Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 380: Mormonism Part III - The Level of Leakage

Episode Date: September 1, 2019

In the third part of our Mormonism series, we cover the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the reasons behind some of the more well-known Mormon laws, and Joseph Smith's adventures with mummies which led to some of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Latter-Day Saints.  

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. Why fuck your glass? That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? It's all week long. I have Marcus telling me I'm with my parents and they're like, you can never gonna get out of the house in a week, all my hurricanes gonna cancel you flat. I heard that. And then you get to stay with us for an extra weekend. Aren't you excited? It's fun. It's like the children under the stairs, but it's your parents. And it's like, what if I just set fire to the house before you're asleep? Why don't you do that? But I have Marcus on the other end saying, Henry, let's not get lost in the weeds

about the hermetic magic background of Mormonism and the ascent to cobalt. And I'm like, Marcus, it's the funnest part of the whole thing. No, you can hear people shut off the podcast. You can hear it like out loud. You can hear people throw their phones across the room. The more I talk about the cobaltistic nature. Mormonism spying, the spying of Mormonism. I'm more interested in the weather report that your parents gave you, honestly. The spaghetti maps. Wow, I love that.

This could tell me shit in the world. And of course it's the people under the stairs, not the children under the stairs. I already got something wrong here. All right, everyone, welcome to the last podcast on the left. I am Ben. I'm with Marcus. And we are lucky enough. He's fresh from Florida. He looks so well rested and tense.

He wasn't getting screamed at by his parents for a week because he didn't wipe properly in the bathroom. We are with Henry as well in studio in beautiful New York City. Now I've discovered I don't even bring underwear with streak marks to my family. I wash them. I pre-wash them in the sink. You have to. It's like I'm washing my underwear in the creek. Like I'm a true indigenous American. Yeah.

But today, again, we're not going to get lost in cobalt. We're not going to talk about this. But the one thing that does get me mad is why do Mormons, just by being super nerds, get gifted their own planets? It's not fair. Well, my mother bought a star. She really did. It's the Laura Kissel star.

It's up there somewhere. Listen, if you know how to learn anything from Pocahontas, you can't own a star. I don't know how it works. She bought one a mile in somebody else's moccasins. I don't know. My mom bought one. It was $50. Oh, God.

She bought it for $50. It was us. She got a freaking planetary map. And then they circled a star and they said, that's the Laura Kissel star. It wasn't a scam. Anyway, that was the same Christmas I got a pet rock. All right, everyone, we are on to part three of Mormonism. So when we last left Joseph Smith, he just managed to publish the Book of Mormon using

money guilted out of his follower, Martin Harris, because Martin's wife had either hid or destroyed the first draft of Joseph's Magnum Opus. Lucy, I'm so glad you picked on that toilet paper from the store and tell me it's very stiff. What is this? Guess. Guess, Martin. Oh, I'm being so much in trouble.

Yeah, man. Joseph Smith would be pretty upset about that. And with the publication of the book done under the supervision of a publisher named Egbert Grandin. Nope. Not a name. It sounds like a man who has two legs but no knees. Well, you be careful when you are the godfather to Egbert Zabrowski, how you start throwing

slams against egg-shaped men and how important they are to this very country we are living. Oh, my God. Oh, omelets for dinner again. Daddy, you're the best. So after that, Joseph Smith moved forward with his desire to set up an actual church despite the fact that the reviews for the Book of Mormon were universally terrible. Really? People hated it.

It's not a good book. It's a terrible book. But can you imagine if the Bible was being written and John the Baptist was like, here my works. And then everyone was like, oh, I don't know. Like seriously, do we really need to have critics for these books? Yeah, of course. Because that's the thing is that Joseph Smith released it as a book.

It was sold at bookstores. Not a religious book. Well, that's the thing is that there was no Mormonism when it was released. When the Book of Mormon was released, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints didn't exist. He did not have a church yet. Yeah, it was just a book. The Bible is actually technically good.

Besides being a rag that should be used for tinder for the flames. It's technically a beautiful collection of poetry and lessons. The Book of Mormon is indecipherable. It's 500 pages of gobbledygook. And I don't need to learn that Jesus' magical touch will make you white. Revelations is very fun. Other than that, the Bible is just a list of names. No, that's just certain books.

There were some lazy writers. There were some lazy writers. That's all I'm going to say. And they just listed names. We're getting a lot of biblical hot takes here today. But the fact that the Book of Mormon was not a good book might be the reason why the Church became such a priority. So you remember that the original point of the Book of Mormon was to just sell a book

so Joseph Smith could support himself and his family through something besides farming, which is a noble impulse, admittedly. But Joseph might have realized that if the book wasn't going to sell on the merits of his abilities as a storyteller, then he needed to bolster those stories with the strength of his own personality, which would hopefully translate to patronage. You could just see him looking in the mirror, just like, rubbing his temples. Just like, I got to figure out my fucking brand.

I got to figure out my brand right now, or I'm fucked. Oh, fuck. Fuck me. Fuck me. He's sitting there and everybody's just staring. He's like, that book was supposed to be huge. So Joseph Smith is the first influencer. Is that what you're saying?

So about two weeks after the book was published, Joseph Smith proclaimed himself to be, quote, a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ, an elder of the church, and the grace of your Lord Jesus Christ. I'm all that. Sounds like Charles Manson on an acid trip. But the thing about Joseph Smith was that while he did eventually become an authoritarian, he was also always keenly aware of what both his followers and what the country was thinking.

So you're aware as many cult leaders are the mighty oak that breaks in the storm. Joseph Smith was, as Confucius says, the reed that bends in the wind. Can you say that properly, Marcus? Are we allowed to do that anymore? I can say it. Just be not like the oak that breaks in the storm. Be like the reed that sways in the wind. That's wisdom.

Well, it is interesting. You mentioned how Joseph Smith sort of understood the mood of the country and what people were thinking, and that explains his racism. I know it absolutely does. He's just, I am just a symptom of the problem, okay? I am not the problem. I'm just a symptom of the problem. I'm a barometer of society.

But he understands it. That's my philosophy, which is why I think that I could lead a benevolent dictatorship of this country because I would be, and I did this while I was courting Natalie. I told her this to her several times. I said, I would be the Lord who listens. You are only saying that because you are currently playing Civ 5 and you are becoming a psychopath. Because if you do not figure out how to measure happiness with your food outtake,

you're going to get rebels showing up and then you have to use your own army to defeat your own people. Oh my God. The Gaddafi of Civ 5. Well, I mean, Henry might be honest up here because Joseph's willingness to bend is why Joseph Smith's legacy is beautiful Salt Lake City while Jonestown is an overgrown jungle run. Interesting. But what Joseph's willingness to listen meant was that he was just as influenced by his followers

as they were influenced by him and his teachings. Because you gotta remember, Joseph Smith was 25 years old when he founded the Church of Jesus Christ a lot of days ago. Hey y'all, I'm just doing what y'all telling me to do. I just delivered. You tell me to jump. I saved. You telling me to fucking jump?

And because Joseph listened, the birth of Mormonism as we know it was messy, bloody, and full of dissension in the ranks. But a big part of Mormonism's rise was the fact that these people were yes anding each other into making Joseph more than a man but less than a god. For example, one of Joseph's earliest followers was a man named Newell Knight. Now Newell Knight believed that he was possessed by the devil or a lesser demon because it's kind of unclear exactly what lived inside of Newell. Prophet, Prophet Joseph, I have a problem.

I have come to you. I do not know what has come inside of me. Last night, I farted on a sandwich and I ate it. And I did it just to see how much fart would stay on the sandwich. Yep, you got yourself a sharp demon, my friend. Sorry about that. But whatever was inside Newell caused convulsions that no doctor could cure. So Newell turned to Joseph Smith, who wasn't even sure he knew how to perform an exorcism.

But when Smith took the devil to task, commanding the devil to release Newell's soul, Newell Knight said that he saw the devil leave his body and disappear. I'm thinking of that Red and Stimpy episode where Stimpy loses his fart. It's like the cutest thing I've ever seen. It was the sweetest episode of the whole show. But this is where, you know, oh God, I'm so torn. I'm not praising Joseph Smith or LRH, but just this idea that a man can come and say, I think I'm possessed by a demon and you know your job is all eyes are on you.

You're the prophet. If anybody can get rid of a demon, it's you. So Joseph Smith just looks at him and he looks at his hands and he's just like, No, get on a bed today. And then it just so happens he buys it enough that he stops convulsing. Hey man, if it works, it works. I mean the power of the mind. After that, Newell claimed that his convulsions never bothered him again.

The key has never bothered him. Right, that's the problem. But this incident is highly underrated for how much it affected Joseph Smith as a leader and as a man who believed he was an honest to God magician. Well, he has got the backup to it. He knows he has the training from his parents. All of this right hand path magic shit has been around for a long time mixed with just the straight up folk magic that I have been reading more and more about

has been a part of the American farming culture since the very beginning. Right, since we started farming in this country. Many people have been using these little talismans and all this kind of shit. So Joseph Smith at this point thinks like, I'm the one. Yeah, I mean before the exorcism, Joseph wasn't sure he had what it took to be a religious leader because he knew that he'd just been making shit up. He knew the golden place didn't exist. He knew the seeing stones were just stones.

But although he was technically a blasphemer, Smith was certainly no atheist. And in pulling off the exorcism, Joseph had done something beyond his known abilities. Now, Joseph Smith had performed what both he and his followers believed to be a bona fide miracle. So he's buying his own message now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, buddy. He's into himself. Yeah, oh, yeah.

He's well on his way to believe in his own bullshit. Okay. Well, I will say it was interesting when his mom wrote about later on when she wrote her own biography and then explaining the childhood of Joseph Smith as she was raising him. She said one thing is she is very interesting. One draft. She was like, it's not like Joseph was constantly using her medics to access the faculty of a brach. And then they cut that sentence out, right?

The faculty of a brach, which was like, that's deep cut. Super deep. Right hand magic bullshit. Then she was just like, oh, so this is like a thing they kind of have talked about. And so eventually it is just that it's like I never would have believed I would be able to suck my own dick. But at one time I prayed as hard as I could to Satan and I had so much whiskey inside of me. Yeah. And I got my nose almost to the tip.

Wow. Isn't that exciting? You got to nose fuck yourself. So it seems like Joseph Smith's mom would be a super cool chicken Sonoma. Yeah. She's just kind of a hippie chick. Oh, she'd be covered in gems. Okay.

And so on April 6th, 1830, the Church of Christ, as they first called it, was formally established with only six members. Within a month that number had jumped to 40. This is the shit that really like flipped me as we were going through this history. Mormonism caught on fast. So super fast. But most people in Joseph Smith's hometown were not buying it. See, these people knew exactly what Joseph Smith was because they'd all grown up with him. And for the most part, they'd put up with all the magical shit that Joseph and his family got up to.

But now Joseph Smith was taking advantage of people's deeply held beliefs. He was a blasphemer and that the people couldn't abide. But it was smart to attach it to Jesus, right? Of course. Because then he makes it, so it's just a, he's just a franchise. He's just a different franchise of Christianity. It's repackaging the essential pieces that make any religion. So then, so then folks who were super Christian could also just be like, well, it's not that bad.

Jesus is still involved. Yeah, of course. And no, and this is also something that's pretty common among cult leaders. Like, you remember Omchenricchio, a lot of their stuff was based on the foundation. And that brought in all of the sci-fi nerds. You gotta have a hook. Yeah. Colts have to have a hook.

Like, you have to add something new to the conversation. Right. Mm-hmm. So, a mob of about 50 people surrounded Joseph and his converts, threatening to tar and feather, until a constable appeared and arrested Joseph for disorderly conduct. This is just the first mob. First. That will come for the Mormons.

Wow. Yeah. But then I researched a little bit about tar and feathering and it's interesting because a lot of it, it's not as bad as I thought it was. Are you sure about that? Well, sometimes it's the super hot tar if they really don't like you. But sometimes it's pine tar that just can be, like, it's still hot. But it's not scalding you hot.

But it's more embarrassing. The worst thing they do is they ride you on a rail. Yeah. They take a fence post and they put it up in your gooch. And then you're covered in the feathers and the tar. And then they bounce you up and down this rail and they embarrass you. Oh, it sounds super embarrassing. You get covered in pine tar like you're a baseball bat and shove stuff up inside you.

Not good. Like Henry said, although this was the first time a mob appeared ready to take Joseph Smith away and it was the first time that Mormons were threatened with violence, it was by no means the last, not even close. And the church was only a couple of months old. Wow. But Joseph skated on this one as he would many times afterwards. Well, what this gave Joseph Smith was something that every good cult leader needs.

An enemy. Get this man. An enemy. The Dracula didn't love him. Honestly, very good. Very good. The Mormons were now persecuted and nothing bolsters faith like persecution. Yep.

About this first persecution, Joseph wrote, quote, They spit upon me, pointed their fingers at me saying prophecy, prophecy, and thus did they imitate those who crucified the savior of mankind, not knowing what they did. Two months in and he's already comparing himself to Jesus Christ. Wow. You got the man, that's how you do it, dude. Fucking John Lennon.

But it's still like, I'm not Jesus. Bah. I'm Jesus at Jason. I'll give you that. But the person Joseph Smith was having the hardest time convincing when it came to the church was his own wife. No. Shit.

Of course. You imagine going home to your wife and you're like, so I'm kind of like Jesus. And she's like, what? What was that? Oh, you mean like Jesus, the garden man? But it's not because she didn't believe in Joseph Smith and the golden plates and all that shit because remember, she helped him translate.

She was the first one. Well, while Joseph Smith was just fine with taking money from parishioners because it kept him out of the fields, Emma had pride. She did not like taking charity from other people. She believed that Joseph Smith should work for a living, that he should work for his money. Well, and I just want to thank everyone who's given to our Patreon. And the money is going to Puffin, to Wendy and to Georgie.

They're the ones really spending the money. It's not Kissel Atlantic City in any way she performed. And it's not me buying various shoes or buying weird eats in the middle of the night. Hey, at this very moment, Georgie is getting her anal glands squozen. So thank you. I'm doing sports Betty now. It took six weeks for Joseph to convince his wife that joining the church was the right thing to do.

And he finally accomplished it through what else, but his natural talent for improvisation, a.k.a. lying. Ah, you say lying. I say selling. It's about getting them in the fold and having everybody see from your perspective. It's don't stand away from me looking at me, stand beside me looking forward with me, friend, wife, friend. Honestly, that's very good.

Joseph told his wife that God had struck him with a capital R revelation. Whoa! It's like, and it's coming. Wait, can you hear? Mine it. Sold. God, according to Joseph, had made Emma Smith a, quote, elect lady going on to say that her only purpose would be, quote,

a comfort unto my servant, Joseph Smith, Junior, thy husband, in the spirit of meekness. In other words, shut your fucking mouth and do what you're told. Listen. This is exciting, yay. No, but you're like a special wife. I am. No, you're a special wife and you get to do special things.

Like what? Like be my wife. But what if I want to do something like at a job? You're already doing a job there. So you're being my wife. You're just sitting there and you're going zip. And me, I'm going to make a money, make a money, make a money. And here, Joseph Smith added perhaps the most important tool

in his entire cult leader skill set. Direct communication with God through revelation. Take a little bit of sociopathic racism and sexism, and then you've got a perfect dish. But all of that gives you a direct channel to Jesus Christ. Oh, is that right? That's the recipe? That's the recipe.

And the thing is about the revelation is that it was one sided. So that way, God's word was always final. Listen, Emma, it's God who made you a special wife. It wasn't me. He told me. You're going to argue with G.O.D.? No. Yeah, you know me?

You were doing this? I remember that. I love the way you rap. Special wife. Special wife is a special type of quite. No, you made a noise there. That was a noise too. Let's see what a special wife does.

What noise does a special wife make? Yeah. Joseph even got rid of his seeing stones and all of his magical accoutrements because he realized that Mormonism would be much more impressive, simpler and infallible if it all came directly from him. See, pretty soon Joseph was claiming that God had whisked the golden plates back up to heaven, every single one of them. So Joseph would never have to face another situation like he'd faced with Lucy Harris's

clever trickery. Hey, Joseph, it's God here. We've got a big spaghetti Thursday coming up. I've got to get these plates back. Is that cool? Absolutely. G.O.D. You're the boss of me.

All right. Thank you. How can I argue? He wanted the good plates. But he must have felt almost a sadness though. I feel like it, not to equate myself to this leader again, but I remember when I got... You're Joseph Smith adjacent. Is that what you're saying?

No. But I remember when I got rid of my big hands from my Mr. Big Hands. You got rid of the big hands from your sketch for murderfist? When I had to, I downsized my sketch comedy closet. I downsized it and I got rid of all these props. And it's a part of me because you want to believe you'd be like, I'm enough. Just my words are enough. I don't need to dress up like a big dildo.

I don't need to put on a Santa Claus costume all covered in blood. No, but literally that's... I mean, me on stage. That bit was only good because you had big hands. It was all dependent on the big hands. Can I get a little bit of big hands just to, you know, if we go back to that moment a little bit? Name's Devon Horse Punch. You need help spanking your daughter?

I'll spank your daughter with my gigantic hands. But listen. Oh, good memories. We see how you're laughing. That's just the power of me, boys. You need to be more supportive of me. But then I've also, but that's the things that I've got the memory of you with the big hands and the glasses hunched over.

It's like in the movies when the nerd girl takes the ponytail down and takes the glasses off. It was always her. She was always a hot chick. It's me. I know I'm with the big hands. All right. Well, Joseph Smith, because he got rid of all of his accoutrements, he became God's mouthpiece, meaning that Joseph would ask God a question concerning whatever thorny matter was before him

or the church, and then Joseph would speak the answer with the voice of God, the final voice of God. Unless, of course, Joseph later decided that God wanted something different. Hey, Joseph, should we get her two or three cheese pizzas for the meeting here? Let me ask God. God, should we get two? Wait, what are you saying? Oh, we don't need to get at least one Hawaiian in there because that's God saying it.

I don't know, Joseph. None of us like it. God said we are eating a Hawaiian tonight. Oh, that ain't even a pizza. Well, throughout Joseph's life, and indeed, up until this very day, the concept of revelation was and is used to change the rules of Mormonism on the fly, again, showing the willingness to bend to whatever whims kept Mormons thriving, and at that time, alive. Again, a similarity to Scientology.

It was about the keyword. Are we going to hit this again? Is alive. They want this shit to live forever. This is a key that Joseph Smith understood, is that he wanted this to go forever, where LRH then used Scientology and moved it towards a business end, which you're going to see a little bit more with Joseph Smith later on down the line, with right now, he's starting to understand we just need to have a little bit of wiggle room in order for this great

experiment to continue. Interesting. So a lot of people believe in a living constitution, for example, and that is why the constitution has been so flexible. Which also makes Mormonism, again, the most American of all religions. But the other thing about the Mormons staying alive, I mean that very literally, because sometimes the Mormons did have to change rules to prevent from being killed by mobs. All right, we'll stop walking backwards on Wednesday, as we understand we're running

into the children. We will stop walking backwards on Wednesday. So after Emma agreed to convert and bend to Joseph's will, the couple moved to Fiat, New York, to live in the home of Peter Whitmer, who'd been one of the eight witnesses to the Golden Plates before God took them back to heaven. Yeah, Pete, you remember you saw the plates, right? Tell Emma you saw the plates. Well, I certainly signed a paper that said I saw the plates.

Yeah, you did, didn't you? Yeah, you did. I feel so bad for Emma in this situation. It's got to suck. Not just to have an authoritarian husband, but to have a husband that thinks he's God. That's a colossal pain in the ass. You're going to feel a lot worse for Emma before this whole thing's over. But she's a special wife.

Yeah. Well, from Fiat, New York, Joseph truly began laying the foundations for his church. Within five months, he had a revelation that God wanted the Mormons to build the city of Zion on the borders of the Lamanites, a.k.a. the Native American tribes. Oh, interesting. And so he sent Oliver Cowdery, who had just returned from a sales trip out east where he'd sold fuck all copies of the Book of Mormon to go proselytize to the Native Americans, who the Book of Mormon promised would eventually turn white if only they believed hard enough.

I also, I'm getting some, I'm getting a revelation here. God also wants us to build a thing called the Keystone Pipeline, directly through Native Land. I don't know. It's just so funny that it always seems to be through Native Land. But listen, guys, listen, if you guys cover yourself just in enough oil and we wipe it off, you too can also be white. Whoa!

And it wasn't just Oliver Cowdery who was given the ability to speak in Joseph's stead. Joseph ordained every male follower with titles like Apostle, Elder, and Deacon, and gave them missions to spread the word of Mormonism to all people. And this is a practice that, of course, we all know today, as I'm willing to bet damn near everyone listening has seen pairs of Mormon missionaries and button-up shirts and black ties walking around their neighborhood at one point or another, although they no longer tell people that the color of their skin can change through belief. It'd be kind of fun if they said, if you believe in God, you turn purple.

Because then I'd be like, I believe, I believe, I believe, am I grimace? Am I grimace yet? And again, to give you a scope of how successful Mormonism ended up being, there are currently 65,000 missionaries in damn near every corner of the globe spreading the word of Joseph Smith. Just tight boys, just full of innocence, and there's new to New York City, but they were taught Spanish for some reason, and they can all speak Spanish, and then those fey young girls, women almost, nay women, nay women, out there teaching lessons all alone in the

middle of snectagy. But the reason why the Mormons promised white skin was because there was an actual scientific belief at the time that this was possible because lighter skin natives supposedly took to European customs more readily than their darker skinned brethren. I think that's probably like a really complicated, nay problematic statement, right? Yes, absolutely. Yes, and as dumb and anecdotal as that is, this belief in so-called science is what actually attracted a fair amount of intelligent for the time people to the Mormon faith, which

again, this is extremely similar to Scientology. Because you add a little bit of the pseudoscience, and then people believe the intellectuals start jumping in. The pseudo-intellectuals, the people who believe their intellectuals, Brigham Young, was one of these guys. Yeah, all the people who went to Yale who currently don't have jobs. Or the other half of people who went to Yale that just write every single TV sitcom in Los Angeles.

Or the person who just wrote an entire 8,000 pages in the New York Times about the TV show Friends. Using pseudoscience, Mormonism was able to bring in dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people who were just smart enough to understand scientific theory, but not so smart that they couldn't see through the bullshit. So, while the first missionaries were out west, a man named Parley Pratt, who was Mitt Romney's great-great-grandfather, came upon a town in Ohio named Kirtland, which was home to a pastor with a sizable following named Sidney Rigdon.

Now, Sidney was a big believer in the gathering of Israel, meaning that chosen people would soon come together in anticipation of the final days. A lot of evangelicals believe in this shit now. And that also meant that Sidney was into millennialism, which was the belief that Jesus was due back on Earth soon to roll for the millennium of peace. Ben, I'm sure you're extremely familiar with this. I thought millennialism was living in your parents' basement because you're too lazy to get a job.

I guess I'll leave them alone. I'd go there, I'd do that. But isn't millennialism also kind of what gives the concept of what we've always talked about in cults, which you have to put an end to, you have to put a thing in the future that we're working towards, which is a goalpost that can be moved? Part of the genius of Joseph Smith, which we'll get into in just a second. So when Parley Pratt showed up at Sidney's church saying that the city of Zion was going to be a merit.

Whoa! Whoa, what? That's so crazy! Wow! Were the Native Americans! Wow! And that a manate from New York had received these revelations straight from God. Of course.

And when Sidney heard all this shit, he was ecstatic. You gotta be kidding me! Here's your sign. So after fasting and praying for three days, Sidney, quote unquote, saw an angel and took it as a sign that this Joseph Smith fellow was on to something. Wow. In three weeks, all of Sidney's parishioners were believers in the Book of Mormon without Joseph even fucking showing up.

Bam! It's about finding yourself a loyal, I mean, honestly, like we have an audience now. And so companies are like, oh, we would like to get a part of that audience. And all he did was take his audience. Joseph Smith was like, I'm a little bit of that audience and flip him. That's a brilliant move. Yep. You'd be like, if we could get another podcast to start flipping their fans towards us.

And then we get them to start, their whole show is just praising us. Right. So they eliminate their show. They just talk about how great we are and they make everybody that subscribes to them also subscribes to us. This is a great move. They're making money on top of money. We're making money on top of money.

Big money moves. But it's weird how it's also about like kind of pokery bluffs where if somebody has enough inertia, like he showed up, Joseph Smith showed up with enough fire and he was the right look. He had the right cut his shirt. He was in there. He had the right words and everybody's just like, okay, you want to be in charge? Okay.

We'll flip to you. Well, no, this all happened before Joseph Smith even showed up in Kirtland. This was just Oliver, this was just Oliver Cowdery taking Joseph Smith's energy and delivering it. Wow. He just showed like, he's like, do you want to see something incredible? And it was just the box and he opened up the top of it and just was a tip of a penis just hanging on the very top of box.

It might have been plaster. And he's like, this is Joseph Smith's penis and it's coming all the way from Albany. Looks like Dan Ackroyd's nose from nothing but trouble. Meanwhile, Joseph Smith was busy writing a bit of a sequel. After completely throwing away the concepts of seeing stones and golden plates, Joseph claimed that the book of Enoch, the sequel to the Book of Mormon, had been zapped straight into his brain by God. This book he claimed, which was supposedly a conversation between God and Moses, had

been omitted from the Old Testament because the Hebrews had been wicked, which definitely took the title of God's chosen away from the Jews. So God was like also playing like role of copy editor and was like, I'm sorry, we're going to have to take that out. Yeah, this is what it was, it was all addendums and edits. So the story went that an ancient city named Zion had been taken up into the heavens whole because its people had been so terribly righteous and God was ready for Zion to come back to earth.

Joseph just had to build it first and once he did, they could kick off Jesus' millennium. I think, I think that's what the story is. It's sort of that, but it is, it is that sort of, but also what I understand is that I thought they took the city as a whole. Why don't they just download the city then? Bring it back. You would think that would be the case. Yeah.

But that's the thing is that I think they just took the souls of the whole city. But he said the city as a whole. Well, I think they took, I think he meant they took the people of the city, all the people of the city up into heaven. Why didn't he say that? I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure this is just the plot of Space Jam. I think they, yeah, I mean that's what, when they, when they zapped Patrick Ewing's energy, which happened in real life.

Yeah. Yeah. During the 90s when they were in the playoffs. But they do that quite a bit in Mormonism. There was a lot of this idea of you just believe so hard you just pop into heaven. Like it's this idea, you go, and then all of a sudden you're in heaven, cobalt. Yeah. Okay.

But whatever the book of Enoch said, Sidney Rignett and said, I love it. I love it. Wait a second, wait a second, just say, just say one more time. Book of Enoch. I love it. This is the worst Hollywood pitch meeting ever. In two weeks, Joseph had another revelation that the Mormons, quote, should have cymbal together in Ohio.

Yay. And we're taking brand new steamship all the way to Cleveland. I called it the Cleveland steamer. And that would give the Mormons their first official home because Joseph had to get the fuck away from New York and everybody who knew who he used to be. That's kind of like the opposite track. Normally people leave from Ohio to go to New York to delete who they used to be. But this is upstate New York.

Like nobody goes to fucking Buffalo to delete who they used to be. He's real keys. Yeah, that's true. But a lot of followers weren't too keen on leaving. So after weeks of arguing, Joseph had another revelation commanding his people to go, which really isn't all that different from Jim Jones moving his people from Indianapolis to California by telling them that a nuclear holocaust was coming. God, there's a lot of people saying they want to leave more.

They want to do an afternoon trip. No, we got to we got to go right now. It's kind of a command. Really? Wow. Yeah. It's a purely Mormon settlement, although there were already about 150 Mormons upon Joseph's arrival before he even fucking got there.

That's nice. The Mormon's biggest rival in the spiritual arena were the Cambolites, who were the polar opposites of the Mormons. We worship this can of chicken noodle soup. I mean, hell, at least it gives you a sustenance. At least it's a real thing. Well, the Cambolites were New Testament literalists who believed that the word of God, i.e. the over-translated King James Bible, which is far from the original word, was to be taken

exactly as it was written, which naturally caused friction with Joseph's style. Yeah, because I'm the hip hop pastor laying down licks. Everybody sees, just wants to see how my brain ticks. That's how it is. See what you see. Yeah. Nice. Jesus was the original hippie.

Now you're just reminding me of when Mitt Romney saying, who let the dogs out? Remember that? That's a fun little video. If you get a chance to YouTube it. It's a serious question. I'm asking. There are dogs everywhere. Who?

Who? Who? And what was more, the Mormons that Joseph found in Kirtland, Ohio were stuck in revivalist mode, meaning they were just, they were still speaking in tongues and flopping around on the fucking floor. And Joseph knew that in religion, the candle that burns the brightest also burns out the fastest. If it's yellow, you got to let it mellow.

I heard that. And part of what he understood that these, that type of passion is not how we're going to build our city. No. We're not going to build our city that's going to last forever. Everybody's acting super intense and fucking speaking directly to God and they're flopping around. But it is interesting because you know that they're showing me like, look, Joseph, look,

I'm talking right there. Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, he's like, stop it, shut up. Yeah. This isn't a crash test dummies music video, would you? Stop that already. The Campbellites were taken full advantage of this. A Campbellite newspaper editor wrote that during worship, the Mormons crept on their hands and feet and acted out, quote, all the Indian modes of warfare, such as scalping and

the tearing out of bowels. I would love to watch these crackers to this. Just the whiteest people. That would be fun to see them. It just sounds like murderous rehearsal. Yeah. Yeah. And that does sound like fun.

It's fun to watch that and hell to participate, to pretend to tear out your neighbor's guts and intestines. But they were doing all this sober. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a lot of people who believe that Joseph Smith was feeding everybody a steady stream of various hallucinogens, but it seems like that would be very difficult to do on it.

On mass. Okay. But that's a theory. It's a theory that I do not subscribe to. Well, you know what, Marcus, I don't either. So Joseph Smith knew that the Mormons couldn't be seen as full crazy, but he also didn't completely ban all of this spiritual hullabaloo because he knew that discouraging faith was a bad idea.

Well, it's weird because he's literally just like, I like your fandom, I like your energy. Love your energy. Love it. Love it. Just tone it down just a bit. Yeah. It's like every commercial edition. Every single commercial.

Love your approach. And if you could just like, not do any of that, that'd be great. It's like when we ask for people to apply for a job here and they send a resume that says, Hey, you fucking dickheads, I want a fucking job. I'm like, we are actually a business. Well, then we did end up hiring Larry and he's a very good employee and I like him very much. I love that he's the human toilet.

He's great. He's great. I really wish we didn't do this whole, if it's yellow, let it mellow thing because I am full of urine. You hold that cup between your knees, it is your job. I would love to flush it. So Joseph Smith had a revelation in which God said that Joseph Smith had to give personal permission to converts before they could speak in tongues and all that shit, making sure

to keep the crazier ones from showing their ass too much in public. So he just did the same thing with his wife. He's just like, but what if everyone just shuts up and this is how we did it? Yes. He's smart. He did it like my father on vacation. But Joseph Smith, it's, you know, every once in a while cause he's like, all right, stop it.

Stop all the, stop the flim flammery, just stop it. Every once while they're just hanging out and they're like, George, do some tongues please. And he goes, he's like, George, you fucking crack me up. What this also did though was put Joseph into a firmly authoritarian position. This would put Joseph and later the church on the road to controlling every aspect of worship and eventually most aspects of people's personal lives as well. And the way Joseph set up the hierarchy was essentially a pyramid scheme.

Since every man was ordained in the church in some way or another, they formed the base, but there were a lot of levels above them. And the best way to move up to the next level was to bring more people into the church. Starting to see a pattern here because you're bringing people into the flock. But everybody was a priest. That's going to become more formal as things go. But it's interesting to see how people behave when you say like, you're not intern Malcolm, you're Admiral Malcolm.

Like when you give somebody a big title, they act like it's more like they have more gravity. It's like MLM now where they tell people like, you own your own business. Yeah. You're also selling Herbalife. Ah. Now, Joseph was also keenly aware of the mood of religious minded folk at the time. Looking at how Sidney Rigdon and his flock had taken to millennialism, Joseph started making that a central tenet of his sermons.

And once he incorporated millennialism, people started flocking by the hundreds to see Joseph speak. And a lot of these people stayed because they saw Joseph's rise as evidence that Christ was indeed coming. The prophets were starting to appear. But what made Joseph so smart was that unlike a lot of other milleniarists and cult leaders throughout history, Joseph never set a date for when Jesus might come back. Although he did once say that Jesus might come back in 56 years, long after Joseph was

dead. I'm just going to put on my truth hat. I just want to get this sentence out there because I hate, Jesus is never coming back. Because Jesus was never here. He's a made up character. Okay. Thank you, Kissal. Honestly, it really means a lot.

I'm glad that you did it, not me. Thank you for saying it. Yes, please. My mother used to allow me to stay home from school, which was a nice reason because she said you don't have to go to school because you never know when Jesus is coming back. So we got to go to Pigley. Wiggly. Yeah.

That was nice. Yeah. But that also introduced a lot of really bad habits that you're still trying to deal with. No, I don't. I just surround myself with smart friends. It's not me stealing people's work. It's me surrounding myself with smart people.

We should have heard me explaining to my niece, Bella. My niece was literally being like, I don't understand group projects at school. There's always one kid who doesn't do anything, but he gets the same grade as us. And I'm like, that's the smartest kid in the group because that's a kid who understands. You just have to go, listen, Bella, love what you're doing. Love your energy. Again, keep it going. I'm here to just, I'm dotting the I's.

I'm crossing the T's. I'm here to support you. Yeah. Honestly, your father's routine of just when he was asked to do something, he did it wrong and then your mother never asked him to do something again. Just get the question wrong when they went in the group work and then, oh, yeah, I guess you better do it. But in the Mormon world, Jesus had already come back.

Oh my God. I just realized something about myself in group projects. I used to just do all of the work because nobody else would do it as good as I could do it. I know. And it's not nothing that's changed. But just stop it. No, don't ever, don't let him know that he's remotely figuring it out, OK?

Yeah, that the same dynamics are in play and that they'll always will be in the jokers who don't do anything, always float casually to the top. Man, I wish I could do less work. But in Mormonism world, Jesus already came back. Oh, already? No, if you think about it, that time when he reappeared in North America, he kind of had a little bit of being like, well, that return kind of already happened. So we don't really have another one of those in the can for a little bit.

OK, so they already do have the, I guess, the dissension of Jesus has already happened? It's not the full dissent. No, it's not the full backup with the army in the end of the times, all the trumpets and the revelations. All the stuff about revelations that I've already forgotten. There was a chicken place that opened up and Jesus really wanted to try it. Why did he come back? He came back to talk to the Lamanites and the Nephites.

Ah, wait a second. Wait a second. Are the chicken wars the sixth seal? Oh, no. Popeyes and Chick-fil-A. I knew the Christians have to do with this. This is Chick-fil-A's Christians. It's an experiment to bring about the end times. Well, millennialism was where the Mormons actually got the name that they used for themselves.

Because even today, the word Mormon, when it comes to referring to these people, is considered of the devil. It's still considered an insult. They do not refer to themselves as Mormons. In fact, it's a great sin to refer to yourself as a Mormon. I'm not a Mormon. I'm a Mormon. Very good.

See, since these people believe that they lived in the end times, they began to refer to themselves as Latter-day Saints. And the Church of Christ eventually became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or more commonly, the LDS. Interesting. During his sermons, Joseph made sure to maintain an easy-going, folksy appeal, but he knew when to hit him with something hard, and it was said that Joseph was able to take a crowd from laughter to tears in a split second, which again is extremely common in cult leaders.

It's like our live show. But Jim Jones was very similar. Jim Jones had a flair for leasing in and being like, nah, I'm just a man like you. I'm just like you. I put my bra on one strap at a time. I'm like, Jimmy, you're gay. It is that stuff that allows you to key into people. That's where Joseph Smith had his special, his truly special gifts.

Interesting. And Joseph was also extremely personable. I mean, he was a great politician. They said he was super funny. He was always joking and jesting, and he would kind of bend the rules just a little bit when it was funny. Oh man, now I'm thinking about again when Mitt Romney's like, who let the dogs out? My God, he is just so personal.

I saw a Dotson in the living room. I saw a Rottweiler in the backyard. I am concerned at the level of leakage that these dogs are receiving. And what's Joseph prove that he could move people at least emotionally and spiritually? He took it to the next step and started asking for land and money. All right. Now for Sidney Rigdon's followers, this wasn't a big deal because they were already living communistically, which was much more common at the time than you might think.

There's a lot of communistic roots in America, especially in small farming communities. Yeah, because they understood that it's not about the ideological end of socialism. It's about just taking care of people. So they lived communally. It was more like communalism. Yeah. But you see that's the thing is that it's just one community. Joseph Smith just kind of stepped like, okay, you're all just one group.

So I'm kind of in charge quotation marks of this entire community. Right. But for the others who weren't so sold on the communistic ideals, Joseph needed a revelation, which said, quote, Behold, said the Lord, thou shalt consecrate all thy properties, that which thou hast unto me, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken, and they shall be laid before the bishop of my church. It's the church. Oh, is that it?

Good Lord. And this demand for Mormon money continues to this day. If you really want to have fun, YouTube, like Kenneth Copeland, for example, he's a multi-multi-multi-millionaire fake pastor. And when they get confronted, be like, why do you have a private jet? Just go down that YouTube hole of people confronting these super wealthy people. And it's really fun to see them try to explain away the fact that they are obviously lying and taking advantage of people.

If you look right here in the book of Corinthians, it says, the most important and luxurious most supple leather is the Corinthian leather, which is why I have spent 25,000 of your most gracious dollars in covering the entire interior of my personal jet plane with Corinthian leather. It is literally exactly that response. I think one of them actually said that demons live on passenger jets. They do. They do. They do.

They technically do. Yeah, we had a flight attendant who told us that that is true. Yeah, well, she said reptilians. Yeah, okay. Well, Mormons are required today to tithe 10% of their annual salary to the church. And if they don't, they aren't allowed to worship in a Mormon temple or even enter a Mormon temple for any reason other than to pay the tithe. Next week, we'll get into all of the weird shit that you have to do and even try to

enter into a Mormon temple. We literally had to sell our house growing up and move into a duplex. And my parents, my dad made 75K a year. They gave so much fricking money to this good news fellowship church. We literally built our pastor's house. And he mentioned, and it was just, it infuriated me at a very, very young age. And it's like, daddy, daddy, Batman has some really cool new action figures out right now. I would really like to get those.

But of course, we have to give to the church. I know that you must have given a lot to the tithing, but I'd also like to get a look at some of the food bills that you and your brothers racked up. I crushed it, man. I could order so much pizza. But along with monetary rules, Joseph was also forming the official hierarchy of the church. And he had a revelation that the ancient Melchizedek priesthood mentioned in the Old Testament

was to be restored immediately and bestowed among the common men. Now this is, you're going to be mad at us theologists listening to this podcast. And if you're a theologist listening to this podcast, congrats. I don't know how you got here. But this is where it's a bit complicated, but I think that Joseph Smith used that to his advantage. Yeah. The Melchizedek priesthood is one of the most important organizations in Mormonism, but

it is also highly complicated. And we just don't have the time, nor honestly, the attention span to dive too terribly deep. Honestly, good, because I'm already getting pissed. Basically, the long and short of it seems to be is that Melchizedek was a famous priest. He was a priest. Essentially, this is a priest class, kind of like for the D&D people out there. It's like the difference between being a paladin and a cleric. Yes.

How'd you make this more confusing? He put this out. I get it. He's making it less confusing for me. They are like it's like an upper class. It's bullshit to say now my priests, all y'all, that I'm going to give you this, this specific priesthood are now more powerful than the regular priests. Yeah.

A paladin is a warrior priest wherein a cleric is more of a healer, correct? You got to be one of those people that's like, you got to be a do, you're on the sides and you're kind of like a medic. You don't do a lot. You do some white magic spells. I have not done a nerd alert in a long time, but you know what, we've got a nerd alert. We've got a nerd alert. We've got a nerd alert.

Literally anything is better than a bard. Yeah. Well, it's like Jesus was in the Melchizedek. Melchizedek or Melchizedek? Honestly guys, can we please move on? My brain is about to explode like the movie Scanners. Well, yes. That was Jesus's class.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now all you really need to know is that it has five levels from elder to apostle and four quorums from the elders quorum at the bottom to the quorum of 12 at the top, which eventually made its way into the lore of Battlestar Galactica. Why does religion, why does it, what is people, why are they the way they are? Well, you know, hierarchies are important.

Yeah. Again, you got to, you got to go towards the nerds. If you want your cult to survive, you got to shoot towards the nerds because nerds, we love game nights, which is basically just hanging out. We like feeling like you're not, you don't have asthma. Like you're not getting gene rub, right? And when you're, what kind of alleviates the feeling of gene rub? What is gene rub?

Hired on, buddy. No, no, no, that's, that's his version of naughty gene rub. I'm talking about base gene rub, which is like, I don't know if you've ever fully filled out your genes. I've been like, when I was really, really big, and then like you get like a rash underneath your belly from the material of the denim and all the inside of your thighs. I've been real fat, kind of fat and currently sort of fat. I have never had any kind of rub.

See, I thought when you said gene rub, I thought you meant like when you get hard when you're wearing your genes and then that rubs. No. What about underwear? Like, horny. Back in the day, it was my penis used to just kind of stick into the bottom of my belly. Ah, you guys must have gotten those fancy genes that had the zipper in the form of a vagina.

But the thing was, although Kirtland was a nice, but you just have to give people steps to go up. Right, right, right. People like numbers. It's like us with the sky miles. Which I obsessively check about once a week. But the thing was, although Kirtland was a nice base for the Mormons, they needed a place a little more malleable and closer to the frontier for their very own Zion.

And Parley Pratt thought he'd found it in Jackson County, Missouri. Remember, this is Mitt Romney's great-great-grandfather. Now, Jackson County was home to Independence, which fans of our Donner Party series will remember eventually came to be a jumping-off point for settlers heading out west about 15 years after the founding of Mormonism. Okay. But back then, in 1830, Independence had no bank, no printing press, and most importantly, no church.

So of course the Mormons were like, this place is just not exciting enough for us to live in. They can't be excited because if not, they can't go to Kobel. Oh no. All Independence had was one shopkeeper who was making a killing, all of which made Independence a seemingly smart place to settle. See if the Mormons got a foothold in Independence, then eventually they would control the gateway to the west, giving them money and more importantly, power.

But it wasn't time to move just yet. Such smart moves. Such smart moves. Because he understood a clean slate's great for them, because that's what he needs. He needs a pre-built city. He needs a thing that he can go and just occupy. If he can bring bodies and he can bring all the people to do old little jobs, he can slowly but surely build all the things and honestly, then Emma will be happy.

Because now Emma will actually be the special wife who's in charge of this entire town. See? It's about the wife. Yeah. Can I talk? Zip it. Zip it. Zip it.

Okay. But like most cult leaders, Joseph Smith knew he needed to save his big moves for when he needed them the most. And that moment came after the disastrous first assembly of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now it all started off as a total success. Started at a high point. It was during this assembly that Joseph established the priesthood of Melchizedek and during the

ordaining ceremony, a fanatic named Lyman Wright jumped on a bench, acted as if his whole system was under attack and screamed, if you want to see a sign, look at me. Here's your sign, Bill Ingval of Mormonism. I was like my father used to go to Don Rickles and his favorite thing to do is that he'd make my mom sit in the front row in the middle of the set that my dad would stand up and go, hey Don, I'm Polish. Your father is just the worst audience member of all time. And upon Lyman's request to look at me, another man was struck deaf and dumb, which the congregation

saw as an act of the devil. So Joseph ran over, commanded that the devil be removed, and the man regained his senses, and everyone, it's just that the room is electrified. Fuck yeah, Joe, Joe, yeah, Joe. Yeah, and Joseph could have just taken the w and moved on. But he decided to press his luck. Howie Mendel. He moved on to another convert whose hands were crippled and curled, and he commanded,

Brother Murdock, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ, to straighten your hand. But it seems like human biology was just a little more stubborn than the devil. Come on. Grab the man's hand and try to straighten, come on, come on, you bitch, come on. Joe kept trying to straighten out the fingers, and every time he straightened them out, they just curl back up again. Yeah, because he has a medical condition. After that didn't work, Joseph was like, ah, fuck it.

And then he moved on to the next old man. You know what you gotta do is you be like, okay, now curl your hands. Did it. And this next old man was lame in one leg, and Joseph commanded him, stand up and walk. Get the fuck up, get the fuck up, we're doing this. Jesus is walking through me, can you feel it, can you feel it, stand up, and then he just, boom, he just immediately falls down in the ground. And then again, you just flip it and be like, fall down.

Now he's falling down. You know why he fell down? Because he's gay. That's why he fell down. Now that shit was completely and totally out of control. Cause everyone's just like, oh shit, this is all fucked up and done. Oh my god. A couple brought their dead child into the church.

They brought a corpse into the church because this child had died after Joseph had encouraged prayer and faith instead of actual medical treatment. Go, go to the doctor. You know, that Joseph Smith, I'm gonna say a little bit, let's have a little bit of compassion for Joseph Smith, okay? He is trying to make this work. He is trying to make a career, you have any idea how hard it is to be an independent artist out there?

It is hard. And he's, he's going for that W and he's so disappointed in himself cause it's worked a couple of times. And they bring this corpse in there and you know, he just goes like, fuck. Man, this is just, y'all, y'all are brutalized in there today, this is just, this is a lot. So the couple laid the dead child, Joseph's feet and said, if you're so goddamn powerful, bring our son back to life because it's your fault he's dead, lie still. You know, we don't know if Joseph actually believed that he could bring the kid back

to life or not, but he still gave it a shot. And after several uncomfortable minutes of Joseph just yelling at a corpse. Get the fuck up, get up, you're disappointing your parents, you're disappointing your parents and you're disappointing me and you're disappointing God, now get up you pussy. Oh my God. The parents finally just told him to stop. They said, stop it, that's done, you're bullshit, you're stupid, we're out of here. And we're taking our dead child with us.

Can we at least have the conversation about how you guys went and dug up your dead son and brought him here? And with that, the air just left the room and everyone just kind of shuffled out. I was doing a little bit of research about how Jesus Christ, the actual magician side of Jesus Christ healed people, right? And they said according to actual, the original writings and the original belief systems of Jesus Christ is that he would take the blind and he'd spit in their eyes and he'd mess the spit up in their eyes to make them not, to make them be able to see and to heal the

death, he'd spit in his hands and give them what a willy. Works every time. And all that shit that happened with Joseph Smith with the fingers and the old man falling down in the exorcism and the dead child, that was the first day. Yeah. The second day he's like, what if I try stink-pulling me in there? Is this fire fest? But for religion, it's definitely a flop.

And on the second day, more bad news came. Two people who had bestowed land upon the Mormons in Ohio were taking the land back and were demanding that the Mormon trespassers return to New York. But this seems to have sparked an idea in Joseph Smith. See, at this point, Joseph was teetering on the edge of losing everything and what else works better for a cult leader when people are losing faith than a change in location. But Joseph Smith was also smart enough to know that he didn't have the spiritual currency to move everyone.

So Joseph announced that God had commanded that he and 30 of his closest followers should immediately leave for Missouri to scout for the city of Zion and he got the fuck out of Kirtland before things could get any worse. He literally just hopped at his horse and went, because he was like, oh, just got a revelation. 30 of my closest boys and I got to go and we're on a scouting mission, we got to do a location hunt. So we're going right now.

And he just hopped in a horse. From day three. Yeah. And just left. He just left. And then other guys were like, so are we part of the 30 that's got a, all right, we're going to two. And they loaded up the horses and basically had to go find Joseph and they fucking hightailed

it out of town. That's how you do it. Yeah. And Joseph had reasoning behind this. He said that he couldn't perform miracles in Ohio because Ohio was not consecrated ground. But in Missouri, in Missouri, the blind would see the lame would walk and the Mormons would be free to build Zion upon the back of an already thriving settlement. Of course.

Missouri. So I think that entire sentence is on their license plate. Nothing is better than a state with the word sour in the middle of it. Not only would they arrive to find a bustling community, but Joseph was sure that Oliver Cowdery, his first missionary, had already converted hundreds of these good, kind folk into Latter-day Saints. But when Joseph and the others arrived at Independence, they found nothing more than a backwater frontier town filled with hard-bitten, highly paranoid frontier men.

In other words, the absolute dregs of American society. That sounds fun to hang out in, actually. Yeah, it does. But not if you're starting a religion. Nah. Joseph. Listen, all love and revelations. Again, no arguing one with God.

I mean, this is totally dope. I'm glad we left in the middle of the night. I love hanging out with you and our boys and these horses out here just hanging out. But this place sucks dick. Well, as far as how many people Oliver Cowdery had converted, it was not the hundreds that Joseph Smith had predicted, but rather four. Woohoo! That's less.

Yeah, that's enough for a quorum. So Joseph pretty much said fuck this and left a contingent of Mormons in Missouri and went back to Ohio 800 miles away. You know what? I didn't listen to it first, but then I spoke with God and this place does, in fact, sucked dick. And once Joseph got back, he began the most revelation filled period in Mormon history. In 1834, Joseph had three times as many revelations as he had in the last 10 years of his life.

It was like Bobby Binney in 1996 with the Metz. Well, how is it like that, actually? I would like to hear this. Why? His peak. Was his peak? I guess. I remember seeing it.

See, by studying the Bible, Joseph was able to extrapolate on verses. Out of an obscure passage in Corinthians, Joseph deduced that there were three kingdoms to which men would be assigned on judgment day. The celestial kingdom would be where members of the true church would go, i.e. the Latter-day Saints. Well, the celestial kingdom was on the sun, or at least it was a place that had the glory of the sun. But a lot of people do see it as the sun.

Yeah. You know that would be really uncomfortable. That would be very uncomfortable. The sun is extremely hot. Are you arguing? Are you arguing with G.O.D.? It just seems hot up there. It just seems like.

I tan. I'm German-American, sir. You know what you do? And I tan very much. You know what you do? What? You stay quiet. Shut up.

That's what you do. And you know what I do? I talk to God and he tells me what's going on. And you know what he's telling me? You're going to the sun, buddy. You did it. Ah! Those who had never known the gospel, they'd be sent to the moon.

Yes. Joseph called the terrestrial kingdom. And we'd find out later on that that was actually completely true. Brigham Young would clarify that the people of Earth would live on the moon, that the people that were ignorant of the message would live on the moon, and that actually they're taller there and they dressed as Quakers and sometimes grew big, giant, leathery bat wings. That is completely real. According to Brigham Young.

Is this the founder of a university? Okay. But for those of us who have heard the word and rejected it, we would stay on Earth. The terrestrial kingdom. I am such a fan of staying on a planet that has a thing called oxygen, because I found that humans need that. Yeah. You don't understand, dude.

You really don't understand the power of it would be like to be on cobalt and to get your own planet, because this is going to expand from here. Yeah. But even though Joseph was popping off some of his greatest hits, people were starting to fall away. A man named Ezra Booth, who'd gone down to Missouri with Joseph, rightly figured out that Joseph's revelations were born of crisis. Plus, he didn't vibe with Joseph's constant jesting and joking.

Really? He didn't like it. He didn't like it at all. He thought that the Prophet should be a serious man, and fucking Joseph was constantly roasting people. Joseph Smith was too funny for this man. He's a funny guy, and he's sitting there and he's quoting Anchorman, and after a while, it gets to be a little tiresome.

The same always, sunny quotes. He's doing it again and again. It's like, do you remember when Danny DeVito was naked in the couch, and they're like, yeah, Joe. Yeah. I did just, on Instagram, I did just watch the, what was it, gotta pay the poach, gotta pay the troll, gotta pay the troll to hold, to get inside of that boys' hole. And he's like, are you saying boys' hole?

Not soul. Anyway, that's funny. Ben, you could start a religion. I know. I just remember that one, though. I remember. Do you remember that one? I remember that, I remember that episode.

Oh, that's very funny. The musical. The boys' hole. Oh my god. Hey, Joseph Smith. Please leave me alone. Well, another guy named Simmons Brighter left the church because his name had been misspelled in a special revelation that was meant specifically for him, and Simmons reasoned that out of anything,

God should at least be able to spell. It's incredibly difficult name to spell. And Simmons spelled S-Y-M-O-N-D-S. So that's hard. And Ryder with a Y. And as we learned with the Manson family, God did not tell them how to spell Helter correctly either. So maybe God is just a bad speller.

It's possible. Possible. And these disaffected former congregants were enormously angry for being fooled. And since nobody really liked the Mormons anyway, it wasn't hard to whip up a mob. So on the night of March 24th, 1832, a mob took Joseph from his bed and tarred and feathered him with his own pillow. God, stop writing me on the rail. Is this because of all the dirty pokers I was singing on the rail?

That's a hell of a commercial for my pillow. This is mob number two. Yeah. Okay, so they actually got him this time. They did. Was it a true tar in feathering? Because my understanding is it's when you try to remove the tar and your skin goes with it.

Yep. And just the tar and feather and that was the least of it. Before the tar even went on, they stripped Joseph naked and covered him in tiny little scratches to make sure that it hurt extra. Then they beat him senseless and crushed a glass vial in his mouth. But it is weird sort of like dream violence? You know what I mean? Yeah.

When you can't really like hit somebody and you kind of like it's that weird thing, you're like forcing a vial in his mouth and you kind of half hazardly like close it and you just like, yeah, thinking about that. That is nasty. Yeah. But this supposed show of strength backfired completely. All the men who participated in the tarring and feathering were there in the pews of Joseph's church the next day to see Joseph's reaction.

God, it's the same. Everybody's mad on Twitter and they want to see how mad you get, how mad they are getting on Twitter. So what the hell did they say like, hey, Joseph, sorry about that. Like what do you say when you look at this man? They're sitting there. They're arms crossed. They're making jokes to each other.

They're ribbing each other saying like, yeah, let's see what this fucker does now. And he walks in like chicken lady from the kids in the hall sketch. Yeah. They're spitting out feathers. He'd cleaned off all the tar the night before, but he looked like shit. He looked like he'd just been tarred and feathered and had the shit beaten out of him and he just went up, gave the sermon he'd already planned to give with quiet dignity, acting almost Christ-like, which made the Mormons only love him that much more.

That makes me so mad. Honestly. Not giving any sort of satisfaction, quiet dignity, just going like, and now we'll talk about again why milk should be illegal. Actually, I mean, I know he's a total flimflam man, but this is kind of badass. So soon after that, Joseph went back to Missouri to smooth things over a bit because the Missouri Mormons were understandably none too happy about being left behind after Joseph told them that they were settling a city of God because they figured if we're settling Zion,

then maybe the prophet should be hanging around and helping us do it. No, no, I'm a hands-off prophet. That's the thing. When Joseph returned, he found that the number of his Missouri congregation had doubled since the last time he was there from 300 to 600. And furthermore, it seemed as if Bible prophecy was coming true through the actions of Andrew Jackson. Wow, like the evangelicals are using Donald Trump's incompetence in order to trigger their

own end game scenario. That's wild. So what was Jackson up to that he predicted? Well, it was during this time that President Jackson began forcibly removing Native Americans from their homes in the east and started relocating them just over the Missouri border in the first push to strand the tribes in the more worthless parts of the Midwest. But instead of looking upon this with horror and shame as we do now, the Mormons were ecstatic because to them, this was God's way of returning the lost tribes of Israel,

a.k.a. the Lamanites to the Promised Land, a.k.a. just outside of Missouri. Oh, God, you mean to tell me that they think that all the angels are going to live in Farktown, USA? And so Smith returned to Ohio on cloud nine. Not only was his congregation growing, but prophecies that he'd made seemed to be coming true. And it was just after Joseph returned to Ohio that a young man from Vermont named Brigham Young showed up in Kirtland having read the Book of Mormon and swallowed every word as

truth. Well, eventually Brigham Young would be the one to lead the Mormons to Utah after Joseph Smith's inevitable death. But until then, while Brigham was a close follower of Joseph, he was a bit of a background character. But speaking of Brigham Young, it was around this time that Joseph Smith started truly designing the city of Zion. It would boast twelve temples which were blocked out in squares of uniform size with farmland

on the outskirts. Actually, people said that it was a feat of urban planning. And before we say that it's ridiculous for Joseph Smith to have such grandiose ideas, under the fact that just fourteen years later, Brigham Young used those exact same plans to build Salt Lake City, currently population 200,000. Did he plan for the Utah Jazz? He did not! And it wasn't even necessarily that ridiculous at the time.

By 1833, three years after Mormonism's founding, Joseph had gone from six followers to thirteen hundred. Not a bad turnaround. But with success comes attack. And the Mormons were about to face their first real religious persecution as a people rather than just a personal attack on Joseph. Okay. See, I'd always heard that the Mormons were heavily persecuted in their early years, but

I'd always wondered why. Because yes, Mormons are weird, but they're not that weird. And in the beginning, Mormons were mostly peaceful. Yeah, they weren't trying to attack people yet. At this point, they were just trying to set up shop. And I mean, I think ironically, they're weird because they're so normal and bland. Kinda, yeah. Well, Von Brody, in No Man Knows My History, laid it out pretty simply.

See, at the time, independence was the edge of the American frontier. And the types of people who settled these frontier areas were not the most welcoming and open folk. What? In fact, it could be said that many of them were on the frontier precisely because they had inherently anti-social personalities. I'm gonna tell you something, you buttoned down a little shit. They like to call this part of the country asshole country.

But before this time period, like when people started moving into an area, these anti-social personalities, they just go further west. There was always more land. But after Andrew Jackson forcibly removed the Native Americans just over the Missouri border and declared it Indian territory, Missouri was suddenly the end of the line. They didn't have anywhere else to go. And furthermore, the Mormons were going over the line and telling the tribes that they not only deserved rights, but should rise up and form their own nation.

Okay. Wow, this is like, this is kind of almost a Ron Contra shit. This is like the thing where they go and they like take that group and they're like, no, you guys need to group together and you guys need to form your own shit. But you also need a leader. And that's why Joseph Smith is just bland enough to turn all of you white. The Oliver North of religious leaders, I suppose. Interesting.

So now was this done out of a compassion for the Native American or was this sort of backhanded? Now it was a way to pump numbers because they saw that all of these got like, it's more like, it's like these people are ripe for the picking. We can take these people, we can bring them into our fold, because that's the thing they also believed that they could turn them white. They believed that. Like they believed that they could turn them white. And they's like, okay, we can take the Native Americans, we turn them white, suddenly we're

the biggest fucking religion in America. But that's how Brigham Young actually got like super close with Joseph Smith because he kept a super secret warehouse of paint that they refused just in case. And on the more municipal minded side of Independence, Missouri, you had guys guessing that pretty soon, Independence was going to be a Mormon town with Mormon mayors, Mormon cops and Mormon rules. Out of these men, this was unthinkable because they believed Mormons were idiots who'd been swindled by a con man in his 20s who claimed that he received messages straight from God.

And to top it all off, the Mormons were enthusiastic about their beliefs and seemed ecstatically happy, which nobody likes. No, it's really fucking annoying. A new cult, especially in the first couple of years of the cult, it's like, I get it, you guys all like chickpeas, stop singing songs, you guys are all acting like you're better than me, you're not better than me, you're not better than me. No, I mean, it happens on a micro level, I had a friend who converted one Friday he left and then he came back on Sunday and he tried to chastise me for drinking a beer

and I was like, we were just hammered on Thursday. And so yeah, it definitely does make you feel like less than. Yeah, but all of this could have been forgiven or at least tolerated if not for one thing. Mormons didn't own slaves. See at this point in American history, we were only about 25 years from the Civil War and the arguments and conflicts that led to the Civil War were already happening because Civil Wars are a slow burn. No, I saw a movie, it ended, it ended and it all and then America was great and then

I saw it. So then the credits rolled. I remember I saw that one black and white Ken Burns movie that I think is called Go to Sleepy Big Time and I remember like listening and I was thinking about muskets and then all of a sudden it's morning. Ken Burns Civil War is a fascinating document. It is. Honestly, it really is.

I can listen to Shelby Foote talk all night long and I have. Then the wind that was blown and the muskets, they were firing and the grits, they were bubbling. Well, at this time, calling yourself an abolitionist or even suggesting that maybe slavery wasn't the way to go could get you murdered in places like Missouri, especially if you printed something that said so. And then the Mormons did just that. Without the permission of Joseph Smith, a Missouri Mormon printed an article declaring

that their church was unsegregated and it was probably a good thing that people were starting to turn on slavery. In response, the non-Mormons in town drew up a manifesto that essentially told the Mormons to either leave or face dire consequences. So once again, the Mormons bent and printed a full retraction saying, quote, having learned with extreme regret that an article entitled Free People of Color and the Last Number of the Star has been misunderstood, we feel in duty bound to state in this extra that our intention was not only to stop free people of color from emigrating to the state, but

to prevent them from being admitted as members of the church. It was opposite day. Good lords, and they almost did something right and they had to walk that back. But it's interesting again, right? Close to the people's temple because they were very close to being like on the right sign of history, where they kind of were using these kind of these wedge issues, essentially, to get the other side on in their corner. It's like why you see struggling comedians go all right, trying to get an uncatered

two audience. But the other thing about the Mormons and the slavery issue is that if they would have gone full on abolitionists, we probably would not know of the Mormons today because they would have all been murdered. It was like they didn't have to go as far as they did because they went all the way on the other side. But if they would have come out as full on abolitionists, they probably would have all been rounded up and shot.

More examples and more evidence that religions are manmade. But even though they printed that retraction, the about face didn't work. After the Missouri Manifesto, condemning Mormons, was read at a town meeting, a mob marched to the offices of the Mormon newspaper, destroyed the printing press, and tarred and feathered two Mormons. But still, the Mormons didn't leave. So the mob assembled once again and threatened church elders with 100 lashes each, which was tantamount to a death sentence.

Then 50 people attacked a Mormon camp, demolishing cabins and whipping them in, and on and on it went until two non-Mormons and one Mormon ended up dead. It got so bad that the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, Lil Burn Boggs, he had to call in a militia to restore order of the state militia. Man, they must have been so excited. Oh yeah, ready to go guys. Yeah, yeah. I got a flag.

I'm the flag guy. It's fun. It's like cosplay, but we really kill people. But since Boggs was pro-slavery, he sided with the non-Mormons and forced the Mormons to disarm while the mob ransacked their homes and then burnt everything Mormon to the ground. That ain't right. By the morning, 1200 Mormons had fled independence to nearby Clay County, who had more reasonable people who felt sympathy for the Mormons after word had gotten out about their treatment.

But the one person who had no sympathy was Joseph Smith. What is happening? I mean, I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing that Joseph Smith was super pissed off about the article that kicked off the whole thing. Well, because he's just trying to get this cult on its feet. Okay, again, have some compassion for what he's trying to do here. He understands people want to make a moment. People want to do all these things.

I get it. We may have had a couple of meetings where we said we're pro-getting rid of slavery. That's great. We keep it all on the inside until we get our Mormon judges, until we get our Mormon police officers, and then we can chase everybody who's not fucking like us out into the desert. But he said that the whole thing had happened because his followers had envied, lusted, and coveted. He put it all on that.

Meanwhile, Joseph Smith in Ohio was slipping as well. A disgruntled ex-Mormon named Philastus Hurlbutt. Come on. Philastus Hurlbutt, a long line of Hurlbutts, it was Roy Hurlbutt, Joy Hurlbutt. They actually changed it when we moved over to this country from vomit ass. Oh, the Hurlbutts. He traveled to Joseph's hometown and gathered a volume of negative trivia on his former prophet.

After obtaining affidavits from more than 100 people who all said Joseph Smith was a lion piece of shit, Hurlbutt printed the testimonies and dispersed them among the people of Kirtland. But brilliantly, Joseph Smith got ahead of the story and read the entire thing out loud to his congregation during a sermon, ripping each page as he read it, saying that each word of the testimonies had come straight from the devil. Flip it and reverse it. That reminds me as well with Jim Jones.

This wasn't there, that news article, the news articles were coming out consistently about the people's temple, and then he got out in front of that as well. The one in the San Francisco newspaper right at the end, kind of sorta. He was more like, okay, I've got to leave now, and I've got to take everyone with me. Things were crumbling at that point. Joseph Smith just had these political skills. That's again the real difference, where LRH was a businessman, Jim Jones used to have those skillsets, and then he went completely insane, and he abandoned it all.

Joseph Smith was trying to stay in the pocket. This is the case I will build eventually, that we will see that Joseph Smith had a long game that he was trying to be essentially king of America. I do believe on some level that Joseph Smith was going to be an incredibly dangerous figure if his life wasn't cut short. Interesting. I would say that LRH was a businessman, Jim Jones was more of a community leader, and Joseph Smith was a straight-up politician.

Soon after, Falastus Hurlbutt put all of Joseph's business out on display. Nothing seems to work right for us, Hurlbutt. I mean, literally the whole thing would just be like, oh, by the way, the name of the dude who wrote the article is Falastus Hurlbutt, so this is kind of funny, right? Yeah, that guy sucks. After that, Parley Pratt and Lyman White arrived in Kirtland demanding protection in Missouri, and since Joseph needed a reason to leave for a bit, and since his people were wondering why he hadn't helped the Missouri Mormons already, Joseph had a revelation that he should

form an army to face their persecutors. Yeah, dude. Okay. Eventually, 200 men volunteered and began marching south to Missouri, and it was pretty much about as goofy and foppy of a march as you'd expect. Cool. With a bloodthirsty horde of avenging angels, Mormon militia sounds more like a trip to the Renfair with a bunch of fucking nerds.

You fight with the army you got. Yeah, that's true. I'm not saying anything bad about the Renfair. People who listen know that I love a good Renfair. I am going to a Renfair, I'm doing it next year, and I cannot wait. I'm gonna wear a brazier, I'm pushing him up, and I'm gonna be the prettiest gal there. Yeah, but I'm not gonna take the friends that I went to the Renfair, I'm not gonna take them to war.

That's not my war friends, and Joseph kind of took his Renfair friends. Do you know that he's sitting there and is like, okay, we need a militia, we need some kind of army, we need some big boys, and he's looking out and he sees like Tubby Sampson and he's all covered in like barley juice and he's just like, I can ran the cannons and he's looking at Skinny Joe Johnson, Skinny Joe Johnson is just there and he's got a bunch of like horns and flutes and he's like, I'll make the army band and he's just like, maybe if they all just like fucking die real hard, maybe if they go in there and they just explode on those muskets, they'll be so scared of how well they died that people will fear

our armies. But Joseph also made sure that it was a fantastical journey. On the way down south, Joseph returned to his grave robbing days, but now he had a whole established mythology to back up his findings. That's so cool. Upon digging up a burial mound on the Illinois River, Joseph came upon a skeleton. Look at this skeleton. Deftly weaving a story on the fly, Joseph said that the man had been a large, thick set white

laminite named Zelf, who is a warrior and a chieftain under the great prophet Onondagus. And if you see here, you'll see this one, I believe this is some sort of silvery canister. It is green in color, and it is his favorite drink. It is called Budweiser Light Lime Flavor, which is a tiny citrus. This red-headed giant certainly died of these giant lumps in his legs. Isn't that interesting? Wow, the lies continue. And since Zelf had been found with an arrowhead in his ribs, Joseph went on and on about the

battle in which Zelf had died, and when the story was over, the Mormons took the thighbones of the corpse as souvenirs. Hey, Joe, I know that I'm supposed to man the cannons, but can I keep one of these bones? I want to bring it to my daughter. But even though the trip was goofy, it wasn't easy. It was 800 miles from Kirtland to Independence, and the men didn't bring enough real food, so they survived on, which sounds like renfair food, corn dodgers, and Johnny cakes. Dude, honestly.

Which is, that's hush puppies and pancakes. I'm sold. I'm sold on this journey. Which you know, that doesn't sound that bad, but late into the trip, some of the men contracted cholera, aka the blue death, so named because people shit themselves to death, and their skin turns bluish gray from the dehydration. But even though the army was small, badly trained because it was led by the dandy Joseph Smith, and barely armed, it was still an army.

So when they got close to independence, runners sent word back to town that the Mormons were coming to murder the women and the children. All right, men, now line up in the single file, turn around, spread your cheeks, poop! Poop! Poop! I can't just see them being so scared. Hide, Betty. Hide, Betty.

Hide, Wilma. You can see the thirsty look in their eyes. Oh, look. Oh, no, they're just literally... Is that just a pack of nerds? Oh, my God, is that the bad news bears? Now, there were a few skirmishes between the Mormons and the Missourians, resulting in a fair amount of death, but the sheriff eventually stepped in and said the Mormons had a choice.

Either leave or repurchase the land that was stolen at double the price, and if neither condition was met, the state militia would step in. Now, a bunch of frontier yokels with muskets, that was one thing, but a well-trained militia would have torn through the Mormons in minutes, and 14 of Joseph's men had already shit themselves to death. That's bad. That sucks. That's bad stuff.

Really? That's so sad. What is the... how do you know when you... like, what's the last drop? Like the last... like, the last thing we're like, that was you. Like, at some point, you have to have your last squirt. Now, the cramps just continue and continue and continue as your body... It's the cramps. The... well, no, you die from dehydration, but your body just continues to try to expel

everything that's in your bowels, and then you just die because you cannot... you cannot replace the water that you're losing fast enough. Because your body starts bringing water from all over. You die of brain death. Essentially, your brain dries up and you die. All of... every bit of moisture... it's not a good way to go. No, I'm actually just... I much prefer when you just shit yourself to death as opposed to the harsh realities of what happens when you go on a cruise ship on a deli.

So defeated, Joseph returned to Kirtland with a promise that he would one day return to purchase the land, and he just sort of left over a thousand followers just camped out on the plains of Clay County. I'll be right back, back, I'm back! You guys doing good? You doing good? I just have to go. I think I dropped my watch 20 miles.

I just gotta go. I have to leave. You think he's gonna come back at all, or like, or we just like... Nah, dude. And I only got like four kernels as a duke left. But Joseph had learned a lesson here. As I said, it was during this time period that he'd been flushed with revelations. He'd just been throwing shit out.

So Joseph was starting to see that people were dying because of it. Now whatever you might think of Joseph Smith, he at the very least was never a death cult leader. And while he did share certain aspects with other cults, this was not the people's temple or home chenrique. Disappointingly. Well, I think that's very good. Yeah, it's good.

I mean, the Mormons again and again fought just to stay alive. So from that point on, Joseph Smith got choosier about his revelations, especially those that required possible bloodshed. So he's taking a little bit of responsibility. Yes, he is. To his credit. Okay, cool. Because before all the mobs were coming for Joseph Smith, and he could handle that.

He could come back from it. He's like, I can handle it. But now the mobs were coming for everyone. I eat tar for breakfast and I shit feathers. I appreciate that y'all trying to put a compassionate lens on Joseph Smith because he was a great American, capital G, capital A. But I do believe he was still looking out for number one, and I don't think that he wanted to fail.

And I think again, it really just boils down to, I'm a prophet now. If they come and kill all these dweebs that I got with me, that means I'm not a prophet anymore. Right. And now Emma's going to stop giving me the gooch. Yeah. So instead of expanding outward, Smith decided to focus on Kirtland. And for three years, Joseph Smith and the Mormons lived in relative peace.

And it was during this time that some of the revelations became more oriented towards personal behavior. In 1833, Joseph dictated a revelation called the words of wisdom. This revelation suggested that church members should abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and hot drinks, i.e. coffee and tea. No. That's what the actual rules in Mormonism say, hot drinks. So you can-

It does not say caffeine specifically. So you can drink iced coffee? No. No. But you can't? No, you can't. It's coffee. To them, he is just saying a hot drink.

Coffee is under the category of hot drinks. Yeah, but I- but Joe, Joe, I just wanted to let- I put some ice cubes in this coffee here. It's cold now. It's good, right? It used to be a hot drink, always a hot drink. Therefore, it's coffee. That's how it is.

You talk with G.O.D. You don't talk with me. No, one might think that this was Joseph Smith jumping on the temperance trend gaining traction at the time because, you know, Joseph Smith always paid around- always paid attention on what was going on around him. But from what Brigham Young himself wrote, the real motivation, as Henry said in the last episode, was much more domestic. Turns out, the suggested ban on tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine came after Emma went

on and on to Joseph about having to clean up all the tobacco spit in her kitchen after every meeting of the apostles. This is completely true. He- this is practical. So he literally had to ban it for everybody because Emma didn't like it and they had to have the meetings in their house. But why can't- just get- just hire a cleaning person or maybe he could clean up a little bit and like- Emma didn't like it.

Thought it was his filthy, disgusting habit. She's right! Just said, oh, you don't like it? You know what's going to happen? I don't like it. God is going to turn your fucking dick into an asshole. How about that? So you're going to shit out of your front and you're- well you- oh yeah, you might get

used to it. Sure, but you're going to have to get fucked from the front too and that's fine if you want that too. I'm sure it'll feel good. Oh, it's not a curse. It's just different. Yeah. But that's the thing is that Joseph, it started off as a suggestion.

It was something that would both please the wife and it would keep Joseph cool with the boys because Joseph's like, hey, it's not me, it's God. Sorry guys. Yeah, I'd be pretty pissed off. But Sidney- but Sidney Rigdon, who sounds like a miserable old bastard, seized the opportunity to push for full abstinence. He put forth a vote completely banning any and all altering substances and it was promptly passed.

And this is why, to this day, Mormons can't smoke, drink, or have a fucking cup of coffee. Yo brother, when we were in Utah, they drink. That is for sure. Those were not Mormons that we were drinking with. We were in Salt Lake City. It's all Mormons. No, it's not. No, there's a very large part of the city that is not Mormons.

Judging by the anger in their eyes, I'm assuming that they were many Mormons. X Mormons. Either way, they were angry. Yeah. But just capital X Mormons. They were mutants. But this is a very interesting concept that you're going to see, right? As we go, the more and more we explain next episode when we talk about the ritual behavior

of the Mormons, we're going to see how these little ideas are going to be called back to as time goes. So what you do is these, these little things, these little revelations to become solid rules inside Mormonism, Joseph Smith and bring them young later on are going to use them as hanging points for the major magical theology of the entire religion. And they use these things to say, ah, but you see, that wasn't just some kind of arbitrary thing, you not being able to have coffee, you know, it's about obedience. It's about purifying your body because if not, you can't have your thousand of God.

You can have your thousand God wives on your own personal planet. Yeah. And they're still doing this shit. Just a couple of weeks ago, the church issued a reminder to members that vaping is not allowed. And they also warned them to be on the lookout for any drinks ending in the suffix, Chino. Oh my God. If it's a Chino, it's going to have caffeine in it. Remember, you can't have that just because it's not called coffee doesn't mean it's

not coffee. Okay, question. Ice decapped coffee. Did you guys read the memo? Hot drink. It started as a hot drink first. It has to be hot to brew it, except if it's cold brew, but still hot drink. And I don't think they make cold brew decaf.

But while the Mormons were passing these internal laws, Joseph Smith decided that the Mormon should be an educated people. So he opened the School of the Prophets in March of 1833. But in educating both his people and himself, Joseph Smith got cocky again. In 1835, Joseph bought four authentic Egyptian mummies from a traveling flimflam man who probably figured he had an easy mark in Joseph Smith. How many times for these four corpses? These are mummies, Mr. Smith.

The corpses. How much are they? I'm going to name this one Brendan Fraser. I'm going to name this one The Rock. Now, this isn't as rare as it sounds because during this time, tombs all over Egypt were being plundered. And the mummies, whoever those mummies might have been in a former life, were making their way to America to be exhibited in traveling side shows.

Wasn't there kind of a mummy fever going on? Definitely mummy fever. But I mean it, people were obsessed with ancient Egypt for a while because these things were getting popped open. Right. And I know that they were talking about how because they used to grind up the mummies so they could be used to give you like boner pills essentially for many years. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Can't believe that would actually work. I don't think it did. No. No, no, no. But I do kind of get horny thinking about eating a bunch of mummy dust. But for Joseph Smith, these mummies were a real opportunity for some actual scholarship

because the mummies came with papyrus scrolls, which gave Smith a chance to translate some of that reformed Egyptian. Interesting. Well, when he bought the mummies, it came with these little strips of papyrus. And he's looking at them and he's like, I can totally read these. And everyone's like, what? He's like, you remember how I did that before? With the plates?

Yeah. The plates, I don't even remember the plates. Good. But now I can really read them. Yeah. Be sure to drink your ovaltine. But sir, is that not a hot drink? Shut up.

No, we don't know whether Joseph Smith actually believed he could translate a language that scholars had spent centuries trying to decipher or not. But he definitely had enough faith to spend $6,000 on mummies. Oh my. So what we see is like, this is when the bird went to the local eye and then at the eye, they had a stick party. What the hell did he say? It is very interesting.

If you look at the actual papyrus that he had, because they found them later on, it turns out it's weird because it wasn't anywhere close to any of his translations. But when you look at that stuff, he used the images much like the way Agrippa describes the way the occult original manuscripts were read and why they were created, the way magical languages were created, where essentially imagine early occultism and alchemical magic as if the thinking men, crazy thinking men were looking at the planet Earth and using actual landmarks and actual positions of stars in the sky to create letters that they would then turn into a language, essentially HTML for reality.

And so he was doing the same thing. He kind of looked at it and he was like, I could totally bullshit this. Right, right. Well, pretty soon he announced that he had translated the papyrus scrolls and that the writings were of Abraham and Joseph of Egypt, although Smith never got around to fully translating the scroll written by his namesake. He was like, ah, it's not important. This is a bad one.

This is not. You just got bored with it? Well, that was all right because the scrolls of Abraham had quite a bit of information for the Mormons to chew on. And the convenience of the arrival of the scrolls didn't really seem to bother anyone. Yeah, of course not. This guy just happened to show up with a bunch of papyrus scrolls that happened to directly address the Mormon religion.

Okay. Instead, it worked as an affirmation of faith. This is what I'd like to call a little bit of what John Cusack would call serendipity. The Abraham add quite a bit to say about the heavens, i.e. space. Yeah, dude! All right. This is my favorite shit that I can't talk about because it's hours of fucking nonsense. Wow.

Let's get to space. That's us not knowing enough to impress the experts and knowing just enough to bore the people who don't know anything. Yeah. I know all about space. It's an area that may not be occupied by something or someone. It is indeed space. See Joseph had been reading a book called Philosophy of a Future State by Thomas Dick,

which dealt heavily in astronomy and metaphysics. And Joseph, ever the aggregator, wanted to work all this shit into Mormonism. So he used one of the scrolls to do it, and that became the book of Abraham. According to Joseph, Abraham said that there was one star named Kolob that sits near the throne of God. Or it's a planet that sits near God because Joseph also referred to planets as stars. So some believe that Kolob is a planet and that Earth was created next to Kolob, then was moved to its current position.

Some people say that Kolob is in the constellation of cancer. There's also some people that say Kolob enters into, it actually lives in the general center of the universe. And it's either a planet that is God, or it is a planet in which God lives, or it's a planet that Elohim, the first man to ever become a God lives, and that God actually lives behind it. It's simple. Well, now I'm thinking about the star registry that my mom signed up for, and I think Laura

Kisselstar is right by it. It's right by Kolob. Yeah, and it's also about that star, is that Wawa star. Yeah, the Wawa. And to bring it back to Battlestar one more time, that planet in the show that has the map to Earth, while the citizens of the colonies are on the run from the Cylons, is called Kobal. Ooh.

Which is also the planet from which humans are said to come in the first place in Battlestar Galactica. I actually like that you're bringing up Battlestar Galactica, because this is exactly, it's like, what religions are, is the same way, like when you think about religion and how ridiculous they are, it is the same thing as if someone said Battlestar Galactica is my favorite documentary. Like, that is the perfect comparison. They'd be like, I love that show. And you're like, you know that was scripted, right?

It's all makeup. It's all made up. He's like, no, I'm pretty sure Ken Burns directed that one. Oh yeah. And then you take that love of Battlestar Galactica, and then you kick your son out of the house because you think he's a Cylon. Exactly. But how Abraham found this planet, found the planet Kolob, was by looking through Urim

and Thummim. Tied it in. Tied it in. He got the rocks back. He got the rocks back. He's bringing the rocks from the first book into the fucking last book of the trilogy. Oh my God. Talk about a Kolob.

I can kill it. Yeah, and he said that the seeing stones were bound to a pair of magical spectacles. And when Abraham looked into the sky, he was able to see Kolob. But you know, that's that. I don't. That's that. You were going to say, that's that? Okay.

Yeah. I can go deeper into it if everybody wants to sitle down on old Zabrowski's knee. You know what? Come sit on my knee, little girl, and I'll tell you a story about how if you just believe hard enough, you too can be kissed by an old man with a beard on a planet where you're the only woman. All right. Let's just fast forward 18 hours and say, that was very interesting.

Thank you. That was a very good lecture. Thanks. And then that's it. I knew. But the book of Abraham wasn't just a fun, goofy journey into space. It was also where Mormonism's deeply racist ideologies and policies were born and were taught as fact for about 140 years.

See if the book of Mormon solved the problem of where the Native Americans had come from, the book of Abraham aimed to do the same thing for the black man. And Joseph used the exact same passage from the Bible that Southerners used to justify slavery. The passage says that Noah cursed his son Ham, and that Ham's son, Canaan, and all his sons afterwards, should be a servant of servants unto his brethren, and race to shipbags often said and say that black people are the sons of Ham, cursed by their skin color, so therefore they deserve to be slaves.

God says that they should be slaves. Now even though Mormons were mostly abolitionists, abolitionists were not popular even in the northern states, because that's the kind of myth that we get a lot of times with the American Civil War is that all of the Southerners were for slavery, and all of the Northerners were against it. And while a lot of the Northerners were against it, or at the very least didn't give a fuck, they didn't want to hear about it. They didn't care.

They just didn't give a shit. Honestly dude, Abraham Lincoln was a bummer to a lot of people. Like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he was getting booed quite a bit. They did not like to be called racist dickbags, like you just said, because they were. Yeah, they just didn't want to hear about it. Nobody wanted to hear about it. It's like, oh, that goes on in fucking Georgia. What the fuck do I give?

Why do I care about Georgia? I live in fucking Albany. But it's interesting how even then, these types of narratives are used by side-possilers. These flimflam men who can use these gigantic currents of thought and weave them in and know that now, being like, now I got you, now we're gonna go this, and then what I'm also gonna do with this weird racist ideology, I'm also gonna tie it into essentially the Xenu level of understanding, the quote-unquote Xenu level of, this is the super secret knowledge that only you know, because only I can teach you.

It was revealed to me through the faculty of Abrac, I could read the scrolls, I give them to my counsel, then it dribbles down. And then there are gonna be lessons as you go deeper into the story, that this is now the real quote-unquote real story that everything is about, that you have to be special to learn. So this is your cult leader, Tufer, where you have people feel better than, and then you also have people divided, so this is good for them. The perennial power of the secret schools. The secret schools that have always been there were the idea that you have a pyramid structure

where only one person knows the secret keys to knowledge. All the people are doing in secret schools, skull and crossbones, they play salty cracker, and then they hold that hostage over the politician when they run for office, and they're like, you better vote with big oil, buddy, otherwise we're gonna talk about how you ate 50 ounces of cum on a crispic. But is it weird that I kind of feel, like I kind of miss that the last 44 presidents like knew what cum tasted like? Well Joseph expanded the story of Ham into a Miltonian narrative, with the battle between

Lucifer and Jehovah, like Paradise Lost. But instead of it just being a two-sided war, Joseph added neutral angels who refused to fight it all, and it was those angels who were cast not into hell after Jehovah won, but to earth. And boom, you got black people. But these are the people, so what it starts with, Elohim is the first man god that was a part of, because Mormonism is actually a polytheistic belief. They believe that there are countless gods, and that their god is the only one that is

they worship, right? They worship Elohim, which is their creator god, who was the first dude to ascend to godhood, and his two sons were Lucifer and Jesus, and they were the ones fighting each other, and it created a gigantic sci-fi. This is where it goes sci-fi, which is why I'm interested. Right, right. Now that's a very interesting commercial for Ancestry.com. So this section of Mormon lore, which prevented black people from even entering a Mormon temple,

would be official policy until 1978, when, as the song from the Book of Mormon Musical goes, God changed his mind about black people. Oh really? Yeah, they had a revelation. The head of the Mormon church in 1978 had a revelation and goes, you know what, scratch it. God said, you're cool now. He called me up and he was like, hey, you've done, I think they said like, yeah, you've

done your time, but you have atoned for the sin of Ham, you've atoned for the sin of the Egyptians. So come on, guys. Henry did mention the Utah Jazz earlier. Is there any correlation with them getting an MBA to where they were like, but at the same time, we do need to think about championships. You know that Carl Malone's a nice guy. We should try to get him in here.

We gotta get him in there. If he's surrounded by, you know, Horne Sack and then John Stockton, that's like two whites and one Carl. Like his name is Carl and we all know a Carl. And I will say when you go inside and do the rituals inside of the Mormon temple, I feel like it would make a lot of people hesitant about wanting to join. Yeah. Because once you get into secret land, what do you do?

We'll go over it next week. Okay. We'll go over it in two weeks. Okay. Yeah. It's very fucking weird, man. You're having a, sometimes like you have to reenact your own murder. There's all kinds of weird shit.

Mr. Kissell, why are you choking yourself with your belt? Well, masturbating. Exactly. I thought you told me to reenact. I was going to die. No, there's a lot of ritual washings that are done by men that have raised you from a supple boy to a supple near man. All right.

We'll get into it in two weeks. Well, all this bullshit was the end of the good times for Joseph Smith, although his racist leanings got the pro-slavery crowd off his back for a bit. He was about to get into a practice that would piss off pretty much everyone. That practice was polygamy. Oh yeah. You're doing that. Fuck it.

And we'll get into that full tilt along with what got Joseph Smith killed and Mormonism part four coming in two weeks after we've got ourselves settled in Europe. All right. There it is. And part three, thank you all so much for listening. Yeah. Part four, we're going to almost call the rise of Brigham Young. Like now it's really becoming, we're in Star Wars world after next week.

All right. It's very, very fun. No, that's helping me not loathe the subject matter, thinking about it as Star Wars. I like that. That's very good. Yes. Thank you all so much for listening. And thanks for the great response to this episode series.

Everyone has been absolutely wonderful. And thanks for all the DMs on Instagram or on Twitter. We're learning a lot. We really are. We've learned a lot of ex-Mormon listeners, and we've heard a lot of different stories of how they were able to get out of the religion. And so congratulations to everyone who is now free. Well, we will talk next week, so next week we're going to be doing a Relax Fit episode

because we are revamping. Basically, you're going to be watching us go into the, after Joseph Smith's death, we're going into the modern world of the FLDS, we're going to be talking about Warren Jeffs, we're going to be talking about the Under the Banner of Heaven story. There's going to be several things that are going to be showing up. So we're now kind of setting the scenario for it. But next week, I'm hoping that we can go through some of these emails that we've been set so we can really see like our listeners know a fuck ton of them.

Yeah, they do. Yes, they do. And this is obvious. We're, we're obsessed. Yeah. No, at this, at this point, we're absolutely obsessed. Like I love this story. It's such a fascinating tale.

Yeah. I mean, especially like, and it's even almost more fascinating than the other cults that we have covered, because most of those other cults besides kind of Scientology have an expiration date. And Mormonism seems like it's going to be going for a very long time because I could see Scientology folding in 20 years, but Mormonism is going to be around for as long as America is. We were only 3 percentage points away from possibly having a Mormon president.

Very interesting. All right, everyone, we will see you the next time we speak with you. We are going to be in beautiful Europe. I believe the entire tour is now sold out. The entire tour. I believe we might have like 20 tickets left in, I think was Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham. So if you do see those tickets in Birmingham, get them. But such that is so awesome, guys.

Thank you all so much. The fact that we get to tour around the world with our best friends and see you all like, it's just such a miracle. So thank you all so much for supporting us and we will see you in Dublin. Our first show is September 4th. Yeah. Oh no, many years from now, like that's going to the sentence I'm going to use to tell my kids I'm cool is, I sold out Berlin.

Yeah. You'll be like, bother, you're not wearing any pants and I have friends coming over. Can you please? I learned that in Berlin. You learned that in Berlin, didn't you? Grimpy Marcus, isn't it true that Adolf Hitler also sold out Berlin? I sold out Stockholm. This is going to be great.

Can't fucking wait. Can't wait. It's going to be so fucking cool. Yes, absolutely. So thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for listening to all the shows on the network. We had a great conversation about automation with the Mike Isaac, he's a New York Times columnist and reporter on top at this week.

So give that a listen and of course, keep on supporting Side Stories. Check out Side Stories Live. It's going to be big. You got to check it out. Washington, D.C. November 8th, but the death becomes us festival, Washington, D.C. Castle and I are going to figure out whatever that show is. We have no idea what that show is going to be, but it's going to be a wonderful night with all of you.

And this is the first time we've ever done Side Stories Live and we would like to take this on the road a little bit more. Give Marcus Pox a bit of a breather so he doesn't have to travel quite as much. So yeah, I don't know, come on out and it will be whatever it is, but it shall be fun. Like Joseph Smith, you're going to tell us what the show is. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, everyone, never forget, hail yourselves. Hail Satan.

Again, magustalations. Hail me. All right, let's go. Let's go get some plates. I think I said that the last time. You did. You really did. I never go to a second location.

Never. Yeah. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.