Prophecy
Nobody Knows Their Names
Secret Combinations, Isaiah 14, and the Men No One Can Identify
Robert Kennedy Jr. stood in front of the Republican midterm convention on Thursday night and said something I have not been able to put down since. He had spent twenty minutes walking through what his old party did to him. The lawsuits in twelve states. The cancelled primaries. The cancelled convention. A nominee no voter ever cast a primary ballot for. And then he got to the part where a man usually names names, and he did not name anybody, because he cannot. He said they were faceless men wearing lanyards in the upper decks of that convention center, calling all the shots, and that nobody can see their faces any more than you could see the faces of the people sitting in the rafters above his head while he spoke.
Think about who was saying that. He is seventy-two years old and attended his first Democratic convention when he was six. He keynoted several of them. He is the son of Robert Kennedy and the nephew of John Kennedy, and he has spent his adult life saying publicly that neither of those men was killed by a lone gunman. He ran for president. He had a national party turned against him personally, in court, in thirty-eight states. Seventy years of access and connections almost nobody alive can match. And he cannot give you one name.
If he cannot, then who can? That question is the whole reason I am writing this, because look at what we have done with our inability to answer it. We decided the people do not exist. Somebody says out loud that there are men making decisions no voter authorized and no reporter can trace, and we do not ask him for evidence. We reach for a label. Conspiracy theorist. And the label does what it was built to do, which is end the conversation before anybody has to sit with how little we actually know. We have been dismissing people for sixty years because they could not produce a name, when the entire point of the arrangement is that no name can be produced.
The Book of Mormon calls this a secret combination, and Mormon and Moroni did not treat it as a fringe concern. They treated it as the thing that killed everybody. Kishkumen started it, and the band he gathered was held together by one promise, that nobody outside would ever learn what he had done. But Kishkumen was not the talent. Gadianton was exceedingly expert in many words, and within a very short time the band was not called Kishkumen's anymore. It was called the Gadianton robbers and it stayed called that for four hundred years. The man who starts an arrangement like this is almost never the man who ends up holding it. Mormon then stops the narrative to explain how the thing actually worked, and this is where it stops being ancient history.
"And it came to pass that they did have their signs, yea, their secret signs, and their secret words; and this that they might distinguish a brother who had entered into the covenant, that whatsoever wickedness his brother should do he should not be injured by his brother, nor by those who did belong to his band, who had taken this covenant. And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the world of their wickedness and their abominations, should be tried, not according to the laws of their country, but according to the laws of their wickedness, which had been given by Gadianton and Kishkumen." (Helaman 6:22, 24)
Signs and words. A way for a member to identify another member without either being visible to anybody else. That is a credentialing system and its only purpose is anonymity. Then comes mutual protection, and this is the part that explains why nothing ever happens to any of them. Whatever wickedness a brother commits, no other brother will move against him. Then comes enforcement. Anyone inside who reveals it to the world is not tried by the law of the land. He is tried by their law. That is why the evidence piles up in public for years and nobody is ever charged. The system was built to protect its own. That is not a defect. That is the product.
And Mormon tells us plainly where it came from.
"Now behold, those secret oaths and covenants did not come forth unto Gadianton from the records which were delivered unto Helaman; but behold, they were put into the heart of Gadianton by that same being who did entice our first parents to partake of the forbidden fruit. Yea, that same being who did plot with Cain, that if he would murder his brother Abel it should not be known unto the world." (Helaman 6:26–27)
Same being. Same design. And the design has one moving part, which is that it should not be known unto the world. Satan has never needed to improve on it because it has never stopped working. But I want to be exact about what happened to that people, because the record does not simply run downhill. When the Savior came to this continent the robbers were gone, and for two hundred years afterward there was no contention and no poor among them. That is the high point of the entire Book of Mormon and we cannot skip past it. What destroyed that nation was the return of the robbers. They got completely free of this thing, lived in peace for two centuries, and then let it back in.
Nephi saw the mindset that goes with it and wrote one line that has never left me alone.
"And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us?" (2 Nephi 27:27)
Who seeth us. That is not a figure of speech. That is a question asked by men who went and checked and came back satisfied with the answer. They looked at the courts and the records and the press and concluded that nobody is watching, and within the terms they were checking they were right. Kennedy looked. He could not find them. Neither can you and neither can I. But this is exactly where the scriptures turn, and the promise they make is not a vague one.
"There is nothing which is secret save it shall be revealed; there is no work of darkness save it shall be made manifest in the light; and there is nothing which is sealed upon the earth save it shall be loosed." (2 Nephi 30:17)
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Nothing. And the Lord said it again in our own dispensation, in the very first section He gave us, that the rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow, for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops and their secret acts shall be revealed. The anonymity has an expiration date, and the men counting on it do not get to set that date.
Which brings me to Isaiah 14. Isaiah is writing a taunt song, and the Lord tells His covenant people that a day is coming when they will stand over the king of Babylon and say out loud what nobody ever dared say to his face. The figure in that chapter is the Antichrist, the final oppressor. I want to be careful about verse 12, because this is where people go sideways. Isaiah is not telling us this king is Lucifer. He is setting Lucifer down beside him so we can see they are the same kind of being running the same play. The king is the subject. Lucifer is the pattern he copied. Once you see that, the chapter is not hard to read.
"That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, and the sceptre of the rulers. The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet: they break forth into singing." (Isaiah 14:4–5, 7)
The whole earth is at rest. Every nation on the planet exhales in the same hour, and what follows is not a war and it is not a coronation. It is singing. Then the scene drops underground, and what is waiting for him there is not a welcome.
"Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee." (Isaiah 14:9–11)
Every tyrant who ever lived gets up off his throne when this man arrives, and they are not there to receive him. They are taunting him. Every one of those kings held his throne by the same arrangement this man held his, and every one of them was promised wealth and power and influence in exchange for his own salvation, and every one took the deal. Now they watch the last and greatest of them walk in with nothing, and what they have to say is that he was lied to exactly the way they were lied to, and that he helped ruin them for a promise that was never going to be honored.
Read verse 11 closely, because it settles something. His pomp is brought down to the grave and the noise of his viols is not heard. Wherever this man went there were ceremonies and bands and crowds announcing him, and all of it simply stops. Then the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. He rots. He gets the same burial and the same decomposition every other human being gets, and that is how we know this chapter is not describing Satan, because Satan has no body to put in the ground. This is a man. This is the great latter-day Antichrist, and Isaiah now lays the pattern down alongside him.
"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High." (Isaiah 14:12–14)
Five sentences beginning with I will. That is Lucifer's script word for word. Now this man was not alive during the reigns of those other kings, because he comes at the very end of everything, but the principle underneath has never changed in any generation of the world. Every one of those tyrants believed the power handed to him came from somebody who would take care of him later. Not one of them thought past the promise he was given. Cain gloried in his wickedness and so did they and so does this man, and none of them receives any mercy at all, because the only real power that has ever existed comes from Jesus Christ, and they denied Him, and every one of them would have crucified Him personally given the chance. The deception was never really about money or thrones. The deception was getting men to believe the arrangement would be worth something to them in a future they never once sat down and thought about.
And then comes the verse I cannot get away from.
"They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof?" (Isaiah 14:16–17)
They narrowly look upon thee. I used a picture once of a dog with its eyes drawn down to slits, head tipped back, studying something it does not understand. That is the look. Chin up, eyes half closed, staring down the nose at a face and trying to make it fit with everything you thought you knew. The reason they have to study him that hard is that they have never seen him before. Only his own circle ever knew who he was. And a man standing there in that condition does not have only one thought. He starts remembering who tried to tell him and what he called them, and the warnings he waved off, and the people he helped discredit for repeating them. All of it comes back at once with the man's face right in front of him, and there is nothing left to do with any of it.
Now, verse 21 has bothered me for a very long time.
"Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities." (Isaiah 14:21)
Nephi quotes this chapter into the Book of Mormon and in his version the word is plural. Iniquities. And the verse before it says the seed of evil-doers shall never be renowned. These are not innocent grandchildren born into the wrong house. These are his seed the way scripture normally uses that word, the ones who carried the work forward. They inherited the iniquities and then went out and committed them, and there are millions of them, and that day is a horrible day. Something occurred to me here that I have never heard discussed, and I offer it as a question rather than an answer. The third part who followed Lucifer were condemned to never receive a body. These people did receive bodies, and the Lord's judgment on them is that it would have been better never to have been born. Better than what? They already got what the third part was denied. Is this a worse condemnation than the one handed down in that council? I do not know. But I have not been able to shake it.
That phrase has a home in our scriptures. It is the language the Lord used in the vision given to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, describing those who knew His power, were made partakers of it, and then denied the truth and defied that power. Of them He says they are the sons of perdition, of whom I say that it had been better for them never to have been born. Same words. And then the Savior Himself, resurrected, standing among the Nephites, says this:
"But behold, it sorroweth me because of the fourth generation from this generation, for they are led away captive by him even as was the son of perdition; for they will sell me for silver and for gold, and for that which moth doth corrupt and which thieves can break through and steal." (3 Nephi 27:32)
Look at what He does there. Son of perdition is a title Jesus used once before, in His great intercessory prayer, about Judas. Now He is on this continent in a resurrected body and He uses it again as a fixed point of reference. And what is the sin He names? They will sell me for silver and for gold. That is Judas exactly. Thirty pieces of it. The thing that drags a man into that category is money.
I have written elsewhere that the Antichrist is most likely a former member of the covenant, because the condition in that vision requires a man to have known the power of God before he can deny it in the way that condemns him. You cannot fall that far from a place you never stood. The people who follow him are a different matter. Most of them will never have known Christ the way he knew Him. They will give their allegiance anyway, and they will give it for exactly what Jesus said they would, and Moroni closed the loop on what that makes them.
"Yea, and wo unto him that shall say at that day, to get gain, that there can be no miracle wrought by Jesus Christ; for he that doeth this shall become like unto the son of perdition, for whom there was no mercy, according to the word of Christ!" (3 Nephi 29:7)
To get gain. There it is a third time. A man who will deny the power of God in public because there is a paycheck in the denying. This is what Babylon has always been underneath everything else, and it is why money is where this combination always concentrates. Power and gain. Those two words are all over the record and they have never once been separated.
There is something almost too fitting about the detail Kennedy landed on. A party that spent a year marching under the words No Kings handed its nomination to a candidate no voter selected, and the handing was done by men whose names have never been printed anywhere. The people carrying those signs were told to fear a crown. The crown was being passed a hundred feet over their heads while they marched, and they still do not know it, because nobody has ever been able to tell them who to be angry at.
But they will know. That is what I want you to take out of here, and I do not hold it as a hope. I hold it as a promise, because the Lord made it and He made it repeatedly. The day is coming when the documents come out. The recordings of conversations held in rooms nobody knew existed. The video. The names, the faces, the signatures, the transfers, the orders and who gave them. All of it published, not leaked in fragments to a press that will bury it, but made manifest in the light in a way nobody can argue with and nobody can suppress. And the people who spent their lives trying to warn everybody are going to be honored. The ones called cranks and lunatics and conspiracy theorists, who lost their careers and their reputations and in some cases their lives for saying out loud that these men existed, will be recognized as having been right the whole time. The judgment that falls on the men in the lanyards will need no explanation from God. Everyone will see the record and everyone will agree that it is just.
So what do we do until then? Not guess at names, because that is how sincere people end up slandering somebody's grandfather over something they read on the internet, and it is the surest way to discredit the truth we actually have. Our work is simpler and far more urgent. Every one of us needs mercy, and mercy is the one thing these men traded away. I cannot pay for my own sins. Neither can you. If the justice of an offended God must be satisfied and I am the one who has to satisfy it, then I am finished and so is everyone I love. The whole of my religion comes down to the fact that Someone else paid that price and offers me the benefit of it on His terms if I will take it. Get on the right side of that. Then stay there, and let the Lord keep His own appointment with the men in the upper deck.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has read the Book of Mormon daily for more than forty years. Find the book, the podcast, and the full article library at FirstHorseman.World.
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