Inside Out: Election Edition

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Hello and welcome to a very special edition of Inside Out.
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My name is Jim Bennett and I am here with the Canadian Ian Wilkes.
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Ian, how are you, sir?
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I am really good.
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Jim, how are you?
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I'm all right.
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I mean, I know you're not originally Canadian.
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But the fact that you are Canadian now figures into what we're going to be talking about.
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And I want to let our listeners know.
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So usually we drop these episodes on a Friday.
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And we had recorded an episode earlier in the week.
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I think it was Tuesday.
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And the focus was the same as what this episode is going to be.
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But somebody, I don't know who, I'm not pointing fingers, could have been either one of us.
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Actually, it was me.
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forgot to click record.
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So we had a very, very great, passionate discussion about the election, and me being the idiot that I am, it was not recorded.
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So Ian, you have graciously agreed to meet on this Saturday morning to record again, and I'm going to put this episode up right after it's done.
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So if we didn't record this one, we'll find out much more quickly than we did last time.
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But Ian, I'm going to read you to begin with here.
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This is from the Deseret News.
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Deseret News, as you know, is, or I don't know if all of our listeners know, the Deseret News is one of the two major metropolitan newspapers in the Salt Lake City area, but it is unique in that it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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And for roughly five years, I was not an employee of the Deseret News, but I wrote a column for the Deseret News, mostly focused on entertainment and media.
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But I was also an editorial writer for the Deseret News.
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When newspapers used to be a thing, you would open the editorial page and there was an article there right at the beginning that said, In Our Opinion.
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And it was an article that was not signed by any one individual because it was supposed to represent the opinion of the newspaper at large.
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This still happens.
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Newspapers are printed with the same regularity.
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The Deseret News now, as far as I know, only prints a print edition once a week.
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but they still have daily online editions and they still have these editorials.
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And I was in a group of about three or four other people who would write these editorials.
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I wrote about two or three of them every week.
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So I would represent the opinion of the Deseret News.
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Now, one of the difficulties and challenges of representing the opinion of the Deseret News is that It's owned by the church.
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So everybody looks at the opinion of the Deseret News and assumes that it's the opinion of the church.
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And the Deseret News tries very hard to say, no, no, that's not the case.
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But the reality is they recognize that association.
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They recognize that responsibility.
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And the likelihood of printing anything in the Deseret News opinion section is under the unsigned editorial banner that would go fly in the face of what the church believes, the likelihood of that is nonexistent.
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It would not happen.
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Now, because of this also, the Deseret News does not endorse candidates.
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Salt Lake Tribune, the other major newspaper, does.
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In this election cycle, we are seeing a lot of controversy over the fact that newspapers like the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, which traditionally have endorsed presidential candidates, are not endorsing presidential candidates.
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So it's very unusual for newspapers to not endorse, but the Deseret News never does endorse.
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So I'm giving this a lot of background here, but I think it's going to pay off as we get here.
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One of the things I discovered when I was writing editorials for the Deseret News was that the goal of a Deseret News editorial is to offend the least amount of people possible.
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Because they recognize that they're scrutinized for their association with the church, they don't want to go out on a limb on anything unless the church has already gone out on a limb on it.
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So publishing anti-gay articles marriage editorials back when I worked for them was something they were more than happy to do because that was at a time when the church was campaigning actively against gay marriage.
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Publishing pro-immigration editorials was easy to do because the church had stuck its neck out on immigration.
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People don't often realize that the church's position on immigration is really directly contrary to the Republican Party's position.
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So those were the two issues where you could actually say something substantive, but on everything else, it was always guarded.
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It was always, I remember once being assigned to write an editorial about how human trafficking is bad.
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And I remember saying when I got the assignment, so what's the flip side to this?
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Are there people arguing that human trafficking is good?
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Of course not.
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So I had to come up with 450 words saying essentially nothing.
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And I had that experience.
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That was the most egregious experience I can remember.
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But I had similar experiences on a regular basis.
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It was often difficult to fill the space because I wasn't given the latitude to take any kind of a strong position.
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Okay, so all that background, I'm going to read you an editorial that was just posted by people on Twitter today.
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And it says, in our opinion, Donald Trump should resign his candidacy.
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For 80 years, the Deseret News has not entered into the troubled waters of presidential endorsement.
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We are neutral on matters of partisan politics.
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We do, however, feel a duty to speak clearly on issues that affect the well-being and morals of the nation.
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Accordingly, today, we call on Donald Trump to step down from his pursuit of the American presidency.
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In democratic elections, ideas have consequences, leadership matters, and character counts.
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The idea that women secretly welcome the unbridled and aggressive sexual advances of powerful men has led to the mistreatment, sorrow, and subjugation of countless women, for far too much of human history.
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The notion that strength emanates from harsh, divisive, and unbending rhetorical flourish mistakenly equates leadership with craven intimidation.
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The belief, okay, I'm going to go through this.
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I'm not going to necessarily read the whole thing.
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But there's a twist to this story.
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The twist is, this is not a recent editorial.
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The twist is that this editorial was published On October 8th, 2016, this was published in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape where Donald Trump was recorded bragging about assaulting women and talking about how you can do anything, you can grab them by their genitalia, he used a less appropriate word, and they let you do it.
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And since that time, About 28 women have come forward to say that Donald Trump did exactly that.
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There are ads running now that have these women telling their story.
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And most significantly, there was a woman by the name of E.
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Jean Carroll who took Donald Trump to court and sued him for defamation because he had insisted he'd never met her, he didn't know her, and she had accused him of raping her in a department store dressing room in new york city and in the course of the trial they investigated that charge and a jury of 12 people the jury of donald trump's peers determined that he had sexually assaulted her and that he had defamed her when he had lied about it and then a subsequent case increased the penalty because donald trump still couldn't shut up about it and still couldn't stop saying that he didn't know who this woman was, that she was ugly, that she wasn't his type.
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And the thing that destroyed him was in a deposition, he was shown a picture of himself with her and identified her as Marla Maples, his second wife.
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He said, oh yeah, that's Marla.
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And they said, no, that's E.
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Jean Carroll.
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That's the woman you raped.
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So the reason I thought it was interesting is that I'm seeing a lot of articles today talking about the fact that that Access Hollywood tape, so many of us of our generation see it as old news, but first-time voters are hearing about it for the first time.
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And when I saw this article from the Deseret News being posted on Twitter, a lot of members of the church did not realize that it was not a contemporary article, didn't realize it was from eight years ago.
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And They were all aghast that the church, even though it's the Deseret News, it's not officially the church, but the church allowed its church-owned paper to publish such a strident opposition article to Donald Trump.
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And when this came out, I remember, because this came out not long after I had stopped working for the Deseret News.
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In fact, I...
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I started writing.
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I was a ghostwriter for Gary Johnson, who was the libertarian candidate for president in 2016.
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And they said, you can't be doing that and also be writing editorials for the Deseret News.
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So I think I took a hiatus, and I think I may have come back after this and started writing again.
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And then I think I stopped writing for them when I ran for Congress in 2017.
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So this was written not while I was there.
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But I remember the Deseret News people saying, well, the first presidency must have approved this.
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And they said, oh, no, no, no, no.
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We did this on our own.
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And I remember I still don't believe that that's in any way possible.
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The idea that the Deseret News would stick its neck out this far in opposition to Donald Trump and not run it up the flagpole.
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seems ludicrous to me.
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I don't have any hard evidence.
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I've talked to the people who were involved in this editorial.
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They insist up and down that that did not happen, that this was entirely something that the Deseret News did on their own.
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But the reality is, I just don't think that if giving them the benefit of the doubt, if in fact they ran this without getting explicit approval, they did so knowing that that the brethren would be okay with it, knowing that there would be no pushback from church leaders.
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And as we come up on election day on Tuesday, and I'm cautiously optimistic, except I hate using that word because I'm not cautious, I'm panicked.
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I recognize that Donald Trump has escaped accountability so many times and he should never have been elected in the first place, and yet he always seems to find a way to squirm out from accountability.
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He was able to postpone all of his criminal trials, except for one, and that one was the least significant one, and he's managed to postpone the sentencing until after the election.
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He's managed somehow...
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Despite the fact that Trump-supported candidates have lost in all these elections since 2016, Republicans lost in 2018 in the midterms, Republicans lost the White House in 2020.
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In 2022, all the polls said it was going to be a red wave and the Republicans were going to dominate, and the red wave didn't materialize, and all Donald Trump's hand-picked candidates lost.
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The guy's a loser over and over and over again, except for in 2016.
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And everybody, so the race is, I don't think the race is as close as some people are saying it is or as the conventional wisdom says it is, but that isn't stopping me from panicking and from worrying because the consequences of a Trump presidency are almost too devastating to consider as far as I'm concerned.
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So this is not a political podcast.
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And the reason I raise this and the reason I want to frame this in terms of the Deseret News editorial is that this election, in terms of how Latter-day Saints are responding to it, is a really telling election in terms of reflecting the values of the church, reflecting the political positions of the church, and demonstrating A lot of the pretense suggesting the church really is just sort of politically neutral and nobody cares which way you vote.
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And even if you look at the church statements that talk about neutrality and talk about the fact that we shouldn't criticize anybody for their vote, in practice, in reality, on the ground, this church, in terms of its membership, and not necessarily its leadership, not even the highest leadership.
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I have received a whole lot of people telling me who would know that the Brethren are not Trumpers, and this editorial in 2016, I think, would demonstrate that.
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I don't think anything's changed.
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If anything, Trump has gotten worse since 2016, and I can't imagine that the Brethren are falling in line behind him.
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But the general membership of the church, the church as a whole, is a Donald Trump church.
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So much so that people consider you not just wrong politically, but wrong religiously if you decide you need to oppose Donald Trump, as I have.
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And I discovered this.
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So when we last recorded this episode, we were focusing on a lot of things that had happened.
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And in the interim, Donald Trump has stepped in it even further from when we last talked.
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So we went over last time the whole garbage thing that Donald Trump held a rally where there was a guy who said, I think there's a floating island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
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I think it's called Puerto Rico.
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And I think that has done a great deal of damage to Donald Trump.
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electorally among the Latino community.
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But as I was getting ready for trying to put the episode together and discovering that it hadn't been recorded, I thought, oh, jeez, we should have done this after Donald Trump essentially called for a firing squad to murder Liz Cheney.
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He went on Tucker Carlson.
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Tucker Carlson, incidentally, who just recently said that he was attacked by a demon in his bed and that it left claw marks.
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I mean, the number of loons that are in Trump's orbit are just astonishing.
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But he talked about the idea that Liz Cheney ought to be executed.
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And now everybody's trying to scramble and say, no, no, no.
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He didn't really say that.
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Here's what he really said.
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But I'm going to play the words for you, and I'll let anybody else make the decision here.
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She's a radical war hawk.
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Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?
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Let's see how she feels about it.
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You know, when the guns are trained to her face.
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Twitter has a function called Community Notes, where...
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people in the community essentially can write a note on a post to point out when somebody is lying when somebody is giving false information and every single post about this where anybody takes any issue with it even when all they do is just post the audio without comment there's a community note he didn't mean that he wasn't trying to say he was trying to shoot Liz Cheney or that Liz Cheney should be shot he and And it's just pathetic and sad to watch as people scramble to try to say that this is somehow acceptable political discourse.
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And rather than apologize for it, or rather than clarify it, because the defense that people are trying to offer is he's just saying that Liz Cheney wouldn't be so quick to send people to war if she were going to war.
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But the way he describes it is let's put Liz Cheney in front of nine rifles aimed at her face.
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And instead of apologizing for it, instead of clarifying it, Donald Trump posted or re-truthed on his Truth Social account a picture of Liz Cheney and said Liz Cheney ought to be tried for treason before a military tribunal.
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Well, when you try somebody for treason before a military tribunal and you find them guilty, what's the punishment?
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Very often, the punishment is death before a firing squad, which is exactly what Donald Trump was describing.
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So rather than try to sort of tone down the rhetoric, I mean, I've got a friend who talks about how, jeez, the heightened rhetoric, particularly from the Harris campaign, is what led to Donald Trump's assassination attempts.
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Give me a break.
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You're going to say that and then give this a pass?
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and tell me that this is an absolutely acceptable thing for people to say.
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And not to be outdone, but if we had recorded that episode and had been able to get it up, it would have gone up before we woke up this morning to find out that Donald Trump had a complete meltdown at a Michigan rally last night and started simulating oral sex with his microphone.
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I mean, this is a guy that is so far out of the bounds of decency and normality that we ought to reject him.
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So, okay, so that's politically, but so I posted this and I got, there was a guy named Tom Tominey.
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He is apparently running for governor of Utah.
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He has a website, tomtominey.com.
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I don't even know if he's on the ballot, so maybe he's a write-in candidate, but he insists that he's a gubernatorial candidate here in Utah.
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And here's what he said to me, Jim, You need to quit the choir.
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Someone who spews such hate towards another child of God surely cannot represent his church in such a capacity.
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You are totally misrepresenting what Trump said, taking it out of context.
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And it went on to the point where other people were talking to him and said, he's not taking him out of context, that even if I The idea that somehow the choir, my first response to him was, you think either the church or the choir would endorse what Trump is saying here?
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Do we live on the same planet?
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It's bizarre to me how this has worked and how people have gone.
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And it looks like he's taken down some of the later things that he posted.
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Because...
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At one point, it devolved into a murder threat against me.
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Somebody else had said, Jim, you know, he said, I'm going to call the choir and I'm going to tell them about you, which is such an empty threat.
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The idea that the choir is going to say, oh, geez, Jim is opposed to murdering Liz Cheney?
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Well, gosh, we ought to just give him the boot.
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I mean, these people who try to get me kicked out of the choir don't seem to realize that The choir leadership is aware of the extremists online, and they are horrified by them.
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They are not on the side of the people who are embracing extremism.
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But that's neither here nor there.
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Somebody else was talking to him, and he said, well, I can live with the fact that he hates church teachings, which of course I don't, but I can let him live with the fact that he hates church teachings, but I can't let him live with this kind of slander against Donald Trump.
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And I'm saying, we're in a discussion about murder threats and you're telling me there's something you can't let me live?
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And I ended up calling the police and talking to them and they said, well, it doesn't sound like you're in immediate danger, but we'll give him a call.
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And so I'm assuming there's been a phone call there and they've bagged down.
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But Looking at this election going forward, seeing just how manifestly unfit Donald Trump is, whether he wins, whether he loses, the thing that breaks my heart more than almost anything is how much Donald Trump has broken my faith community and has broken the moral compass of so many people who desperately ought to know better.
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The Deseret News told us in 2016, this is a man who was unfit for the presidency, and nothing has changed since then.
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He has become more unfit.
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He has become more morally depraved, and he's also deteriorated both mentally and physically to the point where he does not have the capacity to function as president of the United States.
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And yet, every poll shows that Donald Trump is going to win not just the majority of the Latter-day Saint vote, but an overwhelming majority.
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In 2020, when Trump lost, he won 70% of all Latter-day Saint votes.
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In 2024, the most reliable polling shows him winning by a 40-point margin over Kamala Harris among Latter-day Saints.
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And I just look at this and I look at the pushback I get when I speak out against this.
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And I'm speaking out against this, not just politically.
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I'm not saying, oh, geesh, I am a Democrat and therefore, because I'm not a Democrat.
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I never have been a Democrat.
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And You know, I'm not saying, you know, this is my candidate, my party, and so that's why I can't stand Donald Trump.
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I'm saying it's a matter of morality.
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I'm absolutely a Liz Cheney Republican in terms of what I believe.
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And Liz Cheney has said over and over again things along the lines of, we can live with a president with bad policies.
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We cannot live with a president with no respect for the Constitution, who will end constitutional governance.
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And she has told her Republican colleagues that there is a day when Donald Trump will be gone, but your dishonor will remain.
00:25:47.913 --> 00:25:58.189
And when Donald Trump is gone, and I, again, I'm optimistic that he will be in a week or in a few days now.
00:25:58.429 --> 00:26:00.132
We're recording this on Saturday.
00:26:00.192 --> 00:26:01.433
We're going to release this on Saturday.
00:26:02.454 --> 00:26:05.864
And he's The election is on Tuesday.
00:26:06.644 --> 00:26:09.368
And I'm hopeful that that's when Trumpism ends.
00:26:10.691 --> 00:26:14.857
At least that's when Donald Trump's political career ends.
00:26:16.079 --> 00:26:23.611
But Trumpism and what Trumpism has done to Mormonism, to the church, that will continue.
00:26:24.593 --> 00:26:25.473
That will remain.
00:26:25.513 --> 00:26:30.781
And I don't see a way to heal that.
00:26:31.617 --> 00:26:42.371
I don't see a way where all of these people who have embraced a patently immoral evil man, in that Deseret News editorial, they call him evil.
00:26:42.411 --> 00:26:43.972
They call the recording evil.
00:26:45.214 --> 00:26:47.438
I want to see if I can find that phrase.
00:26:49.319 --> 00:26:56.648
But they talk specifically about the fact that this isn't about politics.
00:27:01.122 --> 00:27:01.602
Where is it?
00:27:03.564 --> 00:27:06.948
What oozes from this audio is evil.
00:27:07.827 --> 00:27:17.978
We hear a married man give smooth smug and self-congratulatory permission to his intense impulses, allowing them to outweigh the most modest sense of decency, fidelity, and commitment.
00:27:19.380 --> 00:27:25.045
And although it speaks volumes about sexual morality, it goes to the heart of all ethical behavior.
00:27:25.525 --> 00:27:33.594
Trump's banter belies a willingness to use and discard other human beings at will, that characteristic is the essence of a despot.
00:27:34.895 --> 00:27:46.791
And that's the church I believe in, is the church that finds this kind of behavior evil, this kind of behavior to be the behavior of a despot.
00:27:47.753 --> 00:27:59.589
And yet, that's not the church in which I sit in the pews next to people who are giving this a pass, who are giving this man, giving his threats, giving his bile, giving his totally...
00:28:00.034 --> 00:28:13.211
amoral, immoral lack of character, free reign, and they want to hand him not just the future of the nation, but the future of the church.
00:28:14.554 --> 00:28:22.124
And at one point, and I realize I'm rambling quite a lot here, Ian, and I'm going to turn this over to you in just a second here.
00:28:23.365 --> 00:28:41.903
But at one point, I pointed out that The people that hate, and we talked more about this last time we recorded this episode, but the people who hate Latter-day Saints the most are the other people in Donald Trump's orbit.
00:28:42.104 --> 00:29:05.434
They are the evangelical Christians who believe, and we encountered them in Scotland, people encountered them here in the United States, they believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an evil, wicked, satanic cult that And they stayed home in large numbers in 2012 when the nominee for president was a Mormon, because they hate Mormons more than they hate Democrats.
00:29:06.797 --> 00:29:08.179
And they think we're a cult.
00:29:08.298 --> 00:29:09.260
They think we're wicked.
00:29:09.280 --> 00:29:24.048
And people in Trump's orbit, there's a guy named Michael Flynn, who was Trump's national security advisor, who spoke about how important it is that when Donald Trump is in office, We can't just have one nation under God.
00:29:24.108 --> 00:29:26.372
We have to have one religion under God.
00:29:26.412 --> 00:29:37.228
And I posted a thing where I said, okay, Latter-day Saint Trumpers, what do you think is going to happen to the church when they don't need your votes anymore?
00:29:38.088 --> 00:29:42.214
Donald Trump has said to Christians, just vote this time and you won't ever need to vote again.
00:29:42.255 --> 00:29:51.827
And we've seen Donald Trump has said that he wants to run for a third term, even though the Constitution prohibits somebody from running for a third term.
00:29:52.409 --> 00:29:54.731
This is a guy with no respect for constitutional norms.
00:29:54.791 --> 00:29:57.494
We're the church that says that we are going to save the Constitution.
00:29:57.915 --> 00:30:10.172
And yet here we are handing the reins to a man who has said he who has explicitly said that we need to we need to terminate the Constitution.
00:30:10.633 --> 00:30:20.356
He tweeted the importance of he said we need to terminate all the rules in the Constitution in order to put me back in office because of all of the non-existent fraud in the last election.
00:30:21.397 --> 00:30:39.299
So the consequences, and I believe the brethren can see this, and I wish they would do more about it, but the consequences for the church, if Donald Trump wins, are going to be absolutely devastating in a lot of ways.
00:30:39.519 --> 00:30:41.823
It's going to damage the reputation of the United States.
00:30:42.002 --> 00:30:51.645
It's going to damage the reputation of the church, which unwisely threw in with Donald Trump by sending the Tabernacle Choir to perform in his inauguration.
00:30:52.926 --> 00:31:04.059
And the numbers of the church's voters that are voting for him just give the essence that we're tied at the hip, whether we want to be or not, with Donald Trump.
00:31:04.921 --> 00:31:20.611
And the amount of damage he's going to do and the kinds of people who are going to surround him are people who are not at all interested in supporting the church and helping the church and would love to see the church destroyed.
00:31:21.571 --> 00:31:24.256
So that's who we've thrown in with.
00:31:24.615 --> 00:31:37.875
And I just, no matter what the election results are, I think the church has been damaged in a fundamental and profound way.
00:31:37.914 --> 00:31:42.641
And I don't see how we recover.
00:31:43.623 --> 00:31:44.344
So there we go.
00:31:44.403 --> 00:31:51.654
My opening rant is, Do you have a counter rant or a supplementary rant?
00:31:54.037 --> 00:32:01.223
I have, I don't think I have a rant, but I have some positions and I have some opinions on what we're talking about here.
00:32:01.704 --> 00:32:06.348
So context is very important.
00:32:06.368 --> 00:32:10.653
And so I just want to give a little bit of background here.
00:32:10.712 --> 00:32:15.357
So Inside Out podcast is not a political podcast.
00:32:15.650 --> 00:32:21.797
We talk about the church, you know, the Mormon faith, the church of Jesus Christ, like the saints.
00:32:22.298 --> 00:32:24.299
It's the great things that it does.
00:32:24.359 --> 00:32:25.682
There's many, many great things.
00:32:26.262 --> 00:32:28.025
We talk about the quality of the members.
00:32:28.224 --> 00:32:34.192
For the most part, the members are extraordinary people, good, kind, serving, loving, Christlike people.
00:32:34.992 --> 00:32:40.700
But we also talk about many of the issues in the church and how that impacts mostly rank and file members.
00:32:40.900 --> 00:32:46.295
And of course, people who are post-Mormon, people who've been in the church on the left or people who've navigated the church.
00:32:46.335 --> 00:32:51.383
And that's the primary focus is to look at the church in an honest and a very balanced way, hopefully.
00:32:51.423 --> 00:33:06.265
And anything where the church is, we think, is making a mistake or it's perhaps taking the wrong path is to talk about it with the intent of trying to improve it.
00:33:07.207 --> 00:33:43.607
I'm not sure how much influence we have on that, probably little or nothing, but notwithstanding, it's important, we think, that's the reason why we set this podcast up, is to talk about these issues with the church, the good and the bad, but also to help people navigate their faith, essentially to help people, to talk about these issues, and to provide a safe platform where people can talk and express their views without fear of being labeled or criticized for expressing their opinion or free speech, because we talked about in the church, it's difficult to go to church, and this was my experience, and talk about certain things.
00:33:43.647 --> 00:33:44.828
There's certain things that are off limits.
00:33:44.888 --> 00:33:55.259
And I mentioned when I crossed the threshold of the church, when I was active in the church, and I had questions on anything, including politics, well, there were certain subjects, topics that were off limits.
00:33:55.279 --> 00:33:58.344
You couldn't and shouldn't talk about those things at church.
00:33:58.384 --> 00:34:04.750
And church, I felt in my own experience, on certain topics, certain subjects, was not safe.
00:34:05.510 --> 00:34:09.655
And Inside Out is trying to create a safe space to talk about these things.
00:34:09.715 --> 00:34:11.197
So why are we talking about politics?
00:34:11.777 --> 00:34:12.940
And that's the context bit.
00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:23.476
Well, the politics, whether we like it or not, whether we follow it or not, or discuss it or get into it or not, affects everybody's lives across the planet in very profound ways.
00:34:25.159 --> 00:34:33.431
And there's a distinct relationship between politics and the church, which I want to talk about briefly.
00:34:34.733 --> 00:34:39.802
If we look at the geopolitics that's happening right now, there are some very serious...
00:34:40.418 --> 00:34:43.523
things happening on the geopolitical stage.
00:34:43.623 --> 00:34:49.110
We have a war that's seemingly getting out of control in the Middle East.
00:34:49.871 --> 00:34:50.773
It is out of control.
00:34:50.813 --> 00:35:07.197
You've got Israel, which has been attacked by seven other organizations and regimes, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other state-sponsored terrorist organizations.
00:35:07.938 --> 00:35:24.634
that situation appears to be continuing to escalate and the church does have a relationship with that event and goes to Israel and is pro-Israel.
00:35:24.673 --> 00:35:27.757
The church is pro-Israel, is pro-Christian.
00:35:27.797 --> 00:35:39.289
The church is a Zionist religion and it is pro-Israel and the Evidence of that is extensive.
00:35:40.110 --> 00:35:43.454
The church officially or unofficially supports Israel.
00:35:43.474 --> 00:35:46.438
And I think that's right.
00:35:46.478 --> 00:35:47.260
I think it's important.
00:35:47.300 --> 00:35:51.686
So the church does have a position on Israel and these events.
00:35:52.206 --> 00:36:06.184
If you look at the other events happening in the world, we're now seeing further escalation between Russia and Ukraine with North Korea sending what appears to be 10,000 troops who are now at the border and have actually now entered Ukraine.
00:36:06.224 --> 00:36:11.657
We've got the East now fighting wars in Europe.
00:36:12.880 --> 00:36:15.623
And we see that situation escalating.
00:36:15.664 --> 00:36:24.157
We see Putin do some dummy tests with missiles, seemingly reminding the world that he's got nuclear missiles.
00:36:24.739 --> 00:36:31.731
Essentially, I think the deterrent, that nuclear deterrent for him, at least, is working because Ukraine is fighting the European war.
00:36:31.851 --> 00:36:33.512
This war is Europe, as you know.
00:36:34.146 --> 00:36:41.655
And we're seeing a huge amount of instability in that country trying to protect its democratic values and rights.
00:36:42.315 --> 00:36:50.384
And we're seeing involvement from NATO, from the West, in the form of equipment and military help and training and stuff like that.
00:36:50.724 --> 00:36:55.150
They're still not willing to end the war in fear of escalating the situation further.
00:36:55.489 --> 00:36:57.032
These are major global events.
00:36:57.733 --> 00:37:05.201
There are other major events that happen on a domestic scale that impact the world.
00:37:07.023 --> 00:37:13.233
What happens in the UK politically has, in my opinion, very little impact on the world stage.
00:37:13.954 --> 00:37:22.206
UK's now, certainly post-Brexit, has got limited influence on the world stage, in my view, in many ways.
00:37:22.286 --> 00:37:40.467
But the decisions that the Labour Party are taking recently in the UK, where they just announced£40 billion sterling in tax hikes, tax raises, is going to have a significant impact on the cost of living in that country, which is going through a very serious period of austerity.
00:37:41.230 --> 00:37:48.519
And that's affecting the Brits on a very, very personal level in very profound ways.
00:37:49.021 --> 00:37:55.871
So these are political decisions that are impacting people's lives, regardless of the religion that you follow.
00:37:56.371 --> 00:37:57.313
And then, of course, we come to the U.S.
00:37:57.333 --> 00:37:57.713
election.
00:37:58.135 --> 00:37:58.715
And the U.S.
00:37:58.735 --> 00:38:01.507
election matters because The U.S.
00:38:01.567 --> 00:38:05.311
economy is the biggest in the world, and the U.S.
00:38:05.391 --> 00:38:12.338
military capability and contribution globally, and so is NATO, is by far the biggest and strongest.
00:38:12.978 --> 00:38:14.681
The amount of money spent by the U.S.
00:38:14.701 --> 00:38:18.045
on military budget dwarfs everyone else.
00:38:19.106 --> 00:38:21.568
And the influence that the U.S.
00:38:21.588 --> 00:38:29.789
still has on the world stage is extremely significant, albeit that appears to be diminishing to some extent.
00:38:29.829 --> 00:38:55.902
We had a recent summit in Moscow hosted by Putin of the BRICS countries who are now trying to set up a counter currency to the US dollar and are looking at building a trading block of significance between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and there are some other smaller countries who are now participating, including Iran, of course.
00:38:56.514 --> 00:39:08.291
And so we're seeing these major events happening on the world stage, geopolitically, military, economically, and we should be concerned about what's going on in the world.
00:39:09.172 --> 00:39:13.840
And so this affects everyone in very profound ways.
00:39:14.702 --> 00:39:20.289
And the question I have, or the thoughts I have, is what is the role of the church in all of this?
00:39:20.851 --> 00:40:05.289
The church claims that it is the only true church upon the face of the earth, and I've reference that frequently because I take that very seriously and if that's true and President Nelson at this time represents God, Jesus Christ on the planet, the mouthpiece of Jesus Christ and the Heavenly Father who's got way more power than anything on this planet and can seemingly do things and control things and influence things for the better and bring humanity back from the brink of what looks like an exponential risk and threat to humankind over the next 100 years or so with wars and climate change and famine and all these issues.
00:40:06.030 --> 00:40:09.416
And boy, if we ever needed help, we need help now.
00:40:10.878 --> 00:40:19.851
If the second coming is real, I think Ian's little opinion here, I think now is a good time to kind of press that button to bring Christ back.
00:40:20.132 --> 00:40:21.054
Do we need help right now?
00:40:21.666 --> 00:40:22.106
And we do.
00:40:22.166 --> 00:40:22.987
We're desperate for help.
00:40:23.068 --> 00:40:24.028
We're desperate for leadership.
00:40:24.309 --> 00:40:43.956
And we're desperate to bring us back to save us from what looks like the, not immediate, but potentially mid-long term in the next years, 10, 50 years, whatever, coming back from the brink of extinction on these major events.
00:40:44.536 --> 00:40:50.726
So these are really important critical issues and events that are taking place.
00:40:51.137 --> 00:40:58.389
In my mind, my question is, what's the role of the only true church upon the face of that represents God?
00:40:58.588 --> 00:41:05.858
What's the role of the church and the church leadership in the events that are happening in the world that affect rank and file members?
00:41:06.360 --> 00:41:18.657
If you go to the church newsroom, the church has on the church website, so I'm not making this up, it's not anti-Mormons who posted anti-Mormon information onto the church website.
00:41:19.266 --> 00:41:26.735
This is a section they call Political Neutrality and Participation.
00:41:27.376 --> 00:41:30.699
And this is really important to be aware of this, to read this.
00:41:31.201 --> 00:41:39.490
He says here that the work of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints includes sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, strengthening individuals and families, and caring for those in need.
00:41:40.172 --> 00:41:51.103
The Church does not seek to elect government officials support or oppose political parties or generally take sides in global conflict.
00:41:51.143 --> 00:42:02.833
So there is evidence where they've done that with the events that happened in California and the gay rights movement that took place down there.
00:42:02.853 --> 00:42:05.956
And there's other examples where the church has taken certain positions.
00:42:07.057 --> 00:42:15.326
Nevertheless, it says here the church is neutral in matters of politics within or between the world's many nations, lands, and people.
00:42:15.938 --> 00:42:27.710
However, as an institution, it reserves the right to address issues it believes have significant moral consequences or that directly affect the mission, teachings, or operations of the church.
00:42:27.949 --> 00:42:35.197
You said a few moments ago that a re-election of Trump would have a significant negative potential impact on the church.
00:42:36.579 --> 00:42:51.570
So presumably that Trump's behavior, actions, who was a convicted felon, by the way, as you know, And I think people outside of America, certainly within America, I'm sure, but certainly outside, a puzzle why a convicted felon is even running for office.
00:42:52.311 --> 00:42:54.653
I just can't get my head around that.
00:42:54.715 --> 00:43:04.389
I just can't understand how America, with so many smart people and established systems and processes and institutions, can even allow something like that.
00:43:05.230 --> 00:43:12.862
Presumably, this has come up in the first presidency, that Trump is a convicted felon.
00:43:13.634 --> 00:43:14.394
running for office.
00:43:15.036 --> 00:43:23.005
I'm fascinated, amazing to learn a bit more about that conversation with the first president, what they think about
00:43:23.045 --> 00:43:23.166
that.
00:43:23.586 --> 00:43:24.907
He says he's at the church.
00:43:25.007 --> 00:43:27.672
But convicted felons are generally excommunicated.
00:43:29.514 --> 00:43:31.115
Convicted felons, don't they go to jail?
00:43:32.338 --> 00:43:47.748
Well, they go to jail, yeah, but the church, I think it's in the handbook that a conviction, a felony conviction is considered Sufficient evidence to demonstrate unchristlike conduct worthy of membership withdrawal.
00:43:49.010 --> 00:43:49.532
Absolutely.
00:43:49.552 --> 00:43:51.914
Without being able to be a member of the church as a convicted felon.
00:43:52.596 --> 00:43:57.543
So there are serious consequences for convicted felons if they're members of the church, right?
00:43:57.603 --> 00:43:57.824
Right.
00:43:58.184 --> 00:43:58.905
Absolutely.
00:43:58.965 --> 00:44:00.347
And rightly so.
00:44:01.027 --> 00:44:04.733
And presumably there are serious consequences in U.S.
00:44:04.773 --> 00:44:05.014
law.
00:44:05.474 --> 00:44:10.159
In other words, UK is the same, Canada is the same for convicted felons if you break the law.
00:44:10.378 --> 00:44:13.001
You know, there's a penalty, there's a punishment in some form, right?
00:44:13.762 --> 00:44:18.346
And this is where I'm struggling here with what the church is in its position.
00:44:18.847 --> 00:44:25.914
It says here that the church does not endorse, promote, or oppose political parties and their platforms or candidates for political office.
00:44:26.034 --> 00:44:33.360
Setting the momentable require to the Trump 2016 inauguration, I think he said, you know, is that taking a position?
00:44:33.581 --> 00:44:34.461
Well, I think it is.
00:44:34.818 --> 00:44:40.143
It does not allow its church buildings, membership lists, or other resources to be used for political purposes.
00:44:41.083 --> 00:44:51.735
I think that's false because I think that's when they shipped Utah members down to California to campaign for the position of the church.
00:44:51.775 --> 00:44:54.557
I think that is taking the position, and that's okay.
00:44:54.918 --> 00:44:55.838
I'm all right, by the way.
00:44:55.858 --> 00:44:56.679
I'm very comfortable.
00:44:56.719 --> 00:45:00.083
In fact, the way I'm going with this is I want the church.
00:45:00.523 --> 00:45:04.864
We said earlier, we talked earlier about What's the whole point of Inside Out?
00:45:05.744 --> 00:45:06.985
Why are we doing this podcast?
00:45:07.547 --> 00:45:12.672
We said one of the things is to see where, understand, and talk about where the church could improve.
00:45:13.253 --> 00:45:20.882
Well, as a non-member now, but I was in the church for 35, 37 years, I want the church, Jim, to take a position on things of morality.
00:45:21.322 --> 00:45:43.842
That's the point of the church, is to, as it's said, to implement physically in actions and beyond rhetoric the principles of Jesus Christ, of goodness and wholesomeness and integrity and honesty, which is what I believe the church stands for, is trying to stand for, at least.
00:45:44.943 --> 00:45:47.706
It says it does not advise its members on how to vote.
00:45:47.927 --> 00:45:51.411
I think that's in question on some of its activities as well.
00:45:51.431 --> 00:45:53.853
I think where it suits the church, it has done that.
00:45:54.793 --> 00:45:57.858
It does not direct government officials or party leaders in the duty of their office.
00:45:58.465 --> 00:46:03.494
It does not typically issue statements regarding disputes in or in between nations, lands, or peoples.
00:46:03.534 --> 00:46:10.543
Rather, it teaches the gospel of Jesus Christ with the knowledge that living these principles limits contention and hostilities.
00:46:10.945 --> 00:46:18.516
The church does believe and teach that members should be servitude to kings, presidents, rulers, advisors, churches, obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.
00:46:19.376 --> 00:46:37.173
Although the church has been breached of the law because it set up these funds in these hedge funds, tried to hide its wealth, there was an investigation by the federal authorities in the US and I think the church was fined for two things, I think.
00:46:37.855 --> 00:46:45.706
Hiding its wealth in these hedge funds and reporting that they weren't making as much money.
00:46:45.746 --> 00:46:47.528
If that's incorrect, please correct me.
00:46:48.329 --> 00:47:05.382
But the church did receive an official fine from the federal government about a year ago in respect to where it was investing its money and the rules around investing and disclosing its money and the amount of money that it has and reports.
00:47:06.422 --> 00:47:19.340
It does recognize the universal right to free exercise of conscience and believes all individuals and institutions should be able to express publicly their views on issues facing society.
00:47:20.362 --> 00:47:21.864
That's a really important point, that.
00:47:22.465 --> 00:47:22.985
And that's good.
00:47:23.489 --> 00:47:37.644
It does encourage members to play a role as responsible citizens in their communities, including becoming informed about issues, voting elections, participating in governance processes as they desire, and seeking for elected, appointed, or voluntary office.
00:47:37.704 --> 00:47:46.494
And you are, my friend, you are a great example of that, where you've tried to run for office because you want to improve things.
00:47:47.155 --> 00:47:48.456
Emphasis on tried.
00:47:48.496 --> 00:47:55.840
Well, it still doesn't distract from who you are and the kind of person that you are.
00:47:55.860 --> 00:48:06.030
That you're trying to improve your community in your neighborhood by getting involved in politics and improving the quality of decisions to achieve that.
00:48:06.851 --> 00:48:11.436
It does encourage its members to engage in the political process in an informed and civil manner.
00:48:11.936 --> 00:48:28.610
And one of my notes and my points here on my notes is that it's important to, it's really important to have conversations about politics because that we can influence, we should influence it for the better, for the betterment of the people.
00:48:28.710 --> 00:48:29.512
We've just said that.
00:48:30.172 --> 00:48:41.244
But it's also important to do that in a way that's kind and respectful and that the level of discourse, the type of discourse is not hateful or threatening.
00:48:41.463 --> 00:48:46.329
You've said earlier that you've been, you felt at risk, you felt threatened and you've had to call the police.
00:48:46.929 --> 00:48:55.764
That is where someone who's behaved against you like that, they've stepped over the line and perhaps even broken the law.
00:48:56.324 --> 00:49:03.893
And I think it's very sad when, you know, we can't express a political opinion view without the threat of, you know, without receiving those kind of threats.
00:49:03.914 --> 00:49:04.614
I think it's terrible.
00:49:05.135 --> 00:49:21.820
And we're living in a time now with so much division, so much hatred, where even online, on social media, it's almost impossible to express an opinion without someone at some point becoming hostile are behaving in a threatening way.
00:49:21.860 --> 00:49:35.614
I'm reminded of the January 6th event where Trump incited violent behavior and tried to overthrow the election.
00:49:35.635 --> 00:49:41.360
I don't know where we are with that January election investigation right now.
00:49:41.400 --> 00:49:52.650
I think that's still ongoing, but the evidence seems to be that he broke the law and actually incited violence and tried to-
00:49:54.592 --> 00:49:55.373
Well, yeah.
00:49:55.693 --> 00:49:58.637
The investigation is done.
00:49:58.677 --> 00:50:06.605
The charges have been filed and it was supposed to go to trial before the election.
00:50:06.644 --> 00:50:13.592
If Trump loses, it will likely go to trial with, I'd say, before the end of the year.
00:50:16.001 --> 00:50:43.621
because it's ready to go, and we're just waiting for the election to play out, because if Trump is reelected, he can either pardon himself, which we're not quite sure if that's legal, but I think given the Supreme Court, it will be legal, even if it's not now, or he will simply fire the special prosecutor and get his new attorney general to just drop all the charges.
00:50:44.322 --> 00:50:48.907
So the January 6th charges are federal charges.
00:50:50.047 --> 00:50:53.572
And so he can do that and he can pardon himself and he can affect those.
00:50:54.514 --> 00:50:59.539
There's another federal case that right now was dismissed wrongfully.
00:50:59.559 --> 00:51:02.523
This was the classified documents case.
00:51:03.864 --> 00:51:12.072
And there was a Trumpy judge that dismissed it based on a weird technicality that she didn't think the prosecutor was appointed appropriately.
00:51:12.802 --> 00:51:16.349
The prosecutor is appealing that and is very, very likely to win that.
00:51:16.449 --> 00:51:18.572
And that case is likely to be reinstated.
00:51:19.655 --> 00:51:22.360
And that's the most open and shut case against him.
00:51:22.400 --> 00:51:27.349
But I don't know that will go to trial because right now it's dismissed.
00:51:28.150 --> 00:51:31.737
But there's another case out there in Georgia.
00:51:32.545 --> 00:51:35.911
where Donald Trump tried to overthrow the election in Georgia.
00:51:35.931 --> 00:51:42.641
We have recordings of him calling the Georgia governor and the Georgia secretary of state and saying, look, you guys need to find me 11,000 votes.
00:51:42.661 --> 00:51:46.706
11,480 votes is the number.
00:51:47.708 --> 00:51:59.907
And that trial has gone through all kinds of gyrations because the prosecutor's kind of a doofus who was having an affair with another prosecutor and they tried to get her kicked off the case.
00:52:00.128 --> 00:52:07.628
And that whole melodrama has ended up postponing that case, and I'm not even sure where it is, but it hasn't been dismissed.
00:52:07.748 --> 00:52:21.445
It's still out there, and it's a state case, just like the case where he's been convicted, meaning as a state case, the president cannot pardon, cannot dismiss it.
00:52:21.847 --> 00:52:23.447
So that case will continue.
00:52:23.467 --> 00:52:32.668
It will likely be postponed until after Trump's presidency is concluded, but the charges aren't going away, and Trump is going to be sentenced.
00:52:33.329 --> 00:52:39.257
He's scheduled to be sentenced on November 28th for the convictions he already has.
00:52:40.159 --> 00:52:45.867
And each of those could see he's probably going to get maybe a year or two of jail time altogether.
00:52:46.628 --> 00:52:55.420
But the idea that a former president is going to go to jail, we're just acting like this is normal, that this is acceptable, that this is a guy who ought to run.
00:52:55.440 --> 00:52:56.061
So anyway, sorry.
00:52:56.418 --> 00:52:56.898
I jumped in.
00:52:56.938 --> 00:52:58.481
I think I may have...
00:52:58.661 --> 00:52:58.800
No,
00:52:59.061 --> 00:52:59.541
I'm under that.
00:52:59.561 --> 00:53:12.501
And I just want to, Gavin, just kind of conclude on these official statements by the church, because it's really important to understand the relationship between the church and politics, and the relationship of the church and the geopolitics, all the events happening in the world.
00:53:13.141 --> 00:53:21.393
He says here that the church does request that candidates for office not imply that candidates or platforms are endorsed by the church.
00:53:22.338 --> 00:53:35.672
It does want to provide humanitarian assistance around the world, including in areas of international conflict, where while political strife may be a factor in causing the need for assistance, the church will generally not comment on the conflict itself.
00:53:36.273 --> 00:53:43.161
Rather, the church focuses on the two great commandments, to love God and your neighbor by alleviating suffering, etc.
00:53:43.541 --> 00:53:45.603
Relationship with government, and this is an important statement.
00:53:46.043 --> 00:53:51.409
Government officials and political representatives, who are Latter-day Saints, make their own decisions, period.
00:53:51.969 --> 00:53:58.920
They're not expected or asked to agree with one another or even with a publicly stated church position.
00:54:00.882 --> 00:54:02.304
So the church has said that, right?
00:54:02.324 --> 00:54:05.489
They just have publicly stated positions on certain things.
00:54:05.789 --> 00:54:10.235
Well, and to their credit, that's accurate.
00:54:10.896 --> 00:54:13.260
My father, I remember talking to him about this.
00:54:13.860 --> 00:54:19.889
My father never once, he says, the church never once came to me and said, you need to vote a certain way.
00:54:20.898 --> 00:54:29.706
And he said when he first got elected, he met with the church's governmental relations director, who said, you're probably not going to hear from me very much.
00:54:30.668 --> 00:54:32.449
And that ended up being true.
00:54:33.050 --> 00:54:42.701
And while my father was in the Senate, he was a Republican in Senate leadership, and the Senate majority leader was a Democrat and a Latter-day Saint.
00:54:44.182 --> 00:54:46.105
And they were diametrically opposed.
00:54:46.204 --> 00:54:47.065
And Harry Reid...
00:54:48.161 --> 00:55:07.900
is arguably not not even arguably he is the most powerful high-ranking elected official in he was and still is in terms of this history the most high-ranking latter-day saint ever to be elected to high office and he was a democrat
00:55:08.601 --> 00:55:34.664
democrat and then to to that point he says he says here while the church may communicate its views to them these are people who are members who are really for office As it may to any other officials or representatives, it recognizes that these individuals must make their own choices according to their best judgment and considering the constituencies they were elected to represent.
00:55:35.686 --> 00:55:41.074
And then just to close out the statement here, there's a...
00:55:42.786 --> 00:55:44.186
comment at the end, the conclusion.
00:55:44.246 --> 00:55:51.293
I do recommend people read this because it's a really important official statement of the church on the newsroom here, on the website.
00:55:51.773 --> 00:55:59.601
It says the conclusion, to navigate the application of these principles of political neutrality and participation in an ever-changing and complex world.
00:56:00.302 --> 00:56:07.009
The first presidency of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will continue to seek prophetic wisdom and revelation on these matters.
00:56:07.568 --> 00:56:10.032
And that's the thing that I have a problem with, Jim.
00:56:10.211 --> 00:56:12.233
I would...
00:56:12.802 --> 00:56:18.168
Love to see the church take a position on certain things, to come out and to stand up for what is right.
00:56:18.869 --> 00:56:29.739
If we look at this election on Tuesday with Trump and Harris, matters not only to Americans, but it matters to the rest of the world.
00:56:30.661 --> 00:56:38.969
It is probably, arguably, the most important election in American history, or one of the most important elections in American history.
00:56:39.510 --> 00:56:44.827
It will have a profound effect domestically, economically taxed.
00:56:44.949 --> 00:56:47.351
Trump's talking about raising tariffs.
00:56:47.391 --> 00:56:55.501
That's going to have a profound impact on its economy, a profound impact on the geo-economies happening in the world there.
00:56:56.422 --> 00:57:02.971
And there'll be a profound impact on the moral principles of the country.
00:57:03.871 --> 00:57:18.384
I think the world, not the world, I think there are actors in the world, and I'll name them, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, There's a few of us that would absolutely love to see America weakened.
00:57:18.423 --> 00:57:22.449
It would love to see America divided.
00:57:22.608 --> 00:57:26.793
They're rubbing their hands, seeing the division in America.
00:57:26.954 --> 00:57:28.655
Putin wants to break up Europe.
00:57:28.695 --> 00:57:33.900
He wants to expand his colonial reach, taking over Ukraine.
00:57:34.481 --> 00:57:36.543
He sees Ukraine as part of Russia.
00:57:37.144 --> 00:57:37.605
It's official.
00:57:37.965 --> 00:57:38.425
He said that.
00:57:39.713 --> 00:57:42.237
China sees Taiwan as a renegade country.
00:57:42.277 --> 00:57:44.019
They're trying to pull Taiwan back in.
00:57:45.943 --> 00:57:47.344
Putin won't just stop at Ukraine.
00:57:47.385 --> 00:57:48.346
I think he'll continue.
00:57:48.425 --> 00:57:52.112
Moldova, he also sees that as a renegade breakaway from Russia.
00:57:53.233 --> 00:58:00.063
And to achieve their objectives, their aims, they need a weakened America.
00:58:00.643 --> 00:58:13.001
With a divided, weakened America, speaking as a Brit, a non-American, the world is in greater crisis, greater trouble.
00:58:13.161 --> 00:58:38.514
We need a strong, fair, balanced America with all of its powers, all of its resources, to uphold those fundamental values and principles of decency and honesty, a respect for law, a respect for life, I want to highlight that because there are countries out there that don't respect life.
00:58:39.516 --> 00:58:40.898
They don't value life.
00:58:43.021 --> 00:58:57.523
And America and countries like America, Britain, Australia, Canada, and other countries who respect the democratic laws and process, respect life and have fundamental values.
00:58:58.244 --> 00:59:01.809
And a weak in America is bad for the world.
00:59:03.711 --> 00:59:15.885
And so Tuesday matters to everyone on this planet, certainly Americans, and certainly with the rest of the world.
00:59:20.452 --> 00:59:33.793
Just to conclude my comments at this stage in our conversation, I am disappointed that the first presidency hasn't done more to take a...
00:59:35.041 --> 01:00:04.250
position publicly on the principles of what Christ taught of decency and kindness and goodness and integrity, on those fundamental backbone principles that the church rests on, that the divinity of the church rests on, that the whole point of having the church that relies on and rests on, on that foundation hasn't come out and talked about the morality of this election, the morality of someone like Trump.
01:00:04.706 --> 01:00:16.141
you know, we talked on the first time we did this, you know, I talked about why people voting, you know, for, why would they vote for Trump or why would they vote for any office?
01:00:19.184 --> 01:00:27.777
Someone, vote someone into office who doesn't have or have certain moral values, et cetera.
01:00:27.817 --> 01:00:45.532
And one of the reasons I mentioned is that a lot of people, and I include myself to this extent as well, And I'm not saying that I, if I was an American, I certainly wouldn't be voting for Donald Trump by any means, even though he does some things that I agree with.
01:00:48.496 --> 01:01:05.824
But a lot of people, I think, and I'm one of them, and this is my experience in Canada and my experience in the UK, where I've lost confidence in the traditional conventional political system and process.
01:01:06.905 --> 01:01:07.527
And I'm not alone.
01:01:08.248 --> 01:01:32.679
If you look at the, just trump aside for a moment, if you look at the traditional conventional political system that the UK has, Canada has, America has, Australia, et cetera, and it's not perfect, I understand that, but I've lost confidence in many, many politicians who I don't trust, I don't believe.
01:01:32.719 --> 01:01:44.277
If you look at the Labour Party there, who's now been elected in this last election in the UK, they're now going back on a lot of their promises that they made in their manifesto prior to the election.
01:01:45.458 --> 01:01:57.157
I think in some ways, I think they have to because there was a massive hole in public finances in the UK and they had to raise tax, albeit not to that extent, I don't think.
01:01:57.197 --> 01:02:03.208
But anyway, A lot of people, including myself, have just lost confidence in the political process.
01:02:03.748 --> 01:02:14.382
And the guy in the street, the little man in the street, feels probably disenfranchised and disconnected and helpless and somewhat useless in terms of being able to do anything.
01:02:14.543 --> 01:02:25.297
These events, these political decisions and events, these political parties, we can't influence them, we can't control them, we can vote, etc., but they're going to come into office and do what they want to do.
01:02:25.762 --> 01:02:29.387
however they want and when they want and how they want, etc.
01:02:30.329 --> 01:02:34.315
And so there are many people out there who've lost confidence.
01:02:34.454 --> 01:02:35.856
And so they look at an alternative.
01:02:36.197 --> 01:02:42.447
If you look at Germany prior to the Second World War, Germany was in the toilet economically.
01:02:42.487 --> 01:02:55.286
And it was weakened militarily previously and in other military conflicts prior to the First World War.
01:02:56.001 --> 01:02:59.806
And it was at an intersection.
01:02:59.925 --> 01:03:03.929
And they voted in this extreme fascist, Hitler.
01:03:05.210 --> 01:03:25.570
And the definition of fascism, I've got it here, is so when a country is in a very difficult position and it's lost confidence in those traditional conventional political leaders and processes and systems, the danger is they swing extreme to the other end.
01:03:27.041 --> 01:03:28.543
And this is what happened in Germany.
01:03:28.804 --> 01:03:39.496
And I think this is what could happen in America, where they swing from that established system, because they're not happy with it, Jim, for different reasons.
01:03:39.697 --> 01:03:40.378
And rightly so.
01:03:41.139 --> 01:03:44.802
They've lost confidence, lost confidence in some of it, that they're not represented.
01:03:45.503 --> 01:03:47.385
They can't afford to live.
01:03:47.425 --> 01:03:48.708
They can't afford to pay the bills.
01:03:48.788 --> 01:03:49.849
Can't afford to pay the mortgage.
01:03:50.809 --> 01:03:52.771
Cost of living is out of control.
01:03:52.831 --> 01:03:54.034
They haven't got access to good health.
01:03:54.690 --> 01:04:05.219
These are all basic principles of trying to live a decent life with access to these services to improve the quality of life.
01:04:05.960 --> 01:04:08.322
And for many, it's not happening.
01:04:08.822 --> 01:04:24.197
They don't have access to those opportunities or they're not prospering or progressing financially or personally in some ways under the current established political system.
01:04:24.802 --> 01:04:25.943
It's just not working for them.
01:04:26.423 --> 01:04:28.326
And the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.
01:04:28.365 --> 01:04:33.231
The divide between the rich and poor is getting wider and growing faster, and they feel disconnected.
01:04:33.271 --> 01:04:33.871
So what do they do?
01:04:33.931 --> 01:04:35.454
They opt for an alternative.
01:04:35.954 --> 01:04:39.717
In America, they're opting, looking at something quite extreme.
01:04:39.737 --> 01:04:43.282
I think Trump is a very extreme individual and unhinged.
01:04:43.862 --> 01:04:51.451
His behavior recently in this campaign is increasingly worrying and increasingly unhinged.
01:04:51.992 --> 01:04:56.869
And if you look at the definition of fascism, And you ask yourself if this fits with Trump.
01:04:57.148 --> 01:05:02.735
This certainly fits with the Nazi party in Germany at that time.
01:05:02.775 --> 01:05:07.340
And you can decide whether this fits Trump or not.
01:05:07.460 --> 01:05:43.199
But fascism is a far-right authoritarian and ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a neutral social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and economy.
01:05:43.601 --> 01:05:51.331
Well, that describes Nazi Germany at that time very convincingly in my mind.
01:05:52.492 --> 01:05:53.014
Does that...
01:05:53.922 --> 01:05:57.306
describe the character of the baby of Trump.
01:05:57.626 --> 01:05:59.447
I think some of it does, for sure.
01:05:59.849 --> 01:06:02.271
I'm not for one second saying Trump is Hitler by any means.
01:06:02.871 --> 01:06:08.137
But Trump is wanting to throw out all those political institutions.
01:06:08.518 --> 01:06:17.809
He talked on the first point, the first time we had this conversation, and this is the point I want to hand back to you, actually, because I'm pretty much done with what I want to say on this.
01:06:18.289 --> 01:06:20.110
But we talked about normalcy.
01:06:20.231 --> 01:06:21.072
We talked about...
01:06:22.945 --> 01:06:28.172
We talked about some of the values of the established system, which is not perfect, and I've said that.
01:06:28.693 --> 01:06:50.797
Nevertheless, there's a level of normality that the established system, the processes where people are expected to behave and conduct themselves within that lane of normality, which is that traditional, conventional political thinking and mindset, albeit, as I mentioned, some people have lost confidence in that.
01:06:51.233 --> 01:06:58.780
But when we first talked, Jim, you talked about Trump's behavior being well outside of normalcy.
01:06:58.820 --> 01:07:05.507
So I want to hand that back over to you and ask you to comment on that because people will vote for him.
01:07:05.527 --> 01:07:19.420
It appears that if you look at the polls, it appears from some of the polls that it's quite close, albeit I think that Harris is probably ahead by a little bit, by a smidgen, I imagine.
01:07:19.920 --> 01:07:31.032
But could you talk about the issue of normalcy in the current political climate in the United States?
01:07:31.753 --> 01:07:32.833
Sure, sure.
01:07:32.873 --> 01:07:37.719
Yeah, this is something I talk about a lot when people ask me, how can I vote for Donald Trump?
01:07:37.960 --> 01:07:42.184
I'm sorry, how can I vote for a Democrat having been a lifelong Republican?
01:07:42.905 --> 01:07:46.909
I left the Republican Party when Donald Trump received the Republican nomination in 2015.
01:07:47.871 --> 01:07:52.083
But everything I believed when I was a Republican, I still believe.
01:07:53.143 --> 01:07:56.447
And I look at Liz Cheney and I think, yeah, this is somebody.
01:07:56.467 --> 01:08:07.240
I share a common set of beliefs with this woman who is taking so much heat for putting country over party.
01:08:08.061 --> 01:08:11.505
But I always tell the story of P.J.
01:08:11.545 --> 01:08:16.192
O'Rourke, who was a very funny conservative writer.
01:08:16.591 --> 01:08:17.913
He wrote long-form...
01:08:18.786 --> 01:08:20.167
He wasn't just like a columnist.
01:08:20.207 --> 01:08:20.868
He wrote books.
01:08:21.009 --> 01:08:22.090
I have several of P.J.
01:08:22.109 --> 01:08:22.770
O'Rourke's books.
01:08:22.810 --> 01:08:23.912
I'm looking at them right now.
01:08:23.952 --> 01:08:25.954
All the Trouble in the World is one of them.
01:08:26.475 --> 01:08:28.197
Eat the Rich is another one of them.
01:08:29.118 --> 01:08:34.585
And he wrote from a very broad perspective and a very conservative perspective.
01:08:35.466 --> 01:08:37.268
He's since passed away, unfortunately.
01:08:37.328 --> 01:08:39.730
But in 2016, P.J.
01:08:39.831 --> 01:08:41.792
O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton.
01:08:43.095 --> 01:08:44.315
And he says, this is not a joke.
01:08:44.395 --> 01:08:45.618
I'm doing this unironically.
01:08:46.305 --> 01:08:54.474
And when asked why, he said, I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton because she's going to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything.
01:08:55.515 --> 01:09:02.081
But she's going to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything within normal parameters.
01:09:03.381 --> 01:09:10.109
And that, to me, is kind of what this entire election comes down to.
01:09:10.128 --> 01:09:19.302
And again, to emphasize, I'm talking about the church as well as the nation.
01:09:21.447 --> 01:09:44.622
What Trump has done is erode the boundaries between what's acceptable and what is not, and things that would have been ludicrously disqualifying just even as recently as 2012 if Mitt Romney had done anything like what Donald Trump has done.
01:09:45.154 --> 01:10:06.935
If Barack Obama had done anything like what Donald Trump has done, they would have been laughed out of the campaign, laughed out of the race, if that Access Hollywood tape that the Deseret News editorialized on in 2016 had come from any other candidate at any other time in our nation's history, it would have been the end of that candidacy.
01:10:07.636 --> 01:10:23.140
And you see, if you go through Twitter, you can see things like, early on Donald Trump, there was a reporter who had a withered arm, who was disabled and had this arm that he had this strange look to him.
01:10:23.301 --> 01:10:27.868
And Donald Trump went out at a rally and made fun of it and made fun.
01:10:28.108 --> 01:10:31.472
He did the, nobody can see me, but I'm doing, he did this thing with his arm.
01:10:31.773 --> 01:10:33.234
Oh, and made fun of this reporter.
01:10:33.255 --> 01:10:37.220
And I see a picture of that side by side with this reporter.
01:10:38.100 --> 01:10:41.345
And the caption is always, this should have been the end of it.
01:10:42.402 --> 01:10:52.564
You know, if anybody else had done that, mocking a disabled reporter, they would have been laughed off the stage, off the political stage.
01:10:53.145 --> 01:10:57.194
In 1984, Gary Hart carried on with Donna Rice on a boat.
01:10:57.890 --> 01:10:59.792
A woman who was not his wife.
01:10:59.953 --> 01:11:03.798
And that was enough for him to be booted out of the Democratic primary.
01:11:03.838 --> 01:11:08.364
And Bill Clinton was impeached because he had an affair with a 21-year-old intern.
01:11:08.385 --> 01:11:10.868
And that was this huge national scandal.
01:11:10.969 --> 01:11:15.074
And now we have a rapist who was convicted of 34 felonies.
01:11:15.855 --> 01:11:29.198
Just go down the list of the number of things that Donald Trump has done to obliterate Not just the legal, but the moral norms of how this country is supposed to behave.
01:11:30.761 --> 01:11:33.926
And it just, it brings tears to my eyes.
01:11:33.945 --> 01:11:43.881
And no more so than in thinking about what it's done to obliterate moral boundaries within the church.
01:11:44.902 --> 01:11:52.233
The idea that this man is somebody that my fellow Latter-day Saints not only feel that they can embrace...
01:11:53.185 --> 01:11:57.872
but feel like they can question my faith when I refuse to embrace.
01:11:59.373 --> 01:12:01.155
I get angry.
01:12:01.176 --> 01:12:15.273
I've gotten, I'm going to be very vague here, but at one point I got criticism through official church channels from church leaders who have ecclesiastical authority over me.
01:12:16.453 --> 01:12:19.398
And the criticism was, you are too critical of Donald Trump.
01:12:20.257 --> 01:12:24.023
And I pushed back as hard as I could and said, you are way out of line.
01:12:24.063 --> 01:12:28.149
I have made no covenant not to speak evil of Donald Trump.
01:12:28.849 --> 01:12:40.305
But as I talk to people in the church, I mean, at this point, I don't talk politics with people in the church because it's too painful.
01:12:41.386 --> 01:12:50.238
But I can remember in 2020, I was walking my dog and one of my neighbors was walking her dog and she turned, hey, Bennett.
01:12:50.818 --> 01:12:53.802
Hey, what are you going to do when Trump wins?
01:12:53.823 --> 01:12:55.185
Because you know he's going to win.
01:12:55.204 --> 01:13:07.324
And this same person has spoken up in gospel doctrine class about how Trump is the chosen vessel to do the Lord's will.
01:13:07.364 --> 01:13:12.913
And that kind of vibe circulates throughout the church.
01:13:13.073 --> 01:13:17.782
After the Trump assassination attempt, I had a neighbor stick up this huge, massive Trump flag.
01:13:18.466 --> 01:13:26.779
And this is a neighbor that I've known for a very long time who is, you know, he has a position of responsibility in the church.
01:13:27.680 --> 01:13:42.922
And I just look at all of this and I just, yeah, everything you've said, Ian, about the importance of a strong America, of an America that has integrity, that has the ability to lead the world in so many ways.
01:13:43.663 --> 01:13:44.706
All of that is true.
01:13:45.793 --> 01:13:58.069
But at its core, the thing that breaks my heart the most about Donald Trump is that we need a strong and faithful and kind and decent church.
01:13:59.289 --> 01:14:12.525
And Donald Trump has done more to erode the basic human decency of Latter-day Saints than anyone I have ever seen in my lifetime.
01:14:13.087 --> 01:14:15.510
If I look over the course of the church...
01:14:16.065 --> 01:14:17.368
the history of the church.
01:14:18.469 --> 01:14:29.043
I can't point to anybody else that has done more to erode just basic decency and moral norms within the church than Donald Trump.
01:14:29.725 --> 01:14:41.341
So when you talk about normalcy, what's normal, what is not normal, that's the most painful legacy that Trump has left us as a nation and as a church.
01:14:42.101 --> 01:14:46.532
He's allowed us to live in alternate realities You can talk to people.
01:14:46.851 --> 01:14:49.956
Donald Trump, as we're talking, I've been scrolling here a little bit.
01:14:50.055 --> 01:14:53.921
He's been speaking and he's talking about how the United States is in the midst of a depression.
01:14:54.842 --> 01:14:59.748
The United States right now has the strongest economy in the world and one of the strongest economies it's ever had.
01:15:00.310 --> 01:15:02.493
We have unemployment well below full employment.
01:15:03.474 --> 01:15:05.235
The standard for full employment is something like 5%.
01:15:05.596 --> 01:15:10.042
And we have unemployment around, I don't even think it's 3%.
01:15:11.824 --> 01:15:12.386
We have...
01:15:13.122 --> 01:15:21.552
You know, Joe Biden has created so many new jobs and inflation is now down to target levels.
01:15:21.712 --> 01:15:22.814
The economy is strong.
01:15:22.873 --> 01:15:24.676
And here's Donald Trump saying it's interdepression.
01:15:25.797 --> 01:15:27.640
And the people who are listening to him believe him.
01:15:27.659 --> 01:15:32.286
And Donald Trump has said crime is running rampant throughout the United States.
01:15:32.726 --> 01:15:35.189
No, crime is down in the United States.
01:15:36.002 --> 01:15:39.868
Well, immigrants have taken 100% of the new jobs.
01:15:40.108 --> 01:15:40.930
That's one of his lines.
01:15:41.010 --> 01:15:42.351
That's absolute nonsense.
01:15:42.851 --> 01:15:45.737
All of these things are provably false.
01:15:46.198 --> 01:15:57.675
And yet, not only is Donald Trump allowed to say them, but huge numbers of Americans and huge numbers of Latter-day Saints believe them.
01:15:58.256 --> 01:16:00.118
And they are not true.
01:16:00.659 --> 01:16:02.523
And that is not normal.
01:16:03.384 --> 01:16:04.546
When we were missionaries...
01:16:05.090 --> 01:16:11.823
the thing that we would do to challenge people to join the church would be to read and pray about the Book of Mormon.
01:16:12.045 --> 01:16:15.612
And we would read them Moroni chapter 10, verses 3 through 5.
01:16:16.413 --> 01:16:19.179
And the fifth verse, I think, is the most powerful.
01:16:19.219 --> 01:16:35.222
It says,"...and by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things." not meaning you will know all truth, but you will be able by the power of the Spirit to discern truth from error, to know what things are true.
01:16:35.243 --> 01:16:41.192
That is a gift, that is a birthright given to all of us as children of God.
01:16:41.212 --> 01:16:53.710
And as Latter-day Saints who have the gift of the Holy Ghost, we have more power and authority to call upon that gift.
01:16:54.692 --> 01:16:59.060
What we say we do, that we have that authority that nobody else has.
01:16:59.162 --> 01:17:00.844
You keep talking about this is the only true church.
01:17:00.923 --> 01:17:02.746
We say, well, we have the gift of the Holy Ghost.
01:17:03.146 --> 01:17:05.048
We have the ability to discern truth from error.
01:17:05.869 --> 01:17:18.686
And we have allowed ourselves to be siloed in an alternate reality where truth no longer matters and where outright lies are accepted as reality.
01:17:19.507 --> 01:17:20.949
And that has to stop.
01:17:21.666 --> 01:17:27.672
And so no matter what happens on Tuesday, I am optimistic that Harris is going to win for a number of reasons.
01:17:28.153 --> 01:17:34.680
One, she's run such a great campaign and Trump has run such a nightmare campaign and such a shambolic mess.
01:17:35.421 --> 01:17:36.783
He keeps screwing up.
01:17:36.944 --> 01:17:39.365
She hasn't had a bad day as far as I'm concerned.
01:17:39.747 --> 01:17:45.654
And all the polls show the enthusiasm for Democrats is way above enthusiasm for Republicans.
01:17:46.177 --> 01:17:50.283
I don't think it's going to be as close as people say it is, but of course I could be wrong.
01:17:50.443 --> 01:17:51.283
I have been wrong.
01:17:51.845 --> 01:17:54.528
So my prognostications aren't worth anything.
01:17:55.689 --> 01:18:15.793
But no matter what happens, the fallout, the damage from a church that has allowed itself to sell its soul to the most evil person ever to run for president of the United States, that's going to be damage that will linger.
01:18:16.386 --> 01:18:20.911
And hopefully, Ian, you will be here with me to try to clean it up.
01:18:21.631 --> 01:18:24.395
But it really is heartbreaking.
01:18:24.534 --> 01:18:42.095
And I just implore all of my, anybody who's listening to this, no matter where you are on the spectrum in terms of your faith, please, please, please search your heart.
01:18:42.935 --> 01:18:52.119
I think you know deep down what the right decision is on Tuesday, who you ought to be voting for.
01:18:52.159 --> 01:18:57.689
And I beg of you to trust that.
01:18:58.590 --> 01:19:00.894
Don't trust people who lie to you.
01:19:00.913 --> 01:19:08.426
Donald Trump has done nothing but lie to you since he came down from that escalator after announcing his candidacy.
01:19:09.367 --> 01:19:21.646
Please, if the truth matters to you, it doesn't matter to me where you are in terms of your membership in the church, your faith in the church, your belief in the church, please believe in truth.
01:19:22.167 --> 01:19:23.668
Please believe in decency.
01:19:24.109 --> 01:19:25.430
Please believe in kindness.
01:19:26.192 --> 01:19:27.634
And please reject Donald Trump.
01:19:28.234 --> 01:19:29.976
And that's my final word.
01:19:32.158 --> 01:19:32.840
Jim, thank you.
01:19:32.859 --> 01:19:35.984
Just a couple of real final thoughts here.
01:19:36.845 --> 01:19:38.846
Well, one thought, actually, to keep it brief.
01:19:39.627 --> 01:19:39.768
I...
01:19:41.858 --> 01:19:44.421
still have high expectations of the church.
01:19:44.461 --> 01:19:50.109
I still believe in the goodness of the church and the goodness of the leaders of the church.
01:19:50.269 --> 01:19:51.390
And they do.
01:19:51.430 --> 01:19:57.418
I think for the most part, they make good decisions or try to make good decisions and try to do right.
01:19:57.578 --> 01:20:05.670
And I think basically, fundamentally, the good people, sometimes in certain ways, on some things for sure.
01:20:06.770 --> 01:20:51.996
And I hope that the church leadership will um especially on things like this on on issues of morality and truth and honesty and integrity will take a more obvious position on these things and come out and speak up and take a position it does that and it has done that on issues that it is concerned about and as the only true church upon the face of the earth it has a obligation a moral spiritual emotional obligation to state his position on critical issues that are impacting not just rank and file members of the church, but every living soul on the planet.
01:20:52.055 --> 01:20:58.181
The church reminded that the prophet is not just a prophet for the members of the church, but is he not the prophet for the whole world?
01:20:58.202 --> 01:21:00.163
I think he is.
01:21:00.184 --> 01:21:03.648
I think that's what the church teaches.
01:21:04.427 --> 01:21:50.930
And so it's important I think to vote for people with integrity and honesty and decency and I will leave it on that and I hope my prediction on Tuesday is that Harris will win there'll be four to five four to six point margin I think when people are going to the polls going to the ballot box rather I believe in the goodness of people and that they will think very carefully as they're going to discharge their obligation and vote for someone, I think that will ultimately make a decision on morality and the basic principles.
01:21:51.090 --> 01:22:00.042
Even though you'll have people who will go into the ballot box who are like me, Americans, who probably have lost confidence in that established system.
01:22:00.082 --> 01:22:34.140
Nevertheless, I think they will ultimately vote for the status quo and because that's a lot better frankly than voting for Trump so anyway again we're not political podcasts we never or rarely have these conversations but I think it's important that we did important to talk about these things and we have hopefully to our listeners we've kind of hopefully put it in context in regards to the church and the role of church So I really appreciate this conversation.
01:22:34.279 --> 01:22:35.240
They're very important things.
01:22:35.561 --> 01:22:52.162
And I hope for America to be reunited and to get back to what it is best to be a balancing force and power for good in the world because we need it.
01:22:52.202 --> 01:22:53.283
Thank you.
01:22:54.145 --> 01:22:54.664
Thank you.
01:22:54.865 --> 01:22:56.387
And thank you all for listening.
01:22:56.427 --> 01:23:01.154
Thank you for your patience with this political digression here.
01:23:01.793 --> 01:23:05.783
But we very much appreciate you sharing this time with us on Inside Out.
01:23:05.903 --> 01:23:10.613
Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can be notified when new episodes drop.
01:23:11.475 --> 01:23:18.048
And until next time, thank you for listening, and we hope to see you next time on Inside Out.
01:23:18.368 --> 01:23:19.171
Thank you very much, Ian.
01:23:20.172 --> 01:23:20.634
Thank you, Jim.