The Uffda Times-Picayune

In many ways, Joseph Smith is the 1800’s proto-L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology). The forerunner for b******t, batshit cults, if you will.

Scientology and Mormonism have a lot of similarities—they’re both American, they’re both highly-structured, hierarchical, pseudo-corporate entities cosplaying as a church, and most importantly for the next few editions of this series, they were both founded by military wannabes. Beyond this, they both have cosmological elements, a self-described narrative of constant persecution, and are both infamously difficult to leave and make high-demands of followers for their time, money, and free agency.

If you weren’t aware, L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction author turned religious wacko, was the failson of a Navy officer who just wanted to be a cool sailor like his dad. The military blunders/catastrophes podcast Lions Led By Donkeys has an incredible recounting of his career that better contextualizes it within Scientology. The Scientologists claim he had a miraculous career and used Dianetics alone to heal from a career-ending injury. The US Navy said he was never injured and just had an ulcer he was hospitalized with for 6 months.

1838 gave us our first look at a Hubbard-esque Joseph Smith that anyone familiar with the Book of Mormon (fraudulent holy text) should have seen coming. I didn’t spend a lot of time covering the content of the Book of Mormon (fraudulent holy text), but significant parts of the book revolve around the documentation of wars/conflicts the “Lamanites” supposedly participated in on the American continent, despite literally no evidence existing aside from the Book of Mormon (fraudulent holy text). The book discusses tactics, strategies, and describes dozens of battles. Smith was a wannabe war hero just like L. Ron Hubbard.

Before we could get the “1838 Mormon War,” Mormons were still given the benefit of the doubt that they were a persecuted religious minority seeking to take advantage of the promises of the Constitution and the frontier spirit of Manifest Destiny. The Missouri state government had a chartered militia in the Mormon-haven Caldwell County, which ostensibly was to protect the Mormons from persecution by angry mobs and locals. While Jefferson City had abandoned the Mormons during their fool’s errand to re-take Jackson County land in 1834, they were here to protect them now.

At this same time, when the state has given the Mormons land, military protection, and dozens of second chances, the consolidation of the Mormons in Far West was upending the church power structure. Tensions between leadership in Kirtland and Missouri are well-documented, and the Kirtland Safety Society crisis only fueled more unrest, distrust, and paranoia.

I can’t imagine a paranoid cult leader obsessed with war and military tactics, who was now emboldened with access to the legitimate use of force afforded to the state, would let this power get to his head?

This is Part 6 of Putting the Moron in Moroni. Buckle up, this edition is a bit heavy on the history, but these events are critical turning points for pre-Utah Mormons.

This week: Joseph sows the seeds of his own demise while putting the last nails in the coffin of the Mormon project in Missouri, the supposedly peaceful Mormons engage in some good ol’ mob violence, and we visit a holy jail. Thanks for reading and listening.

I swear on my life that I won’t be talking about Mormons in this newsletter forever. I am funny, too. Subscribe now and take my word for it.

The Mormon church had a new lease on life in Caldwell County, and Joseph Smith used it as an opportunity to weed out dissenters and further control his followers in Far West, MO.

We visited Far West a couple of weeks ago, but there was an important revelation there that led to the inscriptions on the embarrassing monument we saw. Joseph Smith revealed in April 1838:

* Far West is a holy and consecrated place,

* The Law of Tithing is now a thing,

* The church should be called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” and

* God told Joseph Smith that his Kirtland loyalists should be installed as leaders in Far West.

We talked last week about Martin Harris’ excommunication and revolt in Kirtland. As you might recall, Harris was one of the so-called “Three Witnesses” to the Book of Mormon’s creation who later recanted (and would later recant the recantation once the Saints moved to Utah) and claimed it was all b******t.

The other two, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, were Smith’s loyalists in charge of managing the Missouri church before the Kirtland exodus. Predictably, Cowdery and Whitmer became principal targets of Smith’s reorganization, which is a pretty nice way of putting it.

In early June 1838, David Whitmer, his brother John, and William Phelps (who wrote the hymn from last week’s edition), were formally accused of heresy and were excommunicated from the church. Their crimes? Not obeying Joseph’s rules.

The Law of Consecration, which we’ve brought up a few times in this series, was an edict commanding followers to liquidate their property and assets to the church, and the church would lease it back to them. The Whitmers and Phelps were accused of selling their land in Jackson County, which had not been under church control. They were also accused of disobeying the Word of Wisdom, specifically, that they were indulging in coffee and tea, according to John Turner’s Joseph Smith.

On June 17, 1838, Smith’s second-in-command, Sidney Rigdon, delivered an infamous oration, the “Salt Sermon,” during what I would describe as a meeting akin to a wrestling promo. Rigdon gave a scathing rebuke of detractors/dissenters of the Church. We don’t have a one-for-one transcript, but he invoked the Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew to call for sanctions against those disloyal to Smith and his church, including erecting a gallows in the town square of Far West. Wheesh.

Smith was present and spoke after Rigdon, and according to Turner, seemed somewhat apprehensive of the call for violence and urged peace. At the same time, he made the theologically incorrect claim that “Peter hung Judas” as a way to justify violence against traitors. To me, Smith’s effective endorsement was choreographed like a good heel’s promo; they had already prepared printed pamphlets of Rigdon’s remarks they had distributed to those present for the address.

In the days after Rigdon’s “Salt Sermon,” Smith loyalists in Far West drafted a letter signed by 80-some Mormons (not leadership, mind you) and demanded these wicked, designing men (the Whitmers and Cowdery) out of Caldwell County. Almost as consequentially, local Mormons established what they called the “Danites,” a fraternal order meant to serve as a kind of informal paramilitary force operating extrajudicially. They had tacit support from Joseph Smith and were focused on “self-defense” against mob violence. Within two days, the dissenters and their families had fled the immediate danger of the mob-violence-minded Mormons and left Caldwell County.

On July 4, at an Independence Day celebration, the cornerstones (now encased in glass) were laid at the Far West Temple Site (where we visited a couple editions ago). At this event, Sidney Rigdon again delivered a firebrand speech that all but confirmed the Mormons’ days of adhering to an ideology with a modicum of non-violence were over: he declared any mobs attacking the Mormons should prepare for a “war of extermination.” The pamphlet they gave out at the event had the subtitle: “Better far sleep with the dead than be oppressed with the living.” Uffda!

The speech was effectively a public declaration of “independence” from the Missouri state government and called for the Saints to fight to the death to protect themselves from “mobocracy” and set the tone for how the rest of the year would go for the Saints. Let’s see if it pays off (it won’t).

On August 6, 1838, voters in Caldwell County headed to the polls for the first time, and the premier candidate had specifically called out the Mormons as “horse-thieves” and “robbers.” The Mormons also headed to the polls—a group of thirty or so approached the polling place but were denied the right to vote. A brawl ensued, including one Mormon inciting the Danites by name, who were willing to kill for their cause.

There were no injuries, thankfully, but the event is known as the “Election Day Battle.” This was covered on our tour of Liberty Jail, where the missionaries called it “a disagreement on election day.”

Mormons had been settling in areas around Caldwell County, including neighboring Carroll County, where Mormons had moved into the vacant town of De Witt, MO. That same election day, Carroll County voters approved a ballot measure to expel the Mormons from the county. Over the next two months, Mormons would be run out of town by angry mobs who burned their houses down, stole property, threatened lives, etc.

Two days after election day, the Mormons concocted a scheme to try to force the local government outside of Caldwell to defend them. Smith led a group of around 100 armed Mormons to the house of Adam Black, a justice of the peace in Daviess County. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t sign their agreement that he would use force to prevent Mormons from being attacked by angry mobs. Joseph, a f*****g idiot, thought that a signed note had to be legitimate. The next day, Black signed an affadavit that he only signed anything to prevent his “instant death.”

The new Missouri Governor, Lilburn Boggs (incredible name), was made aware of the plight of the Mormons as both government leaders like Black and Mormon officials pleaded for military aid. Boggs obliged, partially, and sent the state militia. State leaders warned Smith and the Mormons that their militia in Caldwell County, sanctioned by the state, was not permitted to enter any other county. In response, the Mormons took the Caldwell County militia to Daviess County to “defend” Mormon settlers there. This was not their brightest move.

They did much more than “defend” property: they pillaged and destroyed non-Mormon communities in Daviess County.

There was widespread looting, property damage, and lawless chaos that the Mormons were finally inflicting on others. Of course Mormons, always the victims, made accusations locals had burned their own houses and stores down simply to blame the Mormons.

There were accounts from Mormon civilians, however, that showed concern over the ease at which a Mormon mob could form, become bloodthirsty, and quench it. You might imagine, the Mormons were not unified in their newfound love for mob violence. Thomas Marsh, the first-ever President of the Q12 (a stupid Mormon council) left the Church the day after the Daviess County attacks. The Missouri government turned on the Mormons for their illegal offensive. The cordial goodwill given to the Mormons by the people of Missouri all but disappeared.

In October, a skirmish between the Missouri militia in Ray County (south of Caldwell) and the Mormons (who instigated it) turned deadly, with 4 dead on both sides at the Battle of Crooked River. I don’t find battles particularly interesting so go get your war documentary crap elsewhere.

The accounts of the Mormon offensive were exaggerated, but this was still an era with little-to-no mass communication, and the Missouri government had decided enough was enough.

Governor Boggs ordered a militia of 2,500 men to head to the area to put down the Mormon revolt and restore some sense of peace to the area, but upped the ante by turning Rigdon’s warning of a “war of extermination” for the Mormons’ foes into a promise. On October 27, 1838, Gov. Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, also known as the “Mormon Extermination Order.”

“Your orders are, therefore, to hasten your operation with all possible speed. The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description. If you can increase your force, you are authorized to do so to any extent you may consider necessary.” - Gov. Lilburn Boggs, Executive Order 44

Three days later, an unauthorized militia of Missourians surrounded Hawn’s Mill, the one historical site in the area we did not get to visit, and attacked the Mormon settlement there. This attack was the bloodiest and arguably cruellest; 17 Mormons were slain, including children. The most shocking aspect, aside from the deaths, is that he militia likely hadn’t even heard about the extermination order at the time.

On November 1, it was all over. The Mormons had retreated to Far West where they were surrounded by the state militia. Joseph Smith allegedly “begged like a dog” for peace terms, and the terms were wildly one-sided and required the Mormons to leave Missouri. The Mormon leaders were arrested on treason charges. Joseph Smith’s hubris and eagerness to test the waters of democracy and cast a wide net of economic, military, religious, social, and political power over his followers and the non-Mormon locals had failed; was the Mormon project in Missouri over?

The government arrested dozens of Mormons and took a victory lap at Far West. A court martial actually demanded Smith be executed publicly, but the local general refused, and he would get a trial.

After a preliminary hearing, Joseph and his brother Hyrum, along with Sidney Rigdon, Lyman Wight (the man who owned the land at Adam-ondi-Ahman), and a couple others, were taken to the jail in Liberty, the county seat of Clay County and just outside of Independence, MO.

Much like Joseph and his accomplices, we made our way through semi-rural Missouri, but unlike the Mormons, we were coming from Jackson County because we had successfully avoided pissing off the locals.

There wasn’t much to see on the way there. There’s something to be said about the kind of rah-rah patriotism one could only get from visiting places called Independence and Liberty in the same day. It is not lost on me that Liberty’s claim to fame is a jail.

Speaking of, we pulled up to a somewhat chaste-looking stone building. I’d contextualize it within Liberty but I don’t remember anything about it other than I just wanted to get in and out as fast as f*****g possible.

Against our better judgement, we went in. Timeline-wise, we went here the same day as Temple Lot and Far West, but Liberty Jail was between the two. This was our first guided tour. I don’t know what I expected, but I really hoped we could just…walk in and wander around and read exhibits.

When we walked in, I immediately felt my fight or flight instincts kick in. Mormon facilities have a very clinical, very American feel, like if you tried to inject patriotic jingoism into a funeral home. The carpet was hideous, the wallpaper drab, and the decorations tacky and classic Mormon core.

Walking in, we were greeted by a group of young sister missionaries, probably all aged 18-22 or so, along with two much older men who really put the elder in Elder. They greeted us and, much to my chagrin, my two companions immediately bailed on me to use the bathroom. So much for sticking together in the cult facility.

While I was waiting, I was really trying to avoid talking to the Mormons. I was taking pictures of some of the surroundings—there was a portrait of White Jesus, White Jesus visiting the Americas, and I’m pretty sure the classic “First Vision” art of Joe on the ground looking up at two identical, but distinctly separate holy beings.

I did, however, eavesdrop. The crowd of Mormons dissipated as I’m guessing shifts were changing over, and it was just a very young sister missionary and an old man making the most uncomfortable NPC-ass small-talk dialogue I’ve ever heard. Once again, Mormons left in their idle spaces will make small-talk like Red Dead Redemption 2 characters.

She pointed out a book he had sitting by him, which was I think an Ezra Taft Benson book (horribly evil right-wing head of the church for the mid-20th century), and she feigned excitement so poorly I really had to keep from interjecting or laughing or otherwise reacting.

“Elder Benson? That’s so cool!” she said half-heartedly. He then went on a diatribe about reading and told her to read more and then asked some probing borderline inappropriate questions about her life. I was uncomfortable. Thankfully, my partner and our friend did eventually come back to me, and the sister missionary pointed us towards a large waiting room.

The room was a pretty typical historical museum orientation room: there were some interactive maps about the 1838 Mormon War (all technically correct information, mind you) juxtaposed with Mormon art about Joseph Smith being held there, the exodus to Illinois after being kicked out of Missouri (next week!), but my favorite piece was this extremely ridiculous looking portrait of Joseph on his knees with a comically large frowny face on as he prays for freedom or whatever.

They made us wait for literally 20-25 minutes before they’d take us on a tour. In their defense, we did have a number of pilgrims join us, a few families, a very young couple, and an elderly couple, all True Believing Mormons (TBMs). Some were in classic road trip clothes but others, like the young couple, were dressed to the 9s with a beautiful dress and fitted suit. Truly bonkers stuff.

We were eventually joined by another missionary, who said she was from Hawaii. She was far less enthusiastic. If you aren’t familiar, missionaries pay their own way, don’t get to choose where they go, and are forced to be around another missionary 24/7, where they constantly police each other’s behavior because “obedience” is considered one of the most important virtues for a missionary.

Anyway, we got an orientation, which was really awkward because the chairs in the room they had us sit in were in two lines, back-to-back, meaning if someone was speaking on the other side of the room you had to turn your whole body around. It’s okay, though, there was nothing worth listening to.

Liberty Jail does a great job at showcasing the Mormon doublethink. The jail was presented as both a holy place where revelations were made and a desolate hellhole. It was “maximum security” according to a missionary, but we were later told they were allowed to leave and walk around, people brought them pies (I’m not kidding), and even their families were permitted to stay with them.

After the orientation, they took us to a smaller room with “art” for us to look at, which was just low-resolution historical photos blown the f**k up and printed on canvas, like some Redbubble s**t. The room was tiny and we were in there all of 30 seconds.

They then led us down a hallway, which felt remarkably similar to the hallways at the Washington, DC temple I toured in 2022; it felt more like an orthodontist’s office than a church facility. The doors were also really creepy—they were all steel doors like you’d find at any public place, but they had these tiny 5"x5” square windows that basically only showed you if the light was on in the next room. They were on every door!

They took us to a large room that housed the historic jail. It was presented as a cutaway, like one of those Dorling Kindersley kids books. We were told photos were fine, but no flash or videos permitted because it would interfere with the “audio-visual presentation.”

The presentation was a series of voiceovers about Joseph et al’s experience at the jail. They talked about the isolation and brutal conditions, while again, simultaneously mentioning the various liberties afforded to the Mormons, particularly by the kind jailers who lived upstairs. There were three parts to the tour, an upper level, and two lower-levels on either side of the jail. It was mostly pre-recorded voiceovers with the occasional interlude by the missionaries.

The highlight was when we got to hear the voice of God speaking to Joseph Smith through a beam of light in the window in the basement. While consuming the heresy, my faithful Catholic partner was having a bad time, because believe it or not it feels wrong to hear fake testimony from a man a missionary literally just told you is “second only to Jesus Christ” in terms of what men have done for humanity.

I haven’t mentioned my favorite part of this tour, which will come up at Carthage Jail too, which is that our friend was moving and had their cat with them in a cat backpack. None of the Mormons ever acknowledged the cat and it was very difficult to not laugh as the cat quietly meowed through the presentation.

One point they made was that the door on the jail was not the original door, but that in 2024 the LDS Church had acquired the actual door and that we shouldn’t worry, because it’s in safe keeping in the church’s archives. Thank God for that.

The whole presentation was extremely culty. Joseph had a whopping three revelations at Liberty Jail, and none are as important as those at Far West that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. But we still had to hear about how holy this place was and how divine providence kept Joseph and his spirits up.

In the spirit of Mormon doublethink, we were told that eventually, Joseph and the gang were being transferred to a different jail when their escorts simply…let them go. The general Mormon theory is that the guards got drunk and Joseph was able to escape, something to reinforce the Word of Wisdom.

More realistically, it was a conspiracy to avoid more scrutiny against the Missouri state government’s treatment of Mormons. Boggs’ political career was irreparably damaged, and after Rigdon-led Mormon refugees fled the state, they found safe haven in Illinois, where the town council of Quincy welcomed them with open arms:

“Resolved: That the governor of Missouri, in refusing protection to this class of people when pressed upon by an heartless mob, and turning upon them a band of unprincipled Militia, with orders encouraging their extermination, has brought a lasting disgrace upon the state over which he presides.”

But what was most disarming, what pissed me off the most, what made my blood boil, was learning that this supposedly very holy site of great persecution, where Joseph was allowed to freely leave, visit with family, and again, were brought pies by supportive locals, is not only not the original jail (it’s a recreation, and not a particularly accurate one at that), but that Joseph was only there for four months. FOUR MONTHS??? WHY IS THIS A HOLY SITE?

The Mormons treated it like we were visiting the f*****g Lorraine Motel or Nelson Mandela’s prison cell. It was a f*****g jailhouse, literally just somebody’s house, that had very little security and was generally a far more positive experience than one might think of when they think about the modern justice system.

When the presentation ended and the lights turned back on, we noticed multiple TBMs also attending were full-on crying about the religious experience they had. Horrified, we bolted out to a vestibule where we were finally alone, I said “what the f**k was that” multiple times, snapped a pic of a giant statue of Joseph Smith, and took a free copy of the Book of Mormon (fraudulent holy text) from the table.

Afterwards, we had one last Mormon cultural site to visit in Liberty: a Swig drive-through. If you’re not familiar with Swig, you’re almost certainly familiar with the “dirty soda” fad of the past few years. Of course it’s a Mormon thing, and we had to stop because we don’t have one anywhere near Minnesota.

Or we would have loved to, but the drive-through line (I s**t you not) was at least 20 cars long and wrapped around multiple sidestreets in the strip mall complex we were in. We instead, opted for the much cheaper and essentially same product that’s offered at Sonic next door. Sorry Swig-lovers, maybe another time. Maybe we’ll stop next time and bring a Swig for Joseph in the jail cell for old time’s sake.

So yeah…the Mormons are kicked out of Missouri, and we are done with the Kansas City region. I’ve stretched this out to multiple weeks, but just know that this, Independence, Far West, The Country Store, and Adam-ondi-Ahman were all done in one day. It was brutal but the history is just so stupid and sooooo 1830’s that I needed to cover it, both to share how insane it all is, but also to rationalize how much money I spent to make this happen by grasping at straws to understand what the f**k is going on.

Next week, the Saints arrive in Nauvoo, Illinois, the hub of the last five years of Joseph Smith’s life. In a couple weeks, we’ll wrap up the tour part of the series in Carthage, Illinois, where Joseph Smith met his timely death in 1844.

I have a couple of other articles in the hopper. I want to cover the 2025 dating show Are You My First? which is predicated on being Love Island but all the people are virgins and it’s only 10 episodes. It’s also full of Mormons. There’s also a whole newsletter worth of content to cover one of the most bizarre and consequential delusional episodes of Joseph Smith’s life: his 1844 campaign for the President of the United States.

Thanks again for reading and listening, and I’ll see you next week.

Wavering Mormons with a history of violence have been in the news a lot this week (see: The Bachelorette), help your curious friends learn that it’s nothing new and share this post.

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“This earth was once a garden place, with all her glories common, and men did live a holy race, and worship Jesus face to face, in Adam-ondi-Ahman.”

- Mormon hymn “Adam-ondi-Ahman”

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The Mormons really thought they cooked when they set up their theocratic enclave in Far West, Missouri in 1836 after getting justly kicked out of Jackson County; at long last, the Mormons had won themselves a home outside of Ohio or New York.

The 1834 Zion’s Camp mission to use quasi-military force to attempt re-seizing the properties Mormons left behind in Jackson County after their eviction was a colossal failure. However, in private correspondence, the Attorney General and Governor of Missouri expressed deep concern over the Mormons’ ability to mount a sizable militia force relatively quickly.

Actions taken by so-called “Anti-Mormons” only further radicalized the Mormons who had already given up everything, in many cases multiple times, to support the now nomadic church that was created just a few short years prior. These Mormons had nothing to lose, driven by 2nd Great Awakening fervor, their cult of personality Joseph Smith, and a tendency to antagonize the locals no matter where they went. Remember all of the angry mobs?

Surely nothing can go wrong.

This is Putting the Moron in Moroni: Martyrs, Mormons, and Misery in Missouri.

In July, against my better judgement, I took a road trip from the Twin Cities to Missouri to visit Mormon holy sites. In this series, we’re looking at my bonkers experiences, the historical context of just what the hell happened at these historical sites, and analyzing what this bit that went too far can tell us about the world’s most American religion.

This week, we visit the Garden of Eden…sorta, Joseph commits banking fraud and gets kicked out of Ohio, and we try and fail to determine once and for all whether this is all a f*****g joke to them or not. Thanks for reading and listening.

Good God, we’re still doing this series. When will it be over? Subscribe now and I promise you’ll eventually receive the last one.

When we last checked in with Joey and the gang, the pressure was starting to build.

It’s 1837, and Joe and his boys (for the most part) are still based out of Kirtland, Ohio. The church was in dire financial straits—as you’ll recall, the Mormons were not the rich pseudo-communitarians they are today. There was no Swig or Crumbl to directly funnel money up to the church.

Joseph had largely relied on revelations and good-natured frontierspeople giving up what little they had for the church Smith convinced them was true. Joseph Smith relied on well-meaning rubes, like Martin Harris and the folks he stayed with in Hiram, OH when he was tarred and feathered, to string along enough money to make it to the next venture.

Like all good cults, Joseph used revelations and prophecies to try to will new money and resources into existence. This worked, for the most part, but new temples, like the one in Kirtland that was dedicated in 1836, were not cheap. It didn’t help that his people had been violently evicted from the holy homeland that he had declared, and the well-documented flaring of tensions between the Ohio and Missouri communities was coming to a head.

You might remember the United Firm from a few editions ago. This was a short-lived business venture of Smith’s cult that, paired with the Law of Consecration, created a mutual aid network (or at least purported to) that focused on pooling resources to create community wealth for the Mormons. What I didn’t mention, is that this endeavor, which was focused solely in Missouri, collapsed in 1834 with the Mormons being kicked out of Jackson County.

In late 1836, Joseph concocted quite the scheme to bolster the church’s coffers. Long before the Federal Reserve existed, and during a time where banking in the US was pretty much nothing like it is today, Joseph thought the easiest way for the church to raise money would be to simply create a church-owned bank. After all, banks were the ones making their own bank notes and banking was wildly different state-by-state. S**t was fake!

Smith wanted to take advantage of the largely unregulated and undeveloped American (and Ohioan) banking system, and devised the “Kirtland Safety Society,” which despite its nice-sounding name was effectively a bank meant to literally print money for the church.

Or so they thought.

Orson Hyde, one of Smith’s Kirtland lackeys, was sent to the Ohio capitol seeking a bank charter from legislators to authorize their church bank. Believe it or not, this did not work. Joseph Smith chalked it up to typical Anti-Mormonism. “If thine scam shall not come to pass then thee shall even blameth thine biggest haters” is something he could have said about the situation.

There was some luck on a second visit to the legislature, but a noted-anti-Mormon activist legislator that had personal beef with Joseph Smith intervened to make sure the Mormons didn’t get their coveted charter. From ‘36-’37, Jacksonian Democrats took power in Ohio and rejected every bank charter but one for two years. Call it good governance or bad timing but regardless it wasn’t going Joseph’s way.

Under the counsel of counsel, the Mormons decided they would move forward and start a bank in everything but name. They founded The Kirtland Safety Society “Anti-Banking Company” (KSSABC), and I wish I was joking about the name.

They had already secured the printing stamp to create bank notes as the “Kirtland Safety Society Bank,” so they had to add an awkward “ANTI” and “ING CO.” in tiny print on either side of the word bank so you know they are definitely not in any way a bank. Smith must have been well-versed in the Fielder Method, because this was a very “Dumb Starbucks” strategy: The plan: call it an “anti-bank” to avoid banking regulations.

The legally dubious KSSABC was a disaster right from the get-go in January 1837.

Immediately, lawsuits were filed against the company’s officials, including Sidney Rigdon and Joseph Smith. They were lampooned in local media for printing worthless “Mormon money.” The company would not make it to the end of the year, and was seized with $100k in debt, including $30k used to bail Smith out of jail for running an illegal bank.

This was the last straw for some significant early members of the church, including all three of the Book of Mormon’s original witnesses. They had been willing to put up with a lot of b******t: Joseph was a lying philanderer running a racket to fund trips to Missouri, Canada, upstate New York, Philadelphia, and pretty much anywhere he wanted to go. His followers had made embarrassing exoduses from various places at the hands of angry mobs. Hoity-toity upstate New Yorkers were now willingly associating with hicks from Missouri and Ohio. The horror of it all!

But for many of his longest and loyalest followers, swindling faithful believers into giving their money to an illegal bank to offset Joseph’s traveling and poor financial management was a bridge too far.

The fallout was incredible—Joseph Smith condemned his now former-friends with excommunications and public denouncements. Smith’s vengance campaign against his now-oppss was further fracturing the Mormon project in Ohio, which was coming to a head by the end of 1837.

A follower named Warren Parrish rallied disillusioned Saints to fight back against Joseph. He allegedly led an armed insurrection mid-church service, and Parrish publicly chastised Smith and the church in the paper, and even tapped Martin Harris to join his cause, who now claimed he had never seen the Golden Plates at all.

Behind the scenes, as outlined in John Turner’s extraordinary biography of Joseph Smith, simply called Joseph Smith, Smith’s loyalists were privately irritated with Joseph’s sexual promiscuity. This was before Smith hard-launched polygamy as doctrine, and between financial ruin and moral corruption, Joseph’s church in Ohio was at its weakest and it was so painfully obvious that it was squarely his fault.

Would you believe it if I told you that Parrish’s armed insurrection against Smith actually worked?

Parrish successfully commandeered the Kirtland Temple, while Smith and his confederation of rubes and criminals were followed by an angry mob looking to arrest Smith to stand trial. A warrant was out for Smith’s arrest for fraudulent banking, again.

For the umpteenth time in his life, Joseph Smith and his followers were driven away from their home for legitimate reasons, but Smith played it off as typical anti-Mormon b******t.

The Mormon experiment in Kirtland was over for now, and for the rest of Smith’s life, at that. And we didn’t even talk about all the other b******t, like the mummies and the papyri and all the stupid theology-building revelations he would have during these self-inflicted tribulations.

Smith set off for Missouri, and hundreds of Mormons, including most of his loyalists, followed in-tow. They headed for Caldwell County, and its seat, Far West to unify the once divided church into a community of 4,000+. A significant number of detractors would stay in Ohio and the Kirtland Temple would eventually come under ownership of resident-Utah-opps, Community of Christ. The LDS Church in Utah would not come to own the temple until 2024.

In case being run out of Ohio wasn’t enough, Joseph Smith and his band of refugee Mormons were testing how far they could go with the limited liberties the Missouri government had afforded them in Caldwell County.

By the end of January, the church had formally moved its headquarters to Far West. Despite getting a dedicated enclave in Caldwell county, many settlers chose to set up homesteads and settlements outside of it, in neighboring areas, notably Daviess County.

A Mormon named Lyman Wight was one of these Daviess County settlers, and set up a homestead and ferry along the Grand River in February 1838. Joseph Smith visited in April, and told Lyman that this location, just outside of their legally sanctioned haven, was actually the place Adam and Eve were sent to after being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Isn’t that f*****g convenient?

This stupid-ass revelation pisses me off so much.

Isn’t it convenient that the Garden of Eden and site of Christ’s Second Coming was in the first frontier community that Joseph felt he could overpower with numbers alone?

Isn’t it convenient that, after getting kicked out of effectively three places (Palmyra, NY, Kirtland, OH, and Jackson County, MO), the last place they would end up would be near a new, even more b******t-ass holy site?

Isn’t it convenient that this holy site is on property already-owned by a TBM and was theoretically an important strategic location, what with the ferry and all?

Isn’t it convenient that Joseph can use the story he invented about Adam and Eve could be used to justify why they aren’t in Jackson County? That they, like Adam and Eve, were struck out of the literal same paradise in Jackson County, Missouri because of Satan?

Isn’t it convenient that this new location was near water, had lots of flat land, and would align with Smith’s expansionist agenda, providing enough land and resources to support at least a small community of Mormons outside of Caldwell County?

Yeah, it’s really f*****g convenient.

Smith formally revealed in May 1838 that this area, known as Wight’s Ferry, about 20 miles north of Far West, was actually an ancient religious site called Adam-ondi-Ahman, which he claimed means “Valley of the Gods” in the non-existent “Adamic” language. Always with the fake f*****g languages.

He claimed that random rocks were “altars” and that it was clearly the place God sent Adam and Eve after they were evicted from Eden. There’s so much d*****s lore that I truly do not have the time or respect to cover it all.

Let’s just visit this stupid f*****g field and get it over with.

Our trip to Adam-ondi-Ahman was more treacherous than we expected.

The very-Missourian elder missionary at the Country Store had made it obvious that the main road was not an option. I white-knuckled it in my mostly pristine and not-at-all-off-road-capable ‘24 Honda Civic across dozens of miles of dirt roads, all a little fucked from recent rainfall (See: the washed out bridge—once again, take a f*****g hint, Mormons!)

I’ll be honest here: even with an exmo on hand, our understanding of this site was…not clear. I knew we weren’t in Jackson County, so I just assumed that The Book of Mormon (musical) had simply gotten their theology wrong, like they did by saying God lives on a planet called Kolob (it’s actually a planet near a star named Kolob), but no, it was just us who were wrong.

We referred to this place as “Mormon Garden of Eden” the entire trip. We continued to do so even after getting a slightly better understanding once we were at the actual historical site: this was supposed to be a different place Adam and Eve went, but was also still a paradise in its own right? It’s not the gathering place for the Second Coming but is one of the places some people will gather for the Second Coming, which is happening about 30 miles away in Independence, of course.

God I hate this theology so much, it’s almost like an illiterate con man came up with it on the fly.

The actual park is pretty big, but there are only a couple of lookout points worth seeing. We weren’t aware that there was much else here, so we missed the cornerstones for the never-built temple at Adam-ondi-Ahman (notice a f*****g pattern???). Instead, we went to the closest overlook that featured the shortest walk. Mind you, it was f*****g hot out and we were crabby and knew it was just going to be an empty field.

The parking/picnic area of this park felt like any county or state park I’ve been anywhere. A small shelter housed bathrooms (I’ll give the Mormons credit: their bathrooms are really nice), with outdoor public drinking fountains including water bottle filler-uppers, and a couple of picnic tables for you to have a picnic with your stupid family.

There was a family walking up from the overlook that we passed. They did not acknowledge us. A woman was parked near us and she was sitting at one of the picnic tables, journaling (a very common Mormon hobby). She only acknowledged us through glares and stares.

I noticed three things on the .1 mile trail to the overlook: 1) a lot of f*****g flowers to cover up the smell of manure, again, 2) no apple trees in sight (what kind of Garden of Eden is this???) and 3) the world’s tackiest f*****g signs.

This edition of this series is called “Is This A Joke to Them?” and references what I said multiple times at Adam-ondi-Ahman: Is this a f*****g joke to them?

Dotted along the path and throughout the park were these cookie cutter CNC’ed wooden signs that read: “Warning: Please Stay On The Path, Snakes May Be Present.”

I honestly was at a loss for words. Is this a tongue-in-cheek joke meant to give the good-natured family-friendly pilgrims a light chuckle as they hit the extremely boring and relatively meaningless historical sites? Are they being serious, do Mormons actually think they’ll run into the f*****g serpent from Genesis? Is this supposed to be the Garden of Eden or a place they were banished to? It doesn’t make sense to me that the serpent would have also followed them out of the Garden of Eden. IS THIS A F*****G JOKE TO THEM???

To quote and expand on a joke Emily made: if the Catholics thought they knew where the Garden of Eden was, and were able to control that land, it would be beyond decadent. There’d be a convent and monastery, massive cathedral/basilica, priceless art and relics, gold leaf covering f*****g everything. But not the Mormons. The same church with decadent temples, a literal infinite money glitch, and a lifetime of being “persecuted” had stupid f*****g tacky signs probably made by a volunteer to get a chuckle out of Mormon dads.

In case that weren’t bad enough, when we finally got to the overlook, we realized that the vast majority of this sacred place—a place where Mormons LITERALLY believe Adam and Eve once lived—is actually a productive farm utilizing factory agriculture. There is a visibly large irrigation system and tightly-kept rows of crops. There isn’t an event space, a place of worship, a church, a temple, a museum, historical artifacts, missionaries to teach you things, somber memorials to pioneers. There are no crosses, no angel Moroni, no statues of Joseph Smith, no representations of Adam and Eve, no recreations of the Mormon settlement. AND THE GIFT SHOP IS 20 F*****G MILES AWAY. I WILL BECOME THE F*****G JOKER!

Worst of all was some extremely dark news about this specific religious site that came out while I was working on this newsletter edition specifically.

On August 23, 2025, Elder Brent Blackburn, 68, who was serving a mission in Missouri, tragically died at Adam-ondi-Ahman in a lawn mowing accident.

Let’s break this down:

* Older, retired Mormons will continue to serve missions like their spry counterparts during their retirement, usually with their spouse. Our tour guide at Carthage Jail (in a couple of weeks) remarked that she struggled with our tour because her husband was out sick. Like the younger missionaries, these are volunteers who will pay their own way, including directly to the church, in order to serve their mission,

* While much of the land at Adam-ondi-Ahman is a working farm along the riverbank, the touristy parts are at the top of a hill and covered in turf grass that needs to be mowed like anywhere else,

* The Mormon Church in Utah has more money than any other religious organization on Earth.

So why was a 68-year-old volunteer missionary, who was paying to volunteer, mowing the lawn here? There is no reason, aside from pure greed, that the corporate church would rely solely on volunteer labor for maintaining these sites. A landscaping company would, at least one would hope, have the equipment, training, and staff to complete the tasks faster, better, and safer than a 68-year-old volunteer. from Utah. I’ll add that the closest hospital to Adam-ondi-Ahman is 30 miles away, and we were only able to take dirt roads to get there.

If this weren’t insulting enough to rank and file Mormons, the Temple Lot Church of Christ, the splinter of a splinter group that owns the little white building and the accompanying Temple Lot in Independence, had a hired landscaping crew that was getting ready to mow the Temple Lot when we visited earlier that day. And we were there for, what, 20 minutes max?

Even the splinter group with literally just one physical location is competent enough to manage their site professionally. The Utah apostates saw the late Elder Blackburn as expendable, and he did not deserve that.

I don’t think there’s any fun way to bring it back around, other than that this is a microcosm of what Mormonism is and always has been about: exploiting people’s time and money. More importantly, in remembering Elder Blackburn as martyr against the Great and Abominable Church of the Devil in Utah, we recognize the LDS Church for what it has become: a cold, callous, and capitalistic corporate machine.

So Adam-ondi-Ahman is not the Garden of Eden, but it’s also not-not the Garden of Eden. No amount of kitschy signs, eager, faithful volunteers unknowingly in danger, and side-eyeing LDS devotees will make this site any more interesting. It really does feel like a joke. If it’s such a holy place, why is the actual site nothing more than a roadside attraction? There’s nothing to see, almost no interpretive signs, and no missionaries standing around to parrot “fun” “facts” at you.

Next week, we go back to Jackson County after Joseph’s shenanigans and alienation of his most loyal friends land him in hot water with the government, we try to go to an actual real-life Swig location, and we witness the effectiveness of the Mormon programming firsthand as we take the tacky guided tour of Liberty Jail in Liberty, MO.

Did the “Snakes May Be Present” sign piss you off as much as it pissed me off? Tell everyone you know about this unserious Ponzi scheme cult of a religion and share my newsletter with them. Everyone is fascinated with these people and surely so is someone you know.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com

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Catch up on the whole series starting with Part 1 here.

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The first article of this series was titled “The World’s Most American Religion.” I made this claim because there aren’t many institutions that represent the American experiment quite like the Mormon Church.

TSSC would be just a twinkle in Joseph Smith’s eye if it weren’t for manifest destiny, the brutal colonialist expansion westward as the American government gobbled up territory to build the most powerful empire in history. Their beliefs in doctrine like the Curse of Ham and their concept of male-only priesthoods literally institutionalize racism and define a literal patriarchy. Today, the Church is propped up by massive sugar-fueled corporate endeavors, venture capital and asset management, and an extensive, global network of guilty tithe-paying TBMs. I’d argue all of these are pretty American characteristics of the faith.

Even the leader of the church is called a President. Mormons are historically militant, and Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both notably (and separately) called for Mormons to take up arms against the United States government. I mean, s**t, they believe that the biblical Zion will be built in the Americas and that Jesus visited here after his resurrection.

What’s somehow more American than all of that, is how the Mormon Church uses an empty, remote holy site to house a tacky, overpriced gift shop to squeeze just a little bit more money out of pilgrims who drove untold distances to see such holy places as jails and empty fields. Especially me.

Welcome back to Putting the Moron in Moroni. This week, Joseph proves he did not learn his lesson when he was tarred and feathered in Ohio. F**k Ohio, Joseph and the gang are going back to Missouri. We did not learn our lesson that these religious sites are mostly just empty fields. F**k Kansas City, let’s check out a gift shop next to an empty field in the middle of nowhere.

We’re keeping the Mormon History Retelling chronological, so the Road Trip Gonzo will be a little out of order, but we’re telling a story here, people.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Please sign up for a shift cleaning the temple. We know you don’t have any hobbies and Boy Scouts doesn’t start back up for at least a month. You do what your Temple Recommend, right? It’ll be fun, we can play Apples to Apples after.

It’s April 1, 1832. One week ago, Joseph Smith was dragged out of the house he was staying in by an angry mob in Ohio. No foolin’.

The mob called for Smith’s castration, but the doctor in town refused to comply. They didn’t care too much, because they still covered the prophet in tar and feathers and he was “left for dead” in the street.

These are all events that probably happened. But now, a week later, Joseph and his confederation of crooks were making their way back to Missouri for yet another mission. This second visit to Missouri was less consequential in terms of actual historical events, but had some pivotal moments for Joseph testing what he can get away with via revelation.

On April 26, 1832, Joseph Smith revealed that the Saints had to make their community in Zion (Independence) bigger. This edict tapped some of his most fervent loyalists to stay and grow the frontier colony of Mormons. They had more or less abandoned the mission of converting Native Americans and were squarely focused on building a larger community.

Smith did this by commanding the establishment of the “United Firm,” the first major business venture of the church aside from the publishing of the Book of Mormon. This revelation was primarily focused on the “literary and mercantile” aspects of the church, and specifically in Independence; how can we make and sell more books and other b******t to make the church more money, while pumping up our rookie numbers?

At the same time, more and more of the first TBMs were bought in on the idea of colonizing the area from Zion to the Missouri River, as we learned last week. The idea of missionary work was starting to take hold and Mormons began their longstanding cultural tradition of being extremely annoying.

Like the Bhagwan in Oregon over 100 years later, Mormons effectively aimed to outnumber the non-Mormons of Independence to control the land, politics, and civic life of the region, and there were certainly few enough people to do so. This was, as you may recall from last week, a directive from God.

Most of the correspondence from summer 1832 that’s documented in the Joseph Smith Papers, an apologetic (not that they’re sorry, but that they’re Mormon Apologists) pseudo-historical research project of the LDS Church, boils down to Joseph trying to talk everyone down.

Tension was growing between the Kirtland and Independence congregations; the Missourians were more…fanatical in the frontier religion sense (lots of speaking in tongues, visions, etc.) and the Kirtlanders were pissed that Joseph’s attention was elsewhere when Kirtland should be the main priority. It was almost certainly not clocking to them that Joseph Smith was standing on business (getting a bad rep in Ohio for being a philandering con man).

In September, we get the first-ever account of The First Vision. As you may recall, this was the story where Joseph didn’t know what church to join so he went to the woods by his parents house and asked God. He got on his knees and then Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father, two distinct beings, appeared before him. Or at least this is the version Mormons know.

This 1832 account was much different. He claims to have seen “Deity,” a phrase I’ve never seen outside of the First Vision context in Mormon theology (exmos please educate me). No mention of Heavenly Father, only “God” who is also Jesus Christ but also refers to a father? No mention of two distinct beings. Luckily for Joseph, this version was not published until the late 19th century, well after his timely death.

Joseph wrote in a letter to William Phelps, one of his top guys who moved to Independence, in November that reported about 800 people had joined the Saints in Zion. This letter, like most of the correspondence from the time, tried to assuage concerns from the Missourians, this time because the financial support promised from the Kirtland church had yet to arrive (Joseph also revealed that they were to build a temple in Kirtland).

At the same time, these enterprising Zion-ists were attempting to fulfill God’s revelations to operate a printing press and store to prop up Smith’s Missouri project. This was not their brightest idea.

The Evening and Morning Star was the name of the Mormon-operated newspaper in Independence started in June 1832 and began ruffling the feathers of the “old settlers” of the Independence area.

This was an important step in the creation of Zion and showed that the Missouri delegation was taking Joseph seriously, despite the near constant infighting since the end of 1831. There were leaders teaching their own versions of doctrine, and wherever Joseph wasn’t, Mormon leaders were criticizing him behind his back. Other colonies struggled to align their doctrine with Smith. Between slow transportation and communication, Smith was doing damage control for the better part of 1832 and 1833. Oh yeah and he also took a mission to Canada. I’m sure his local leaders struggling to keep everything afloat really loved that.

Who knew a decentralized cult would have constant struggles for power?

The Star, however, may have gone a bit too far in poking the bear that was the local racists in the area. In their July 16, 1833 edition, they published an editorial with “practical” advice for free “people of color” who are moving to Missouri, which mostly just amounted to “please keep your papers on you.”

We, readers and listeners, are smart enough to know that the Mormons were extremely racist, but to the slaveholding hick settlers of Missouri, they took it as an invitation for Black Mormons to move to the area, or worse, encourage the enslaved people of Jackson County to join the Mormons for an armed revolt against the slaveholding locals.

This was also Ye Olden Days, so mass communication wasn’t really a thing. Messages and letters could take weeks or months to get to Ohio from Missouri and vice versa. Correspondence between the Ohio and Missouri at the time showed great worry from Smith that the tensions could quickly become insurmountable. New doctrine was being created, and a “Book of Commandments” was sent to Missouri to be printed at the press in Independence.

The Ohio church was totally unaware of the scale and speed at which locals would negatively react to the July 16 editorial. On July 20, locals published a response which made racist assumptions that Smith was trying to incite a race war in Jackson County in hopes of padding his numbers or push the locals out of town. This was also a period where Mormon doctrine would continue to radically diverge from mainline Protestantism and later, there would be speculation that Joseph Smith had begun privately practicing polygamy as early as 1832—Brigham Young and his contemporaries would say as much after Smith’s death.

Regardless, the locals’ rebuttal worked, and that same day an angry mob (funny how there’s always an angry mob chasing the Mormons around) destroyed the printing press at the Evening and Morning Star. Remember, the church is Ohio, including Joseph Smith, had no idea.

In Jackson County, things moved really fast. On July 23rd, an angry mob rounded up the church leaders in Independence. The Mormons were compelled to agree to the locals’ demands, which principally kicked the Mormons out of Jackson County. They agreed to have at least 50% of Mormons leave the county by January 1, 1834. The leaders were allowed to continue to wrap up their business, but the message was clear: Stay out of Independence, Lebowski! Stay out of Independence, deadbeat! Keep your ugly f****n' goldbrickin' ass out of my prairie community.

The church in Zion sent the terms of the agreement to Joseph Smith, which he would finally receive in late August. The agreement is extraordinary, but also proves that the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

I’ve gone back and forth on how much of this I want to directly discuss because my God, I’ve read enough primary and secondary sources from the perspective of Mormons (read: Joseph Smith Word Vomit), but it’s soooo nice to read something from their haters, even if they were racist people from Missouri.

We the undersigned citizens of Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand as regards our civil society, in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our County, styling themselves Mormons and intending as we do to rid our society “peacably if we can, forcibly if we must”

Okay, fair enough, locals. I’d say the same thing if a bunch of freaks claiming they can all talk to God showed up in my town expressly to push me out by buying all of the land.

It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics or knaves; for one or the other they undoubtedly are, made their first appearance amongst us and pretending as they did and now do— to hold personal communion and converse, face to face with the most high God, to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven, to heal the sick by the laying on of hands, & in short to perform all the wonderworking miracles wrought by the inspired apostles & prophets of old.

We believed them to be deluded fanatics or weak and designing knaves and that they & their pretensions would soon pass away, but in this we were deceived.

Please do note how more cogent the locals’ agreement is than literally anything Joseph or his uneducated cadre of fanatics would publish.

The acts of a few designing leaders amongst them have thus far succeeded in holding them together as a society and since the arrival of the first of them, they have been daily increasing in numbers & if they had been respectable citizens in society & thus deluded, they would have been entitled to our pity rather than to our contempt & hatred. But from their appearance, from their manners and their conduct since their coming among us, we have every reason to fear that with very few exceptions, they were of the very dregs of that society from which they came, lazy, idle & vicious.

This we conceive is not idle assertion, but a fact susceptible of proof…they brought into our county, little or no property with them, & left less behind them, and we infer that those only yoked themselves to the Mormon Car who had nothing earthly or heavenly to lose by the change, and we fear that if some of the leaders amongst them had paid the forfeit due to crime, instead of being chosen embassadors of the most high, they would have been inmates of solitary cells.

“Those who yoked themselves to the Mormon car” is one of my favorite phrases I’ve read from a primary source while researching for Putting the Moron in Moroni, I am sooooo on board. When are they gonna lose me?

But their conduct here stamps their characters in their true colors. More than a year since, it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves and endeavoring to sow dissensions & raise seditions among them.

In a late [Evening and Morning] Star published at Independence, by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free [people of color] from other States to become Mormons and remove and settle among us.

Ohhhhhh…there it is. So it turns out the land-owning, slaveholding, colonizing gentry of Independence, MO might actually also be bad people. Who could have predicted that?

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Joseph was still fixated on building Zion while his buddies were getting kicked out of it.

In August, Smith urged his followers to not sell “one foot” of land and to stick to their guns, even thought he had an incomplete understanding of just how dire the situation was. In a very David Korreshian way, he proclaimed:

“All hell and the combined powers of Earth are Marsheling [sic] their forces to overthrow us.”

By October the Mormons had organized a response. Joseph’s “embassadors” [sic] traveled to Jefferson City and made a plea to the Missouri state government, petitioning for political protections (read: the state militia needs to protect us) as well as financial compensation for the seizing and destruction of property and land.

Governor Daniel Dunklin was not keen to support the Mormons in their suit. He recommended that they go through the court system first. This did not work for the Mormons. They announced their intention to fight the eviction, and hired a big money law firm on October 30. On October 31, an angry mob attacked a Mormon settlement just outside of town. A few days later, another mob captured the Mormon ferry on the Big Blue River. This skirmish was the most consequential; both parties exchanged gunfire, and one Mormon and two locals died. It was only at this point when the Mormons agreed to leave Jackson County and surrendered their arms.

After the Saints were successfully driven from Jackson County, they found short-term refuge in neighboring Clay County. Jackson County locals refused to permit Mormons to return to get their possessions or conduct additional business. This was Not Very Cash Money of Them, in Joseph Smith’s eyes.

In 1834, high on his own supply, Smith organized “Zion’s Camp,” which was a quasi-military operation to try to forcibly take back Mormon property in Jackson County. He was banking on the support of the Missouri government, God knows why, and Missouri obviously refused. They didn’t get anywhere near Independence before realizing the help from Gov. Dunklin was not coming, giving up, and going back to Ohio.

He had already given up on Independence having the first temple (which was more like a fancy church than the rigorous purpose-built facilities Mormons have today), and the actual first one would be raised in Kirtland.

In 1836, the Missouri government determined that Clay County was no longer a suitable home for the Mormon refugees (and migrants). They created a new county, Caldwell County, to serve as a haven for the Mormons. It wasn’t Zion, which undoubtedly pissed Joseph off, but it was a place nonetheless. Mormons settled in a town they called Far West, MO, which would become the largest settlement of Mormons to date, swelling to 4,000 by 1838.

I guess this was kind of a concession for getting kicked out of Jackson County? The town was laid out according to Joseph Smith’s design for Zion (Independence), and like Independence, Joseph Smith revealed in 1837 that a temple was to be built in Far West. Like Independence, that temple would never be built, but we’ll learn more about that next week.

It was also in 1836, back in Kirtland, that Joseph Smith began a relationship with 16-year-old servant, Fanny Alger. The relationship was described by his contemporaries as a “nasty affair.” Emma Smith recalled in a letter that she caught Joseph and Fanny mid-”transaction” in the barn on their farm. It’s important to note that Fanny was effectively adopted by the Smiths and lived with them.

This relationship strained Joseph’s relationship with his most devout followers. There was no doubt that Smith’s activities were immoral, extramarital, and counter to his pious image. This chink in his armor would sour long-time followers, and paired with the Kirtland Safety Society’s failure (next week!), would put the future of Joseph’s church in financial and political jeopardy, not to mention the danger of pissing off thousands of armed frontierspeople across multiple states.

The jury is still out on whether Joseph and Fanny’s affair led to a “plural marriage” or not, but she was effectively the first “plural wife” of Joseph: a woman with whom God had ordained him to have holy sex with. She may not have been “sealed” to Joseph in the way Mormons are familiar with today, but we can be pretty sure Joseph justified his infidelity with a child by saying God told him to, and I guess Mormons are just OK with that. “A Mormon just believes!”

Instead of the Far West Temple Site, we set our GPS to take us to The Country Store, an LDS Church-owned gift shop and book store meant to serve the same function as a truck stop bathroom.

It does have a “historical site” next door, but it’s so insignificant it doesn’t even show up as a point of interest on Google Maps. It was some dude’s cabin.

The Country Store sells Mormon books, art, music, movies, and most importantly, overpriced commemorative souvenirs. I am not ashamed to admit I did purchase a $20 “Adam-ondi-Ahman” commemorative baseball cap in Minnesota Vikings colors. Mind you, we were still a solid 20-30 minute drive from Adam-ondi-Ahman, but when God shows you a souvenir hat for Mormon Garden of Eden, you take out your wallet.

The Country Store isn’t even right next to the Far West temple site, which is the actual historical site with some degree of religious significance. It’s like, a half-mile down the road. I am going to do a ~bonus~ newsletter about what I bought there (and also other Mormon stuff I got on the trip, including loaned items and gifts from my exmo friend), but the actual experience of shopping there was jarring.

Walking in, a family of TBMs who was clearly on a pilgrimage to the various sites in the area (their car had Utah plates) was chatting with the clerk, who was a burly older man who clearly was from Missouri. He talked like an NPC in The Oregon Trail, muttering about the trails and the tough road ahead. It was like LeapFrog Red Dead Redemption 2.

I was pleased that the man was distracted—we were able to avoid him trying to talk to us, for the most part. The family left, and he just sat at the counter with the quiet christian rock radio station playing out of a small boombox.

We spent most of our time combing through the books, particularly on the discount shelf, but again, nothing beats my God Damned Commemorative Adam-ondi-Ahman Baseball Cap. I’d have gotten a hoodie instead, but they were f*****g $60, and it was bad enough to be buying anything, knowing it goes directly into the LDS church’s pockets.

The only plus is that the man working there, with is G-rated old-timey vibes, was astute enough to gather that we were non-Mormons touring the various sites. He clocked that we were on our way to Adam-ondi-Ahman, and let us know the bridge on the main road had been washed out, and provided an alternative route (but he never mentioned that the entire 45-minute drive would be on dirt roads).

I can’t say it enough: do these people never take a f*****g hint? How many natural disasters, burned down temples, washed out bridges, and violent angry mobs do Mormons need to suffer through before they realize that maybe God doesn’t think they’re his chosen people???

But back to my most righteous pilgrimage.

The name “temple site” should immediately raise alarm bells. You might remember the first stop on the road trip was to Temple Lot, an empty lot where the Mormons were supposed to build their first temple, but to this day no such temple exists, at least not by the Utah Mormon church. “Site” and “Lot” mean functionally the same thing: there’s supposed to be a temple here but for…reasons…there isn’t.

The actual site is extraordinarily underwhelming.

The site is basically just another empty field. There’s no remains of Ye Olde Far West Towne where the 4,000 Mormons allegedly lived, just a fenced in field with four cornerstones, all encased in tacky glass boxes. A tasteless three-piece granite monument stands that features Mormon stuff, including the law of tithing, because, oh yeah, Joseph Smith had his revelation that all of his followers owed his church 10% of their income for time immemorial while at Far West in 1838.

The worst part about the monument, though, is that the entrance gate to the temple site is not centered with the monument. They couldn’t even bother to line it up correctly. This was so memorable to my brain, that that night, I had a dream where I was trying to fix things that weren’t lined up simply because they didn’t bother to click the “center” button on the CAD landscape architecture software. Just f*****g unprofessional b******t.

The LDS Church owns the site, but the only physical presence the church has is the gift shop. Like Temple Lot, the Community of Christ is, yet again, a foil of the Utah apostates. Literally across the street from the site is a meeting house/church for the Community of Christ. It’s baffling, again and again, to see that the splinter group that denied Brigham Young takes the religious reverence of these sites seriously, while they’re just roadside attractions to Utahns.

The first thing you notice when you get out of your car is the overwhelming smell of farm country. Just an unavoidable stench of manure everywhere. This was the case at all of these rural sites. A hallmark of Mormon church-run places, that I’ve noticed both in Missouri/Illinois and touring the Washington, DC temple a few years back, is that they will spend a fortune on landscaping, especially beautiful flower beds that look like they were planted mere minutes before you got there. Another expression of their opulent wealth.

These flower beds were present at Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman, and throughout Nauvoo. Especially at Far West, though, it was obvious these flowers were partially meant to offset or overpower the disgusting stench of America’s productive farmland.

Where the Catholics build immense sanctuaries filled with evocative music, beautiful art, and an instant sense of spiritualism created by burning incense, the Mormons just hope you can’t smell the literal b******t all around you.

Thanks for reading and listening this week. Next week, we figure out why the Mormons had to leave Far West (spoiler: it was treason) and visit the closest place to the Garden of Eden on Earth, Adam-ondi-Ahman, which “““translates””” to “Valley of the Gods” in the (fake) “Adamic” language.

Also, stay tuned, a special bonus “haul” edition of the newsletter is coming where I’ll touch on all of the Mormon paraphernalia that came into my possession during the road trip, both gifts from my exmo friend and purchases feeding money directly to the Mormon machine.

As much as I’d love to sing Broadway show tunes with you after we swing through Swig, I have to admit I can’t be with you. I’m waiting for my returning missionary to sweep me away. He’s so dreamy. Oh, his name? I’ve actually never talked to him. He’s the Bishop’s son.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com

“We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.” - Article Ten of the LDS Church Articles of Faith

“I believe that God lives on a planet called Kolob! I believe that Jesus has his own planet as well. And I believe that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri.” - “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon (musical)

We did almost no planning for this road trip.

The idea had been a joke I’d been kicking around for years. I can spend all day reading books about Mormons, hundreds of r/mormon and r/exmormon posts, and Wikipedia wormhole my way down the complicated-ass racist and patriarchal lore. Not to mention the hours of ex-Mormon Alyssa Grenfell videos I watch to pass the time during the workday.

The only things we knew about this trip were that we had lodging accommodations at three hotels. One night in Kansas City, one night in the middle of nowhere, and one night in St. Louis. We’d get to see the city a little, but more importantly, both cities are near holy sites in the Mormon faith.

(If you didn’t catch the first or second issues, go back and read it on Substack, or listen to it on the Substack app. This isn’t an ad for Substack, I’m just too lazy to put it anywhere else.)

We woke up in Kansas City and ate breakfast at Dagwood’s Cafe, just across the state line in KC, KS. It was terrific and extremely affordable. 10/10.

We spent the morning in downtown, primarily at Kansas City Union Station, where I enjoyed the hell out of their extensive model railroad museum. It’s honestly shocking how large the setup is given there’s no admission fee. Just an absolute blast and it’s great for kids. I also got some pics of the Western Auto building and the WWI memorial.

It was really f*****g hot out. We were smack dab in the middle of the national heatwave plaguing the entire lower 48 in late-July. The only respite for the entire trip was the cool A/C of my Honda Civic. Godspeed you beautiful blue b*****d.

We drove from the train station to a quick stop at the Kansas City library to take a picture of the wall styled like books. Turns out that’s just the parking garage for the library so I snapped a quick photo and we were on our way.

Our time in Kansas City was a whirlwind—we stayed in the city less than 24 hours. I couldn’t point on a map where even the general area we stayed was; it was me, the GPS, and revelations from the Angel Moroni that guided me towards the various empty fields across the Great Plains we would be visiting.

Welcome back to Putting the Moron in Moroni: Martyrs, Mormons, and Misery in Missouri. This week, we’re actually doing The Thing and starting our Tour de Mormon with a visit to Temple Lot in Independence, Missouri. This location is arguably the Mecca of Mormondom, especially because splinter groups largely recognize this community as Zion, while the apostates in Utah have their great and abominable church.

Thanks for reading and listening.

If there were a way I could baptize you to christen you as a new newsletter subscriber, I would. If you are already subscribed, please sign up for a shift cleaning the temple.

Independence, MO is considered a “satellite city” of the Kansas City metro area.

It’s about a 25-minute drive from downtown KCMO, and is a proper city in its own right; Independence boasts a population of over 120,000. Most Americans will recognize the name from the MN-made edutainment classic The Oregon Trail, where it’s one of the main launch points for your pioneer trek west. Yes we do need to buy four shotguns and 1000 shells and 8 oxen.

The drive from downtown featured a smidge of highway before embarking on the onslaught that was Truman Road east of downtown KC. This long stretch of road connects Independence to Kansas City and is named for the Harry S. president who grew up and lived most of his life in Independence.

The entire road was a mix of industrial and commercial buildings that seemed closer to a ghost town than the great avenue fit for a president. Storefronts were boarded up. It wasn’t the welcoming boulevard one would hope for on the road to the Garden of Eden.

The first stop we made was Truman’s house and his wife’s aunt’s house across the street. Only the wife’s aunt’s house was open and it wasn’t particularly interesting. It’s basically just one exhibit where you get to “see how in love they were” before glossing over justifying his use of the atomic bomb. Just a small thing he did two times. I’ll give Truman some credit, it really did feel like they were in love. And the bombs also happened.

We made a brief stop at the Truman presidential library to get a stamp on our friend’s National Parks Service passport and we headed toward the big shiny metal and glass spiral towering over the sleepy Midwestern city.

In 1831, with his little blue book at the ready, Joseph Smith was convinced he needed to move west to try to convert American Indians to Mormonism.

When we last saw Joe, Sidney, and the gang, they had just arrived in Kirtland, Ohio. Almost immediately, Joseph Smith led a missionary party to Missouri in summer 1831. Encountering what Wikipedia calls “some moderate success” proselytizing, the Saints decided to set up an extant community from Kirtland in the frontier town they ended up at: Independence, MO.

In August 1831, Joseph Smith declared in a (handwritten—remember he was functionally illiterate) revelation “how to preceed [sic] concerning purchuseing [sic] Lands”:

“Hearken Oh ye Elders of my Church, saith the Lord your God, Who have assembelled [sic] yourselves together, according to my commandment in this land which is the land of Missorie [sic] which is the Land which I, have appointed & consecrated for the gethering [sic] of the Saints.

…Behold the place which is now called Independence is the centre place, & the spot for the Temple is lying westward upon a lot which is not far from the court-house. Wherefore it is wisdom that the land should be purchased by the saints and also every tract lying westward even unto the line runing [sic] directly betwen [sic] Jew and gentile and also every tract bordering by the Prairies in as much as my Deciples [sic] are enabled to buy lands.”

Joseph Smith identified a 62ish-acre parcel of land known today as “Temple Lot” as the location where the first Mormon temple was to be built. He also taught that it was exact location of Christ’s Second Coming, and while it was never written as a revelation, contemporaneous accounts from other Mormon leaders (including Brigham Young) report that Smith taught that the Garden of Eden was also in Jackson County, Missouri, suggesting it was also at Temple Lot.

Smith’s revelation designating Independence as Zion started a chain of events that would *spoiler* lead to his timely death in 1844. Important to note is God’s commandment that the Saints were to buy as many tracts of land as possible between what is effectively Independence and the border with Kansas to the west, which includes the entirety of modern-day Kansas City (which would not be incorporated until 1850).

There was also commotion in the Mormon movement: you mean to tell me I moved whole family to join a group of fanatical converts in bumfuck nowhere Ohio, and now we’re supposed to move to Missouri? Thankfully for Joseph, God revealed a solution to the PR crisis and was able to do some damage control in September, after his return to Kirtland from his first visit to Jackson County:

“[The Lord shall] retain a strong hold in the land of Kirtland, for the space of five years, in the which I will not overthrow the wicked, that thereby I may save some.” - D&C 64:21

It’s important to remember that the Mormons were not rich at this point. Joseph Smith relied heavily on the generous distribution of land to white settlers as part of the Manifest Destiny-era, which enabled the church to effectively build wealth through real estate ownership. They also formalized this process in the church community, particularly via the Law of Consecration, a convenient revelation from February 1831 establishing Fully Automated Luxury Mormon Ohio Space Communism; this revelation commanded Mormons to live communally and consecrate their property and personal belongings to Smith’s church for the (stated) benefit of the poorest members of their community. Mormons = Woke?

Basically, we have a series of revelations telling Mormons to move further west to Missouri, purchase as much land as possible, then give that land to Joseph Smith and his jabroni cronies.

I’m sure the racist settlers advocating for slavery in Missouri would really love it if a bunch of religious Yankee nutjobs came to their town in the middle of nowhere to build a theocratic society based on a bunch of treasure digger b******t, led by a guy who made a career of sex trafficking his friends’ wives. He was also a pedophile. This is not a serious religion.

The area around Temple Lot is built up today, and is noticeably lacking an official LDS Temple, y’know, the one they’re supposed to build to give Jesus a place to Second Come to.

Instead, a striking, towering glass spiral rises out of the relatively flat treeline as you approach the Temple Lot area. There is no angel Moroni heralding the trumpet for the end times. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically friendly. As we drove up, the main entrance of the temple looked a lot more like a Bond villain compound than a site of holy reverence.

This is not an LDS temple, but the world headquarters and temple of Community of Christ, one of multiple splinter groups from the mainstream LDS church that split off after Smith’s death in 1844. They’re the largest non-LDS denomination of Mormonism. The theological splits are frankly not interesting enough to cover, but they diverge on many of the hallmarks of Utah Mormonism. For example, women can receive the priesthood in CoC.

What’s more interesting is that CoC adherents did not join the rest of the Mormon project in leaving Illinois/Missouri for Utah. The Utah Mormons vacated their land claims in 1847 and gave up on God’s commandment that they build a temple on Temple Lot…for now (they have yet to make an effort to do so).

The CoC adherents spent the latter half of the 19th-century in legal battles over the ownership of the Temple Lot area, because they never really left. Their main opponent was not the Utah church, but rather another splinter group, The Church of Christ (which was Joseph Smith’s original name for the church). This splinter group won their legal battle and won claim to the lot after they squatted on the empty lot, which they do to this very day.

The Community of Christ Temple in Independence is a dramatic slap in the face to TSCC in Utah. It’s CoC’s sole temple and paired with their auditorium, command the entire area around Temple Lot. The Utah Mormons have slowly purchased plots around the area, with a visitor’s center across the street, but notably not on the Temple Lot itself.

The Temple is also host to the United Nations Peace Plaza, which sits directly across from Temple Lot. This very literal worldly presence alone (“worldly” is how Mormons refer to apostates who don’t follow the Book of Mormon) demonstrates how Community of Christ functions differently from the LDS church. Joseph Smith’s LDS church would eventually form an organized militia that, much, later, became today’s Utah National Guard.

I did not visit the LDS visitors center or any of the buildings in the area. There were no pilgrims and I certainly did not see Heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, the angel Moroni, or even a single Elder or Sister missionary! At the a holy site that is supposedly the location of Jesus’ second coming! NOT A SINGLE PERSON! This is NOT a serious religion.

Meanwhile, in the 19th century, Smith would not stay in Missouri…this time. Back to Ohio it is.

1832 was a big year for Joe and his confederation of con men and rubes. Joseph and Emma Smith were staying in a town called Hiram, Ohio starting in November ‘31, about 30 miles south of Kirtland. TSCC claims this was a nice time of missionary work and love for his church and that he was creating his “inspired” version of the bible. TSCC claims that Joseph’s work was pissing off the local yokels.

These are the facts: on March 23rd (or 24th) 1832, Joseph Smith would be dragged out of the home he was staying at and tarred and feathered by an angry mob and “left for dead,” as we were told at Liberty Jail.

TSCC portrays this as unjust mob violence by ignorant people who hated Joseph because he told the “truth.” They argue this was because, during his “translation” of the bible, he had a revelation that gave us the confusing theology of Mormon heaven (I know I got it wrong in the first edition: let it be known that I do not respect Mormon theology enough to learn it accurately, and you, the reader, get what you pay for).

There’s not necessarily contemporaneous evidence, but much speculation has been made that Joseph allegedly angered locals by maintaining an inappropriate relationship with Nancy Johnson, a 16 year-old daughter of the couple he was staying with in Hiram. What supports this, to me, is that Nancy, despite already being married to another convert, would follow the Saints to Nauvoo and go on to marry Joseph Smith as a “plural wife” in 1842, 10 years later. There were also multiple reports that the angry mob demanded Smith’s castration, but a local doctor refused.

Apologists will argue that because Sidney Rigdon was also attacked, there’s no way it couldn’t be because of Joseph’s testimony of his revelations from Heavenly Father.

Another piece of apologist trash about this incident is that TSCC will depict it as hot, black tar but it’s far more likely it was pine tar (which is not black) and was almost certainly cold.

I find it very difficult to believe that a 2nd-or-1st-Degree-Burn-Victim Joseph Smith would be able to begin a journey back to Missouri on April 1, just a week later. Have you ever seen a burn victim? I’m fairly confident most do not recover in a week, and certainly not well enough to do a pre-car, pre-train 900-mile trip to the American frontier. Tarring and feathering usually kills people. But maybe that was just Heavenly Father looking out for his Prophet.

Temple Lot is a curious case that punctuates how church history and theology is conveniently retconned to match the current whims of church leadership.

Come Outer Darkness or high water (literally: a bridge on our way to Adam-ondi-Ahman was washed out by a flood, LMAO), Independence was Zion and Joe Smith had to make it a reality.

Simultaneously the aggressor and the victim, Joseph Smith’s hubris would boil over as more and more people joined TSCC. He would test what his followers would be willing to do for his race-science cult project: he already got them to give up their worldly possessions. Would they be willing to fight and die for him?

Community of Christ’s real estate holdings throughout Mormondom have extorted millions from TSCC and serve as an unavoidable, uncomfortable reminder for LDS Mormons that Brigham Young was not unilaterally accepted as the next prophet after Joseph Smith’s timely death which would mean that maybe, just maybe, the Church is not true,

The post-Smith LDS church has diminished the religious significance of these locations for strategic reasons: Zion now refers to almost anywhere a lot of Mormons are, a far cry from God’s very specific revelation to Joseph Smith where exactly Zion is to be in Jackson County, MO.

If the the musical The Book of Mormon is right, and the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, I know god-damned well I didn’t see it. The closest place to heaven on Earth sure as s**t felt like hell.

Thank for reading and listening this week. Next week, we’re going to learn just what the hell happened to get the Saints kicked out of Jackson County, Missouri. I’m sure it is purely religious persecution and nothing else. We might get to the gift shop, but no guarantees there. No matter what, everything is far out in Far West, Missouri. See you next week.

Bear testimony to your loved ones: you know The Uffda Times-Picayune is true. I discovered the golden newsletters and translated them. Share the restored gospel now or be prepared to atone eternally in Outer Darkness.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com

Listen: I’m recording podcast-style narrations for this series. You can listen on Substack and in the Substack app, catch Part 1 here.

When Joseph Smith published the Pearl of Great Price in 1838, he claimed to have received his “First Vision” and visit from God in 1820

The story goes that he didn’t know what church to join, so he went to the woods, fell on his knees, and asked God. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ (two distinctly different beings who also look identical) appeared before him and told him to join none of them. This is amusing because he was a practicing Methodist up until his founding of the church. This probably never happened. We were also told this exact recounting at least three times at various Mormon sites we visited, twice by missionaries and once by propaganda video.

Young Mormons are encouraged to memorize the 1838 account of the First Vision. This is despite neither Smith nor any of his contemporaries, documenting the final, canonized “First Vision” before 1838. 18 years is an awful long time to not mention something that would become the foundational event core to the Mormon faith. No First Vision means no Moroni visit means no Golden Plates. At least we know he was an honest and upstanding member of the community.

It’s well-documented that young Joseph was a “treasure digger,” who employed folk magic, like dowsing machines, to try to find buried treasure. He used this scam to trick fellow Upstate rubes into giving the poor farm boy (Mormons’ favorite characterization of young Joey Smith) money, which ultimately led to Joseph Smith’s first interaction with the United States justice system, when he was arrested in 1826 for being paid to find treasure he promised existed on a farm. and turned up empty.

The kickoff to all of the pain and suffering the Mormon church would go on to create, started when Joseph Smith claimed that an angel named Moroni visited him in 1823 and told him to go to Hill Cumorah, a small hill about two miles from his parents’ house (convenient) where the Golden Plates were supposedly buried. He claimed he had to go look for them on the same day in September every year for four years at the request of the Angel.

Supposedly, he was finally allowed to get the plates in 1827.

Welcome back to Putting the Moron in Moroni, my series covering the Mormon church’s influence on American history and culture with a road trip to holy sites in Missouri and Illinois.

This week, we’re not actually on the road trip yet. There’s a lot of church history that sets us up nicely to Joseph’s revelation of just where exactly Zion is, the New Jerusalem in the Americas, and the same place where Christ will return during the Second Coming are. We’re just getting started.

Thanks for joining us.

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The Golden Plates were allegedly in a script that has never been found to exist in any culture on Earth, which Joseph Smith called “Reformed Egyptian.”

It was this same “language” that Smith would go on to claim in 1842 was used in facsimiles of actual ancient Egyptian papyri he bought from a traveling salesman in 1835. In case he weren’t weird enough, he bought 4 mummies from the same salesman, too; this was, of course, for phrenology purposes.

The papyri he purchased were indeed authentic funeral papyri looted by Europeans digging up the necropolis in Thebes. Joseph Smith claimed they purported to depict the so-called Book of Abraham and allegedly an “untranslated Book of Joseph,” which turned out to be a copy of the Book of the Dead, a funerary document used in Egyptian society for over 1,500 years.

Joseph Smith was obsessed with convincing people he had a unique gift from God to be able to translate pretty much anything (anything to feel special I guess).

He wrote an “inspired” translation of the bible where he removed parts he didn’t like and added whole chunks. Almost none of it is in the modern LDS canon except for two included in The Pearl of Great Price: his total re-work of Genesis he called “The Book of Moses” and a new version of the Book of Matthew. Nothing says “The Word of the Lord” like rewriting one of the four canonical gospels.

The “translation” of the Book of Mormon allegedly took three years and was financed by a rich gullible man from Palmyra named Martin Harris. Harris’ wife left him over his financing of the translation and publishing after Smith could not recreate the same “translation” twice after she took the 116 pages they had made so far, which were never recovered. But Martin stood to be a financial beneficiary if the book takes off so our man was bought in. Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb.

The “translation” process was absurd: sometimes the plates were in a different room entirely. Sometimes it was forbidden to see them. Sometimes they were under a sheet. Sometimes Moroni took them back. Sometimes you could watch Joseph. Sometimes he would wear a veil. Smith claimed the characters would spontaneously appear as he looked into a hat with two magic rocks. He also was functionally illiterate. This is not a serious religion.

The visit from Moroni and the Golden Plates are the keystone of the religion: if Joseph Smith faked or lied about the finding, translating, and publishing of the Book of Mormon, the entire premise of the religion falls apart. There were no Nephites or Lehites or Lamanites. The Urim and Thummim were just random polished rocks. There were no Golden Plates.

If Joseph lied, the Book of Mormon is b******t and the church isn’t true.

Perhaps the most baffling part of the entire translation affair relates to the Three Witnesses. In every copy of the Book of Mormon, there reads a letter that attests David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris’ all saw the gold plates and attest to the Book of Mormon’s legitimacy.

"And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true."

All three of the Book of Mormon’s original witnesses would be excommunicated from the church by Joseph Smith in 1838.

NOW That’s What I Call Legitimacy!

None of this really matters because after The Book of Mormon was published, it caught the attention of fellow Second Great Awakening nutjob Sidney Rigdon.

Rigdon had his own congregation of fanatics, and in 1830 he proposed to Jospeh Smith that they should combine their congregations and move the Mormons from Palmyra to Kirtland, Ohio, where Rigdon was currently set up.

This was advantageous for Smith, who had run into legal trouble in New York, including being charged with a misdemeanor for being a “disorderly person” in 1830. He also corroborated an account that he got into a violent scuffle with his neighbors, who claimed he had been raucous after a night of drinking (oh yeah, Joseph Smith was a big drinker even though he preached abstinence from alcohol) and assaulted six of his neighbors, whom Joseph Smith would later claim:

“[I] whipped the whole of them and escaped unhurt which they swore to as recorded”

Remember, if someone wrote it down it must have happened.

Sidney Rigdon will come up as a frequent accomplice (and later detractor) of Smith, but his conversion and merging of churches brought hundreds of new followers to the faith, a built-in community in Ohio, giving Smith and his cult an out as his reputation had deteriorated significantly in New York. Some cynics believe Rigdon was behind much of the writing in the Book of Mormon, but that’s water under the baptismal font as far as I’m concerned.

Rigdon also gave Smith an air of legitimacy: a man of the cloth was sold on Joseph Smith? Maybe he’s onto something…

Oh yeah, and God said in December 1830 that he couldn’t keep translating more things until he went to Ohio. Convenient.

The Upstate congregation of Smith’s Church of Christ was not exactly thrilled with the Rigdon developments, and there was a lot of resistance to the Prophet’s insistence in uprooting everyone’s lives to move to f*****g Ohio. But much like the legitimacy of the Book of Mormon’s translation, none of this mattered because in February 1831 the whole Smith family and a significant number of followers (some “fifty souls”) moved to Ohio anyway.

Smith took advantage of Sidney’s ability to lead a congregation and left Rigdon to look after the flock in Kirtland, while Joseph sought bigger ambitions: if Lamanites (read: Native Americans) were once followers of Christ, maybe they just need a little of the Prophet’s razzle-dazzle testimony to get on board.

Whether it was Joseph Smith’s hubris or a revelation from God, in June 1831, he revealed:

“Behold thus saith the Lord unto the Elders whom he hath called & chosen in these last days by the voice of his Spirit saying I the Lord will make known unto you what I will make known that ye shld [sic] do from this time untill [sic] the next conference which shall be held in Missorie [sic] upon the land which I will consecrate unto my People which are a remnant of Jacob & those who are heirs according to the covenant” - D&C 52:2

You really gotta love how much extra crap he includes to sound vaguely biblical. Religious doctrine based on his (very bad) vibes.

Joseph Smith gathered up a small group of about 8 people and they took off, mostly by boat and waterway, for the 900-ish mile journey west. They proselytized the whole way there, and Joseph’s ego must have been through the roof, because allegedly their missionarying worked on white people in Ohio and Illinois. People of the Second Great Awakening were really receptive to charismatic con men like Joseph Smith.

At the culmination of their journey, they find a small community near the Missouri River with just 20 or so buildings: the settlement of Independence.

Thanks for reading/listening. I promise next week we’re going full gonzo as, like the Mormons, trek some 435 miles to Independence, Missouri ourselves to see just how unserious these holy sites in the middle of nowhere are.

Over the next few issues, we’re going to:

* Find out where the Second Coming is happening (an empty field)

* Visit the Garden of Eden (an empty field)

* Accidentally condemn ourselves to Mormon Hell as we visit Joseph Smith’s grave (near a bunch of empty fields)

We’re looking for temple workers to come in during the day Monday through Friday because we just don’t have enough people. You’re not required but your salvation will be a lot easier if you just come in for a few hours. No we’re not paying you and no we won’t respect you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com

Listen: I’ve made a voiceover for this article and actually put some work into the production. I’d like to do podcast-y stuff and this is my first shot.

Give it a listen in the Substack app or website.

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Since I was in high school, I’ve had a fascination with the members of and institution that is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, AKA the Mormon Church.

The LDS Church is largely known by Americans today as a quirky religion in Utah with overly chipper, sometimes pushy and irritating, members who proselytize with Sister/Elder name tags and go door-to-door on missions across the world.

The So-Called Church (TSSC) likes to keep it that way. TSSC is often accused, particularly by former members, as being closer to a cult than a traditional denomination of Christianity. The religion has been controversial from the very beginning, with its race science-obsessed fiction-inspired lore, con man and criminal founder, Joseph Smith who came up with a canon reason to f**k his friends’ wives (he was also a pedophile), and the mob violence its followers tended to bring to wherever they settled.

Mormon kids receive a sanitized view of the world, particularly an incomplete view and history of their own church and its theology. Many Mormons won’t even understand if you try to push back against the most unsavory parts of the Church’s history, particularly Joseph Smith’s affinity for f*****g other people’s wives and also being a f*****g pedophile.

Sheltered kids beget sheltered adults beget sheltered kids and so forth. It is extremely common for Mormons who leave to be frequently harassed by practicing members, disowned by family (especially financially, which is particularly risky if they skipped college to do a mission), and otherwise undergo years of deprogramming to think like a normal f*****g person and not a Mormon. There’s a reason Wikipedia has an entire article devoted to LGBTQ Mormon suicides.

Today, Mormonism is most closely associated with Utah, but like all good wacko 19th-century American religions, started in Upstate New York (Palmyra, to be exact), before moving to Kirtland, Ohio, and then Independence, Missouri, and finally Nauvoo, Illinois before Joseph Smith’s assassination by an angry mob.

Well, you might know that Missouri and Illinois are a completely doable weekend road trip from Minnesota. And that’s exactly what I did.

I’ve wanted to do a Mormon pilgrimage for a while, and this plan materialized after a friend of my fiancee and I’s was making a cross-country move from CA to PA. This friend also happens to be the first ex-Mormon I’ve met and welcomed into my life. We pitched the idea that we meet them in Missouri and do a road trip to various important sites to Mormons, specifically:

* Temple Lot in Independence, MO, where Joseph Smith declared Jesus would return for the rapture; it was also where he said the Garden of Eden was,

* The site also has a massive Mormon temple that is actually run by the church’s largest splinter group, the Community of Christ (who will be a frequent foil for the Mormons in this series)

* Liberty Jail in Liberty, MO, where Joseph Smith and conspirators were held on treason charges after the Mormon War of 1838,

* Far West, MO, which was to be the location of a Mormon temple and was at one point the largest Mormon community at 4,000,

* Adam-ondi-Ahman in Daviess County, MO, the location where Joseph Smith claimed Adam and Eve were banished to after getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and the closest thing to the Garden of Eden on Earth,

* Nauvoo, IL, a small town that was once the center of Mormondom and is where Joseph Smith is buried today, and finally

* Carthage Jail, in Carthage, IL, where Joseph and his brother Hiram were held and consequently murdered by an angry mob.

In this series, I want to document the most insane s**t I saw, heard, and experienced immersing myself in Mormon tourism at a time where Mormonism is at a crossroads: do they maintain their unique theology as an out-group of Christendom, or pull back and embrace a more mainstream protestant approach, allying itself with the country’s evangelicals?

Is all the tithing money in the world enough to stop this house of UNO cards from tumbling down?

This is Putting the Moron in Moroni: Martyrs, Mormons, & Misery in Missouri, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride as we explore some of the most foundational, sacred, and underwhelming holy sites in Mormonism.

Don’t miss a single issue of this limited series, Putting the Moron in Moroni and all your other favorite UTP originals and surrender your personal information to me.

Before we can talk about the trip, we need a primer from what they would call an “Anti-Mormon” AKA me.

I want to make it very clear that I believe the Mormon Church is exploitative and employs cult-like strategies to maintain a congregation of yes-men willing to give incredible amounts of money and time to the Mormon cause. I believe Mormon culture is toxic, and its more important than ever that we remember exactly who the LDS church is, and for me, who better to do that than the Church themselves through their missionaries and holy sites. It’s my belief that this is a cult and Joseph Smith was a criminal and a cult leader.

Since 2000, the LDS church has enjoyed its strongest era of soft power and relevance in American culture since its inception in 1830, all thanks to mass communication.

Mormonism thrives on TV. The TikTok age has brought forth hundreds of wildly successfully Mormon influencers who romanticize the ideal Mormon life, where moms are homemakers and dads are patriarchs endowed by God.

The most far-reaching and successful work of pop culture about the church is the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which takes every opportunity to roast Mormons and also to be extremely racist. Thank you, Trey Parker and Matt Stone for missing the whole point all the time. It obviously didn’t bother the Mormons too much, considering they are usually the primary Playbill sponsor for productions since.

Shocking documentaries have been made, and books written, about splinter groups where the most conservative, patriarchal doctrines are turned up to 11. I’m talking about groups like Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist LDS (FLDS) sect, and other sects’ various crimes highlighted in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. Turns out an environment obsessed with bloodlines, control, and conformity begets sociopaths who are EXTREMELY obsessed bloodlines, control, and conformity and also being pedophiles.

Mormons’ shockingly outsized influence on pop culture extends far beyond television and social media; Mormons can also sing and write books and start dessert/sweet treat fast food chains.

David Archuleta was famously LDS before abandoning the church and decrying it in his 2024 song “Hell Together.” 2010’s Jeep Commercial Core rock band Imagine Dragons is famously Mormon, which explains their safe, family-friendly music that can still be heard on variety station airwaves across the country today. Pop culture aficionados can enjoy Benson Boone flipping like a jackass off a piano as he sings his boring songs about falling in love. Generations of hormonal high school orchestra students have been enamored with the vaguely sexualized manic pixie dreamgirl that is violinist Lindsey Stirling (who disavowed the church when she was featured on Archuleta’s song named above).

The late-aughts were a boom time movies and books by Mormons. Nearly every kid in America was quoting the still exceptionally funny Napoleon Dynamite, which was made by an active, practicing Mormon. Middle school girlies weren’t free either: the Twilight series is an infamously Mormon work. Stephanie Meyer is a practicing Mormon and the books are known as a quintessential modern Mormon classic, evidenced by its presence at the Far West Temple gift shop, “The Country Store.” We haven’t even talked about Mitt Romney (and we won’t).

Mormons are also making their mark on the American diet. Crumbl is a national 1000-calorie cookie fast food chain that was started in Utah by Mormons, with over 1,000 locations across the US as of June 2025. The “dirty soda” trend originated in Utah, where soda shops outnumber coffee shops due to the religion’s rules against consuming coffee (Minnesota has our own version, whose owners are LDS, called Sota). Cafe Zupa’s has exploded as the primary national competitor against Panera Bread’s monopoly on the bakery-cafe dining concept.

All of these people, works, and organizations associated with the Church and its members vary in “how Mormon” they are, but regardless, the church and its adherents genuinely believe that people making half-baked 1000-calorie cookies are actually missionaries spreading the word of God.

Beyond the cultural impact, Mormonism, and specifically the mainline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is basically an infinite money glitch for those at the top.

Despite supposedly having just 17 million followers worldwide, the Mormon church is the most financially successful religious institution on the planet, with assets, including cash, amounting to an estimated $293 billion. This has largely been the result of the faith’s doctrine of tithing, where members, no matter what they must sacrifice to do so, must contribute 10% of their income directly to the church.

The church has an official venture capital and investment management division called Ensign Peak. Wikipedia estimates that Ensign Peak alone manages more than $124 billion in the Church’s assets. How else do you think companies by BYU grads get their start-up money? Yet, stake presidents are urged to pressure members into tithing no matter how they and their family will suffer to do so. Mormon Facebook is full of AI-ass posts lauding people sacrificing food because they spent so much on tithing (not all Mormons are rich!)

The Church enjoys free labor from their members, as if 10% of their income wasn’t enough. The iconic image of two Mormon missionaries going door-to-door is etched into the cultural zeitgeist, but most people don’t realize that not only are these folks not getting paid, they are usually paying out of pocket directly to the church on top of volunteering their time. They are usually sent to a different part of the country (or world), have shitloads of rules they have to follow, and are usually encouraged to forego other commitments to do so. Seniors are also exploited; all volunteers we met were either college or retirment age.

We haven’t even talked about what they actually believe!

Mormons will be ecstatic to tell you how they have been persecuted throughout American history for their religious beliefs; they will be less eager to tell you what beliefs they have that caused them to be persecuted in the first place. Did I mention Joseph Smith was a pedophile?

The Book of Mormon (“Another Testament of Jesus Christ”) is the foundational text of the religion and also how Mormons got their nickname. The story goes that Joseph Smith Jr., the son of a carny con man in upstate New York, was visited by an angel named Moroni [sic], who told him how to find “golden plates” with a new gospel of the Bible, or something. He supposedly found and “translated” the plates by looking through a hat using a “seeing stone.” Nearly all of Joseph’s writings and “revelations” were dictated to someone else. This “translation” became what we know today as The Book of Mormon and was published in 1830.

It’s been speculated that it just so happens that Joseph Smith likely found a manuscript from a fiction author from Upstate New York that basically mirrors the premise of The Book of Mormon called A View of the Hebrews. If this weren’t enough, significant parts of the Book of Mormon are 1:1 taken from the King James bible.

The gist of the Book of Mormon is basically that sometime before the life of Jesus, a supposed “lost fourth tribe of Israel” had been on a sailing voyage and gone off course, which is basically the plot of A View of the Hebrews, a popular book in Upstate New York at the time. They landed in America and are today’s Native Americans. The book documents how these “Hebrews”, who the Book of Mormon calls “Lamanites,” kept their faith and did all sorts of s**t until its most famous sequence where Jesus Christ comes to America to visit the Lamanites after his resurrection.

It’s basically New Testament fanfiction, but Mormons believe that the Book of Mormon is a historical document, and despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, that it was literally divinely translated by Joseph Smith. They have spent A LOT of money trying to prove it’s historical accuracy.

Mormons also have two other texts: Doctrines & Covenants (D&C) and the Pearl of Great Price.

D&C outline revelations initially from Joseph Smith, but then from leaders of TSCC since his death. We get a lot of what would shape Mormonism’s most controversial beliefs, including D&C 132 which justifies so-called “plural marriage” AKA polygamy and permits men to take up multiple wives. It’s not like, a passing line, either. D&C 132 is loooong and makes it pretty clear what Joseph Smith wanted—as many wives as possible and to forbid his wife from leaving him for it.

“And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.” - D&C 132:54

The Pearl of Great Price is made up of two lost “books” of the bible: the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses. The Book of Abraham was “translated” from an Egyptian funeral papyri which Joseph Smith bought from a traveling salesman.

Instead of the traditional Christian heaven and hell, Mormons believe in an extremely complicated and oddly cosmological concept of three heavenly kingdoms: the Telestial, Terrestrial, and Celestial kingdoms.

People in the Telestial Kingdom are basically people who go to normal heaven. It’s amusing that in Mormon theology, non-Mormons are not automatically condemned to hell. Instead, they are condemned to a kind of Diet Heaven where they can be converted to Mormon in the afterlife via Mormonism’s famous “baptisms for the dead.”

The Terrestrial Kingdom is basically Diet Mormon Heaven, where Mormons go even if they weren’t following all the rules all the time.

The Big Dawg of Mormon heaven is the Celestial Kingdom, where the most righteous Mormons became God-Kings over their own planet, well at least the men do. Earth was Jesus’ planet, so the idea is that you’ll become the Jesus of some other planet, I guess.

In Mormonism, marriages are not like they are at any other Christian church. Mormons undergo a “Sealing Ceremony,” where two people are sealed with the Holy Spirit and will live forever together in the Clestial Kingdom. Sealing is one of several so-called Ordinances which are all done at the Temple.

We can’t talk about the sealing ceremony without talking about polygamy. The Church tries its damnedest to try to get everyone to forget the whole polygamy thing. This is difficult, because it has pissed people off since the 1830s, when Joseph Smith allegedly started a “relationship” with 16 year-old Fanny Alger, who was a servant working for his wife Emma that they had adopted as their own child. Joseph Smith was alleged to have somewhere between 30-40 “wives,” including at least seven girls who were under 18, with multiple as young as 14 years-old.

Mormonism is extremely patriarchal, and some speculate that seemingly frivolous edicts were actually petty ways of getting revenge on followers who did things he didn’t like. The story goes that Joseph’s wife Emma was not pleased that he was f*****g other people’s wives (and that he was a pedophile), so to punish her for dissenting, he forbade her and her girlfriends from having their tea and coffee salons, so now today people go on suicide watch because they went to Starbucks.

You’d think the temple is a place they go every Sunday, right? Wrong.

Mormons attend two types of churches: a church/meeting house and the temple. The temple is only for ordinances, and most Mormons only go every once in a while.

Temples are not open to the public, and they don’t just let any Mormons in either. You have to earn what’s called a “Temple Recommend,” where your local dickhead in charge of your stake (which is what they call a parish) says you are a good enough Mormon to go do the final bosses of Mormonism. Getting a Recommend taken away literally withholds your ability to spend eternity with your family and you won’t go to heaven, and one of the requiremenst is “following the Word of Wisdom.” It can be taken away because you drank coffee or showed your shoulders. Cuuuuuuult.

If it makes you feel better, the Church doesn’t require background checks for clergy and insists at every turn that they have no legal obligation to be mandatory reporters (they direct clergy to call the “ecclesiastical help line,” not contacting police). Their founder was a pedophile. Surely deputizing random people to enforce who gets to enter heaven won’t be abused.

The funniest ordinance by far is the Endowment Ceremony. When we toured the Washington, DC Temple, we overheard a TBM in the Endowment Room giving a tour to, who I guess, were his gentile family members. He said:

“This is where we watch a movie”

And he’s not exaggerating. This ceremony includes the presentation of a silly movie, which was made in the 70s (they may have updated in the last couple of years), that depicts scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon. They then do some secret handshakes that are 1-for-1 stolen from Freemasons (who Joseph Smith was obsessed with). This is literally the last thing you have to do as a Good Mormon to go to heaven.

The whole thing feels like a loyalty test to see if you’ll still believe in the religion afterwards, especially because kids are not taught what happens in the temple before going. Alyssa Grenfell outlines in several videos that her first time getting temple ordinances was the first time she legitimately felt like she was in a cult.

Thanks for sticking with me on this first issue. If you haven’t gathered it, beneath the cheery facade of its members, the LDS Church is a profit-motivated corporation that uses a cult cosplaying as a racist religion started by an illiterate folk magic-obsessed sexual predator who Mormons literally believe is second only to Jesus Christ for who has done the most for mankind, something we were told at Liberty Jail and heard again at Carthage Jail.

Join us for the first stop on our trip: the City of Independence, county seat of Jackson County, Missouri.

Congratulations! *places hands on your head* You have been called by Heavenly Editor to spread the reformed gospel of the Uffda Times-Picayune. Your mission assignment is to send this to 10 apostates in hopes of getting them subscribaptized. Also I get to marry your wife.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com

EPISODE 2 | JULY 4, 2025 | UTP SALUTES 2025 YEARS OF AMERICAN HEGEMONY

When a reasonable newsletter author is driven to do unreasonable things, you might expect the worst.

But when a “““reasonable”””" man is driven to do (extremely) unreasonable things, you probably should expect the worst.

Just over 21 years ago, on June 4, 2004, a local libertarian extremist turned internet folk hero, Marvin Heemeyer, began a violent assault against his enemies: the town of Granby, CO and its crooked, corrupt government officials.

Their crime? Not paying for a $42,000 sewer hook-up he requested, not getting the overvalued amount for a portion of property to be used for a concrete plant he campaigned (and lost) against, among other embarrassing, public incidents. He received a “sign from God” that told him to use his Komatsu D355A bulldozer he purchased for $16k—and failed to sell (remember, he couldn’t afford the $42k sewer hook up, but somehow had $16k to drop on a used bulldozer)—to “enact vengeance” against the town. Unbeknownst to local authorities, Heemeyer had, over a year and a half, turned his used bulldozer into an extremely makeshift tank armored with thousands of pounds of concrete, dubbed by the media as the “Killdozer.”

Over the course of the day, he attacked the city hall/library (which was hosting a story hour for children), the offices of the Granby newspaper of record, public infrastructure like trees and traffic lights, political enemies’ homes. Nothing was safe. Throughout his violent rampage, police failed miserably to stop him. Allegedly, the governor of Colorado considered a 2-man Javelin missile crew on a Hellfire missile-equipped Apache gunship as a last resort.

After his final building was smashed, the bulldozer was rendered inoperable, and he was found with a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound in the cab of his concrete construction coffin. Thankfully, the only person killed by the Killdozer was Heemeyer himself.

I could keep reciting the Wikipedia article for Marvin Heemeyer, but I’ll let you fall down that wormhole. What I think is far more consequential, is how Heemeyer’s violence has been pigeon-holed as a sort of “hero of the common man” story that is supposed to be a celebration of everyday Americans standing up against the tyranny of the nanny state. Like if Ron Swanson got too hyper and took things too far.

This leads me to a totally different kind of Killdozer, YouTube and Twitch’s killdozer_tv (or as Emily and I have Mandela Effect-ed it, killdozerr). I mentioned him briefly in the June 21st edition of UTP, but the crux of the content he has become known for are these “diet challenges.” He’s about as close as you can get to the platonic ideal of one of the internet’s beloved “himbos.”

I knew there was a Himbo Watch, but really wasn’t expecting a Himbo Warning. Subscribe to get all the latest himbo alerts.

But why the name “Killdozer?” Is this just one of 100s of radical right-wing messages inserted into every episode by creator Mikey Killdozer?

Honestly, and I think you’d agree if you watch his videos, I struggle to believe he thinks about politics enough to have an ideology foundational or coherent enough to slide into his videos. Over the past few videos, we’ve seen a little more and more about his life. I think he’s a dumb, mid-to-late-20s hot guy who spends most of his time eating gross food, going on walks with his wife (who appears alongside him in videos, lately with increased frequency), gambling, playing World of Warcraft (Volmer looks amazing), gambling, and going to the gym. He’s closer to a golden retriever than a German shepherd or rottweiler. Who gambles.

I don’t think he has anything in common with Marvin Heemeyer aside from bearing the name of his weapon of choice. If I were a betting man, like Killdozer, I’d probably wager that he just thought the name sounded cool.

Here’s a list of all the “diet challenges” he’s done, which is his bread and butter—pun intended:

* “The Marshalls Diet” - 7 days, only food and drink (no outside water) from Marshalls

* “The Red-40 Diet” - 3 days, only food and drink (no outside water) that contains the controversial additive red-40

* “The Protein Shake Diet” - 7 days, only protein shakes, NO OUTSIDE WATER (he almost died)

* Last, but certainly not least is: “The Vegas Diet,” where he just…goes to Vegas.

In multiple other videos, we see him sports betting, opening Counter-Strike 2 cases, opening Pokémon cards, playing and losing at slot machines, playing and losing at card tables, among other activities, like playing Fortnite, Minecraft, and World of Warcraft, which he also streams on Twitch.

By all reasonable standards, this man has a gambling addiction.

He apparently has a day job, but it’s not clear exactly what he does from watching the videos alone—he only says he “goes to the lab.” He will drop uncomfortably large sums of money, sometimes in the thousands, on baseball parlays. When he inevitably loses, I’ll credit him, insofar as he responds more or less neutrally. No big crash-outs, for the most part.

But he really likes to open up Counter-Strike cases.

My brother is a Counter-Strike player (I tried to be, too, once upon the time), and I had him over for a weekend recently. I showed him Killdozer—he was unimpressed. However, we got a glimpse of Killdozer streaming Counter-Strike 2.

CS2, and the game it is deviated from, CS:GO have a mechanic where the more you play, the more likely it is that you’ll get a random drop (either in-game or after matches) for some kind of cosmetic item or a case. These cases are marketable on the Steam Community Market, a real in-game market where users can buy and sell cases to each other for real money in the form of Steam Wallet funds.

My brother remarked that Killdozer was actually pretty good at CS, but was amused at his apparent strategy: which is to open a case in between every death, (about 5-10 times a game). For $2.50, you can purchase a key and use it to open a case. “Opening cases” on stream is one of Killdozer’s specialties, and his Steam inventory is public.

Montuga, a website for tracking Steam inventory prices, estimates the cumulative value of Killdozer’s Counter-Strike 2 inventory at $54,953.05

The sheer amount of money this man has spent is almost certainly in the thousands. If he opens 10 cases a day, that’s a minimum of $25. That said, you can use Steam Wallet funds to purchase more cases and keys, so perhaps it’s just a matter of recycling and upselling with some real money here and there. It’s unlikely he’s spent $55k on a free-to-play shooter that’s effectively been out for 13 years, but it’s safe to say he’s sunk in a lot.

What’s most mind-boggling, is that this isn’t real wealth. You can’t really turn it into real money without going through a 3rd party marketplace, which don’t get me wrong, a LOT of people do, and at least it’s possible. Call of Duty will charge you literally $40 on cosmetics in your $80-100 video game. At least CS2 is free and you get to gamble. Case Tracker, a site that does what it says, reports that 32,000,000 cases where opened in the month of March alone. My God. Imagine if the casinos reported how many spins each machine had.

I’m concerned for Mikey Killdozer in the same way I am concerned for anyone struggling with problem gambling.

It’s now extremely easy to gamble, and venues like Counter-Strike cases are effectively casinos with some superficial restrictions and very few regulations around, at least in the US. This sequence from the 6/30 stream really sums it up. In just 60 seconds he warns a viewer “Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” when they ask for a recommendation on what the best case for “getting started” would be. His warning is totally genuine. Moments later, he unboxes a knife valued at $475 and celebrates with goofy faces, opening more cases, and his “Get a knife, give a knife” rule to entice viewers to continue watch him gamble.

Get an article, give an article. GIVE AN ARTICLE GIVE! AN! ARTICLE!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit uffdatimespicayune.substack.com