Hanging by a Thread

WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out, where we were going to...
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Hang on a minute.
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Close it.
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It's okay.
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Throw it.
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Sir.
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That's what I got in.
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Okay.
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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.
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My name is Jim Bennett, and I am here as always with the Frabjous Ian Wilkes.
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How are you, sir?
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I was feeling okay until I heard that word.
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How do you pronounce it again?
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Frabjous! It's not really a word.
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It's taken from Jabberwocky, a poem by Lewis Carroll with a bunch of nonsense words.
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But, oh, frabjous day, kaloo kalay.
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You've never heard that?
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No.
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Okay.
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Well, according to the dictionary, it means wonderful, elegant, and superb.
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Well, I'm grateful for that.
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So thank you for that wonderful, descriptive introduction.
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And I promise you, Nick, now we can't change the rules on that word.
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I'm going to come back with some weird and wacky words I can think of.
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All right.
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So, yeah, you wait.
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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 and 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.
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Trump, that relationship has caused me no shortage of trauma, really, pain, frustration.
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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.
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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.
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He would always call my father bishop because my father was a Mormon bishop.
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And he said, I've never been in the Senate with a bishop before.
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They had a real bond there.
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They would trade religious books.
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Dad would read these Catholic books and I'd say, where'd you get that?
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Oh, Joe Biden gave it to me, but I gave him Hugh Nibley's book.
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And, you know, there was this good natured attempt to sort of convert each other.
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They weren't really going to convert each other, but there was a bond there.
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And my father had genuine affection for Joe Biden as a human being, even if he disagreed with him politically.
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And he did disagree with him politically.
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Dad was a very conservative Republican.
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And Biden is now the standard bearer for the Democratic Party.
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So I had no problem and no reservation voting for Biden.
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I couldn't bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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If I were to go back in time, I would change that.
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Because I naively assumed that, well, Clinton is bad and Trump is bad and they're both awful.
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And that's true.
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I still think they're both bad in the same way that I think cold sores and late stage syphilis are bad.
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They're both bad.
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One is a whole lot worse.
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We have normalized so much evil, so much that is awful.
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in the form of Donald Trump that anytime anybody says, oh, why are these the two candidates we've got?
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They're both terrible.
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Yes, they kind of are.
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One of them is so, so, so, so much worse, not just politically, not just ideologically, but morally.
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I see this as not conservative versus liberal, Republican versus Democrat.
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I see it as decent versus indecent.
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that support for Donald Trump is morally abhorrent for any number of reasons, for any number of issues.
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And I think the reason why 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.
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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 dementing.
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That Joe Biden, yes, he's slower than he used to be.
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He speaks more softly than he used to.
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Sometimes he stumbles over words.
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But cognitively, he's all there.
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Whereas Donald Trump is cognitively, he's completely lost it.
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I mean, Donald Trump gives...
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long, confabulated speeches about Robert E.
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Lee, a Confederate general, telling his army, never run uphill, me boys.
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I don't know why he suddenly got an Irish accent, but in Donald Trump's retelling, he just makes up stuff.
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And it's not that he just lies.
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He talks about Hannibal Lecter as a wonderful man, and he's the late, great Hannibal Lecter.
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And he talks about him as if he's a real person.
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And it's...
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I mean, he's...
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There are definite signs of dementia.
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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.
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And I thought Joe Biden challenging Donald Trump to an early debate was Joe Biden saying, OK, I recognize that I'm going to show everybody that.
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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.
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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?
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And there are no drugs that can turn a demented person into somebody who's coherent.
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That's absolute nonsense.
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And so I had all these high expectations that Joe Biden was going to come into this debate and put this race to bed.
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And he was going to embarrass Donald Trump, who was going to 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.
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And what happened, I didn't watch because I was in Tabernacle Choir rehearsal, but I as I'm not supposed to do in Tabernacle Choir rehearsal, I sat there and I kept checking my phone and it was clear from every corner that not only did that not happen, the exact opposite happened.
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Joe Biden came out looking feeble, sounding hoarse and incoherent.
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Joe Biden gave answers that made no sense.
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He talked about in one of his first answers, we've finally beaten Medicare, which, I mean, he was exactly what I was describing to everybody what I thought Trump was going to be.
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Trump was vigorous.
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Trump was confident.
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Trump was coherent.
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Trump lied with every single answer and made stuff up.
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But he did it with confidence.
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And these debates have nothing to do with substance.
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They have to do with appearance.
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And Joe Biden's appearance could not have been worse.
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And Joe Biden, I think, has lost, has already lost the race.
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There is now growing sentiment among Democrats that Biden needs to be replaced.
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I think eventually that is going to happen.
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It will only happen If Joe Biden himself steps down and steps aside, I don't think he can be forced out.
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And right now he's insisting that's not going to happen.
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But I just don't see any other way.
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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 four years.
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I mean, if he's this bad now...
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he's not going to be able to survive for another four years.
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So that's the context, the political context in which we find ourselves.
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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.
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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, sometimes at the exclusion of what's happening internationally.
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And I think that's a problem.
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But anyway...
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a couple of things.
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One, 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.
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This is not a man who was capable of leading the government.
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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.
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He was 19 years old when Joe Biden was born.
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Or 18 years old, like he was about to turn 19, I guess.
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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.
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And his two counselors are both in their 90s.
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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.
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And all we hear from these men now is, is when they stand up at a general conference and they read essentially their essays.
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I mean, these aren't really speeches, they're essays.
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They are written to be read, not to be spoken.
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But that's what they do.
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They read these essays and in the last couple of conferences, our 100-year-old president hasn't had the stamina to read more than one essay.
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Usually he's read two or three And now he's too old and too tired and can't even do it in person.
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He'll do it pre-recorded from his own home where it's edited and everything else.
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And so it's stunning to me that so many church members do not see the difference here, do not see that there's a problem with the gerontocracy, with the fact that our seniority system is essentially what's called a tontine.
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Have you ever heard of a tontine?
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Tontine is a system where, essentially, the way I learned about it was from The Simpsons, where I learned pretty much everything of value.
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In one episode of The Simpsons, there's all this stolen art from the Nazis that Mr.
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Burns and Grandpa Simpson were part of a...
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of a platoon that got all the stolen art and they buried it.
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And they entered into a tontine, which was that the person who got the art was the last person to survive.
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When the last person survives, he gets the whole treasure.
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And that's the way that seniority works in the church.
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The last person to survive gets to be president of the church.
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And all you have to do to become president, there's no sort of extra righteousness you have to show.
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There's no test.
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There's no qualifications other than you have to outlive everybody who is senior to you or is junior to you.
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And you get to be president of the church.
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And now plenty of people will say, well, yeah, but that's the way the Lord wants it.
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There's no scripture that says that's the way the Lord wants it.
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And if there were, we would have avoided the big, messy...
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succession crisis we had after Joseph Smith died because nobody was quite sure what to do.
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And even then, Brigham Young took over only as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve.
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He didn't reform the first presidency until several years later when they finally arrived in the Salt Lake Valley.
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So 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.
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So that's one issue.
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The second issue, and we talked about this the last time we talked about politics, 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 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.
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He's written a bunch of books that Glenn Beck used to peddle, a lot of conspiracy-type books that all talk about, that push a very, very right-wing conspiratorial idea of what the church should be and and we just had a primary election where the the wacky conspiracy 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.
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Now, this is rooted in, I think, largely folklore.
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There's this idea of the white horse prophecy that's an elaborate thing.
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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.
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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.
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There are lots of people who have quoted Joseph Smith as saying that.
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I mean, I pulled up some of those quotes that I'm going to pull up here.
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I've got to put my glasses on.
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But Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, recorded in his journal a statement attributed to Joseph Smith.
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They will come when the Constitution and free government will hang by a brittle thread and will be ready to fall into other hands.
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But this people, the Latter-day Saints, will step forward to save it.
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John Taylor said, we have prophecies something like this, that the time would come when the Constitution of the country would be in danger of an overthrow.
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And if the Constitution be saved at all, it will be by the elders of this church.
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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.
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Okay, so what I'm saying is 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, 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.
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I was helping to manage the campaign of a Democrat in 2010.
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who was running for my father's Senate seat.
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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.
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And he was a good friend of Thomas S.
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Monson, who was the president of the church at the time.
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And he got us into a meeting with Dieter F.
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Uchtdorf, which was really wild to me.
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I got to go in, and Dieter F.
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Uchtdorf was in the first presidency.
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And he said, I want to talk to President Uchtdorf about this race.
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And I said, well, the church isn't going to endorse you.
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And he says, no, but I still want to talk to President Uchtdorf.
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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.
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And I brought this whole hanging by a thread thing up.
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I mean, during that race, this comes up every single race.
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In every single race in Utah for the past...
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For as long as I've been alive, somebody will say the Constitution is hanging by a thread.
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So the Constitution has been hanging by a thread for decades now, maybe centuries.
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And during this race, 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?
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And I wanted to say, yes, several.
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Why are you doing this?
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You're a lunatic.
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And I brought this up with Dieter Fuchdorf and he rolled his eyes.
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And he said, all of that is nonsense.
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He said, I don't know how we deal with that.
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And I said, well, I know how you deal with that.
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You could say something in conference.
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And he says, that's not something we discuss in conference.
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And that's pretty much the extent of it.
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But it was very clear that he had no patience for any of this.
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So in looking at all of this, I have not been able...
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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.
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I still cling to maybe there is something there.
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We don't have a firsthand account of it, but these other prophets have reiterated it.
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Maybe there is something there.
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And if it is there, when is it going to happen and how is it going to happen?
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Well, I think you could 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.
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But there really was no time in that conflict that the church could have done anything, that the elders of Israel, or at least that the elders of Israel did do anything.
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And so if that wasn't the place, when is that going to be fulfilled?
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And I look now at Donald Trump, who has called for the suspension of the Constitution.
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He insists the last election was not legitimate.
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He demanded his vice president go in and reject the final vote totals when he was recording them in the Senate on January 6, 2021.
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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.
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They were trying to kill the vice president.
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They were trying to overthrow a legitimate election.
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And the fact that they did not succeed to me is cold comfort.
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It just means, okay, they botched it the first time.
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They'll get it right next time.
00:23:24.705 --> 00:23:35.199
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.
00:23:35.980 --> 00:23:45.191
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.
00:23:45.892 --> 00:23:48.634
Donald Trump has made it very clear that that's what he wants to do.
00:23:48.674 --> 00:23:50.837
He has no respect for constitutional government.
00:23:51.137 --> 00:23:51.618
governance.
00:23:51.979 --> 00:23:54.541
He tried to get rid of the Constitution four years ago.
00:23:55.001 --> 00:23:57.424
He's going to try to get rid of the Constitution again.
00:23:57.444 --> 00:24:03.411
If ever the Constitution were to hang by a thread, it would be now.
00:24:04.633 --> 00:24:14.123
And if that's the case, and the elders of Israel can come in and save it, that is possible now.
00:24:14.824 --> 00:24:17.886
Imagine, for instance, if Russell M.
00:24:17.946 --> 00:24:51.661
Nelson were to stand up in October of 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.
00:24:52.342 --> 00:25:07.019
Donald Trump's people, Michael Flynn, who was his national security advisor, and now we're being told he's a frontrunner to be Donald Trump's new vice president, gave a talk where he said the Pledge of Allegiance talks about one nation under God.
00:25:07.079 --> 00:25:10.103
We need to have one religion under God.
00:25:11.424 --> 00:25:13.948
And we need to reject people who don't support our religion.
00:25:15.309 --> 00:25:19.086
And That religion does not include Latter-day Saints.
00:25:19.885 --> 00:25:25.051
Donald Trump and his advisors and the evangelicals around him hate Latter-day Saints.
00:25:25.112 --> 00:25:28.115
They love their votes, so they try not to alienate them.
00:25:28.915 --> 00:25:35.442
But Russell Nelson could stand up and say, these people have made threats, and they have.
00:25:36.344 --> 00:25:38.026
They've made threats against the church.
00:25:38.226 --> 00:25:40.469
They've insisted that we are not Christians.
00:25:40.528 --> 00:25:41.250
They've insisted...
00:25:41.826 --> 00:25:51.522
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.
00:25:51.563 --> 00:26:07.410
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 re-elected.
00:26:07.842 --> 00:26:19.914
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.
00:26:20.895 --> 00:26:23.699
I know that that will not happen.
00:26:24.559 --> 00:26:27.644
And my question is, why won't that happen?
00:26:28.304 --> 00:26:40.221
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?
00:26:41.162 --> 00:27:02.066
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 four years are up.
00:27:02.849 --> 00:27:11.903
If that isn't something that a prophet, seer, and revelator ought to be talking about, then what are we going to talk about?
00:27:11.943 --> 00:27:13.306
We're going to announce more temples?
00:27:14.508 --> 00:27:27.268
I mean, 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.
00:27:27.367 --> 00:27:31.113
So there's my rant, and I'll turn it back over to you.
00:27:31.650 --> 00:27:33.132
Is that too hyperbolic?
00:27:34.454 --> 00:27:36.337
Do you see any value in any of that?
00:27:36.959 --> 00:27:42.949
Am I just a crazy person standing at the top of a cliff looking for reasons to jump?
00:27:44.932 --> 00:27:53.526
No, all that to me, without, you know, our backgrounds, your background, my background is very different.
00:27:54.047 --> 00:27:56.750
All that sounds reasonable to me.
00:27:58.657 --> 00:28:00.520
We've not even finished the podcast.
00:28:00.760 --> 00:28:02.482
It's another half an hour or so to go on this.
00:28:03.263 --> 00:28:11.316
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.
00:28:11.715 --> 00:28:14.440
You know, what is the role of the prophet in all of this, right?
00:28:15.020 --> 00:28:16.563
Especially in the United States.
00:28:17.344 --> 00:28:18.846
What is the role of the church in this?
00:28:19.446 --> 00:28:28.106
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?
00:28:28.207 --> 00:28:42.900
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 the Trump party or as follows?
00:28:43.340 --> 00:29:02.076
And then 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 about establishment formed and established over time.
00:29:03.238 --> 00:29:14.855
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 and change the rules.
00:29:14.915 --> 00:29:20.243
Perhaps that's the closest we've come since the civil war in the United States.
00:29:21.865 --> 00:29:25.983
This doctrine of, and this position of saving the constitution.
00:29:26.003 --> 00:29:26.884
I'm not sure what that means.
00:29:26.945 --> 00:29:28.146
I've heard that and I've taught that.
00:29:28.688 --> 00:29:29.789
I really don't know what that means.
00:29:30.892 --> 00:29:37.320
And they allow, the church allows these, you mentioned folklore, myth or doctrine.
00:29:37.340 --> 00:29:39.064
I'm not sure where it is or where it came from.
00:29:39.545 --> 00:29:41.347
You've made some quotes there, of course.
00:29:42.048 --> 00:29:44.451
There's some sources there, but they don't revisit that.
00:29:44.531 --> 00:29:45.413
They don't bring that up.
00:29:45.433 --> 00:29:46.615
They don't talk about things like that.
00:29:46.675 --> 00:29:53.165
And so, and of course what happens in America affects the rest of the world.
00:29:53.953 --> 00:29:55.276
in very significant ways.
00:29:57.838 --> 00:30:02.644
When I was watching the debate between Trump and Biden, I was just...
00:30:04.468 --> 00:30:05.128
You watched it?
00:30:05.709 --> 00:30:06.450
Yes, I watched it.
00:30:06.851 --> 00:30:10.435
At points in the debate, I could only watch it through my fingers.
00:30:11.737 --> 00:30:16.423
It was extraordinarily uncomfortable when Biden was speaking at those points.
00:30:17.325 --> 00:30:23.791
And I remember thinking that there is something distinctly bad when you have a convicted felon A convicted fellow on 34 accounts.
00:30:24.313 --> 00:30:26.135
Not one account was he not convicted.
00:30:26.155 --> 00:30:27.498
34 accounts, right?
00:30:28.199 --> 00:30:32.605
Here he is, more coherent, yes, but lying, I agree.
00:30:32.625 --> 00:30:36.329
He couldn't even answer some of the questions on the January 6th insurrection.
00:30:36.410 --> 00:30:38.093
I think he dodged those questions.
00:30:38.113 --> 00:30:38.732
Many of the questions.
00:30:39.413 --> 00:30:51.131
But here he is debating his incoherent incumbent, whose mental capacity has diminished, fast decline, and both fighting to be the leader of the most powerful nation in the world.
00:30:51.250 --> 00:30:54.496
And I remember thinking, is this the best American could do?
00:30:54.596 --> 00:31:04.590
I've got a lot of colleagues and friends in the United States, and I've learned some extraordinary things working with my American partners and colleagues.
00:31:05.192 --> 00:31:08.256
There's some incredibly smart people, of course, in the United States.
00:31:08.355 --> 00:31:14.846
And I remember thinking, is this really the best America could do with both of these?
00:31:15.521 --> 00:31:39.405
And then, of course, all of this against the backdrop, all these events happening, president of its new territory 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.
00:31:40.130 --> 00:31:48.200
I'm sure you'll agree, we're living, Jim, in an extraordinary period of geonational and geopolitical change and instability.
00:31:49.580 --> 00:32:26.355
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 centre-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.
00:32:26.395 --> 00:32:42.240
And we're seeing the 650 constituencies in the UK, and we're probably likely to see Polls seem to suggest between 400 and 450 for Labour, Centre, Left, Socialist Party.
00:32:43.021 --> 00:32:48.191
A colossal swing on a historical level.
00:32:48.612 --> 00:32:49.673
The biggest in history.
00:32:50.835 --> 00:32:55.743
And we're seeing huge dissatisfaction.
00:32:55.804 --> 00:33:09.946
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.
00:33:10.867 --> 00:33:22.468
We're seeing a massive erosion of confidence in the British public against the, or within the British political system.
00:33:23.789 --> 00:33:32.682
Almost everyone that you speak to or have been interviewed, my friends and family were there, have lost or very little confidence in the British political system.
00:33:32.742 --> 00:33:34.044
People are disenfranchised.
00:33:34.484 --> 00:33:40.752
You've got 4.3 million children living in relative poverty currently in the UK.
00:33:41.954 --> 00:33:46.060
You've got massive inflation problems, huge issues with the NHS.
00:33:46.801 --> 00:33:48.182
You can't get an appointment with a doctor.
00:33:48.203 --> 00:33:58.657
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.
00:33:59.170 --> 00:34:03.477
There are major, major problems with the National Health Service in the UK.
00:34:03.497 --> 00:34:04.278
It's just not working.
00:34:04.479 --> 00:34:07.083
The whole thing is crumbled, not just crumbling.
00:34:07.563 --> 00:34:14.514
You've got massive immigration problems with tens of thousands of individuals crossing the English Channel.
00:34:14.815 --> 00:34:21.326
You've got these issues down in the US-Mexican border, of course, which is a major topic for Americans, understandably.
00:34:21.793 --> 00:34:25.077
And in the UK, you've got salaries that are not matching inflation.
00:34:25.217 --> 00:34:25.818
People are poor.
00:34:25.858 --> 00:34:26.900
They haven't got any money.
00:34:27.260 --> 00:34:28.101
Rich getting richer.
00:34:28.161 --> 00:34:37.454
The gap between rich and poor is widening and huge loss of confidence on a seismic scale in the UK.
00:34:38.375 --> 00:34:40.777
And just extraordinary times.
00:34:41.358 --> 00:34:55.009
And then just across the channel where you've got France, which, like the UK, like France, UK Prime Minister who called a snap election six weeks ago when the UK Prime Minister announced the election.
00:34:55.389 --> 00:34:56.329
Election day is tomorrow.
00:34:56.951 --> 00:35:00.454
You had President Macron also do a snap election.
00:35:01.255 --> 00:35:04.057
And it looks like that's going against his party as well.
00:35:04.077 --> 00:35:12.405
You've got this right-wing party called National Rassemblement.
00:35:12.726 --> 00:35:14.027
I think I mispronounced that.
00:35:14.208 --> 00:35:16.530
Rassemblement.
00:35:16.802 --> 00:35:18.143
are completely messed up laws.
00:35:18.164 --> 00:35:25.273
But it's the national right-wing party, who is Marie Le Pen, and she's leading the polls.
00:35:25.813 --> 00:35:27.235
So this is quite right-wing.
00:35:27.757 --> 00:35:29.077
They've got the majority of the...
00:35:29.117 --> 00:35:37.168
For the polls indicate they've got to have potentially a major win in the National Assembly for France.
00:35:37.969 --> 00:35:43.838
And the French, the other counterpart, is now trying to team together, try to block this election.
00:35:44.737 --> 00:35:48.762
Some argue a right-wing extreme party coming into power.
00:35:49.043 --> 00:35:55.092
That party, by the way, the national, I'll try again to pronounce the last word, Rassemblement.
00:35:56.193 --> 00:35:59.317
I'm not French, I messed it up.
00:35:59.336 --> 00:36:03.442
But they were a French party, Jim, only a few years ago, right on the fringe.
00:36:03.902 --> 00:36:05.585
Right-wing, extreme.
00:36:06.887 --> 00:36:07.588
How do you pronounce it?
00:36:08.007 --> 00:36:08.929
Rassemblement.
00:36:09.650 --> 00:36:10.331
You're better than me.
00:36:10.472 --> 00:36:12.253
My goodness, my French is not great.
00:36:12.577 --> 00:36:17.405
I got the national bit right, but now they're actually mainstream politics and they're ahead.
00:36:17.786 --> 00:36:20.769
And President Macron's party is in third place.
00:36:22.273 --> 00:36:31.246
You've also got major events that have unfolded and continue to unfold and get worse with the Ukraine war.
00:36:32.847 --> 00:36:44.572
And then also I learned yesterday that there are British companies funding the transportation of LNG liquid natural gas through a back door to Russia.
00:36:45.494 --> 00:37:13.898
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 seem to be, the LNG, unlike oil, is not subject to sanctions, so they can sell billions of dollars of liquid natural gas to and from Biden from Russia.
00:37:13.918 --> 00:37:18.766
And of course, that money is going into Russia on the side of the Ukraine war.
00:37:19.206 --> 00:37:25.556
A very ugly, awful war and no sign of that ending in the near future, at least.
00:37:26.038 --> 00:37:40.833
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 from both sides.
00:37:43.257 --> 00:37:45.181
There's more losses on the Palestinian side.
00:37:45.641 --> 00:37:56.157
And then we're seeing the development as other nations like Iran and Hezbollah, other terrorist groups, coming into the mix.
00:37:56.257 --> 00:38:00.182
So we're seeing the potential, closer than potential, actually.
00:38:00.222 --> 00:38:04.510
And on the verge, it appears to be a wider, major...
00:38:05.025 --> 00:38:17.344
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.
00:38:17.403 --> 00:38:19.527
It doesn't appear to be working so well.
00:38:19.807 --> 00:38:30.023
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?
00:38:31.045 --> 00:38:42.250
What do the enemies of America, when they see Biden and stumble and trip all over his words and seem and appear weak physically and mentally.
00:38:42.990 --> 00:38:46.175
What does America's enemies and the free world's enemies think about this?
00:38:46.235 --> 00:38:49.297
North Korea, China, Iran, Russia.
00:38:49.338 --> 00:39:03.014
And of course, you don't have to look too far to see the teeming and emergence of the Brit countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, other countries that are now teeming up.
00:39:03.585 --> 00:39:09.333
to replace the US reserve, the US dollar, create a counter currency equal in power and strength.
00:39:10.353 --> 00:39:15.139
And again, to make things more complex there.
00:39:15.721 --> 00:39:32.378
You've got all these events happening in the world, instability, uncertainty, you've got new unprecedented terrain that you are now traversing in the U.S.
00:39:32.438 --> 00:39:33.159
politics there.
00:39:33.780 --> 00:39:35.963
I think Trump is going to win.
00:39:36.804 --> 00:39:38.327
I think Biden has lost.
00:39:39.027 --> 00:39:41.931
Some of his strongest advocates are now asking him to stand down.
00:39:41.952 --> 00:39:55.094
I think it's quite awful, actually, for Biden's wife and the people close to him why they're allowing him to continue the race.
00:39:55.155 --> 00:39:59.121
I think he came out tonight, today, Biden said, look, he's not down and out.
00:39:59.260 --> 00:40:02.425
He's not going to be pushed out, I think he said earlier today.
00:40:02.465 --> 00:40:04.568
He's not going to be pushed out of the campaign.
00:40:04.708 --> 00:40:05.911
He's in it for the race.
00:40:06.070 --> 00:40:06.751
He wants to win.
00:40:06.791 --> 00:40:10.518
And I just don't believe he's got a cat in hell's chance of winning.
00:40:11.099 --> 00:40:19.371
And then tying this back to the church, which is our primary focus of our podcast, what is the church position on this?
00:40:19.632 --> 00:40:20.873
What does the prophet think of this?
00:40:21.313 --> 00:40:25.460
What's the advice and counsel from President Nelson on how we should vote?
00:40:25.559 --> 00:40:35.695
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.
00:40:36.615 --> 00:40:46.710
Surely the church has a role in advising or at least commenting on issues of significant political importance.
00:40:47.132 --> 00:40:48.574
It made a position on COVID-19.
00:40:49.217 --> 00:40:51.601
It's had a position on LGBTQ.
00:40:51.701 --> 00:40:54.824
So it decides to get involved, Jim, when it wants to.
00:40:55.346 --> 00:40:55.806
And it does.
00:40:56.487 --> 00:41:03.998
And what it does, by the way, very aggressive, commits significant resources when it wants to and it can to protect its own position.
00:41:04.659 --> 00:41:05.340
Where is it?
00:41:05.500 --> 00:41:15.172
Where's the leadership in this US and this geopolitical environment that we find ourselves in?
00:41:15.632 --> 00:41:23.836
You know, we're having a religious and a political conversation here and A lot of people, they say, keep away from religion, keep away from politics.
00:41:23.896 --> 00:41:25.619
Don't try not to talk about that.
00:41:26.280 --> 00:41:29.447
But whether you like it or not, you can't escape politics.
00:41:30.367 --> 00:41:36.097
On the local level, regional, national, geopolitical, it affects our lives.
00:41:36.838 --> 00:41:45.074
These people that get into power affect every aspect of our life, financial, economic, jobs, inflation.
00:41:45.666 --> 00:41:55.016
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.
00:41:55.697 --> 00:41:57.199
There's a lot of disinformation out there.
00:41:57.239 --> 00:42:05.329
You know, the church, one of the things I know that we talked about is the argument by the church where it said, look, there's a lot of anti-Mormon stuff out there against the church.
00:42:06.070 --> 00:42:11.077
And you can't trust that information that's not written or produced by the church.
00:42:11.797 --> 00:42:14.842
Stay close to the church-approved materials.
00:42:15.521 --> 00:42:19.646
Church-approved lesson manuals, church-approved books and talks and general conference.
00:42:20.447 --> 00:42:21.849
You know, therein lies the safety.
00:42:21.869 --> 00:42:25.393
I think President Barnsley talked about that.
00:42:25.614 --> 00:42:30.960
President Hinckley, I think it was, rather, talked about this safety and staying close to the gospel.
00:42:31.721 --> 00:42:36.806
And the church has often talked about be careful what sources you trust.
00:42:37.969 --> 00:42:42.494
And we're seeing a lot of disinformation out there.
00:42:42.849 --> 00:42:44.672
And it's the same in politics.
00:42:44.731 --> 00:42:52.362
I think we've got to be very prudent about sources of information, political information that we read and that we trust.
00:42:52.382 --> 00:42:55.204
There's a lot of propaganda out there, a lot of misinformation.
00:42:55.865 --> 00:43:00.271
And people now, I think the internet's been extraordinary, mostly beneficial.
00:43:01.092 --> 00:43:15.079
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.
00:43:15.239 --> 00:43:16.521
You just can't.
00:43:17.523 --> 00:43:19.766
Well, it's not just that they have their own opinion.
00:43:19.806 --> 00:43:21.009
They have their own facts.
00:43:22.010 --> 00:43:23.251
They have their own reality.
00:43:23.932 --> 00:43:24.875
They've got their own facts.
00:43:25.034 --> 00:43:28.762
And the debate kept saying things that were factually incorrect.
00:43:29.663 --> 00:43:45.643
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.
00:43:46.985 --> 00:43:53.014
And we showed him the pictures and we showed them that's factually not true.
00:43:53.293 --> 00:44:02.507
More people came to Obama, to his inauguration, four years before yours, and we have the pictures to prove it.
00:44:03.527 --> 00:44:07.313
And one of his advisors even said, well, these are alternative facts.
00:44:08.418 --> 00:44:10.501
Alternative facts.
00:44:10.902 --> 00:44:11.963
Facts are facts.
00:44:12.764 --> 00:44:14.547
I mean, something either happened or it didn't.
00:44:15.449 --> 00:44:20.115
And so the democratization you're talking about, I don't mean to interrupt you.
00:44:20.757 --> 00:44:22.800
It's not just everybody has their own opinion.
00:44:22.820 --> 00:44:28.809
It's that we really have siloed ourselves into separate realities.
00:44:29.670 --> 00:44:39.219
When I talk to people about Donald Trump and they talk about Joe Biden, they describe a reality that I do not recognize.
00:44:40.079 --> 00:44:46.788
And when I point out, for instance, that Donald Trump tried to overthrow January 6th, oh, no, no, no, that was a false flag.
00:44:46.827 --> 00:44:47.949
That was just Antifa.
00:44:49.231 --> 00:44:53.577
And Donald Trump offered 10,000 troops to Nancy Pelosi and she turned them down.
00:44:53.617 --> 00:44:56.599
No, none of that is true.
00:44:56.641 --> 00:44:59.023
That is not factually correct.
00:44:59.664 --> 00:45:21.958
And we now, what Donald Trump has done has normalized 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.
00:45:22.177 --> 00:45:31.590
Actually, the green sky people are right, because the blue sky people are all just Biden plants and Antifa plants and part of the conspiracy to drink your blood.
00:45:31.610 --> 00:45:33.614
I mean, it's lunacy.
00:45:34.146 --> 00:45:37.431
And I don't know how we recover from it.
00:45:38.030 --> 00:45:46.742
And I don't know how the church can sort of absolve itself from a responsibility to help fix it.
00:45:47.264 --> 00:45:49.407
Because that right now is what the church is doing.
00:45:49.507 --> 00:45:54.514
The church is just punting and saying, go to the temple and don't worry about anything else.
00:45:54.994 --> 00:45:55.514
So I'm sorry.
00:45:55.675 --> 00:45:56.076
That's my...
00:45:57.137 --> 00:45:58.018
I
00:45:58.039 --> 00:45:59.541
think that was a really funny interruption.
00:45:59.581 --> 00:46:00.161
You're absolutely right.
00:46:00.282 --> 00:46:00.702
We're living...
00:46:00.742 --> 00:46:03.005
They have different realities, these alternative acts.
00:46:03.585 --> 00:46:09.032
And so what happens is those people assign themselves to those realities, as you've described.
00:46:09.672 --> 00:46:23.748
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, because they're reading stuff that they want and they need, and that's that particular account, right?
00:46:24.347 --> 00:46:27.211
And whether it's true or not, it doesn't matter.
00:46:27.291 --> 00:46:31.476
In these people's minds, it's become, to your point, it's become their reality.
00:46:32.056 --> 00:46:33.038
And I think the internet...
00:46:33.282 --> 00:46:38.809
has, I think that's the dark side or the other side of the internet, where you've got all this information.
00:46:39.650 --> 00:46:40.791
How do you make sense of it?
00:46:41.331 --> 00:46:42.072
What is real?
00:46:42.353 --> 00:46:42.853
What is not?
00:46:42.934 --> 00:46:43.373
What is true?
00:46:43.414 --> 00:46:43.735
What is not?
00:46:43.795 --> 00:46:44.356
What is fact?
00:46:44.436 --> 00:46:44.976
What is not?
00:46:45.777 --> 00:46:53.827
And people now, to your point, argue against truth and fact and provide these, what you call, alternative facts.
00:46:54.327 --> 00:46:57.030
And the church, Jim, is doing exactly the same thing.
00:46:57.652 --> 00:47:02.157
You say, look, these are our facts.
00:47:03.041 --> 00:47:05.565
Any other source is unreliable.
00:47:06.206 --> 00:47:06.987
This is our source.
00:47:07.128 --> 00:47:07.929
You can only trust this.
00:47:08.411 --> 00:47:20.010
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.
00:47:20.389 --> 00:47:26.159
And so, again, the church is political in that sense.
00:47:26.300 --> 00:47:27.521
It's got its own propaganda.
00:47:27.969 --> 00:47:31.112
just like these political parties.
00:47:31.594 --> 00:48:24.079
The other thing I found quite interesting and quite disturbing, actually, and confusing, and maybe you could help me on this, understand this, because I don't fully understand, is the ruling, the recent ruling from the Supreme Court, which seemed to suggest that the decision granting Trump as president just look at my notes here, the historic Supreme Court decision granting Trump what they call partial presidential immunity, where he's only 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 judiciary.
00:48:24.099 --> 00:48:25.981
Again, there's a connection there with the property.
00:48:26.210 --> 00:48:36.681
prophets, and we've heard this many times, they talk about this, use this term, when you're speaking as a man, you know, when the prophet made this comment about COVID or this or LGBTQ or whatever, right?
00:48:37.221 --> 00:48:39.463
Well, not LGBTQ, because he was speaking as a prophet there.
00:48:39.483 --> 00:48:47.731
It goes into great detail, as Nelson, about the revelatory process on the children and LGBTQ parents, etc.
00:48:47.751 --> 00:48:58.836
But we've heard oftentimes where when the prophets or the apostles say something that's probably not or popular, they say, well, he was speaking as a man, right?
00:48:59.336 --> 00:49:35.565
And so tying this back to Trump, to me, the process now, you know, based on that, I think, 63 Supreme Court ruling, if I got my numbers right, I think the solution then is to go through each account and look at the, you know, the lawful acts, potential lawful acts that is, and decisions that is 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.
00:49:36.146 --> 00:49:37.067
A king is like a king.
00:49:37.086 --> 00:49:38.367
He's like immune, really.
00:49:39.148 --> 00:49:39.710
He's above the law.
00:49:40.210 --> 00:49:47.237
And then separate that from decisions and behaviors and acts when he wasn't the president and charge him on that.
00:49:47.297 --> 00:49:48.778
That's my understanding.
00:49:49.880 --> 00:49:52.815
Help me understand this as a I'm not living in America.
00:49:52.835 --> 00:49:54.418
I'm not as familiar with US politics.
00:49:55.400 --> 00:50:00.027
Help me understand that position in the Supreme Court.
00:50:00.068 --> 00:50:04.675
Does that mean Trump is essentially mostly or partially immune?
00:50:06.177 --> 00:50:07.199
I'm not sure.
00:50:07.219 --> 00:50:12.306
I say that only because I have read
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...
00:50:12.347 --> 00:50:16.313
The decision was a six to three decision.
00:50:16.898 --> 00:50:24.608
with the six Republican appointed justices coming down in favor of immunity, the three Democratic appointed judges coming out against.
00:50:25.530 --> 00:50:41.492
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.
00:50:42.494 --> 00:50:44.396
And if he does all these things, he's immune, he's immune.
00:50:44.516 --> 00:50:45.018
And this was...
00:50:45.666 --> 00:50:48.690
So this should never have gone to the Supreme Court.
00:50:49.831 --> 00:50:52.393
So this was raised by the fact.
00:50:52.434 --> 00:50:58.221
So Donald Trump, he's facing three more prosecutions.
00:50:58.440 --> 00:50:59.503
He's already faced one.
00:50:59.543 --> 00:51:01.244
He's been found guilty of 34 counts.
00:51:02.485 --> 00:51:04.327
The other three have all stalled.
00:51:04.347 --> 00:51:08.833
The one in Georgia for trying to overturn the election in Georgia.
00:51:09.474 --> 00:51:20.007
has stalled because the prosecutor's kind of an idiot 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.
00:51:20.047 --> 00:51:30.001
She initially wasn't thrown off, but that's been derailed that we're not going to see that one go to trial, certainly not before the election.
00:51:30.081 --> 00:51:32.005
None of these are likely to go to trial before the election.
00:51:32.985 --> 00:51:41.576
The open and shut case of Donald Trump stealing classified documents and refusing to return them, It's an open and shut case.
00:51:41.715 --> 00:51:44.639
It should have gone to trial and gone to verdict and sentencing.
00:51:44.679 --> 00:51:56.215
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.
00:51:57.255 --> 00:52:03.202
Now, the most important case out there is the one in Washington, D.C.
00:52:03.282 --> 00:52:08.570
That's the January 6th case that's charging Trump with crimes, trying to overthrow the election.
00:52:09.346 --> 00:52:22.380
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.
00:52:23.202 --> 00:52:25.905
And they took it to the circuit court.
00:52:26.766 --> 00:52:37.538
I don't know 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.
00:52:37.889 --> 00:52:45.681
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?
00:52:46.862 --> 00:52:50.168
And Trump's lawyers said, well, he would get impeached.
00:52:51.009 --> 00:52:54.313
Well, if he doesn't get impeached, I mean, because we know impeachment doesn't do anything.
00:52:55.074 --> 00:52:57.057
Impeachment is not a legal process.
00:52:57.838 --> 00:53:05.931
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.
00:53:06.331 --> 00:53:07.413
There is no legal...
00:53:07.938 --> 00:53:40.085
remedy or recourse 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 So impeachment won't do anything.
00:53:40.184 --> 00:53:45.231
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.
00:53:46.291 --> 00:53:48.255
And so everybody went, this is lunacy.
00:53:48.755 --> 00:53:50.516
And the circuit court threw it out.
00:53:51.257 --> 00:53:52.840
And Donald Trump took it to the Supreme Court.
00:53:52.920 --> 00:53:55.884
And everybody's like, the Supreme Court's not going to do anything.
00:53:55.943 --> 00:53:57.525
And the Supreme Court said, no, not so fast.
00:53:57.746 --> 00:53:58.527
We want to take this case.
00:53:59.829 --> 00:54:01.570
And they go, why do you want to take this case?
00:54:02.010 --> 00:54:04.074
This case has no legal merit whatsoever.
00:54:04.641 --> 00:54:05.943
You shouldn't take this case.
00:54:05.983 --> 00:54:07.445
You're lewd to take this case.
00:54:07.766 --> 00:54:12.634
All right, well, if you're taking the case, then great, quickly decide and turn it around.
00:54:12.733 --> 00:54:13.976
You know, the court can do that.
00:54:13.996 --> 00:54:15.097
The court does do that.
00:54:15.177 --> 00:54:31.702
When Donald Trump, 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.
00:54:31.742 --> 00:54:34.355
But they sat on it For months.
00:54:35.277 --> 00:54:35.898
For months.
00:54:36.858 --> 00:54:42.409
And the only reason they did that, the only reason that makes any sense, is to delay the trial.
00:54:43.570 --> 00:54:46.916
They sat on it, they sat on it, they sat on it, and everybody went, well, okay.
00:54:49.079 --> 00:54:56.152
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.
00:54:56.632 --> 00:55:01.646
And surprise! According to Sonia Sotomayor, that's exactly what they said.
00:55:01.726 --> 00:55:06.934
Now, there are other people that read this decision as being more measured than that.
00:55:07.614 --> 00:55:09.858
And I suspect it probably is.
00:55:10.619 --> 00:55:16.266
It tries to make the distinction between official acts and unofficial acts.
00:55:17.007 --> 00:55:29.836
And then it talks about this sort of middle ground where the official acts for core presidential responsibilities are fully immune to But see, they kind of always have been.
00:55:29.856 --> 00:55:31.798
For instance, people point out...
00:55:32.840 --> 00:55:49.057
That means you can't, after Barack Obama used drones to take out military combatants who ended up being American citizens, you can't prosecute him for murder for that.
00:55:50.239 --> 00:55:52.822
And that was already sort of the precedent.
00:55:52.922 --> 00:55:54.704
I don't think it had ever been specifically...
00:55:56.065 --> 00:55:57.007
defined that way.
00:55:57.327 --> 00:56:06.101
And some people are saying that's all the court did here was just say that those core acts are protected, but they always have been.
00:56:08.184 --> 00:56:18.378
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.
00:56:19.400 --> 00:56:22.003
And nobody has any idea what that means.
00:56:22.224 --> 00:56:23.025
What are these acts?
00:56:23.485 --> 00:56:24.527
What is this presumption?
00:56:24.847 --> 00:56:25.389
Does it mean if...
00:56:26.210 --> 00:56:30.416
that you can pierce the presumption and decide that you can't.
00:56:30.936 --> 00:56:32.619
It's madness.
00:56:32.820 --> 00:56:41.753
And what it's done is extended the legal issues that have to be resolved before this goes to trial.
00:56:42.896 --> 00:56:54.554
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.
00:56:54.753 --> 00:57:03.206
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.
00:57:04.106 --> 00:57:11.056
And it's impossible not to say, well, the Supreme Court is muddying the water so that this will never go to trial.
00:57:11.717 --> 00:57:13.340
There are so many weird legal issues.
00:57:13.679 --> 00:57:23.193
Donald Trump has already taken this decision and said, well, my convictions, my 34 convictions...
00:57:23.938 --> 00:57:27.202
they were part of this presumption of immunity.
00:57:27.724 --> 00:57:29.686
They weren't core presidential acts.
00:57:30.086 --> 00:57:33.893
And there's also this thing in there about you're not allowed to question.
00:57:33.932 --> 00:57:40.623
You're not allowed to use core presidential acts to question the motives of any other acts.
00:57:41.244 --> 00:57:48.534
So Donald Trump's lawyers are saying, well, some of his core presidential acts were being used as evidence in this trial.
00:57:48.615 --> 00:57:51.519
So even though these weren't presidential acts...
00:57:53.346 --> 00:57:54.527
You know, it's madness.
00:57:55.469 --> 00:57:59.554
And he was supposed to be sentenced on July 11th.
00:58:01.637 --> 00:58:02.478
And he's going to be...
00:58:02.878 --> 00:58:10.130
They postponed that now to September because they now have to consider whether or not this weird little presumption of immunity...
00:58:10.250 --> 00:58:12.632
It's madness.
00:58:12.974 --> 00:58:14.476
It's absolute madness.
00:58:15.436 --> 00:58:19.842
And the court has done nothing to clarify and done everything to muddy the waters.
00:58:20.483 --> 00:58:21.766
I do think that...
00:58:22.434 --> 00:58:35.847
At its core, it's probably not as problematic as the alarmists are saying it is, but it's certainly problematic in holding Donald Trump accountable.
00:58:36.027 --> 00:58:52.242
It's made it impossible for Donald Trump, I think, to be convicted of anything because we're going to have to sort through this decision and litigate and establish all kinds of precedents before we can even go to trial.
00:58:52.865 --> 00:58:53.626
on anything else.
00:58:54.367 --> 00:58:55.951
And what happens, I give you
00:58:55.990 --> 00:59:00.336
that, what happens November elections?
00:59:01.177 --> 00:59:02.561
Looks like Trump will win.
00:59:03.862 --> 00:59:06.706
It's hard to see if Biden stays in the race.
00:59:07.527 --> 00:59:10.152
Difficult to see Biden winning this.
00:59:10.231 --> 00:59:10.893
I just don't see it.
00:59:12.195 --> 00:59:17.402
I don't think, I'm putting on now my hat, my political strategist hat.
00:59:18.925 --> 00:59:21.989
I don't think Biden is going to be able to stay in the race.
00:59:22.753 --> 00:59:26.159
He's telling everybody, and when I say that, everybody's like, well, he's telling everybody he is.
00:59:26.239 --> 00:59:27.141
Yes, of course he is.
00:59:27.661 --> 00:59:28.943
Of course, what else is he going to say?
00:59:29.304 --> 00:59:30.706
He wants to stay in the race.
00:59:31.766 --> 00:59:34.170
The pressure is going to be too much.
00:59:34.431 --> 00:59:35.873
It's going to continue to build.
00:59:35.914 --> 00:59:37.175
It's not going to abate.
00:59:38.016 --> 00:59:45.688
He's got an interview that's coming out with George Stephanopoulos on ABC that he thinks is going to turn this all around.
00:59:45.768 --> 00:59:47.190
That's going to come out on Sunday.
00:59:47.231 --> 00:59:49.353
It's not going to turn this all around.
00:59:50.018 --> 00:59:54.163
And the drumbeat is just gonna get louder and louder and louder.
00:59:54.702 --> 01:00:01.530
Peggy Noonan, who's one of my favorite columnists, she was a speechwriter for Reagan, and she wrote a column where she says, this is August of 1974.
01:00:01.710 --> 01:00:08.257
In August of 1974, Richard Nixon was telling everybody, there's no possible way I will ever resign.
01:00:09.559 --> 01:00:27.922
And the drumbeat just got so loud and so loud and so loud that finally all of, 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.
01:00:28.523 --> 01:00:28.903
And he did.
01:00:28.923 --> 01:00:40.501
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, you will not win.
01:00:40.541 --> 01:00:42.202
The polls are collapsing.
01:00:42.284 --> 01:00:45.775
I mean, the polls right now, have started to collapse.
01:00:45.956 --> 01:00:47.559
Some have collapsed, some have not.
01:00:48.139 --> 01:00:56.291
Some people are clinging to the fact that, I mean, Jennifer Rubin, who's a columnist for the Washington Post said, polls are unchanged for April.
01:00:57.313 --> 01:01:00.137
To which my response is, that means he's losing.
01:01:00.157 --> 01:01:06.947
The reason he did this early debate was to change the state of the race because he was losing.
01:01:06.987 --> 01:01:11.333
And so if it's unchanged, he's still losing.
01:01:11.842 --> 01:01:15.407
And unchanged is the best scenario we've seen.
01:01:16.168 --> 01:01:23.978
And there are a number of polls that have leaked that show that he's lost anywhere from two to nine points and mostly in swing states.
01:01:24.978 --> 01:01:28.864
You know, he cannot win and everybody looking at it.
01:01:29.405 --> 01:01:33.088
And so, yes, he's going to get, this is just like, this is like anything.
01:01:33.530 --> 01:01:36.072
This is like right before the manifesto.
01:01:36.673 --> 01:01:39.677
That's where you find all the fieriest speeches happening.
01:01:39.905 --> 01:01:42.228
from the brethren saying, we will never give up plural marriage.
01:01:42.268 --> 01:01:43.550
We will never give up plural marriage.
01:01:43.590 --> 01:01:44.793
We will never give up plural marriage.
01:01:45.574 --> 01:01:46.394
We gave up plural marriage.
01:01:47.396 --> 01:01:49.579
This is what you do when you're losing.
01:01:50.300 --> 01:01:54.244
In legal terms, they say, when you have the facts on your side, argue the facts.
01:01:54.766 --> 01:01:56.728
If you don't have the facts on your side, argue the law.
01:01:57.168 --> 01:01:59.311
If you don't have the law on your side, pound the table.
01:02:00.032 --> 01:02:01.315
Joe Biden is pounding the table.
01:02:02.076 --> 01:02:08.355
And he's going to pound it louder and louder and louder until it finally gets to the point where he has to say, I can't do this.
01:02:08.556 --> 01:02:09.757
And he will step aside.
01:02:10.018 --> 01:02:12.161
And I think Kamala Harris will be the nominee.
01:02:12.201 --> 01:02:14.844
And I don't know where that goes.
01:02:15.025 --> 01:02:18.170
I think Kamala Harris certainly has a better chance than Joe Biden does.
01:02:18.210 --> 01:02:20.753
Is it enough to win?
01:02:20.773 --> 01:02:21.615
I don't know.
01:02:21.635 --> 01:02:23.918
My gut says probably not.
01:02:24.880 --> 01:02:26.864
But I don't think Joe Biden's going to be the nominee.
01:02:27.244 --> 01:02:33.333
Anyway, that's Jim Benioff, a strategist who's never been wrong about anything except for just about everything.
01:02:34.114 --> 01:02:38.257
Camilla Harris, oh boy, I can't even go there.
01:02:40.920 --> 01:02:42.681
I think Biden's better than Camilla Harris.
01:02:43.182 --> 01:02:44.503
I think you're probably right.
01:02:44.664 --> 01:02:46.505
I think the drum is getting louder.
01:02:47.007 --> 01:02:56.096
There's Democrats coming out vocally, publicly rather, saying that Biden needs to step down and let somebody take over the reins.
01:02:56.715 --> 01:03:04.266
From a human perspective, I mean, and the same, the question's also directed to President Nelson, who's you know, coming up 100.
01:03:04.628 --> 01:03:05.688
Is he 100 now?
01:03:05.748 --> 01:03:06.150
Is he 100?
01:03:06.809 --> 01:03:07.271
Not quite.
01:03:07.610 --> 01:03:08.351
He's almost there.
01:03:08.391 --> 01:03:09.514
He's close.
01:03:09.713 --> 01:03:17.083
So you've got Biden 81, being in office for another four years, you know, 85, 86, right, whatever.
01:03:19.065 --> 01:03:19.766
I just don't see him.
01:03:19.947 --> 01:03:24.813
If Biden were to win, I don't know how he could survive mentally, physically, right?
01:03:25.914 --> 01:03:33.976
From a human perspective, the toll on these men's lives, mental health, well-being, physical health.
01:03:34.836 --> 01:03:36.780
Nelson pushing it under there.
01:03:37.320 --> 01:03:41.347
You get called by God as an apostle, a prophet, and you get released by death.
01:03:42.789 --> 01:03:45.052
President Biden could step down.
01:03:45.371 --> 01:03:45.952
I hope he will.
01:03:46.793 --> 01:03:47.675
Nelson can't do that.
01:03:47.715 --> 01:03:48.496
He can't resign.
01:03:48.516 --> 01:03:52.943
The toll on these men's health is extraordinary.
01:03:52.963 --> 01:04:01.943
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.
01:04:02.123 --> 01:04:06.748
I just, you know, from a human perspective, it seems very awful.
01:04:06.807 --> 01:04:08.088
I mean, Biden has his choice.
01:04:08.548 --> 01:04:09.630
Nelson doesn't have a choice.
01:04:10.411 --> 01:04:12.713
It just seems very awful.
01:04:12.753 --> 01:04:13.054
Nelson doesn't
01:04:13.094 --> 01:04:13.713
have a choice.
01:04:14.635 --> 01:04:14.855
Sorry?
01:04:15.496 --> 01:04:17.097
Nelson does have a choice.
01:04:17.838 --> 01:04:18.077
Well,
01:04:18.237 --> 01:04:18.579
he
01:04:18.898 --> 01:04:19.619
beat to resign.
01:04:19.639 --> 01:04:22.282
To go emeritus?
01:04:23.302 --> 01:04:24.344
Yeah.
01:04:24.704 --> 01:04:24.844
Okay.
01:04:24.905 --> 01:04:26.206
Has that ever happened before?
01:04:26.246 --> 01:04:26.606
It
01:04:28.847 --> 01:04:30.369
happened in the community of Christ.
01:04:30.849 --> 01:04:31.230
Okay.
01:04:31.411 --> 01:04:32.652
Everybody freaked out when it happened.
01:04:32.711 --> 01:04:40.501
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.
01:04:41.362 --> 01:04:44.005
And I don't remember who it was that replaced him.
01:04:45.268 --> 01:04:51.956
But this is the thing, is there is no scriptural mandate for the way we do it.
01:04:52.135 --> 01:04:53.097
It's all tradition.
01:04:53.998 --> 01:04:59.706
It's all, this is the way we've done it, so this is the way, it's the foolish traditions of our fathers, to use the Book of Mormon phrase.
01:05:00.577 --> 01:05:04.561
There's no reason why he couldn't resign, why he couldn't step down.
01:05:05.664 --> 01:05:07.405
We release or be released.
01:05:07.786 --> 01:05:08.827
We release 70s.
01:05:09.608 --> 01:05:10.929
Why can't we release apostles?
01:05:11.469 --> 01:05:12.911
Why can't we release prophets?
01:05:13.833 --> 01:05:14.653
It's quite
01:05:15.054 --> 01:05:15.855
unprecedented.
01:05:15.994 --> 01:05:17.275
Yeah, he can do it.
01:05:17.697 --> 01:05:22.461
From what you're saying, he can do it, but it's just unheard of, right?
01:05:23.463 --> 01:05:28.949
Two thoughts as we're coming to the end here, listening to that conversation.
01:05:29.666 --> 01:05:44.862
What 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?
01:05:45.342 --> 01:05:48.226
How can you not talk about what the heck is going on?
01:05:48.806 --> 01:05:56.054
It seems absurd that you wouldn't address this huge elephant, elephants in the room, right?
01:05:56.456 --> 01:05:58.038
And that was only halfway through the podcast.
01:05:58.561 --> 01:06:00.864
My other part was looking at the geopolitics.
01:06:01.045 --> 01:06:02.688
My gosh, that's a mess, right?
01:06:02.708 --> 01:06:08.074
How can you not talk about or address these uncertainties and people's fears and concerns?
01:06:08.536 --> 01:06:11.820
You've got Putin who's threatening nuclear war, right?
01:06:12.581 --> 01:06:14.224
Is it war with NATO by proxy?
01:06:14.264 --> 01:06:14.744
We know that.
01:06:14.824 --> 01:06:18.889
We're supplying arms and munitions and equipment and missiles now, right?
01:06:19.710 --> 01:06:22.414
We're seeing all these extraordinary things happen within the U.S.
01:06:22.434 --> 01:06:23.317
and outside of the U.S.
01:06:23.797 --> 01:06:26.300
Surely the president can...
01:06:27.521 --> 01:06:28.804
references.
01:06:29.003 --> 01:06:34.472
And then the second point to add to that, where is the church leadership on this, the prophet?
01:06:35.514 --> 01:06:40.623
I want to know what the Lord thinks about what's happening in the world.
01:06:41.525 --> 01:06:51.621
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?
01:06:51.922 --> 01:06:54.206
Not just the prophet of the members, right?
01:06:54.722 --> 01:06:56.384
Is he not the prophet for the world?
01:06:56.764 --> 01:06:58.365
I understand he is, right?
01:06:58.987 --> 01:07:05.733
So what's the message from the living prophet, the one who represents Jesus Christ on the earth at this time?
01:07:06.295 --> 01:07:07.635
What's the message?
01:07:07.835 --> 01:07:08.677
What's the direction?
01:07:09.157 --> 01:07:09.998
What's the instruction?
01:07:10.458 --> 01:07:11.239
What's the counsel?
01:07:11.440 --> 01:07:12.141
What's the advice?
01:07:12.842 --> 01:07:13.643
What are we supposed to do?
01:07:13.682 --> 01:07:15.324
Do we pray?
01:07:15.784 --> 01:07:17.746
Is there any physical preparations that we need to make?
01:07:18.427 --> 01:07:20.309
Is there something that we're not doing that we should be doing?
01:07:20.849 --> 01:07:36.675
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?
01:07:36.936 --> 01:07:52.934
And I'm hoping, if we have conference in October, and if this is not, anything that we're talking about is not referenced, directly or indirectly, it will just absolutely astound me.
01:07:53.730 --> 01:08:05.826
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.
01:08:05.846 --> 01:08:07.007
And boy, do we need him, Jim.
01:08:07.088 --> 01:08:13.896
We need, you know, we are desperate for heavenly intervention.
01:08:14.818 --> 01:08:54.708
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 want to come across like a doomsday sayer, speaker, so to speak, or anything conspiracy, because I always worry about hearing extreme Things are alternating things from people.
01:08:55.390 --> 01:08:58.914
But it's hard on the current trajectory of the geopolitics.
01:09:00.016 --> 01:09:18.264
It wouldn't surprise me if we're 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.
01:09:18.925 --> 01:09:19.666
So who is it?
01:09:20.609 --> 01:09:21.291
That helps us.
01:09:21.470 --> 01:09:22.592
Where does that help come from?
01:09:23.333 --> 01:09:24.657
God, this is his earth.
01:09:24.896 --> 01:09:26.439
Jesus Christ created this planet.
01:09:27.541 --> 01:09:30.305
We have a living prophet on the earth today.
01:09:31.266 --> 01:09:42.626
Where is that revelation, that inspiration, that direction from the prophet to bring us back from, oh, is this how it's meant to be?
01:09:42.645 --> 01:09:47.234
Is this the position of God that we don't say anything or do anything?
01:09:48.194 --> 01:09:49.615
And we don't speak about these things.
01:09:49.695 --> 01:09:53.780
Maybe that's the mind of God, the will of God, that we don't talk about these things.
01:09:54.421 --> 01:10:04.273
And we let this whole, you know, these events push us off the cliff into deeper, darker days ahead.
01:10:04.673 --> 01:10:17.789
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...
01:10:18.337 --> 01:10:26.867
conflicts beyond what we're seeing right now, where is the help that we desperately need right now?
01:10:28.708 --> 01:10:31.533
Well, you know, one of the things that Russell M.
01:10:31.573 --> 01:10:47.210
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.
01:10:48.417 --> 01:10:55.185
And since that time, critics of the church have said, well, haven't seen it.
01:10:55.725 --> 01:10:56.787
Well, haven't seen it.
01:10:57.207 --> 01:10:58.047
Well, haven't seen it.
01:10:59.369 --> 01:11:04.916
And if we ever needed to see it, we need to see it now.
01:11:05.817 --> 01:11:10.921
And if Jesus is going to come back, I hope he does so before November.
01:11:12.323 --> 01:11:14.225
So I think that's my final word on this.
01:11:16.417 --> 01:11:18.841
I'm really grateful for this conversation.
01:11:19.060 --> 01:11:27.931
The thing that's helped me in this conversation, I feel so frustrated and so a little bit fearful, if I'm being honest.
01:11:28.091 --> 01:11:33.217
I try not to be fearful, especially with my recent health scare.
01:11:33.238 --> 01:11:36.903
I try to live each moment now and not take things for granted.
01:11:37.724 --> 01:11:39.485
But I'm still worried.
01:11:39.786 --> 01:11:41.929
I'm worried about the future of my kids.
01:11:42.269 --> 01:11:43.610
You have kids.
01:11:43.751 --> 01:11:44.311
I've got kids.
01:11:45.813 --> 01:12:14.792
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 knowledge yep you know when uh adam and eve was on the earth and uh they came you know these uh devil his angels came and uh to trick him and and uh and eve and and what do you want, what do you need, et cetera, what are you waiting for?
01:12:14.832 --> 01:12:16.295
He said, we're waiting for further line knowledge.
01:12:16.314 --> 01:12:22.884
Well, I'm not in the church, but I do look to the church to an extent for further line knowledge.
01:12:22.944 --> 01:12:45.913
I still have, and this hopefully comes through in our conversations, I still, Jim, I 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.
01:12:46.673 --> 01:12:51.180
God's will, you know, mind and will on events that happen in the world.
01:12:51.220 --> 01:12:57.627
I still look to the church as a, not the source anymore, but a source of inspiration, guidance and direction.
01:12:57.728 --> 01:13:03.015
And I hope, I hope we can get that because I, it's hard not to be worried.
01:13:03.114 --> 01:13:08.402
You try to be positive and you look at the world and you think it's all going to hell in a handbasket, right?
01:13:08.462 --> 01:13:11.823
But, Where does that light come from?
01:13:12.385 --> 01:13:13.966
I don't have an answer to that,
01:13:14.006 --> 01:13:16.128
but we'll see.
01:13:16.168 --> 01:13:17.529
We'll see what happens.
01:13:17.831 --> 01:13:20.033
And I would love to see the church step up.
01:13:20.894 --> 01:13:28.322
I still have confidence that these are good men who have authority from the Lord to do his work.
01:13:30.824 --> 01:13:33.386
I think it's just a question of, are we equal to the task?
01:13:34.609 --> 01:13:41.239
And I think we need to have faith, not just in the church, But we need to have faith.
01:13:42.240 --> 01:13:48.869
Each of us needs to have a direct relationship with our Heavenly Father, with God himself.
01:13:50.832 --> 01:13:54.677
Because I don't see any other way to get through the dark times that are ahead.
01:13:55.578 --> 01:13:58.162
So anyway, careful note.
01:13:59.564 --> 01:14:02.569
Thank you all for listening to another episode of Inside Out.
01:14:03.551 --> 01:14:05.632
And we'll look forward to seeing you next time.
01:14:05.672 --> 01:14:07.376
Until then, thank you very much, Ian.
01:14:08.096 --> 01:14:08.516
Thank you, Jim.