Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Exit Podcast, this is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm joined here by Tiffany Langford.
Speaker: Tiffany grew up in the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico during the drug war, which began in 2006 and is ongoing today.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I'm interested to learn how she and her community adjusted to those circumstances.
Speaker: So welcome to the show, Tiffany.
Speaker: Tiffany M.: Thank you.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: This is exciting.
Speaker: Great to have you.
Speaker: So first of all, a lot of our audience may be surprised to hear that there are Mormon colonies in northern Mexico.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit about the history behind those colonies and the people that live there now?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, there's an extensive history, depending on... We probably don't have enough time to even talk about that history.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Technically, I am not from a Mormon colony.
Speaker: It's more of a break off from the Mormon colonies.
Speaker: So there's the Mormon colony.
Speaker: There's a Mormon colony in Chihuahua that we lived.
Speaker: I was born about 40 minutes away from that in an American town there.
Speaker: And then, um,
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.
Speaker: There's like one house left, my great-great-grandpa's or something.
Speaker: So there's these two colonies, and we live on the outskirts of those colonies.
Speaker: But yeah, so I guess the Mormons went down there after they couldn't practice plugging me up in the States anymore.
Speaker: So a lot of them were sent down there to keep the principal alive, I guess.
Speaker: And then at one point, the...
Speaker: it became illegal to live it there as well.
Speaker: I guess in the church, they stopped practicing it there as well.
Speaker: So my family, my grandparents kept on living it.
Speaker: And so that's where I come from.
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.
Speaker: I think it's the smallest temple in the world.
Speaker: It's what I've heard unless they built a smaller one since, but...
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.
Speaker: So you grew up in a separatist group or were you also connected to the mainstream church?
Speaker: I understand it's a little bit hazy, the lines.
Speaker: Yeah, so I'm in the LDS church right now, but I wasn't baptized until 2014.
Speaker: I got baptized and my family one at a time joined the church and we're still all not part of the church.
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.
Speaker: There's a lot of them in the state.
Speaker: There's a lot in Mexico as well.
Speaker: So, or a couple in Mexico.
Speaker: So my mom was from, she's actually a LeBaron.
Speaker: So she came from the LeBaron group there in, it's actually Colonial LeBaron is where I was born at my grandma's house.
Speaker: So that's a big community.
Speaker: It's really,
Speaker: they've really integrated with the locals there as well.
Speaker: So it's grown and it's not just like our little family town anymore.
Speaker: It's pretty big.
Speaker: So she was from there.
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.
Speaker: And they moved to a completely different state and they moved way more out in the middle of nowhere in the Sonora mountains.
Speaker: We have a couple of
Speaker: local towns there, like half hour, hour away from us, but it's kind of just in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker: And we have a little ranch there.
Speaker: We just grew up in the middle of mountains.
Speaker: It was such a cool life for kids.
Speaker: We loved it.
Speaker: But yeah, so he grew up there.
Speaker: And then at one point, my mom's family and my dad's family ran into each other somewhere along the way.
Speaker: And there were a lot of different marriages between both my grandparents' kids.
Speaker: And so the Langford and the Barons are kind of interconnected really well because of that.
Speaker: But yeah.
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.
Speaker: I wasn't in a priesthood work or in a church at all.
Speaker: We were just like independents, but we didn't, how do you say it?
Speaker: We didn't practice the priesthood.
Speaker: Nobody had the priesthood.
Speaker: We kind of had our own Sunday schools at our houses.
Speaker: We would sing hymns with my grandma.
Speaker: And we grew up, you know, knowing the gospel, reading the Book of Mormon.
Speaker: And then when we came to the States, my mom would take us to church.
Speaker: So we went to the LDS church most of our lives.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So Sunday, if you were going to church, you were going to the mainstream church.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I grew up feeling like I was a Mormon.
Speaker: And when I actually got baptized, I was like, well, it didn't feel like a lot was going to change to me.
Speaker: Because we went to seminary.
Speaker: We went to the treks.
Speaker: We love the church.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we did grow up in a different society.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Was your dad polygamist?
Speaker: So not everybody in the town lives polygamy.
Speaker: There's actually a very few people who live it or who even have lived it.
Speaker: My dad, he did live it for a while, but it didn't end up working out.
Speaker: And I was a kid when that happened.
Speaker: So it was only about a year.
Speaker: Is that sort of just fading away as less and less people do it?
Speaker: I don't think it's not really fading away.
Speaker: It just was never like it was something we were taught that was true.
Speaker: And I guess we were taught that it never should have stopped being lived in the church.
Speaker: That's what a lot of the groups believe is that it should have continued.
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
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.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So it's probably much more of a sustainable situation if it's like, you know, here and there people doing it.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, so much more.
Speaker: We definitely, there's some weird stuff going on in that group that really sketchy.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, there's only a couple people out of the hundreds who live there who have actually lived polygamy.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
Speaker: Like, were the, was the Langford group substantially different from the LeBaron group?
Speaker: Or were they pretty much just kind of relatively doing the same thing?
Speaker: Yeah, they're relatively doing the same thing.
Speaker: Besides, no, they actually were different.
Speaker: Never mind.
Speaker: Like my dad's family.
Speaker: It's a funny joke.
Speaker: I tease about, we tease about it in my family because it's not as bad as it used to be.
Speaker: And we tease my dad and my uncles because they all married LeBaron girls.
Speaker: But yet they thought the LeBarons were priest crafters, they called them, because they had started their own church.
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.
Speaker: But no, the LeBarons... My...
Speaker: My grandpa and his brother, so his brother started the Church of the Firstborn, they called it, down in LeBaron.
Speaker: And I don't know how much you know about the LeBaron's.
Speaker: They're a little bit infamous for some crazy things that happened a lot of years ago.
Speaker: It was like a Cain and Abel story, I guess.
Speaker: So Joel was the prophet of the church.
Speaker: And so they broke off from the church, just living polygamy.
Speaker: And then I guess at some point they decided to join, I mean, to make their own church.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: They started their own church.
Speaker: And like my grandpa was the patriarch and
Speaker: And they had their own thing going on.
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.
Speaker: And so he went crazy and he decided to kill his brother.
Speaker: And so he had his brother killed.
Speaker: And so he was the prophet of the church that was killed.
Speaker: And he actually later on had my grandpa run off the road as well.
Speaker: It became this like, it became this, they call them the Ervilites.
Speaker: It was really sad.
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.
Speaker: And my mom was the daughter of the main guy of the church who wasn't killed yet.
Speaker: And so my grandpa died when she was 14.
Speaker: And after that, the church kind of, they kind of
Speaker: The church didn't keep going.
Speaker: They have their little Sunday schools and stuff.
Speaker: But after my grandpa and his brother were both killed, they kind of just relaxed with that whole thing.
Speaker: And my uncle, yeah, Erval was taken to prison and he actually died in Utah State Prison, I think.
Speaker: So yeah, he went crazy.
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.
Speaker: And he thought that he was killing all these people for God.
Speaker: So, so yeah, that was a crazy LeBaron story.
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.
Speaker: And they believe that they could still live them without the priesthood authority from the church.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To practice polygamy or even from what I understand, to advocate polygamy.
Speaker: for polygamy in any sort of immediate practical sense will get you excommunicated in most cases from the church now.
Speaker: So it's, so, so that the mentality was like, you know, we still believe in the church,
Speaker: And like, they're wrong about excommunicating us, but they're still good guys.
Speaker: And we're still sort of loyal to that system.
Speaker: Is that am I picking that up?
Speaker: Or is that wrong?
Speaker: Yeah, that's how it was.
Speaker: Like, it depended.
Speaker: It depends on who you're talking to.
Speaker: Like, there were some people who were more Scrooges about the church.
Speaker: Yeah, but I grew up I grew up loving the church.
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
Speaker: We didn't like the LeBarons believed that the that the priesthood switched after Joseph Smith and it went to them.
Speaker: And so like Brigham Young, John Taylor, all the prophets after Joseph Smith were just carrying on with the church.
Speaker: So they believe that they took the rights and the keys.
Speaker: But I grew up believing that all of these men were prophets and that we were just living a different life.
Speaker: because that's what my family felt to do.
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.
Speaker: He was going to some firesides and somebody in his bishopric, I think, decided that he was upset with him.
Speaker: And he went and talked to his stake president and he ended up telling him that he was
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
Speaker: And he had a second wife at that time.
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.
Speaker: But it sounds like there's lots of people kind of going back and forth.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: I mean, maybe it was mostly my family.
Speaker: We're kind of gypsies.
Speaker: We go around a lot and we make it around to a lot of these groups and we're kind of vocal.
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.
Speaker: My grandparents on my mom's side,
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.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it was all just, everyone was living it like they were supposed to.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden it became illegal.
Speaker: So some continued and some didn't.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so you all have, from what I understand, American and Mexican passports, right?
Speaker: Not everybody does.
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.
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.
Speaker: But if you're born in Mexico, it's a lot easier.
Speaker: So I am a dual citizen.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Because I was born there.
Speaker: So I,
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.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: I actually, I think it just, yeah, I think it depends on the family.
Speaker: A lot of kids grow up, yeah, and they'll get their Mexican licenses.
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
Speaker: where they're going to be.
Speaker: And a lot of people in Mexico probably haven't even been much to the States.
Speaker: So my family came out to the States a lot.
Speaker: And so America feels like home just as much or more than Mexico most of the time.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So I wanted to ask you about that.
Speaker: Like, first of all, how do people like, again, I'm going by my picture, which is very desert and hot and inhospitable.
Speaker: That's what I'm picturing in my mind.
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.
Speaker: What do people do for a living out there?
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.
Speaker: And it's hard to make a living there unless you get yourself set up and it takes a while.
Speaker: So most people will set up their trees.
Speaker: So most people are supporting themselves off of they'll plant pecan trees or we did pomegranates.
Speaker: We did chiltepine for a while.
Speaker: They'll have their different plants that they'll do.
Speaker: So they're farming.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So a lot of people do farming.
Speaker: A lot of my family are construction people too.
Speaker: And they'll actually...
Speaker: Go to the States.
Speaker: Some will, they'll go for a while, come back.
Speaker: That's what my dad did a lot.
Speaker: So we would sometimes stay in Mexico while he would go and work and then come back.
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.
Speaker: So, so yeah, most people do farming and a lot of people do really well.
Speaker: down there with it.
Speaker: They've been doing it for a lot of years.
Speaker: They'll have their greenhouses.
Speaker: But life has changed a lot.
Speaker: Like when I grew up in Sonora, I lived in a little ranch called La Mora, which is the mulberry in Spanish.
Speaker: But it's just a little ranch and it's grown really big now with all the generations coming up.
Speaker: But I remember as a kid, we...
Speaker: didn't have, we had electricity throughout the day, but it would go off.
Speaker: We ran the whole farm off of a generator.
Speaker: And so it would go off at five o'clock and we wouldn't have lights.
Speaker: And so we would get our kerosene lamps out and our candles.
Speaker: And it was just a different lifestyle.
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.
Speaker: It was
Speaker: It was the life.
Speaker: We lived right next to a river.
Speaker: We would milk cows every morning and work on the farm.
Speaker: It was a good life.
Speaker: But it's changed a lot.
Speaker: We have internet there.
Speaker: We have phones.
Speaker: We have electricity all day now and all night.
Speaker: We have AC.
Speaker: Things have changed a lot.
Speaker: So we definitely are living the high life.
Speaker: It feels like in Mexico compared to a lot of the locals in the towns.
Speaker: We brought America.
Speaker: A lot of people say we brought Babylon back to Mexico.
Speaker: our sanctuary.
Speaker: Well, what's your take on that?
Speaker: Do you feel like they brought Babylon back?
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.
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 a fun place for kids.
Speaker: We grew up going to school in a little
Speaker: brick schoolhouse, a two bedroom schoolhouse.
Speaker: My grandma taught and then we had a Spanish teacher.
Speaker: And yeah, it was a pretty simple life.
Speaker: I remember coming out to the States and I would be out here for a couple of weeks.
Speaker: And it was so fun because we had, we had tons of friends in all the different groups and then just in church.
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.
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.
Speaker: And it was like, oh, I need to go home.
Speaker: I need to go all the way to Mexico just so I can regroup and find myself again, find my peace.
Speaker: But I finally decided to figure out how to do that out here.
Speaker: So you ran it from a generator.
Speaker: So like, would he go get like a gas tank and fill it up?
Speaker: Or how did you power the generator?
Speaker: I don't actually don't.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Don't know.
Speaker: I was a kid at the time.
Speaker: Fair enough.
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.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It's a simple life.
Speaker: But yeah, that's that.
Speaker: So that's very appealing to to me and to a lot of people that kind of.
Speaker: lifestyle going without AC in those circumstances would be pretty tough.
Speaker: How did you guys handle that?
Speaker: So we had fans in a lot of our bedrooms.
Speaker: I remember there were some summers and this was when I was a teenager.
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.
Speaker: They'll have like
Speaker: the little coolers that they put on the wall, the AC unit.
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.
Speaker: But this is even like,
Speaker: we're not, we're not in Cancun, like where the, it's really muggy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we're, it's not that type of weather.
Speaker: It's more of a dry heat, but it was still hot.
Speaker: So we had these things called swamp coolers.
Speaker: I don't know if you know what those are.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's a weaker up in most of the time and it, it cooled off our house pretty good, but yeah.
Speaker: It made our floor swell.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You weren't, you weren't entirely without, cause man, that would just be brutal to, especially in the heat of the day.
Speaker: Is there a,
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?
Speaker: Do you go to church together?
Speaker: Is it very like very different?
Speaker: So, yeah, it's not super mixed and it depends where you're at.
Speaker: Like in LeBaron, like I said, it's it's they've assimilated a lot more.
Speaker: But they still have their church there in LeBaron that a lot of people will go to.
Speaker: And then other people just go wherever they have their Christian churches there that aren't LDS.
Speaker: So in La Mora, where we lived, we didn't have a church.
Speaker: So we just did church at our house.
Speaker: Our parents would teach us or our grandparents would get together and we'd do Sunday school.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: I think they have like their Catholic churches up there in the towns.
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.
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
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.
Speaker: And they've been working for them for years.
Speaker: Like they've become part of the family is what it feels like.
Speaker: And then they have their women, their daughters or their moms who will come and actually help around our houses.
Speaker: And they'll get paid way more than they ever did for doing anything else.
Speaker: And so it's actually really blessed those communities.
Speaker: So a lot of them have become really close.
Speaker: to the locals there and it just depends on who they are.
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.
Speaker: And they had like, it was a massive funeral they had.
Speaker: And so many people came from town because they just loved these men.
Speaker: So there's a lot of, of love and friendship between the towns there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Part of the reason why I asked that is like, as things started to get out of hand in terms of the violence and the drug war, you were pretty young when all that got started.
Speaker: But can you remember anything about what it was like before?
Speaker: Did anything change for you personally?
Speaker: Did you see adults like responding to the change?
Speaker: Or was it a clear change?
Speaker: A change like with the people, like how we were treated?
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it depends on where you're at.
Speaker: So like I grew up in La Mora in Sonora.
Speaker: on our ranch and we, like my mom always wanted us to be safe.
Speaker: We didn't go up to town by ourselves.
Speaker: We didn't go up there to party very much, which my parents were really strict.
Speaker: A lot of the youth could go to the dances up there and they socialized with the locals up there.
Speaker: But we still, we were pretty free there though.
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.
Speaker: and be completely fine as long as we didn't get bit by a rattlesnake or something on the way.
Speaker: So it was pretty safe there.
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.
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.
Speaker: Like there were soldiers there a lot and we would just always...
Speaker: be careful.
Speaker: We would always try to have men with us when we went places just because we were blonde girls in Mexico, you know?
Speaker: So after, so I was about 18, I think, or 19 when our first big run in with the mafia happened.
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.
Speaker: We had like
Speaker: prayers and fast going on over the whole world where we had our family.
Speaker: But he was, he was let go, they let him go, and they didn't hurt him.
Speaker: So it was a miracle.
Speaker: And after that, though, his older brother started being a little bit more outspoken in politics in Mexico.
Speaker: And they
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
Speaker: So he got killed along with his friend who came to help him, who just was there to help.
Speaker: He wasn't actually going to be attacked that night.
Speaker: But so that was our first run in.
Speaker: We had that the kidnapping and then that murder where they killed both those guys.
Speaker: And so after that happened, everyone was a lot more careful.
Speaker: I don't remember what year this was, but it's been probably 10 years at least or more.
Speaker: With the kidnapping, do you know why he was released?
Speaker: Did they give a reason?
Speaker: I don't remember the reason.
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.
Speaker: And he was involved more with, I guess, the locals there.
Speaker: And I don't know if they were, they had like a whole group of people go down to Chihuahua to protest, actually.
Speaker: That's probably.
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
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.
Speaker: They're living in Mexico and nobody does anything about it.
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.
Speaker: So they did make a big deal about it.
Speaker: And I don't know if they got scared or what happened, but they ended up letting this kid go.
Speaker: His name was Eric.
Speaker: And yeah, but then they killed his brother.
Speaker: So it was his older brother that they actually killed after that.
Speaker: And after that, my uncle, his dad...
Speaker: There were death threats after that.
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.
Speaker: And there were death threats to a lot of just random people there who were more of the wealthy people.
Speaker: They would leave these black wreaths on their doors.
Speaker: And it was kind of a sketchy time to be down there.
Speaker: I was worried for all of our family there.
Speaker: So a lot of people came out to the States for a while just to bide their time.
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.
Speaker: Does the colony or any of these groups have any like special dispensation to carry these weapons?
Speaker: Or is the state just not really able to enforce those laws right now or at the time?
Speaker: I don't know if they're not able to enforce them or if they just they just don't.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I guess when you live in a police state,
Speaker: It's like, do you protect your family or you don't?
Speaker: People definitely don't carry guns as far as you don't carry it.
Speaker: You don't see anyone carrying a gun on their hip or even a secret gun.
Speaker: But the only people you see carrying guns are the soldiers.
Speaker: Okay.
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.
Speaker: Like, you know, I'm going to protect myself even if I have to go to jail kind of thinking.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's like a last resort thinking.
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
Speaker: take us captive or tried to kill us all off.
Speaker: If something crazy happened like that, which we were never too worried about it.
Speaker: But if it happened, then we would have some guns to at least do our best to protect ourselves.
Speaker: But it's definitely not like out here.
Speaker: Like I own, I own guns here.
Speaker: You can take them to the shooting range.
Speaker: I can carry my gun if I want.
Speaker: So it's definitely doesn't feel like that.
Speaker: You got to be careful.
Speaker: Did you ever have, did your, did your, maybe your father ever have a conversation with you about like,
Speaker: you can't trust the police or like, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Like those types of lines or was that just not kind of on the radar?
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Well, like I grew up when, whether it was like we had conversations about specifically about it or not.
Speaker: I grew up feeling like if I called in, this is in Mexico.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: And so you'll think they're police or maybe they are and they're just in bed with the mafia.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So your family was the victim of a really horrific crime.
Speaker: From what I understand, it was a convoy of SUVs that were going to a wedding or something, or where were they headed?
Speaker: But they were attacked by the cartels, and I think it was nine people were killed.
Speaker: So you mentioned last time we spoke that...
Speaker: After the massacre, President Trump at the time got involved and threatened maybe some intervention if it wasn't resolved appropriately.
Speaker: And the president of Mexico stopped by to visit and met with some of your family.
Speaker: Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it was a really intense time for, I guess, everybody because of the massacre and what happened.
Speaker: And it was also, I guess, surprising.
Speaker: Like I said before, we
Speaker: we had had those issues before with my cousins that had died, but then it had been years that anything had happened.
Speaker: And we lived in our little Mexico town in La Mora and nothing had ever happened there.
Speaker: So it was such a shock that these, these women and children were attacked.
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.
Speaker: She just got her account.
Speaker: And I had kind of just
Speaker: redownloaded it because I hadn't been using Twitter for a long time.
Speaker: I never really got into it.
Speaker: But I was like, we were in a panic.
Speaker: I was up here.
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.
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.
Speaker: So at this point, I put out a tweet that, and I think I tagged President Trump in it
Speaker: Because I was just like, anything, if he can see this, if anybody could help, we didn't know.
Speaker: We heard that there was a war going on at that time between the mafia.
Speaker: And we were like, we need help.
Speaker: And people, like, that's what was crazy is when this happened, the local police were too scared to do anything.
Speaker: against the mafia.
Speaker: So no one's going to just go up against the mafia, especially in a big blood battle like that.
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.
Speaker: But, um, so he ended up tweeting out these prank phone calls.
Speaker: My goodness.
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.
Speaker: that was taken by the mafia.
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.
Speaker: So I don't know where the prank phone call came from, but it happened at the exact time that this was happening.
Speaker: So, so we didn't know what was happening.
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,
Speaker: the president of Mexico didn't do anything about it.
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.
Speaker: So this was pretty big.
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.
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.
Speaker: So their husbands, their wives, some of their older children.
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.
Speaker: in honor of the nine people who, who passed away.
Speaker: So yeah, it's interesting what happens to a small little community.
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.
Speaker: I mean, I, is he still, is he still the president, the president who was in charge at the time?
Speaker: As far as I know, he is, I haven't been changing.
Speaker: So yeah, just, just the, the, the leverage that you have as American citizens,
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.
Speaker: A similar thing is true of us.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and.
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.
Speaker: It's crazy how much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that, you know, potentially changes the whole security environment for you guys.
Speaker: If, because especially if these, if these cartels are, um,
Speaker: Well, they're not used to being told what to do.
Speaker: They're not used to being contradicted and denied.
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.
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
Speaker: I don't think they're as scared of us as they used to be.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And she says that, cause I was like, how is it?
Speaker: Cause I haven't been back home for a while, but he went, yeah.
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.
Speaker: And he'll say, hey, I'm leaving right now.
Speaker: I'm coming out.
Speaker: I should be there.
Speaker: If I'm not there, then they know to come and get him, to come and check on him.
Speaker: And once he gets there, he checks in with the police station.
Speaker: And then when he goes over to Chihuahua, he actually doesn't drive over there without a vehicle of soldiers following him.
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.
Speaker: And they're still like, people are there now.
Speaker: They just had a big Thanksgiving.
Speaker: We have a three day Thanksgiving, which ends up being about a week long Thanksgiving every year.
Speaker: So everyone went down for that and they're still able to live their lives, but they're definitely, they're definitely cautious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's good that they're, that they've got some, some protection now.
Speaker: That's, that's awesome to hear.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: There's gotta be a really, like a really good reason to stay.
Speaker: And so I know that some people have left since then.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But when you talk to people who are still choosing to live there, what do they tell you?
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.
Speaker: And we wondered if we would ever go back to our home there.
Speaker: And it was a really big for me, my my life had already been uprooted.
Speaker: It was still home, but my house, our family home had burnt.
Speaker: down a couple years before that.
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.
Speaker: So people were really sweet out here in the States after the massacre and they welcomed them in and, and,
Speaker: rented their places to them and they kind of started their own little community up here in Utah.
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.
Speaker: And a lot of it started out, they wanted a new place, kind of like you guys are wanting.
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
Speaker: bombarded with all of the, with the world where they could raise their kids in a more free way.
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.
Speaker: So they wanted to raise, they wanted to teach them how they wanted.
Speaker: They wanted to have their own schools.
Speaker: So they didn't want to be our family from the start.
Speaker: Like we were born into a family of freedom fighters.
Speaker: They wanted to be not controlled.
Speaker: And we believe in government.
Speaker: We believe in like the proper roles of government.
Speaker: At least I do.
Speaker: There are some people that are different, but we tend to believe in that and we just wanted less control.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so nobody really told me this.
Speaker: I hadn't gone into, like since then I've studied politics and I've studied freedom and the constitution a lot more.
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.
Speaker: But what I realized was that nobody knew it out here.
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.
Speaker: Wow.
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.
Speaker: Like you're never, you're never completely free.
Speaker: You're never completely out on, on your own, or you're always dependent on some part of the government to survive.
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
Speaker: have our little country life on a couple acres if it was possible.
Speaker: And it wasn't that we want to be away from people.
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
Speaker: and forced things that they're trying to put upon us.
Speaker: We don't like the idea of going and just separating yourself and living in a cabin in the mountain by yourself.
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.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I think it's an interesting point that, you know, because rhetorically and on paper,
Speaker: Both the U.S. and the Mexican constitutions cover a lot of the same ground.
Speaker: People theoretically have a lot of the same rights.
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?
Speaker: Like, you can't just, that piece of paper will not protect you.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so we can't just reflexively.
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.
Speaker: Like everybody that you lived with understood that the government was corrupt and they wouldn't protect your rights.
Speaker: I feel like up here, there's a lot more people who view that system as legitimate.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I just I just think that freedom is not defined by what's on the paper.
Speaker: Well, yeah, and especially because like, I think that our Constitution is a beautiful, a beautiful document.
Speaker: And so a constitutionally sound law
Speaker: I am totally for obeying the law and not being a rule breaker.
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.
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.
Speaker: and they were giving so much of their lives, their kids going to school, what they were learning.
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
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.
Speaker: And they were there in the fifties, they were started.
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.
Speaker: I just don't believe in keeping laws that are immoral and that they,
Speaker: go against that take away your personal freedom.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's, that's the challenge that, that so many people are up against, especially in the church.
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.
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.
Speaker: They are,
Speaker: They don't have any respect for any of these things that we care about.
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.
Speaker: And I think a lot of our people are in a situation where they're going to have to take a side.
Speaker: They're going to have to decide like, am I with the church?
Speaker: Am I with the things that we grew up believing?
Speaker: Or am I with...
Speaker: you know, the world.
Speaker: And because we believe the constitution was divinely inspired and, and, you know, the founding of America had a, had a divine purpose.
Speaker: It's really hard for us to switch from like, these are the, these are the good guys.
Speaker: These are us to like, you know, we're under occupation.
Speaker: These are the bad guys.
Speaker: But down in Mexico, maybe that understanding was already pretty clear just based on like,
Speaker: even before the drug war, maybe just like petty corruption, just like the fact that you couldn't trust.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of lawlessness all over.
Speaker: So like we were never involved with the federal government much.
Speaker: It's government.
Speaker: We're further up north.
Speaker: We're actually only about 80 miles south of the border, but it's over a rough road.
Speaker: So it feels like a journey to get to our place.
Speaker: But yeah, it's different down there.
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
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.
Speaker: A lot of us have said that before.
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.
Speaker: We can legally protect ourselves.
Speaker: So a lot of people in LeBaron and in La Mora, they will...
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.
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
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
Speaker: for people who are leaving maybe America or other places.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, well, like, so from what I understand when,
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.
Speaker: And the thinking behind that was...
Speaker: They won't be able to drive us out.
Speaker: We'll exist across all of these jurisdictions.
Speaker: And I mean, it's kind of similar to what the FLDS guys do.
Speaker: They live around the four corners and they jump state lines when they need to get away from local law enforcement.
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.
Speaker: And I mean, honestly, the freedom that I'm interested in personally
Speaker: is kind of a negative freedom.
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.
Speaker: And like, you know, maybe we have more freedoms, like especially with owning guns than you guys do down in Mexico.
Speaker: But like down in Mexico, the police just aren't there.
Speaker: And there's a lot of freedom to that, right?
Speaker: Like just to do what you want.
Speaker: And it's just not anybody's business.
Speaker: So what about you?
Speaker: Like, I know that you're in Utah now and that you've joined the mainstream church.
Speaker: Can you tell me a little bit about like what made that decision for you?
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.
Speaker: And like, I still believe in the fundamentals of the gospel.
Speaker: I didn't stop believing them just because I joined the church.
Speaker: It took me a long time.
Speaker: I prayed about getting baptized for years.
Speaker: And that's a whole other story.
Speaker: But I was living in North Dakota, actually, in a little tiny town there.
Speaker: My parents were doing, my dad was doing construction up there and my brothers are in the oil field for a while.
Speaker: So I was living up there and I knew that it was something I needed to do.
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.
Speaker: But I have no control over that.
Speaker: And so I felt like I knew I needed to get baptized.
Speaker: And it really has changed my life just being in the church.
Speaker: And so I know that it was the right choice.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so me getting baptized almost felt like I was giving up on that hope.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And on that, it was like I was giving up on everything that I believed in.
Speaker: A lot of people actually feel that way about us getting baptized because all of us aren't in the church.
Speaker: Most of us aren't actually in our extended family.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I feel like there's a reason for me to be here, whatever it is.
Speaker: So I'm sticking with the church.
Speaker: Well, I mean, also just the choice to live in Utah and not Mexico.
Speaker: I mean, is that driven by...
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?
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.
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.
Speaker: So
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.
Speaker: But it was still good when I was a teenager.
Speaker: We worked really hard and we got a lot done.
Speaker: But I like the States for different reasons.
Speaker: And I'm not necessarily, like I said before, since my house burned down, so much happened and changed.
Speaker: And we still like, we started rebuilding and it's not finished yet.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I still have roots there, but I feel personally like I'm supposed to be in the States.
Speaker: And it's a different thing.
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.
Speaker: the whole family, like everybody would be like, it's happening.
Speaker: The banks are closing.
Speaker: We're going to Mexico.
Speaker: Like, I can't tell you the times that we have packed up our house, sold all our stuff.
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.
Speaker: Like we are out of here if we need to be out of here.
Speaker: And I remember as I started to get older, I was like, I'm tired of living in this fear.
Speaker: I don't want to live in the fear of the end of the world or the end of the government.
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.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: But if we think that we're going to be protected by God in Mexico,
Speaker: and not in the States unless we feel inspired to go down there for a certain purpose.
Speaker: Because a lot of people were just going because they were fearful.
Speaker: And I'm like, God doesn't want us to run in fear.
Speaker: If we're inspired, there's a different story.
Speaker: But I was tired of living in fear.
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?
Speaker: We could die just as easily.
Speaker: So when this whole COVID thing happened, I was living in North Dakota and I was by myself.
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.
Speaker: They knew something crazy was happening.
Speaker: It wasn't normal.
Speaker: And they're like...
Speaker: it's going to get so bad.
Speaker: You're going to be out there by yourself.
Speaker: You don't have a husband to protect you.
Speaker: Like they were fine with my siblings.
Speaker: Like they wanted them to come out, but they're like, they're married.
Speaker: They have their husbands.
Speaker: They can come if they need to, but you're by yourself.
Speaker: And so it was so much pressure.
Speaker: And I remember praying about it and feeling that peace that I had never felt in my life.
Speaker: And I had already been on this.
Speaker: I've been like,
Speaker: I believe in America.
Speaker: I don't know if a lot of people have given up hope.
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.
Speaker: And it's going to be.
Speaker: But I believe that this land is going to be a free land again, and it is a promised land.
Speaker: And so I haven't given up hope on the constitution being restored.
Speaker: And so that's my belief.
Speaker: And it's my hope to help that happen somehow.
Speaker: So I'm studying and I'm working with a couple of groups of
Speaker: young people who have that same hope.
Speaker: And I guess we all feel inside of us that it's something that's going to happen.
Speaker: So staying out here, I stayed in North Dakota and I was like, no, like if I perish, I perish.
Speaker: I don't know what's going to happen with the world, but I, I feel to be here.
Speaker: Yeah.
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
Speaker: The point of the group is to put people in a situation where they can't be fired.
Speaker: They can't have their kids' health insurance taken away.
Speaker: They can't have government benefits taken away because they're not dependent on any of that stuff.
Speaker: And so they can speak their mind.
Speaker: Yeah, you've got nothing to threaten them all.
Speaker: And I'm finding as time goes on, there are more and more and more
Speaker: people trying to do similar things.
Speaker: And I really think that we're just one little piece of this really huge movement that that makes it sound organized.
Speaker: It's not organized.
Speaker: It's just everybody seeing the same things and saying enough, you know, we're tired of it.
Speaker: As far as adjusting to life in the U S you mentioned before that you had a little bit of culture shock.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure
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.
Speaker: And what's that experience been like?
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
Speaker: My mom put us out there.
Speaker: She brought us to church.
Speaker: She had us go into, she put us in talent shows.
Speaker: Wherever we went, my family was involved in something, in the community, in the church.
Speaker: And I love the church for that reason.
Speaker: I remember growing up feeling like, because we moved so much that it kind of felt like we were always on the go.
Speaker: And our only, like I said before, Mexico was our secure safety spot to where we could just go and catch our breath.
Speaker: But we had so much fun moving around and the church was always there.
Speaker: They were always good to us.
Speaker: A lot of them knew our polygamous background and they were just super kind people.
Speaker: So we've made friends through wards all over the United States, wherever we've lived.
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.
Speaker: that there's a lot to connect us on.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We could do whatever we wanted that was moral.
Speaker: Like if it was our land, we could do whatever we wanted on it.
Speaker: And that feels like freedom to me.
Speaker: To feel like you buy land and you have to go ask somebody what you can do on it and pay them.
Speaker: That's slavery to me.
Speaker: So that was a culture shock to me.
Speaker: And then like you said, the police always being there.
Speaker: I wasn't afraid of the police here.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Like I was there.
Speaker: Like, you know, there's bad people everywhere, but I support the police.
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.
Speaker: Like most people don't know their rights.
Speaker: And so that was a big difference.
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,
Speaker: big parties and dances and everybody's really just, they're really outgoing more and you meet outgoing people here too.
Speaker: But on a whole, we would go to somebody's house or you're just more open there.
Speaker: I think the culture is like, you meet somebody on the street, you're like, they're nice.
Speaker: Or you meet them at church, come over, we'll feed you dinner.
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?
Speaker: That's kind of how it is down there compared to out here.
Speaker: It's a lot more formal, it feels like.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, I've spent time in that culture and in Arab culture.
Speaker: And I think actually we're probably the weirdos in that regard.
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.
Speaker: And because...
Speaker: the industrialized West is so much more like you're raised with schedules and you're raised with like a very full day.
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.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's much more open.
Speaker: So would you, I mean, in terms of how,
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?
Speaker: What do I want to change?
Speaker: How do I want to live?
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.
Speaker: So what's the dream look like for you as far as how you want to raise a family?
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.
Speaker: So it's kind of nice.
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.
Speaker: You know, people are being drawn out of the big cities into the country.
Speaker: So my aim for my family is to be in a community that is, I like small communities.
Speaker: I always have, and I still do.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It creates different types of people.
Speaker: Like you recognize a country person.
Speaker: I just call them country people, but you recognize that you recognize a person.
Speaker: They stand out of the crowd when you get talking to people, not just because of the way they dress.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I vibe with that a lot.
Speaker: So I want my kids to, to grow up knowing what it means to work hard and to not feel entitled and to,
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.
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.
Speaker: And we didn't always have everything perfect.
Speaker: But we lived it up.
Speaker: And we used our imaginations, we didn't grow up on phones.
Speaker: We watch TV sometimes, but it was a privilege when we got to watch a movie.
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.
Speaker: They can be involved with other kids.
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.
Speaker: I want to feel the freedom that I felt growing up, even if it will probably be different.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think it's so important to establish a family culture that is distinct and is like where home is home.
Speaker: And that's the home base.
Speaker: That's where people return to.
Speaker: And that's what we're trying to build.
Speaker: So I, you know, growing up, I grew up in a very normal suburban liberal type of environment.
Speaker: I was, I was a late convert to the church too.
Speaker: So what I wanted is basically what you're describing.
Speaker: I just had no idea how to build it.
Speaker: I'd never seen it.
Speaker: Yeah, that's, that's definitely the dream.
Speaker: And I like the idea of, I don't know if I would want like,
Speaker: to do like the compound thing and have everybody like literally like on contiguous plots of land.
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.
Speaker: And we don't have to be like right on top of each other, but in the community close.
Speaker: And so we can go to church together and we can do homeschool co-op and we, you know what I mean?
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.
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.
Speaker: And, and, and it gets a little sketchy.
Speaker: So yeah, I think it's, I think it's,
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
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.
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.
Speaker: And yeah, like the whole property thing, I'm not into the communal thing where everybody's sharing all their stuff.
Speaker: I think people need their own space.
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.
Speaker: You have to have your own spot to have that freedom.
Speaker: So you have to be able to control what's yours.
Speaker: And even right now,
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?
Speaker: And there's a lot of homeschoolers that turn out fine.
Speaker: And there's a lot that are weird too.
Speaker: So like, I know homeschoolers, they have people think they're weird.
Speaker: I'm like, they're not all weird.
Speaker: Most people, most kids that turn out weirder because their parents are weird.
Speaker: It's more of a parent thing, not a, not a school thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
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,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's fine.
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.
Speaker: They like Thomas Jefferson and our founding fathers.
Speaker: They, a lot of them were, they didn't get this big college education.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what are college educations these days?
Speaker: I love education.
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.
Speaker: That's when it starts to get sketchy.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: And it's, it's so captured.
Speaker: So your plan is to homeschool with your, with your kids.
Speaker: Well, I don't have any kids yet, so I don't have to think about it yet, but I've always planned.
Speaker: I've always planned to homeschool or to be in a community where there's a, a small setting of a school.
Speaker: Like I like other people too.
Speaker: I like to,
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
Speaker: have all of that.
Speaker: I want them to play sports.
Speaker: I love sports.
Speaker: And I was never actually in a school sport really.
Speaker: But I played sports growing up my whole life with our community.
Speaker: And it's one of my favorite things.
Speaker: So I want my kids to have that.
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.
Speaker: I like using the community if it's a good one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's, I mean, it's, it's so funny.
Speaker: Like, so you, you can, you can trace, you know,
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
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.
Speaker: And once those supply lines and trade routes became unsafe, that pottery became too expensive and people started to make their own.
Speaker: And it's like really crappy.
Speaker: Like it's really bad pottery.
Speaker: And it's all different all over Europe.
Speaker: And you can watch like the Roman empire is receding and you can see that in the fossil record based on the pottery.
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.
Speaker: Like, am I going to be as good at educating my kids as like,
Speaker: the best public school teacher who like, or like a tutor or something, you know, maybe not, but like the infrastructure is collapsing.
Speaker: And so we have to do it ourselves.
Speaker: But if we can, but if we can get together and build a community, rebuild that like sense of like tribe,
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
Speaker: So interesting how you can see that in just in their pottery with with the community.
Speaker: It's like you can be independent or you can be interdependent.
Speaker: You don't want to be dependent on the on the government like you can if there's that balance.
Speaker: But I love this.
Speaker: I'm the same way.
Speaker: Like I there's a lot of variety in what I like to do and what I like to to teach.
Speaker: but I'm not a school.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I have taught school before technically, but I'm not like, I don't want to be an actual school teacher.
Speaker: There's certain subjects that I'm like, yeah, well, I would teach history.
Speaker: I love history and I'm really into art.
Speaker: So I would teach into the arts.
Speaker: I would teach music or I would teach choir or theater or dance.
Speaker: And I would love to do all of that in the community, but I don't want to teach.
Speaker: I don't want to teach the kids math and
Speaker: English and all these subjects that I'm just like, yeah, I'd already did that.
Speaker: So I would love to have somebody who I could trust, who I knew who they were.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's become sort of my life's work at this point to make that happen.
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.
Speaker: It's hard because we're all geographically separated.
Speaker: Are you homeschooling now?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, we are.
Speaker: My oldest is seven.
Speaker: And so it's...
Speaker: It's pretty basic, pretty straightforward to do.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, in the next five years, I want to be living around people that I can do that with.
Speaker: And because like, for one thing, kids are massively easier to deal with in groups.
Speaker: Like they just, so, I mean, I can tell you, like when we just had our daughter,
Speaker: We were her whole social universe and she wanted to play all the time.
Speaker: And now she's got this little army of little brothers to boss around and- Someone else to amuse her.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And when they've got friends over, they actually like kind of behave better.
Speaker: And so-
Speaker: In order to build that community, I have to sell my house and I have to quit my job.
Speaker: There's so much that goes into what seems like a very simple thing.
Speaker: But it's really rewarding.
Speaker: I'm watching the sense of purpose in my house transform, the way that we look at all these things.
Speaker: And it's really cool.
Speaker: Tiffany, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about what Tiffany's up to, you can follow her at daughter of the Republic on Instagram.
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.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about the organization that we're building here at Exit,
Speaker: You can check us out at exitgroup.us.
Speaker: You can follow us at exit underscore org on Twitter.
Speaker: You can also get back episodes of the podcast on exitgroup.podbean.com.
Speaker: Tiffany, thanks so much for coming.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: This was fun.
