President Benson Was Right, and the Hindsight Argument Proves It

I have enjoyed watching Scott and Casey's channel for years now. They cover some pretty deep subjects and they do an excellent job of it, and I have learned things there that I never would have found on my own. I learned a few things in this particular episode too. But the more it went on, the more uncomfortable I became, and by the time it ended I had a knot in my stomach that took me several days to name. They were covering President Ezra Taft Benson and the years he spent warning the Church about communism.

President Benson is one of my favorite prophets. It was his talk encouraging the members to read the Book of Mormon every day that changed my life.^[1] Something hit me that day and I have tried my best to live by it ever since. It has now been forty years and in all that time I have missed sixty-six days. I love that book and I will always be forever grateful for his words of advice. I have written elsewhere about what four decades of daily reading did to me, so I will not take up room with it here, but you should know that is the lens I brought to this episode.

Here is where they land, and I would rather you watch the segment yourself than take my summary of it. Through the fifties and sixties President Benson warned repeatedly that communism was working its way into this country, into its institutions and its government, and that it posed a real and immediate danger to the republic. Their conclusion is that looking back now, with the clarity of hindsight, that infiltration never actually materialized. The republic did not fall. The takeover never happened. We can see all of that now with twenty-twenty vision, and so the warnings look overheated in retrospect.

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The Warning May Be the Reason It Never Arrived

Now wait a minute. Is it not possible that because of his warning, and because of the bold statements he made about what was happening at the time, that is exactly what kept it from having the effect he warned about? He was an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. He said it from the pulpit, in general conference, in the plainest words he could find, and millions of Latter-day Saints heard him say it. A great many of them changed how they voted and what they taught their children and what they were willing to put up with in their own communities. Didn't his role as an apostle help change the course of the world at the time? I believe he did.

Think for a minute about what actually happens when a warning gets heard. The danger never arrives. There is no disaster on the evening news, no wreckage to photograph, no death toll for the historians to argue over, and so forty years later somebody looks back at the whole thing and decides that the man who warned us must have been overreacting. But I want you to ask yourself something. If a fire gets put out before it ever spreads, where are the ashes you would use to prove it was dangerous? There are none. That was the point.

And the second problem is bigger than the first. It's happening right now. It's taking place as we speak, and this needs to be spoken out against again. We have openly avowed communists holding elected office in cities across this country today, running on the very same promises and using the very same language about fairness and equality that was used seventy years ago. To brush all of that aside as a settled historical curiosity, something we can look back on and smile about, is not hindsight. It's a blind spot.

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What President Benson Understood

President Benson had firsthand experience with communism in the forties, the fifties and the sixties. He was not theorizing about any of it. He served as Secretary of Agriculture for both full terms of the Eisenhower administration, eight years inside the cabinet, and he watched the thing operate up close. He spoke out against it. And he knew where its true power came from, because it is the same desire that Lucifer promoted in the premortal life. He wanted to take control of everything and force everybody to follow a certain way, thereby supposedly equaling everything out, making everything fair, and making sure that everybody was taken care of.

That is not my reading of what President Benson meant. It is what he said. In the October 1961 general conference he called communism "the earthly image of the plan which Satan presented in the pre-existence,"^[2] and in April 1965 he opened an address with the line "The war in heaven is raging on earth today."^[3] He was never making an economic argument. He was making a doctrinal one, and if you read those two statements as politics you will miss everything he was trying to tell us.

Go back and look at what was actually offered in that council.

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)

Nobody lost. Every soul saved. Guaranteed results, perfect fairness, everybody taken care of, and not one person left behind to fall through the cracks. On its face that is the most generous proposal that has ever been made to anyone, and if you were not paying close attention you might have voted for it yourself. But look at the price he attached to it. He wanted the agency and he wanted the honor. That concept is that old, and it has resurfaced again and again in every century since, and in our day it is taking on an even larger role than it had in President Benson's.

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Did President Benson Join the John Birch Society?

His involvement with the John Birch Society has been scoffed at for sixty years, and almost everybody doing the scoffing has the facts wrong, so let me put them down plainly. In October of 1962, Elder Benson went to President David O. McKay and asked for permission to join. President McKay told him no. He did not join. He never joined.^[4] His son Reed joined, and Reed became the Utah coordinator and eventually the organization's national director of public relations,^[5] and nearly all of the confusion that has followed for six decades comes from people collapsing the father into the son.

Now look at what President Benson actually did. He believed the threat was real enough that he went and asked for permission to affiliate. The prophet told him no. He accepted it, and then he went right on preaching the doctrine from the pulpit where he had every right to preach it, and he left the organization alone. He was not freelancing outside his stewardship. He knew exactly where the line was and he stayed on his side of it, and I wish more members knew that story, because it tells you more about the man than the caricature ever will.

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The History Almost Nobody Has Been Told

There is a second video I want you to watch, and I will warn you before you click it that it is harsh. Matt Walsh lays out a history of the civil rights movement and its leadership that most of us were never taught in school and that is still carefully avoided today. It is not kind to Martin Luther King and it is not kind to several other figures of that era. Watch it and decide for yourself whether I am telling you the truth about any of this.

But I don't want you taking Walsh's word for it, and I don't want you taking mine either, so let me show you what sits underneath it. David Garrow won the Pulitzer Prize for Bearing the Cross, his biography of Martin Luther King, and he spent thirty years as one of the most sympathetic and most respected King scholars alive. In May of 2019 he published an eight thousand word article in Standpoint after working his way through more than fifty-four thousand FBI documents that had been posted to the National Archives.^[6] What he found in those files were extensive extramarital relationships with dozens of women, named in the records. He found entanglements with members of the Communist Party. And he found an FBI memo, annotated by agents who had the recording and the transcript sitting 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.

Let me be exact about what I am claiming here, because I hold myself to the same standard I ask of everybody else. That hotel room account is what the Bureau's own contemporaneous notes allege. The audio has never been heard by the public. It sits under a court seal that expires on the thirty-first of January, 2027, which is only a few months from now.^[7] And here is why I find it credible anyway. This is not J. Edgar Hoover's smear reaching us secondhand through his enemies. This is King's own biographer, a man with every reason in the world to protect that memory, reading the file and changing his mind about the man he had spent his career defending.

We have highways and schools and bridges named for him in nearly every city in America. I will state this as opinion and let you weigh it for yourself, but on the evidence available right now, he does not deserve that honor. In a few months those tapes come out of the vault and this country is going to have a conversation it has spent sixty years finding ways to avoid. And I bring all of this up in an article about President Benson for one reason. Garrow's documents also record the Communist Party connections in that movement that President Benson was warning about at exactly that time, and for which he was mocked, edited, and told to stay in his lane.

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The Word They Never Said

Now back to Scott and Casey's podcast, because this is the part that actually kept me awake. They never denounced it. They walked all the way through that history, carefully and thoroughly, and they never once said the plain thing about what communism actually is. I know why. They are trying to keep a politically neutral podcast because they deal with all kinds of people all over the world from every different political background there is, and neutrality is how you keep those doors open. In their chair I might make the same call.

But communism is nothing short of Lucifer's plan. Should that not be spoken out against? Is that not exactly why President Benson preached against it in the first place? It is not a political position at all, it is a theological one, and if a man holding apostolic authority stood in general conference and identified it as the earthly image of Satan's plan, then declining to name it is not neutrality. It is something else. That is what I would like to see corrected, and I say that as a viewer who intends to keep watching.

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The Book of Mormon Warned Us About Exactly This

The Book of Mormon warns about the terrible secret combinations that will engulf the world, and it gives us two prime examples of what happened to the people in that marvelous book. The Jaredites destroyed themselves. The Nephites destroyed themselves. Both of these examples wiped each other out in tremendous civil wars, and in both cases the mechanism was identical: organized groups working in secret to get power and gain, and a population that decided tolerating them was easier than rooting them out. The book warns that we will suffer the very same fate if we will not learn from their tragedies and remove these groups and their ideologies from power.

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)

Look at who Moroni names as the builder of these things. Not a party. Not an economic theory. Not a foreign government. The devil, by name, which is the same figure we just read about in Moses chapter 4. And Moroni was not writing that warning to the Jaredites, who were already gone and beyond helping. He tells us straight out that he wrote it to the Gentiles, meaning us, so that we would not suffer these combinations to get above us. I have gone through that whole warning verse by verse elsewhere.

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So Why Is Anyone Considering This Again?

Communism has a horrific history and it has never ever provided the promises it promoted. It has killed over a hundred million people in just the last century,^[8] and yet here we are again, with people promoting it and being elected into office on promises of equality and fairness. It is the least equal and least fair economic system in the history of the world. It removes all incentive and it puts the power of decisions in the hands of a few who then decide what is right for the masses. I need not go into a lengthy dissertation about the damaging effects of communism.

So why is this being discussed today? Why is anybody considering it at all? With a background that horrible, what could possibly be the reason it is on the table again? The number one reason is the price of gasoline. Out here in the West we have been paying around five dollars a gallon or more all summer, and diesel has been worse than that, which matters a great deal more than most people realize, because everything sitting on the shelf at the grocery store rode a truck to get there. The second most important reason is the high cost of living, which has now outrun what a lot of families can absorb. And when people cannot make the math work at the end of the month, somebody always shows up promising fairness. The debt sitting underneath all of 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

And everybody is blaming Trump. Now let me be clear here, because what follows is my opinion and I want it labeled as such. The war with Iran has driven fuel prices up, there is no question about it, and we are all feeling the pain of it including me. But I'm here to tell you this is a short lived experience. It will come down. It will come way down, because Donald Trump looked at the long hard road and made the very tough decisions that no other president in forty-seven years was willing to make. Every one of them found a reason to hand that bill to the next man, and this one did not.

He is the only one who took on the real structure underneath the oil market. And notice I didn't say Iran. Iran has been propped up and used as the bully of the oil industry to hold up a banking and insurance system that has been protected for decades. I am not going to try to prove all of that inside a blog post, and I will tell you plainly that these are advocacy channels with a strong point of view and I do not agree with everything either of them says. But they shaped my thinking on it and you can start there and check them against other sources and reach your own conclusion.

Promethean Action and Rich Does Politics

All of those people who have done everything in the world to try to bring Trump down are in reality working for the beast system, and most of them have no idea that is what they are doing. No one in history has been marred more than he has, and this is according to prophecy as the sign of who God's servant would be in the last days.

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)

We have to look for someone who fits that description, and there is no one else who fulfills all of the signs needed to be recognized as that servant. I have been attacked viciously by people who absolutely hate Donald Trump and cannot understand why in the world I would support him, and I have laid out the full case for the marred servant elsewhere rather than relitigate it here.

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What We Are Actually Looking For

But back to my point in all of this. President Benson was correct, and we need to do everything we can to avoid any acceptance or promotion of communism in any form. We need to recognize its true history, which goes clear back to the premortal life. We need to recognize that it has no future and that it has never produced anything worthwhile in any country that has tried it. With all the faults that capitalism has, and it has real ones, it is the only system that has brought more people out of poverty than anything else in history. Both of those things are true at the same time and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Now of course we are looking for something better than that, and it is Zion.

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 where we are going, and it is coming, and Donald Trump will have a hand in its establishment. But here is the distinction that people who compare consecration to communism never seem to catch. Consecration is a covenant, entered freely, by people who have already been changed. Communism is compulsion, imposed on people who have not been changed at all. The chart might look similar if you squint at it. The difference between them is the entire war in heaven. I have written a full article on that distinction, because it is the objection I get more than any other.

President Benson was right about the doctrine, right about the source of it, and right to say it out loud at a time when saying it out loud cost him something inside his own Church. The argument that the danger passed is not evidence that he was wrong. It is evidence that he was heard. And it did not pass, it only went quiet, and it is waking up right now in exactly the conditions that have always woken it up before.

I pray that you will recognize these things and not fall for all the people who promote the hatred of Donald Trump and try to prevent him from achieving what he has been commissioned by God to do. I pray that we will not fall for communism, that we will be humble, and that we will recognize that a few hard months at the pump will soon end and that America will be propelled back to the forefront of technology and manufacturing again. A few months of expensive gasoline is 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.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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