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EXIT Podcast Episode 23: The Mexican Colonies (feat. Tiffany Langford)
428 Plays3 years ago
Tiffany Langford's family has successfully navigated work and life in an active war zone for decades. She grew up in the Mormon colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora during the height of the drug war, a time when the violence in those regions outstripped the death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan. Local police and government forces were thoroughly infiltrated by the cartels and could not be trusted.
Despite all that, she describes an idyllic rural childhood. We discuss:
- Thriving in a politically and geographically inhospitable environment
- The role of American media and military power in protecting the colonies
- The freedom that comes with state decline
- Homeschooling and community building
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Transcript
Introduction to Tiffany Langford and Her Unique Background
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Exit Podcast, this is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm joined here by Tiffany Langford.
00:00:22
Speaker
Tiffany grew up in the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico during the drug war, which began in 2006 and is ongoing today.
00:00:29
Speaker
She spent most of her time in Chihuahua and Sonora, which were among the most dangerous states in Mexico at a time when there were actually more conflict deaths due to the drug war than there were in the Iraq war.
00:00:40
Speaker
I wanted to have her on the show because many of us are preparing for more difficult, more lawless times here in the States.
History and Religious Practices of Mormon Colonies
00:00:49
Speaker
And I'm interested to learn how she and her community adjusted to those circumstances.
00:00:53
Speaker
So welcome to the show, Tiffany.
00:00:55
Speaker
Tiffany M.: Thank you.
00:00:56
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:00:57
Speaker
This is exciting.
00:00:58
Speaker
Great to have you.
00:00:59
Speaker
So first of all, a lot of our audience may be surprised to hear that there are Mormon colonies in northern Mexico.
00:01:06
Speaker
Can you tell us a little bit about the history behind those colonies and the people that live there now?
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:11
Speaker
So, I mean, there's an extensive history, depending on... We probably don't have enough time to even talk about that history.
00:01:18
Speaker
But...
00:01:19
Speaker
Technically, I am not from a Mormon colony.
00:01:22
Speaker
It's more of a break off from the Mormon colonies.
00:01:25
Speaker
So there's the Mormon colony.
00:01:26
Speaker
There's a Mormon colony in Chihuahua that we lived.
00:01:29
Speaker
I was born about 40 minutes away from that in an American town there.
00:01:33
Speaker
And then, um,
00:01:34
Speaker
In Sonora, where my dad was from, which is where I actually grew up more, we were actually an hour away from an old Mormon colony that is completely, there's nobody there anymore.
00:01:43
Speaker
There's like one house left, my great-great-grandpa's or something.
00:01:46
Speaker
So there's these two colonies, and we live on the outskirts of those colonies.
00:01:51
Speaker
But yeah, so I guess the Mormons went down there after they couldn't practice plugging me up in the States anymore.
00:01:58
Speaker
So a lot of them were sent down there to keep the principal alive, I guess.
00:02:03
Speaker
And then at one point, the...
00:02:05
Speaker
it became illegal to live it there as well.
00:02:08
Speaker
I guess in the church, they stopped practicing it there as well.
00:02:10
Speaker
So my family, my grandparents kept on living it.
00:02:15
Speaker
And so that's where I come from.
00:02:17
Speaker
But there's still a Mormon colony there in Dublin and they have a church and they actually have a temple there in Colonial Juarez.
00:02:25
Speaker
I think it's the smallest temple in the world.
00:02:26
Speaker
It's what I've heard unless they built a smaller one since, but...
00:02:29
Speaker
It's, yeah, so they have a temple there and they definitely have a church there and missionaries and stuff, but it's not too big.
00:02:36
Speaker
So you grew up in a separatist group or were you also connected to the mainstream church?
00:02:42
Speaker
I understand it's a little bit hazy, the lines.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm in the LDS church right now, but I wasn't baptized until 2014.
00:02:53
Speaker
I got baptized and my family one at a time joined the church and we're still all not part of the church.
00:02:59
Speaker
But so I grew up, I know there's a lot of, I don't know how much you know about the fundamentalist or the polygamist groups.
00:03:05
Speaker
There's a lot of them in the state.
00:03:06
Speaker
There's a lot in Mexico as well.
00:03:08
Speaker
So, or a couple in Mexico.
00:03:10
Speaker
So my mom was from, she's actually a LeBaron.
00:03:14
Speaker
So she came from the LeBaron group there in, it's actually Colonial LeBaron is where I was born at my grandma's
Life in Remote Mexico and Family Dynamics
00:03:19
Speaker
house.
00:03:19
Speaker
So that's a big community.
00:03:20
Speaker
It's really,
00:03:21
Speaker
they've really integrated with the locals there as well.
00:03:24
Speaker
So it's grown and it's not just like our little family town anymore.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's pretty big.
00:03:29
Speaker
So she was from there.
00:03:30
Speaker
So I'm part LeBaron and my dad's a Langford and he actually grew up, his grandparents moved down to Mexico, completely separate from LeBaron people.
00:03:39
Speaker
And they moved to a completely different state and they moved way more out in the middle of nowhere in the Sonora mountains.
00:03:46
Speaker
We have a couple of
00:03:48
Speaker
local towns there, like half hour, hour away from us, but it's kind of just in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:53
Speaker
And we have a little ranch there.
00:03:55
Speaker
We just grew up in the middle of mountains.
00:03:57
Speaker
It was such a cool life for kids.
00:03:58
Speaker
We loved it.
00:03:59
Speaker
But yeah, so he grew up there.
00:04:01
Speaker
And then at one point, my mom's family and my dad's family ran into each other somewhere along the way.
00:04:07
Speaker
And there were a lot of different marriages between both my grandparents' kids.
00:04:13
Speaker
And so the Langford and the Barons are kind of interconnected really well because of that.
00:04:19
Speaker
But yeah.
00:04:20
Speaker
So yeah, it was like two polygamous towns kind of, but that's the difference is like my dad's town, we weren't, we're not, I never grew up in a group.
00:04:29
Speaker
I wasn't in a priesthood work or in a church at all.
00:04:32
Speaker
We were just like independents, but we didn't, how do you say it?
00:04:36
Speaker
We didn't practice the priesthood.
00:04:38
Speaker
Nobody had the priesthood.
00:04:39
Speaker
We kind of had our own Sunday schools at our houses.
00:04:43
Speaker
We would sing hymns with my grandma.
00:04:45
Speaker
And we grew up, you know, knowing the gospel, reading the Book of Mormon.
00:04:51
Speaker
And then when we came to the States, my mom would take us to church.
00:04:55
Speaker
So we went to the LDS church most of our lives.
00:04:58
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:04:59
Speaker
So Sunday, if you were going to church, you were going to the mainstream church.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:05:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:05:06
Speaker
I grew up feeling like I was a Mormon.
00:05:08
Speaker
And when I actually got baptized, I was like, well, it didn't feel like a lot was going to change to me.
00:05:14
Speaker
Because we went to seminary.
00:05:16
Speaker
We went to the treks.
00:05:18
Speaker
We love the church.
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, we did grow up in a different society.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:24
Speaker
Was your dad polygamist?
00:05:26
Speaker
So not everybody in the town lives polygamy.
00:05:29
Speaker
There's actually a very few people
Doctrinal Differences and Violent History
00:05:31
Speaker
who live it or who even have lived it.
00:05:33
Speaker
My dad, he did live it for a while, but it didn't end up working out.
00:05:39
Speaker
And I was a kid when that happened.
00:05:41
Speaker
So it was only about a year.
00:05:44
Speaker
Is that sort of just fading away as less and less people do it?
00:05:49
Speaker
I don't think it's not really fading away.
00:05:51
Speaker
It just was never like it was something we were taught that was true.
00:05:55
Speaker
And I guess we were taught that it never should have stopped being lived in the church.
00:06:00
Speaker
That's what a lot of the groups believe is that it should have continued.
00:06:03
Speaker
being practiced but we also but it didn't need to be universal is that the thinking well basically i guess i was taught that we you're supposed to know and have a revelation or just you know you know that you're supposed to live it i don't believe yeah we weren't we weren't taught that everybody just lives it on a whim so it's more of a serious thing that people live if they feel inspired to and i guess a lot of people don't always feel inspired to do it
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like, because from what I understand, the FLDS church, the Warren Jeffs group in like Colorado City, one of the problems that they have socially is all of the men are expected to do that, which means that there's not enough women to go around, which means they end up kind of expelling a lot of the young men to, to like make room.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yes.
00:06:55
Speaker
So it's probably much more of a sustainable situation if it's like, you know, here and there people doing it.
00:07:03
Speaker
Oh, yeah, so much more.
00:07:05
Speaker
We definitely, there's some weird stuff going on in that group that really sketchy.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:11
Speaker
So yeah, there's only a couple people out of the hundreds who live there who have actually lived polygamy.
00:07:17
Speaker
So yeah.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:18
Speaker
Do you have like a sense of, you know, I know you said that you sort of grew up more or less Mormon, like, were there cultural differences between the groups or like doctrinal differences?
00:07:27
Speaker
Like, were the, was the Langford group substantially different from the LeBaron group?
00:07:31
Speaker
Or were they pretty much just kind of relatively doing the same thing?
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, they're relatively doing the same thing.
00:07:36
Speaker
Besides, no, they actually were different.
00:07:38
Speaker
Never mind.
00:07:39
Speaker
Like my dad's family.
00:07:41
Speaker
It's a funny joke.
00:07:42
Speaker
I tease about, we tease about it in my family because it's not as bad as it used to be.
00:07:47
Speaker
And we tease my dad and my uncles because they all married LeBaron girls.
00:07:51
Speaker
But yet they thought the LeBarons were priest crafters, they called them, because they had started their own church.
Cultural Exchange and Safety Concerns During Drug War
00:07:56
Speaker
So there was that little rift between them to where... But I'm like, well, you guys married them, so they tease about that they saved them from their cult.
00:08:05
Speaker
But no, the LeBarons... My...
00:08:09
Speaker
My grandpa and his brother, so his brother started the Church of the Firstborn, they called it, down in LeBaron.
00:08:14
Speaker
And I don't know how much you know about the LeBaron's.
00:08:16
Speaker
They're a little bit infamous for some crazy things that happened a lot of years ago.
00:08:21
Speaker
It was like a Cain and Abel story, I guess.
00:08:24
Speaker
So Joel was the prophet of the church.
00:08:27
Speaker
And so they broke off from the church, just living polygamy.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then I guess at some point they decided to join, I mean, to make their own church.
00:08:34
Speaker
Sorry.
00:08:35
Speaker
They started their own church.
00:08:36
Speaker
And like my grandpa was the patriarch and
00:08:39
Speaker
And they had their own thing going on.
00:08:41
Speaker
And then their younger brother, whose name was Ervil, he decided that he wanted to be the leader and he wasn't getting what he wanted.
00:08:49
Speaker
And so he went crazy and he decided to kill his brother.
00:08:53
Speaker
And so he had his brother killed.
00:08:54
Speaker
And so he was the prophet of the church that was killed.
00:08:57
Speaker
And he actually later on had my grandpa run off the road as well.
00:09:01
Speaker
It became this like, it became this, they call them the Ervilites.
00:09:05
Speaker
It was really sad.
00:09:06
Speaker
my mom kind of grew up in that situation to where she was always running, always hiding, she felt like, from the herbalites, they called them, because they were trying to kill.
00:09:16
Speaker
And my mom was the daughter of the main guy of the church who wasn't killed yet.
00:09:20
Speaker
And so my grandpa died when she was 14.
00:09:23
Speaker
And after that, the church kind of, they kind of
00:09:28
Speaker
The church didn't keep going.
00:09:29
Speaker
They have their little Sunday schools and stuff.
00:09:31
Speaker
But after my grandpa and his brother were both killed, they kind of just relaxed with that whole thing.
00:09:36
Speaker
And my uncle, yeah, Erval was taken to prison and he actually died in Utah State Prison, I think.
00:09:42
Speaker
So yeah, he went crazy.
00:09:43
Speaker
He was like threatening the President of the United States and all the other leaders of the groups out here, the other polygamist groups.
00:09:51
Speaker
And he thought that he was killing all these people for God.
00:09:54
Speaker
So, so yeah, that was a crazy LeBaron story.
00:09:57
Speaker
And so, yeah, so my dad's family, that was the difference is my dad's family believed in the principle, the fundamentals of Mormonism.
00:10:05
Speaker
And they believe that they could still live them without the priesthood authority from the church.
00:10:11
Speaker
Right.
00:10:12
Speaker
To practice polygamy or even from what I understand, to advocate polygamy.
00:10:16
Speaker
for polygamy in any sort of immediate practical sense will get you excommunicated in most cases from the church now.
00:10:23
Speaker
So it's, so, so that the mentality was like, you know, we still believe in the church,
00:10:27
Speaker
And like, they're wrong about excommunicating us, but they're still good guys.
00:10:31
Speaker
And we're still sort of loyal to that system.
00:10:33
Speaker
Is that am I picking that up?
00:10:35
Speaker
Or is that wrong?
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's how it was.
00:10:37
Speaker
Like, it depended.
00:10:38
Speaker
It depends on who you're talking to.
00:10:40
Speaker
Like, there were some people who were more Scrooges about the church.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, but I grew up I grew up loving the church.
00:10:45
Speaker
And a lot of us grew up having a lot of respect for the church, like the prophets, Brigham Young, John Taylor, all these guys, they were
00:10:52
Speaker
We didn't like the LeBarons believed that the that the priesthood switched after Joseph Smith and it went to them.
00:10:59
Speaker
And so like Brigham Young, John Taylor, all the prophets after Joseph Smith were just carrying on with the church.
00:11:05
Speaker
So they believe that they took the rights and the keys.
00:11:07
Speaker
But I grew up believing that all of these men were prophets and that we were just living a different life.
00:11:14
Speaker
because that's what my family felt to do.
00:11:16
Speaker
So, and actually funny thing, my grandpa, he was 18, I think, and he was living in California and he got excommunicated at 18 because of something that happened.
00:11:29
Speaker
He was going to some firesides and somebody in his bishopric, I think, decided that he was upset with him.
00:11:35
Speaker
And he went and talked to his stake president and he ended up telling him that he was
00:11:40
Speaker
advocating for polygamy which wasn't true at the time my grandpa wasn't he didn't believe like he wasn't advocating it at all and ends up so he got excommunicated wrongfully for it but after he got excommunicated i think they like asked him back and told him they were sorry for excommunicating him but he had already he had already gotten his own like he went and studied polygamy out and he felt inspired to live it at that point so at that point he was already in mexico
00:12:07
Speaker
And he had a second wife at that time.
00:12:11
Speaker
So it sounds like, I guess my impression of that history was that the colony had been sent down there by Brigham Young and that it was sort of a closed system and those people were, that there wasn't a lot of like traffic and conversation in between that colony and Utah.
00:12:32
Speaker
But it sounds like there's lots of people kind of going back and forth.
00:12:36
Speaker
Is
Gun Ownership, Family Tragedy, and Cultural Ties
00:12:37
Speaker
that true?
00:12:38
Speaker
I mean, maybe it was mostly my family.
00:12:40
Speaker
We're kind of gypsies.
00:12:41
Speaker
We go around a lot and we make it around to a lot of these groups and we're kind of vocal.
00:12:46
Speaker
So I don't know how much all the LDS people down there get around, but it seems like, yeah, it seems like they do.
00:12:52
Speaker
My grandparents on my mom's side,
00:12:54
Speaker
Like my grandpa, before they actually started the church there in LeBaron, he was LDS and he grew up going to the LDS school down there in Chihuahua.
00:13:04
Speaker
So while they were still, while it was still legal in the church to practice plural marriage, he was growing up in that town.
00:13:12
Speaker
Right.
00:13:14
Speaker
And it was all just, everyone was living it like they were supposed to.
00:13:18
Speaker
And then all of a sudden it became illegal.
00:13:20
Speaker
So some continued and some didn't.
00:13:23
Speaker
Right.
00:13:23
Speaker
And so you all have, from what I understand, American and Mexican passports, right?
00:13:30
Speaker
Not everybody does.
00:13:31
Speaker
Like even in my own, even in my own family, only a couple of us are dual citizens because we were born in Mexico.
00:13:38
Speaker
It's easier if your parents have that dual citizenship, your parents have it because they can apply for it for their children, even if they're not born in Mexico, but it does take a process.
00:13:49
Speaker
But if you're born in Mexico, it's a lot easier.
00:13:51
Speaker
So I am a dual citizen.
00:13:53
Speaker
Got it.
00:13:54
Speaker
Because I was born there.
00:13:55
Speaker
So I,
00:13:56
Speaker
Okay, so I was picturing that like maybe people who didn't have dual citizenship would have primarily Mexican citizenship, but it sounds like you're saying there's a lot of people who have just American citizenship down there.
00:14:07
Speaker
Is that true?
00:14:08
Speaker
I actually, I think it just, yeah, I think it depends on the family.
00:14:12
Speaker
A lot of kids grow up, yeah, and they'll get their Mexican licenses.
00:14:16
Speaker
So they'll come to the States with only a Mexican driver's license and they'll use that for a while until they decide
00:14:21
Speaker
where they're going to be.
00:14:22
Speaker
And a lot of people in Mexico probably haven't even been much to the States.
00:14:26
Speaker
So my family came out to the States a lot.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so America feels like home just as much or more than Mexico most of the time.
00:14:33
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:14:35
Speaker
So I wanted to ask you about that.
00:14:36
Speaker
Like, first of all, how do people like, again, I'm going by my picture, which is very desert and hot and inhospitable.
00:14:47
Speaker
That's what I'm picturing in my mind.
00:14:49
Speaker
And I'm wondering how does, how do people, it sounds like there's like relatively like a, an American type standard of living American cultural practices.
00:14:58
Speaker
What do people do for a living out there?
00:15:00
Speaker
So, um, a lot of us, like my dad, we came out to the States a lot because he didn't have a setup to where he made a living there.
00:15:09
Speaker
And it's hard to make a living there unless you get yourself set up and it takes a while.
00:15:13
Speaker
So most people will set up their trees.
00:15:17
Speaker
So most people are supporting themselves off of they'll plant pecan trees or we did pomegranates.
00:15:22
Speaker
We did chiltepine for a while.
00:15:23
Speaker
They'll have their different plants that they'll do.
00:15:25
Speaker
So they're farming.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:27
Speaker
So a lot of people do farming.
00:15:29
Speaker
A lot of my family are construction people too.
00:15:31
Speaker
And they'll actually...
00:15:33
Speaker
Go to the States.
00:15:34
Speaker
Some will, they'll go for a while, come back.
00:15:36
Speaker
That's what my dad did a lot.
00:15:38
Speaker
So we would sometimes stay in Mexico while he would go and work and then come back.
00:15:42
Speaker
And then a lot of times my mom would just be like, Hey, we're going to go with you and not separate the family for too long.
00:15:47
Speaker
So, so yeah, most people do farming and a lot of people do really well.
00:15:51
Speaker
down there with it.
00:15:52
Speaker
They've been doing it for a lot of years.
00:15:54
Speaker
They'll have their greenhouses.
00:15:55
Speaker
But life has changed a lot.
00:15:57
Speaker
Like when I grew up in Sonora, I lived in a little ranch called La Mora, which is the mulberry in Spanish.
00:16:04
Speaker
But it's just a little ranch and it's grown really big now with all the generations coming up.
00:16:08
Speaker
But I remember as a kid, we...
00:16:11
Speaker
didn't have, we had electricity throughout the day, but it would go off.
00:16:14
Speaker
We ran the whole farm off of a generator.
00:16:16
Speaker
And so it would go off at five o'clock and we wouldn't have lights.
00:16:20
Speaker
And so we would get our kerosene lamps out and our candles.
00:16:23
Speaker
And it was just a different lifestyle.
00:16:25
Speaker
All the kids on the farm, we would go and play at the river and build huts and play cowboys and Indians and teepees.
00:16:31
Speaker
It was
00:16:32
Speaker
It was the life.
00:16:33
Speaker
We lived right next to a river.
00:16:35
Speaker
We would milk cows every morning and work on the farm.
00:16:39
Speaker
It was a good life.
00:16:40
Speaker
But it's changed a lot.
00:16:42
Speaker
We have internet there.
00:16:43
Speaker
We have phones.
00:16:44
Speaker
We have electricity all day now and all night.
00:16:46
Speaker
We have AC.
00:16:48
Speaker
Things have changed a lot.
00:16:49
Speaker
So we definitely are living the high life.
00:16:51
Speaker
It feels like in Mexico compared to a lot of the locals in the towns.
00:16:57
Speaker
We brought America.
00:16:59
Speaker
A lot of people say we brought Babylon back to Mexico.
00:17:02
Speaker
our sanctuary.
00:17:05
Speaker
Well, what's your take on that?
00:17:06
Speaker
Do you feel like they brought Babylon back?
00:17:08
Speaker
Well, yeah, in a lot of ways, you know, we brought our movies and our internet and our music and it's just the modern generation.
00:17:15
Speaker
That's a whole, it's a whole different ball game than what I grew up in to see, you know, just with social media and with phones, but it's still
Transition to the LDS Church and Vision for the Future
00:17:24
Speaker
a fun place for kids.
00:17:25
Speaker
We grew up going to school in a little
00:17:27
Speaker
brick schoolhouse, a two bedroom schoolhouse.
00:17:29
Speaker
My grandma taught and then we had a Spanish teacher.
00:17:33
Speaker
And yeah, it was a pretty simple life.
00:17:36
Speaker
I remember coming out to the States and I would be out here for a couple of weeks.
00:17:40
Speaker
And it was so fun because we had, we had tons of friends in all the different groups and then just in church.
00:17:44
Speaker
And, and, um, we would make friends really fast wherever we went because we were only there for a little while and then we'd leave.
00:17:50
Speaker
But I remember feeling like the rush of this life out here was so different that I only could handle it for so long.
00:17:58
Speaker
And it was like, oh, I need to go home.
00:18:00
Speaker
I need to go all the way to Mexico just so I can regroup and find myself again, find my peace.
00:18:05
Speaker
But I finally decided to figure out how to do that out here.
00:18:11
Speaker
So you ran it from a generator.
00:18:13
Speaker
So like, would he go get like a gas tank and fill it up?
00:18:17
Speaker
Or how did you power the generator?
00:18:20
Speaker
I don't actually don't.
00:18:21
Speaker
I don't know.
00:18:22
Speaker
Don't know.
00:18:23
Speaker
I was a kid at the time.
00:18:24
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:18:25
Speaker
But it ran like we had like two of them, I think, and it would run like four houses on this side of the farm and then the other one would run this side.
00:18:34
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:18:34
Speaker
Wow.
00:18:35
Speaker
It's a simple life.
00:18:36
Speaker
But yeah, that's that.
00:18:39
Speaker
So that's very appealing to to me and to a lot of people that kind of.
00:18:44
Speaker
lifestyle going without AC in those circumstances would be pretty tough.
00:18:50
Speaker
How did you guys handle that?
00:18:51
Speaker
So we had fans in a lot of our bedrooms.
00:18:54
Speaker
I remember there were some summers and this was when I was a teenager.
00:18:56
Speaker
So we still didn't have like the good, we don't have actual, most people don't have AC systems like they do here.
00:19:02
Speaker
They'll have like
00:19:03
Speaker
the little coolers that they put on the wall, the AC unit.
00:19:07
Speaker
So we have those now, but I remember in the summer as me and my sister would go to bed and we would just lay on top of our sheets and we would sleep in our shorts and turn our fan on and spray, spray bottles above us because it was so hot.
00:19:20
Speaker
But this is even like,
00:19:21
Speaker
we're not, we're not in Cancun, like where the, it's really muggy.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:26
Speaker
So we're, it's not that type of weather.
00:19:28
Speaker
It's more of a dry heat, but it was still hot.
00:19:31
Speaker
So we had these things called swamp coolers.
00:19:33
Speaker
I don't know if you know what those are.
00:19:34
Speaker
Sure.
00:19:34
Speaker
Sure.
00:19:34
Speaker
Sure.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:36
Speaker
So that's a weaker up in most of the time and it, it cooled off our house pretty good, but yeah.
00:19:41
Speaker
It made our floor swell.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:43
Speaker
You weren't, you weren't entirely without, cause man, that would just be brutal to, especially in the heat of the day.
00:19:49
Speaker
Is there a,
00:19:50
Speaker
Is there a really clear like cultural or geographic boundary between these groups and like the the mestizo population or is it pretty mixed?
00:20:00
Speaker
Do you go to church together?
00:20:02
Speaker
Is it very like very different?
00:20:03
Speaker
So, yeah, it's not super mixed and it depends where you're at.
00:20:07
Speaker
Like in LeBaron, like I said, it's it's they've assimilated a lot more.
00:20:12
Speaker
But they still have their church there in LeBaron that a lot of people will go to.
00:20:15
Speaker
And then other people just go wherever they have their Christian churches there that aren't LDS.
00:20:20
Speaker
So in La Mora, where we lived, we didn't have a church.
00:20:24
Speaker
So we just did church at our house.
00:20:26
Speaker
Our parents would teach us or our grandparents would get together and we'd do Sunday school.
00:20:31
Speaker
So.
00:20:32
Speaker
I think they have like their Catholic churches up there in the towns.
00:20:36
Speaker
But yeah, we don't go to church together usually, but we have a lot of the people from the towns who have been working for our family on their ranches.
00:20:44
Speaker
And our family actually have brought a lot of progress to those towns because of coming down there and starting on their farms and having so much work that these people, because a lot of our families now, they'll have
00:20:59
Speaker
They'll have the men who will work out in the fields and on their houses and building stuff for them and their ranches.
00:21:04
Speaker
And they've been working for them for years.
00:21:06
Speaker
Like they've become part of the family is what it feels like.
00:21:10
Speaker
And then they have their women, their daughters or their moms who will come and actually help around our houses.
00:21:17
Speaker
And they'll get paid way more than they ever did for doing anything else.
00:21:20
Speaker
And so it's actually really blessed those communities.
00:21:23
Speaker
So a lot of them have become really close.
00:21:27
Speaker
to the locals there and it just depends on who they are.
00:21:30
Speaker
But like when we had our funerals down there recently, like our first, one of our first big funerals, my cousin and my uncle both passed away in a car, in a plane crash a couple of years ago.
00:21:43
Speaker
And they had like, it was a massive funeral they had.
00:21:46
Speaker
And so many people came from town because they just loved these men.
00:21:49
Speaker
So there's a lot of, of love and friendship between the towns there.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:56
Speaker
So,
00:21:57
Speaker
Part of the reason why I asked that is like, as things started to get out of hand in terms of the violence
Concluding Thoughts on Community and Resilience
00:22:04
Speaker
and the drug war, you were pretty young when all that got started.
00:22:09
Speaker
But can you remember anything about what it was like before?
00:22:13
Speaker
Did anything change for you personally?
00:22:14
Speaker
Did you see adults like responding to the change?
00:22:18
Speaker
Or was it a clear change?
00:22:19
Speaker
A change like with the people, like how we were treated?
00:22:24
Speaker
Well, either that or like, well, we don't go outside after dark anymore or you know what I'm saying, like adjusting to a different risk environment.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:35
Speaker
So it depends on where you're at.
00:22:37
Speaker
So like I grew up in La Mora in Sonora.
00:22:42
Speaker
on our ranch and we, like my mom always wanted us to be safe.
00:22:46
Speaker
We didn't go up to town by ourselves.
00:22:48
Speaker
We didn't go up there to party very much, which my parents were really strict.
00:22:51
Speaker
A lot of the youth could go to the dances up there and they socialized with the locals up there.
00:22:57
Speaker
But we still, we were pretty free there though.
00:23:00
Speaker
Like it was just our ranch and we didn't wander around at dark by ourselves in the middle of the night, but we could walk from one side of the farm to the other.
00:23:09
Speaker
and be completely fine as long as we didn't get bit by a rattlesnake or something on the way.
00:23:16
Speaker
So it was pretty safe there.
00:23:19
Speaker
In LeBaron, in Chihuahua, where they dealt with mafia a lot more, they dealt with the drug war because they're a way bigger place as well.
00:23:27
Speaker
So I remember growing up there and we were always a little bit more careful, but it was still, it was never a real big concern.
00:23:35
Speaker
Like there were soldiers there a lot and we would just always...
00:23:38
Speaker
be careful.
00:23:39
Speaker
We would always try to have men with us when we went places just because we were blonde girls in Mexico, you know?
00:23:46
Speaker
So after, so I was about 18, I think, or 19 when our first big run in with the mafia happened.
00:23:54
Speaker
And that was in Chihuahua when my cousin, he was 16, he got, he got kidnapped by the mafia and they ended up surprisingly, it was a miracle.
00:24:06
Speaker
We had like
00:24:06
Speaker
prayers and fast going on over the whole world where we had our family.
00:24:10
Speaker
But he was, he was let go, they let him go, and they didn't hurt him.
00:24:15
Speaker
So it was a miracle.
00:24:16
Speaker
And after that, though, his older brother started being a little bit more outspoken in politics in Mexico.
00:24:24
Speaker
And they
00:24:25
Speaker
didn't like it and so they went in and they took him out of his house in the middle of the night and his friend jumped over the wall and tried to come and help him and you've probably I don't know if you've heard all this but this was our first big run in with the mafia to where somebody actually died
00:24:40
Speaker
So he got killed along with his friend who came to help him, who just was there to help.
00:24:45
Speaker
He wasn't actually going to be attacked that night.
00:24:48
Speaker
But so that was our first run in.
00:24:49
Speaker
We had that the kidnapping and then that murder where they killed both those guys.
00:24:54
Speaker
And so after that happened, everyone was a lot more careful.
00:24:58
Speaker
I don't remember what year this was, but it's been probably 10 years at least or more.
00:25:04
Speaker
With the kidnapping, do you know why he was released?
00:25:06
Speaker
Did they give a reason?
00:25:08
Speaker
I don't remember the reason.
00:25:09
Speaker
I think he was the child of one of my uncles who was one of the more well-to-do men of the town.
00:25:17
Speaker
And he was involved more with, I guess, the locals there.
00:25:21
Speaker
And I don't know if they were, they had like a whole group of people go down to Chihuahua to protest, actually.
00:25:27
Speaker
That's probably.
00:25:28
Speaker
So it was the first time in years, maybe in all of the years that the Americans had been down there that they had actually stood up against
00:25:37
Speaker
these drug cartels and went to the government to ask for help because for so long, these things just happened to, they just happened to normal people all the time.
00:25:45
Speaker
They're living in Mexico and nobody does anything about it.
00:25:48
Speaker
And so our family decided to go and they had a huge group of people along with a lot of local people there in Chihuahua or Mexico city, I think where they went and they protested with their signs and they went and talked to the, to the leaders there.
00:26:02
Speaker
So they did make a big deal about it.
00:26:05
Speaker
And I don't know if they got scared or what happened, but they ended up letting this kid go.
00:26:09
Speaker
His name was Eric.
00:26:11
Speaker
And yeah, but then they killed his brother.
00:26:14
Speaker
So it was his older brother that they actually killed after that.
00:26:18
Speaker
And after that, my uncle, his dad...
00:26:22
Speaker
There were death threats after that.
00:26:23
Speaker
I didn't go to Mexico for, I think, two years after that because of to that part of Mexico because of what was happening.
00:26:30
Speaker
And there were death threats to a lot of just random people there who were more of the wealthy people.
00:26:36
Speaker
They would leave these black wreaths on their doors.
00:26:38
Speaker
And it was kind of a sketchy time to be down there.
00:26:41
Speaker
I was worried for all of our family there.
00:26:43
Speaker
So a lot of people came out to the States for a while just to bide their time.
00:26:48
Speaker
So I've noticed that in a lot of these videos from like the height of the drug war, there are streets patrolled by residents open carrying rifles or even sitting in the back of a truck with heavier weapons.
00:27:02
Speaker
Does the colony or any of these groups have any like special dispensation to carry these weapons?
00:27:07
Speaker
Or is the state just not really able to enforce those laws right now or at the time?
00:27:11
Speaker
I don't know if they're not able to enforce them or if they just they just don't.
00:27:17
Speaker
I don't know much about all the gun laws there besides that it's clearly like it's illegal to carry most a lot of guns.
00:27:23
Speaker
And I think that, I mean, I know that a lot of people obviously have guns there and I don't know whether they have them legally or whether they don't, but I'm assuming a lot of them aren't legal.
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:34
Speaker
But I guess when you live in a police state,
00:27:37
Speaker
It's like, do you protect your family or you don't?
00:27:40
Speaker
People definitely don't carry guns as far as you don't carry it.
00:27:43
Speaker
You don't see anyone carrying a gun on their hip or even a secret gun.
00:27:48
Speaker
But the only people you see carrying guns are the soldiers.
00:27:51
Speaker
Okay.
00:27:52
Speaker
So the thinking, I guess, then is, you know, maybe I'll go to jail, but I'm not going to get shot or whatever.
00:27:59
Speaker
Like, you know, I'm going to protect myself even if I have to go to jail kind of thinking.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's like a last resort thinking.
00:28:06
Speaker
Most guns, I think, stay at the homes where they're just like, if, like my idea growing up was just like, if the soldiers came in and tried to
00:28:16
Speaker
take us captive or tried to kill us all off.
00:28:19
Speaker
If something crazy happened like that, which we were never too worried about it.
00:28:23
Speaker
But if it happened, then we would have some guns to at least do our best to protect ourselves.
00:28:28
Speaker
But it's definitely not like out here.
00:28:29
Speaker
Like I own, I own guns here.
00:28:31
Speaker
You can take them to the shooting range.
00:28:33
Speaker
I can carry my gun if I want.
00:28:35
Speaker
So it's definitely doesn't feel like that.
00:28:37
Speaker
You got to be careful.
00:28:39
Speaker
Did you ever have, did your, did your, maybe your father ever have a conversation with you about like,
00:28:45
Speaker
you can't trust the police or like, you know what I'm saying?
00:28:48
Speaker
Like those types of lines or was that just not kind of on the radar?
00:28:54
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:28:55
Speaker
Well, like I grew up when, whether it was like we had conversations about specifically about it or not.
00:29:01
Speaker
I grew up feeling like if I called in, this is in Mexico.
00:29:07
Speaker
If I called the police or if I asked for someone to help me, you don't always know if they're going to help you or if they're going to hurt you.
00:29:15
Speaker
Right.
00:29:15
Speaker
And it was just like this mistrust I had for because a lot of times things would happen to where the mafia will dress up as policemen.
00:29:22
Speaker
And so you'll think they're police or maybe they are and they're just in bed with the mafia.
00:29:26
Speaker
So either way, it's like this lack of trust that we have for soldiers there, which is why a lot of people feel like they need to have a way to protect themselves against the government if that's what's happening.
00:29:39
Speaker
Right.
00:29:40
Speaker
So your family was the victim of a really horrific crime.
00:29:47
Speaker
From what I understand, it was a convoy of SUVs that were going to a wedding or something, or where were they headed?
00:29:55
Speaker
But they were attacked by the cartels, and I think it was nine people were killed.
00:30:01
Speaker
So you mentioned last time we spoke that...
00:30:04
Speaker
After the massacre, President Trump at the time got involved and threatened maybe some intervention if it wasn't resolved appropriately.
00:30:13
Speaker
And the president of Mexico stopped by to visit and met with some of your family.
00:30:17
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:20
Speaker
So it was a really intense time for, I guess, everybody because of the massacre and what happened.
00:30:25
Speaker
And it was also, I guess, surprising.
00:30:28
Speaker
Like I said before, we
00:30:29
Speaker
we had had those issues before with my cousins that had died, but then it had been years that anything had happened.
00:30:36
Speaker
And we lived in our little Mexico town in La Mora and nothing had ever happened there.
00:30:41
Speaker
So it was such a shock that these, these women and children were attacked.
00:30:45
Speaker
So when it happened, I actually put a tweet out and I didn't even use, I had some backlash on this because people were like, she doesn't even use Twitter.
00:30:53
Speaker
She just got her account.
00:30:54
Speaker
And I had kind of just
00:30:56
Speaker
redownloaded it because I hadn't been using Twitter for a long time.
00:30:59
Speaker
I never really got into it.
00:31:00
Speaker
But I was like, we were in a panic.
00:31:03
Speaker
I was up here.
00:31:04
Speaker
I was actually in North Dakota and we didn't know where, we didn't know at this point what had happened to these families.
00:31:09
Speaker
We knew that some of them had died, that some of them had been burnt in their cars, but we hadn't found the other two vehicles with my aunt and my cousin and their other kids in there.
00:31:20
Speaker
So at this point, I put out a tweet that, and I think I tagged President Trump in it
00:31:26
Speaker
Because I was just like, anything, if he can see this, if anybody could help, we didn't know.
00:31:30
Speaker
We heard that there was a war going on at that time between the mafia.
00:31:34
Speaker
And we were like, we need help.
00:31:36
Speaker
And people, like, that's what was crazy is when this happened, the local police were too scared to do anything.
00:31:44
Speaker
against the mafia.
00:31:45
Speaker
So no one's going to just go up against the mafia, especially in a big blood battle like that.
00:31:49
Speaker
So, so yeah, I put a tweet out and he ended up seeing it and it got, at that point we thought some of them had been kidnapped and we didn't know because we had got some prank phone calls at that time.
00:31:59
Speaker
But, um, so he ended up tweeting out these prank phone calls.
00:32:04
Speaker
My goodness.
00:32:04
Speaker
Well, yeah, we got, my aunt got a prank phone call where this girl was screaming in it and we thought that it was our, it was her daughter.
00:32:11
Speaker
that was taken by the mafia.
00:32:13
Speaker
It was really, it was really weird what was happening at this time, but ends up, ends up her daughter has had actually been killed though.
00:32:20
Speaker
So I don't know where the prank phone call came from, but it happened at the exact time that this was happening.
00:32:25
Speaker
So, so we didn't know what was happening.
00:32:27
Speaker
And Trump ended up tweeting out when he said that he's, I don't know if you remember seeing the tweet, but that the Americans, there were some American families who had been killed and that he was willing to step in and help if,
00:32:40
Speaker
the president of Mexico didn't do anything about it.
00:32:42
Speaker
And so this is like the first time I've ever heard of the president of Mexico getting involved in anything of this situation, which you don't see these massacres happening on a daily basis either.
00:32:52
Speaker
So this was pretty big.
00:32:55
Speaker
But yeah, so the president and the governor, they ended up coming back to the town after the funerals were over and after people left and came back again.
00:33:05
Speaker
the president ended up coming back and he stayed at my aunt's house or just like he ate there and they visited and they had, he had visits with the, the families, the Vic, the victims families.
00:33:17
Speaker
So their husbands, their wives, some of their older children.
00:33:22
Speaker
And he ended up coming back every couple of months after that to do, he would do like a speech and they had all the cameras and the people there and he ended up, they ended up getting a big monument built.
00:33:34
Speaker
in honor of the nine people who, who passed away.
00:33:38
Speaker
So yeah, it's interesting what happens to a small little community.
00:33:41
Speaker
It's still a small community, but to have the president of Mexico there, like, it's like a family friend now it's, it's different.
00:33:52
Speaker
I mean, I, is he still, is he still the president, the president who was in charge at the time?
00:33:57
Speaker
As far as I know, he is, I haven't been changing.
00:33:59
Speaker
So yeah, just, just the, the, the leverage that you have as American citizens,
00:34:04
Speaker
It used to be, you know, you kind of had a Pax Americana situation where just like, you know, in the Bible, when, when Paul says that he's a Roman citizen and is able to, he's entitled to some protection there.
00:34:17
Speaker
A similar thing is true of us.
00:34:18
Speaker
And I definitely felt that when I was in the middle East, people, people treat Americans differently because they know that there's, that they'll be protected and that, that American law enforcement will, will get involved if necessary.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:31
Speaker
And, and.
00:34:32
Speaker
I think that that confidence is eroding, you know, like, I'm not sure that I would count on Biden to threaten, you know, the Mexican government.
00:34:42
Speaker
It's crazy how much.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:44
Speaker
And that, you know, potentially changes the whole security environment for you guys.
00:34:48
Speaker
If, because especially if these, if these cartels are, um,
00:34:55
Speaker
Well, they're not used to being told what to do.
00:34:57
Speaker
They're not used to being contradicted and denied.
00:35:00
Speaker
And so to be threatened in that way by an American president and then to have that protection withdrawn is maybe a scary situation.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't thought too much about our new presidency in that situation, but it would because so many, the world has lost confidence in America on so many levels because of the new presidency and a lot of things that have happened that
00:35:23
Speaker
I don't think they're as scared of us as they used to be.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker
But as far as our protection in Mexico, in that area, like my uncle who lost his daughter-in-law and four of his grandchildren, just him specifically, every time, like I just talked to my cousin who, who heard her dad still lives there.
00:35:41
Speaker
And she says that, cause I was like, how is it?
00:35:43
Speaker
Cause I haven't been back home for a while, but he went, yeah.
00:35:47
Speaker
When he leaves to over the road, he'll take a picture of his license plate of his vehicle and he'll send it to the police station in the next town over the mountain.
00:35:56
Speaker
And he'll say, hey, I'm leaving right now.
00:35:58
Speaker
I'm coming out.
00:35:59
Speaker
I should be there.
00:36:00
Speaker
If I'm not there, then they know to come and get him, to come and check on him.
00:36:04
Speaker
And once he gets there, he checks in with the police station.
00:36:07
Speaker
And then when he goes over to Chihuahua, he actually doesn't drive over there without a vehicle of soldiers following him.
00:36:15
Speaker
So there's definitely a lot more protection, even up to, it's been two years now, this November, it's been two years since massacre happened.
00:36:23
Speaker
And they're still like, people are there now.
00:36:25
Speaker
They just had a big Thanksgiving.
00:36:27
Speaker
We have a three day Thanksgiving, which ends up being about a week long Thanksgiving every year.
00:36:32
Speaker
So everyone went down for that and they're still able to live their lives, but they're definitely, they're definitely cautious.
00:36:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:38
Speaker
Well, that's good that they're, that they've got some, some protection now.
00:36:41
Speaker
That's, that's awesome to hear.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:44
Speaker
One of the questions that the guys had was, you know, if, if there's this really serious violence happening there and horrible things are happening in the face of that, there's gotta be something really strong holding you to where you are.
00:37:01
Speaker
There's gotta be a really, like a really good reason to stay.
00:37:05
Speaker
And so I know that some people have left since then.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:09
Speaker
But when you talk to people who are still choosing to live there, what do they tell you?
00:37:14
Speaker
So I think that now that things have settled down more, because when it all happened, it kind of felt like it just felt like our whole life was uprooted.
00:37:23
Speaker
And we wondered if we would ever go back to our home there.
00:37:25
Speaker
And it was a really big for me, my my life had already been uprooted.
00:37:30
Speaker
It was still home, but my house, our family home had burnt.
00:37:34
Speaker
down a couple years before that.
00:37:36
Speaker
And so I already, I was already uprooted from that place, even if it was still home, we would go back, but it just felt different, you know, but a lot of people had been living there so permanently for so long that to be uprooted felt like they didn't know where they belonged for a while.
00:37:50
Speaker
So people were really sweet out here in the States after the massacre and they welcomed them in and, and,
00:37:55
Speaker
rented their places to them and they kind of started their own little community up here in Utah.
00:37:59
Speaker
But it's really ingrained in our communities, in both communities, in the LeBaron community and the Langford community, that our family came down to Mexico for a purpose.
00:38:10
Speaker
And a lot of it started out, they wanted a new place, kind of like you guys are wanting.
00:38:17
Speaker
They wanted a place to raise their kids outside from the, I guess, Babylon, as you could call it, where they're not constantly
00:38:25
Speaker
bombarded with all of the, with the world where they could raise their kids in a more free way.
00:38:31
Speaker
They could grow up on a farm and they could learn how to work and actually make good citizens out of them, you know, good people out of them.
00:38:39
Speaker
So they wanted to raise, they wanted to teach them how they wanted.
00:38:41
Speaker
They wanted to have their own schools.
00:38:43
Speaker
So they didn't want to be our family from the start.
00:38:46
Speaker
Like we were born into a family of freedom fighters.
00:38:49
Speaker
They wanted to be not controlled.
00:38:51
Speaker
And we believe in government.
00:38:53
Speaker
We believe in like the proper roles of government.
00:38:56
Speaker
At least I do.
00:38:57
Speaker
There are some people that are different, but we tend to believe in that and we just wanted less control.
00:39:05
Speaker
And even clear back then when my mom was a kid, there was so much going on with the government to where they felt like it was too much and they wanted to raise their kids in a different society.
00:39:17
Speaker
So when I grew up in Mexico, I would come out to the States and I remember talking to some of my friends and I was just like a little, a young kid or a teenager.
00:39:26
Speaker
And so nobody really told me this.
00:39:28
Speaker
I hadn't gone into, like since then I've studied politics and I've studied freedom and the constitution a lot more.
00:39:35
Speaker
But before that, it was just something that I sensed and that I saw was that we had a lot more freedom in Mexico than the Americans who were supposed to be in this land of the free were experiencing on a daily basis.
00:39:48
Speaker
But what I realized was that nobody knew it out here.
00:39:51
Speaker
They didn't know that they were already becoming slaves to their government, which we see right now how fast in the past two years these crazy things have happened.
00:39:59
Speaker
Wow.
00:40:01
Speaker
But at that point, nothing that crazy was happening, but yet it was still like just to build a house, all the permits you have to get that you have to pay property taxes your whole life.
00:40:11
Speaker
Like you're never, you're never completely free.
00:40:15
Speaker
You're never completely out on, on your own, or you're always dependent on some part of the government to survive.
00:40:21
Speaker
And especially living in the big cities, like even when we lived out here, my mom would really try to get a place out on the outskirts of town where we could
00:40:31
Speaker
have our little country life on a couple acres if it was possible.
00:40:34
Speaker
And it wasn't that we want to be away from people.
00:40:36
Speaker
I think the best place to be, and especially in a situation like that we have now where you don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next with the government and with the world order and everything that's happening with these mandates and
00:40:48
Speaker
and forced things that they're trying to put upon us.
00:40:52
Speaker
We don't like the idea of going and just separating yourself and living in a cabin in the mountain by yourself.
00:40:59
Speaker
I like the idea of having a community of like-minded people who are willing to support each other and to defend each other if something happened.
00:41:09
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:41:09
Speaker
And I think it's an interesting point that, you know, because rhetorically and on paper,
00:41:18
Speaker
Both the U.S. and the Mexican constitutions cover a lot of the same ground.
00:41:24
Speaker
People theoretically have a lot of the same rights.
00:41:28
Speaker
But in both cases, it's more of a question of what are you going to do when someone tells you you don't have those rights anymore?
00:41:36
Speaker
Like, you can't just, that piece of paper will not protect you.
00:41:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:41:42
Speaker
And so that's an interesting piece of this, which you were talking about potentially keeping a gun to defend your family, even if that was illegal.
00:41:52
Speaker
And I think one of the things that we're gonna have to do as a society, as things get more and more chaotic here, is we're gonna have to get comfortable with the idea that the people who run things don't necessarily get to tell us what to do.
00:42:09
Speaker
And like, even if they, you know, pass a law or, you know, issue some executive order, like the legitimacy of that whole system is now in question.
00:42:20
Speaker
And so we can't just reflexively.
00:42:23
Speaker
And I think that's one of the sources of freedom that maybe you guys had down in the colonies is that everybody kind of knew the score.
00:42:30
Speaker
Like everybody that you lived with understood that the government was corrupt and they wouldn't protect your rights.
00:42:36
Speaker
I feel like up here, there's a lot more people who view that system as legitimate.
00:42:40
Speaker
And so like, they'll narc you out if you, if you, if you step over the line, and like families will like get in fights about that stuff increasingly.
00:42:50
Speaker
Yeah, I just I just think that freedom is not defined by what's on the paper.
00:42:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, and especially because like, I think that our Constitution is a beautiful, a beautiful document.
00:43:02
Speaker
And so a constitutionally sound law
00:43:04
Speaker
I am totally for obeying the law and not being a rule breaker.
00:43:09
Speaker
But I think that what's happened to our country is that we've become a nation of we're kind of all a lot of us are asleep and people are starting to wake up.
00:43:17
Speaker
But they haven't they didn't like I said, when I was a kid, they didn't realize that they that these freedoms were already to be taken away from them.
00:43:24
Speaker
and they were giving so much of their lives, their kids going to school, what they were learning.
00:43:28
Speaker
Like I've gone to public school a couple of times, but we were actually homeschooled most of our lives because clear back then we knew
00:43:36
Speaker
that these things were happening already, that the infiltration of communism and all of the doctrines that they were teaching children in school that were already there.
00:43:45
Speaker
And they were there in the fifties, they were started.
00:43:47
Speaker
So, so all these things have been happening to where if the United States was still being governed by moral people who were trying to live according to the constitution, if these laws were constitutional, then I'm all for keeping them.
00:44:01
Speaker
I just don't believe in keeping laws that are immoral and that they,
00:44:06
Speaker
go against that take away your personal freedom.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:09
Speaker
And that's, that's the challenge that, that so many people are up against, especially in the church.
00:44:13
Speaker
I mean, like our, our culture is very much, you know, even more so than the average American is very much about good people follow the rules, good people obey the law.
00:44:25
Speaker
And what's happening to those people is that the, the people who decide those laws, the people who, the people who make the rules are lawless people.
00:44:35
Speaker
They are,
00:44:35
Speaker
They don't have any respect for any of these things that we care about.
00:44:39
Speaker
And so they're sort of wearing the skin of that old thing that all these people have loyalty to and demanding the same deference.
00:44:48
Speaker
And I think a lot of our people are in a situation where they're going to have to take a side.
00:44:53
Speaker
They're going to have to decide like, am I with the church?
00:44:59
Speaker
Am I with the things that we grew up believing?
00:45:02
Speaker
Or am I with...
00:45:03
Speaker
you know, the world.
00:45:04
Speaker
And because we believe the constitution was divinely inspired and, and, you know, the founding of America had a, had a divine purpose.
00:45:12
Speaker
It's really hard for us to switch from like, these are the, these are the good guys.
00:45:17
Speaker
These are us to like, you know, we're under occupation.
00:45:21
Speaker
These are the bad guys.
00:45:24
Speaker
But down in Mexico, maybe that understanding was already pretty clear just based on like,
00:45:31
Speaker
even before the drug war, maybe just like petty corruption, just like the fact that you couldn't trust.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of lawlessness all over.
00:45:40
Speaker
So like we were never involved with the federal government much.
00:45:44
Speaker
It's government.
00:45:45
Speaker
We're further up north.
00:45:46
Speaker
We're actually only about 80 miles south of the border, but it's over a rough road.
00:45:51
Speaker
So it feels like a journey to get to our place.
00:45:54
Speaker
But yeah, it's different down there.
00:45:58
Speaker
different ways like i know like i love america and as much as i love mexico a lot of times i've and so back to what you were saying about why our family stays down there yeah a lot of it is the where it's at but i think deep down most of it is uh it's ingrained in them as a spiritual or a religious belief that they should be there because
00:46:21
Speaker
We all know that we could come out to the States and find a massive ranch and live off of it and make kind of like our own ranch in Mexico somewhere in America.
00:46:29
Speaker
A lot of us have said that before.
00:46:31
Speaker
Why don't we just bring La Mora up to America and let's have a place out there where it feels like we're still under the Constitution and it feels a little bit more safe because we can legally own guns and all these things.
00:46:42
Speaker
We can legally protect ourselves.
00:46:43
Speaker
So a lot of people in LeBaron and in La Mora, they will...
00:46:47
Speaker
tell you that they feel either inspired to be there or like I was raised growing up with the belief that things were going to get so bad in America at some point when what's happening right now is starting to happen, like we're seeing the beginning of it.
00:47:01
Speaker
So that things were going to get so bad in America that if you were in Mexico, just being across the border, you would be so much more
00:47:09
Speaker
safe already just being across the border because of how bad it was going to be here and there's a lot of prophecies like there's a lot of mormon prophecies and just other people who have seen visions and dreams and i grew up on all these things to where it's like hey well these things are going to happen in america and so our family was like well we were sent to mexico for a reason a lot of them actually believe that that um it's a refuge in a sense which sounds strange because of what's happened there with the mafia but they still believe that it's going to be a refuge
00:47:38
Speaker
for people who are leaving maybe America or other places.
00:47:42
Speaker
And so a lot of people are there as like, that's their home, but they also want to prepare, like they're getting their food storage and, you know, they're preparing so that when people come, they'll have a, the ability to help people who are on the run or in, in need.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:59
Speaker
I mean, well, like, so from what I understand when,
00:48:03
Speaker
Because I know that there were colonies that were built by separatist groups, but there were also colonies that were established by Brigham Young down there and up in Alberta in Canada.
00:48:14
Speaker
And the thinking behind that was...
00:48:18
Speaker
They won't be able to drive us out.
00:48:20
Speaker
We'll exist across all of these jurisdictions.
00:48:24
Speaker
And I mean, it's kind of similar to what the FLDS guys do.
00:48:28
Speaker
They live around the four corners and they jump state lines when they need to get away from local law enforcement.
00:48:33
Speaker
But it's a similar mentality of like, if we spread out across these jurisdictions, then we'll always have a place to be.
00:48:39
Speaker
And I mean, honestly, the freedom that I'm interested in personally
00:48:46
Speaker
is kind of a negative freedom.
00:48:48
Speaker
It's not like, I don't want to live in this society like where there's lots of police and those police tell me what my rights are, which is kind of where we're at now.
00:48:59
Speaker
And like, you know, maybe we have more freedoms, like especially with owning guns than you guys do down in Mexico.
00:49:05
Speaker
But like down in Mexico, the police just aren't there.
00:49:09
Speaker
And there's a lot of freedom to that, right?
00:49:11
Speaker
Like just to do what you want.
00:49:13
Speaker
And it's just not anybody's business.
00:49:14
Speaker
So what about you?
00:49:15
Speaker
Like, I know that you're in Utah now and that you've joined the mainstream church.
00:49:20
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about like what made that decision for you?
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I've always loved the church, like I said, and it was a really hard decision growing up believing in the fundamentals of the gospel.
00:49:32
Speaker
And like, I still believe in the fundamentals of the gospel.
00:49:34
Speaker
I didn't stop believing them just because I joined the church.
00:49:37
Speaker
It took me a long time.
00:49:38
Speaker
I prayed about getting baptized for years.
00:49:41
Speaker
And that's a whole other story.
00:49:42
Speaker
But I was living in North Dakota, actually, in a little tiny town there.
00:49:46
Speaker
My parents were doing, my dad was doing construction up there and my brothers are in the oil field for a while.
00:49:51
Speaker
So I was living up there and I knew that it was something I needed to do.
00:49:56
Speaker
And I sometimes wonder why, because there's things going on, especially even right now with the whole world and the politics and how, I guess, controlled we are.
00:50:04
Speaker
But I have no control over that.
00:50:06
Speaker
And so I felt like I knew I needed to get baptized.
00:50:09
Speaker
And it really has changed my life just being in the church.
00:50:12
Speaker
And so I know that it was the right choice.
00:50:14
Speaker
I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but I love the church and my family loves the church and we support it.
00:50:19
Speaker
We've always been raised to believe that it's going to be like the reason why we didn't get baptized for so long was because we believed that they had stopped living certain things and they had lost, I guess, a lot of their authority and that at some point it was going to be set in order.
00:50:35
Speaker
And so me getting baptized almost felt like I was giving up on that hope.
00:50:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
And on that, it was like I was giving up on everything that I believed in.
00:50:43
Speaker
A lot of people actually feel that way about us getting baptized because all of us aren't in the church.
00:50:49
Speaker
Most of us aren't actually in our extended family.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:53
Speaker
But I feel like there's a reason for me to be here, whatever it is.
00:50:56
Speaker
So I'm sticking with the church.
00:50:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, also just the choice to live in Utah and not Mexico.
00:51:01
Speaker
I mean, is that driven by...
00:51:04
Speaker
just the security or like is there a, like what's the dream for you as far as like what you want to do and how you want to live?
00:51:10
Speaker
So I used to dream to live in Mexico until I became a, probably an older teenager and I realized that they were all my cousins down there.
00:51:17
Speaker
I knew they were, but when you're an adult and you're all of a sudden wanting to get married or you want to have like, you want to date people, there's nobody to date.
00:51:26
Speaker
So
00:51:27
Speaker
It's really fun growing up as a kid because you're just hanging out and you're having fun and you're playing in the dirt and it's just a great life.
00:51:33
Speaker
But it was still good when I was a teenager.
00:51:35
Speaker
We worked really hard and we got a lot done.
00:51:37
Speaker
But I like the States for different reasons.
00:51:40
Speaker
And I'm not necessarily, like I said before, since my house burned down, so much happened and changed.
00:51:45
Speaker
And we still like, we started rebuilding and it's not finished yet.
00:51:48
Speaker
And
00:51:49
Speaker
I still have roots there, but I feel personally like I'm supposed to be in the States.
00:51:54
Speaker
And it's a different thing.
00:51:55
Speaker
Like when all of this, so growing up because of our belief about Mexico being a refuge for our family and for others, every single time, like something would happen in the government to where it was like an economic crash a little bit.
00:52:11
Speaker
the whole family, like everybody would be like, it's happening.
00:52:14
Speaker
The banks are closing.
00:52:15
Speaker
We're going to Mexico.
00:52:16
Speaker
Like, I can't tell you the times that we have packed up our house, sold all our stuff.
00:52:21
Speaker
Like we've gotten so good at just setting up within a couple of days and then being done in a couple of days.
00:52:27
Speaker
Like we are out of here if we need to be out of here.
00:52:29
Speaker
And I remember as I started to get older, I was like, I'm tired of living in this fear.
00:52:35
Speaker
I don't want to live in the fear of the end of the world or the end of the government.
00:52:38
Speaker
And to think that we're going to go and be safe in Mexico, because a lot of times, like I would tell my parents and my family who were so set on like Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, I'm not against Mexico.
00:52:48
Speaker
I love it.
00:52:49
Speaker
But if we think that we're going to be protected by God in Mexico,
00:52:54
Speaker
and not in the States unless we feel inspired to go down there for a certain purpose.
00:52:58
Speaker
Because a lot of people were just going because they were fearful.
00:53:01
Speaker
And I'm like, God doesn't want us to run in fear.
00:53:03
Speaker
If we're inspired, there's a different story.
00:53:05
Speaker
But I was tired of living in fear.
00:53:07
Speaker
And I was like, if we're not being righteous people, and if we're not worthy of the Lord's protection here in Utah or in North Dakota or Alaska or wherever we're at, then why is he going to protect us in Mexico?
00:53:18
Speaker
We could die just as easily.
00:53:20
Speaker
So when this whole COVID thing happened, I was living in North Dakota and I was by myself.
00:53:24
Speaker
I had moved out and I had a sister up there, but I was living by myself and my mom and my aunts, like they were calling me up.
00:53:31
Speaker
They knew something crazy was happening.
00:53:32
Speaker
It wasn't normal.
00:53:34
Speaker
And they're like...
00:53:35
Speaker
it's going to get so bad.
00:53:36
Speaker
You're going to be out there by yourself.
00:53:37
Speaker
You don't have a husband to protect you.
00:53:39
Speaker
Like they were fine with my siblings.
00:53:41
Speaker
Like they wanted them to come out, but they're like, they're married.
00:53:43
Speaker
They have their husbands.
00:53:45
Speaker
They can come if they need to, but you're by yourself.
00:53:47
Speaker
And so it was so much pressure.
00:53:49
Speaker
And I remember praying about it and feeling that peace that I had never felt in my life.
00:53:55
Speaker
And I had already been on this.
00:53:57
Speaker
I've been like,
00:53:59
Speaker
I believe in America.
00:54:00
Speaker
I don't know if a lot of people have given up hope.
00:54:02
Speaker
I know that things are going to happen and that the government needs to, like this land needs to be cleansed, let's be real.
00:54:07
Speaker
And it's going to be.
00:54:09
Speaker
But I believe that this land is going to be a free land again, and it is a promised land.
00:54:14
Speaker
And so I haven't given up hope on the constitution being restored.
00:54:19
Speaker
And so that's my belief.
00:54:20
Speaker
And it's my hope to help that happen somehow.
00:54:23
Speaker
So I'm studying and I'm working with a couple of groups of
00:54:26
Speaker
young people who have that same hope.
00:54:28
Speaker
And I guess we all feel inside of us that it's something that's going to happen.
00:54:31
Speaker
So staying out here, I stayed in North Dakota and I was like, no, like if I perish, I perish.
00:54:38
Speaker
I don't know what's going to happen with the world, but I, I feel to be here.
00:54:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:42
Speaker
I mean, that's definitely my, my vision for what I'm trying to accomplish is absolutely to build enough capacity that people are not afraid to speak up so that people aren't
00:54:54
Speaker
The point of the group is to put people in a situation where they can't be fired.
00:54:59
Speaker
They can't have their kids' health insurance taken away.
00:55:01
Speaker
They can't have government benefits taken away because they're not dependent on any of that stuff.
00:55:06
Speaker
And so they can speak their mind.
00:55:08
Speaker
Yeah, you've got nothing to threaten them all.
00:55:09
Speaker
And I'm finding as time goes on, there are more and more and more
00:55:18
Speaker
people trying to do similar things.
00:55:21
Speaker
And I really think that we're just one little piece of this really huge movement that that makes it sound organized.
00:55:29
Speaker
It's not organized.
00:55:30
Speaker
It's just everybody seeing the same things and saying enough, you know, we're tired of it.
00:55:36
Speaker
As far as adjusting to life in the U S you mentioned before that you had a little bit of culture shock.
00:55:44
Speaker
I mean, I'm sure
00:55:45
Speaker
Just, I mean, forget about moving away from Mexico, but just being in an environment where everybody is your kinfolks is a very different thing than having to go in a ward full of strangers and figuring out who you can trust or who really sees things the same way you see things.
00:56:02
Speaker
And what's that experience been like?
00:56:04
Speaker
Yeah, I guess since it started, since I was a kid, it doesn't feel like it's been, I don't remember the culture shock because I was lucky enough to
00:56:13
Speaker
My mom put us out there.
00:56:14
Speaker
She brought us to church.
00:56:16
Speaker
She had us go into, she put us in talent shows.
00:56:19
Speaker
Wherever we went, my family was involved in something, in the community, in the church.
00:56:24
Speaker
And I love the church for that reason.
00:56:26
Speaker
I remember growing up feeling like, because we moved so much that it kind of felt like we were always on the go.
00:56:32
Speaker
And our only, like I said before, Mexico was our secure safety spot to where we could just go and catch our breath.
00:56:39
Speaker
But we had so much fun moving around and the church was always there.
00:56:43
Speaker
They were always good to us.
00:56:44
Speaker
A lot of them knew our polygamous background and they were just super kind people.
00:56:50
Speaker
So we've made friends through wards all over the United States, wherever we've lived.
00:56:54
Speaker
But I think a lot of the, I mean, people are people and we have so much, we have so many similarities, even with our culture differences.
00:57:03
Speaker
that there's a lot to connect us on.
00:57:05
Speaker
But I think a lot of the differences that I saw in the culture was, I guess, the feeling of freedom, because we felt free.
00:57:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:15
Speaker
We could do whatever we wanted that was moral.
00:57:18
Speaker
Like if it was our land, we could do whatever we wanted on it.
00:57:21
Speaker
And that feels like freedom to me.
00:57:24
Speaker
To feel like you buy land and you have to go ask somebody what you can do on it and pay them.
00:57:30
Speaker
That's slavery to me.
00:57:33
Speaker
So that was a culture shock to me.
00:57:34
Speaker
And then like you said, the police always being there.
00:57:38
Speaker
I wasn't afraid of the police here.
00:57:41
Speaker
Really?
00:57:41
Speaker
Like I was there.
00:57:42
Speaker
Like, you know, there's bad people everywhere, but I support the police.
00:57:46
Speaker
I just think that the government on a whole has way too much power and the people have given it to them by being lazy about standing.
00:57:53
Speaker
Like most people don't know their rights.
00:57:54
Speaker
And so that was a big difference.
00:57:56
Speaker
I think another culture difference was as a community and as a people down there, and I think just the Mexican culture are really, like if you go to a Mexican quinceañera or a wedding or something, we're used to these like,
00:58:10
Speaker
big parties and dances and everybody's really just, they're really outgoing more and you meet outgoing people here too.
00:58:16
Speaker
But on a whole, we would go to somebody's house or you're just more open there.
00:58:22
Speaker
I think the culture is like, you meet somebody on the street, you're like, they're nice.
00:58:26
Speaker
Or you meet them at church, come over, we'll feed you dinner.
00:58:28
Speaker
Or you can just kind of stop in at someone's house without calling and making a plan two weeks in advance and just say, Hey, I want to visit you, you know?
00:58:39
Speaker
That's kind of how it is down there compared to out here.
00:58:42
Speaker
It's a lot more formal, it feels like.
00:58:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:58:45
Speaker
I mean, I've spent time in that culture and in Arab culture.
00:58:51
Speaker
And I think actually we're probably the weirdos in that regard.
00:58:55
Speaker
Like, I think most of the world is probably more like, you know, you can just show up, you can just drop by and say hi.
00:59:04
Speaker
And because...
00:59:07
Speaker
the industrialized West is so much more like you're raised with schedules and you're raised with like a very full day.
00:59:15
Speaker
And so like, you know, people can't throw off your vibe, but like, but yeah, I always admired and appreciated that about those guys.
00:59:23
Speaker
It's, it's, it's much more open.
00:59:24
Speaker
So would you, I mean, in terms of how,
00:59:28
Speaker
Anyone who grew up in a unique situation with their parents and the culture they were raised in, they have to make a choice about what do I want to keep?
00:59:36
Speaker
What do I want to change?
00:59:39
Speaker
How do I want to live?
00:59:40
Speaker
You know, you mentioned being homeschooled, growing up in this rural environment, a lot of things that you liked about it, some things you didn't.
00:59:47
Speaker
So what's the dream look like for you as far as how you want to raise a family?
00:59:53
Speaker
Oh, so like right now, my family is actually moving from where we live here in Utah, further south, further into the country, like we're country people, but they're moving to a place that isn't just family.
01:00:05
Speaker
So it's kind of nice.
01:00:06
Speaker
It's actually an already established community that a lot of people who are like-minded are seeming to be drawn to right now.
01:00:14
Speaker
You know, people are being drawn out of the big cities into the country.
01:00:17
Speaker
So my aim for my family is to be in a community that is, I like small communities.
01:00:23
Speaker
I always have, and I still do.
01:00:24
Speaker
Even if the world wasn't crazy right now, even if it wasn't this crazy, I would still want a small community because I love, I just love the lifestyle.
01:00:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:33
Speaker
It creates different types of people.
01:00:35
Speaker
Like you recognize a country person.
01:00:37
Speaker
I just call them country people, but you recognize that you recognize a person.
01:00:41
Speaker
They stand out of the crowd when you get talking to people, not just because of the way they dress.
01:00:46
Speaker
I'm not into the way they dress, but it's just like the way that they think, the way that they act, they're just their whole being feels different.
01:00:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:55
Speaker
And I vibe with that a lot.
01:00:56
Speaker
So I want my kids to, to grow up knowing what it means to work hard and to not feel entitled and to,
01:01:02
Speaker
Hopefully, you know, get off of this, the TV and the social media, not that it's not good for some things, but just to live life.
01:01:09
Speaker
I remember growing up with the best childhood, I think I don't know of any person who's had a funner childhood than I did.
01:01:15
Speaker
And we didn't always have everything perfect.
01:01:18
Speaker
But we lived it up.
01:01:20
Speaker
And we used our imaginations, we didn't grow up on phones.
01:01:23
Speaker
We watch TV sometimes, but it was a privilege when we got to watch a movie.
01:01:29
Speaker
So I want my kids to be, I want to live in a community that has enough to offer my children to be like, hey, well, they can go take good classes.
01:01:39
Speaker
They can be involved with other kids.
01:01:41
Speaker
They can have a church to go to, but to where we are not just like crowded inside an apartment in the middle of the city somewhere.
01:01:49
Speaker
I want to feel the freedom that I felt growing up, even if it will probably be different.
01:01:53
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's so important to establish a family culture that is distinct and is like where home is home.
01:02:05
Speaker
And that's the home base.
01:02:07
Speaker
That's where people return to.
01:02:08
Speaker
And that's what we're trying to build.
01:02:09
Speaker
So I, you know, growing up, I grew up in a very normal suburban liberal type of environment.
01:02:17
Speaker
I was, I was a late convert to the church too.
01:02:22
Speaker
So what I wanted is basically what you're describing.
01:02:26
Speaker
I just had no idea how to build it.
01:02:28
Speaker
I'd never seen it.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's definitely the dream.
01:02:31
Speaker
And I like the idea of, I don't know if I would want like,
01:02:34
Speaker
to do like the compound thing and have everybody like literally like on contiguous plots of land.
01:02:43
Speaker
But I would love to live in a community where I had, you know, a couple dozen people that I knew I could count on.
01:02:51
Speaker
And we don't have to be like right on top of each other, but in the community close.
01:02:56
Speaker
And so we can go to church together and we can do homeschool co-op and we, you know what I mean?
01:03:00
Speaker
Like all of that community stuff, having a tribe without, without being like, without having like concrete walls around it, you know, maybe someday that becomes necessary.
01:03:12
Speaker
But like, I think a lot of, I think a lot of those guys get in trouble because they, they want to jump the gun on all that.
01:03:19
Speaker
And, and, and it gets a little sketchy.
01:03:22
Speaker
So yeah, I think it's, I think it's,
01:03:25
Speaker
interesting how those models are sort of converging because you because i grew up in in a very like babylon type of situation and you grew up in a very not uh like like very separated from that type of situation and you're like well you know maybe we should live with some people and maybe we should you know like it's sort of it's sort of meeting in the middle and i think that that's uh that's the right approach
01:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think in the end, truth and like the like minded people will find like it's interesting to even hear that that's where you come from.
01:04:03
Speaker
And we have a lot of similar views, I guess, now in what we think is good for for our children or for our families or where we want to be.
01:04:12
Speaker
And yeah, like the whole property thing, I'm not into the communal thing where everybody's sharing all their stuff.
01:04:18
Speaker
I think people need their own space.
01:04:20
Speaker
And even the founding fathers said that without, that life and liberty were basically, you couldn't have them really without the right to property.
01:04:28
Speaker
You have to have your own spot to have that freedom.
01:04:33
Speaker
So you have to be able to control what's yours.
01:04:36
Speaker
And even right now,
01:04:38
Speaker
Like I've never been a hater of public schools, but a lot of people go to public schools and they turn out fine, you know?
01:04:44
Speaker
And there's a lot of homeschoolers that turn out fine.
01:04:46
Speaker
And there's a lot that are weird too.
01:04:48
Speaker
So like, I know homeschoolers, they have people think they're weird.
01:04:51
Speaker
I'm like, they're not all weird.
01:04:53
Speaker
Most people, most kids that turn out weirder because their parents are weird.
01:04:55
Speaker
It's more of a parent thing, not a, not a school thing.
01:04:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:59
Speaker
And I mean, I think a lot of people are getting to a point where they're like, you know, if my kids are a little bit weird relative to this culture, you know,
01:05:07
Speaker
Right.
01:05:08
Speaker
That's fine.
01:05:09
Speaker
Like they can, they can be weird, you know, think of all the homeschoolers, like homeschooling was a thing that all of our, some of this, like my, my heroes of people who were wise and knew what was going on in the world.
01:05:23
Speaker
They like Thomas Jefferson and our founding fathers.
01:05:26
Speaker
They, a lot of them were, they didn't get this big college education.
01:05:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:31
Speaker
And what are college educations these days?
01:05:33
Speaker
I love education.
01:05:34
Speaker
I'm all for learning, but who's teaching you, who's teaching your children for eight hours a day, that type of stuff.
01:05:41
Speaker
That's when it starts to get sketchy.
01:05:42
Speaker
So, yeah.
01:05:43
Speaker
And it's, it's so captured.
01:05:45
Speaker
So your plan is to homeschool with your, with your kids.
01:05:49
Speaker
Well, I don't have any kids yet, so I don't have to think about it yet, but I've always planned.
01:05:53
Speaker
I've always planned to homeschool or to be in a community where there's a, a small setting of a school.
01:05:59
Speaker
Like I like other people too.
01:06:00
Speaker
I like to,
01:06:01
Speaker
other people teaching like here in our community my sister sends her kids to an awesome school and it's just a small community school where they teach they teach freedom they teach civics they teach a good history that's not all demented like the history in the school right now they teach about god and they're pretty open that way they teach all the music all the arts and so i'm like i want my kids to
01:06:26
Speaker
have all of that.
01:06:27
Speaker
I want them to play sports.
01:06:28
Speaker
I love sports.
01:06:29
Speaker
And I was never actually in a school sport really.
01:06:33
Speaker
But I played sports growing up my whole life with our community.
01:06:36
Speaker
And it's one of my favorite things.
01:06:37
Speaker
So I want my kids to have that.
01:06:40
Speaker
So I'm not like, well, I have to keep my kids home in my house, teaching them every single day until they're out of school.
01:06:46
Speaker
I like using the community if it's a good one.
01:06:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:49
Speaker
And that's, I mean, it's, it's so funny.
01:06:52
Speaker
Like, so you, you can, you can trace, you know,
01:06:55
Speaker
the collapse of the roman empire in europe this is sorry this is a wild subject change but i'm gonna bring it back yeah um you can trace the collapse of the roman empire in europe because you can watch as the pottery goes from this really beautiful finely manufactured thing this product that it's all the same all over the empire
01:07:21
Speaker
And then gradually, as the supply lines fail and people can no longer safely bring, like all these pots apparently came from like one place in North Africa or something.
01:07:34
Speaker
And once those supply lines and trade routes became unsafe, that pottery became too expensive and people started to make their own.
01:07:45
Speaker
And it's like really crappy.
01:07:46
Speaker
Like it's really bad pottery.
01:07:48
Speaker
And it's all different all over Europe.
01:07:50
Speaker
And you can watch like the Roman empire is receding and you can see that in the fossil record based on the pottery.
01:07:57
Speaker
And I think what we are kind of having to do now is to do that, but for like all of these cultural institutions, like I would, I think, I think homeschool is that type of thing.
01:08:11
Speaker
Like, am I going to be as good at educating my kids as like,
01:08:17
Speaker
the best public school teacher who like, or like a tutor or something, you know, maybe not, but like the infrastructure is collapsing.
01:08:27
Speaker
And so we have to do it ourselves.
01:08:29
Speaker
But if we can, but if we can get together and build a community, rebuild that like sense of like tribe,
01:08:36
Speaker
then you know your kids because there's so many it's not it's not like I would be an ineffective teacher it's more like I don't know how to play the bassoon and my daughter really wants to learn how to play the bassoon like what am I going to do about that you know so but if you have a community then you can have access to all that stuff and so that's that's a big part of my dream is I want to get people together to do that kind of thing yeah I like it that's interesting about the pottery
01:09:01
Speaker
So interesting how you can see that in just in their pottery with with the community.
01:09:05
Speaker
It's like you can be independent or you can be interdependent.
01:09:08
Speaker
You don't want to be dependent on the on the government like you can if there's that balance.
01:09:13
Speaker
But I love this.
01:09:15
Speaker
I'm the same way.
01:09:15
Speaker
Like I there's a lot of variety in what I like to do and what I like to to teach.
01:09:21
Speaker
but I'm not a school.
01:09:22
Speaker
Okay.
01:09:22
Speaker
I have taught school before technically, but I'm not like, I don't want to be an actual school teacher.
01:09:26
Speaker
There's certain subjects that I'm like, yeah, well, I would teach history.
01:09:29
Speaker
I love history and I'm really into art.
01:09:31
Speaker
So I would teach into the arts.
01:09:33
Speaker
I would teach music or I would teach choir or theater or dance.
01:09:37
Speaker
And I would love to do all of that in the community, but I don't want to teach.
01:09:40
Speaker
I don't want to teach the kids math and
01:09:42
Speaker
English and all these subjects that I'm just like, yeah, I'd already did that.
01:09:45
Speaker
So I would love to have somebody who I could trust, who I knew who they were.
01:09:49
Speaker
I knew what was going on in that school that I'd be like, yeah, teach them and I'll teach them the other stuff or we'll just branch out.
01:09:58
Speaker
And it's funny because like that, it, well, there's so many things that seem simple until you have to do them yourself.
01:10:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:06
Speaker
It's become sort of my life's work at this point to make that happen.
01:10:12
Speaker
So like that's, you know, in my group, we've got like a homeschool chat where we sort of trade notes on how things are going and what we'd like to do.
01:10:22
Speaker
It's hard because we're all geographically separated.
01:10:26
Speaker
Are you homeschooling now?
01:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we are.
01:10:29
Speaker
My oldest is seven.
01:10:30
Speaker
And so it's...
01:10:31
Speaker
It's pretty basic, pretty straightforward to do.
01:10:34
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, in the next five years, I want to be living around people that I can do that with.
01:10:41
Speaker
And because like, for one thing, kids are massively easier to deal with in groups.
01:10:47
Speaker
Like they just, so, I mean, I can tell you, like when we just had our daughter,
01:10:52
Speaker
We were her whole social universe and she wanted to play all the time.
01:10:56
Speaker
And now she's got this little army of little brothers to boss around and- Someone else to amuse her.
01:11:02
Speaker
And yeah.
01:11:03
Speaker
And when they've got friends over, they actually like kind of behave better.
01:11:05
Speaker
And so-
01:11:07
Speaker
In order to build that community, I have to sell my house and I have to quit my job.
01:11:18
Speaker
There's so much that goes into what seems like a very simple thing.
01:11:23
Speaker
But it's really rewarding.
01:11:24
Speaker
I'm watching the sense of purpose in my house transform, the way that we look at all these things.
01:11:32
Speaker
And it's really cool.
01:11:34
Speaker
Tiffany, thanks so much for coming on the show.
01:11:36
Speaker
If you want to learn more about what Tiffany's up to, you can follow her at daughter of the Republic on Instagram.
01:11:42
Speaker
She also has an Etsy shop where she sells heatless silk curlers called Lish Locks, L-I-S-H-L-O-C-K-S.
01:11:49
Speaker
If you want to learn more about the organization that we're building here at Exit,
01:11:53
Speaker
You can check us out at exitgroup.us.
01:11:55
Speaker
You can follow us at exit underscore org on Twitter.
01:11:58
Speaker
You can also get back episodes of the podcast on exitgroup.podbean.com.
01:12:02
Speaker
Tiffany, thanks so much for coming.
01:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
01:12:05
Speaker
This was fun.