Salt City Sinner

posted on 2/6/2021 by Charles R. Bernard To the Editors of the Salt Lake Tribune, When I saw in my podcast feed that Mormon Land would be covering so-called “#DezNat” extremists, I tuned in with great interest. I study (and often write about ) cultic movements, far right ideology, and online extremism, so naturally #DezNat is a phenomenon I became aware of a few years ago. It currently exists at the confluence of many of the powerful forces that drive American politics in 2021.  

posted on 12/6/2018 by the Salt City Sinner A consistent theme present in many events from about 2008 until now can be summed up as “things as they have always been, but stripped of pretense and nicety.” Whether you’re talking about the racial politics of the GOP or Jerome Corsi admitting (on camera!) that a lie isn’t really a lie when an evangelical tells it to a heretic*, these are things that we’ve all known were true all along yet more-or-less mutually agreed to bury beneath a blanket of bullshit, nonsense, and euphemism. Ever so has it been, yea verily, in Zion. Anyone who hails from the land of Life Elevated knows that the LDS Church wields more cultural, political, and economic power than any other entity ever has (or probably will). Given our state’s history, the Church’s grip on Utah is understandable (if unconstitutional and colonialist) and has been the subject of much ink and many pixels from irritated, impotent nonbelievers such as myself. Having lived in...

posted 2/22/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Bountiful, Utah In my family, only my sister is a native-born Utahn. My parents were both tumblin' tumbleweeds for most of their lives, although they met and fell in love in Salt Lake City, where my father was studying at the University of Utah and my mother was waiting tables after a stint as a cross-country drifter and scallywag. Other portions of my clan have settled in Boise, Tampa, Pittsburgh, etc. -- I myself was born (as I noted in a previous post   here ) in Grand Junction, Colorado. Despite my status as an immigrant to Utah, however, the place in which I have lived the longest over the course of my life was Bountiful, Utah, a medium-sized town about ten minutes north of Salt Lake City -- close enough, in fact, that Bountiful bleeds into the suburb of North Salt Lake with no appreciable boundary to speak of. Since I moved back to Utah almost a decade ago, I've had a few opportunities (if you can call them that) to vi...