Romney and the White Horse Prophecy

The White Horse Prophecy (WHP) is the popular name given an influential but disputed version given by Edwin Rushton, in about 1900, of statements supposedly made in 1843 by Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, on the future of the Latter Day Saints (popularly called Mormons) and the United States.

Joseph Smith is said to have made his statement to Edwin Rushton. The most complete copy of the prophecy is contained in a 1902 diary made by John Roberts of Paradise, Utah.

This version asserted that in his statement Smith had prophesied that the Mormons:

"...will go to the Rocky Mountains and will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety. “I shall never go there. [1] "You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber....I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense.” [1] [Smith never made it to Utah, as he was “martryed” by a posse of fed-up Illinoisans when he was shot in his cell at the Carthage jail before he could stand trial for treason. The precipitating event was when he ordered his Navoo Militia to destroy a opposition newspaper’s offices and press in June of 1844. Smith had been pushing locals and the Govenor to the brink with his armed militia, a bank failure, the exposure of his polygamy, and running for president on a radical religious platform.]

It must be noted that this prophecy is most often referenced by non-Mormons (in LDS jargon, “Gentiles”) whenever a Mormon does anything interesting, controversial or of any import on the national stage.

Re-enter Mitt Romney, after his long political journey of geographic carpetbagging, he finally arrives in the Rocky Mountain LDS stronghold of Utah as a “true blue Mormon” US senator.

Mitt was not the first Mormon to mount a failed run for president. Church founder, Joseph Smith, ran as a candidate in 1843. That is a pretty steep presidential precedence act for a Mormon to follow. But the idea of a Mormon president or savior of the Constitution has been a meme for the Saints from the very beginning.

Q: Will Willard ride a White Horse out of the West to Washington?

Well...we need to wait and see how Mittens votes (see: Flake, Jeff.) However, his recent Washinton Post Op-Ed has more than just the citizens of the Beehive State buzzing about Romney.

Romney is a chimeric Republican who preaches GOP “modern conservative values,” but (if you believe his WaPo Op-Ed) will vote with the GOP orthodoxy (again, see: Flake, Jeff.)

In the Slate article, “Mitt Romney’s Mormon Mission

“Mitt Romney is finally going to Washington. And Romney is going there on a mission: to bring “Utah’s values” to the nation’s capital…The first rumors of a possible “Senator Romney,” which began to swirl in April 2017, brought new life to the long-whispered “White Horse Prophecy” that combines this messianic constitutionalism with Mormon politics. Depending on whom you ask, the White Horse Prophecy holds either that Mormons will one day save the American constitutional system in its darkest hour, or that Mormons will overthrow American democracy to create a latter-day theocracy. “’Romney is fundamentally a Republican Party guy, a true believer in its principles, which he also truly believes are the best principles by which to govern the country,’ said Russell Arben Fox, a Mormon and political science professor at Friends University. Other Mormon politicians have been cowed by Trump’s combative style and popularity with the Republican base. Romney assumes that with his reputation and talents he’ll be able swoop into Utah—as he did in 2002 with the Salt Lake Olympics—and save the Republican Party from a total-Trump takeover.

Although the idea that members of the LDS Church will someday or at various times take action to save an imperiled US Constitution has been referenced by numerous LDS Church leaders over the years, the LDS Church has stated that "the so-called 'White Horse Prophecy'... is not embraced as Church doctrine."

Still, some fundamentalist LDS do ascribe to the concept, and it is a persistent part of Mormon mythology. And the US Constitution is presently imperiled...due to interference in the 2016 election via Russian cyberwarfare.

I actually worked briefly with Romney as Director of Security Architecture at Logictier for the team he selected to build and run Internet Operations for the 2002 Olympics. Unlike what I had expected, he didn’t delegate responsibility when faced with difficult technical and cybersecurity concepts, and Mitt did seem to have a surprisingly tenacious (if bland) work ethic.

Admittedly he did possess the intellectual curiosity, cognition, and stamina required to participate very attentively throughout the complexities of a broad-ranging, technical, and hours-long cybersecurity debriefing...without cartoons or his name being mentioned even once.

I do have a crisp memory of Mittens actually startling and turning from the slide screen to look at me directly when I was outlining how the previous Sydney Olympics network had been plagued by hackers, the critical importance of coordinating the 2002 event with the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, and insisting that state-actor hacking of “iconic events” was “not a matter of ‘if’...but ‘when and how.’”

To place the project in realpolitik context, the presentation was in August of 2000. Before 911. By 2002 at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, an American flag rescued from the World Trade Center Site on September 11 was carried into the stadium by an honor guard of American athletes, firefighters, and police officers. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, clad in white sweaters, performed The Star Spangled Banner, as the flag was raised. [Coda: The Dixie Chicks also performed.]

Terrorism and its cousin, cyberwarfare, clear and present dangers to our democracy was here.

In our infosec presentation, I highlighted the vulnerabilities exploited by state-actor hackers and terrorist propagandists network hijacking and media manipulation. I drew the extrapolation between the Black September terrorist attack on the Munich Olympics and network hijacking cyberterrorism. All forms of media we were hosting, especially the reach and power of the Internet, could provide a terrifying propaganda means, and the Olympics the stage.

Just like the means and the stage the 2016 election provided for maximum Kremlin tradecraft.

This was best illustrated by a quote from George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine:

“A bomb in the White House. A mine in the Vatican. An earthquake in Paris could not have echoed through the consciousness of every man in the world like the operation at Munich...the choice of the Olympics, from a purely propagandist point of view, was 100 percent successful. “It was like painting the name of Palestine on a mountain that can be seen from the four corners of the earth.”

That quote visibly jarred Romney. I hope Mitt was seriously paying attention. Because we need senators and congresspersons who have enough technical awareness to understand the existential threat posed to our nation by the Russian interference in our election and their continuing cyberwar as detailed in this FBI report is not “fake news.”

I have this wee fantasy that the data covered as a “security missionary” (which included state-actor backed hacking, global network cybersecurity, protecting our media, broadcast and internet from social engineering and hijack, SCADA vulnerabilities to our critical infrastructure, et. al.) planted a mustard seed regarding the scope and dangers of cyberwarfare somewhere in Romney’s Republican frontal cortex.

If Mitt wants to work across the aisle to save the US from our Constitutional crisis he needs to stand on principle to defend and act on the report from the Mueller’s investigation. He needs to support expansion of the US Cybersecurity Department budget and scope. He should work to wrest the GOP out of Trump’s grip on its sanity, back increased sanctions on Russia until they stop their cyberwar. And press the Republicans to hold Trump’s campaign and administration (and especially our Department of Justice) to their counterintelligence and judicial reckoning.

Can Williard find the courage to ride or die on that prophetic White Horse, through the right-wing propaganda Wurlitzer, through McConnell’s GOP deathgrip, help right the shutdown stalemate, then ride right up to the "stupid Watergate" White House and tell Trump its time for his “Come to Jesus” rally?

Actually, at this point, I’d be satisfied if Romney could just rise to the level of a steadfast Eisenhower Republican. Horse or no horse.

But...McConnell Republicans. They're a horse of a different and malevolent color America has not seen since the anti-immigrant, conspiracy-mongering Know Nothing party.

As Abraham Lincoln said:

I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy

To hell with Know Nothing Mitch’s cabal, and Trump: the horse’s ass they rode in on.

Romney v. McConnell? We’ll wait and see. The trepidation is we’ll (see: Flake, Jeff — 2.0.)