What Is Mitt Romney’s -- and Mormonism's -- Final Destination?
McKay Coppins's Romney book is as much about Mormonism's reckoning as it is about Mitt's.
I recently read McKay Coppins’s book, Romney: A Reckoning, and have some thoughts about what it might portend for the future political role of the Mormon Church in America.
You might have noticed that this topic has become a theme of mine as of late and I may well turn to it in more detail once I’ve digested my family’s own connection to the Mormons who broke from Joseph Smith and joined up with Abraham Lincoln. We take on with some attention la famille Huntsman and its connections to Deseret and the Armenian mafia. (Um… why was Jon Huntsman Sr. granted Armenian citizenship anyway?)
Coppins’s book was published last year and has some interesting political trivia and a few juicy details but it has to be very carefully read, so carefully read in fact that I can’t say I’d recommend it to you. I don’t agree with Coppins’s conclusions about Romney being particularly morally compromised. And besides does Coppins who works for the IDF-controlled Atlantic and is edited by prison warden really want to talk about moral compromise as the Israeli state rampages throughout the Middle East? Oh you better believe they’ll be a reckoning here, too, even if the IDF is being tamed by the NSA! Kick that door open for that larger conversation about Israeli operations against Americans Ta-Nehisi Coates!
No, there’s a nobility to Romney and his sense of WASPish noblesse oblige. “The Romney Obligation” harks back to another, perhaps better time though I couldn’t help but wonder how much it’s a performance like that of his California-born actress mother or his car salesman father. How much of all statecraft is all stagecraft anyway? Maybe effective government — to say nothing of Mormonism — is all really just management consulting in the final analysis. “Give that Excel spreadsheet and I’ll protect your rights!”
Still to the extent that Romney opposes the criminal Huntsman family which is currently fighting California he has more support and even my praise.
Romney always struck me as a kind of compromise candidate, bouncing between the dictates of his faith and demands of his alleged constitutionalism, which funnily enough somehow seemed to line up with whatever the LDS establishment wanted. There’s a telling moment in Coppins’s book where Ann and Mitt Romney seem gratified that more people are joining their church after their runs for the presidency. Maybe this was the plan all along?
As I see it the central issue in Mormonism is choice — Choosing the Right — and it’s in that context we can evaluate Romney’s choices as he tried to capture the presidency. How did our septuagenarian senator fare? Not well, he concedes.
For what it’s worth I don’t believe that a believing Mormon can ever become President. I’m not a fan of Deseret nor they of me. In my less charitable moments I regard bringing Deseret to heel as a completion of the Republican Party platform of 1856 which struggled against the twin barbarisms of our time slavery and polygamy.
To be sure polygamy isn’t really a feature of anything other than the Salt Lake City exurbs (or reality TV) but slavery is still with us. Oh yes, that $100B+ Mormon sovereign wealth fund was built on slave labor, cultish thinking and deception. Such a largesse needs to be repurposed for the needs of the American people and maybe managed by one Mitt Romney, albeit with American supervision.
There’s been a kind of politesse around talking about cults. Cult leaders tend to like other cult leaders. There’s even a tacit agreement: “I won’t call you on what you’re about if you don't call me on what I’m about.”
For all Mormonism’s talk of the Constitution being an article of faith it’s awfully convenient that Romney has voted for his wife in the past few elections. Yes, yes, Romney’s a wife guy but that sort of thing is more than simple simping. It’s evading a public responsibility to stand and be counted. It’s running away.
To his credit Romney backed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson but he should be backing Howard University’s own Kamala Harris.
If Mitt Romney really wants our attention he ought to endorse Kamala Harris and she ought to accept that endorsement by making Romney Secretary of State.
In that gesture Romney will reveal that his branch of Mormons are fit to serve the Union — just as my branch of Mormons made the decision to serve Lincoln, come what may. He will break from the politics of failsons who serve first and foremost their families rather than our fragile young Republic.
To their credit Romney’s family chose the Union after the tumult in Mexico and so he offered a path away from Deseret’s strange alliances in China and Russia. Note that Jon Huntsman Jr. was ambassador to both.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s campaign against ExxonMobil over plastic dishonesty demands a more important fight against the Huntsman plastic empire. California & Deseret are on a collision course, whatever Romney does.
Okay, okay. I’ll tell you a few things you should already know but which have been kept from you for reasons of convenience, laziness and worry about what it could all mean.
Take it from someone who cofounded Clearview.AI, January 6th was largely a Deseret plot.
Coppins hints that he, too, might know that by making allusions to Mormon radical Cliven Bundy and to the flight where Romney flew from Salt Lake City much to the ire of the Deseret fellow passengers (and co-religionists) who denounced him as a traitor to their cause.
You’re not supposed to think too hard about how Romney was a regent. He was appointed or selected by Utah’s establishment in a strange political convention and whether that great defender of democracy appreciates how he was, in effect, not really popularly elected. Can a Mormon effectively serve on the Homeland Security Senate committee when so many of the threats come from the unholy union of the LDS and
There’s a lot of things you need to know. You can’t know know that the Trump assassination plot by Ryan Routh was a Deseret plot too.
We don’t talk about Deseret’s role in the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Nor do we discuss Deseret’s ties to automated flight controls around 9-11. You see drones fly above and self driving cars drive by you but you don’t think there are such things as remotely piloted 747s slamming into office buildings… But I’m the crazy person.
Qui bono from September 11th? Maybe a number of Mormons who were laundering money through the Salt Lake City Olympics have resented Romney cracking down on their hustle?
And might the Mormons, who after all don’t take drugs, speak languages and advocate for one another, have seen the opportunity to populate the American deep state? And maybe those Mormons — working with Unit 8200 — have spied on Americans to run their own hustles?
Was there an attempt to kill Mitt Romney on September 11th? Coppins suggests that there might well have been.
[Romney] thought about the Olympics—Will we have to cancel?—and about the country, how everything would be different now. It wasn’t until later that he thought about how he was supposed to be in Manhattan that day. Before the last-minute trip to Washington, he’d planned to announce the names of the Olympic torchbearers at a press conference in Battery Park, at the foot of the World Trade Center.
Oh my!
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The Atlantic’s current management won’t survive the Harris Administration. How could it? Its proprietor Ms. Laurene Powell Jobs is close to Harris while its writers are anything but.
No, I do not think David Frum will be allowed to continue operating an Israeli cell in D.C. even if the IDF is under full NSA control. To be sure the IDF is being tamed but its assets in America need punishment. Some might even crave punishment. Isn’t it the Day of Atonement lately? I always found it more than a little funny that Trump came down with covid on Yom Kippur.
Netanyahu was not in Israel—he was addressing the UN — when the strike was ordered on Hassan Nasrallah. Bibi couldn’t check his electronics so easily. Did we order that strike? Oh, don’t ask that question!
I read McKay Coppins’s book about Romney as an attempt to escape The Atlantic and move onto more serious writing. I don’t think it will happen for him. Having broken the story about Jon Huntsman Jr.’s entry into politics I’ve taken Coppins, a BYU graduate like Romney, as sort of Likud-Mormon middleman man.
The book is interesting but more in what it leaves out than it what it reveals. It comes at a bad time. Mormon power is waning everywhere. Harry Reid is dead. Flake is out as ambassador to Turkiye. Romney is retiring.
What hope remains for Mormon pols is likely to be found in the “Secret Mormons” who have long since infiltrated Protestant churches. One of the architects of January 6th is Mo Brooks, who is quietly LDS.
These Mormons, too, are being detected whether they like it or not, thanks to the advent of modern genetic testing and the satellite listening services and the NSA takeover of much our technology.
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We will talk more soon about how genetic detection is being used by our enemies and friends alike to find the hidden aristocrats and bloodlines among us. The NSA is working on this very question. So, too, is Traitwell.com, the genomics company I started a few years ago.
Mitt Romney and I have intersected a number of times, starting in my boyhood Boston. There are videos and photos out there on the Internet where I confront the governor — he in his tailored suits, me in my tattered hand me down sports coat. Or, if you will, the patrician against the pupil.
It was in college that we really clashed and in that clash, I think we laid out a different vision of how America might be governed. I complimented Romney on Romney Care but pointed out that there was a political problem at the heart of any individual mandate. Those niche ailments would have every incentive to offloads the costs onto the greater public and render health insurance all but unaffordable. This is, in fact, precisely what has happened. Great for the insurance companies, not so great for Americans.
Romney agreed with my analysis and said that the solution was to oppose the loading up of disorders on the public purse. I wasn’t satisfied and indeed it seems that President Joe Biden had exactly that same insight as well which is why the Inflation Reduction Act started with prescription drug reform, which cut down the cost of prescription drugs and made it harder to launder money.
You can see these Romneycare and Obamacare insurance hikes as a kind of Mormon kidnapping, albeit one that’s a touch more sophisticated than the Mormon involvement in the Hearst, Hughes and Huntsman operations. In a way Mormonism couldn’t really confront genomic genealogy uncovering the disappeared bodies or the compromised nature of both its NSA facilities and forensic labs.
You might ask how many other billionaires are captured by the Mormon world. You might notice that Elon Musk’s lieutenant is Mormon. So, too, was Peter Thiel’s. How often do Mormon FBI agents use the information that they get through government databases to blackmail rich people?
Sure enough that does seem to be the Mormon business line. Might all the hacking that the Mormon FBI did with Israeli products as it targeted people like me be finally subsiding?
If it is, we might see the collapse of Elon Musk as a tell. The Mormons bailed out Elon Musk and own something like ten percent of Tesla. Mormons are working on the wrong national project. A few friends have told me that they were involved in a scam in solar power.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal features new California congressman Kevin Kiley — who absolutely vibes “Secret Mormon” — attempting to defend SpaceX from the FAA. In a better time Musk could rely on Kevin McCarthy but McCarthy’s out of work.
As The Beehive State warms along with the rest of the planet it has real problems because there’s no queen running the place. When the leaders have no vision the people perish.
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I first encountered Mormons in my college years. One of my college mentors was a Jack Mormon. Some of my family friends were also “recovering” Mormons in San Diego, a place I would soon learn is the seaport of Deseret.
In the political scrum of Proposition 8 in California I was particularly disturbed by gay activists who were targeting the Mormon world with violence and threats. I had quietly voted for gay marriage but I found it unbecoming to vandalize houses of worship for any cause. Lawlessness, even for a good cause, never particularly enticed me.
Mormonism sees the Constitution as an article of faith and I have to confess that when I studied Max Farrand’s The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (1913) with Professor Ralph Rossum at Claremont McKenna College I found myself altogether persuaded that there was indeed a divine presence in Philadelphia which guided the delegates to the formation of the Union. Subsequent research into Farrand’s work on Ben Franklin’s memoirs suggested that maybe the whole thing really was just Franklin’s genius. But what’s genius if not some sort of attempt to peer into the divine?
In any event a Mormon classmate from that very class later married me in my wife in a secular ceremony in Alaska. After college I spoke with Clayton Christensen when I was working at the Wall Street Journal. Back in California I focused on my attention on genetics and genealogy.
As 23 & Me falls — just as we predicted it would — my sense is that Blackstone will tighten the leash on Ancestry.com as well it should — and the NSA and U.S. government should be doing what it can to take over those genetic databases, tout suite.
America has built a closer alliance with UAE and Singapore in large measure because those areas need protection. The UAE is “doubling down” on its alliance with America and France.
We want investment into the projects essential for the future. Romney is involved personally with the energy transition and we are co-investors in at least one electric vehicle project.
There are all these dirty places where money collects. There’s no greater dirty place than the LDS church’s $100B+ fund.
Yes, America needs to tame Deseret. We all know that the 17 new temples advertised are just a way of washing money.
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There’s a cannon of Mormon theology that’s influential and hotly contested — The White Horse Prophecy.
The Mormon leader Joseph Smith had prophesied that the Mormons “will go to the Rocky Mountains and will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety.” Like Moses Smith knew that "I shall never go there" and predicted continued persecution by enemies of the church, "You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.... I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense."
“I don’t think the White Horse Prophecy is fair to bring up at all,” Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune when he was asked about it during his 2008 presidential bid. “It’s been rejected by every church leader that has talked about it. It has nothing to do with anything.”
But that hasn’t stopped figures from viewing Romney as having satisfied the White Horse Prophecy when he voted to convict Trump.
Far be it from me but I do wonder: who is the Red Horse?
LDS is heavily invested in Walmart. My cousin married into the Walton family but she's Catholic, not Mormon.
Kiley always seemed out of place. Makes so much now.