The militia that has occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters represents a strain of right-wing Mormonism that took shape after World War II.
That was when laissez-faire economics, accompanied by staunch anti-Communism, began to supplant traditional Mormon communitarianism in the Mountain West. The key figures in the shift were Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower Administration who became president of the LDS Church in 1985; Benson’s son Reed, an active member of the John Birch Society; Ernest Wilkinson, president of Brigham Young University; and W. Cleon Skousen, a sometime member of the BYU faculty who worked for the F.B.I. and later served as chief of police in Salt Lake City.
Read Full Article »