System," and is therefore opposed by globalists who fear that he might resist their policies if he were to become president. This fantastic view may have collapsed of its own dead weight when candidate Romney made a covert visit to the Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia in early June 2012.

After the present writer exposed and denounced the Romney-Ron Paul alliance at the time of the Bilderberg meeting in Virginia, on June 8, 2012, Joel Skousen joined Stan Montieth in devoting an entire radio program to attempt to discredit the present writer. In good JBS-Mormon tradition, they focused on the accusation of "socialism." [344]

Romney's choice of Paul Ryan for Vice President therefore reflects and expresses the role of the John Birch Society in spreading the ideology of right-wing Mormonism far beyond the confines of the Mormon confession. In the Romney-Ryan ticket, we see a combination of Mormonism's reactionary mainstream, supplemented by its most robust ideological tentacle. This may explain why commentators repeatedly cited the excellent personal chemistry between Mitt and the young congressman. They find each other congenial because they both derive from the same ideological template.

BISHOP ROMNEY'S 2012 CAMPAIGN

Romney's 2012 campaign contains a series of echoes that hearken back to the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which 140 peaceful Arkansas travelers of the Baker- Fancher party were slaughtered by Brigham Young's Danite militia. (The Mormon Rebellion, Bigler & Bagley, p. 156)

PARLEY PARKER PRATT'S ANCESTOR ANNE HUTCHINSON BANNED IN BOSTON

The first echo involves the top of the ticket -- Romney himself. Romney's status as belonging to one of the first families of Mormondom derives from his great-great-grandfather, Parley Parker Pratt. Parley Pratt came from a family whose ideology had been tinged by antinomianism for two centuries: Pratt was a descendent of Anne Hutchinson, the founder of the antinomian group in Boston during the 1630s. The argument of this group was that the imperatives of obeying the moral law and the need to do good works of charity were suspended for the elect. Although much admired by modern feminists, there was little theological merit in Anne Hutchinson's tenets. Rather, her antinomian clique posed a real practical and political danger to the future of Massachusetts Bay colony. Anne and her followers were expelled from Boston, and soon joined Roger Williams and his eclectic group of seekers in Rhode Island. She later moved on to Eastchester in the Bronx, where she was killed by Indians. Joseph Smith's mother was also an antinomian, and the social practice of Mormonism as a whole was decidedly on the wild side of antinomianism.

Pratt was a part of Joseph Smith's original quorum of supporters, and became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve apostles in 1835. He then took part in Brigham Young's mission to Great Britain between 1839 and 1841. He later spent time in San Francisco, hoping to recruit enough Mormons to detach California from the Union. Pratt was one of the most prestigious and popular early Mormon oligarchs, variously called "the Apostle Paul of Mormonism" or "the Archer of Paradise." His brother, Orson Pratt, was another LDS bigwig. Parley Pratt practiced polygamy with great gusto, taking no fewer than a dozen wives who gave him thirty children. Pratt married his second wife so quickly after the death of the first that even Joseph Smith had to criticize his unseemly haste. Not only Mitt Romney, but also Jon Huntsman, are descendents of Parley Pratt.

If Parley Pratt was supposed to be the Archer of Paradise, it was Cupid's bow which proved to be his undoing. While on church business in San Francisco, Parley Pratt had met and seduced Eleanor McLean, who was still legally married to Hector McLean. Eleanor became a Mormon, and brought along her elder sons with her. Hector did not want his sons and daughter to be forced to live under the leadership of Brigham Young, so he sent them to New Orleans to live with their grandparents. Eleanor McLean came to New Orleans and took the children off to Salt Lake City. There she formalized her union with Parley Pratt, being sealed to him in celestial marriage. Hector McLean was able to get Pratt arrested in Oklahoma Territory in 1857 on charges of kidnapping and stealing the children's wardrobe. Pratt was acquitted on these charges. But on May 13, 1857, Hector McLean caught up with Pratt near Van Buren, Arkansas and inflicted fatal wounds by shooting and stabbing. Pratt died protesting that he was merely trying to save Mrs. McLean from oppression. In life, he was variously described as dour, humorless, and antisocial-traits which live on in his distinguished great-great-grandson.

Brigham Young in public speeches put the death of Parley Pratt into the same category of glorious martyrdom as Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith. At the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre a few months later, the entire Mormon community was animated by insatiable thirst for revenge and blood atonement against peaceful travelers simply because they happened to be from Arkansas, the same state where Parley Pratt was finally overtaken by the backlash from his polygamist escapades. Mitt Romney is thus the scion of the polygamist line that provided the pretext for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

MIKE LEAVITT, MITT'S RIGHT-HAND MAN

A second echo of Mountain Meadows in the Romney camp today is the role of former Governor Mike Leavitt of Utah, who is the boss of Romney's transition team. Leavitt as a doctrinaire Mormon required his staff to read the Book of Mormon every morning. [345] In 1998 he publicly defended polygamy as being covered by religious freedom. Mike Leavitt is a lineal descendent of (Thomas) Dudley Leavitt, who was one of the Mormon butchers at the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Several years ago, the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre was being prepared for a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary. Forensic research carried out by the state of Utah was beginning to reveal additional and hitherto unknown details about the brutality of the massacre, including female and child victims shot at point-blank range, and other grisly details.

The Mormon cover story has generally been that the Arkansas pioneers were responsible for what happened to them because they were mistreating the Indians and picking fights with the local population. According to this cover story, the Arkansas people were killed by Paiute Indians -- not Mormons. The weakness of this deception is that the Indians had very few firearms, and relied instead on bows and arrows, clubs, and other primitive weapons. It was the Mormon Danite militia that was armed to the teeth.

According to John Elvin, writing in the old Washington Times Insight magazine, the evidence unearthed while the site was being prepared for the anniversary "supports the execution version of the story. In preparing the site, now owned by the Mormon Church, for a new monument a few years ago, piles of bones were turned up in mass graves. On advice from Ron Loving, president of the Mountain Meadows Association (MMA), a group of descendants of victims, the church decided to keep the find secret. Though the remains of murder victims had to be turned over to a medical examiner under state law, the state also agreed to keep the find quiet. But the secret quickly became public knowledge, sparking protests by a rival group, the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, that groups of descendants had been unaware of the discovery of their ancestors' bones."

TRANSITION BOSS MIKE LEAVITT COVERS UP FOR HIS TERRORIST ANCESTOR AT MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

Mike Leavitt's crude and illegal attempt to cover up the evidence for Mormon butchery at Mountain Meadows caused a bitter division between the descendents of the Arkansas victims and those of the Mormon killers. "There's a sense among some of our members that it's like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK's tomb," commented Scott Fancher, a descendent of the victims. A spokesman for the pro-Mormon side claimed that "the reason for the quick and surreptitious reburial was to protect the sensibilities of the families" and to guarantee that "no unnecessary tests were conducted on the remains." The pro-Mormon view was that "Utah state forensics experts were conducting precisely such 'unnecessary tests' to determine who was responsible for the massacre."

But before Mike Leavitt was able to stop the investigation with an illegal executive order and bury the evidence, "the University of Utah's Shannon Novak, leader of the team of scientific examiners, discovered that many of the dead men and women were shot as they faced their assailants, and none died, as had been claimed, from arrows shot by Indians." Governor Leavitt had a double conflict of interest, first because he was a leading Mormon, and secondly because his ancestor [Thomas] Dudley Leavitt was "a massacre veteran" -- or, more accurately, one of the assassins.

Hiding behind spokespersons, Leavitt repeatedly told the public that he was unaware that his interference with the investigation constituted a violation of state law. Leavitt stuck to his story that he was concerned about the mental anguish of the descendents of the victims. John Elvin commented: "Despite the rush to rebury the bones, the finding that the men, women and children had been shot just about demolished the popular tale that Indians killed the travelers." [346]

MOUNTAIN MEADOWS RINGLEADER JOHN D. LEE AND UTAH SENATOR MIKE LEE

A third echo is that one of Romney's Utah backers is fellow Mormon Senator Mike Lee, who is a direct lineal descendant of John D. Lee, the leader of the Mormon killers at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. According to some accounts, Lee raped some of the female victims before murdering them, and his polygamist wives were later seen wearing the clothing and jewelry of the dead Arkansas women. John D. Lee in 1877 became the only one of the perpetrators to be executed (by firing squad) for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Lee went to his death saying that he had been scapegoated by Brigham Young, and indeed there is reason to believe that John D. Lee, while certainly guilty of multiple murders, was taking the rap to protect other Mormon bigwigs. The extremely reactionary (or protofascist) Senator Mike Lee, a Tea Party fanatic, has declared that child labor laws are unconstitutional, a position previously embraced by the Mormon John Birch Society ideologue Cleon Skousen.

In another echo of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect in the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in which several other people died, is also a descendant of John D. Lee. Other prominent descendents of John D. Lee include New Mexico Democratic Senator Tom Udall and Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall. In the previous generation, Stewart Lee Udall and Morris Udall represented this wing of the Mormon Lee clan.

GOP SUPPRESSION OF MINORITY VOTERS MESHES WITH RACIST MORMON TRADITION

The Republican strategy for winning back the White House in 2012 depended to a significant degree on voter suppression, targeting especially black and Hispanic voters in states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan. Republican measures to make voting harder were energetically advocated by ALEC, The American Legislative Exchange Council, an entity notoriously funded by the reactionary Koch brothers. The strategy was always the same: allege widespread voter fraud, and then proceed to create obstacles between minority voters and the ballot box. This outrageous Republican ploy was of course perfectly coherent with the racism which pervades Bishop Romney's Mormon tradition. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post raised the issue of the legitimacy of a possible future Romney presidency, if it were to be discovered that Romney's margin of victory was significantly smaller than the number of minority voters who were kept away from their polling places by the Republicans. Meyerson asked, "And what should Democrats do if Romney comes to power on the strength of racially suppressed votes? Such an outcome and such a presidency, I'd hope that they contend, would be illegitimate -- a betrayal of our laws and traditions, of our very essence as a democratic republic. Mass demonstrations would be in order. So would a congressional refusal to confirm any of Romney's appointments. A presidency premised on the racist restriction of the franchise creates a political and constitutional crisis, and responding to it with resigned acceptance or inaction would negate America's hard-won commitment to democracy and equality." [347]
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Re: Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of

Postby admin » Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:59 am

Part 3 of 3

ROMNEY CLIQUE'S BUNGLING AND INEPTITUDE

The Republican presidential primary contest effectively ended on April 10, when the clerical-authoritarian candidate Santorum announced that he was dropping out. It was a case of Santorum's right-wing Jesuit networks being bested by a combination of Mormon and Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction freemasons in the form of the Romney and Ron Paul campaigns. The futurologist Newt Gingrich had run only a token campaign after March 27, when he lost the Louisiana primary, but he too dropped out on May 2 after losing in Delaware.

The Romney forces therefore could have used May and June, the last two months of the Republican primary season, to begin projecting a positive image of their candidate, necessarily including some specific ideas about what a Romney presidency might do for the United States. But Romney's handlers refused to use this opportunity. They were dominated by the obsessively held idea, repeated ad infinitum by media commentaries over many months, that the 2012 presidential election will be exclusively a referendum on Obama, with the popularity and policies of the Republican nominee playing no role whatsoever.

Because of this amateurish misconception, the Romney campaign stagnated in May, June, and July of 2012, when Romney backers had hoped to build up an insuperable lead over the feckless Obama. During this time, the Axelrod-Plouffe-Valerie Jarret Chicago clique who run Obama's campaign began to assail the Mormon plutocrat using the obvious issues pioneered against Romney by Senator Kennedy in 1994: Romney had asset stripped and destroyed viable businesses for short-term super-profits when he was running Bain Capital. An important feature of the Bain looting process was that US plants were shut down, and the jobs outsourced and shipped overseas. Romney refused to release more than one or two years of his federal income tax returns, feeding reports that he had avoided paying income tax altogether in one or more years. Romney was discovered to have hidden tens of millions of dollars of proceeds from his asset stripping activities in more or less secret accounts in the Cayman Islands (where he invested in a dozen funds); in his very own, wholly owned Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Fund in the Bermudas; and in others in Ireland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Germany, and Australia.

GOP NOMINALISTS NOT HAPPY WITH ROMNEY'S "BOSTON COTERIE"

When, at the end of June 2012, the Supreme Court validated the Affordable Care Act commonly known as Obamacare, the immediate Pavlovian reaction of the reactionary Republican congressional leadership was to seize on the part of the majority opinion which declared that the individual mandate feature of Obamacare was constitutional because it constituted a tax. The mantra that Obamacare was bad because it was a tax fit smoothly into the nominalistic-hysterical Republican world outlook, and thus represented the neatest and easiest way to package this issue to reassure the credulous Republican base. The Obama administration, by contrast, insisted that the money paid to the government by those who refused to buy health insurance in defiance of the individual mandate had to be considered a penalty or a fee, not a tax.

Top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom appeared on television to agree with Obama: an additional payment assessed on those who do not buy insurance has to be considered a penalty or a fee. This line robbed the reactionary Republicans of their slogan that Obamacare had raised taxes on the middle class, in direct betrayal of Obama's election-year promises of2008. Fehrnstrom was evidently concerned that if the Obamacare individual mandate represented a tax, then so did the money collected in Massachusetts under Romney care from those who similarly refused to buy a health insurance policy.

Faced with a hue and cry from reactionaries, Romney, in a July 4 interview went back to calling Obamacare "a tax." By early July, the militant reactionaries who run the Wall Street Journal editorial page were thoroughly alarmed, and declared a state of emergency.

If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts' Obamacare salvage operation -- that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax -- into a second political defeat. [348]


The Wall Street Journal assailed Fehrnstrom and Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, whom it described as being part of a "Boston coterie" motivated by fear that Romney would be "labeled a flip-flopper." If so, they got the worst of all possible worlds when Romney reverted to calling Obamacare a tax.

According to the reactionary flagship, the "Boston coterie" represents the Romney "campaign's insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity ... the Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it's Mr. Obama's fault. We're on its e-mail list and the main daily message from the campaign is that 'Obama isn't working.' Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the president's policies aren't working and how Mr. Romney's policies will do better."

Rupert Murdoch's minions were also upset by the photo opportunities arranged by the campaign during the nominee's vacation a few days earlier, which featured the candidate on jet skis and riding in an expensive speedboat. The jet ski cameo resembled John Kerry's windsurfing debacle of 2004, and the speedboat hearkened back to George H. W. Bush cavorting in his Don Aronow cigarette boat in the waters off Kennebunkport, Maine. "The Obama campaign," wrote the Murdoch team, "is assailing Mr. Romney as an out of touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lakeside home with a jet ski cameo ... team Obama is now opening up a new assault on Mr. Romney as a job outsourcer with foreign bank accounts, and if the Boston boys let that one go unanswered, they ought to be fired for malpractice."

ERIC FEHRNSTROM'S ETCH-A-SKETCH STRATEGY

Eric Fehmstrom has been described by the New York Times as Mitt Romney's David Axelrod -- "the keeper of the candidates narrative, the guy who has been with Mr. Romney since before he was governor of Massachusetts and has stuck like glue through two grueling presidential campaigns -- he has been the defiant defender of Mr. Romney when he has been accused of being a flip flop per or having no core principles."

Fehrnstrom had been responsible for the notorious "Etch-a-Sketch" episode of mid- March 2012. Asked about when Romney might begin to jettison some of his most extreme reactionary posturing to appeal to persons less fanatic than the typical Republican primary voter, Fehrnstrom remarked: "everything changes. It's almost like Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again." [349] It was one of the best summations heard in recent years of the cynical hypocrisy which pervades American politics during the late empire. Gingrich and Santorum began carrying Etch-a- Sketch toys to their campaign rallies, as the Democrats would surely do in October.

Fehrnstrom was working as an advertising copywriter when Romney recruited him. That day, he recalls, he was "working on a press release for a new, spicy menu at Popeye's Fried Chicken. I said to myself, 'there have to be more interesting things in life than spicy fried chicken.' I hung up the phone, walked down the hall and quit."

A month after the editorial blast at Romney's inner circle of handlers, the Wall Street Journal was still deeply concerned about the cliquishness and drift of the Romney campaign: "Nearly every presidential candidate relies on a handful of trusted advisors who have been longtime loyalists. Mr. Romney's inner circle includes a large number of people from fields other than politics. Many say they have little taste for campaigning, have no plans to move on to another job in the political world and are in the campaign only to help a friend become president. Outside the campaign, some conservatives have questioned whether Mr. Romney is too reliant on longtime aides and friends -- whether the team is too tight-knit to sufficiently consider the advice of others who also want Mr. Romney to succeed. Polling suggests that Mr. Romney's team has not successfully conveyed Mr. Romney's strongest qualities to voters or parried the Obama campaign's efforts to cast his business career as a pursuit of profits at the expense of workers." [350]

During July, Romney hired a number of experienced Republican hacks with backgrounds in national political campaigns. These included Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who had also served in the White House under George W. Bush. There was also Michelle Davis, who had been a top Treasury official under Bush the younger.

But the inner circle of Romney's handlers continued to be dominated by long-term cronies. One of these was Bob White, who had been Romney's partner in asset stripping at Bain Capital, and who was described in the press as a "longtime friend and senior advisor to Romney." Another was Spencer Zwick, often called Romney's sixth son, who was a student at Brigham Young University when he was recruited by Romney for the purpose of covering up the bribery and corruption perpetrated by the Mormon Saints in the preparation of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Zwick then went on to serve Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts and in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns. He is a partner in an investment company he co-owns with Romney's eldest son.

Yet another long-term Romney aide is Beth Myers, who was given the assignment of evaluating possible choices for the vice presidential slot on Romney's ticket. She served in Romney's gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts, and then as his chief of staff in the State House in Boston.

Most important of all is former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, who brought Romney in to cover up the crimes of the Mormon Saints who had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing foreign officials to bring the Winter Games to the heart of the Mormon Inland Empire.

Leavitt was appointed as director of Romney's presidential Transition Team in early June 2012, quite possibly the earliest date at which this post has been filled and announced by any candidate in recent decades. Leavitt, a Mormon true believer, will thus control appointments to every political patronage post in the federal Plum Book. Based on the pattern displayed by Romney so far, we can expect that the Mormon Saints will be heavily over-represented in the new regime. US propaganda rails against the Syrian Baath party regime of President Bashar Assad as bad because it is overstocked with members of the Alawite minority, but this may be nothing compared to the narrow, Mormons-only, personnel policies of a Romney regime. A predatory Mormon yoke may be about to descend on the United States.

Michael Okerlund "Mike" Leavitt was governor of Utah from 1993 to 2003. He then became Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency in the Bush the younger Administration from 2003 to 2005. He was then Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2005 to 2009.

Romney's appointment of Leavitt generated significant criticism from reactionary circles. According to one account, "Mitt Romney is under fire from conservatives for selecting a man to run his White House transition team who has championed a key element of 'Obamacare' and benefited financially from the law -- and the Romney campaign is already working to ease the right's concerns." This criticism alleged that Leavitt was not reactionary enough for the extremists at Freedom Works and similar outfits. Leavitt was accused of being "a high profile Obamacare profiteer" through his company Leavitt Partners. But behind these attacks may have also lurked the dawning realization that, in a Romney administration, the lion's share of the corporate welfare would go to the Mormon Saints.

ROMNEY TRANSITION BOSS MIKE LEAVITT: POLYGAMY PROTECTED BY FIRST AMENDMENT AS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

In 1998, Governor Leavitt was asked why polygamy is not frequently prosecuted. His answer was that "it may fall under religious freedoms." [351] He later retreated to the safer position that polygamy is and should be illegal.

Leavitt later commented: -- 'I was asked sitting in this [governor's] chair whether I thought it [polygamy] was constitutional, and I said I didn't know." [352]

In May, 2001, Mike Leavitt was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where he had been planning to make a pitch for investment in Utah based on a new report from the Center of the New West. But this report was forced to include a section on "The Polygamy Issue." This section would have doubtless piqued the curiosity of the Washington press corps, especially since Tom Green, a noted Utah polygamist who had proclaimed his practices on television, had just been convicted on four counts of bigamy and one count of criminal nonsupport. This case had been the first polygamy prosecution in many decades.

Interestingly, the Juab County Prosecutor who brought this case against Tom Green was David Leavitt, the brother of Governor Mike Leavitt. Both Leavitts are descended from Mormon polygamists. The policy of modern Utah prosecutors seems to focus on low level polygamists who have little or no standing in the hierarchy of the Latter-day Saints Church -- polygamists of the Warren Jeffs variety, for example -- as a way of reassuring the public that polygamy is under control. But this leaves open the question of the polygamy reportedly practiced by top-level Mormon bosses.

MIKE LEAVITT COVERS FOR AMERICAN TALIBAN

The prosecution of Tom Green was also regarded as a piece of Mormon window dressing to reassure reporters and possible visitors to Mitt Romney's 2002 Olympic Winter games that the issue of polygamy was under control in Utah. The Utah Legislature voted for the appointment of a full-time polygamy investigator (or polygamy czar) in the year 2000. They acted under pressure from anti-polygamy groups, often composed of women fleeing from polygamous households, such as Tapestry against Polygamy (TAP). TAP's favorite slogan is that polygamists represent "the American Taliban." Utah polygamy investigator Ron Barton produced only one important prosecution in 2000-2002, and this was the "flamboyant polygamist" Tom Green. When Green went to jail, it was the first conviction for polygamy in Utah in 50 years. Anti-polygamy activists described the case as a "show trial."

One TAP organizer pointed to the obvious problem of tackling polygamy in Utah: "They've been slow to respond to the issues. I don't think Utah can really tackle this problem without outside help. They can't do it themselves because everyone is too connected to polygamy." This is especially true in a state like Utah where 70% of the population are Mormons, and 90% of elected officials are members of the official LDS. [353]

TRANSITION BOSS LEAVITT SCORNS FEDERAL BAN ON POLYGAMY

At Leavitt's monthly news conference for the Utah media, he repeated a mantra as: "polygamy is against the law. It has been for 100 plus years in the state, and it ought to be." But this remark shows that Leavitt is still defying the Morrill Act of 1862, which outlawed bigamy under federal law. If he had wanted to respect the Morrill Act, Leavitt could have said that polygamy had been outlawed for almost one and a half centuries. After all, when federal law banned bigamy, then polygamy became illegal in Utah Territory as well. Leavitt's hundred year time frame, by contrast, shows that he thinks polygamy only became illegal in Utah when the state code was altered to say that it was, as a part of Utah's successful effort to finally join the Union on January 4, 1896.

Today, Utah, Arizona, and other states of Brigham Young's former Inland Empire notoriously refuse to bring cases against known polygamists. Would Leavitt call that a policy of salutary neglect of US law? The governor's 2001 answer was evasive: "Those are decisions that local prosecutors need to make. It's against the law, it ought to be, and I believe that the outcome of this [Tom Green] trial was an appropriate one." Not surprising, since the prosecutor was Leavitt's brother.

ROMNEY WIN WOULD BRING A "MORMON MOMENT" FOR PATRONAGE JOBS

At the beginning of2012, Washington journalist Wayne Madsen warned about a massive increase in the numbers and power of the Mormon Mafia in the eventuality of a Romney victory: "The word from federal departments and agencies that have experienced a steady influx of Mormon senior officials over the past few years is that one thing that can be expected from a Mitt Romney presidency is the type of rampant nepotism and cronyism already witnessed at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and CIA, but on a much wider scale." [354]

Madsen cited Mike Leavitt as one of the Mormon officials of the Bush administration most determined to pack the federal bureaucracy with his coreligionists. He noted that Leavitt, at both EPA and HHS, "ensured that his Mormon friends and members of their families were appointed to high-level positions in both agencies. Leavitt's conflicts of interest at EPA and HHS were even more stark when considering that he inherited the Leavitt Group regional insurance company founded by his father and served on the board of Utah Power & Light."

One notorious example of Leavitt's Mormon cronyism had been his hiring of his old pal Charles Johnson: "Johnson was Leavitt's chief financial officer for EPA and his Assistant Secretary for Budget, Technology, and Finance at HHS. Johnson, in turn, hired his niece as the director of the grants program at HHS. President Obama kept Johnson on at HHS, and Johnson's niece managed to burrow down from a political appointment to a career civil service position before the Bush to Obama transition. As a further example of Mormon nepotism, Johnson served as President of Huntsman Cancer Foundation and as Vice President of Huntsman LLC in Utah. Jon Huntsman, Jr., a former Utah governor who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for president, served as Obama's ambassador to China. Huntsman and Romney are cousins." [355]

Corrupt bureaucrats sometimes attempted to justify all this cronyism with the argument that Mormon clean living made the new hires more stable and less subject to blackmail: " ... CIA and FBI ... have instituted hiring preferences for Mormons in the belief that they are squeaky-clean when it comes to alcohol and drug use. In addition, many Mormon recruits have proficiency in at least one foreign language, a result of their foreign Mormon missionary work. But for those who believe that all Mormons are squeaky-clean and besides the fact that Romney has destroyed entire towns through the actions of his vulture capital company, Bain Capital, consider the close ties between the Mormon Church and organized crime in the Western states." [356]

In reality, the Mormons were up to their necks in gambling, prostitution, and related activities in Las Vegas and Reno. Madsen recalled the case of Don Bolles, an investigative journalist for the Arizona Republic, who was killed by a car bomb on June 2, 1976, while probing the links between the Mormon Mafia gambling operations and the Intermountain West. [357] During his last years, the mentally disturbed billionaire recluse Howard Hughes had been surrounded by Mormons. Though Hughes died in April 1976, a last will and testament allegedly sworn by Hughes was discovered in the office of a Latter-day Saints official in Salt Lake City. Among the beneficiaries, Madsen writes, was the Mormon Mafia stalwart Bill Gay, who was president of Hughes's Summa Corporation, the owner of The Sands, Silver Slipper, Frontier, Landmark, Castaways, and Desert Inn hotel-casinos in Las Vegas. This "Mormon Will" attributed to Howard Hughes was thrown out as a forgery by a Nevada court. Madsen also notes that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is traditionally regarded as the interface between the Mormon Saints and organized crime. [358]

MORMON ROOTS OF ROMNEY'S PROWESS AS A LIAR

Romney's extraordinary achievements as a liar and a flip flopper, this book has argued, are rooted in the Mormon belief in the suspension of the moral law for the Saints as the end of the world approaches. Romney, in other words, is a typical Mormon antinomian. Romney's antinomianism was displayed in grand style during his first debate with Obama on October 3, 2012. Here, Romney's strategy was to evade all responsibility for the extreme reactionary policy positions he had taken during two years of presidential campaigning, and to reinvent himself on the spot as a moderate. In a breathtaking series of lies during the first 10 minutes or so of the debate, Romney repudiated his own platform concerning a $5 trillion tax cut for the very rich, concerning his desire to wreck Medicare, and concerning his intent to loot Social Security. As Paul Krugman and John Stewart noted, this was simply a strategy of blatant lying and prevarication. The only possible effective answer by Obama would have been to condemn Romney on the spot as a pathological and compulsive liar. But since Obama is a notorious weakling and coward, since Obama fears the image of the angry black man, since Obama feels he must preserve his likeability as his principal remaining asset, and since Obama believes that the so-called independents do not like acrimony, the craven president let this cascade of lies pass almost without comment.

Romney had long been known as a flip flopper, but in this debate he outdid even himself in mendacity. What is notable about Romney is his ability to lie effortlessly, without skipping a beat. Other candidates lie, but they often display symptoms of bad conscience, fear, or anguish. None of that is seen in Romney's case: as this text has shown, Romney's striking ability to lie without any apparent internal friction is the heritage of 182 years of Mormon deception and prevarication, especially about polygamy and related practices. As an antinomian, Romney is way ahead of Richard Nixon and virtually all other recent US political figures, and in this, he is standing on the shoulders of Joseph Smith and his successors.

"A WILD AND CRAZY MAN ... JUST WAITING TO COME OUT"

The 2012 election campaign has revealed many disturbing facts about Bishop Romney. It has been revealed that Romney launched Bain Capital with money from wealthy and reactionary Central American families, who were implicated in illegal drug trafficking and in the operations of right-wing death squads operating in a civil war in El Salvador. [359]

We have read the story in the Washington Post of the young Mitt Romney's leading role in a campaign of hazing, harassment, and bullying against John Wilder, a gay student at the expensive Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1965. Romney led a gang assaulting Wilder, and personally cut off much of Wilder's hair, supposedly to make him conform to his own idea of what a Cranbrook student should look like. Wilder was severely traumatized by this event. Ann Romney has observed: "there is a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out." What if the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call announcing an international crisis should be answered by this "wild and crazy man"? The consequences for the American people might well be tragic. [360]

We have also learned from national media reports of young Romney's strange hobby, practiced when he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in California, of dressing up in a Michigan State Trooper's uniform (the gift of his father, the Governor of Michigan). Romney would reportedly attach a flashing red light to the roof of his white Rambler automobile, and harass motorists by pulling them over to the side of the road.

According to one account, Romney had also equipped this car with a siren. The targets of Romney's harassment included his own friends and acquaintances, but apparently also chance passers-by. Fraudulently impersonating a police officer is a serious crime in both California and Michigan. Incidents like these, combined with Romney's cruel indifference to working people at companies assets stripped by Bain Capital, unavoidably raises the question of whether the bishop is actually a sadist.

BISHOP ROMNEY AT STANFORD: "PRETTY WEIRD ... CREEPY"

A woman who was attending Stanford in those years and who knew about Romney's strange hobby recalled that "we thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, 'Wow, that's creepy. "' [361] Many recall the sinister role played by the mentally troubled dry drunk George W. Bush as the Nietzschean Blonde Beast, acting as kingpin for a gang of neocons in starting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which have caused the deaths of millions. Would Romney the sadistic prankster assume the same role in the midst of his own gaggle of angry neocons? The danger is severe, especially since Bishop Romney has been imbued with the antinomian spirit which pervades the entire history of Mormondom from 1830 to the present day. This antinomianism is closely related to the Nietzschean slogan of "everything is permitted," which the neocons have taken over. This will make for an explosive combination.

How explosive can perhaps be seen from the nominee's October 8, 2012 foreign policy speech to the Virginia Military Institute. This speech promised a return to all the bluster, bellicosity, bombing, and boots on the ground of the tragic Bush-Cheney era. In particular, Romney harped on the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Romney's tirade was especially duplicitous, for two sets of reasons.

CIA MORMON MAFIA PRIME SUSPECTS IN DEATH OF AMBASSADOR STEVENS

The anti-Moslem film which figured prominently in demonstrations in Egypt, Pakistan, and two dozen other countries across the world has been blamed on the hapless ex-convict and apparent patsy Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, aka Sam Bacile, but a key player in this project would appear according to published accounts to have been Joseph Nasralla Abdelmasih of Media for Christ, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt. Nasralla was a speaker at a rally organized by Pamela Geller and her Islamophobia Network near the site of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2010, for the purpose of protesting against plans to build a mosque and Islamic community center in the financial district. Another speaker at that conference was former State Department official John Bolton, who made a videotaped address. John Bolton is known to be one of the principal foreign policy advisers to Romney, and has been mentioned as a possible future Secretary of State in a Romney administration. Through the close connection between the Islamophobic network on the one hand and the Romney campaign on the other, we are justified in remarking that the Romney campaign is the prime suspect in the creation of this anti-Islamic film. It is not surprising that Romney wants to minimize the importance of this film as much as possible. This film and the violence it provoked may represent one of the most ambitious dirty tricks ever launched by a US presidential campaign in search of an October surprise in the service of their own candidate.

Romney obviously blames Obama personally, and not even Hillary Clinton's State Department, for the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and his associates. But here again, we may be dealing with a case of consummate lying. As US intelligence sources told Fox News on September 20, 2012, all signs suggest that the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the murder of Ambassador Stevens were carried out by forces under the command of Sufyan Ben Qumu (or Kumu), a noted terrorist leader of the Libyan Islam ic Fighting Group, an affiliate of AI Qaeda. [362] Qumu is a native of Derna, Libya, the city which US Army files suggest has produced more violent terrorists per capita than any other in the world. The US government knows everything about Qumu, who spent about five years as a prisoner in detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Qumu was then sent back to Libya in September 2007, where he was set free by Gaddafi in an amnesty in 2010.

Qumu illustrates the important fact that the Guantanamo prison camp is not just a place of confinement, but also of training and instruction for terrorists about to be sent forth into the world on missions assigned to them by the United States government. It is clear that the only way someone like Qumu could ever get out of Guantanamo would be by agreeing to serve for the rest of his natural life as a CIA double agent in service of the United States -- assuming that he was not one already. Qumu appears to have been sent back to Libya for the purpose of preparing the civil war which, supplemented by NATO bombing, succeeded in overthrowing and killing Colonel Gaddafi in 2011. The State Department and Ambassador Stevens knew all about Qumu, with whom they may have negotiated to procure levies of terrorist fighters to be sent into Syria to wage civil war against President Assad and the Baathist party government.

The security for the US Consulate in Benghazi was provided by Libyan nationals working for Blue Mountain, a British private military firm on contract for the State Department. Even more disturbing, backup security in case of an attack was supposed to be provided by the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, a terrorist group which had taken part in the overthrow of Gaddafi. This backup security never materialized. The February 17 Martyrs Brigade is also generally considered guilty of the murder of General Abdel Fattah Younes (or Younis) and his staff in the spring of2011. Younes was at that time the main military commander of the Libyan rebel forces opposing Gaddafi in eastern Libya. The death of Younes was especially advantageous to Khalifa Hifter (or Hiftar), the main rival of Younis.

Khalifa Hifter defected from the Gaddafi regime and created his own militia with money from the CIA, according to his own 2001 book Manipulations africaines, published by Le Monde Diplomatique. [363] Hifter came to the United States and lived for about 20 years in Vienna, Virginia, only 5 miles from CIA headquarters. Hifter was shipped back to Libya in the spring of 2011, with the obvious intention of becoming the commander of all rebel forces. In the process, he collided with Younes, who was then eliminated by the February 17 Martyrs Brigade. From this we can assume that the February 17 Martyrs Brigade is also not lacking in contacts with the CIA.

The question is therefore, why would the CIA asset Qumu be sent to assassinate Ambassador Stevens of the State Department?

As this book has stressed, a Mormon Mafia has established itself across the entire US intelligence, diplomatic, and security community. The existence of this CIA Mormon Mafia is a well-known fact of life in Washington, DC. Even the mainstream Washington Post has noted "the influx of Mormons into positions in government, the military and the C1A." [364] The last time the United States had a president explicitly supported by the CIA, it was George H. W. Bush, who with the help of his National Security Adviser, the Mormon Brent Scowcroft, launched the United States on the current cycle of never-ending wars in the Middle East. Obama has been a terrible president, but he has not been able to rely on a dedicated network of hard-core backers across the main national security agencies. In the case of Romney, we have a presidential candidate who would receive the unquestioning support of the CIA Mormon Mafia. This could give Romney a greater unchecked power to do evil than many of his predecessors.

ROMNEY A BIGGER MISER THAN EBENEZER SCROOGE

On the domestic side, anyone who currently relies on a federal government program or might conceivably have to do so in the near future should be aware that Bishop Romney is a miser and skinflint so extreme as to make Ebenezer Scrooge look like the last of the big spenders. In contrast to other Republicans, Romney chose a shabby third-floor walkup for his campaign headquarters, and furnished it with second-hand items from the General Services Administration. Although his personal net worth is about $250 million, Romney insisted on flying coach during his presidential campaign, and refused to pay $10 for early boarding. He insists on carrying his own suitcases because he is too cheap to tip a bellboy, and washes and irons his own dress shirts in his hotel room. When Romney's Massachusetts home needed repairs, the Bishop insisted on doing the work himself to save money. Romney has been known to buy mineral water from a nearby Seven-Eleven to save money while dining at an outdoor cafe. Those who know Romney comment that "He respects money very much ... He is frugal in the extreme," and reporters note that "Mitt Romney always seems to have kept score with dollar signs." [365]


Romney's obsession with money as the measure of all things points to severe psychological alienation, which blinds him to the fact that human productive activity, and not money in any form, is the source of all wealth. Romney qualifies as a money fetishist, from whom the victims of his austerity measures can expect no mercy.

CONCLUSION: THE DANGER OF PERMANENT PLUTOCRATIC RULE

The danger represented by Bishop Romney's possible entry into the White House is that of permanent plutocratic rule, complicated by increased foreign adventurism, and by savage austerity verging on genocide against the American people. The 2012 election may represent a critical turning point in this regard.

From a demographic point of view, the current reactionary Republican Party, dominated by its racist, anti-immigrant and xenophobic Tea Party wing, is doomed to dwindle in importance over the coming decades, as the white population of the United States declines relative to Latinos and other new immigrant groups. At the same time, while the US ruling class is aware of Obama's valuable services as strike-breaker over recent years, the Republican Party offers a better prospect for imposing a permanent austerity dictatorship. This is because the Democratic Party will always have to offer some slight symbolic concessions to labor, blacks, Latinos, women, city dwellers, and the elderly. The Democratic Party is more a confederation of interest groups, while the Republican Party is animated by a unifying ideology of oligarchical privilege.

Therefore, according to some analyses, 2012 may represent a last chance for the Republicans to seize and hold power in the form of a permanent austerity dictatorship.

ROMNEY AS ARCHITECT OF PERMANENT AUSTERITY DICTATORSHIP?

As we have shown, a Romney presidency would be very narrow in its representation, with neocons taking control of foreign policy and Mormons dominating the domestic side. The neocons in question are still angry and humiliated because they were so roundly repudiated by the American people in 2008, when the popularity of the George W. Bush regime sank to just over 20%. The neocons want to vindicate themselves and their methods, and the only way they can imagine doing this is by successful wars of conquest, in contrast to the failed military adventures of the Bush-Cheney era. At the same time, Wall Street demands nothing less than genocidal austerity against the American people, with comprehensive attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment compensation, Head Start, WIC, food stamps, and the other remaining elements of the social safety net. Over the long term, the Republican Party might be better able to deliver on this set of foreign and domestic policies.

The Republican recipe for a permanent austerity dictatorship or plutocracy begins with disenfranchising large parts of the US electorate through voter suppression and related methods. More stringent voter identification laws, based on the nonexistent threat of "voter fraud" (as distinct from vote fraud as favored by Karl Rove and his minions) function like a modern poll tax in making it more difficult for the poor, the elderly, Hispanics, blacks, and working people in general to cast a ballot. At the same time, Republican governors are hiring corrupt contractors to remove hundreds of thousands of probable Democratic voters from the voting rolls, with the pretext that these people are felons, deceased, no longer residents, etc. In addition, reactionary Republicans are making it more difficult to vote early or to obtain an absentee ballot.

In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision, sponsored principally by the RATS cabal (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia), billions of dollars are being mobilized to support reactionary candidates at all levels of government. Labor unions, which might have countered this tendency with money contributions and campaign volunteers, have been under heavy attack by reactionary Republican governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Maine, Florida -- and also New York and California. The expansion of the so-called "right to work laws" for union-busting has weakened the labor organizations which have traditionally constituted one of the most effective forms of resistance against totalitarianism and oppression.

Given the structure of the US electorate, it is likely that a Romney-Ryan victory in November 2012 would be accompanied by reactionary Republican majorities in the House and Senate as well. The last time the United States suffered such a catastrophe of one-party rule was under Bush and Cheney, and the tragic consequences of that are still with us. If Republicans can control the entire federal government, they will attempt to radically narrow the franchise in such a way as to make it almost impossible to dislodge them from power during the years ahead.

Because the creation and consolidation of a permanent plutocracy or austerity dictatorship must, under current US conditions, entail a policy of severe repression against blacks, Hispanics, and working people in general, Romney appears as a much more suitable candidate than Obama to lead such a regime. Obama is notoriously timid, diffident, cautious, cowardly, and weak. Romney has brazenly proclaimed his scorn and contempt for poor people, working people, and the 47%, as this book has documented, Romney brings with him an ingrained Mormon theological hostility to black people, brown people, poor people, and to the American people in general. Romney has a mean and cruel streak which may make him indifferent to the suffering he causes, as during his years as an asset stripper at Bain Capital. Romney's servile devotion to Netanyahu of Israel, and his venom against Putin and Russia, complete this picture of the grim future which lies before the United States in 2012.

Once again, you have been warned.

_______________

Notes:

329 Michael Luo, "'Romney Leads in Ill Will Among GOP Candidates," New York Times, January 24, 2008.
 
330 Anne-Marie Cox, "The "I Hate Romney' Club,'" Time, February 3, 2008.
 
331 Ironically, Ron Paul's approach might also be the only way sharia law could come to the  United States -- the outcome GOP activists say they fear most.
 
332 Matt Canham, "Utah-based Super PAC supports Paul-not Romney," Salt Lake Tribune, February 21, 2012.
 
333 "Five Members of Romney Family Endorsed Ron Paul for President; Free to Speak at Idaho Caucus Sites," RonPaul.com, March 5, 2012. 
 
334 Judd Legum, "Study: Ron Paul Never Attacked Romney Once during 20 Debates, but Attacked  Romney's Rivals 39 Times," ThinkProgress, February 27, 2012.
 
335 Jonathan Easley, "Ron Paul Defends Romney, Bain Capital from GOP Attacks," The Hill,  January 10, 2012.
 
336 Dave Martin, "Ron Paul's CPAC and Virginia Cop-outs: The Last Straw, March 14, 2012, DC  Dave.com.
 
337 Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Family Affair (Washington, 2012).
 
338 Economic Policy Journal, May 2012; OpenSecrets.org. 
 
339 The Oklahoman, December 4, 1993, online at newsOK.com, August 11, 2012. 
 
340 Jon Meacham, "The Mormon in Mitt," Time, October 8, 2012. 
 
341 Michael Leahy, "The Willing Lightning Rod: Paul Ryan's Stance in Daring to Touch Entitlement Reform Most Accounts for His Rise to a Bigger Stage," Washington Post, August 20, 2012.
 
342 [None]
 
343 For Cleon Skousen. see his biography on Wikipedia.

344 I am in fact an exponent of the Hamilton-List-Clay-Lincoln-FDR American System of Political  Economy, and a critic of Karl Marx as a British asset -- see Chapter III of this book.
 
345 Ibid.
 
346 John Elvin, "The Madness at Mountain Meadows: a New Book and Forensic Evidence Suggest  That the Mormon Church Has Long Covered up Complicity in the 1857 Massacre of US Civilians  in Southern Utah," Insight un the News. January 21, 2003.
 
347 Harold Meyerson, '"The illegitimate aims of voter suppression," Washington Post, July 25,  2012.
 
348 "Romney's Tax Confusion," Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2012.
 
349 Michael D. Shear, "For Romney's Trusted Advisor, 'Etch-a-Sketch' Comment Is a Rare Misstep," New York Times, March 21, 2012.
  
350 Colleen McCain Nelson, "Following Romney Again and Again: Some of the Candidates Close  Circle Work for Him Multiple Times, but Not for Love of Politics. Wall Street Journal, August 4-5, 2012.
 
351 Salt Lake City Tribune, August 9, August 29, 1998.
 
352 Dennis Romboy, '''Polygamy Is against the Law,' Leavitt Stresses," Deseret News, May 25, 2001. 
 
353 Julie Cart, "Groups Airing 'Utah's Dirty Little Secret': As Activists Gather, They Say States  in Action on the Issue Allows Sexual Assaults, Child Abuse, Welfare Fraud to Go Unchecked,"  Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2002.
 
354 Wayne Madsen, "A Romney presidency? Get ready for massive Mormon nepotism," Wayne  Madsen Report, February 1-2, 2012.
 
355 Wayne Madsen, "A Romney presidency? Get ready for massive Mormon nepotism," Wayne Madsen Report, February 1-2, 2012.
 
356 Ibid.
 
357 Ibid.
 
358 Ibid. 
 
359 Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler, "Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital with Money from Families Tied to Death Squads," Huffing/on Post, August 9, 2012; Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason, Matea Gold. "Bain Capital Started with Help of Offshore Investors," Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2012.
 
360 Jason Horowitz, "Romney's Pranks Could Go to Far: Classmates at the Elite Cranbrook Boys' Prep School Recall Much Joking by Their Friend, but Also Troubling Incidents," Washington Post, May 11, 2012. 
 
361 Joe Conason, "Did Young Mitt Romney Impersonates a Police Officer? Another Witness Says  Yes," The NationalMemo, June 6, 2012; see also Kranish and Helman.
 
362 "Al Qaeda, Ex-Gitmo Detainee Involved in Consulate Attack, Intelligence Sources Say," Fox  News, September 20, 2012.
 
363 See Wikipedia article on Hifter.
 
364 Diane Winston. "The Faith That Fills the Romney Soul." Washington Post, March 11, 2012.
 
365 Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker, "Romney's Money Trap: A Frugal Man Who Saw Wealth as a Path to Public Service is Now Paying the Price with Voters," Washington Post, September 30, 2012.
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