President Benson Was Right, and Saying "It Never Happened" Proves It

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I have watched Scott and Casey's channel for years. They take on deep subjects and they do an excellent job with them, and I have learned things there I would not have found anywhere else. I want that on the record before I say the rest, because the rest is a disagreement and I would rather disagree with people I respect than people I don't.

I learned a few things in this particular episode too. But the further it went, the more uncomfortable I got, and by the end I had a knot in my stomach.

They were covering President Ezra Taft Benson's years of warning the Church about communism.

I should tell you where I stand on that man. It was his counsel to read the Book of Mormon daily that changed the direction of my life.^[1] Forty years later I have missed sixty-six days total. I have written elsewhere about what that did to me and I will not take up room with it here. I owe him. That is the lens I brought to this episode.

Here is the part that bothered me. You can watch it yourself:

The conclusion they reach, roughly, is that with the clarity of hindsight, the things President Benson warned about did not actually come to pass.

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Two Problems With That

The first one is simple, and I am surprised more people don't raise it.

Is it not possible that the events he warned about did not arrive because he warned about them?

He was an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. He said it from the pulpit, in general conference, in the plainest words available, to the largest audience he would ever have. Millions of Latter-day Saints heard him. Many of them changed how they voted, what they taught their children, and what they were willing to put up with. And then the thing he described did not fully land.

That is not evidence he was wrong. That is what it looks like when a warning works. The fire that gets put out leaves no ashes, and you cannot point to a house that never burned.

The second problem is bigger. It did happen. It is happening right now. We have openly avowed communists holding elected office in American cities today, running on the same promises, and nobody in that conversation seems to have noticed.

Brushing this aside as a settled historical curiosity is not hindsight. It is a blind spot.

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What He Actually Understood

President Benson had firsthand experience with this in the forties, fifties and sixties. He was not theorizing. He was Secretary of Agriculture for the full eight years of the Eisenhower administration and he watched the thing operate up close.

And he never described it as an economic argument. He described it as a spiritual one. In the October 1961 general conference he called communism "the earthly image of the plan which Satan presented in the pre-existence."^[2] In April 1965 he opened with the line "The war in heaven is raging on earth today."^[3]

Read those as theology, because that is what they are.

And I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.

Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down. (Moses 4:1, 3)

Look at what he offered. Nobody lost. Guaranteed results. Perfect fairness, everybody taken care of. On its face it is the most generous proposal ever made to anybody.

The price was agency. The fee was honor.

That is the whole thing. Every version of this since has been the same offer in different clothing: hand over the freedom to choose, and a brilliant and benevolent few will guarantee the outcome for everyone. The idea is that old, and it keeps resurfacing.

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About the John Birch Society

His association with that group has been scoffed at for sixty years, and the scoffing usually gets the facts wrong, so let me put them down plainly.

In October 1962, Elder Benson asked President David O. McKay for permission to join. President McKay told him no. He did not join. He never joined.^[4]

His son Reed joined, became the Utah coordinator, and eventually the organization's national director of public relations.^[5] Almost all of the confusion since comes from people collapsing the father into the son.

So look at what Benson actually did. He believed the threat was real enough to ask to affiliate. The prophet said no. He accepted it. And then he kept preaching the doctrine from the pulpit where he had every right to preach it, and left the organization alone.

That is not a man freelancing outside his stewardship. That is a man who knew exactly where the line was and stayed on his side of it. I find that more instructive than the caricature, and I wish more people knew it.

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The Part of This History Almost Nobody Has Been Told

There is a second video I want you to watch, and I will warn you up front that it is harsh.

Walsh lays out a history of the movement's leadership that most of us were never taught and that is still carefully avoided. It is not kind to Martin Luther King and it is not kind to several others. Watch it and decide for yourself whether I am telling you the truth.

But I do not want you to take Walsh's word for it, or mine, so let me point you at the source underneath it.

David Garrow won the Pulitzer Prize for Bearing the Cross, his biography of King. He spent thirty years as one of the most sympathetic and most respected King scholars alive. In May 2019 he published an 8,000-word article in Standpoint after working through more than 54,000 FBI documents that had been posted to the National Archives.^[6]

What he found: extensive extramarital relationships with dozens of women, named in the files. Entanglements with Communist Party members. And an FBI memo, annotated by agents who had the recording and the transcript in front of them, describing King present in a Washington hotel room while a Baptist minister allegedly raped a woman from his own congregation, with King recorded as having looked on, laughed and offered advice.

The Bureau's tape of that assault still exists. It sits under a 1977 court seal that expires January 31, 2027.^[7]

I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because I hold myself to the same standard I ask of everyone else. The hotel room account is what the FBI's own contemporaneous notes allege. The audio has not been heard by the public. Garrow, who had every reason in the world to protect this man's memory, examined the documents and concluded they are genuine.

That is the part that matters to me. This is not Hoover's smear reaching us secondhand. This is King's own biographer reading the file and changing his mind.

We have highways, schools and bridges named for this man in nearly every city in America. That is my opinion and I will state it as opinion: on the evidence now available, he does not deserve that honor. In a few months those tapes come out of the vault, and the country is going to have a conversation it has spent sixty years avoiding.

I bring it up here because Garrow's documents also record the Communist Party connections that President Benson was warning about at precisely that time, and for which he was mocked, edited and told to stay in his lane.

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The Thing They Never Said

Back to the podcast, because this is what actually kept me awake.

They never denounced it.

They walked the whole way through the history, handled it with care, and never once said the plain thing about what communism is.

I understand the reason, and I am not questioning anyone's faith or motives. They speak to a worldwide audience with every political background in it, and neutrality is how you keep those doors open. In their chair I might make the same call.

But communism is not a political position. It is a theological one. If it is Lucifer's plan wearing an economic costume, and President Benson said from the pulpit that it is, then declining to name it is not neutrality. It is a category error.

That is what I would like to see corrected.

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The Book of Mormon Already Ran This Experiment Twice

We are not guessing about where this ends. The Book of Mormon gives us two full case studies and both civilizations are gone by the last page.

The Jaredites destroyed themselves. The Nephites destroyed themselves. Both times the mechanism was identical: organized groups working in secret for power and gain, and a population that decided tolerating them was easier than rooting them out. Both times it finished in a civil war that left nobody standing.

For it cometh to pass that whoso buildeth it up seeketh to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries; and it bringeth to pass the destruction of all people, for it is built up by the devil, who is the father of all lies; even that same liar who beguiled our first parents, yea, even that same liar who hath stirred up man to murder from the beginning. (Ether 8:25)

Notice who Moroni names as the builder. Not a party. Not an economic theory. The devil, by name, which is the same figure from Moses 4.

And Moroni was not writing to the Jaredites. He tells us directly that he is writing to us, so that we will not suffer these combinations to get above us. I have gone through that warning verse by verse elsewhere.

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So Why Is Anyone Considering This Again?

Communism has killed something on the order of a hundred million people in the last century.^[8] It has never once delivered what it promised. It is the least equal and least fair arrangement ever devised, because it strips out every incentive and hands every decision to a small group who decide what is good for the rest of us.

So why is it back on the table?

Two reasons, and neither one is ideological.

The first is gasoline. Over Labor Day weekend the national average sat at about $4.15 a gallon, the first Labor Day in American history above four dollars. It peaked at $4.46 in late May. Out here in the West we are past five, and California is over five and a half. Diesel just set an all-time record at $5.85, and diesel is the number that actually matters, because everything on the shelf rode a truck to get there.^[9]

The second is everything else. The cost of living has outrun people's ability to keep up, and when people cannot make the math work at the end of the month, someone always shows up promising fairness.

That is how this has worked every single time. The debt underneath it is a problem nobody in either party has a solution for, and the system that profits from the squeeze already has a name in scripture.

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Trump Is Not the Cause

Everybody is blaming him. Let me be clear that what follows is my opinion.

The war with Iran drove fuel prices up. I believe that is short lived and I believe it comes down, and comes down hard, because this President looked at the long road and made decisions nobody in forty-seven years was willing to make. It hurts right now. There is no pretending otherwise and I am paying it at the pump like everyone else.

But he is the only one who took on the actual structure underneath the oil market. And notice that I did not say Iran. Iran has been propped up and used as the bully of the oil industry to hold up a banking and insurance system centered in Great Britain, and that arrangement has been protected for decades.

I am not going to try to prove that in a blog post. I will tell you who I have been reading and let you do your own work:

• Promethean Action
• Rich Does Politics

Both are advocacy channels with a strong and specific point of view. I do not agree with everything either of them says. I am pointing you there as a starting place, not as a citation. Check them against other sources and reach your own conclusion.

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Why the Hatred Matters Here

Everyone working to bring this President down is serving the beast system, whether they know it or not, and most of them do not know it.

But there is one who shall be marred because of them; but I will heal him, for I will show unto them that my wisdom is greater than the cunning of the devil. (3 Nephi 21:10)

No public figure in American history has been marred more thoroughly, and scripture identifies that marring as a sign rather than a disqualification. I have been attacked viciously by people who cannot understand why I would defend him. I have laid out the full case for the marred servant elsewhere and I am not going to relitigate it inside an article about President Benson.

I will say only this, and I want to be exact. I hold no office and no keys. What I have is the gift of prophecy described in Doctrine and Covenants 46, which every member of this Church is invited to seek and which carries authority over nobody but me. Within that limit, I know what I know, and I have said so plainly.

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The Answer Was Never Capitalism Either

Capitalism has real faults and I am not going to pretend it doesn't. It has also lifted more human beings out of poverty than any other arrangement in history. Both of those are true at once.

And it is still not where we are going.

And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. (Moses 7:18)

That is the destination, and it is coming. The distinction that critics of consecration never manage to catch is that consecration is a covenant freely entered by people who have been changed, and communism is compulsion imposed on people who have not. The chart may look similar. The difference between them is the entire war in heaven. I have written a full article on that, because it is the objection I get more than any other.

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Where This Leaves Us

President Benson was right. He was right about the doctrine, right about the source, and right to say it out loud when saying it out loud cost him something inside his own Church.

The argument that the danger passed is not evidence he was wrong. It is evidence he was heard.

And it did not pass. It went quiet, and it is waking up now in exactly the conditions that have always woken it up.

A few hard months at the pump are not what I am afraid of. What I am afraid of is a generation trading away its agency for a guarantee and calling it compassion.

I pray we will not fall for it.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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