In the past couple weeks I’ve written about a new Latter-day Saint Twitter militia movement, DezNat, and the recent petition to better emphasize Christ-centered education at BYU. These causes piqued my interest because of their similarities to movements I blogged about a few years ago. As I’ve investigated further, though, I’ve come to realize that the similarities aren’t accidental.
Wife With a Purpose and the “Mormon Alt-Right”
In August 2017, I wrote about then-Latter-day Saint blogger Ayla Stewart, a.k.a. Wife with a Purpose. Ayla gained notoriety as an outspoken proponent of White Nationalism and the TradWife (Traditional Wife) movement. In a recently published book about women in the white nationalist movement, author Seyward Darby explained how the two movements intersect.
Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America’s moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families). Such close proximity, particularly on social meda, makes the exchange of ideas a straightforward prospect. When a tradwife mentiones threats to “European culture” and “Western civilization,” she’s borrowing euphemistic language from white nationalists. When she talks about protecting her children from multiculturalism and black-on-white crime, she’s all but reading from the hate movement’s proverbial handbook.
Seyward Darby, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020), Kindle edition locations 2323-2331.
It’s important to note that Ayla didn’t see herself as part of a “hate” movement, and she most certainly didn’t see herself as a racist or a white supremacist. She was a “race realist” who wanted to simply preserve and celebrate her “white culture” and European heritage. “All races deserved to be majorities in their homelands,” with the United States as an exception since its founding was based in European heritage. Ayla also discouraged interracial marriage. “She saw unions across races as threats to diversity, by which she meant distinct racial populations.”[fn1]
One of the beliefs that surprised me when I wrote my 2017 blog post was Ayla’s desire to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, voting rights for women. The argument “was that women drag politics to the left in Western countries; if their suffrage were gone, white people’s problems, including low birth rates, would vanish.”[fn2]
Ayla self-identified as a member of the alt-right, and she wasn’t the only Latter-day Saint to do so. Several members of the Church active in the “Manosphere,” primarily concerned with men’s rights and neomasculinity, also identified as members of the alt-right. These included Jeffrey Johnson of the blog Red Gulls and –REDACTED– of the blog –REDACTED– (he later formed a new blog called –REDACTED–). Besides promoting each other’s blogs on their websites, they often interacted with each other and other alt-right figures on Twitter. They operated under the handles @apurposefulwife, @redgullsjeffrey, and –REDACTED– (later renamed –REDACTED–). A March 2017 Buzzfeed article, “Meet The (Alt-Right) Mormons: Inside The Church’s Vocal White Nationalist Wing,” identifed more alt-right Latter-day Saints by their Twitter handles. They showed tweets by Ayla’s @apurposefulwife, @WilhemBrucher, @solutreandream1, @JReubenCIark, and @Teancums_Spear. In May 2017, Ayla Stewart hosted the frst #TrueBlueMormon Conference of nationalist Latter-day Saints, there were “about a dozen adults as well as a bushel of kids.”[fn3] Ayla’s speech was titled “The Gospel and the Alt Right.” Two other talks included “Sustainable Christian Charity” by @CMHammer732 and “The Consequences of Postmodernism” by @stacydacheat (later renamed @MormonCounterNa).
In March 2017, this last individual (@stacydacheat/@MormonCounterNa) posted a video on YouTube called “The effect of Cultural Marxism in the Mormon Church.” A 2015 news article from The Guardian explains that the idea of Cultural Marxism is rooted in the belief that political correctness was created as a way to “destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise” using the vehicles of feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. The 2017 YouTube video condemned Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), defined as “Leftist, feminist, and pro-gay agitators.” Even though they represented a small portion of Latter-day Saints, Stacy explained, their influence is magnified by outside news media. These SJWs aim to portray certain groups in the church as “oppressed,” and the oppressors (according to SJWs) are always “whites, males, heterosexuals, and christians.”
“I made this video,” she said, “to show Mormons that no matter how much we bend over backwards trying to appease them and show that we’re tolerant, no matter how much we give in to their demands, even if we were to give women the priesthood and allowed gays to get married in the Church, they would come back the very next day with a new set of grievances and a new set of demands.” This video was received favorably and shared at other Latter-day Saint sites not affiliated with White Nationalism, such as Mormon Chronicle, Third Hour (previously named LDS.net and Mormon Hub), and the LDS Freedom Forum. Even the conservative mainstream blog Millennial Star praised the video.
Ayla and other alt-right Latter-day Saints again came into the spotlight in May 2017 when they responded to the trending hashtag #DearWhiteMormons. Religion News Service reporter and Latter-day Saint Jana Reiss explained that the hashtag gave “Mormons of color an opportunity to share their experiences of being in a mostly-white church.” But the reaction against the hashtag revealed a sinister racism, she said, and illustrated her point with tweets by Ayla Stewart. Over at the Red Gulls blog, Jeffrey Johnson called out Jana Reiss for using “Nazi tactics” to defend racism against white people. He defended the indignant reactions of Ayla and others to the hashtag. “They weren’t just bringing up their identity, Jana. Nobody is outraged when that happens. They were attacking another group of people based on race. This is known as racism.”
On August 13, 2017, Church leaders released an official statement in response to the violence seen at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ayla Stewart, one of the scheduled speakers, praised the statement, retweeting it with the comment, “The #LDS church teachings are clear, you cannot be anti white and a follower of Christ. We are ALL God’s children!” Our own Andrew S wrote a blog post featuring Ayla’s statement, arguing that the Church’s statements on race tend to have a purposeful ambiguity, making them virtual Rorschach tests. On August 15th, however, Church leaders amended their previous statement. “It has been called to our attention that there are some among the various pro-white and white supremacy communities who assert that the Church is neutral toward or in support of their views. Nothing could be further from the truth.” The statement later went on to state that “Church members who promote or pursue a ‘white culture’ or white supremacy agenda are not in harmony with the teachings of the Church.”
Ayla did not take the amended statement well. “My church just declared that I, as a white person, have no culture. Despite my never claiming supremacy of any kind & advocating for ALL ppl.” Other Latter-day Saints were similarly frustrated. In a later discussion on the statement, Stacy (@MormonCounterNa) indicated she had no problem with the Church condemning white supremacy and racism. “The problem here is they equated our positions with white supremacy.”
Adding insult to injury, in his October 2017 general conference address, Elder M. Russell Ballard seemed to take a swipe at White Nationalism. After cautioning members against being caught up in fringe movements like doomsday prepping and energy healing, he said, “We need to embrace God’s children compassionately and eliminate any prejudice, including racism, sexism, and nationalism.”
Late in December 2017, Ayla’s Twitter account was suspended. In announcing the suspension, Latter-day Saint @JReubenCIark added, “The current sociopolitical system can’t tolerate people who want whites to survive and thrive.”
Complaints about Cultural Marxism at BYU
In November 2017, a video was posted on the Mormon Counter Narrative YouTube channel in response to a photo of Black Lives Matter students at BYU. In the video, Stacy warned Latter-day Saints that even a few BYU students supporting the Black Lives Matter movement was a bad sign.
If you are interested in keeping this postmodern cultural Marxist mind virus from spreading throughout Mormon culture, Mormons need to be aware of what is being taught and what is going on at these church-owned schools, because this has to do with changing Mormon culture. SJWs believe if they can capture Mormon culture, they can change the Mormon Church, and what they want to change Mormon culture to is anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian values.
Mormon Counter Narrative, “Black Lives Matter on BYU Campus,” YouTube
On Twitter, Stacy lamented, “I’m holding out hope that BYU hasn’t completely succumbed to Cultural Marxism. We’ll see how they react when people on our side start to organize.”
This wasn’t the first time alt-right Latter-day Saints had complained about Cultural Marxism at BYU. In December 2016, Jeffrey Johnson at Red Gulls stated, “Possibly the ugliest truth that we have to face in the Mormon Church is BYU is just another Cultural Marxist university pushing globalism, degeneracy and poz in general.” (Poz is slang for HIV positive.) Around the same time, –REDACTED– over at –REDACTED– observed, “BYU in Provo is massively infiltrated with naive leftists. The school is overrun at this point, just one step below the the typical university SJW factory.”
But, again, the 2017 YouTube video spread to other organizations. Defending Utah, a Utah-based political group, shared the video at their website. The group is a John Birch-esque ultraconservative organization intent on rooting out secret combinations trying to destroy our religion and freedoms. Recently they gained attention for organizing flash mobs at grocery stores to protest government overreach with mask mandates. In the Black Lives Matter post, Defending Utah also shared previous podcasts about “socialist/communist infiltration at BYU” and a “Marxist BYU Professor” attacking the Family Proclamation.
DezNat
Now we jump forward to the creation of the #DezNat hashtag in August 2018 by Twitter user @JPBellum. As I said in my post a couple weeks ago, Bellum wanted to carve out a safe space on Twitter for “all who were willing to build the kingdom and defend the church and its leaders online.” DezNat stood for Deseret Nation, or, more appropriately, Deseret Nationalism.
Bellum was drawing, whether he knew it or not, from an earlier idea suggested the previous year by Latter-day Saint white nationalists. The hashtag #DeseretNationalist seems to have first appeared on a March 2017 tweet by @_DNA_Mond. It was attached to a meme saying “Deseret: Welcome home, white man.” Other users tagged in that tweet included Ayla Stewart (@apurposeful wife) and the white nationalist group Vanguard Utah (@vanguardutah).
A blog with the URL deseretnationalist.blogspot.com, was also created that year[fn4]. One blog post was shared on Twitter in September 2017 by the same user (@_DNA_Mond) with the comment, “New DNA article out on why homosexuality should be expelled from the West by yours truly #DeseretNationalism.” In October, the same user posted a meme of a man with a gun pointed at the viewer with the Deseret Nationalist hashtag and a phrase written in the Deseret alphabet. Translated, the phrase said “If you cannot read this, get out of Deseret.” Other Latter-day Saint white nationalists, @solutreandream1 and @MaDeGrAg, were also tagged in the tweet.[fn5]
Unsurprisingly, several of the previous white nationalist Latter-day Saints like @_DNA_Mond, –REDACTED–, @JReubenCIark, and @CMHammer732 became early users of Bellum’s DezNat hashtag. In this virtual nationalism, one’s identity was based on religion rather than race. Instead of attacking threats to white culture, it was about attacking those who would pollute the church with apostate (Cultural Marxist) ideas. Instead of fighting against those who talked about “white guilt” (based on the misdeeds of ancestors) it became about fighting those who would critize decisions of past church leaders and members. Instead of promoting neomasculinity and tradwife ideals, it became about defending divine gender roles as espoused in the Family Proclamation. But the enemies remained the same: feminists, LGBT advocates, and other social justice warriors.
Overt alt-right ideas still occasionally poke through in more recent DezNat posts. One example is the DezNat Facebook page sharing a meme created by Identity Dixie, a NeoConfederate propoganda group. The meme shows a nineteenth century photo of a white family on a farm with the phrase “Your Ancestors Weren’t Evil.”
Some DezNat Twitter users still support the idea of repealing the 19th amendment (#Repealthe19th).
And in a particularly unfortunate series of events Saturday, six different DezNat hashtag users appeared to combine their efforts to call Latter-day Saint Kwaku El the N-word.
BYU Petition
But what about the BYU petition? Like I pointed out last week, one of the authors of the petition, Tristan Mourier, sees the “Keeping Faith at BYU” effort as “exposing Cultural Marxism infiltrating BYU.”
In interviews at BYU and at Defending Utah, Mourier has identified the “godless” ideologies professors “preach” as successor ideology, Cultural Marxism, deconstructionism, and critical race theory. In a Cwic interview, Hanna added gender theory to the mix. She explained that they all stem from Marxism, and are fundamentally incompatible with the gospel.
As I stated in my post last week, the Keeping Faith at BYU Twitter account, which solicits stories for the BYU petition effort, has critized BYU, BYU Football, and the BYU Law School for their support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Whoever is behind this account views BLM as destructive, violent, anti-family, anti-Mormon, and allied with “Antifa terrorism.” The account also critized BYU’s new committee examining “race and inequality on campus,” suggesting it may have Marxist goals for using the term “equity” instead of “equality.” Finally, the account has denounced the BYU Slavery Project, patterned after the 1619 Project, as “point-scoring against our pioneer ancestors.”
I saw a particularly concerning conversation on the Keeping Faith at BYU Twitter account last week. The account tweeted a pic of a diversity training slide from the BYU law school. The point of the tweet was to show that BYU professors used a meme from a website known to be very critical of the Church. The meme itself displayed an old quote from President J. Reuben Clark, Jr., stating that interracial relationships were “wrong” both physically and spiritually.
In the resulting comments, though, the discussion shifted from the propriety of using an “anti-mormon” meme to the subject matter of the meme itself. At least three different commenters openly expressed questionable statements about race. One (who identifies with DezNat) bluntly stated, “J. Reuben Clark was right,” following it up with “interracial marriage is bad. It makes unhappy, confused children (on average) compared to same race unions.” Another commenter stated, “I legit believe that [African Americans] didn’t pick a side in pre-existence. I don’t think that part was wrong at all.” Finally, a third commenter stated, “The problem isn’t that it was said. It is that we have departed from counsel and use excuses and ‘well that’s not in line with contemporary, worldly beliefs.”
Honestly, this is really bothering me. If an environment has been created, in the name of preserving Christ-centered education, where members of the Church feel comfortable espousing blatantly racist beliefs, what does that say? I get that many members of the Church are disturbed about recent events at BYU, but we can’t allow other dangerous ideologies free reign among our Church community.
Discuss.
Update 08/25/2020: The name of a blogger, his blog, and his Twitter handles have been redacted as a courtesy. This post was meant to document how the DezNat movement seems to have ties to efforts of older known white nationalist Latter-day Saints like Ayla Stewart, and how the current BYU petition efforts seem to be creating a concerning environment where racist attitudes can thrive. It was not meant to target a particular blog. I do not appreciate being accused of publishing false information, and I will be more than happy to devote an entire post towards defending my reasoning for originally including him if it becomes necessary. –Mary Ann
[fn1] Seyward Darby, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020), Kindle edition location 2542-2550.
[fn2] Darby, Sisters in Hate, Kindle location 2495.
[fn3] Darby, Sisters in Hate, Kindle location 2567.
[fn4] A July 2018 Buzzfeed News article, “The Mormon Church and the Exorcism of the Far Right,” reported that the Deseret Nationalist blog was gone by that point.
[fn5] Apparently the handle @MaDeGrAg was based on the phrase Make Deseret Great Again.
Wheat & Tares 
That this bothers you would suggest you have ethics and a conscience, Mary Ann. You’ve done excellent work compiling this admittedly disturbing information in one document.
If members feel comfortable (although how comfortable they feel is open for debate, given the anonymous nature of so much of this content) espousing clearly racists perspectives, that says the church has not done nearly enough to disavow and correct clearly racist beliefs and doctrines. You feed people bigotry and they become bigots. Two plus two equals four.
I don’t think they’re ever going to do any more than they have already with the Gospel Topics essays. The internet is Shiva–both creator and destroyer.
Leaders need to speak out more, just like they did against Wife with a Racist Purpose. When leaders speak out, that gives us legitimacy to condemn the crypto-racists. And I say crypto-racists, because as you point out, Ayla Stewart appeared reasonable on many fronts, but was constantly pushing the boundaries, and appealing to the narrative of white victimhood and white pride and how there was nothing wrong with celebrating white heritage. She was careful not to be overtly racist, but when the Charlottesville protesters marched and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” she couldn’t help herself and tweeted a photo of them with the caption of “Let Your Light so Shine.” At that point, it was over for her. We all knew she was a racist. We just had to wait for her to let her guard down and reveal the true filth beneath. And all it took was excitement about the Charlottesville rally.
A good strategy to expose the crypto-racists, such as DezNat and those crying about the boogeyman of “Cultural Marxism” (I doubt most BLM protesters could accurately state what Marx promoted), is to indulge them a little bit. Scratch them if you will. Try to goad them into overtly racist speech. It often doesn’t take much. But you need to disguise yourself as one of them and lull them into taking down the mask. And once they’ve revealed the racism beneath, they jump the shark, they become easier to throw overboard, and show’s over.
John W,
“A good strategy to expose the crypto-racists… is to indulge them a little bit. Scratch them if you will. Try to goad them into overtly racist speech. It often doesn’t take much. But you need to disguise yourself as one of them and lull them into taking down the mask.” I don’t agree with this tactic. Not only does it feel unethical, it ends up contributing to the misinformation that’s already out there. As it is, I see a lot of responses to accusations of racism or hate speech as “you just don’t get my sense of humor.” When you add impersonators into the mix, it just confuses everything. As I’ve studied the more objectionable #DezNat posts, I keep having to wade through the troll accounts that are doing exactly what you suggest. Someone throwing out hate speech in order to goad another person into saying hate speech just keeps adding to all the hate speech online.
The Church teaches correct principles, and allows members to govern themselves. I am okay with this. I hope the Church will continue to teach correct principles, and let members govern themselves.
If there is racism still remaining among a minority of Church members, and no doubt there is, it seems to me that more individual members need to push back whenever they hear or see racism. I don’t know who these racists are, as I have heard nothing racist in many years of Church settings — if I have met them, they have kept their racism hidden. Maybe this is because my wife was a woman of color?
Is there really a Marxist influence at BYU? At best (or worst depending on your perspective) some PC culture has crept in. But that’s probably driven more by students than BYU officials or professors. College students, even at BYU, don’t tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. generally. If that makes them Marxists in your eyes, that’s probably because you went to BYU in the 80s or 90s like I did when it was easier to be racist, sexist, and bigoted. It just was.
I am torn on whether BYU should go more mainstream or whether it should dig in and play the “Lord’s University” card. I like that BYU exists for the type of families who want to send their kids to that kind of institution. I like that an LDS kid can go to a university where it is totally safe to be LDS (BYU is 98.5% LDS). On the other hand, if BYU tolerates any kind of white supremacy and if it continues to marginalize the homosexual community, it might find itself to be marginalized in the eyes of the public that it so badly wants to be a part of.
I work at BYU, and I have never heard about this big controversy. I wonder how many students are bothered by this. I have heard before that 60 percent of BYU faculty are Democrats. If true, it wouldn’t surprise me, because more education generally leads to thinking more carefully about complex issues, and right now the only party that seems concerned about the most significant issues facing the country and the world is the Democratic Party. The Republicans have forsaken serious policy development and have become a personality cult. Cultural Marxism? This sounds like just another scare phrase from the right. Like “Socialism!!!” Personally, I’m rather concerned that our Church leaders have been so silent about the lies, the disinformation, the undermining of the institutions of democracy, and the blind support for a corrupt autocrat that have spread like a fungus throughout the GOP. My guess is that they’re afraid of upsetting their “base.” I have been disappointed that our prophet, who happens to be a medical doctor, has been completely silent about even the wearing of masks. You’d think he would call people back from the fringes and counsel them to do what is compassionate and responsible regarding our public health. His silence has allowed a lot of extreme views to take root.
BLM is a Marxist movement. Most people supporting black lives do not understand the goals of the leaders of this movement. Critical race theory is garbage and the same as gender theory. You profess to believe in science only when it suits your political beliefs. Thomas Sowell one of the great minds of our day has debunked the most of your Leftists beliefs. And he’s a POC, that should give him more credit.
The Millenial star blog:
https://www.millennialstar.org/the-meaning-of-the-gay-dating-fiasco-at-byu/
Is arguing essentially that progressive Mormons and cultural marxists are invading BYU right now.
There is a lot of the conservative angst I don’t understand, but this is a key example of what puzzles me. There may be liberal or progressive professors at BYU, but I feel like that is a good thing. I am sure that desnat and altright believers would blame that on my democrat and liberal bias. Which it probably is.
Thanks for documenting this phenomenon so thoroughly, Mary Ann. I would think that the GAs would be *far* more concerned with groups like this than they ever would be about groups on the left. The problem is that the distribution of people in the Church (in the US, anyway) skews to the right, so when you get white nationalists like this arguing for their version of Mormonism as the true one, they’re only a short step away from a huge number of positions that most US Mormons are already comfortable with. At the other end, OW was likely to always have limited influence (much as I’ve appreciated their work) just because most members are far away from their positions. (I know this is oversimplifying a bunch of stuff like conflating religious and political views and pretending there’s a single dimension that captures all of people’s views, but I think it’s a close enough approximation to be useful.)
It would be great if GAs could come out more strongly against this type of rhetoric and threat. Unfortunately, as you’ve already mentioned, the DezNat folks would fit right in with a number of past GAs, like ETB and J. Reuben Clark. And even present GAs, like say President Oaks, might not be that far away from them. So even if on the whole the Q15 perhaps should or does worry about the effect of DezNat on the Church more generally, it seems unlikely that they’ll say very much against them.
Mary Ann,
How do we get rid of crypto-racists then? Charlottesville goaded Wife with a Racist Purpose off the cliff. If DezNat becomes more extreme, it too will fall off the cliff and won’t be able to attract the in-betweeners.
Aaron Walker,
Thomas Sowell has little credibility or standing in the mainstream study of economics. He is a McCarthyist fearmonger about the left.
I have heard it said that church leaders are more concerned about the alt-right and ultra conservative factions than they are about progmos and the like. I don’t know if that is true. I hear a lot more about church trying to tamp down liberals than conservatives.
There is a lot of Information here. I’m impressed that you found the deseretnationalist hashtag and even translated the Deseret alphabet. I would not have recognized it as such to determine hire to translate it.
John W,
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was not initiated by imposters seeking to point out the racism of the alt-right.
Ziff and Rockwell,
Church leaders *are* concerned with the fringe right. In an earlier draft of the post, I was going to talk about the 2015 “enemies slide” that was leaked by MormonLeaks in 2017. Threats on the “right” were represented just as big as threats on the “left.” I even remember Ryan McKnight saying at the time that folks who leave the Church from secularism, feminism, etc., tend to lean politically left as well. That reduces their credibility in the eyes of many mainstream (U.S.) church members. Those who leave because of stuff on the right (gnosticism, energy healing, doomsday peppers, etc.) tend to remain on the “right” politically. That makes them much more persuasive with church members. I agree that those excommunications (Julie Rowe, Mike Stroud, Denver Snuffer) don’t make the news as much, but they are still concerning to church leaders. I mentioned in my last post about the early nineties when the press picked up on reports that Church leaders were cracking down on fringe elements on both the “right” and “left.” Some of the warning signs for those veering off the right were membership in the John Birch society, believing that President Benson was being muzzled by church leaders, and believing in government conspiracies.
What I’m worried about is the way that alt-right ideas and terminology have infiltrated the mainstream (U.S.) conservative right, so the line is really difficult to point out. In that recent book, Sisters in Hate, that I referenced above, the author makes the point that it is *super* easy for white nationalist ideas to be accepted by U.S. conservative Christians because there are so many ideological points where they connect. After seeing how easily the white nationalist ideas were converted into a Latter-day Saint version with DezNat, I agree with her.
Brian, I thought they were going furthur and believed that anyone to the left of them politically was part of a plot to undermine what they see as american values.
There is a blog on meridian about how to vote (which I thought was sensible) but some of the responders, like our extreme people above see marxism (was this socialism 5 years ago?) everywhere.
For example
“This is all good advice to follow good principles. However, for those who may not be aware, Marxism is the antithesis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Marxism is professed anti-Christ. According to Karl Marx, existing society, including religion and families, must be destroyed, and then his followers can “stride through the wreckage and create a new society.” Couple this with the fact that Marxists have totally permeated the Democrat Party. This is not a theory nor an opinion, this is plain fact. November 3 is the most important election in American history since the Civil War.”
I can not get anyone to explain what the democrats are advocating that is marxist? Is it universal healthcare, addressing climate change ( while you have unprecidented fires, and consecutive hurricanes)?
The right in America swallow lies in order to justify voting for Trump.
It seems there are people who want to out conservative, the conservative party, even when the republican party is already extreme. In All other free countries universal healthcare, abortion, climate change etc, are not politicized. They are accepted by both sides of parliament. 11am q
In Australia the conservative party has been in power for 7 years. They have legalized gay marriage, and abortion, weve had universal healthcare for years.
There was a scandal exposed on 60 minutes on Sunday, where a member of the conservative party, with the support of a couple of members of parliament was branch stacking with mormons in order to get rid of progressive members of the same party, and swing his state to be more conservative. The fowl mouthed organizer has resigned , but the mps are still there, and presumably the mormons.
Mary Ann, we don’t necessarily need to be imposters. But simply engage the Desk at folks and get them to flesh out what they mean and own the implications of what they say. Often we’ll find a deeper hatred lying beneath the veneer of conservativish nobleness they pretend to.
It’s worth noting that “cultural Marxism” is a decades-old anti-semitic trope.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
There’s supposedly a shadowy cabal of Frankfurt School marxist / freudian intellectuals trying to undermine the traditional christian culture of western europe and the US? That’s only slightly less overtly antisemitic than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The only thing good I can say about “cultural marxism” is that when you find someone who believes it’s a threat to western culture, you can stop taking them seriously as a thinker and start taking them seriously as a white nationalist.
Mike R., and now we arrive at the scene where the RNC publicly denounces the SPLC as a “far-left organization with an obvious bias.” Funny how streams converge in remarkable ways.
I am very disturbed by this post. My children include Gay, Black, Korean, two With Down syndrome, and Autism. They have suffered everything from microaggressions to felonious assaults. One was raped as an infant before we adopted them, and two others have been raped in part because of their marginalized race or orientation.
So when I hear about white supremacists and anti-LGBT+ people – I know first hand what they are capable of and the sheer hell they bring into innocent lives. And from within our own ranks! Maybe those far-right church members would not commit such atrocities themselves, but it’s hard to believe that they would lift a finger to stop them or work in any capacity to seek justice.
When they proclaim BY was not wrong about the priesthood and temple ban, we need to remember that BY lumped in those with mental and physical handicaps, and those not born as whites as being less valiant as well. Often in the same speech (and of course, women don’t fare much better).
What do Zion, the Millenium, and the afterlife look like to them? I always imagined the lion lying down with the lamb – all peace. No predation. All men and women alike unto God. All nations as one under the King of Kings.
How does their vision bring that about? Nationalism (US and white European only – but the US most blessed), people of color as eternal servants, closed borders excluding the third world from earth’s bounty. Justifying domination, exploitation, and inequality in the name of God. Using their AR-15s to protect their food storage horde from starving brothers and sisters.
Somehow imagining that when the Christ returns to the earth, He will be well pleased with the hell they built outside their own borders and ideologies, and blessed race. I believe they will be surprised indeed by the “I never knew thee” that they will surely receive.
When we would wrangle our seven kids into a restaurant, we always got a lot of looks. When we were in Salt Lake City, those looks were accompanied by smiles. In Utah County, we got mostly unapproving stares and a lot of head shaking. I know which heaven I would rather live in.
What I’m worried about is the way that alt-right ideas and terminology have infiltrated the mainstream (U.S.) conservative right, so the line is really difficult to point out. In that recent book, Sisters in Hate, that I referenced above, the author makes the point that it is *super* easy for white nationalist ideas to be accepted by U.S. conservative Christians because there are so many ideological points where they connect. After seeing how easily the white nationalist ideas were converted into a Latter-day Saint version with DezNat, I agree with her.
This is why I use the twitter deznat Block list and ignore them. I read I study that says spreading the ideas of white nationalists in an attempt to discredit them often attracts them more followers because so many people realize they hold similar/overlapping viewpoints they must not be that bad. (This was post Charlottesville)
Why did you redact the references to @ConflictJustice aka Rick Moser? His threat of a defamation suit is toothless, and is a common white nationalist tactic: https://twitter.com/adam_alba/status/1298346256297865228?s=19
Teagan,
I’m not worried about a lawsuit. His antics about me “targeting” him and his blog were distracting from the purpose of the article (tracing the origin of DezNat to its white nationalist roots and how those ideas are playing into the current BYU petition debacle). I’m not out to “get” anyone. If he’s that terrified of his history being made public, then I’ll walk away.
I just want to publicly thank OP for her research.
It goes without saying, but maybe bears repeating: spaces that enjoy sensible, civil moderation (as W&T does) are valuable to maintaining our commitment to (small d) democratic discussion, respectful disagreement, and rejection of disinformation, disingenuous discourse and dissembling extremist shenanigans designed to divide us.
My username links to our new Reddit repository for all things DezNat: r/DezNats … and we appreciate W&T’s contribution to the aggregation of links we’ve built so far. Looking forward to more.
chinoblanco, I googled and found the Reddit site you referenced, but your user name did not link to the site. You may want to add a link so we can be certain we are finding the appropriate site. Thanks for your work, as well, on the issue. You and Mary Ann (and JD as well, iirc) have been helpful in bringing attention to a worrisome issue within the church community. Thank you to all of you and others who have helped call attention to this group before they gain outsized power.
MN, thank you for the kind words. I’m still new to the DezNat phenom, so r/deznats has been mostly me attempting to put what I’ve learned in one handy place. That subreddit was created a few months ago, but I only recently noticed it, and the owner was nice enough to let me jump in and use the place as a virtual index card catalog.
What I have in mind for the next step for r/deznats is to start adding personal testimonials of those who’ve experienced DezNat’s cyberbullying firsthand. Here’s a link (sorry it’s not very exciting at the moment):
https://old.reddit.com/r/deznats/comments/iutor2/phase_ii_of_rdeznats_will_involve_collecting_and/
My intro to DezNat was happenstance. I came across this goofy masked bowie knife wielding kid performing for the camera to a Mormon rap soundtrack and knew I’d stumbled on something that Reddit would have all kinds of fun with. After that went viral, the DezNat crew responded by attempting to smear me as some kind of porn-loving pedo, or something. Oops. Kinda picked the wrong target for those kind of hijinx, lol.
In any case, I texted Tristan and let him know he really should have a tête-à-tête with his crew, because trolling into me with false accusations would be worse than a crime, it would be a blunder. C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.
But he didn’t listen and Hanna proceeded to create a DezNat blog where she attempted to lay out my crimes. Oof. She’s since deleted that blog after receiving a point-by-point rebuttal that made it clear what an ill-advised fishing expedition she was on, if the intent was to somehow publicly slander me into submission or avoid sounding like a crazy person on a weird vendetta against an internet stranger whose only crime was poking fun at a DezNat clown who has since gone on to use the N-word to describe a well-known BYU student. It’s a circus. But I don’t mind setting aside a bit of time to write and collect a few reviews of their show.
I posted a longer comment with a hyperlink, so it’s probably caught in the filter. Enjoy!
Chino and MN, yeah, diving down the DezNat rabbit hole has been interesting. I’ve been busy with other stuff so haven’t had time to post, but I haven’t stopped observing the group. Before I even wrote my first post, I expressed a fear to my co-bloggers that bringing attention to the movement/hashtag would inevitably draw others toward it. Later I found out that JPBellum (the hashtag creator) was drawn to Twitter in the first place by news articles talking about the “Mormon alt-right” Twitter users like JReubenCIark and Ayla Stewart, so that wasn’t comforting. It’s been interesting to observe the internal debates among the users (whether #DezNat is a movement or “just a hashtag”). Those who were into the original “Deseret Nationalism” and separatist ideas seem to be coalescing more around the Dezbollah identity, hoping that it doesn’t become “watered down” like the DezNat hashtag did. So you have all these Twitter users who, for the most part, use the DezNat tag to share gospel messages and “ironic” memes, while a smaller subset appears to be less “ironic” about racial superiority, theocracies, sexism, denying the holocaust, boogaloo, etc. But as long as the DezNat users can claim that people just “don’t get” the humor in the memes they post, people can just shrug it off as harmless. Just boys LARPing as Latter-day Saint jihadists fighting off the degenerate evils of secularism and Leftism; for real calling people to repentance, but being TOTALLY kidding when they suggest physical harm against anyone who disagrees with their interpretation of the Kingdom of God.
I may have missed it, but to fill in what seems to be a hole in the narrative here, there was a Discord discussion group apparently run by a man who goes by Dagger/Dr Dagger “where #DezNat was born” according to JP Bellum in a tweet:
Evan J. Worthen claims in a tweet that DNA Mond, whom you identify as the earliest known user of the hashtag #DeseretNationalist, was in that group, though Worthen doesn’t say when he joined it. That tweet is towards the end of a series of screenshots from the Discord group showing a variety of racist, homophobic, and misogynist comments. (Worthen rightly includes a content warning.)
It may be that Bellum (is that a pseudonym?) was aware of the earlier use of the hashtag and developed the #DezNat hashtag in connection with Mond directly, along with others who are active in DezNat.
Dagger is someone worth more mention, it appears, as he seems to have created the space for the birth of the idea. In one of the screenshots he claims to be a Young Earth Creationist. More seriously to my way of thinking, he uses “gay” as a slur. In tweets yesterday he expressed views sympathetic with Holocaust denial/doubt, ending (for the moment) with this tweet:
He defends not calling out some of the vile remarks in the group in part on the basis of it being a sort of ministry to bring troubled young men to Jesus: “young men who are victimized by a culture that hates them, particularly white men. Young men are rambunctious, and quite often women-brained spaces are at odds with their personalities, and very often this is how church functions are run.”
There’s something akin to incel culture involved, though he ties it to “the chaotic male archetype,” a new term to me.
Bellum’s own role in the screenshots is limited to his singling out the Jews for opposing the building of an LDS temple: “The Manhattan Temple was an F you to the Jews in White Plains who wouldn’t let it happen.”
A couple more pieces of the story.
You say of the creation of #DezNat, “Bellum was drawing, whether he knew it or not, from an earlier idea suggested the previous year by Latter-day Saint white nationalists.”
Not much doubt he did know, and that the shift from #DeseretNationalist to the new hashtag was worked out with their participation. It was changed to make it more palatable to non-nationalists, though the nationalist goals didn’t change.
Several months before the first use of #DezNat, Bellum had already been talking with Clark, Dagger, Mond, and MaDeGrAg about their alt-right visions of Deseret.
In April 2018, for example, Dagger asks Bellum, “Is there a movement in particular you felt drawn to (alt-right?) [his parenthesis], or is it more broad?” Bellum replies that he was drawn to the alt-right and then moved to “Deseret-right.” The difference is that Deseret-right incorporates a necessary religious side, he explains. He says a couple tweets later he believes he got that term from Mond, who acknowledges the tweet, and MaDeGrAg, whose account was already suspended.
Particulars were worked out in Dagger’s Discord chat group as mentioned above.
More recently, Bellum acknowledged the hashtag was softened from #DeseretNationalism to make it more easily accepted: “necessary until such time that people could handle the nationalist goals of the gospel.”
In a followup, he remarks “Optics matters just as much as ideology,” with a photo of Mussolini addressing a throng, showing once again Bellum’s wonderful sense of humor, no doubt.
Naturally, none of this appears in Bellum’s #DezNat manifesto, which claims “#DezNat is not a movement, it is not political (especially not alt-right), racial, national, or sexual. It is simply a hashtag” etc, which manages to be false or misleading in every respect.
Deseret Nationalism takes the secular politics of the American alt-right movement, including the fixation on violence, and projects it onto Deseret, which fits in some ways, obviously not in others. My impression of Bellum and others tied up with the nationalist foundation of DezNat is that they don’t really know what they’re about in any very concrete way, and their followers know even less, but as with the mixed-up folks that stormed the US Capitol (including “Captain Moroni”), that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous to themselves and others.