The Mormon Candidate Takes Utah

I can't believe it. Mormons did vote for the Mormon Guy. This table from Google shows the Utah Vote with 75% of the votes counted. The Mormon Guy got 21% of the vote. 21% is phenomenal for a candidate who had no possible chance of winning the election.

Utah Vote
Candidate	Party	Pct	Vote
Donald Trump	Republican	46%	360,634
Hillary Clinton	Democratic	28%	217,820
Evan McMullin	Mormon	21%	160,801
Gary Johnson	Libertarian	3%	25,096
Jill Stein	Green	0.7%	5,295

Yesterday I linked to an article by Neal Silvester on why Mormons voted against Trump and for a political operative from Goldman Sach whose only qualification is that he is a member of the LDS Church. The article is a great example of Mormon-think in action.

Silvester starts with a with a standard sales pitch for Mormonism. The pitch includes a claim that Mormons are somehow victims of great persecution.

Silvester whines that non-Mormons project false images on Mormons.

He then spends twenty pages projecting images from the Book of Mormon onto Donald Trump. Silvester's thesis is: "men like Donald Trump are everywhere in the Book of Mormon;" therefore I can take any negative image from the Book of Mormon and project the image onto Trump. (Mormons pull this type of crap routinely.).

Silvester says idiotic things like Trump seeks to persecute Muslims because Trump is worried about the current wave of immigrants from Syria who many suspect of being infiltrated by ISIS. Silvester accuses Trump of adultery and accuses him of promoting whoredoms among priests because Trump once owned the Miss Universe Pageant. (This from a state that brought the world "princess pageants").

Silvester complains that Trump builds tall buildings. This is supposed to be sinful because some fictional Nephite King built a tall building on temple grounds. (Mormons built a tall building on Temple Grounds).

Silvester's post has page after page where he throws invective from the Book of Mormon at Trump.

The article had me rolling on the floor with laughter.

Before reading the article, I want to point out: The Book of Mormon was written in the 1800s. It is based on a speculative idea that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel.

Joseph Smith claimed that a group of Israelites called "The Nephites" came to the new world on a submarine.

The Nephites were a "white and delightsome" people. The Nephites kept doing sinful things. After each episode, God would curse the people he didn't like and turn them brown.

The idea is similar to the "The Mark of Cain." The "Mark of Cane" idea states that God turned the descendents of Cain black and doomed African Americans to be the slaves of the white people. Realizing that everyone was supposed to have died in the Great Flood, Brigham Young said blacks were descendent of someother person who did great evil.

Anyway, the Book of Mormon conflict ends with an extermination war where the "white and delightsome" Nephites are slaughtered by the dark and loathsome Lamanites.

The "proof" for of the Book of Mormon is the observation that Native Americans have darker skin than European settlers.

I've heard Mormons called Barack Obama "the antichrist" based on the observation that Obama has dark skin.

Anyway, Silvester's page on why Mormons voted against Trump is quite amusing. It provides insight into a strange think called "Mormon think."

PS: Apparently the Mormon candidate Evan McMullin has called for Mormons to leave the Republican Party (Washington Post). I would love to see that happen as such a departure would improve the GOP.