Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 385: Mormonism Part VI - X-Men Cult Edition

Episode Date: October 5, 2019

On the conclusion to our series on Mormonism, we cover two modern true crime stories that occurred as a direct result of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young's teachings. The first, set in the early 1980s, is a tale of revelation and blood atonement involving a brutal double murder, while the second is a story of polygamy perverted to satisfy the pedophilic desires of the sociopaths in charge of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Check out our special Zombieland Double Tap episode coming out next Monday, October 7th. We chat with the director Ruben Fleischer to find out more about the new film. Don't forget to watch Zombieland Double Tap in theaters, October 18th. There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. Why? That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that? Oh, yes! You know, in light of this episode, this last episode of Mormonism Saga, so much work has gone into it, but I had this idea. It kind of came to me as a revelation. Speaking with Natalie about, I think within our own marriage, we should have a special priesthood that would require maybe some sort of tiny bed that I crawl up in a little dress and I go upstairs up to the top of the bed

and then she comes in full Warren Jeffs Cosplay. Oh, right. And sanctifies me in the temple of our apartment with Wendy as a witness, unfortunately. That is disturbing wild stuff. This is the last podcast on the list. It's wild, wild stuff. Warren Jeffs Cosplay, wild stuff. This is the last podcast on the left ever when I am Ben Gissel,

staring at Marcus Parks. Hello. And the demented, deranged relationship insight that we just received was from Henry Zabrowski. And I'll grow up my hair as long as humanly possible. The top doesn't grow anymore. No, it does not. The sides do. And as they grow to the side, sort of like Mrs. Frizzle,

I believe her name is from the magic school bus. What I'll do is I'll pull it back to like a ponytail and I wear my little see-through dress and the first thing I always say is, I'll never tell upon the prophet. All right. Well, I'm not sure if Marcus approves. Marcus, what do you think? Your face isn't discussed.

I fucking hate it. What? I can't remember the last time I hated something so much. Are we going to start this episode with Henry in free speech jail? No, it'll be just like Warren Jeffs in jail where I'll just stand for hours staring at the mirror and masturbate at the guards until they have to beat me with sticks. All right, everyone. So this episode is going to get a little, you know what this is?

This is blue humor. Yeah. This is blue humor. It's a bit blue. It's a bit blue. We are in the, we are damn near. The finish line when it comes to Mormonism and Henry was not lying about one thing that he said in the beginning of this episode,

the amount of research that has gone into this series has been unbelievable. So you know what I'm going to do? Oh, and please thanks over to Joel and Rachel. They also helped out immensely on this episode. Yes. We've got to reiterate that. They did a fucking great job. Thank you very much.

Kizzle didn't applaud with his hands. He just stood on the chair and shook his butt back and forth. I want to say thank you for the applause. All right, everyone. Well, let's jump into it. Mormonism part six. Mormonism part six. Is this Mormonism takes Manhattan?

Yes. I think we're going to spend most of the time on a boat and then we're going to go to one film set in Manhattan. And then we're going to spend all of our budget on one photo shoot in Times Square. So in this final chapter of our series on Mormonism, we aim to tell two true crime stories that are direct echoes of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young's actions.

And both of these stories are modern day tales. The first story set in the early 80s is a tale of revelation and blood atonement involving a brutal double murder. While the second came to its conclusion just a little over a decade ago. That one is a tale of polygamy perverted to satisfy the pedophilic desires of the sociopaths at the top. Oh, my goodness. I wonder where I've heard this story before.

It seems like, yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem to happen like a lot. Yeah, it's not every organized religion, but, you know, I mean, who's who's I to say I'm wearing short shirts today. So I'm asking for it. Yeah, interesting. But both of these stories begin with one organization, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

aka the FLDS. Now, when the mainstream church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially renounced polygamy in 1890 and later removed the Oath of Vengeance in 1927, there was a small subset of Mormons who thought that this was a bad move. This subset believes that the removal of these doctrines was the equivalent of spitting on Joseph Smith's grave as they still considered Joseph Smith to be on the level of Moses, if not higher. Can we not agree, though, that Moses is at best the B minus figure in the Bible?

Like, honestly. I don't know. Moses is pretty big in other holy books, though. He's sort of the, he's the top guy. He's the goat. If we're doing scales here, right, because it's like, technically, Jesus, you're going to put it in sort of the hierarchy of celebrity. Jesus is like a Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio.

But Joseph Smith is close, I guess, if we compare him to Moses, who is sort of more like a John Hamm. You know what I mean? Oh, I don't know. He's successful on TV, but he hasn't really made the jump to film. Oh my goodness. Well, you mentioned short shorts and John Hamm. Now I gotta go look, I gotta go do a Google image search of John Hamm in short shorts.

He can't even wear them. He has to wrap his dick around his ass and he has to put the head of it in his butthole so it won't get in the way of his legs. It's unbelievable. But also with this story, you know what this also shows me? The Mormon Church is fucking weak, bro. That's what this is about, man. That's why the FLDS technically was right,

because Mormonism decided to back down on this shit that made them truly OG. They sold out. Well, it made them truly OG, but also made them truly evil. Yeah. All right. Interesting take. Well, these people also had reverence for Brigham Young, because Young had been the man who brought the Mormons west.

And Young had been an unapologetic polygamist, a racist, and a violent theocrat until the day he died. And anyone after Young, as far as these fundamentalists were concerned, was full of shit. So, those who didn't agree with the decision to scuttle polygamy and church-sanctioned murder formed their own communities. And those communities eventually became the FLDS as well as a whole slew of other offshoots. Okay. Because you remember we had Joseph Smith III.

Before a while, he went out there. Joseph Smith's other son tried to create a legit branch of the Mormons that didn't have polygamy. The Reformed Mormon graph. So, immediately, especially after when Joseph Smith died, Brigham Young won the competition to be the head of the legit church. But now, he kind of set a little motion. And because it was under Brigham Young, Brigham Young helped get rid of polygamy. Then it became sort of, alright, that created the central pillar of what would be, from now on,

legit Mormonism, the LDS, and then everybody else would scurry and run, because why am I going to get rid of all my hot, new-bile Mormon wives? So, to break this down for people who might like professional wrestling, I have a new wrestling show, kind of fun. Check it out. Very good. NWO, New World Order. Obviously, you start with Kevin Nash. You got Scott Hall in there.

Got it. Next thing you know, you got the NWO Black. You got the NWO Red. Next thing you know, you got the Latino World Order. What I'm saying is, a lot of Splinter Groups here. Thank you for equating it to something you truly understand. There it is. Now, the FLDS and their teachings are responsible for thousands,

if not tens of thousands of crimes since its founding, ranging from everyday tax evasion and fraud to the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, which will get its own episode eventually. That's a crazy-ass story. It's an insane story, and it's got its roots in the FLDS. Damn. But before we get to the stories today, let's acknowledge our sources. The first is Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer,

and the other is Prophet's Prey by Sam Bauer. Besides being great reads, these men also played big roles in taking down the boogie man of today's episode, Warren Jeffs. Still, I mean, honestly, just like his fingers on your knee, checking the length of your dress, we'll get into it. He's disgusting. But even besides that, both books are full, fantastic stories, which will only skim today, and Under the Banner of Heaven,

in particular, goes into a lot of true crime stories involving the FLDS that you'll just have to read for yourself. Under the Banner of Heaven is a modern true crime classic. They are true crime classics. I loved Prophet's Prey, too, as much as I read of it. Like, it is legitimately, I mean, it's very, very complicated, but it is this example of taking down one of the biggest American cults that continues to exist.

And I don't know if I need to clarify this, but it's Prophet's Prey, P-R-E-Y. Yes. Just so you know. Yeah, very good. It's a thing. It's a play on words. The difference, but the same.

I think it's a homonym. I don't know. I think it's a homonym. I don't think that is a homonym. Actually, it is a homonym. That's a homonym? Yeah, a homonym. Two words that sound the same,

but are spelled differently and mean different things. That's a homonym. You passed the Marcus task, Henry. But before we get into the blood-atonement murders, it's important to give an overview of the sect of Mormons that consider themselves to be the true followers of the word of the prophet, Joseph Smith, the fundamentalist church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

See, the FLDS is a direct result of Joseph Smith's proclamation that he himself was a prophet of God and the sole conduit of God's word. And as we all know, one of the biggest tenets of Mormonism and by extension Christianity is blind faith in the face of logic. What that means is that after the death of Joseph Smith, any man who was able to convince people that he was talking to God was able to step into the Joseph Smith role

and peel Mormons away from the mainstream Mormon church. As a consequence, the last 100 years or so have been filled with tiny prophets following in Joseph Smith's footsteps. And as often happens, these new cults within a cult resulted in murder, sexual abuse, or both. Yeah, man, because it's all about power completely unchecked because you have to believe that it's, you know,

you're diminishing supply. So demand increases. This is a cult. This is a cult economics. So what you do is you make sure that there's, you make it scarce like where power comes from. Where the dude, it has to be the guy that talks directly to God that tells everybody else what God is saying. And so these tiny prophets, they gotta have a fucking kind of swerve and an X factor. It's about bluff. It's about timing.

It's like blood check. I'm gonna put it to another way you can understand because it's about betting right at the right time and saying, okay, I'm now in charge. I know what's up. And you gotta have the fucking, the way to position yourself. Well, technically, that's not how you play Blackjack. That wouldn't really, wouldn't matter at all. But you mentioned cult economics.

And I did read the book Freakin'omics. And if you go to chapter 13, it's called Cult Economics and it's very exciting. No, none of that is real. What? That is not real. You almost pretended like you read a book. I almost believed you.

That's Freakin'omics. Yeah, I can read books. I read books like that. I just don't like your fiction books about dunes. I don't care about sand. Honestly, it would teach you a lot about ecology and power structures because there's a lot of lessons inside a dune. I'm re-reading and it is, it is very prescient to modern times. Well, it certainly made you more of a human being.

Well, all of these tiny messiahs is actually nothing new in Mormonism. Remember, from the very beginning, Joseph Smith had to tell his followers to cool it with their own revelations because shit was spinning out of control almost immediately. Dude, it's fun as shit. Yeah. The guy who made, like, he just said, if you are proper clever enough at the time and you see the Joseph Smith, he might just be making shit up.

You realize, if I throw a couple of revelations in there, I'd be like, I had a revelation. We should all have popcorn tonight for movie night. And everyone's just like, whoa, maybe he is talking to Jesus Christ. This is exactly what I was thinking. Could be. And following Brigham Young's death in the 1870s and the renunciation of the practice of polygamy in 1890,

there were plenty of Mormons who were ready to listen to anyone who would let them continue their own way of life. As such, a fundamentalist sect of the Mormon Church began to emerge, even though the mainstream LDS officially says they have no connection to them whatsoever, because as far as the mainstream church is concerned, Mormon fundamentalists don't exist. Oh, that's a clever way of getting rid of them, huh?

They don't exist. Like, I'm right here in front of you. Hello. They ain't there. And it's a really convenient way of not having cancer for a couple of months. You know what I mean? If you just, like, pretend like you're not sick, like you're pretending you're not throwing up blood, or you're pretending like you're not coughing up blood,

or seeing blood, you can just kind of keep going with your days until you just drop dead. Yeah, that's why I went to the doctor and they were like, and I answered, and I'm like, nah. Well, in this, they're about half correct. Now, they're definitely fundamentalist Mormons, but I think that fundamentalism goes against the entire spirit of mainstream Mormonism,

which is embodied by the make-em-up spirit that Joseph Smith had from day one. Because if you've learned anything from this series, it's that Mormonism is a religion of evolution or devolution, depending on how you look at it, just as American Christianity has devolved from a collectivist religion of peace into a religion of fear whose rallying cry is, fuck anyone, who isn't me and mine.

But that's where we will, I think that if we had a theologist on here, it'd be interesting. I'd love to talk to a theologist. If there's anybody out there that listens to the show, side stories, L-P-O-T-L at gmail.com, to talk about the idea of fundamentalism, because it's interesting, because it's true. I do believe the central tenet of Mormonism,

from what we have read, is the idea, I'm with the concept of, you make it up, see who it sticks, modern, more liberal Mormonism, is them showing that this is our lasting power, that we can move with the times, we can evolve. But at the same time, the original stream of Joseph Smith's thought was a reformation, that we're going back to the original church.

So every fundamentalist breakout, like the idea of we're going back to the original rules, because Joseph Smith said the only way you can get to heaven, the only way you can be a god, the actual hermetic teachings, like the idea that the celestial marriages must happen in order for you to populate the outer space, after life you're supposed to go into, is have many, many wives.

So they are constantly also revolving back. So I don't know what the actual true nature of Mormonism is. I don't know if it is this people constantly seeking, no, we have to go back to the original thought, or is it the side that says, no, you know, gaze are cool now, it's cool. No, we're super cool, we had a hip-hop song with a full on beat. Mr. Zabrowski, you're at the DMV.

So did you want to get your license renewed, or? I want to ride a horse. You want to ride a horse. We'll just stand there, we'll take a quick picture. And you said you're 5'6", is that right? Oh, damn it, I'm going to come over there. Well, the Mormon church, I mean, it has evolved throughout the years. And the ways that the Mormon church always evolves

is whatever's going to help them get to the next level. Every time something in their own belief system threatens their existence, the Mormons get rid of it. When the United States government threatened to take away all their assets because of polygamy, and refused to let Utah become a state and union, they got rid of it. It came to be 1978, and most people in America were starting to think, like, oh, black people are people too.

They got rid of all of the racism, and on and on and on. And even now, like they, now that the general mood of the country is switching towards acceptance of gay people, now they're starting to move towards that too. The Mormons will throw away anything if it means they survive. They have changed on the outside. But on the inside, polygamy has just been sent deeper into the afterlife, because of what we talked about last week,

where just the idea that women cannot be unsealed from their marriages ceremonially. They can get divorced, but they are forever spiritually bonded to the men in the afterlife, creating the same polygamous harem for them to populate whatever planet they get. So it's clever, where blood atonement, they have really gotten rid of blood atonement. They don't like it no more. But the whole, the weird many wives thing is still a ghost that haunts them.

That they just seem to can't fully part with. They can't just cut it out of the fucking, the Mormon Bible. Let's say it was a little late on the racist thing. Yeah, 1978. Yeah. Good fucking Christ. That was way behind mainstream America. Yeah, it was.

Geez. I guess it wasn't that far behind Utah though. I guess not. But the point here is that the fundamentalist LDS believes that the evolution of their religion, if they even think of it that way, should have stopped at the death of Joseph Smith. Or at the very least, that evolution should not be in the hands of the people on the High Council in Salt Lake City.

In fact, the FLDS, of whom there are over 30,000 living in America today, they call the mainstream Mormon church, quote, the wickedest whore of all the earth. Oh my goodness. And you don't want to hear them talk about Monica Lewinsky. Definitely not. Now, the roots of the FLDS lie in Colorado City, Arizona. Originally known as Short Creek, this town was settled in the 20s

by half a dozen polygamist families who were hoping that, again, isolation would allow them to live in peace. It's a nice piece of land. They got a nice mountain. I saw that one mountain. It's nice. And eventually, though, the FLDS figured they needed a business arm for the community.

So they formed the United Effort Plan, a.k.a. the UEP in 1942. All right. And this, the people pulled all their resources, and the trustees, again, were supposed to redistribute the wealth. And they did. And it worked perfectly. Everyone got their fair share and lived happily ever after. So that's been Mormon as a part six.

You know, what a great series it's been. Now, let's talk about how everyone got a skip it in 1987 from the beautiful, beautiful UEP. And back in 1942, the man placed in charge of that money was a man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Joseph Smith. His name was Rulan Jeffs. And he took it from a guy named LaRoy Johnson. There was another complicated figure, which is really fun.

They all seem to be really complicated figures. Yeah. Rulan sounds like someone you fight in Street Fighter. It would be a short fight. Because you could kill him with a car horn. He was pretty frail. Born to a secretly polygamous Salt Lake City family in 1909, Rulan was raised to think that polygamy was not only God's one

and only preference when it came to marriage, but also a central tenet of Mormon life. So after Rulan's mission, mission being the time when young Mormons go out to try to convert people, Rulan got a job at the Utah State Tax Commission where he learned how to handle money and cheat the system. So what you want to do is you want to lick your fingers before you touch any dollars. And then when you see a hundred, you smell it to make sure it's real.

The big thing you do is you hand them a 20, right? You hand them a 20 when you go in and get to go and buy some kind of candy at the store. And when they give you the change, you tell them, I gave you a 50. And they go, no, no. And I tell you, by the name of God, you give me $30 or I will marry your daughter. All I know is, man, it's great to be part of the Italian Mormon mafia. Well, eventually Rulan married Grace Zola Brown in 1934.

But when Rulan's father took Rulan to see the leader of the FLDS, Rulan decided that it was God's will that he become a polygamist. Oh, isn't that interesting? One of their central beliefs is that God is a dude. And that they still talk about this to this day in modern Mormon teachings. That God is a dude that received his powers because of how powerful his wife's structure was. And that he was so exalted and he kept marrying people in space and moving his way up the fucking hierarchy like it's an MLM.

God became our God because he got hired to do it because of how much juice he could shoot because he made enough children. It's completely true. So this is where the fundamental part comes back. You know what? I just want to say this. Kevin Smith had it right. God is a land of s'moreset. Dogma nailed it. That's my thoughts. You remember Mormonism is a gnostic type of religion.

They don't have the God as mainstream Christianity does. They have gods. They have a God. We have our God, the God that we're all trying to get to. And then there is, of course, the Godhead above that, but there is one specific God that they're trying to emulate and that God is in the form of a man. No, that God is fucking hardcore. And that's what they all look up to. But Joseph Smith, as we'll get into,

he was way more of a, he wasn't as into fucking, but he was more into being a prophet. Some people, they're super into fucking. Yeah. Well, the problem with Rulon's newfound polygamy love was that his wife did not share that opinion. That's a big problem. Plus, her father was a high-ranking apostle.

So when Grace snitched on her husband to her father, Rulon was quickly excommunicated because it was soon discovered that he'd already married his second wife in secret. But this was just fine with Rulon because now he had no choice but to go all in with the FLDS. So when the leader, John Barlow, died in 1949, Leroy Johnson took control and ruled in Colorado City while Rulon Jeffs took care of things in Salt Lake City.

There, Rulon lived in a house with 23 bedrooms, two kitchens, and 10 bathrooms. Damn. That's unreal. These fucking houses are huge. They did the walkthrough of Warren Jeff's house. This shit's fucking, it looks like an optical illusion. And that was just Rulon Jeff's first home.

In his second, which was right next door, there were 22 additional rooms. And both houses were surrounded by a concrete wall that kept prying eyes away from Rulon's highly-found-upon lifestyle. This was in the middle of Salt Lake City. You don't really see this too much on the HGTV home shows where they're like, I want closed concept. Like, so closed concept where it's like 22 rooms

like where you could keep people, you know, like, you know, not open concept. Like a prison? Like a prison. As a matter of fact, could we just go into a prison? My big thing is that my deal breaker on the house is I need a fuck room, like a central fuck room where nobody gets out, they only get in.

So that's kind of a deal breaker for me. Also, I need to finish basement. And Rulon had good reason to be paranoid. In 1953, a force of 100 police officers and 40 deputies, along with dozens of Arizona National Guard troops, stormed Colorado City and arrested 122 polygamists. Consequently, 263 of their children were put in foster care and considering how the population of Colorado City

was only about 400 people at the time, this meant that the town was pretty much cleared out. The Short Creek Raid would go on to be a fucking turning point for the fundamentalist movement because they would use it time and time again to show that they're being prosecuted for their religious beliefs. And the Short Creek Raid actually ended up being a victory for them

because it became like a states rights thing where they came out being like, oh, they're messing with this gentle lifestyle. They let them do as they will so they got like a PR bump afterwards. But what they didn't realize is just how much awful shit was happening inside of these communities. Yeah.

And this was all done at the, you know, I wouldn't say at the behest of the mainstream LDS church, but the mainstream LDS church was definitely pushing for this to happen. Okay. But the problem was the raid ended up being the 1950s version of the Elyon Gonzalez story, you know, in which a young Cuban refugee

was photographing and ripped from his mother back in the 90s. Concerning the Colorado City Raid, the New York Times ran pictures of children being taken from their mothers by force on the front page. And as a result, the country for the most part sided with the polygamists. And based on that public sentiment, Arizona Governor Howard Powell

was voted out of office the very next year. And by 1956, every single polygamist was back in Colorado City with their children in tow. What that meant was that it was going to be a very, very long time before anyone fucked with Colorado City again. Even though the FLDS always has been and still is a monumental drain on the United States government. These motherfuckers have the system worked out.

They sound like a bunch of background actors that know the exact ways to get as many pennies out of the union as humanly possible. They are very smart with money. There's something interesting about Colorado. That's also the place where James... This is Arizona. Oh, this is Arizona.

Colorado City, Arizona. Oh, okay. Just like there's Colorado City, Texas, where I live briefly as a child. So Colorado Cities, huh? They're all over the place. Yeah. So this is Colorado City, Arizona.

This is Arizona, yeah. Good clarification. Now, even though the FLDS sees the government as a satanic force, they still accept about six million dollars in public funds every year. Satanic, monadic, monadic, whatever. Or at least that's how much they were pulling in at the beginning of this century when John Krakauer

wrote Under the Banner of Heaven. It might be more now. In December of 2000, the FLDS was able to funnel enough funds through their county's public school district to buy, among other things, a $2.2 million Cessna airplane. That's because they took care of their own when it came to education. Everyone's just fucking homeschooled.

Right. So they had no need for a public school. So all the money that came in for the public school, I said, well, nice airplane, you can borrow that. What did they do? Did they go anywhere with it? Or did they just look at the airplane? They used $2.8 million in public funds to build an airport

that is almost exclusively used by the FLDS community. Do you imagine being stuck overnight at the Mormon airport? How boring that would be? No bars, no good food. It would be devastated. They have a game where you can jump over a rock, which is kind of fun. That's a time killer.

But the story would be, I mean, because there are many, as we'll see, there are many enclaves of FLDS throughout the country. So that's where they'd go and visit them. It's like their own Arkansas airport like Bill Clinton had to run the CIA's drugs through. It's the same shit where they have this little fucking airport that they can go and zip in and out to keep their shit very,

very secret. It sounds like X-Men, like cult edition. Yes. To put it into perspective, FLDS members in Colorado City receive $8 in government services for every one tax dollar they pay, while people in neighboring Mojave County get just a little over a buck in government services for every dollar they pay.

And the FLDS calls this system of taking money out of the pockets of Americans like you and me. What? And Henry. And Henry. I don't pay taxes. What? What are you talking about?

What? Henry, there's someone knocking on your door. Oh, yeah. I'm a religion. What? Jesus Christ told me I don't have to pay my taxes. He doesn't shoot. Watch, he gives me the power to suck my own dick.

Oh, my God. The tax man actually disappeared. It worked, Henry. It worked. Well, the FLDS calls this system of scamming the taxpayers bleeding the beast. And every single one of them see it as a justified and virtuous act. Isn't that weird?

It's so strange. Isn't it? To them, this money is their right because they basically believe that God is laundering money through the United States government to ensure that his chosen people are well taken care of. It's like the way the Russians launder money through the NRA. Yeah. It makes all the sense in the world.

The US government always has done, they always work hand in hand with Moroni. And Moroni taught them back in the day, hey, a little bit for you, a little bit for me, because it's one thing that the eternal, heavenly, all-powerful God needs is money. Because he certainly can't just fucking make it up or like just save it to people or make a bunch of gold to up, right? He needs real, actual money.

That's why he's real. Unbelievable. In other words, FLDS members have no respect for the law at all and are perfectly content in making up their own rules because they believe that God not only gives them permission to do so, but commands them to do it. And when cults start making their own rules, that's when people start getting abused and that's when people start dying.

Because unfortunately, some people need societal rules to keep them from doing awful fucking things. But man, I will say, this is not different for the fundamentalist side of the Mormon church. They've always been doing this. That's how Joseph Smith started this shit, was by breaking rules. He created his own scam bank. He's been fucking teenagers all the entire time.

So that's one of those things where the Mormon proper, the LDS, keeps saying how much better they are than the FLDS. But y'all started from the same shitty delta. You guys came from the same spot. But it was not official members of the FLDS that were responsible for the murder story were about to tell. Rather, it was the members of a sect who were an offshoot of even the fundamentalist church led by a man named Bob Crossfield.

Cool. Crossfield became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1948 after reading the Book of Mormon during an extended stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Edmonton, Canada. I mean, really, he would have read anything. He's at a tuberculosis sanatorium. Think about what he could have been. If he read a karate manual, he could have been a fucking leader of a dojo.

He could have been generally plumbing manual. He could have been the head plumber of the White House. He would have been amazing. I've heard this story about Mormonism again and again where people say, yep, I just had the Book of Mormon to read, so I read it. By the time I was done, I was a Mormon. They should just put Dr. Seusses, oh, the places you'll go

at every single hotel. And then you can feel confident leaving and that you can do it. No, they should put fucking Dune in there. They teach them lessons about the ecology of planets and the true essential natures of linking religions and powers. Interesting. I mean, Hellman, there was a Book of Mormon in our hotel room in Edinburgh. I mean, they're all over.

The fucking Book of Mormon is everywhere. Think about this. You just got done choking yourself while masturbating in a hotel room. You're looking at all the cum on your knees and you wonder how we got here, why are you living this fly, and then you see the Book of Mormon. Boom, because you have all the stupid posts, not clarity. Well, concerning Crossfield, though, by 1961,

he started hearing the voice of God just like Joseph Smith had, and God was telling him that he was the next Holy Prophet of the Lord. And God's first commandment, bring back polygamy. Got to. Got to. Soon after, Crossfield moved to Creston, British Columbia, which just happened to be down the road from Bountiful, which was the Canadian FLDS settlement.

Hmm. There, Crossfield found he wasn't the only Mormon still down with polygamy. Ten years after that, Crossfield self-published a book called The First Book of Commandments, which was a compilation of the 23 revelations from God that Crossfield had received thus far. These revelations were mostly just criticisms of the mainstream LDS leadership, and when the LDS got wind of the book, Crossfield was excommunicated. How the hell did he self-publish a book?

This is the 60s? 60s, yeah. What do you do? You just got a bunch of loose leaf. You tie it around a brick and throw it through people's windows. No, dude. It's from fucking ancient times. How do you self-publish a book in the 60s?

It's actually probably easier because there's smaller publishing companies that you go and just bring a manuscript to, and you give them money. You don't have to pitch a book. You just give them a manuscript, you pay a money, and then they print the book. You go and you get the book out, and then you just give it to people. This was him investing in himself. Which is what we'll do on our book tour when we buy out pallets of our own book and just hand them to the armed homeless that will give people our book at gunpoint.

When I produced over at Fox News for that year, it is funny. They're always on the bestseller list for one week, and every time a new book comes out by one of the lunatics that speaks on that network, boxes and boxes of their book just ended up on the 18th floor. They were number one bestseller on New York Times, never seen again, because it's all a lie. But Crossfield didn't care about being excommunicated. In fact, he wasn't even going by Bob Crossfield anyway. Uh-oh.

God told him that he was now called the prophet Onias. And God also told him that the FLDS was misinterpreting Joseph Smith's doctrines just as badly as the mainstream LDS was. So how does that work? So one day, he's Bob. And then Tuesday, he's like, no, no, no. I'm the prophet Onias. Uh-huh.

At what point did his friends just be like, you're Bob? Nah. Like, no, Bob, no. You're Bob, so we're not going to call you prophet Onias? Marilyn Manson was Brian until 1991. Well, since Onias started talking shit about the FLDS, they kicked him out as well. But Onias was fine with this too, because he happened to own a little piece of Mormon history. Onias owned 300 shares of stock in what is known in Mormon lore as the Dream Mine.

Okay, is that where you show up and you're giving a presentation in front of your class and you realize you're in your underwear? What the hell is that? No, that's where I go. I light a candle. When I go down there, it's middle Utah. And I do this once a year. You guys know when I go off the grid once a year for two weeks.

Of course, yeah. I go down there. We always do wonder, like, what do you do for that two weeks when you're off the grid? I'll tell you what it is. Maybe I shouldn't reveal this to you, but it's a secret to every solid character actor in this country. So go down to the Dream Mine. I light a candle. There's this statue of Brigham Young bent over with his hemorrhoid butt just kind of hanging out.

You put a coin in it. You put a coin in it and you go down to the Dream Mine and I find my characters all living there in little, like, kind of a cabbage patch. Interesting. Where they open it up and the characters just jump into my mind. Isn't that so? It's just you, Paul Rubins, Keenan Thompson. Me, Paul Rubins. I remember the last time it was me because it was around 1998 because I was loading up as a boy.

It was me, Michael Jackson, and that's where he got his new face. Oh, I see. It's very interesting. It was very, very cool. And a young Toby Hooper. No kidding. Well, to talk about the Dream Mine, we've got to cover yet another prophet. Back in 1894, the angel Moroni, who, if you'll remember, brought the golden place to Joseph Smith.

He visited a prophet named John Hiram Coyle. But this time, Moroni wasn't bringing golden plates. Rather, he was just bringing straight up gold. Yeah, dude. He showed John Coyle a vision of a mountain filled with treasure. You like that, dude? You like that? Yeah, you was all right.

Well, that treasure had originally belonged to the Nephites of the Book of Mormon, but after the Nephites had squabbled amongst themselves about the gold, God took it away and stored it in a mountain 12 miles south of Provo, Utah. All for when the last days on Earth came. That's when the gold would be revealed. Okay. God had a whole thing, right, where he's like, I don't want you spending this gold. But you could definitely waste it instead of using paper.

You could definitely write a bunch of shit on it. And that's what we did, huh? It's kind of fun, where you got the gold, but you can't, like, spend it or anything. You can just look at it. But they can only one guy can look at it. And everybody else, if they look at it, they have fucking brains explode. God's funny. He's so funny.

And so Coyle gathered a group of fellow Mormon investors who believed the vision and they started the dig on the dream mine in 1894. 50 years later, they were still digging a hole that was by then 3,400 feet deep. Just another, just one more foot. I think we're going to get it. Here we go. Look at that. What is this?

I'm sick of my head through this hole. I think I see a pagoda. What is this? Oh my God, boys. We made it to China. Wow. Awesome. But Coyle was not the president of the Mormon church.

And only the president was allowed to have revelations. So Coyle was excommunicated in 1948. And he died heartbroken a year later, thinking that his place in heaven was lost. Did they like gold because we were at the gold standard then? Because we were still a gold based economy. Well, gold's always been valuable. Yeah. It's pretty, man.

Was there anything with that? Because obviously we changed. Now gold's always been a thing. Okay. Gold is just pretty. It's been a part of the human culture since the beginning of what they found gold. It's easily malleable and turned into jewelry. So it's always been a precious metal.

Yeah. Gold's just always been there. Okay. So nothing to do with that. It sounds good. It does sound good. Thing is, many people still believed in the dream mind even after Coyle was excommunicated. And that included the prophet Onias.

Man, prophet Onias does sound like what's his name, Orion, the fucking Elvis impersonator. I was thinking that too. It's a great documentary on Orion, by the way. It's amazing. Very good. So in the 70s, Onias had a revelation that he should build a city at the base of the mine. This would be a city of refuge where his followers and the mine stockholders could wait until the last days so they'd have first dibs on the Moroni load.

What was more? Yes. What was more, Onias seemed to fulfill a revelation of John Coyle. Coyle had foretold the coming of a, quote, lightly-complexed man with white hair who would come from the north with whom the stockholders would rally and bring remarkable changes in and around the mine. And I will reveal to you, your prophet. It is Tim Gunn.

Hello, designers. It's the make-it-work MoMA. Wow, you really did go down to the dream mine and pick up some new characters. Oh, really? It's the make-it-work MoMA. So Mr. Gunn, I see you're wearing your MK Ultra shirt today. Is that in mode? Is that fashionable this season?

One must always do something different. I don't have sex. Well, Onias fit the bill of this revelation perfectly because most of the other people who own stock in the mine were totally down for this city of refuge idea. In building off of that, Onias began a school of prophets in which he said that he could teach his followers how to receive revelations straight from God. You don't even need me. You can do it yourself.

The first trick is to fully fall over. Grab your ankles. Now, I mean this. If you just spread your cheeks in a way of making it talking, there is I foresee a man. I foresee a man by the name of Ace Ventura. That will be the true, true prophet. Very interesting. And he called this school because Brigham Young loved shit so much, he actually called

this school Logwarts, which is kind of fun. Logwarts. Logwarts. Well, where we learned how to turn shit into gold. Very good. Very good. So, after establishing the school, Onias sent one of his men out into the world to find candidates, men who would be open to talking to God directly.

And that scout found a chiropractor named Dan Lafferty. Why do chiropractors go insane? I don't know, man. Chiropractors is a common job. A guy that killed his family and systematically killed his whole family and then tried to set fire to the house and was driving around in an SUV with a change of clothes and shit when they found him. He was a chiropractor.

I think that they just hear bones cracking every day and at some point they just realize that we're all just skeletons covered in fat and then they just say, what is a human being? And once it crosses, it's like that story we told last week on Side Stories about the Pomeranian who got a taste for human flesh. Now, Dan Lafferty was a lifelong Mormon who had not been raised as a polygamist, although he was still raised in a strict arch-conservative household in one of the most conservative states in America. Dan met his first wife, Matilda, while on his mission to Scotland.

And six years later, she moved to America for marriage. But five years after that, Dan Lafferty became interested in polygamy after hearing a talk about the subject at the local LDS ward. Digging deep into the Brigham Young University Library, Dan Lafferty chanced upon the 51-page pamphlet on polygamy by Udney H. Jacob that Joseph Smith had published in 1842, back when he was still testing the waters on acceptance of this practice, back in Nauvoo. In a refresher memory of it, the pamphlet, entitled The Peacemaker, was the one who called having sex in a loveless marriage, fornicatin' in the wife.

In this pamphlet, Udney said that monogamy was the source of unhappiness for most marriages, and those unhappy marriages were sources of evil in this world. Therefore, polygamy was the only thing that was going to fix it. Well, I'm going to say, if you do read the pamphlet, I started reading a little bit of the pamphlet, I'm going to use the word problematic. Yeah, maybe something your spouse wouldn't love to hear. Furthermore, the pamphlet, although it was not written by a Mormon, argued the Mormon belief that wives should be utterly compliant when it came to their husband's wishes, because

taking away a woman's agency would make everyone happier. But also remember, if you're a husband, I mean, I remember trying to explain this to Natalie, husbands are training to be God. So that's what's important, is that you have to be properly trained how to designate authority to your family. The children are for working, the wife needs to make the child, the husband needs to go to the space, the space engineering firm and make the O-rings for the challenger, which is what we'll talk about later on.

So when are you getting a divorce, Henry? Soon. When's the divorce coming in? Soon. Okay. Well, I got a couch for you over here in Brooklyn, so. Man, I can't wait to not being able to lift my skin from that couch. Yep.

Well, Dan Lafferty took to the doctrines of Udney Jacob like a duck to water. And that's the amazing thing about this Udney Jacob shit, is that this was something that Joseph Smith published in 1842. Yeah. And it had reverberations in 1982. Just like C. Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, blow the dust off of the great book of whatever and he's like, I'm supposed to fuck a bunch of chicks, huh? No go, man.

I'm a zittier looking for statues. God damn it. Well, Dan went home and began applying the doctrines to his own life. Instituting complete control over his family by forbidding his wife to drive, handle money, or to talk to anyone without Dan being present. Abusive relationship. Very. He took his four biological and two stepchildren out of school and forbade them from playing

with friends. He replaced all medical care with prayer and herbs. And when their next son was born in 1983, Dan circumcised the child himself. You see him just getting a kid like between his knees, the knife in his teeth, he's like, are you squibbling around? All right, let me get this. Just get in the tip, you little bastard. Come on.

Good lord almighty. Yeah. Then Dan removed all the clocks from their home saying his family was running on spiritual time now. Honestly, if this man is schizophrenic, it seems like he's having a total mental break. He's having a mental break, but I don't think he's schizophrenic. Okay. Well, I'll say in mental break, I honestly don't think so.

I think that he was always a piece of shit, and I think that he saw a theological way to validate what he was doing, which is what all of this is a story of, all of this fundamentalist fucking crime, is that they found a way to make it cool with the lord to do whatever the hell it is that they wanted to do, and so then they can use it. And unfortunately, I don't think he was necessarily a nice man up until this point. Oh, and now he is using this as a fucking weapon against his whole family. Yeah, and when Dan punished his wife for disobedience, he would spank her in front of the children. But what all this was leading up to was a plural marriage, and when it came time for

Dan to choose a plural wife, he chose his oldest stepdaughter. But at the last minute, Dan changed his mind. Instead, he married a nearby Romanian non-mormon immigrant named Ann Randak, whose job was to take care of Robert Redford's horses. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. How the hell does she get that job? Go to, go with horses.

No kidding. I'll tell you how old, you know how you get hired by an actor? You just kind of hang around. You had to make it really easy, because eventually it's just, you just stand near one of Robert Redford's horses, and he's like, who are you? My name is Ann. Oh, so you just tell the horses what to do, you yell at them instead of whispering? You're hired.

No kidding. I don't know who does my money, and there's a guy over there with a big change purse that just hangs out in the living room. I don't know, I'm an actor. So she was taking care, I don't know why, this is amazing. Yeah, she was taking care of, that was her whole job. At the time when she met this maniac. She was the stable master for Robert Redford's horse farm.

Okay. Ranch, horse ranch. Whatever it is. But once Dan saw how much more he liked life with polygamy, he started wondering what else the church had scuttled. And after a little more digging, Dan Lafferty discovered the doctrine of blood atonement. Uh-oh. Which got filed away in Dan's brain for later use.

And Dan started inching his way towards murder by flouting other laws of man. Now when the Board of Health shut down Dan's home sandwich making business. Hey, he was an artist. Okay, no, no man. And he was trying to spread his art through the palette of sandwich. I don't think I'm gonna want a sandwich from this dude quite honestly. Nothing but mayonnaise or mayonnaise or mayonnaise sandwiches. What I do is I get the bolognese and I just carve off the tip of them.

And I put them in big loaves of bread. I call it, I named them after my son. That's disgusting. I don't want a sandwich made at some guy's house. It's made at his home? It was his home sandwich. The Department of Health came in and said, you can't just make sandwiches at your house and sell them to people.

I'm an independent business. It's disgusting. This is an independent enterprise. That is disgusting. So Dan quickly adopted Joseph Smith's proclamation that the laws of God overtook the laws of man every single time. And the laws of sandwich overtake the laws of God. Pretty soon, Dan Lafferty was proclaiming himself to be what? A sovereign citizen.

He starts to sound like Kissel on acid during her buddy's bachelor party. He refused to have a driver's license, pay taxes, or quote, submit to the oppressive burden of a social security number. Forget it. All truly independent, man. And it all started with a pastrami sandwich. That showed him his way of breaking the yoke of the American fucking citizen prison situation. I don't think it was the pastrami sandwich.

I think it was like the toenail that was in the pastrami sandwich. It was like maybe the state was right on this one. Someone had to have gotten sick. Someone had to have gotten really fucking sick. And to tie his sovereign citizenship off, Dan mailed his driver's license to somewhere in the state of Utah, some government building. Honestly, I just hope like some 14-year-old god, it was like a fake idea. He revoked his marriage license and he returned his social security card to the federal government.

And he thought that after doing all this, I ain't got to pay taxes no more. Of course you wouldn't. Can you imagine? Yeah, how many times the fucking, the fed must receive these like just envelopes filled with social security cards. And he's like, these fucking idiots. I still shred another batch of these. Dan even refused to pay sales tax in stores. I am a sovereign citizen.

You, alright, you said, alright, there's a shirt that says no fatties. According to the sign is $14.99. That's correct. I'm not paying no $15.87. I want the 88 cents back in my pocket so that I can tell the world I do not agree with fatties. Oh man, now naturally this caused a bit of trouble in Dan's life. I would think so. On one occasion, he was thrown in jail after running away from a cop who'd stopped him for speeding.

Then Dan blew up in court and was given 30 days after he told the judge, quote, In the name of Christ, do justice or be struck down. Am I being detained? Am I being detained? Am I being detained? Then the government came and seized his home and all of his chiropractic equipment because he didn't pay his property taxes. But Dan was saved at the last minute by his father who actually owned the equipment and he paid off the debt. I will say those laws, they're pretty pesky in the way they stick around.

Even if you deny it, even if you just say, no, no, no, I do not believe in these laws. So how can I be beholden to them? They still seem like they stick. It's funny because other people do believe in them and then turns out they tend to win. But Dan was not the only Lafferty in play here. He had five brothers and almost all of them were starting to cotton more and more to Dan's polygamist beliefs. Those brothers were Ron, Mark, Watson, Tim and Alan. Tim, yes.

It's Tim Alan. It's literally the second tour, just one guy. And the sixth was Glenn Borland. But what they did was they excommunicated him out of their own family. Because the name was too disgusting to be fucking said all that. Now Ron, the eldest, was a latecomer to the whole polygamist scene. But the other brothers almost immediately started gathering at Mark and Dan's offices to discuss how the government was keeping him down. And Dan would quote the Book of Mormon to back up his claims.

Dan also began to believe that the mainstream LDS had gone off the rails when they gave up polygamy a century before in order to become a part of the oppressive government. Which made them complicit in all this. In other words, Dan Lafferty radicalized himself without even coming into contact with the fundamentalist Mormons. Or before he was even contacted by the aforementioned prophet Onias. Or anything that's an important lesson for our listeners, don't sit around waiting to be radicalized. You can do it for yourself. You can radicalize yourself whether it's like, man, gardening is radical. It is.

Like leading a militia against a government is so radical. It's just very bizarre. If he would have just stuck with the sandwiches, he could have been the next Jersey Mike. Get radicalized about how good your sandwiches are. Absolutely. By the way, cousin subs. That one holds up and I had Jimmy Johnson Milwaukee and that's the best sandwich of all time. I don't know if it's the best sandwich of all time.

Oh, buddy, you didn't have the sandwich you didn't have the sandwich that I had. Well, Dan's other brothers were following suit in this radicalization. Three of the Lafferty's took plural wives and also declared themselves sovereign citizens. Uh-oh. But the only one who was really having trouble with it was Ron. Now, Ron was, when he was a young man, what you might call a super Mormon. Gold star. Gold star Mormon.

Yeah. He's up there, man. He's on the track for apostle. He's on the track for counsel. Okay. Super Mormon. He followed all the words of wisdom by abstaining from alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and masturbation. Because you know their big thing, the way they avoid masturbation, they say?

Always stay, when you're traveling, one thing to do, there's a guide to avoiding masturbation for Mormonism. You got to have a buddy. You have to have the masturbation buddy. Oh, yeah. It never evolves into two people just sucking each other off in a hotel room. But you're supposed to have a dude that will spot you. That you say to him, hey, man, I'm really horny right now, Ben.

I'm really horny right now, and I'm thinking about touching it, Ben. You got to tell me I won't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You won't, buddy. Yeah, you won't. Oh, man. What you're doing is bigger. I imagine there's a Mormon boys series as well, right?

Oh, yes, there is. Oh, that's the, it's a brother-sister team. Yeah. And the man makes the Mormon boys. Yes. But they're legally men. Of course. Well, Ron Lafferty also didn't read anything but LDS literature, and he listened to nothing

but LDS music. Oh, damn. This is a singular brass instrument cover of the Mario Brothers theme song. Yeah, it was very good. It's the only song you're allowed to listen to in the Mormon church. Well, by the way, a bit of a side note here, but I was reminded of an actual Mormon celebrity, Steve Young, the quarterback. BYU, BYU quarterback.

There you go. Isn't he also, isn't he gay? No, he's just Mormon. That theory's been out there for a long time, but I think it's just because he didn't drink coffee, drink booze, or masturbate. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's gay. Yeah, Steve Young is actually the, every time someone mentions BYU, I always think of Steve Young.

Steve Young? Yeah, the Mormon's got an athletic superstar. So by the end of Ron's mission in Florida, he had baptized more than 50 people in a period of two years in a situation where even the best missionary was expected to convert no more than four Gentiles. But this, okay, but they're all sovereign citizens? Well, Ron is not a sovereign citizen just yet. Okay.

No, no. Ron is the super Mormon. Ron started off as the super Mormon, yes. And the other brothers, three or four of the other brothers, four out of the six, like really fucking fell on us. There was one guy who was like, ah, this sounds kind of weird. Okay. But yeah, the other brothers at this point are all sovereign citizens.

Okay. But you're also just trying to get signatures on a piece of paper. So people could be lying about the baptism part and just kind of be like, please get away with me. Please get away from me. But you know what it also is? You could also have a good eye. As a Mormon missionary, I want to find out if you are a Mormon missionary, tell me if this

is true. Do you have good nerd radar where you know how to go at the people that are technically already living these lifestyles and you just kind of need to like flip them over to Mormonism? Maybe. Yeah. I would assume that they know when someone is more available than others. I mean, I opened the door in my Texas chainsaw massacre shirt wearing my fucking underwear. I'd just be like, what?

What? And then they're like, thank you, sir. I was like, thank you. Thank you for making me get out of bed because I was just gonna shit in the bed this morning. I mean, I don't know. I don't know who he was targeting that because the baptism. I mean, it's a ritual. It's not.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a huge, it's a whole deal. Do they do the, do they do the full Dipperoo, the full going under the water in the lake, the whole thing? No, you remember from last week, man, we talked about in two episodes ago where we talked about they, they got to wash the fucking butthole. They got, they don't do that anymore, but it's a whole, it's a whole Meshuggah.

If you are going to get baptized and I've told this story before, but don't be a fat kid like me and don't wear a white T-shirt. It was mortified. Being the eldest, Ron Lafferty had always looked after his younger brothers and when their wives started complaining to Ron's wife about how they were being treated, Ron decided to step in. All right, there, Mr. We're going to have to have a bit of a what for or we're going to have some fisticuffs.

All right. I want to understand it. All right. I am very tired because I only got three hours of sleep last night because I had a plow each morning and I don't believe in coffee. But I, you know, I get a nice breeze coming through here and I'll have enough energy to punch you in the face, Dan. So on one fateful evening, Ron met with his brothers at Dan's house and read aloud an

essay about the dangers of fundamentalism, saying that there was no place in their church for extremes. In response to this statement about extremes, Dan gave a serious retort that sounds like a joke. He said, quote, Well, how about the extremely good? All I'm trying to do is be extremely good. And so the argument began with the two of them trading quotes from the Book of Mormon and the polygamous pamphlet by Adne Jacob published by Joseph Smith, the peacemaker.

Fucking God, man. What is this fucking nerd? Olympics? We're all fighting each other. By the end of the night, Dan had won. And from what Ron's wife, Diana, later said, Ron returned home a totally different man than the one who'd walked out the door just a few hours before. Uh-oh.

Ron threw away his license, removed the plates from his truck and quit his job declaring himself a sovereign citizen. What? I will not be detained! And when Dan started applying the control rules to his wife, she went to the only Lafferty wife who hadn't taken this bullshit lying down, Brenda Lafferty. Brenda was married to the youngest brother, Alan, and she'd resisted all this shit from the word go, and she made sure to tell all the other wives that they should do the same.

But she had to deal with her fair share of bullshit as well. Alan refused to eat at restaurants that weren't closed on Sundays, and she didn't find out about Alan's sovereign citizen status until after they were married. Brenda, I hope you're really excited to have Chick-fil-A again today. How did she even, I guess you find out where he's like, I don't sign contracts. Because as soon as you sign a marriage contract, then the government says you're married to them. And you're like, what? Well, Alan was always kind of like half in, half out.

Or he always got paid in cash, he didn't pay his taxes, at least when they got married. But when Brenda married him, being strong-willed, she at the very least convinced her husband to pay taxes and be a somewhat functioning member of society. But don't they agree if they don't sign their license, that they don't sign the contract to believe in the money? Isn't that another thing too, where they try to make their own money, which is why a lot of them are in Bitcoin? I think sovereign citizens make up a lot of their own rules.

Yeah, the whole point, the whole thing. When Brenda convinced Alan to pay his taxes, that pissed off the other Lafferty brothers. But what really got their goat about Brenda was that she was educated. She was the only wife who had been to college. And she knew the Book of Mormon better than any of them. Meaning that they couldn't just shout random scripture to get her to shut up. But up until that point, Brenda was more of a nuisance to the Lafferty brothers than anything. It wasn't until Brenda got in the middle of Ron's marriage did the real hatred begin.

Uh oh. Life from your grave. Life from your grave. Now as I said, Ron had quit his job and dropped out of society. He was abusing his wife Diana, and on top of it all, the once faithful Mormon was in the process of being excommunicated. And so Brenda convinced Diana to leave Ron. And when Diana left, she sought refuge with a man named Richard Stowe,

who was directing the High Council that was excommunicating Ron. And the person who helped Diana pack was a woman named Chloe Lowe. Before long, Ron was living out of his 1974 Chevy Impala. And in his mind, the three people responsible were Richard Stowe, Chloe Lowe, and especially Brenda Lafferty. And it was amidst this mood that the brothers Lafferty were introduced to the prophet Onias. Yeah, to the shitty fucking desert-based X-Men. They go out there to meet him.

It's very, very strange how this stuff works, how they built these imaginary hierarchies. So you have a man that has no powers who has somehow become a leader of a group of people, prophet Onias. These three fucking idiots, they all show up to go meet another big top idiot that is going to help them get validity for their actions. So you have all of these people do a bunch of made-up stuff, but because they keep flipping and making it up, the more and more it becomes reality. That's the only, there's only two options.

After living in your car, you become a massive criminal or a stand-up comedian. You gotta make, you gotta double down. You gotta do one or the other. You are, hey man, you are counting out becoming a ufologist. To the Lafferty's, Onias was just the type of man they'd been looking for. He was a leader of men, he agreed that the mainstream church was corrupt, and he was sitting on a magical, mindful angel gold to boot. They haven't found it yet, but it's almost better to get in before they find it.

Of course, yeah. And conversely, the Lafferty's were exactly what Onias had wanted when it came to students for a school of prophets. And by January of 1984, the Lafferty's were making appearances in Onias's revelations. Now it's important, boys, remember to do the bit when you bent over first, you take the bonacca, and you spray it towards the butt, and the essential nature of this is that you're playing as if your butt can't talk and it has bad breath. And you got it, it's important to know, and yeah, it may burn.

But the bit is incredibly important for people to believe that your butt does indeed have a mouth that does speak in the name of the Lord. And Ron, with nothing going on in his life, threw every bit of energy he had into the school of prophets, whose main purpose was to teach people how to have revelations just like Joseph Smith had. Okay. And pretty soon, God began speaking to Ron Lafferty directly. And describing the feeling of revelation to his brother, Ron said, quote,

It's like a blanket falls over you. You can feel the Lord's thoughts, and you write them down. And the Lord's thought were, your house is running out of gas. Go to the gas station. So between February and March of 1984, Ron received 20 revelations supposedly straight from God. Some would appear directly in Ron's head, while others would make themselves known through Ron while he was typing on his word processor.

Oh, perfect. Yeah. But the most consequential of Ron's revelations would be written on a simple sheet of yellow legal paper. It read in part. Thus saith the Lord unto my servants the prophets. It is my will and commandment that ye remove the following individuals in order that my work might go forward.

For they have truly become obstacles in my path, and I will not allow my work to be stopped. First, thy brother's wife Brenda and her baby. Then Chloe Lowe. Then Richard Stowe. And it is my will that they be removed in rapid succession, and that an example be made of them in order that others might see the fate of those who'd fight against the true saints of God. So it's a hit list, huh?

It's a hit list. He did the hit list in the voice of God. Yep. Yep. Damn. Just so happened that those were the same people that he blamed for his whole life falling apart. Right.

Weird. It's weird how it works like that. It is. They didn't blame for anything, or also the one that God wants to kill. It's serendipity. He should have peppered in some make-believe names, you know, just like so it wasn't so obvious. And Durf Noggle.

Durf Noggle. You know, Durf Noggle needs to go also Bill Cosby. Yeah. So, after commanding the murder of four people, including an infant, God went on to tell Ron was the same ilk as Porter Rockwell, who attempted the murder of Lilburn Boggs and had been one of Brigham Young's henchmen. And when Ron showed this revelation to his brother Dan, all Dan had to say was, quote, Make sure it's from God.

That's it? Yep. That's it? You better double check with Triple Stamp on this because I want to make sure this is from God. Is there some kind of like a letterhead or do you got some kind of watermark on there that we can immediately check out? Because this is, I mean, it seems coincidental.

I don't mean to step on your toes here. Right, yeah. Because we're talking like quadruple homicide here plus one. But in the days following the first revelation, Ron received another saying that Ron was the mouth of God while Dan was the arm. I just do the talking. I just do the talking. I can't be doing all this murdering.

You know, I'm trying. I have vision for the future. Even I was in the middle of it, like, oh no, we got to get hot pockets tonight. It's revelation from God. I know that. So Dan, this is on you, buddy. Wow. And both brothers took this to mean there would have to be Dan who would commit these

murders. And they used a murder that Nephi committed in the Book of Mormon as justification for their actions. Is there some kind of captcha God can do so I can be sure? This collection of communications from God came to me known as the removal revelation and the seed that the founders of Mormonism planted with the blood atonement doctrine so many years past was about to bear bloody fruit once more. But to the prophet Onias' credit, murder was a bridge too far when it came to the

revelations of his students. Although this does tell you that even when it comes to prophets, belief has borders. And even so, the prophet allowed the removal revelation to be brought to their high council and it was put to a vote as to whether or not it truly came from God. Now, was this council actually stoned? Because it seems like you would have to be so high off of some strong ass weed to even consider any of this stuff. Dude, it's just about the, I just like the idea that they become very practical.

Yeah. They have to sit and vote with like, oh, this came from God or not. I mean, they got close technically. I mean, they lost six to three. But they still got three votes. Who were the three? Them. Ah.

Nice. Okay. Never. It's like when you vote for yourself. Yeah, they voted for themselves. They all voted, they voted that it was real. Okay. You remember when you voted for yourself 1800 times in Brooklyn?

Yeah, I loved it. Just went with so many different wigs, a babushka. I was like a real Robin Williams. And so, after they lost the vote, they left the church of the prophet Onias and they were on their own. The only thing the council did in response to this very real threat on the lives of four people was to sign and notarize an affidavit documenting the threat. Then the affidavit was placed in a drawer for later use should the brothers go through

with it. Just kind of a bit of a cover your ass type of thing. Yeah, you gotta have, it's gotta be legal. Yeah. Maybe this, this is like one of those times where it's like, sheriffs love to get this info. Like cause it makes them feel like, oh, I have a real job. I'm haggard.

This is the reason I'm drinking whiskey all night. And go through with it, the Lafferty brothers did. Surprisingly though, before they went through with it, Dan went to his little brother, Alan, and straight up told him that he and Rom were gonna murder Alan's wife and child. Geez. Now Alan didn't accept the revelation. Whoa. What?

But he also didn't say a goddamn word to his wife. What is wrong with these people? That might be because Brenda was getting sick and tired of all the bullshit that went with living with Alan. Brenda was on her way out the door when it came to her marriage. But such things are difficult and they take time. And while Brenda was preparing, Dan and Ron Lafferty took a road trip out west to ruminate until God commanded them that the revelation be made real.

Ugh. And they didn't know what ruminating was until they saw it once in a dictionary. And they're like, I think that's what we should do. I don't think that they are bright. No, doesn't sound like it, man. During the two months that the brothers were on the road, they picked up a 24-year-old homeless ex-con named Ricky Knapp. Ricky had a friend who was a pop farmer.

And Ricky knew where his friend threw away all the seeds and stems. Was my fucking dealer in 2003 when Florida? Yeah. Oh, you wouldn't believe it, Henry. We've got to go out 20 miles outside of Tallahassee. I know where all the seeds and stems are. No, great, great. Ricky, thank you so much.

I certainly didn't get enough seeds and stems in the last fucking batch I got from my friend Forrest. So Ricky and the Lafferites went out to the dumping ground and gathered up all the stems they could find in a grocery bag and had a weird, janky high together. I remember being convinced. I was told by endless dealers that you could just chew on the stems and get kind of high. You boil it. Like you take it all, you boil it, do a fucking little tea thing, and it's fucking disgusting. So ex-con Ricky was like, I'm a thief, but only of shit that sucks.

So super shit that sucks. That is a weed farm, but we're not going to go with the weed. We're going to go with that stems and seeds. You guys ever done knife hits? Every two-liter bottle has been cut off from the bottom, so you can really inhale it hard. But the Lafferites still maintain that they got a little high, and they named it a tool of spiritual enlightenment. Yeah, bro. Man, it's looking jawed at it.

They got a headache is what they got. Then the trio swung by a Mormon commune that Ron knew about, and Dan picked up a wife. Just as well. What? He did what? He picked up a wife. He picked up a wife. Picked up a wife.

Like a hammer. What do you mean he picked up a wife? He met a girl, and he's like, hey, you want to be a wife? And she was single. She had two kids, or four kids actually. So she's like, yeah, I could use a husband. So he's like, okay, we're on this weird road trip. You got to go now.

Man, it was different. Well, the marriage gave the brothers an extra car and four kids to deal with. But Dan divorced the woman two weeks later. It didn't work out. Sounds like a horrible, horrible comedy. Yes. Well, afterwards, he met back up with Ron and Ricky, who'd picked up another drifter named Chip Carnes, and they all went to Ron and Dan's mother's place in Provo, Utah,

on July 23rd. This is literally trailer park boys. That's where it's becoming, yes, but it's far more dangerous. Yes. On that day, Dan, Ricky, and Chip were all geared up to head into Salt Lake City for the Pioneer Day celebration on the 24th. Oh, they have a commandment for corn dogs? Well, they have the Pioneer Day was them trying to figure out a way to celebrate things.

So they use it as like a big Mormon day where everybody can get together and not listen to music and not drink beers. But I know that they do now. Now they listen to music. Okay. Yeah. It's Brigham Young's entry into the Salt Lake Valley. I actually hear that non-Mormons in Salt Lake City on July 24th, they have Pie and Beer

Day. Hell yeah. Oh, you non-Mormons. I want to go to Pie and Beer Day. Yeah, I'm also going to Pie and Beer Day. I'm just going to be a little bit of a contrarian here. No. Pie and beer.

If it's a meat pie. They're not doing meat pies. They're not doing meat pies. It's not the UK. It's not the UK. Kissel, you are the strangest. That is the strangest, most off-brand thing I have ever heard you say. You literally would not sit and enjoy a beer and a piece of pie. No.

Beer and pie? You're very strange. You sound like you're mixing them all together in a big bowl. You're going to have beer and you're going to eat pie. You really have to chase it. You're going to end up with the fat kid and stand by me. Everyone's going to vomit all over each other. I don't want to hear about how you feel that your eating habits are correct.

This is wrong. I think it's got to be salt. It's got to be salt-based. That's the whole thing. With beer consumption, you've got to be surrounded by carbs and salt. Okay. I'm going to go Wisconsin with you on this one. What if you have apple pie with a piece of cheese?

So that way you have the apple pie, you buffer it with a piece of cheese, then you go for your beer. If it's spotted cow, you can have anything with it. That's what I'm saying, buddy. But they don't got that in Utah. The problem was, these boys weren't going to Pioneer Day. Ron said they had to forget all about the fair because God had finally spoken. Instead of good times and clean Mormon fellowship, the day of July 24th would be filled with murder

and mayhem. And that is not easy. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for four idiots to forget about a fair? It's so difficult. They are so easy. You're already in a car. You're in a car. You're already like driving past it probably a lot and you see all the things go up and

all the fried Oreo stands and you're just like, man, oh man, can we just go for like a little bit? Can we go for 20 minutes or so? We can't do much damage then, right? It's like, no cricket. That would mean that we would have to be citizens of this disgusting United States of America. Oh, what's the use of being a sovereign citizen if you can't go to the fair? I agree.

I throw a fair for myself. I went, I got a hot dog that I stole from a dumpster and I'm drinking a can of motor oil that technically I should be saving for my house car. For the entire time that Ron was telling the group, hey, tomorrow's the day we're going to go murder four people. Jesus. Their mother, Claudine, was just sitting on the couch, knitting. Didn't say it.

Damn thing. Didn't make a single phone call. Just let it go. This means there's now about nine people who know that these murders are going to take place and absolutely fucking nothing. Do you think that they actually thought these murders were going to take place? It seems as if these guys like do a lot of makeup ups. So I don't know.

But that's- I'm with you, Kissel. I think that there was a time period where they legitimately thought these fucking idiots, they could do whatever the hell it is they want. I guess they're going to do this. I have no clue if they really mean this because they all knew. I guess they'd never told Brenda. They never actually told her.

She was the one that was decidedly out of the loop when it came to what the hell they were planning to do. Everybody else was just kind of like, well, I see it when I believe it because they mail their social security cards to the government. How can they even put together an afternoon of murder in Miami? So the next day, on July 24th, Dan woke up and sawed off the barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun with a hacksaw because God had told him to do it during his morning prayers. Surprisingly, Ricky and Chip were all in when it came to the mission.

Surprisingly, I feel like they're the ones that are- they're the ones who be like, yeah man, here, I got some new ones making a wacky Wednesday. Wacky Wednesday indeed. So the four men loaded up in the Impala with an additional two guns and headed to their brother Mark's house where they picked up one last firearm so all four men could be armed. Then, at 1.30 that afternoon, they drove to their brother Allen's house where Brenda and her daughter Eric were.

Ron walked up to the door with a shotgun hidden in his sleeve and a 10 inch boning knife in his boot and knocked on the door, but no one answered. At that moment, Ron said that he was relieved. He believed momentarily that this had all been a test, like how God had tested Abraham just to see how far the motherfucker would go. In killing his son. Yes. Yeah.

So Ron got back in the car and started driving away, but as he was pulling away from the house, he was overcome with the feeling that he should return because he had heard no confirmation from God that this had been a test. So God must still want these people dead. Horribly, what happened next fed directly into their revelation. Remember God had said that Ron was the mouth of God while Dan was the arm. So the second time, Dan knocked on the door and this time Brenda opened it. After some awkward small talk, Dan forced his way inside and wrestled Brenda to the

ground, sending a glass crashing down in the process. Ron heard the glass break and came in to help. And while Ron held Brenda down, Dan gave some thought as to what the best way to fulfill the revelation would be. He asked Ron for the knife to help him think, maybe give him a little bit of inspiration. And after Ron beat Brenda senseless, screaming that she was why he didn't have a wife anymore, they made her sit in the corner of the room. But when she finally figured out what they were planning, she tried running after her

child who was in the other room. Dan stopped her by grabbing her by the hair and Brenda fainted. With the mother unconscious, Dan got the feeling that God wanted him to kill the child first. So guided by what he called the Holy Spirit, he walked down the hall. When he got to the baby's room, the baby must have thought that Dan was her father Alan, because Dan and Alan both looked alike and they both had beards. Because of this, the baby calmed down and Dan put his hand on the baby's forehead. Then he closed his eyes and drew the knife so deep across the baby's throat that he

almost decapitated her. Then he walked back to the kitchen, washed off the knife, and did the same to the unconscious Brenda, cutting so hard he heard the knife scrape her spine. Dan then washed the knife again, returned with Ron to the car where Chip and Ricky had been waiting this whole time and took off without telling their two companions anything about what had transpired in the house. They did nothing. They literally were the ones helping push the whole thing along and they sat in the car

while the whole thing went down just moping about not being at Pioneer Day. Unbelievable. This is disgusting. With the first part of the revelation fulfilled, the men drove to the home of Chloe Lowe, the third of God's commanded victims. But thankfully, Chloe was not at home. She was out celebrating Pioneer Day. So Ron and Dan robbed the house, destroyed Chloe's precious porcelain figure collection,

and moved on. Oh my God, you might as well just kill my mom if you destroy her porcelain figure collection. It's like a horror crux. Then they moved on to the home of Richard Stowe. But along the way, Ricky, who was driving, took a wrong turn. After he took a wrong turn, he stopped the car and said, alright boys, we've got to talk about this for a second. There on the side of the road, the men discussed whether or not a third murder was worth it.

Or if they'd done enough already. Have we done enough already? I am exhausted. But we had a revelation. I was supposed to kill three people. So they have to negotiate with revelation. Yeah, and Chip finally chimed in to say that if the Lord wanted them to kill someone else that day, they'd already be there.

Of course. I'm going to posit this as well, okay? If the Lord really wanted them dead, now I'm not saying we wasted an afternoon. But wouldn't God have made them explode? Good. Honestly, y'all, wouldn't God just made them explode? Or some kind of big eagle to pick them up? I'm just spitballing here.

It seems to me like you just want to go to pioneer days. I just know that the tuba concert is going to start at four. And if you've never even, I've heard that the polka this year was quite knee shifting. Oh, my God. Well, thankfully, Ron agreed, and they drove off down I-15. And had Ricky taken the right turn, though, Richard Stowe would be a corpse right now. He was home, and he'd taken Pioneer Day off to do some renovations with his son. The men then moved on to Nevada and checked into a motel in Wendover where they bought

beer and hot dogs and turned in for the night. But Ricky and Chip were starting to realize they were in over their heads, because Dan had told them the whole story since they'd arrived in Nevada. Yeah, Rick and Chip. Yeah, they didn't realize. Hey, I got to say something, Chip. I never feel like we made a whole series of wrong decisions in our lives that have kind of led to this afternoon.

You know what, Ricky? Yeah, I could have done better in biology. I really feel like maybe that's the turn. I remember when someone asked me if I wanted to join the basketball team, and I said, basketball makes you stupid. I think that I should have done that. It would have given me some structure. Yeah, that might have been good.

So Ricky and Chip stole Ron's and Paula and hauled us to Cheyenne, Wisconsin, where they were picked up by the cops four days later and the pair subsequently spilled the beans on the whole thing. Meanwhile, Ron and Dan had just kind of said fuck it when their car and accomplices were gone so they hitchhiked to Reno and made friends at the nugget with a dude named Bud who let him sleep on his floor for the night. It sounds like a Ben Kistel story. Other than the murder.

No, I'm making friends with Bud at the nugget in Reno, Nevada. No, I mean, obviously Bud is a fun guy. I'm not dissing on Bud. Oh yeah, Bud took the water ski the next day, dude. Bud was a great man. He didn't know. He just thought he had two fun local yokels to hang out with. No, Bud would sit and play video games with you.

You guys could get Papa John's together and enjoy your night, and keep Bud with us. You'd probably kind of successfully convince you to not murder all your enemies. Bud is one of those guys who understands that if you're playing the slots long enough, they just give you free drinks. You just got to sit down, you can go to a low table, you don't got to bet that much money, and by the end of the night you got 20 free beers, you're making money on top of money. That's the thing though, couldn't you just buy the beers?

Yeah. Well, then you couldn't gamble. The whole thing is we've now meandered back into Uncle Corner. Well, after hanging out with Bud, the brothers moved on and took up residence in a double deck or shuttle bus, they then spent the next- That is a very fancy way of saying, found a fucking bus. Man, we got to hold these room for a fucking activities. Look at this.

I look, vroom, vroom, vroom, I'm driving a bus, it's funny, I'm driving. Man, we found a residence. Do you have the home suite at home? Little thing, the mat, do you have the mat? You know, I saw this thing the other day that's inspired me. It just said, and I think that these are important to remember for every day, live, you got to live, you got to laugh. Yeah, yeah.

You really got to laugh. Every day it's important. Yeah. And you got to love my friend. And you know what I love? This double-decker bus. Double-decker bus? That's great.

We can put it right by our little sign that says, home is where the heart is. Well, Ron and Dan then spent the next two weeks going to the Pepper Mill Casino every day because at the Pepper Mill, anyone who had an ID, you get a few complimentary chips free plate and nachos. Oh, my God. See, technically, that is amazing. That is amazing. That is amazing.

A free plate, a casino, warm, kind of cold, though, nachos, mostly cold. They're living their life, man. They're having a good time. And using these complimentary chips, they were pretty good at this shit. They made enough money to get two plates of nachos a day. Damn dog. Oh, Mamacita. The toilet on that double-decker bus.

Woo. The best part about nachos is that when they come out of the other side, it's like nachos again. It is. Then they visited their friend Debbie who worked at the classiest of casinos, Circus Circus. Ah, yes. But it was while they were at Circus Circus that a blackjack dealer recognized Dan and Ron.

The dealer called the cops and the brothers were arrested soon after while waiting in line at the Circus Circus Buffet. So disappointing. Go to Vegas. Circus Circus hasn't changed since they've been there. Oh, my friend. This is the Reno Circus Circus. Oh, this is the Reno Circus Circus.

Woo. Woo. Woo. Woo. You know, it's, you know, these guys, because this is a trip very similar to what we'll see with Warren Jeffs as well. They're just living their, they're just fucking living it up, man. They know it's over.

They know it's over. And so the guys who are not, I don't want to say snitching, they were telling the police in Wisconsin. So their photos were in newspapers and things. Yeah. Everyone was looking for these guys. So they were, they were immediate. Well, not immediate.

They know it took two weeks of them fucking around in Reno for them to be recognized. To be fair, that's fairly fast for someone to be found as a murderer in Reno. Especially in Reno. Yeah. You could live there for like a decade. For them to flip on anybody inside of Reno, you know, that's difficult. Now, as it is with many religious zealots charged with major crimes, Ron Lafferty refused to mount an insanity defense because he still truly believed with all his heart that God

had commanded him to murder a young woman and a toddler. As a result, he was very quickly convicted and sentenced to death. But a technicality earned him a second trial. He again refused to plead insanity, but in the interval, his understanding of God had somewhat changed. Now, he believed that Moroni was a homosexual spirit who was constantly trying to invade his anus. That is...

Oh, if I'm the judge, I'm like, I know you said you weren't crazy. And technically, if I say that you are crazy, it's going to be easier for you. But can we just say, for the record, he's batshit nuts and still charged? My thing is that people are saying, I'm crazy, but I think you'd be crazy if you tried denying my sweet, succulent butt. Are you going to do the monogamy? See just how it swaggles back and forth. I could see how the hand of God would just look up my two plump little butt cheeks and

just imagine what it would be like to play dirty harmonica on my holes. But he also, he had a magical ward to keep Moroni away. He did. Someone gave him an exit-only sticker, and he put it on his jumpsuit. Oh my god. Oh my fucking vomit. This person took two lives. This man?

That's it. This walking Chevy truck? That's just the rules, dude. Yeah, that's the rules. If you got a no exit sign anywhere on your body, no one can touch your butthole. Oh yeah, that's the rule. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No angels can have gay sex with you that way.

No, you don't see that sign on every single pickup truck at every single rest stop all over this country. And when Ron was convicted of murder a second time, he told the judge, quote, You can kiss my butt, pal. I thought you didn't like that. I thought the whole thing was that Moroni was having sex with your butt, so why would I kiss your butt, sir? Here's my sign.

Here's your sign? And when asked to choose his method of execution, Ron said he'd already had his legal injection of Mormonism, so he'd take the firing squad. Ho-ho! Hell yeah, dawg. Yeah, yeah, man. Getting snappy with it. Yeah.

And to this day, Ron Lafferty is awaiting the bullet, and that day could come at any time. As per a new story released just this last August, just a couple months ago, Ron has lost his last appeal, so any day now, Ron's gonna get a fucking bullet to the head. For Dan's part, he represented himself in his trial. Smart. Smart. Yeah, he got you, man. I mean, who are you going to trust beside yourself?

Of course. I'm not trusting these lawyers. I'm a lawyer, because I'm putting on a funny wig. Show up like one of these barristers. But he actually did all right. He didn't get the death penalty. Wow. Yeah, he got life in prison, but he also now believes he's the prophet Elijah, and that

Ron is the son of Satan, whose mission is to stop the second coming of Christ. It's really just about trying to have fun with your monkey. You know, you gotta tell him some stories. Now naturally, the prophet Onaius absolved himself of all responsibility because he had, after all, said no. No. Don't do it. It ain't my problem.

I'm just looking for gold. Furthermore, the mainstream LDS denied that these men were even Mormons, making sure to point out that Ron had already been excommunicated. See, that's how they're completely, they got nothing to do with this. Nothing to do with it. Oh, blah, blah, blah, I can't see him. I can't see him. Can't hear him.

Blah, blah, blah. And to be perfectly clear, blood atonement murders are increasingly rare these days. Although a polygamist leader named Ervil LaBaron was responsible for over 25 blood atonement murders in Mexico back in the 70s. Ervil, huh? Ervil. Damn. There was also a recent one.

They said they believed that they did were, there was a family that got involved in a blood atonement murder that said that they were in a direct extension of Dan Lafferty. That he was talking to them from jail. Ah, jeez. And I do remember watching a true crime TV show about a guy who believed that he was the next Joseph Smith and he also murdered somebody. So it's happening not as regularly, but it's still going down. It's still going down.

I would say it's still going down. This is one of those things where it should be none. Yeah, it should be in 2019, it should be none. But of course, religions have been the reason for violence for many, many years. Yeah, it's from the beginning of time. But one of the other big sins of Mormonism's past is still to this day creating misery for tens of thousands of people. That splotch on the Mormon's record is polygamy.

Now we're not saying that poly relationships are a bad thing as we know plenty of people out there who live in loving, if stressful, polyamorous relationships. It's a lot of rules. You really got to follow by the rules, but at least they don't come from God. They come from San Francisco. But it is the specific brand of polygamy that the fundamentalist church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-day Saints practices, that's the great sin because oftentimes women in these communities are given away with no regard for their wishes when they're barely past puberty.

They're in slavery just like the kids. And no man in the history of the FLDS took advantage of this more than Warren Jeffs. Oh, guys, this fucking guy. Warren Jeffs looks like the human being that would become the Chatterer Centabyte. Warren Jeffs, I think. Because I think I spent the majority of my time researching him, unfortunately. And he is a ghoul, he is a truly evil human being. Yeah, you can tell.

Just look at the pictures. There's nothing in those eyes but evil. To reiterate, the FLDS is a direct result of Joseph Smith's proclamation that he himself was a prophet of God. And if Smith can do it, then any man who can convince others that he's told the truth can do it as well. Unfortunately, if a person has manipulative skills on that magnitude, then that person almost certainly does not have good intentions. Because that person is probably a sociopath.

He kind of looks like Steve Buscemi and John Tertorio's abortion. That's sort of imagining Steve Buscemi just coming and all little sperms looking like Warren Jeffs. Warren Jeffs heads on a sperm. You know what it is too? I do believe there is obviously a modicum of skill of manipulation that you have to do in these time periods, especially back in the day when they were first splintering off. When groups are first created, they really have to create a hub of personality that makes people kind of join around you.

But in Warren Jeffs' specific case, you're now looking at three generations of fundamentalist, polygamous lifestyle. So, you already have hundreds of children that have been engendered by a generation of schooling to receive the further teachings of Warren Jeffs. These people have been raised in such a vacuum, and because it's been built into their entire lives, it's their whole family, it's their entire existence. Warren Jeffs, why would not call the charismatic human being? Unless you just want to do capital C charismatic where he kind of like, it's kind of forced upon him. Because of his role within this society that has been specifically literally bred to believe in this leadership style,

that's what allows him to be so successful in creating an entire system of abuse. Well, that's the thing when it comes to foundations. This is just, obviously they get, once the foundation is Joseph Smith, Warren Jeffs can take that to the next level, when it comes to sports, you've got Dr. J, Julia Serving. He's doing a reverse layup, everyone's like unbelievable. Now, everyone does it, but you've got to do it first. But you build on the next generation, then MJ's taken off from the free throw line, now freaking LeBron can probably do it from the three point line.

I feel like this works, but I also feel like I think it doesn't fully connect. I am not certain. For me, and again, it's like Moppy Mania with his million dollar contract moving into the future. You just kind of set it up in the beginning, you got to set it up in the beginning. No, I get it. I know you get it. Henry only reads Dune. Yeah, actually when we released the first episode of No Dogs in Space here pretty soon, the Music History podcast of me and Caroline are doing,

you can hear a similar argument when it comes to the Stooges. Ooh, the three Stooges. That's a comedy podcast there. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Henry, how was that? It's fine. Well, when it comes to cult leaders, this manipulative sociopathy seems to invariably lead to sexual abuse and sometimes outright murder.

In the case of Warren Jeffs, it was undoubtedly and disgustingly the former. Warren Jeffs sexually abused countless children and adults in the FLDS, both male and female, and those victims sometimes included his own daughters and nephews. And oftentimes, Jeffs was joined by other senior members of the FLDS. Well, much like the U.S. government, this is a way towards a secret keeping technique. The idea is that everybody's in on the sin. You have to double down all the time because if you are then implicated as a part of a series of especially sexual crimes, it destroys everyone.

So everybody has to stay solid. And it's also what creates this fucked up scenario because it's all in the family. It's literally, as it goes further too, it's more deeply deeply, it is literally your family that is all implicated in all of this bullshit. The idea of fucking with the system would destroy your entire universe. So you're sort of forced to also help support it. Can we just give a time frame here? What era are we in now?

We are now in... Because we're in relatively recent history. When Warren Jeffs comes in power, we're talking early 2000s, late 90s, something like that. But we are in this century. Oh, God, yes. Clear that up. This isn't something happening in the 60s or 70s, this is happening basically in real time. In our lifetimes. Easily in our lifetimes.

If not in high school, it's fucking nuts. The end of it came when we were in fucking college. All of this is extremely, extremely recent. Yes it is. Well, Warren Jeffs is a predator, plain and simple, and his teachings gave permission to other predators to do the same. All while Jeffs convinced his followers that the abuse was not only normal, but essential to their entire belief system.

See, the phrase that the women and children of the FLDS were told over and over again to the point where it was embroidered on their pillows was, Keep sweet, no matter what. Keep sweet. That's always the thing they say. Keep sweet. You keep in sweet? Yeah.

It's very scary because this is going to become, you're going to the center. This is truly the final extension of Mormonism to deep cultism. Yes. Inside of Warren Jeffs mind. And there's actually a great horror movie that came out. I believe it was this year, maybe last year, Level 16. Have you seen Level 16? I have not.

It plays on this narrative. Yes. And it is really good. So if you get a chance, check it out. Level 16, worth a watch. Hell yeah. Well, with the phrase keep sweet, the FLDS was able to ensure that women and children stayed compliant and submissive always.

And if those people did not keep sweet, then the punishment was often swift and severe, usually resulting in extreme isolation in which the women were locked away from their children for months at a time. The most tragic part about this is that Jeffs was teaching these people that the outside world was even worse, which kept most of them terrified every single day of their lives. I listened to testimony from one victim of Warren Jeffs. And when she started to be molested by him, the first thing she thought

was like, wow, this is supposed to be where I'm safe. So if outside of here is worse than here, I definitely don't want to leave my community. Right. Yeah. In fact, Jeff's own daughter, who has since left the church, she said that even though Warren started abusing her at the age of eight years old, she felt lucky to be under his protection.

Gross. And if the outside world was worse than this, then it was wicked beyond imagination. So who is Warren Jeffs? And how did he get this sort of power? That's the question here. All right. Well, part of that question could be answered in who Warren's father was.

And we've already mentioned them once in this episode. Warren's father was Rulon Jeffs. Oh, man, Rulon Jeffs is just another. When you see all of them stand together, it's just all of the worst forefathers to ever exist. It's from a fucking horror movie. Now, like any good Mormon cult leader, Rulon had a bounty of wives, even more than Brigham Young.

Rulon married 75 women and had at least 65 children, although that number is probably higher. We just don't know because the FLDS isn't great at record keeping. I wonder why. Purposefully so. That nothing could ever be trained, which again, I was even talking about this with Ed Larson this week about the idea of like guys in the KKK wearing masks where it's like, you know, it's bad because you're hiding it.

Yeah. But you still, but then you flip it acting like our secrecy is what makes us truly pure and that because everybody will fuck with our perfect way of life if they just knew about it. Well, it's also a way to hate society even more because it's saying society is making me do this. Right. I shouldn't have to do this.

So fuck society. And out of those 65 some odd children that Rulon Jeffs had, the skinny, incomparably creepy Warren Jeffs made his way to the top by the simple virtue of surviving. See, Warren had been born seven and a half months early. He was a two and a half month preemie. Damn. And he somehow survived to become his father's favorite.

They looked at him as the miracle baby. Yeah. Because he was born of Rulon's favorite wife because they always have favorites. I believe it was his sixth or seventh wife. Well, as a child, Jeffs was described as a spoiled brat who constantly wet his pants and he was also a born pervert. By the time Jeffs was eight, women and girls knew to tape

newspapers over their windows when little Jeff came to visit. Jesus. And in 1973, when Rulon set up a private FLDS school, he installed a 20-year-old Warren as the principal. Yeah, dude. He started as a teacher when he was 17. He barely graduated high school and then they just made him a teacher because they don't believe the actual schooling is important.

It's this thing called the Alta Academy, which was just this breeding ground of abuse. Similar to what they did with Epstein. He gave a very high-powered possession with no education. Interesting. Now, needless to say, Jeff was not the most capable of headmasters. No. Some kids graduated still unable to write or even speak in complete sentences.

See, the thing is, it's like a reverse school where I make them dumber. So technically, I did a great job. And some of these people, just like Jeffs, went straight from sitting at the desk to standing in front of the class to teach because private school teachers don't need college degrees. Of course, education wasn't really the point. Education itself actually had labor and delivery rooms ready to go when the girls were ready to give birth because if they gave birth there,

the pregnancy wouldn't be on the record at the hospital and uncomfortable questions wouldn't have to be answered. Yeah, like, is the father of this baby your father, which would happen again and again. And also, they kept their numbers off any sort of official census so that the idea is also make sure that no one knew quite how many people were living in these communities. But other women, you know, who were, I guess, deemed not a risk,

what they would do is they would marry, men would marry their first wife and every single wife after that would be a single mother. And all of them would get welfare, as much welfare as they possibly could. Pumping the system as hard as they possibly could. Working that scam. Oh, yeah. That's how they'd bleed the beast. And that's how they'd get all of the benefits they were going for

and it's got many things and it also isolates you. It also gives you a good sense from when you were a little kid that there was literally no escape. Not surprisingly, this school is where Jeff's abuse began. He beat the boys so hard with yardsticks the instruments would break and he would run his fingers over girls' legs under the guise of checking to make sure their dresses were long enough. Apparently they called him the Dress Policy Cop

because none of them fully understood why Warren Jeffs was so obsessed with what the girls were wearing to school and that he wanted to make sure, like, he created the dress code and that he would bring girls in there alone again and again to check to make sure that they were wearing proper clothes. Good Lord. I mean, I wasn't allowed to wear wrestling shirts my senior year. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I remember that. It was the Catholic school. Yeah. Remember that? It was the Attitude Era. Yeah. So Stone Cold had a lot of blood on his shirts and stuff. Yeah, it's the same. Yeah.

No, it's totally different. It's just totally different. They made me tuck in my t-shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's actually normal. I was encouraged to be an individual. Yeah, but this is obviously extremely abusive. Yeah, but that was the small stuff.

And here's a warning because it's about to get horrible. While at the school, Warren Jeffs repeatedly, aimly raped his four nephews when all of them were between the ages of five and seven. And it wasn't just Warren who did it either. One of those boys who wrote a book on the subject called Lost Boys said his other uncles, along with Warren, would take turns raping him in the children's bathroom while the older children were at sermons. And while they were doing it, the men would ramble on

about how this was all a secret initiation into the priesthood and that everyone did it. But if the boy ever told anyone, he would be eternally damned. It's very, very convenient. And also, at this time, Rulon's still alive. So Warren Jeffs is the favorite son of the prophet. Yeah. And it's another, like, second layer because he's not fully the prophet yet.

But Warren Jeffs, like, true predators often do, understood that eventually he would be the prophet. And so he's setting a groundwork of abuse deep inside, like setting a ribbon of it through the entire church so that when he took full power, it's almost like you have groomed the entire generation into accepting that this is a part of what God's will is. And it is hard to understand how powerful Warren Jeffs was because now he's obviously just the warmy, weird, impotent man

jerking off in prison. But you think about he is the descendant of a prophet. Mario Batali could only make sweet cakes. He was still able to basically have a factory of people that he was able to abuse. So that is the level of power we're talking here. Yeah. We're talking the power of God.

Power structures. That's why it's really important for people on the tops of so-called either corporate or social pyramids to understand that they have this agency. That's what they don't. That's what we're dealing with as a society right now, where it's stuff like Warren Jeffs shows is a perfect example of when you breed it all in. Because also it starts with this sentence that he does a lot.

The motto of the academy, which was perfect obedience produces perfect faith. So after 13 years of Warren Jeffs being allowed to do this shit, the kid after kid after kid and after he picked up two wives, Rulon Jeffs became the prophet of the FLDS and Warren became his right-hand man. Now Rulon played fast and loose with a lot of the rules of Mormonism. Rulon was a Vakaman and the kids were all warned about taking a sip from his ever-present tumbler filled with what he called grandfather water. It's the most normal thing I've heard yet.

Yes, it truly is. The only thing that is like, yeah, that's what every grandfather calls the thing in their special cup. Yeah. And Rulon governed like a classic cult leader as well, stripping wives and children from men and giving them to those he deemed worthy while also taking adolescent wives of his own. But in 1998, Rulon had a major stroke. He was gross before, but when he had the stroke and like half his face is fucked up and then, you know, he's the leader of the prophet.

But this motherfucker just would not die. He's just turning more and more of a question mark in a chair, literally screaming, why can't I go? Why can't I die? And they have to all kind of be like, oh, Rulon, it's time for you to have another wife. Well, Warren, who had been waiting for the opportunity to take control for years, he stepped up and said that while his father now had the outward mental capacity of a child, Rulon could still command and Warren would be his father's mouthpiece.

Pretty soon, Warren was making predictions and saying that his dementia-ridden father was really the one making them. Oh, yeah. I think that's what the top aides of Bob Dole are doing. Yes. No, Bob Dole definitely wants us to buy an apple. Yes, absolutely. First, Warren predicted the apocalypse would come in September of 1998. Oh, way too early, Warren.

Way too early. Come on. When we all survived that, it was moved to October. Then December. When that didn't happen either, he amended the date to reflect the 11th birthday of the man who had been in charge before Rulon. Yeah, Leroy Johnson. Yeah. When that didn't come either, Warren went classic coke with the whole thing and said the world would end.

Guess when? 2001, 9-11, 2001. It's a good guess, though. Good guess, but January 1st, 2000. Oh, my God. Yeah, why'd you come? Why'd you come? Do you remember how scared we were?

Oh, yeah. I ate a lot of chili. My parents stocked up on that sweet hormone. I tell you what, mom and dad, if we're going up to heaven with the whole, I mean, they're going to come to wrap you. You're going to get meat with the whole lot of chili diarrhea. Yeah, they will. I loved it. I was driving around with my buddy, Wes, listening to Korn talking about how much this town sucks.

Oh, of course, man. Korn was awesome. If you ate a bunch of chili and you got raptured, do you think the chili shit would just be left behind and you'd disappear? I think the bodies are left behind. The soul gets raptured. No, the body's disappeared. No, no, no. The body's disappeared.

It's body and soul. Because remember that bumper sticker in the event of rapture, this car will be unmanned? Yeah, but that's a bumper sticker. Oh, no. I think that's a toss-up. I don't think so. I heard it was always the soul. I think it's the body and the soul, I think.

All the TV stuff tells me that it's... Yeah, but it's all made up, so I'm just going to say. Yes. I have always heard it was the soul. Well, when the turn of the millennium came and went, Jeff said that it was because his people had been too sinful. They weren't worthy. And as a result, a can was kicked down the road to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Okay.

People just accepted it. Sure. They just fell in line. What else do they have? They're victims, so... They fell in line like they always did. Because by the time Warren Jeffs was in power, whoever was the leader of the FLDS had complete control over these people. It was an entrenched power system.

All you had to do was plug a dude into that top spot and they would do whatever he said, no matter what. Well, both of these kind of had... All of these stories happened on the outskirts of society. This was in a place called Short Creek. They had a move from Short Creek. They had it going even deeper into seclusion. So these guys are already like... They are fucking in a prison of their own making.

Oh, yeah. And because of the Short Creek raid, the US government is not dabbling with fucking with them at all. They view them as these sort of like enclaves of, well, let these weirdos have their religious freedom and they can do whatever they want. And what that is is creating this whole thing of an entire culture of we can do whatever the fuck we want here and no one's coming to save you. Well, that's also Ruby Ridge and it's also Waco. The government had a lot of mud on their face after Waco specifically. This is an unintended consequence of Waco. Yes.

Where they knew bad shit was going down there. Women were coming out and telling them how awful shit was and still they were like, I don't really feel like it. And this was well known. I mean, 2020, Dateline, like they were doing investigative reports on this for a while. So you can all just watch that because it's all modern history. Yeah. And it's still happening. Don't think that this shit went away with Warren Jeff. No, absolutely. It's still happening.

And it isn't just the women who were treated horribly in the FLDS either. All the children are abused in one way or another. And both young boys and men can be excommunicated for no reason worse than the Prophet saw them in a bad dream. And if a young boy is excommunicated, then the family is forced to abandon the child by the side of the road. They just drive up the road a little bit and throw them out like a fucking dog. Like people used to do when I was a kid. They used to throw out dogs at the side of the road right next to our house because they knew we would take care of them. You gotta take care of them. Yeah, we would. That's how I got Velma, who was one of my favorite dogs. Velma was a circus dog. She walked on the fence.

That is cute. I'm just going to say looking at the bright side of this though, if you are excommunicated, you're just like, so I get to go? Like it could be the best thing that ever happened to you, right? The problem is that they have no clue what to do with their lives. Right, right. This would become a group of dudes that would go on to be self-identified as the Lost Boys. Right, right. And a lot of times, I mean, honestly, it seems like a lot of them fell into drugs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of them fell because they lost their whole infrastructure. They had no schooling. Right. They were left. They could barely read. All of a sudden, they have to figure out how to pull together a whole life. They gotta figure out how to live in a modern society. Right.

And these callings would happen again and again. Every single time, people would get closer to threatening the internal power structure of orange apps. A couple of them got a TV show though. Hey! The American Dream! And really, the rank and foul men of the FLDS are no more than drone workers. Many of them leave school in the third grade and begin a life of nothing but hard manual labor. The author of Profits Prey said that he personally saw boys as young as eight working commercial construction projects, driving heavy machinery, setting cement.

These boys were so short that the hammers that hung from their work belts drug the ground. So he looked up. There was a fucking eight-year-old walking on an I-beam. Geez! They truly went all the way back, where children are workforce. So they were having as many kids as humanly possible and throwing them into gigantic construction projects. So a part they would undercut. So a lot of the surrounding community would be super mad at the FLDS groups, especially Warren Jeff's groups,

because they could fucking undercut all these other projects. Because they don't charge as much because they got kids doing free labor. Can you imagine, guys, if an eight-year-old we were supposed to do construction, Marcus would just be digging. I would just be like, how do we make a bounce house? And then Henry, I think that you would just probably be trying to set up a burger stand or something. I'd just disappear into the woods. I think that at some point I'd be like, y'all, I'm more of like, I do funny voices.

That's a good thing I like to do. And I like watching movies. And I like movie trivia. So I can help with that. But otherwise, I believe it. That's how I'd get kicked out of the army, too. That's a pretty intense archeological digs when I was eight years old. So don't malign my digging skills.

They're pretty fucking nuts then. It is literally the opposite of building a building. It is down into the ground. I would make dugouts. That's what I would make. When I learned what dugouts were, you build something into the side of a hill. It's all digging. It's building by digging.

That's what he likes. All right, all right. That makes sense. I get it. Well, if Warren Jeffs had a bad feeling about any kid at any time, they were gone. And a 12-year-old boy was dropped off by the side of the highway by his own father after Warren called the boy a bad seed. That's all he said.

He's a bad seed. And so the father went, dropped him off by the fucking highway. And of course, this all plays great for the higher ups because less men means more women. And that's very important for FLDS members because only a man who has three wives can reach the highest kingdom of heaven. Three wives is dumb, man.

That's not what you're talking about. You need more than that, my friend. Three wives is a starter pack for an FLDS husband. I don't know if this is a proper segue or not, but you said the kid was a bad seed. And I want to say, prophets pray, the documentary. Nick Cave did a great job creating the score for that documentary. Oh, yeah.

I love Nick Cave's scores. He is the best. Well, as far as women go, those in the FLDS believe that they can't even enter heaven until they have a priesthood head, otherwise known as a husband. And since Mormons are taught that they can in fact go to hell from the age of seven on, then you can see how a young girl might be anxious to enter into a marriage as soon as possible because no husband means no heaven.

So, by the early part of this century, the academy where Jeff's taught was sold. The Salt Lake City United Effort Project closed up shop and the entire operation moved to Colorado City, Arizona. And there, Jeff's started tweaking rituals. He maintained that everyone had been getting a blood atonement ritual wrong all along. And what the founders had really meant was that sinners and apostates should actually be killed on a stone altar in a sacred place.

So, he went even farther and tried to bring it even deeper under cover and saying we need to start doing sacrifices for the Lord. Interesting. This reminds me of the church that y'all went to in Edinburgh that just had the guillotine in the back of the church. Yeah. That would just 200 people a day, and then they put the guillotine back in the back of the church,

and then they say, let's pray. Mm-hmm. Well, the sinner would be bound to a rock where the high priest would place a mask on the victim, then the victim's throat would be cut ear to ear just as the punishment oath says. And the priesthood would drink the blood and burn the body as an offering to God.

Yeah, man, you're reasonable. He's going straight primitive with this. He's going back to the early days. Mm. Now, Jeff's never actually did this as far as we know. That's not for lack of trying. He came very close at least once after a girl named Vanessa Robach was rebaptized by a rival FLDS sect

after she had run away from an abusive marriage. That's the thing, Warren Jeffs is just one part of the FLDS. It's a large part. Mm-hmm. It's a very large part, but he's still just one part. They all viewed him as the outlier, though. Mm-hmm. So the other ones were all like,

Warren Jeffs is kind of weird. We just have a lot of wives over here, and yeah, they can't do a lot, but Warren Jeffs, he's a fucking weirdo. He's a super weirdo. Yeah. Now, the rebaptism was bad enough, but when this girl requested to marry her boyfriend,

a man she had chosen, Jeffs wanted nothing more than to tie her to a rock and slit her throat, and he even began making preparations to do it. He started telling people, go out, find her, bring her to me. Go and get, go to Target and get one of those big styrofoam rocks

that they have in the, because it's summertime, and we got to do with it. It's one of those fun things. You get it in the decorations section. We just do it. You get it done. I want to see her blonde.

But thankfully, word got to the FBI before Jeffs could get the girl, and once the FBI got involved, Jeffs took a step back. But now, Jeffs was on the FBI's radar, and he wouldn't leave it until the day he was arrested.

And all this time, Jeffs was still saying that orders were coming from his now 92-year-old stroked-out father, who on his more lucid days would still be wheeled out to the church to yell catchphrases like this. The judgments of God are upon you.

And then straight up like this, where Warren Jeffs, they would go like, Warren Jeffs is now the perfunctory leader of the church. He's leading sermons. And be like, but I'm not the prophet here. It's just like,

we need to speak with my father and see what my father says. And they would wheel him out and straight up like, hit him with their elbow. And he'd go, the judgments of God are upon you. And it's like, all right, great work, Rulon.

Wow. Great work. And when they were done with Rulon, they'd just wheel him back to his room. Bye-bye, Rulon. Bye-bye. Would you not have me facing the wall this time? I would love,

can I face the television please? When will I go? When will I die? Technically, you just went in your pants again, sir. Yeah. But still, Rulon was the leader as far as the people were concerned. And Warren started spreading rumors

that he would live for centuries. Because he's doing so great at 92. He survived. When will I die? Yeah, the man is demanding death. And Warren used his father in other ways as well. Warren married girls off to Rulon well into Rulon's 80s and 90s,

just to take him off the board. And Rulon would still manage to have sex with these young girls. I firmly believe Ann and Nicole Smith love that man. And if that's what we want to talk about now, no, young girls like 13-year-old girls. Ugh, okay. I don't know if she loved him,

but she was fine with it. But the idea of bring him into Rulon Jeff's room, which is the secret of the room, and he's like, bring them closer, bring them closer. And then they go and he's like, this is your new wife, Uncle Rulon.

And then they would just pop her up on your knee and you'd have to sit there and stroke old man Rulon's crotch while Warren Jeff's watched you because they had to make sure that the relationship could be consummated. So they would have these moments where they would do a boner check

on Rulon. I'm not even making this up. That they would go and literally like, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink his penis to see if they could still get it up in order to get her going. But the thing is is that

Rulon liked them a little bit older than Jeff's did. He liked them to be 17, 18. More legal when Warren Jeff's would get them far, far too young to be with Rulon and then Warren Jeff's would sleep with them first to ready them for their husbands. But Rulon finally died

on September 8th, 2002 from septic shock as a result of an obstructed bowel. Uh-oh. Which came as an honest-to-God shock to the FLDS. Another one died from a shit disease, just like Brigham Young. Everyone sincerely thought that Rulon

was going to live for centuries and that upon his death, God would enter the room and bless Rulon with a new young body. The only person who didn't believe this, it seemed, was Warren Jeff's, because Warren Jeff's was ready. It's almost like he was counting upon his death

in order to be totally in charge. There are some intimations, if you listen, if you watch both Damn to Heaven and Prophet's Pray, which are both essential documentaries on this topic, they both believe that Warren Jeff's might have essentially murdered Rulon Jeff's

by feeding him heavy fat foods and giving him more booze to drink as he got older. But it's like, he still lived to the fucking age of 92. Like, he didn't have to feed a lot to a 92-year-old man to fucking kill him. Yeah, I think he just died. Out of all the horrible things that Warren Jeff's did,

because I remember that too, and I'm like, I don't know, dude. Well, I don't know, man. After his father died, he married his father's nurse and kept her in hiding. Yeah, but Warren Jeff's is Scott. I mean, I don't know.

No, kept her in hiding so she wouldn't tell his secrets. So she couldn't tell people any of that shit. Oh, my goodness. In two days after his father died, Warren swooped in and took his father's quote-unquote best wives for himself and handed what he considered to be the undesirables

to lesser men. I wish I could tell you that this is going to get like an easier listen, but it's really not. It's going to get a lot more. We have definitely saved the worst for last in this series. Well, it's the most recent, so.

But for Jeff's, this wasn't just about power. It was also about the money. Now, although the FLDS at large sits at around 30,000 members, only about 10,000 are under the control of Warren Jeff's. And every bit of money those people make gets funneled back into the church,

into the UEP. And it wasn't like they were just taking money from low-wage construction workers. They're not getting $5 donations, $10 donations. The UEP owned the contracting businesses and owned the factories where these people were employed.

And it all got funneled back to the UEP. To tell you how big these businesses were, Rulon Jeffs himself founded Utah Tool and Die, which eventually came to be known as HydroPak. And if the name HydroPak sounds familiar, it's because they were the subcontractor

who built the faulty O-rings, which caused the Challenger Shuttle to explode in 1983. The original O-rings of the Challenger Shuttle were built in the living room of polygamous. This is not even a fuck... That's not a bit.

That is not an exaggeration. The first models were just built in some guy's fucking house. In the middle of Arizona. And sent to Cape Canaveral to attach to a spaceship. I was going to say NASA should have known something was weird when a truck pulls up

driven by a 10-year-old. And then all the O-rings are delivered by 9 and 12-year-olds. Children built these things, perhaps. Yeah, are we... Wait a second. Does your factory... Is it in Neverland?

Good God. Yeah. And so this is... I mean, that is really remarkable, though. It's huge. I mean, it's a national tragedy. These people are directly responsible for it. Directly responsible for it.

But also, this follows back to... You know where the first seed this started with? Joseph Smith's Hotel. Yeah. This is the first thing of him... At first explaining that Mormons need to be good at business and they need to make a lot of cash.

So, what they did, which was the way they worked it, they had so much free labor, they could build these massive construction corporations, where they are just pumping out work as fast as humanly possible. And they're making millions of dollars a month.

Yeah. Now, after his father's death, Warren Jeffs decided that he'd do something that hadn't been done since the days of Joseph Smith. Jeffs decided to write his own holy book, co-dictated by God himself, and the now-dead Rulon Jeffs. I can't believe they got Morgan Freeman.

Yeah, that's amazing. And so, Jeffs, like Nixon, decided to record damn near every thought that came into his head, no matter how awful. He called this his priesthood record, and he used it to justify his crimes against children.

Jeffs said that his plan was to teach the young people that there was no such thing as underage marriage, and that the older men who married young girls were actually protecting them if the girls would, quote, look at it right. The way they called it, they called it raising them up. They'd raise them up from a child,

because if you look, remember the first instinct of this to cling it back to was bring them young when he said you could marry a 12-year-old, but you can't touch her until, like, he should let her turn into an adult. 13-year-old. 13-year-old. Jeffs is doing the same shit,

but he's not waiting for them to turn into adults. And he observed all this from a purely criminal perspective as well. He knew what he was doing was wrong. Yeah! He said that he would have to marry more girls as young as 12, not just to test the parents,

but as a test to all of his people to see if they would snitch on the profit. He had to flaunt it. He had to show all of them I'm doing this. Jeffs even started making his own child pornography, and would keep it all locked away in a safe. But around 2003, the state of Utah was starting to turn their attention to polygamy once more.

If you want to ruin an afternoon, look up Warren Jeff's sex tape. He has this tape. It's not visual, and you can't hear anything, but he played it in court during his trial. And it has a series of instructions of him talking to his brides in one room where he is instructing them

how to properly please their husbands, and they have to practice on him. Well, Utah convicted an FLDS cop named Rodney Holm of bigamy and sexual assault with a minor, because his third wife had been only 16 years old. And that girl testified that it had been not only her husband who had abused her, but her sister wives as well.

So the story we heard over and over again when it comes to sister wives is that if one woman doesn't stay sweet, then the others will beat her, lock her away from her children, and emotionally abuse her in any way they deem necessary. That's how you got your favorite wives, because the favorite wives are the ones

that were the real taskmasters that would hold up the status quo so it wouldn't fuck up their own lives, too. Yeah, they're beating each other to try to get to the one who's at the top. Right, right. Now, people have been coming out of FLDS for years with stories of abuse,

but with the conviction of Rodney Holm, things started turning. In August of 2003, the Utah Attorney General, Mark Shurtliffe, said point blank that he was coming for war on Jeffs. All right. And so, Jeffs went underground and established three further outposts,

pretty much a bend in Colorado City. Okay. One outpost was in South Dakota, the other was in Mankos, Colorado, and the most infamous was built by the small government paradise of West Texas near the town of San Angelo. And this is when it really hits me

how recent all this is, because my friend Megan's parents actually lived in San Angelo when me and Megan were in college, when we were going to college together. And Megan vividly remembers prairie dress clad sister wives from the war on Jeffs compound wandering around Walmart.

Oh, yeah, dudes. Buying shit in bulk, because now he's completely in hiding. People are actively looking for him. And he goes completely off the radar and he says, which is an occult leader's fucking perfect world. I'm being persecuted for my beliefs

because they know I'm the one true savior. So now I am going to go and live these separate lives and he has his favorite wives that he keeps with him in a fucking SUV at all times, like a little fucking female army with his fucking like coterie of what he'd end up calling the God Squad. A bunch of fucking big youths

that would rove around and blacked out SUVs so that would be his like security detail everywhere he went. Sounds like Gaddafi surrounded by women and people who look like Bane from Batman. So I don't want to make, I don't want to be, I'm just adding a little levity here. How good are the deals at Walmart?

Like it seems as if he was willing to give up his location, willing to lose everybody by sending them to Walmart because they're rolling back prices. So he's just like, no, we gotta go to Walmart. You gotta understand Mac and Cheese the 79 cents. The best part about Walmart is that you can get a mattress.

You could get a gallon of milk or you can get a shotgun. From what Megan would tell me, the Mormon women, the FLDS women in Walmart would pointedly not talk to anyone. Oh, I'm sure. That they would make a point a point to not speak with anyone at all, like nobody else even fucking existed.

Yeah, and I'm sure they weren't just be, no one goes alone either. I'm sure they have a kind of a snitch system as well. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And so Jeff started bouncing between the three settlements, building a twisted society of his own makin', often wandering the grounds in a haze experiencing revelation after revelation. In fact, it's worth noting that some argued that Warren Jeffs could very well be schizophrenic, because schizophrenia runs pretty deep on his mother's side of the family. But on the other hand, Jeffs could also just be extremely calculating. I am not going to put anything towards him having mental illness. I mean, sure, you could say whatever you want. I'm definitely not blame

this on schizophrenia. No, I think that he is an extremely cunning and able predator that was born into a perfect scenario for a predator, and he fucking rid it as hard as he could. Absolutely. And we have to be careful not to escape mental illness is very real. Of course. But you know who else had mental illness? Or you know who had mental illness? Daniel Johnson. Yeah. And he just made incredible. Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson. Me. Yeah. And Marcus Burst. We're all right. I agree with both of you guys. This man is very calculating. Obviously, something was loose. Yeah. Yeah. Warren Jeffs would look up designs for mainstream LDS churches online

and pass the designs off as his own, saying they came directly from God. But Jeffs usually added a little flair of his own to the design. In one design, Jeffs commanded the construction of a hardwood bed frame on wheels that would be used during special ceremonies. The frame was covered in a table. And when the table was opened, it revealed a mattress and ropes. There is a thing that he liked to talk about, which I couldn't find the real explanation for anywhere called the Law of Sarah, that he would do this. He would have public sex with his wives in front of his other wives inside the inner sanctum of the temple while attached to this bed. And the bed literally had a staircase that you could roll up to

it because it was like six feet tall. So you could roll up to it like I will have one day in my discerning adults bedroom. Okay. Interesting. In another temple, Jeffs tried installing an incinerator that could reach temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees twice as hot as a crematorium. He requested this specifically. It has to be twice as hot as a crematorium. And when the guy who was tasked to build it refused unless Jeffs would tell him what the fuck it was for, Jeffs fired the guy rather than give away the game. It's pottery. I'm making pottery. I guess I'll never get my own fashion style charred pizza. I love pizza and I just can't get it charred enough and I just wish that pizza could be more burnt.

You know what? It does matter. It does matter. Like a good hard crust. Oh, I don't like it. I like a hard crust. I like a good soft crust. Like a hard crust. Like a hard crust. What really baffles me about Warren Jeffs was that, well, you know, if you think about it, Jim Jones, yeah, he sounded like Droopy Dog, but he could still whip up a room. By contrast, Jeffs sounded like a fucking deflated balloon filled with Droopy Dog's liquid shits. He sounds fucking awful. Maybe they feel petty for him then. So then they say, oh, he can't be a bad man. Look how meek he is. A little, you know what's strange is I think that you're accidentally correct a little bit. I'm not accidentally correct. I'm perfectly correct.

I think he is. It does like appearing to be weak. But it's also just like he's kind of born into this, so he doesn't have to try hard. That's true. Exactly. We'll take a listen to an excerpt from one of his sermons. I hope all of you can see that you're drawing closer together through me, through priesthood, and the confidence is creating a heaven between us. Always directable by the priesthood over you. Remember, purity is to do all that you do through the power of the Spirit of God and be directable by the priesthood over you. And in those revelations the Lord said, be willing to do whatever he directs through your husband. We believe in revelation. Walk in the light, and the light will grow in you.

Walk in the light, and the light will grow within you. And pray for everyone else to succeed, including the children. Pray me there, ladies. Get me there. The Lord will if you'll have faith. I want to apologize to everyone who crashed their cars. Please don't blame the podcast. You can blame Warren Jeffs. But you know, if he's setting the tone and for a very quiet meet people, I guess to them that must seem energetic. Well, this speech in particular was him trying to convince a group of his wives about being comfortable being nude around him. Because he had for years set up a doctrine of you need to be fully clothed. And that's

the only way that you will be heavenly until when you are pure. With this whole side movement, he's trying to then be like, no, but because I'm your husband, it's totally cool for you guys to be fucking super freaky with me, even though you don't even know what the hell that means. Interesting. And honestly, we're just giving you the extremely broad strokes here when it comes to Warren Jeffs. If you want the full story, please go read Sam Brower's Prophet's Pray because this story really is fantastically complicated, but still fascinating.

Absolutely. Especially when you, the cat and mouse game that goes to try and find him, the problem is it's like, it's another three hours of podcast. So this is a story that if you really want to get into those nitty gritty details of like just how long he was on the run, read Prophet's Pray. In fact, it was the testimony of the men who wrote the two books sourced today that finally made the state of Texas raise the legal age of marriage from 14 to 17. Because no representative was going to publicly argue against that. I think we should make it nine.

Oh, man, I can't believe I said it out loud. Oh, my girl. You never know. You might get reelected. It was partly through the investigative work of Sam Brower that Warren Jeffs was finally taken down. On June 8th, 2005, Jeffs was indicted on two felony counts of sexual misconduct. Then after further investigation, the FBI finally placed Warren Jeffs on their top ten most wanted list. Within three months, he was arrested during a routine traffic stop outside of Apex, Nevada. When the cops pulled him over, Jeffs gave the oddly pedophilic name of John Findlay.

He said it like that with his fingers. It sounds like when Tom Hanks played that scary guy with the black suit and all of the pumpkins on SNL. Oh, yeah. Remember him? Was it Alvin Pumpkins? Not like that. Jim?

Yeah. Do one of those guys. Yeah, I think it's Tommy Pumpkins. I don't remember the character. He's funny, though. But during this time period, so he'd be on the road, so what he did was that he knew the jig was up. So for about a couple months, he went on a full-on vacation with his favorite wives,

and he would dress in like a who farted shirt, wore shorts, they fucking listened to a lot of fucking classic rock on a motorcycle. He had a little motorcycle, and he was zipped all around, and his job was to go, and he wanted to show his wives the actual monuments of the LDS, the mainstream Mormon church, so they could see the history of where they came from, but also wanted to expose them to the true wickedness of the outside. So he'd buy lots and lots of pornography and show it to them, and also he took them to Mardi Gras to see just how disgusting Mardi Gras was, even though they just had a good time.

Right, right. Definitely. Unbelievable. So he went to Mardi Gras in 2005, and Warren Jeffs said that God shall take this wicked generation from this earth, and then when Katrina hit a couple months later, Warren Jeffs took credit. So I did that. I did that.

That was me. I did that. Yeah, it's the same. Yeah, he pulled the Lord right out. He accidentally got something mildly correct. Accidentally. I mean, obviously it wasn't God, but a storm did occur. Yeah, a storm did occur.

Oh my God. Well, when Jeffs was pulled over and gave the name John Findley, nobody in the car could really agree who owned the car or where they were going or anything like that. So the cops arrested all of them because obviously something extremely fishy was going on here. Right. And inside the car was $67,000 in cash, $10,000 in prepaid credit cards, three iPods, several laptops, and the keys to 10 brand new luxury SUVs. Damn.

This is just a fraction of what Warren Jeffs had at his disposal. The pact at the end was worth $110 million, and it was all his money to do whatever the fuck it is he wanted to do with it. Yeah, he was in charge of the entire thing. And when the cops searched one of the laptops, they found a video of Jeffs raping a 12-year-old girl. Oh, God. Why do you think that he filmed all of this shit?

Do you think it's like the traditional, like he's trying to keep people in play by seeing other people's faces on these videos because he recorded all of his crimes? Yeah. He recorded it for the same reason that, you know, BTK took the driver's license of Vicky Wegerly. He wanted to rebuild it. Yeah. He just wanted to walk in.

It's a fucking trophy. It's a trophy. He might have had that Epstein-like thing, too, where he's like, this old, like, 18 thing is a fad. You know, this is, it's kind of past. They're going to see how cool this is. Yeah. What a fucking scumbag.

I feel bad. That's a rough day to be an agent. Real rough. It's good to get him off the streets, though. Yeah. Jeffs was extradited to Utah, where he slowly began to deteriorate under the pressure of being locked up. Eventually, in one jailhouse interview, Jeffs said this.

I'm not the prophet. I never was the prophet. I have been deceived by the powers of evil. You know what? You can't take it back. Yeah. At this point, you really can't take it back. Yeah.

You might as well just lean in. I mean. Because also, with the amount of pressure he put on, it's because he was also doing the, he was trying to really go in the model of the ancient Mormon heroes. So what would end up being the YFC Ranch, the YFC Ranch, the yearning for Zion Ranch, and it becoming this massive construction in Denver. That was like his final, like, the last spot that he was trying to hide, where they went, they built a whole town, and that temple's still there.

Yeah. Yeah. It's closer to the town of El Dorado. It's fucking creepy. It's sitting out there, you know? Empty, I assume. And these people would, no. It's still full of Mormons at this point.

It's still got people living there, right? Oh, yeah. Man, fucking Lyle Jeffs is still in charge. Warren Jeffs is still technically in charge. Yeah. We'll get into a little bit more of this, but yeah, it's still kicking. Yeah. Like, after Jeffs was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, he seemed to regain his faith

in himself. He did. He did. He did everything he said. Well, did you hear about this shit, the way he would do, what he did during his sentencing, how he stood up, like, again, everyone was just like, sit down, please sit down. He stood up, he listened to his sentencing, and then he walked, and he looked at people's faces, each one of the jurors.

He looked into their faces, and like, was like, challenging them. He went full fucking nut bar. Yeah. Right. And to this day, Warren Jeffs issues commands to his followers from prison. When Jeffs called from jail and told his followers that from then on, everyone had to put their right sleeve on before their left, they did it. When he told them that they couldn't eat squash, onions, cabbage, milk, potatoes, or

corn, they did it. Not allowed to wear red, because Jesus is going to come back in a red suit, like Eddie Murphy. Really? No kidding. And they absolutely do not believe anything anyone says about Warren Jeffs except for Warren Jeffs. Wow. And these people look at Warren Jeffs as a martyr.

At one meeting house in Colorado City, they have a replica of Warren's jail cell to remind the faithful of the sacrifices their prophet has made. Oh. Oh yeah, dude. And he said, because that's what we're saying, he's being in prison for their sins. Right. The reason why their world didn't end was because they weren't holy enough. So now he is the one, he was truly accepting these on his own.

He also is like, he's being very strange in jail. Apparently, he has seen motionless for hours. He does masturbate so much that he is constantly reprimanded by his jailers. And also, he praised, at one point, he was praying so much, his, the skin on his knees split open from kneeling, and he had lesions and believed through all of his prison uniforms. But his brother's still in charge. All right. And to this day, they believe that Warren will eventually be freed from prison because

he is the thing. Warren Jeffs still has all of his fucking money owing to a district court decision a few years ago. Utah had taken away control of the UEP from Warren Jeffs, but Judge D. Vance Benson gave it back, which put $110 million back in Warren's control. Warren Jeffs will have that money until the day dies. A lot of phone cards. Yeah, because it's a lot of phone cards.

And he wrote a book from a jail called Jesus Christ, Message to All Nations, with the first paragraph saying, in the name of God, you will release Warren Jeffs, and it will be done. And he's like, I don't think it's... No, they didn't do it though, huh? I was 2011. He sent it to Barack Obama, sent it to Clinton. All the members of Congress got one.

Good. It was 958 pages. Well, as soon as Mitch McConnell becomes president, he's out of it. Oh, yeah. All right. Now, after this episode, some might think that the FLDS is representative of all Mormons, and we want to be clear that this is not what we're saying. What we're saying is that the FLDS exists because of the way Mormonism was set up by

Joseph Smith oh so long ago. And we're not saying that Mormonism at large is evil or even necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of people derive great joy and comfort from Mormonism, and they don't hurt a single soul in the process. Although, it must be said, those same people probably aren't gay. Yes, because the emails that we have received of people who believe that they have straight up talks about in terms of escaping from Mormonism because it's so familial, because it's so buried deep into generations that people feel like they can't leave even when,

especially as a woman, it's still not a very woman-friendly fucking religion. And it is because they are still viewed as baby makers. But nevertheless, Mormonism, whether we like it or not, is here to stay. Although conversions are slowing down considerably, they're still adding about 300,000 converts worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of adding the city of Cincinnati to your religion. But amazingly, as of last year, although Mormons still make up 61% of Utah's population, they are now the minority in Salt Lake City. And I say, you know, if you're happy as a Latter-day Saint, then by all means, stay.

But if you're someone who's listened to this entire series with guilt because you have questions about your faith, and particularly the history behind your faith, we want you to know that there's absolutely no reason for that guilt. If you want to leave, then leave. And if your family doesn't accept it or accept you for whatever reason, remember, as we always say, friends are the family you choose. And remember that there are people out there willing and able to help you overcome your fears because at the end of the day, just remember that the reason why you're feeling

that fear and guilt is because a grave robbing magician decided 200 years ago that he didn't feel like working his family's rock farm. And the scam he used to escape took on a life of his own, thus birthing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. God damn! All right, there it is. The Mormonism series has come to an end. That was unbelievable.

God damn. Damn. This is fucking, you do what you gotta do, man. I guess Mormonism is fine, but I don't care anymore, especially after the last, especially after all of the history of it. But I wonder if you what you'd see if you did go to the beginning of Christianity like what it would be like. Yeah, I mean, I think it's extremely similar.

There's just something about knowing every inch of it that really is like, like Scientology. You know, every inch of Scientology, but it still has its hold because it does serve its own functions. It does provide systems of support. Scientology's got a really great rehab program for people that are addicted to drugs. Do they then take everything you own, yes, but you're not on drugs anymore. And so that's a part of what you kind of decide that it's worth it. So I could see why people want to belong to these giant fucking families, but just understand

what you are a party to when you say, yes, I am a Mormon. And don't forget, it's all just a human institution. But again, as I've said, and I'll say it again, Henry, whatever you got to do, don't hurt anyone. This life is very difficult. If you want to, there's a YouTube video that I actually did about five years ago. You can just YouTube it. It's Ben Kissel.

Feel free to go or something like that. I didn't talk about my experience leaving the Christian faith so or the evangelical faith more specifically. So yeah, yeah, that was a great way to wrap it up. It's a great way to wrap it up and wonderfully educated. And you're right, man. It's crazy to have such recent history of a cult that now has become a solidified religion almost to the point where we had a Mormon president.

So close. No, I mean, not really, but the fact that he got 50, 50 shots, it was a pretty close election. But anyway, we are going on the road to sort of switch gears here a little bit. We cannot wait to see everyone. We are going to end up. We're going to Henry's, I don't know, the place where you became a man. My adopted home.

Your adopted home. Florida. We're going to Florida. Guys, those disappoint us here. All right. This is how you're going to start that. You're going to start that. He's only going to be an Andrew Yang email.

Okay. Come on. We need to talk. Let's get our shit fucking together here. Okay, guys. Because Tampa is doing great. We're almost sold out in Tampa. I need people to come to Old Town.

Go get your oxy. This is the time. We have a massive opioid epidemic. And also I'm just saying, oh, town, that's where you'll get it. No one has ever called Orlando, oh, town. The band of the members of the band, oh, town, would like to disagree with it. Right. But we need you there, man.

Yeah. Miami. I know a lot of our audience gets really sunburnt. Yes. No, but just slap on that 75 SPF drive to Miami. We're going to have a good time. Please accompany us in Miami. Yes, because I don't know if there's going to be three men that stick out more in a

city. Yeah. Then besides us in Stockholm. I am eating some Cuban food. Yeah, y'all been yelling at us to come to Florida for nine fucking years. So now that we're coming, come on out. Come on out. Come on out.

Yeah, go to the last podcast on the left.com and click on the shows tab to buy tickets to that. And other shows we got coming up. We got Portland, Maine on the 21st. We got Northampton, Massachusetts on the 22nd. It's a November Buffalo on the 23rd. And then in December, we've got Toronto, Detroit and Columbus on the 5th, 6th and 7th. And Ben and Henry are going to be doing a side stories live on November 8th in Washington,

DC. Yes, indeed. Can not wait to see in DC. We really will. Won't be. Because unless we can schedule. Unless we both die. Yeah.

We will be. No, we can't die before Marcus's wedding. I know. At the very least. Yes. I also come to Los Angeles. I have, we're doing a classic night out with Ed Larson at the PAC Theater October 9th at 9.30 p.m.

It is free, but donations are accepted. Come on out and see us. Yuck it up. Absolutely. Support. Live. Entertainment. All right, everyone.

Thank you all so much for listening to this Mormonism series and for listening to our longest episode ever. Longest episode ever. Yes. Ever. And the longest series ever. Yes. Without a doubt.

But now guys, you know, it's also coming. Uh-oh. Can you feel it? Oh yeah. Leaves. Leaves. We, it is almost Halloween. And our goal now, sir, in these next couple weeks, we're going to get spooky.

I'm very, very excited. I don't know exactly what we're going to talk about yet. Yeah. We've been focused so hard on Mormonism that we forgot that there are going to be other episodes after Mormonism. So for the rest of our lives, we have to keep you in the show for a bunch more years. Yeah. So now we got to get back into pocket and we're going to do this, this move.

Are we going to be taking in listener submissions for stories? Are we doing a listener pasta type thing? Should we plug that in? On side stories. On side stories. We'll be doing it. Great. On side stories we're going to be doing in, to celebrate the month of October, we will

be taking in some listener submissions, send us some creepy spooky tales. You can go to side stories LPOTL at gmail.com, side stories LPOTL at gmail.com, send us your stories and we're excited to read those as Halloween approaches. As is. All right, everyone. Hope you're doing well. Have a great weekend. We love you very much.

Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail Gim. Let's do a Magoo Stylations. Hail me. If y'all will. Or you know, just not too much of hailing any other person though, because that'd be a cult.

Yeah, exactly. Just fucking, just be an individual. The only kind of polygamy I'd ever do is get more dogs. Yeah, that's a good polygamy. Dogimity? Dogimity? Dogimity? It sounds like you're just fucking these dogs.

No! I know! They made me the ultimate human dog hybrid. Your mind is, it's what my father would say, warped. Wow. Wow. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them.

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