E39: Boys With Sticks

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:13)
In 2011, members of the sleepy little town of Mount Pleasant, Utah were growing concerned. They had seen large fields once used for farming, seemingly taken up with men in camo and guns.
Each week, onlookers would spot groups of men running drills, looking like they were preparing for the end of days. This group ended up being a local militia, largely organized by a Mormon fundamentalist sect known as the AUB.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:40)
You can look this up, there's a great article by Nate Carlisle in the Stalag Tribune that talks about this little militia from the Apostolic United Brethren. It's a polygamist break-off sect, which I've covered a ton about in Year of Polygamy. And it talks about one of their local militias that they were running during the presidency of Obama. Let me just give you a Mormon militia 101 Basically, anytime a Democrat is elected into office, Mormon fundamentalists, Mormons, conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians lose their minds. But someone like Obama in, who was the first black president and a Democrat, we're talking apocalypse.
So of course, you can read about this militia, but it's crazy. Basically, they're tucked up in the sheep fields of Mount Pleasant, running drills. They end up putting explosives or plan to put explosives in both sides of the mountain. So when all the world goes to hell and the government comes to take your guns, they can really blow it up. Eventually get shut down, even the AUB has distanced themselves from it. It's a crazy story. Why are these men in these sleepy farming communities running drills and starting militias?
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:04)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:05)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills straight out of Zion, this isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:14)
Thanks for watching! This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:38)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:46)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:10)
I had lunch last week with my good buddy, Kenneth Lines, who is also known as Mithren on the Mormon Reddit communities. He's a really good dude. And as we sat at our annual lunch at David's Kitchen, sipping our hot and sour slowly, the conversation inevitably turned to cults.
Mithren has done a lot of writing about dynamics of cultic systems. And so we were sort of sharing our own experiences working with different communities that people sometimes feel were cultish.
You know, like hippie communities, wild, wild country stuff, those sorts of things. We follow all the cult shows. I'm helping co-produce some work for the new cult podcast that Ty Meesom is putting out for Heart Radio. Cults come up every once in a while. And to me, I think the common component of cults is the idea of some communal work to change the world for the better. So you usually see this, all cults have this idea that they're going to change the world somehow, and it has to be done in community, which in and of itself is not a bad idea. It just seems that all cults that I have followed have a similar pattern, this idea of building a utopian community that involves communal living and plan to change the world. So I'm waxing off about this during lunch, and Mithran Cutson, he says, Don't forget secret police. If you're a cult, you need to have a secret police. Now, before you turn the podcast off because we use the C word, hang on just a minute. I know the word cult is extremely fraught in Mormonism, but with my work dealing with many, many Mormon groups, it's hard to deny that at least some of the Mormon groups we know of, like the FLDS, for example, are cults, if not cultish.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:48)
Well, this might be a good time to talk about a random trip we just went on with some friends recently. As you may or may not know, the FLDS had several places of refuge stocked way around the country. You've undoubtedly heard about Texas, the most famous of them, but there were others. There was one in Colorado, and there was one in South Dakota, actually not too far from Mount Rushmore.
You may also have heard that recently the property up there was sold at a sheriff's sale to former members of the FLDS Church, who we know. And they invited us to come up there and kind of check out what was there and kind of give them some ideas about what was there, what they had on their hands. And so we, some of us got there a little earlier than others.