Hanging by a Thread

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out, where we were— we're gonna—

hang on a minute.

Close it down.

It's okay. Roll it.

Sir, that's like going in. Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out, where we explore the teachings and the history and doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from both the inside and the out. My name is Jim Bennett, and I am here as always with the frabjous Ian Wilkes. How are you, sir?

I was feeling okay until I heard that word. How do you pronounce it again?

Frabjous. It's not really a word. It's taken from Jabberwocky, a poem by Lewis Carroll with a bunch of nonsense words, but, oh, frabjous day, kalloo-kalay. You've never heard that? No. Okay. Well, according to the dictionary, it means wonderful, elegant, and superb.

Well, I'm grateful for that. So thank you for that wonderful descriptive introduction. And I promise you, now we kind of changed the rules on that word. I'm going to come back with some weird and wacky words I can think of.

All right.

So, yep, you wait.

Well, it's a word that's appropriate given the subject matter, because nonsense words are the only words we can use to adequately describe the political situation we find ourselves in. And this is not a political podcast, but I have discussed that. We have discussed how, at least for me, politics in the United States, particularly the relationship between church members and the most execrable, terrible human being ever to hold political office, let alone the presidency of the United States, Donald J. Trump. Uh, that relationship has caused me no shortage of, uh, trauma, really. Pain, frustration. The idea that we are the people that have the gift of discernment, who have the gift of the Holy Ghost to be able to know the truth of all things, that 70% of American Latter-day Saints voted for Donald Trump knowing just what a terrible human being he is. And now They also know after that election he tried to overthrow the government and stage a coup and tried to hang his own vice president. And now Latter-day Saints are still going to vote for him in, in mass numbers. And it's so frustrating to me and such a trial of my faith. And I was very involved in 2020 with a group called Latter-day Saints for Biden. And I talked about the fact that my father, who was a United States senator, had a very close relationship with Joe Biden, that their relationship was built largely on religious ideas. Joe Biden being a practicing, believing Catholic, he would— he would always call my father Bishop because my father was a Mormon bishop. And he said, I've never been in the Senate with a bishop before. They had a real bond there. They would trade religious books. Dad would read these Catholic books and I'd say, where'd you get that? Oh, Joe Biden gave it to me, but I gave him Hugh Nibley's book. And, you know, there was this good-natured attempt to sort of convert each other. They weren't really going to convert each other, but there was a bond there. And my father had genuine affection for Joe Biden as a human being. Even if he disagreed with him politically, and he did disagree with him politically. Dad was a very conservative Republican, and Biden is, was, is now the standard bearer for the Democratic Party. So, so I had no problem and no reservation voting for Biden. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. If I were to go back in time, I would change that because I naively assumed that, well, Clinton is bad and Trump is bad and they're both awful. And that's true. I thought they were— I think I still think they're both bad in the same way that I think cold sores and late-stage syphilis are bad. They're both bad. One is a whole lot worse. We have normalized so much evil, so much that is awful in the form of Donald Trump, that anytime anybody says, oh, why are these the two candidates we've got, they're both terrible. Yes, they kind of are. One of them is so, so, so, so much worse. Not just politically, not just ideologically, but morally. I, I, I see this as not conservative versus liberal, Republican versus Democrat. I see it as decent versus indecent. That support for Donald Trump is morally abhorrent. For any number of reasons, for any number of issues. And I think the reason why I, I wanted to talk about this. So on Thursday night, last Thursday night, when the debate was held, I had been peddling this sort of narrative. I listened to a podcast called Shrinking Trump, where these two psychologists discuss the fact that Joe Biden is aging, but Donald Trump is both aging and demented. That Joe Biden, yes, he's slower than he used to be. He speaks more softly than he used to. Sometimes he stumbles over words, but cognitively he's all there. Whereas Donald Trump is cognitively, has completely lost it. I mean, Donald Trump gives long confabulated speeches about Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general, telling his army, never run uphill, me boys. I don't know why he suddenly got an Irish accent, but in Donald Trump's retelling, he just makes up stuff. And it's not that he just lies. He makes up, he talks about Hannibal Lecter as a wonderful man, that he's the late, great Hannibal Lecter. And he talks about him as if he's a real person. And it's— I mean, he's there. There are definite signs of dementia. And I had sort of bought into— there are a bunch of psychologists that are saying he's— Donald Trump's lost touch with reality to the point where he will not be able to debate. And I thought Joe Biden challenging Donald Trump to an early debate was Joe Biden saying, okay, I recognize that. I'm going to show everybody that I've got it and you don't, and everybody is going to turn to me and that's going to change the race. And Joe Biden gave a wonderful, vigorous State of the Union address earlier this year where everybody thought, well, he must be on drugs because how can he be comatose and give a talk like that? And there are no drugs that can turn a demented person into somebody who's coherent. That's absolute nonsense. And so I had all these high expectations that Joe Biden was gonna come into this debate and put this race to bed, and he was gonna embarrass Donald Trump, who was gonna say ridiculous things, and everybody would see the contrast between an old guy who still got it and an old guy who's completely lost it. And what happened, I didn't watch because I was in tabernacle choir rehearsal. But as I'm not supposed to do in Tabernacle Choir rehearsal, I sat there and I kept checking my phone. And, and it was clear from every corner that not only did that not happen, the exact opposite happened. Joe Biden came out looking feeble, sounding hoarse and incoherent. Joe Biden gave answers that made no sense. He talked about in one of his first answers, we finally beaten Medicare, which I mean, he just— he was exactly what I was describing to everybody, what I thought Trump was going to be. Trump was vigorous. Trump was confident. Trump was coherent. Trump lied with every single answer and made stuff up, but he did it with confidence. And these debates have nothing to do with substance. They have to do with appearance. And Joe Biden's appearance could not have been worse. And Joe Biden, I think, has lost— has already lost the race. There is now, um, growing sentiment among Democrats that Biden needs to be replaced. I think eventually that is going to happen. It will only happen if Joe Biden himself steps down and steps aside. I don't think he can be forced out. And right now he's insisting that's not going to happen. But the— I just don't— I don't see any other way. There's no possible way that the man who showed up on that debate stage can win an election, let alone govern the United States for the next 4 years. I mean, if he's this bad now, uh, he's not going to be able to survive for another, another 4 years. So that, that, that's the context, the political context in which we find ourselves. Um, how this relates to the subject of our podcast, at least in my mind, and I want to hear your thoughts because I know you're also looking at what's happening in the UK, what's happening internationally, and I, being the ugly American, am only focused on what's happening in my own backyard. But given the fact that the church very often functions, even though it says it's an international church, and indeed in membership it is an international church, politically the church still very much operates as an American church and focuses on American politics and focuses on what's happening in the United States, uh, sometimes at the exclusion of what's happening internationally. Uh, so I, and I think that's a problem. But anyway, uh, a couple of things. One, uh, the President of the United States is 81 years old, will be 85 years old And everybody was able to see that this is not a man who was up to the job. This is not a man who was capable of leading, uh, the government. Uh, well, I compare that to the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who I think this month turns 100 years old. He was 19 years old when Joe Biden was born, and, uh, or 18 years old, like he was about to turn 19, I guess. But regardless, this is a man who by every possible metric is way too old to be leading an organization of 17 million people worldwide, and His two counselors are both in their 90s. Uh, now all three of these men sound more coherent than Joe Biden did on Thursday night, but Joe Biden sounds very coherent when he's reading from teleprompters. And all we hear from these men now is when they stand up in a general conference and they read their— essentially their essays. I mean, these aren't really speeches. They're essays. They are written to be read, not to be spoken. But that's what they do. They read these essays. And, you know, in the last couple of conferences, our 100-year-old president hasn't had the stamina to read more than one essay. Usually he's read 2 or 3, and now he's too old and too tired and can't even do it in person. He'll do it, uh, from pre-recorded from his own home where it's edited and everything else. And so I— it's, it's stunning to me that, that so many church members do not see the difference here, do not see that there's, there's a problem with the gerontocracy, with, with the fact that we— that our seniority system is a, um, is essentially what, what, what's called a tontine. Have you ever heard of a tontine?

Hmm.

Tontine is a, is a system where, uh, essentially the way I learned about it was from The Simpsons, where I learned pretty much everything of value. Uh, in one episode of The Simpsons, there's all this stolen art from the Nazis that Mr. Burns and Grandpa Simpson were part of a, um, of a platoon that got all the stolen art and they buried it and they entered into a tontine, which was that the person who got the art was the last person to survive. After— when the last person survives, he gets the whole treasure. And that's the way that seniority works in the church. The last person to survive gets to be president of the church. And all you have to do to become president— there's no sort of extra righteousness you have to show, there's no test, there's no qualifications other than you have to outlive everybody who is senior to you or is junior to you, and you get to be president of the church. And now plenty of people will say, well, yeah, but that's the way the Lord wants it. That's the— there's no scripture that says that's the way the Lord wants it. And if there were, we would have avoided the big messy succession crisis we had after Joseph Smith died because nobody was quite sure what to do. And even then, Brigham Young took over only as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve. He didn't reform the First Presidency until several years later when they finally arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. So, so I, I would hope that this would cause the church to be able to recognize, you know what, maybe it's not a good idea to have this, this tontine in place as the only way we choose the president of the church. So that's one issue. The second issue, and we talked about this the last time we talked about politics, uh, there is a really sort of rancid mixture of religion and politics in the state of Utah. Which has its roots in Ezra Taft Benson and Ezra Taft Benson's paranoia about communism and Cleon Skousen, who was the police chief in Salt Lake City but was also sort of the political guru for Ezra Taft Benson and for a lot of people since. He is— he's written a bunch of books that Glenn Beck used to peddle a lot of conspiracy-type books that all talk about— push a very, very right-wing conspiratorial idea of what the church should be. And we just had a primary election where the wacky conspiracy theory candidates lost to the more reasonable candidates. Which I thought was encouraging, but the more reasonable candidates are still going to support Donald Trump. So I don't find that encouraging. But these guys were— the thing that keeps coming back is this idea that the Constitution is hanging by a thread and the elders of Israel are going to be the ones to save it. Now, this is rooted in, I think, largely folklore. There's this idea of the White Horse Prophecy. That's an elaborate thing. There's going to be a white horse and a red horse and a black horse, and it's this big sort of elaborate conspiracy prophecy that the church has explicitly issued statements to say is not true. And the idea that the Constitution is going to be hanging by a thread is intertwined with the White Horse Prophecy, but it also exists independent of the White Horse Prophecy. There are lots of people who have quoted Joseph Smith as saying that. I mean, I pulled up some of, some of those quotes, um, that I'm going to pull up here. I got to put my glasses on. But Joseph Smith, um, Wilford Woodruff, uh, recorded in his journal a statement attributed to Joseph Smith: They will come when the Constitution and free government will hang by a brittle thread and will be ready to fall into other hands. But this people, the Latter-day Saints, will step forward to save it. John Taylor said, we have prophecy something like this, that the time would come when the Constitution of the country would be in danger of an overthrow, and if the Constitution be saved at all, it will be by the elders of this church. And Brigham Young: When the Constitution of the United States hangs, as it were, upon a single thread, they will have to call for the Mormon elders to save it from utter destruction, and they will step forth and do it. Okay, so what I'm saying is there you can find credible sources that reject all of the White Horse Prophecy extraneous details But the core idea of the Constitution hanging by a thread is, I think, part of— I mean, it's been repeated by Ezra Taft Benson. It's been repeated by a number of people fairly recently, and it's hard to dismiss altogether. I was helping to manage the campaign of a Democrat in 2010. Who was running for my father's Senate seat after my father lost and Mike Lee became the Republican nominee. I started working for the Democrat who I thought would be a whole lot better. And he was a good friend of Thomas S. Monson, who was the president of the church at the time. And he got us into a meeting with Dieter F. Uchtdorf, which was really wild to me. I got to go in and Dieter F. Uchtdorf was in the First Presidency. And he said, I want to talk to President Uchtdorf about this race. And I said, well, the church isn't going to endorse you. And he says, no, but I still want to talk to President Uchtdorf. So we went in and President Uchtdorf could not have been more gracious, was very kind, welcomed us into his office, and we started talking about the race. And I brought this whole hanging by a thread thing up. I mean, during that race, this comes up every single race. In every single race in Utah for the past, for as long as I've been alive, uh, somebody will say the Constitution is hanging by a thread. So the Constitution has been hanging by a thread for decades now, maybe centuries. And during this race, we, one candidate stood up and he had a little pocket Constitution and he took a hole punch and he hole punched the Constitution, tied a piece of string on it, hung it from his microphone and said, any questions? And I wanted to say, yes, several. Why are you doing this? You're a lunatic. And I brought this up with Dieter Uchtdorf, and he rolled his eyes and he said, all of that is nonsense. He said, he said, I don't know how we deal with that. And I said, well, I know how you deal with that. You could say something in conference. And he says, that's not something we discuss in conference. And that's pretty much the extent of it. But it was very clear that he had no patience for any of this. So in looking at all of this, I, I have not been able in terms of my own faith, I have not been able to sort of find a place for this idea of the Constitution hanging by a thread, meaning I'm not sure if I should reject it altogether. I still cling to maybe there is something there. We don't have a firsthand account of it, but these other prophets have reiterated it. Maybe there is something there. And if it is there, when is it going to happen and how is it going to happen? Well, I think you can make an argument that the Civil War, if ever the Constitution was hanging by a thread, it was when the country was at war with itself. But there really was no time in that in that conflict that the church could have done anything, that the elders of Israel, or at least the elders of Israel, did do anything. And so if that wasn't the place, when is that going to be fulfilled? And I look now at Donald Trump, who has called for the suspension of the Constitution. He insists the last election was not legitimate. He demanded his vice president go in and reject the final vote totals when he was recording them in the Senate on January 6th, 2021. His vice president refused to do that, so he went out and incited an unruly mob to go and attack the Capitol, and they brought with them a gallows that they set outside the Capitol building with a hangman's noose and were chanting, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence. They were trying to kill the vice president. They were trying to overthrow a legitimate election. And, and the fact that they did not succeed, uh, to me is cold comfort. It just means, okay, they botched it the first time, they'll get it right next time. Donald Trump is now talking about suspending the Constitution to allow himself to run for a third term. And indeed to be president essentially for life. He wants to be the Emperor from Star Wars who disbands the Senate and just declares, we are now a Galactic Empire and I am your emperor. Donald Trump has made it very clear that that's what he wants to do. He has no respect for constitutional government— governance. He tried to get rid of the Constitution 4 years ago. He's going to try to get rid of the Constitution again. If ever the Constitution were to hang by a thread, it would be now. And if that's the case and the elders of Israel can come in and save it, uh, that is possible now. Imagine, for instance, if Russell M. Nelson were to stand up in October of an election year when the election is going to be held less than a month after General Conference and he were to say, we do not get involved in partisan politics, but we do get involved in political issues when there are moral issues at stake. There is a moral issue at stake in this election in the United States. If Donald Trump were to get elected, it would be devastating to the Constitution of the United States and to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Donald Trump's people, Michael Flynn, who were being told he was his national security advisor, now we're being told he's, he's a front-runner to be Donald Trump's new vice president, gave a talk where he said the Pledge of Allegiance talks about one nation under God. We need to have one religion under God, and we need to reject people who don't support our religion. And that religion does not include Latter-day Saints. Donald Trump and his advisors and the evangelicals around him hate Latter-day Saints. They love their votes, so they try not to alienate them. But Russell Nelson could stand up and say these people have made threats, and they have. They've made threats against the church. They, they've insisted that we are not Christians. They've insisted that they need to have one Christian religion that would not include us. And they are a grave threat to our religious freedom as well as to our political freedom. And as a prophet, seer, and revelator, I am aware of the damage that will happen to the church and to the nation and to the Constitution, which we have a divine charge to protect, were Donald Trump to be reelected. And therefore, I am urging all Latter-day Saints to go out, no matter what your political preference, and cast your vote for the Democratic ticket in order to save the church. I know that that will not happen. And my question is, why won't that happen? If a prophet, seer, and revelator can't do that at a time of crisis, and this is absolutely a time of crisis, then what good is our prophet, seer, and revelator if we're just going to go through the next conference in October and pretend that none of this is happening or none of this matters and that there is no danger and it's going to be just fine to have a guy who's trying to overthrow the government, who tried to overthrow the government, take control of the government and then not give up that control when his 4 years are up. If that isn't something that a prophet, seer, and revelator ought to be talking about, then what are we going to talk about? We're going to announce more temples. I mean, it just, it just makes the church look small and impotent when we are faced with, I think, an existential crisis that we're not willing to address. So am I. So there, there's my rant. And I'll turn it back over to you. Is that too hyperbolic? Do you see any value in any of that? Am I just a crazy person standing at the top of a cliff looking for reasons to jump?

No, all that to me, without, you know, our backgrounds, your background, my background is very different, but all that sounds reasonable to me. We've not even finished the podcast. There's another half an hour or so to go on this. And rightly, we're asking the question right now, you know, half an hour into it, listening to your thoughts and your opinions and comments and your experience, your perspective, you know, what is the role of the Prophet in all of this, right? Especially in the United States. What is the role of the church in this? In the US, but also what is the role of the church in the other major events that are happening within, but certainly outside of the United States? What is that role of the prophet who is the mouthpiece for Jesus Christ upon the earth, the only true church upon the face of the earth, which is not recognized by, you know, by the Trump Party or his followers? And then to the, you know, to this Constitution hanging by the thread The Civil War would arguably be considered to be a major critical threat to the Constitution as it was being developed and established and formed and established over time. And perhaps the Trump insurrection that happened a few years ago now, was it January the 6th, with his followers and trying to overthrow the government and the Constitution change the rules. Perhaps that's, uh, the closest we've come since the Civil War in the United States. Uh, this doctrine of, uh, and this position of saving the Constitution— I'm not sure what that means. I've heard that and I've taught that. I really don't know what that means. And they allow— the church allows these, um— you mentioned folklore, myth, or doctrine. I'm not sure what it is or where it came from. Uh, you've made some quotes there. Of course, there's some sources there, but, uh, they don't revisit that. They don't bring that up. They don't talk about things like that, as Elder Uchtdorfer said. And so, and of course, what happens in America, um, affects the rest of the world in very significant ways. Um, you know, when I was watching the, uh, debate between Trump and, uh, Biden, I, I was just—

you watched it?

Yes, I watched it. At points in the debate, I could only watch it through my fingers. It was extraordinarily uncomfortable when Biden was speaking at those points. And I remember thinking that there is something distinctly bad when you have a convicted felon, and a convicted felon on 34 accounts, not one account was he not convicted, 34 accounts, right? Here he is, more coherent, yes, but lying, I agree. He couldn't even answer some of the questions on the January 6th insurrection. I think he dodged those questions, many of the questions. But here he is debating his incoherent incumbent, um, whose mental capacity is diminished, fast decline, and, you know, both fighting to be the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. And I remember thinking, is this the best America could do? I, I've got a lot of colleagues and friends in the United States, and I've learned such extraordinary things, um, working with my American partners and colleagues. There's some incredibly smart people, of course, in the United States. And I remember thinking, is this really the best America could do with both of these? And then of course, all of this, you know, against the backdrop, you know, all these events happening and President of its new territory happening in the United States against the backdrop of all these major geopolitical events happening outside of the United States. And without trying to overstate something or sound too sensational, I'm sure you'll agree we're living, Jim Bennett, in an extraordinary period of geo-national and geopolitical change and instability. We've got the UK electorate goes to the polls tomorrow. And we're seeing what is looking like from all the polls that have been coming out in the last few days, a historical win for center-left socialist party Labour. In history, we probably will witness the biggest decline in the loss of seats of the Conservative Party, which had been in power, the incumbent in power for the last 14 years, in its entire history since the Conservative Party was created back in the 19th century. And we are seeing a, you know, the 650 constituencies in the UK, and we're probably likely to see polls seem to suggest between 400 and 450 for Labour, center-left socialist party, a colossal swing on a historical level. The biggest in history. And we are seeing huge dissatisfaction. In fact, all the polls suggest because of the corruption of the Conservative Party and other politicians, and you can Google this, there's been some very significant corruption and scandals going on in the Conservative Party the last many years, certainly the last few months, that we are seeing a massive erosion of confidence in the British public, uh, uh, against the— or within the British political system. Almost everyone that you speak to or have been interviewed, my friends and family, would have lost or very little confidence in the British political system. People are disenfranchised. You've got 4.3 million children living in relative poverty currently in the UK. You've got massive inflation problems, huge issues within NHS. You can't get an appointment with a doctor. People who are on waiting lists to deal with treatment for cancer are dying in the thousands because they can't get an appointment to see a doctor or get the treatment. So major, major problems with the National Health Service in the UK. Just not working. The whole thing is crumbled, not just crumbling. You've got massive immigration problems, you know, with tens of thousands of individuals crossing the English Channel. You've got these issues down in the US-Mexican border, of course, which is a major topic for Americans, understandably. And in the UK, you've got salaries that are not matching inflation. People are poor, they haven't got enough money. Rich getting richer, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and huge loss of confidence. Seismic scale in the UK. And just extraordinary times. And then just across the channel where you've got France, which like the UK, like UK Prime Minister who called a snap election 6 weeks ago when the UK Prime Minister announced the election, election day is tomorrow. You had President Macron also do a snap election. And it looks like that's going against his party as well. You've got this right-wing party called National Rassemblement. I think I mispronounced that. Rassemblement. I completely messed up the last word. But it's a national right-wing party who is Marine Le Pen, and she's leading the polls. So this is quite right-wing. They've got the majority of the polls indicate they're going to have potentially a major win in the National Assembly for France. And the French, the other counterpart is now trying to team together, try to block this, some argue, a right-wing extreme party coming into power. That party, by the way, the National I'll try again to pronounce the last word. Rassemblement. I'm not French, I messed that up. But they were a French party, Jim Bennett, only a few years ago, right on the fringe, right wing, extreme. How do you pronounce it?

Rassemblement.

You're better than me. My goodness, my French is not great. I got the national bit right, but you know, but now they're actually mainstream politics and they're ahead. And President Macron's party is in third place. You've also got major events that have unfolded and continue to unfold and get worse with Ukraine war. And so, and then also I learned yesterday that the British, there are British companies funding the transportation of LNG, liquid natural gas, through a backdoor to Russia. So receiving and sending LNG, liquid natural gas, to Russia using Russian ships, but British insurance companies, other British companies putting deals together, company based in Glasgow actually. And actually seemed to be— the LNG, unlike oil, is not subject to sanctions, so they can sell billions of dollars of liquefied natural gas to and from Biden from Russia. And of course, that money's going into Russia to fund their side of the Ukraine war, a very ugly, awful war, and no sign of that ending in the near future, at least. And then to add to that, again, in a major event, as you know, all this unfolded the last few months, is this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is absolutely brutal, you know, for both sides. There's more losses on the Palestinian side. And then we're seeing a development as other nations like Iran and Hezbollah, other terrorist groups coming into the mix. So we're seeing the potential, close to the potential actually, And on the verge, it appears to be a wider major conflict in the Middle East with, we can argue for or against the Biden foreign policy, whether that's working or not in the Middle East to try to stabilize things. It doesn't appear to be working so well. So, and then of course, going back to the US politics, when I was watching that Biden-Trump, debate, I was wondering, what does China think to all this? Uh, what do the enemies of America, you know, when they see Biden fumble and stumble and, you know, trip all over his word, you know, his words, and, and seem and appear weak physically and mentally, what does America's enemies and the, the free world's enemies think about this? North Korea, China, Iran, Russia. And of course, uh, you don't have look too far to see the teeming and emergence of the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, other countries that are now teaming up to replace the US reserve, the US dollar, create a counter currency equal in power and strength. And you know, again, to make things, you know, more complex there, you've got all these events happening in the world, instability, uncertainty. You've got new unprecedented terrain that you are now traversing in US politics there. I think Trump is going to win. I think Biden has lost. Some of his strongest advocates are now asking him to stand down. I think it's quite awful actually to, you know, for Biden's wife and his close, the people close to him, why they're not, why they're allowing him to continue the race. I think he came out tonight, today, Biden said, look, he's not down and out. He's not going to be pushed out. I think he said earlier today he's not going to be pushed out of the campaign. He's in it for the race. He wants to win. And I just don't believe he's got a cat in hell's chance of of winning. And then tying this back to the church, which is, you know, our primary focus of our podcast, um, what is the church position on this? What does the prophet think of this? What's the advice and counsel from President Nelson on how we should vote? I mean, they talk about voting with your conscience, voting, you know, do your research, vote for the right person, person with integrity, intelligence, good policies, etc. Surely the church has a role in advising or at least commenting on issues of significant political importance. It made a position on COVID, it's had a position on LGBTQ. So it decides to get involved, Jim, when it wants to, and it does. And when it does, by the way, very aggressive, commits significant resources when it wants to. And it can to protect its own position. Where is it? Where's the leadership in this US, in this geopolitical environment that we find ourselves in? You know, we are having a religious and a political conversation here. And you know, a lot of people, they say, you know, keep away from religion, keep away from politics. Don't try to, you know, try not to talk about that. But whether you like it or not, you can't escape politics. On the local level, regional, national, geopolitical, it affects our lives. These people that get into power affect every aspect of our life, financial, economic, jobs, inflation. And it's important, I think, to follow this and to understand and to have a voice and to speak up and to really do our research and to counter there's a lot of disinformation out there. You know, the church— one of the things I don't think we talked about is the argument by the church where it said, look, a lot of anti-Mormon stuff out there against the church. And you can't trust that information that's not written or produced by the church. Stay close to the church-approved materials, church-approved lesson manuals, church-approved books and talks and general conference. You know, therein lies the safety. I think President Monson talked about that. President Hinckley, I think it was rather, that talked about this safety in staying close to the gospel. And the Church has often talked about be careful what sources you trust. And we're seeing a lot of disinformation out there. And it's the same in politics. I think we've got to be very prudent about the sources of information, political information that we read and that we trust. There's a lot of propaganda out there, a lot of misinformation. And people now, I think, uh, I think the internet's been extraordinary, mostly beneficial. The downside to it is that in some ways it's over-democratized the process where everybody has a say and an opinion and everybody wants their own way, and you can't please everybody, you can't satisfy everybody's opinion. You just You just can't. You have—

well, it's not just that they have their own opinion. They have their own facts. They have their own reality.

They've got their own facts.

And the debate kept saying things that were factually incorrect. And throughout his presidency and throughout his life, essentially, he'll get up and he'll say something like— I mean, when he first became president, one of the first things he said was he sent his press secretary out to say, more people came to my inauguration than have ever come to any inauguration in the history of the United States, period. And we showed him the pictures and we showed them that's factually not true. More people came to Obama, to his inauguration, 4 years before yours. And we have the pictures to prove it. And one of his advisors even said, well, these are alternative facts. Alternative facts? Facts are facts. I mean, something either happened or it didn't. And, and so the democratization you're talking about, I don't mean to interrupt you. I just, it's not just everybody has their own opinion. It's that we really have siloed ourselves into separate realities. When I talk to people about Donald Trump and they talk about Joe Biden, uh, they describe a reality that I do not recognize. And when I point out, for instance, that Donald Trump tried to overthrow January 6th, oh no, no, no, that was a false flag. That was just Antifa. And, and Donald Trump offered 10,000 troops to Nancy Pelosi and she turned them down. No, none of that is true. That is not factually correct. And we now— what Donald Trump has done has normalized that it's acceptable to have an entirely separate reality where you don't have to acknowledge that something is true, that you can look at the sky and say it's blue, or you can look at the sky and say it's green, and both of you are right. Actually, the green sky people are right because the blue sky people are all just Biden plants and Antifa plants and, and part of the conspiracy to drink your blood. I mean, it's, it's lunacy. And, and I don't know how we recover from it. And I don't know how the church, um, can sort of absolve itself from a responsibility to help fix it, because that right now is what the church is doing. The church is just punting and saying, go to the temple and don't worry about anything else. So I'm sorry, that's my— oh, it's a little bit of a free rant.

I think that was a really important interruption. You're absolutely right. We are living, they have different realities, these alternative facts. And so what happens is those people assign themselves to those realities as you described. And then when they search information or they read something, when it confirms their bias, when they read it, it just reaffirms and recommits them 'cause they're reading stuff that they want and they need. And that's that particular account. Right? And whether it's true or not, it doesn't matter. In these people's minds, it's become, to your point, it's become their reality. And I think the internet has, I think that's the dark side or the other side of the internet where you've got all this information. How do you make sense of it? What is real? What is not? What is true? What is not? What is fact? What is not? And people now, to your point, argue against truth and fact. And provide these what you call alternative facts. And the church, Jim Bennett, is doing exactly the same thing. He's saying, look, you know, this is our, these are our facts. Any other source is unreliable. This is our source. You can only trust this. But the reality is lots of those facts that the church has been teaching for many years across a whole range of doctrines since the restoration of the church, Many of them, not all of them, have turned out to be false, right? And so again, the church is political in that sense. It's got its own propaganda, just like, you know, these political parties. The other thing I found quite interesting and quite disturbing actually, and confusing, and maybe you could help me on this, understand this, 'cause I don't fully understand, is the ruling of the recent ruling from the Supreme Court, which seemed to suggest that the decision granting Trump as— just look at my notes here— the historic Supreme Court decision granting Trump what they call partial presidential immunity, where he's only— is, immune for decisions and acts while in office as the president versus acts and behavior that he performed when he was not in office or not the president of the church. Again, there's a connection there with the prophet. So prophets, and we've heard this many times, they talk about this, use this term, well, you're speaking as a man. You know, when the prophet made this comment about COVID or this or LGBTQ or whatever, right? Well, not LGBTQ because he was speaking as a prophet there. It goes into great detail, this Nelson, about the revelatory process on the children, LGBTQ parents, et cetera. But we've heard oftentimes where when the prophets or the apostles say something that's probably not popular, they say, well, he was speaking as a man, right? And so tying this back to Trump, To me, the process now, you know, based on that, I think, 6-3 Supreme Court ruling, if I've got my numbers right, I think the solution then is to go through each account and look at the, you know, the potential lawflax, that is, and decisions that he's made and things that he's done. When he was in office as a president, and therefore is he immune of that, which means he set himself up as a king. A king, it's like a king, he's like immune really, is above the law. And then separate that from decisions and behaviors and acts when he wasn't the president and charge him on that. That's my understanding. But what's your, help me understand this as a, I'm not living in America, I'm not as familiar with US politics. Help me understand that, that, you know, that position then in Supreme Court. Does that mean Trump is essentially mostly or partially immune?

I'm not sure. I mean, I say that only because I have read it. So the decision was a 6-3 decision with the 6 Republican-appointed justices coming down in favor of immunity. The 3 Democratic-appointed judges coming out against. And one of those opposing dissenting judges, Sonia Sotomayor, wrote a dissent where she talked about the fact that, okay, so if the president orders SEAL Team 6 to murder a political rival, he's immune. And if he does all these things, he's immune, he's immune. And this was— so I mean, this came to— this should never have gone to the Supreme So this, this was raised by the fact— so Donald Trump is facing, he's facing 3 more prosecutions. He's already faced one, he's been found guilty of 34 counts. Uh, the other 3 have all stalled. The one in Georgia for trying to overturn the election in Georgia has stalled because the prosecutor is kind of an idiot and, and was having an affair with another prosecutor. And so they're trying to figure out whether she should be thrown off. And that's going through the appeals process. She initially wasn't thrown off, but that's been derailed. That I don't— we're not going to see that one go to trial, certainly not before the election. None of these are likely to go to trial before the election. The open and shut case of Donald Trump stealing classified documents and refusing to return them. It's an open and shut case. It should have gone to trial and gone to verdict and sentencing. But the judge was appointed by Donald Trump and is a huge Trump fan and has done everything in her power to throw up ridiculous roadblocks to keep it from happening. Now, the most important case out there is the one in Washington, D.C. That's the January 6th case that's charging Trump with crimes for trying to overthrow the election. And the judge there is sound and sensible, and that was on its way to trial. Until Donald Trump appealed and said, no, no, presidents have full immunity to do anything they want, which is a ridiculous argument. And they took it to, uh, the circuit court. Okay, this is the 7th— I don't remember what number the circuit court is, but they took it to a circuit, took it to federal judges who rejected it very quickly, said this is lunacy. And in the course of it, they said, so is it legal for the president to order SEAL Team 6 to go out and take out a political rival? And Trump's lawyer said, well, he would get impeached. Well, if he doesn't get impeached, I mean, because we know impeachment doesn't do anything. No, impeachment is not a legal process. Congress can impeach a president if they don't like his hair, and they can ignore a president strangling somebody on live television if they want to. There is no legal remedy or recourse if if Congress fails to impeach. And we've seen that now twice with Donald Trump, where he's clearly committed crimes that merit removal from office. But since his party, other than Mitt Romney, weren't able to do anything about it— that's what I actually thought. This is Mitt Romney saving the Constitution by a thread. He was the single vote, uh, for— of the Republicans to impeach Donald Trump in the first impeachment trial. A few more came over in the second. But, uh, um, so impeachment will do anything. And so they said no, if he's not impeached, yeah, he can go and murder anybody he wants if it's an official act. And so everybody went, this is lunacy. And the circuit court threw it out. And Donald Trump took it to the Supreme Court, and everybody's like, the Supreme Court's not going to do anything. And the Supreme Court said, nope, not so fast, we want to take this case. And like, why do you want to take this case? This case has no legal merit whatsoever. You shouldn't take this case. You're loons to take this case. All right, well, if you're taking the case, then great, quickly decide and turn it around. You know, the court can do that. The court does do that. When Donald Trump, uh, when Colorado threw Donald Trump off the ballot because the 14th Amendment of the Constitution says that insurrectionists can't hold office, the court intervened without an appeal. And issued a decision within days, which they could have done here, but they sat on it for months, for months. And the only reason they did that, the only reason that makes any sense, is to delay the trial. So they sat on it, they sat on it, they sat on it, and everybody went, well, okay, uh, but they'll finally issue it. And of course they're not going to say that It's okay for a president to use SEAL Team 6. And surprise, that's according to Sonia Sotomayor, that's exactly what they said. Now, there are other people that read this decision as being more measured than that, and I suspect it probably is. It tries to make the distinction between official acts and unofficial acts, and then it talks about this sort of middle ground where the official acts for core presidential responsibilities are fully immune. And, and, but see, they, they kind of always have been. For instance, people point out for, I mean, that, that, that means you can't, after Barack Obama, um, used drones to take out, uh, military combatants who ended up being American citizens. Uh, you can't prosecute him for murder for that. And that was already sort of the precedent. I don't think it had ever been specifically, uh, defined that way. And some people are saying that's all the court did here was just say that those core acts are, are protected, but they always have been. Um, but the court went beyond that and talked about, well, there are things that are peripheral. To the core acts, and there should be a presumption of immunity for those things. And nobody has any idea what that means. What are these acts? What is this presumption? Does it mean if, if that you can pierce the presumption and decide that you can't? I, it's just, it's madness. And what it's done is, is extended the legal issues that have to be resolved before this goes to trial. And the— and if they had ruled that there wasn't immunity, this could have gone to trial and would have gone to trial before the election. It would have gone to trial sometime in September, and Donald Trump would have spent the last few months of the presidential election on trial for trying to overthrow the government. And it's impossible not to say, well, the Supreme Court muddying the water so that this will never go to trial. There are so many weird legal issues. Donald Trump has already taken this decision and said, well, uh, my, my convictions, my 34 convictions, uh, they were part of this presumption of immunity. He said they weren't core presidential acts, but the— and there's also this thing in there about you're not allowed to question. You're not allowed to use core presidential acts to question the motives of any other acts. So Donald Trump's lawyers are saying, well, some of his core presidential acts were being used as evidence in this trial. So even though this— these weren't presidential acts, you know, it's, it's madness. And, and he was supposed to be sentenced on July 11th., and he's gonna be— and they postponed that now to September because they now have to consider whether or not this weird little presumption of immunity in Nuremberg— it's madness. It's absolute madness. And the court has done nothing to clarify and done everything to muddy the waters. I do think that at its core, there's their It's probably not as problematic as the alarmists are saying it is, but it's certainly problematic in holding Donald Trump accountable. It's made it impossible, uh, for Donald Trump, I think, to be convicted of anything because we're going to have to sort through this decision and litigate and, and establish all kinds of precedents before we can even go to trial. On anything else.

And what happens, I give you that, what happens November elections? Looks like Trump will win. It's hard to see if Biden stays in the race, difficult to see Biden winning this. I just don't see it.

I don't think, I'm putting on now my hat, my political strategist hat. I don't think Biden is going to be able to stay in the race. He's telling everybody— and when I say that, everybody's like, well, he's telling everybody he is. Yes, of course he is. Of course. What else is he going to say? He wants to stay in the race. The pressure is going to be too much. It's going to continue to build. It's not going to abate. He's got an interview that's coming out with George Stephanopoulos on ABC that he thinks is going to turn this all around. That's going to come out on Sunday. It's not going to turn this all around, and the drumbeat is just going to get louder and louder and louder. Peggy Noonan, who's one of my favorite columnists, she was a speechwriter for Reagan, and she, she wrote a column where she says this is August of 1974. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon was telling everybody there's no possible way I will ever resign. And the drumbeat just got so loud and so loud and so loud that finally all of it My grandfather was actually one of the senators who went over to the White House, Republican senators, and said, President Nixon, if you don't resign, you're going to get impeached and you're going to get removed and you need to resign for the good of the country. And he did. I think Joe Biden is an inherently decent man, and it's going to reach a point where people are going to approach him and say, you cannot, uh, You will not win. The polls are collapsing. And I mean, the polls right now have started to collapse. Some have collapsed, some have not. Some people are clinging to, to the fact that, I mean, Jennifer Rubin, who's a columnist for The Washington Post, said polls are unchanged for April. To which my response is, that means he's losing. The reason he did this early debate was to change the state of the race because he was losing. And so if it's unchanged, he's still losing. And unchanged is the best scenario we've seen. And there are a number of polls that have leaked that show that he's lost anywhere from 2 to 9 points, and mostly in swing states. You know, he cannot win, and everybody looking at it. And so yes, he's gonna get— this is just like, this is like anything. This is like that right before the manifesto. That's where you find all the fieriest speeches from the brethren saying, we will never give up plural marriage, we will never give up plural marriage, we will never give up plural marriage. We gave up plural marriage. This is what you do when you're losing. In legal terms, they say when you have the, the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you don't have the facts on your side, argue the law. If you don't have the law on your side, pound the table. Joe Biden is pounding the tape and he's gonna pound it louder and louder and louder until it finally gets to the point where he has to say, I can't do this. And he will step aside. And, uh, I think Kamala Harris will be the nominee. And I don't know where that goes. I think Kamala Harris certainly has a better chance than Joe Biden does. Uh, is it enough to win? I don't know. I, my gut says probably not, but I don't think Joe Biden's gonna be the nominee. Anyway, that's Jim Bennett, strategist who's never been wrong about anything except for just about everything.

Camilla Harris. Oh boy, I, uh, I can't even go there. Um, I think Biden's better than Camilla Harris. Uh, I think, I think you're probably right. I think the, the, the drum is getting louder. There's Democrats coming out vocally, uh, publicly rather, saying that, you know, Biden needs to step down and, and let somebody, take over the reins. From a human perspective, I mean, and the same, the question is also directed to President Nelson, who's, you know, coming up 100. Um, is he 100 now? Is he 100?

Not quite, he's almost there.

He's close. So you've got Biden, 81, be in office for another 4 years, you know, 80, you know, 85, 86, right? Whatever. Um, I just don't see him— if, if, if Biden were to win, I don't know how he can survive mentally, physically, right? From a human perspective, the toll on these men's lives, mental health, wellbeing, physical health, you know, Nelson pushing 100 there. You know, you get called by God as an apostle, a prophet, and you get released by death. You know, President Biden could step down. I hope he will. Nelson can't do that. He can't resign. That the toll on these men's health is extraordinary. I mean, the pressure on the most powerful job in the world, President of the United States of America, and the pressure on President Nelson must be just unbelievable. I just, you know, from a human perspective, it seems very awful. I mean, Biden, his choice. Nelson doesn't have a choice. It just seems very awful.

Nelson doesn't have a choice. Sorry, Nelson does have a choice.

Well, he, he'd be to resign, uh, to go emeritus.

Yeah.

Okay, okay. Is that, is that ever happened before?

Is that, uh, it happened in the Community of Christ.

Okay.

Everybody freaked out when it happened. Wallace Smith, direct descendant of Joseph Smith, was the first president of the church in the Community of Christ to declare himself a president emeritus. And then, and I don't remember who it was that replaced him. But this is the thing, is there is no scriptural mandate for the way we do it. It's all tradition. It's all, this is the way we've done it. So this is the way, this, it's the foolish traditions of our fathers, to use the Book of Mormon phrase. There's no reason why he couldn't, there's no reason why he couldn't resign, why he couldn't step down. We release or be released. We released '70s. Why can't we release apostles? Why can't we release prophets?

It's quite unprecedented. Yeah, you can do it. Probably just saying it can do it, but it's just unheard of, right? Two thoughts as we're coming to the end here, listening to that conversation. One is half an hour ago, halfway through the podcast, You said that come General Conference, the next General Conference, how can the brethren stand up and not talk about these things, right? How can you not talk about what the heck is going on? It seems absurd that you wouldn't address this huge elephant, elephants in the room, right? And that was only halfway through the podcast. But he, you know, my other part was looking at the geopolitics. My gosh. That's a mess, right? How can you not talk about or address these uncertainties and people's fears and concerns? You've got Putin who's threatening nuclear war, right? We're at war, is at war with NATO by proxy. We know that we're supplying arms and munitions and equipment and missiles now, right? We are seeing all these extraordinary things happen within the US and outside of the US. Surely the brethren can references. And then the second point to add to that, where is the church leadership on this? The prophet, what does the—

I want to know what the Lord thinks about what's happening in the world.

What do we need to know as not just as members, I'm not in the church, but members of the church. But the prophet is not just the prophet of the church, correct? Not just the prophet of the members? Is he not the prophet for the world? I, I understand he is, right? So what's the message from the living prophet, the one who represents Jesus Christ on the earth at this time? What, what's the message? What's the direction? What's the instruction? What's the counsel? What's the advice? What are we supposed to do? Do we pray? Uh, is there any physical preparations that we need to make? Is there something that we're not doing that we should be doing? Where is the leadership from the prophet and the leaders of the church amidst all these major events locally, regionally, nationally, internationally? Where is it? And I'm hoping I— if we have conference, we have conference in, in October. And if this is not anything like that, we're talking about is not a reference directly or indirectly, it will just absolutely astound me that we've got this alleged true church upon the face of the earth, the only church with authority, the only church that represents Jesus Christ, who's got far more power than we have. And boy, do we need him, Jim. We need, you know, we are desperate for heavenly intervention, some power, some influence, someone to come to us, come down from heaven, from somewhere, to knock our heads together and say, look, wake up, get some sense, start thinking intelligently, work collaboratively, start fixing these problems, because we are on the verge of major events the next 10, 15 years. And I hope If I'm a, I don't wanna come across like a doomsday sayer speaker, so to speak, or anything conspiracy, 'cause I always worry about hearing extreme things or ultimating things from people. But it's hard on the current trajectory of the geopolitics. It wouldn't surprise me if we are going to witness major an elevation even beyond what we're doing right now in international conflict on an even grander scale than we are in the next 10 to 15 years if we don't change course. So who is it that helps us? Where does that help come from? God. This is his earth. Jesus Christ created this planet. We have a living prophet on the earth today. Where is that revelation, that inspiration, that direction from the Prophet to bring us back from, or is this how it's meant to be? Is this the position of God that we don't say anything or do anything and we don't speak about these things? Maybe that's the mind of God and the will of God that we don't talk about these things and we let this whole, you know, these events push us off the cliff into deeper, darker days ahead. And yes, I hope I'm wrong and I hope I'm not making any sense here whatsoever, that we push ourselves into a Third World War or other regional conflicts beyond what we're seeing right now. Um, where is the help that we desperately need right now?

Well, you know, one of the things that Russell M. Nelson said in a recent conference, I think it was a year or two ago, he said, in the coming days we are going to see the greatest manifestations of the power of the Savior that the world has ever seen. And since that time, critics of the church have said, well, haven't seen it. Well, haven't seen it. Well, haven't seen it. And, uh, I— if we ever needed to see it, we need to see it now. And if Jesus is going to come back, I hope he does so before November. So I think that's my final word on this.

I'm really grateful for this conversation. You know, what thing that's helped me in this conversation, I feel so frustrated and so a little bit fearful if I'm being honest. I try not to be fearful, you know, especially with my recent health scare. Try to live each moment now and not take things for granted, but I'm still worried. I'm worried about my my, the future of my kids. You know, you have kids, I've got kids. Um, what future are we leaving to our children, right? And how do we fix things? How do we make things better? And, um, I just, I guess I'm looking for hope, looking for some light, looking for— what do they say— further light and knowledge.

Yep.

You know, when Adam and Eve was on the earth and, uh, there came all these devil and his angels came and tricked him and Eve and, you know, what do you want, what do you need, etc.? What are you waiting for? He said, we're waiting for further divine knowledge. Well, I'm not into church, but I do look to the church to an extent for further divine knowledge. I still have, and this hopefully comes through in our conversations, I still, Jim Bennett, still surprisingly perhaps have a hope, some level of confidence that the church leadership will communicate in some representative form or other, partial or otherwise, of God. Not exclusively of God, I don't believe that, but in some way represent God that I know exists, and Christ that exists, God's will, you know, mind and will on events that happen in the world. I still look to the church as a, not the source anymore, but a source of inspiration, guidance, and direction. I hope I hope we can get that, 'cause it's hard not to be worried. You try to be positive and you look at the world and you think it's all going to hell in a handbasket, right? But where does that light come from? I don't have an answer to that, but we'll see. We'll see what happens.

Me neither. And I would love to see the church step up. I still have confidence that these are good men who have authority from the Lord to do his work. Uh, I think it's just a question of are we equal to the task. And I think we need to have faith not just in the church, but we need to have faith— each of us needs to have a direct relationship with our Heavenly Father, with God himself. And because I don't see any other way to get through the dark times that are ahead.

So anyway, amen to that.

Careful note, uh, thank you all for listening to another episode of Inside Out, and we'll look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, thank you very much, Ian.

Thank you, Jim Bennett.