#824 - Most Famous Ex- Trad Wife in the World

Jennie Gage was once a devout Mormon, a Christian nationalist, a white supremacist, and a proud Trump supporter. In this gripping episode of Dogma Debate, she shares her raw, courageous journey out of an ideology built on fear and control. Her story is one of reckoning, transformation, and the power of asking hard questions. Don’t miss it.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Neil de grass Tyson. Hey, I'm Adam Carol Gillette
not only listening, I'm the guest and.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Tell her and I am a fourth listener.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
And I am the fourth listener.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
And that must make me at least the fourth listener.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
It's Dogma Debate with your host Michael Rigillio. For extra
content and to join the conversation, please head over to
Dogma Debate dot com and join our Patreon Wow. Is
today's episode going to be fantastic? So good in fact,
that normally these long form conversations the second half is

(00:36):
for Patreon only. I'm making the whole thing free because
I just I feel like this is an episode that
you need to hear. And that's because I have Jenny Gage.
Jenny is a woman who People Magazine called her the
most famous ex tradwife in the world, and she's so
much more. She's an ex Mormon, an ex Christian, and

(00:57):
ex Christian nationalist, and by her admission, an next white supremacist.
And these are not easy things for somebody that's come
out on the other side of those things to talk about.
And you'll hear it, You'll hear it in her voice
that these are hard things to talk about. But this
is an important conversation and once she wants to have
and so I really I was moved by Jenny. Her

(01:21):
story is amazing and her insights are amazing. Oh, by
the way, good news, as you know you may may
or may not know, but David Smalley is coming back
to the podcast. Original host David Smalley. No, I'm not
going anywhere. I'm not sure exactly when that is, but
just keep keep your eye out. Things are changing around here,

(01:44):
things are getting better around here. All the same content
you love, but we're adding a new element. David's coming back.
We're changing in theame of the show to serious circus.
It's going to be exciting. Keep an eye out for it.
Get on Patreon, join our patreon at Dogmentdebate dot com

(02:05):
for all the content, the great content that's coming. But
until then, I give you Jenny Gage and welcome to
just This promises to be such a good episode of
Dogma Debate because I have Jenny Gage here and I
am a fan of her content. She is online as

(02:29):
life take two and do I get that right? I
knew ID would. And her description is a very interesting one.
She is an ex Mormon, ex Christian, nationalist, ex white supremacist,
ex Christian, current atheist, current advocate, current liberal. Would you say,
I see, I think current liberal. So with that incredible introduction, Jenny,

(02:54):
Welcome to Dogma Debate.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm so excited to be on today. This is one
of those days when I woke up an hour early
and cann't sleep because it's like, oh, this is going
to be such a fun podcast. I'm just excited to
talk to you today.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Nice. I hope it's going to be a fun podcast.
So wow, where to begin? I guess start from the
very beginning, which is they let's knock the first one off,
ex Mormon, and quite frankly, I think we'll both agree
that from Mormonism is where the white nationalism, white supremacist, conservative,
all that stuff stems from. So you are born. Oh

(03:27):
and by the way, ex tradwife, big time extrad wife.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
I'm the People magazine interviewer. I was in People magazine
here this past year. Susan young, fantastic veteran journalist. She said,
you are the most famous ex tradwife in the world. Yeah,
and I thought, what a label. You know, when we're
little kids, we want to grow up and be like,
I want to be an Olympic gold medalist or I
want to be Miss America. Now I'm the most famous

(03:54):
ex tradwife in the world. Not a title that I
thought i'd hold, but I guess.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
You know what, the X there is doing a lot
of work. If you were just the most famous tradwife
in the world, I'd feel bad for your most famous
ex trad wife. That's a badge of honor. So where'd you?
Where were you were you? Are you from Salt Lake
City or the area? Or tell me everything.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Here's my Mormon story, Michael in a nutshell. I was
born and raised into the Mormon Church, and I'm actually
in Arizona. Mormon we are a little bit different than
the Utah Mormons. We are just as orthodox, just as cloistered.
Bit we tend to wear more bikinis, and I don't
know that's really the only difference. So one really interesting

(04:40):
aspect of my Mormon life is that my dad was
a brand new recent convert. He had just joined the
church a couple of years before he met my mom
and they got married, So he was well into his
late twenties early thirties when back in the early nineteen seventies,
late nineteen sixties girlfriend took him to church and he

(05:02):
would eventually get baptized and then marry my mom. My mom,
on the other hand, her family is multi generational, so
she was lifelong born and raised to parents who were
lifelong members of the church. And it was kind of
an interesting dichotomy having a dad who's this brand new
convert who was a little bit rough around the edges,

(05:23):
and then my mom, who was super orthodox, very mormony.
She was like just your typical nineteen fifties more than girly.
So I was born into home. I was the oldest
of five kids.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Wow, I'm Catholic and I'm middle of six. Just quick question,
because we talk about the zeal of the converted, would
your dad fall into that category? Would because of his
recent conversion, would you say that he was even more
of a zealot than some of the other Mormons you know?

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Or I would almost say okay to answer that question.
My dad by the time I was born, which was
just a year and two months or so after they
got married, my dad seemed to be bipolar and in
his zealousy, and I would not learn until just seven
years ago today, the mystery behind my dad's relationship to

(06:16):
the Mormon Church. So my dad had been this very
gung ho, all in member of the church. And remember
again nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies, he didn't have the Internet,
so everything that the missionaries told him was his reality.
You know, he just accepted his truth everything, no way
to cross reference, fact check or see if any of
the stuff was sketch, So he was all in. My

(06:41):
dad is a writer, He was a journalist, he was
an anchorman, and so he was always putting his thoughts
into essays and poetry. And he had a little notepad
that he had filled with poems about Joseph Smith and
the restoration of the Gospel and all of the miracles
around the First Vision and things like that. In fact,
I believe he won a scholarship to b YU where

(07:04):
he would meet my mom for a single poem about
the restoration of the Gospel. And you know the Angel
appearing to Joseph Smith.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
To give him the Book of Morona.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
So yep, Angel Maroni, get job Michael. So he was very,
very very he had that new convert fire and then
he met my mom at BYU. They dated for a
year and then they had a temple wedding, which does
see a lot is a new convert for my dad
to have had his priesthood and been able to have

(07:36):
that temple recommend so that he could go to the
temple and marry my mom, whose lifelong number. That's a
big deal for him to have had that at that point,
and I wouldn't know this at any point in my childhood.
I would only find this out when I was an
adult left the church. At their temple wedding, which was
in nineteen seventy three, my dad had to literally take

(07:58):
his hand in gesture that he was cutting the zone
jugular vein. He then had to gesture that he was
slicing his stomach down the middle, and then he had
to say that I will I would rather disembowel myself
and feed my organs and my bells to the birds
of the air and the beasts of the field than ever
divulge any of these secrets that I've learned in the temple.

(08:19):
He had to take all these blood oaths while dressed
in his crazy cult clothes and doing all the hand
gestures and oaths and stuff. So my dad, in the
middle of his temple wedding, which was like three hours long,
all this crazy stuff starts to have a mental meltdown,
and what he told me what fifty forty something years later,

(08:43):
was in that moment in the temple that we began
the ordinances, all I could see was cult. I knew
that this was a cult. I knew that the missionaries
had bamboozled me. And I realized that everything that my
Southern Baptist mom had told me was true. And then
I baptized into a colt. So he says that they
went out to the car after they left their temple wedding,

(09:06):
and he, once the doors were closed, turns to my
mom and says, Kathy, this is a cult. Your church
is a cult. Like what did we just do? What
just happened? And my mom starts crying. According to my
dad's version of the story, and then they drive to
their wedding reception where all of their family is waiting
there for them to slice the cake and whatnot. So
my dad's testimony of the Mormon Church literally unraveled in

(09:30):
his temple experience at their wedding. So by the time
I came along, my dad was kind of fetny, like
he would lean over in church and whisper to me
as a three and four year old child, like, Jenny,
that thing that the bishop just said, that's not true,
Like Jesus doesn't Jesus doesn't do that, Jenny. I can

(09:50):
remember a family home evening, which Mormons do every Monday
night to indoctrinate their kids, when I was maybe kindergartener.
So and my mom asking as kids, if we, you know,
can one of you read a scripture? And she hands
me a book of Mormon, and my dad grabs it
out of my hands and he flings the book Mormon
with the wall and says, Kathy, I thought you said
that we were going to stick to Bible versus only

(10:16):
if anything is Michael that I didn't realize that my
dad was not a Mormon, because somewhere they must have
had a conversation where my mom's reason with him. Listen up, Roger,
I married you as a Mormon. Now we're married, and
if you want to stay married, and then as we
began and have children, if you want to be part
of the children's lives, you're going to have to go
to church and pretend to be Mormon. And my dad

(10:37):
would pretend to be Mormon for almost fifty years until
I left the church.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Wow, that is an amazing, amazing story. And I have
to say the first thing that really struck me was
the slice your throat and say, I'd rather this is
part of supposed to be a beautiful ceremony of a
man and a woman coming together. I would rather disembowel
myself and tire my organs out like that seems like
a very dark thing to bring into a wedding ceremony.

(11:05):
And it is like just a sort of one step
away from as tech like tearing people's hearts out on
a pyramid. It's like, Wow, I just you got me
on that one. And then your dad never believed it
and you didn't know it. I mean you must. I
mean the fact that he would whisper to you that

(11:26):
you know that's not true or something must have had
some effect on you. But you were a devout Mormon yourself,
so you bought it, hook line and sinker.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
He was always sitting in church on Sunday, you know,
and he did have some monkey ideas. You know. He
would kind of whisper things to me over the years,
and he would try to convince me to read my
Bible and not the Book of Mormon, and he wasn't
very supportive of me going to a church college. I
went to BYU Idaho, which was called Rick's College at

(11:56):
the time. It wasn't really thrilled that I went there
over just a regular college. But I was just kind
of chucked that up to the fact that he was
a convert, Like Dad's a convert, so he still has
problems and Satan is testing him, so that's why he
has some of these wacky ideas. At times, I just
thought he was plain crazy, like my dad has a
mental illness, the way that he's bipolar about his faith
because he's sitting there in church on Sunday and you know,

(12:19):
he's doing all the churchy things, and then he's telling me,
Joseph Smith was the son of pradition, So which is it.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Joseph Smith was the son of what tradition? Explain that
to me, the.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Son of tradition? Those are followers of Satan.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Oh wow?

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah. So And as far as the temple ceremony, I
had that same experience at my wedding, and you're not
prepared for it at all. You can any of your
listeners can look up the lds, temple endowment, blood oaths,
and prior to the early nineteen nineties, I believe I

(12:58):
think that stopped just right before or my temple wedding.
You literally promise that you would unlive yourself rather than
betray your temple covenants, and you acted the whole thing out.
So what I went through I got married in nineteen
ninety five, and leading up to the actual wedding, when
you're kneeling at the altar, I had to do a

(13:19):
modified version of that. So for me I had to
still make the same signs with my hands. But then
I said, I will give everything that I have, my time,
my talents, everything that I've been blessed with to the
Church or Jesus Christ of Batterity Saints, including my own
life if it be necessary. So as a twenty year
old girl, I didn't quite have to like I'm gonna

(13:39):
chot my throat and rip out my own testoms and
feel them to the birds and the squirrels. But I
did have to grapple with that moment of what I
die for the church? Will I give my life for
the church or Cheeses CHRISTI of Blotterity Saints. And then
after you finish your endowment and everything. Then you go
off into the ceiling room and you at the altar
and Tanny, I love you.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Wow. I So here's a comparison. I don't know if
you've ever heard this before, but as an American male,
I'm obliged to be a fanatical about the Godfather films
and the Sopranos and have read a number of books
on the mafia. That sounds like a mafia ceremony. That's
exactly what you have to do. You have to say,

(14:21):
like I will kill myself rather than turn my back
on the mafia. Like there's like part there's like a
a the FBI actually got a microphone into one of
these ceremonies like forty years ago, and like you have
to swear that if your children try to rat out
the mafia, you'll kill them. Like it just it's a cult,
but it's also sounds a little mafia like like this

(14:42):
is wow, that's so funny.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
I'm gonna have to find one of my early TikTok
videos way back like six years ago, because I did
this series of videos where I talked about how I
felt like I was a mobster because at every point
in my life, there was somebody who's going to do
you in about a boom. You know, Jenny, you had
sex before you're married, it being about a boom, and

(15:04):
it was always like my eternal life. I didn't necessarily
feel like somebody was going to like gutt me down
to the streets. But more in church, it's very much
like the mafia. There's a lot of death threats.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Wow, I mean eternal death threats, like the destination of
your soul.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
But in the temple that was literal. In the temple,
the blood oaths were literally rather than sharing this stuff
that I chucked down on the temple and nut these ordinances,
I will personally cut my own throat, my own intestines open,
and feeding my guts to the ship minks.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Wow. Okay's job. Which leads me to this question. I
don't know if you have an answer for it. Is
there any record of somebody actually making good on this
blood oath? Has anybody been like well, I promised I
would slep my own throat. Guess I gotta go now.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
There was a Reddit thread on this topic of the
blood oaths, so I would imagine that it's still up.
But something that I've heard discussed off and on back
in the day too. If you committed a sin, then
somebody would do that to you so that they could
save your soul, because otherwise you'd be cursed to hell.
So if you had committed some major sin, then the

(16:16):
blood oath was the way for you to make it tonement.
So yeah, there was a reddit threat. I mean, I
personally have never known of anyone who I don't know.
I like, certainly I think that that was a part
of my mind to set too. If we want to
jump into that for just a second, and like, how
PG do I have to be on this podcast? Can

(16:38):
I share things?

Speaker 1 (16:40):
We say it all for sure.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
So when I and I hadn't gone through the temple,
but this is just such a part of Mormon culture that,
like absolution, I guess is the topic. And I shared
a complete long version of this on Cults to Consciousness
with Shalise. But when I was a fourteen year old girl,
I had a much older boyfriend, he was like a
fifty year senior, and we had a coerced sexual experience.

(17:10):
I was a little fourteen year old freshman cheerleader, and
it was a horrible, horrifying situation. I couldn't talk to
anybody about it because I didn't want to get in trouble,
and I wrote about it in my diary, not realizing
that my mom basically just had my diary as a
spy mechanism. So my mom every year for my birthday,

(17:30):
I'd get a diary. That's such a Mormon thing, right,
and my mom was just using that as surveillance apparently,
So my mom read my diary and read what had happened,
and so she makes an appointment for me to go
talk to my bishop, and the bishop instructs that I
am my mom's to drive me to the Mormon bookstore
and by a book for me that's still in existence.
I ten out of ten recommend anybody try to find
this on eBay or wherever you can find it. It's

(17:52):
called the Miracle of Forgiveness. It sounds sweet, written by
the Mormon prophet during my childhood, and in this Miracle
of Forgiveness, he says that if you commit the sin
of having sex, you know, if you're immoral, that you
have committed the sin next to murder. So I'm this
little fourteen year old girl. As punishment, I have to

(18:13):
go talk to the bishop you know, my mom reads
my diary, takes me to the bishop. The bishop says,
buyer this book. Jenny read this book twice. I'm reading
this book and that's sinking into my little fourteen year
old brain. I have committed the sin next to murder,
So I guess the only way through this is to
end my life. So probably too graphic if I actually

(18:34):
show this on camera, but on my inner left wrist,
I still have the scars from when I was fourteen
years old and took a razor blade to my wrist
because I saw it as possibly the only way to
get out of the horrible thing that i'd done. So
that it wasn't successful, obviously, So that is it. That's

(18:58):
part of Urtic culture in my lifetime.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Certainly that is shocking and upsetting, and I'm so sorry
that you went through that. But my mind goes too.
Did your mother at that point then, except that maybe
she was complicit in this by making you read this book,
and that it was the Mormon teachings, that it had
been a secular family or a different family, that you

(19:21):
wouldn't have had these thoughts. Did they understand that Mormonism
was to blame for their beautiful fourteen year old daughter
doing this terrible, terrible thing.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
No, absolutely not, because, first of all, my mom was
deeply in doctrinated, multi generations of indoctrination, and we were
sent to an LDS therapist. The LDS therapist confirmed what
the bishop had said, and so after I made that
suicide attempt, I was sent to the LDS therapist. Our

(19:55):
bishop referred us out to this family services lady and
she said, you know, so, first of all, you've had sex,
and now you've tried to kill yourself. If you had
been successful, you would have burned in hell. Why don't
we focus on getting you out from under the influence
of Satan? And that was that was what everybody viewed
was happening. Nobody thought that the church was to blame

(20:16):
my mom, the bishop, my young women's leaders, anybody involved
saw that clearly I was under the influence of Satan.
And then because I had lost the spirit, because I
was no longer righteous, I had committed this horrible sin,
so the spirit wasn't working on me anymore. Then I
had tried to kill myself and who knows what next,
you know, So, no, that was all on me. I

(20:36):
had tapped into Satan's power. You know. Ruby Frankie. No,
Ruby Frankie was a very famous Mormon podcaster. She's in
jail now, and what was it, Just about two years
ago her little nine ten year old son escaped the
home where she was, where he had been bound and

(20:59):
was being told and she's in jail with a cohort
for some really egregious childs child abuse. Yeah, so Ruby Frankie,
she believed that her children were under the influence of Satan.
My mom, everybody around me believed that I was under
the influence of Satan. So yeah, that was my fault.

(21:21):
That was the boy's fault.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Man. I mean, it's dark, and it's just from the
outsider's point of view, I mean it just it does
sound so much like, I don't know, Lord of the
Rings or something like that, a dark wizard had influenced you.
And I just, man, it's so hard to wrap my
head around from my current perspective. Although I was I

(21:47):
was raised as Catholic as they come. My dad was
Opus Day, which is the Catholic Church was too as
it stood in the eighties, was too liberal for my dad.
He wanted to go back to pre Vatican two and
say Mass in Latin and all that stuff. So it's
I understand it. And I was afraid of Satan too
as a kid. Uh yeah, you're blowing my mind. And

(22:11):
just to get back to what you said that if
you commit a sin and you're going to go to hell,
Mormons believe that if somebody murders you that gets you
out of it.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Is that that is no longer accepted as Mormon doctrine.
And I'm not sure the exact year, but it's called
blood atonement, blood atonement, and they're still even though they
stepped away from blood atonement, even though it's no longer
part of the temple Ornans. And that's the interesting thing
about Mormonism. There are kids today who will listen to

(22:42):
this podcast and they'll say, that's not the Mormon Church
at all, because the Mormon Church doesn't have an anchor
where the Bible is the anchor for so many Christian religions.
The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, he did this really
curious thing and he's like, yeah, the Bible is kind
of important, but who we can't trust the translation. We
have this new scripture, the Book of Mormon, and I

(23:03):
as the prophet can reveal new scripture anytime I want to.
So he really, in so many ways sat Mormons adrift
in the sea of doctrine because you don't have to
go back to you know, what does the Bible say?
What did the apostles teach? At any given moment, the
Mormon prophets can reveal something new and then everything changes.

(23:27):
So it's fascinating. So Mormons today no longer have the
blood atonement. It's not part of the doctrine. It's been
disavowed in much the same way that polygamy has been disavowed.
Members of the church who discussed a blowdy Saints out
of Saltlake City they no longer practice polygamy, and they
no longer practice the blood atonement. But when I grew
up in the seventies and eighties, there were still remnants

(23:49):
of it found within some of the teachings that I
was learning in seminary, some of the scriptures that we
were reading, some of the lessons from the prophets that
I was still learning in the sixties or in the
seventies and eighties when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
I hate to keep harping on this, but I have
so many questions. Number one, just the way it was
taught at the time. The person that killed you, are
they off the hook for murder? Are they also doing
a good thing? If you're doing they're doing you favor?
And so God gives them a pass on the whole
thou shalt not kill thing, and they get to go
to I guess in Mormon case, not heaven but their

(24:26):
own planet.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yes, Mormonism has a lot of sanctified murder. And I
know again some the younger Mormons are going to argue
in the Book of Mormon, and this is a book that,
like my mom would just get this out and read
this to us when we were little kids. I would
read this to my children early on. In the Book
of Mormon, just the first couple of chapters, the main prophet,

(24:49):
his name is Nephi, as they're preparing to leave Jerusalem
to come to the Americas, right way back, way back
in the day anciently, he needs to get some things
from one of his uncles, and in this story, he
is led to the uncle who then refuses to give

(25:10):
him the brass plates and some of the records and
things that God required him to take from the ancle.
And so the Holy Ghost commands him that he's supposed
to chopply bin set off, and do you want me
to pull the scripture for you really quick? Because it's best?

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
I just don't I like to bring receipts, you know,
I don't like anyone to argue with this. So as
a little kid, I would grapple with this concept of
when is this a god justified murder? When is it
okay for me to take somebody's life? Which is I mean,
isn't that she hot? Isn't that just the concept of
a holy war?

Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah, there's no shortage of it in the Bible either.
Canaan I certainly got the wrong end of the stick
on that one.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
I think the difference though, is that in the Bible, like,
if you're a little CHRISTI and get a Bible camp,
you're not necessarily going back to the Old Testament, which
was thousands of years ago and gleaning every day lessons
from it. Nobody's like, okay, let's learn how to kill
the Canaanites or Egypt or whoever. In Mormonism, this stuff
feels very real, it feels very living and very current,

(26:20):
and the way that it's taught. You know, I had
seminary lessons where we learned lessons from Laban, where we
learned lessons about when it was okay to go to
war against our neighbors. Okay refuses to give up the
record to be delivered into his son's hands, is slain
by me, fy, so you're going to go to fight

(26:41):
or seven here? Yeah, this was something that I grappled
with as just a girl growing up. When will I
know if I am supposed to take somebody's life.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
Wow, that is not something a person growing up in
this world that has enough to grapple with should be
grappling with. That is too much to grapple with and unnecessary.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
My whole life was a battle of good and evil.
I talk about that on my page all the time
on my channels. I'm like, it's so hard to explain
to someone who didn't grow up like this what it
means to see every day when you wake up, Like
the minute my feet hit the floor, Satan and his
spirits are after me, and everything that I do is
a battle of good and evil, and all of this
life is a battle between Satans. So the spirit takes

(27:30):
Nephi this young, he would become the prophet. He takes
him into his uncle Laban's, and the spirit said, unto me, behold,
the Lord had delivered him into thy hands, and he
tells him that you need to slay him. Came to pass.
I was constrained by the spirit that I should kill Laban.
But I said in my heart, never any time have
I shed the blood of a man, and I shrunk,

(27:52):
and that I would not slay him. And the spirit said,
unto me again, slay him, for the Lord hath delivered
him into thy hands. Behold, and this is this is
a scripture that we memorized in seminary when I was
like fourteen fifteen, sixteen years old. This was taught to
the kids. Right. Behold, the Lord slayeth the wicked to

(28:13):
bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one
man should perish, that a nation should dwindle and perish
and unbelief. And now, when I NEEDFI had heard these words,
I remember the words of the Lord which he spaken
to me in the wilderness, telling him to keep all
my commandments. And so basically he takes the sword and
he chops off labor. And said, so I did obey

(28:37):
the voice of the Lord and took Laban by the
hair of the head, and I smote off his head
with his own sword.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Oh, the smoting, always with the smoting, right.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
So yeah, as a kid growing up, I used to
grapple with that, like, Okay, when do I know that
I'm going to need to be an assassin for Jesus? Like,
when's that can happen? Either I'm gonna have to take
my own life, I'm gonna have to take somebody else,
because it's better that one bad man perishes that everybody
else dwindles.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
And yeah, And I mean when it comes to the
Spirit of the Lord speaking to you, we all hear
voices in our head all day. It's just us talking
to ourselves, you know. So, I mean it just sets
up the risk of somebody taking this seriously and acting
on it, somebody who otherwise probably wouldn't have had these

(29:29):
murderous inclinations. Do we know of that? I'm thinking of
the book Under the Banner of Heaven, where certainly the
two Brothers chronicled in that book, And if you haven't
read it, it simultaneously tells the story of Joseph Smith in
the formation of the Mormon Church, as well as a
modern story of two brothers I think in the eighties
who went on a murderous campaign the Libarons.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah right, yeah, I have family that are down in
the Liberian colonies in Mexico. Also, I mean, notably Laurie
Dave Bell and Chad Dave Bell. They murdered their children
because they thought that they were demon possessed, buried them
out in the desert. Ruby Frankie and Jodie Hildebrandt her
cohort and the child abuse in that case very similar.

(30:15):
So it's interesting, Michael, like you say, one person might
be ratified by that and one person might not. Just
in life in general, I'm the type of person who
takes everything very literally. So I went on the Atkins
diet way back when when I was like a twenty
year old girl, and I buy the letter. You know,
not a carb passed my lips because I'm all in.

(30:37):
I'm very black and white. And I have conversations with
other people who remembers in a Mormon church who are like,
what the hell are you talking about, Jenny, Like, I
didn't do that, and I didn't think that, but there
were maybe people who didn't take things as literally. I
take everything literally, and I think The most interesting thing
about my experience in the church is that I actually
believed all of it. I believed with scriptures taught, I

(31:00):
believed what my seminary teachers taught. I believed what they
taught in the temple, and I tried to actually live
it all of it.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
So that's really interesting and it makes me wonder did
you feel a divine presence in your life at that
time when you believed it what you said, you felt
like you had to wake up and fight demons and Satan?
Did you sense them around you? Did you feel them
when you felt like that you were, you know, a
warrior for Jesus. Did you sense him his presence in

(31:29):
your life? I mean, could you feel these things? Did
you sense that this was real because you could eternalize it?

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Oh, that's such an interesting question. My brain's kind of
just like going back over like growing up Mormon. I
would say that to answer that, there's two aspects of
that question that were at play in my life. So,
first of all, signs were a big deal for me.
I believed that God spoke to me through little things.

(32:00):
It like it could even be like a fortune cookie.
I had a lot of teachings growing up around listening
to the still small voice, in the ways that the
Spirit would talk to me, the way that Heavenly Father
and Jesus Christ would speak to me through the Holy Ghost,
who was that personage in the Godhead that was directly
tasked with speaking to the mortals. Right, So, if I

(32:21):
if I was seeing a fight with a friend and
then I said a prayer asking Heavenly Father to help
me smooth over my little middle school tip with one
of my besties, and then I turned on the radio
and there was a song about you know, you should
write a letter. Then I would see that as a
sign from Heavenly Father. I would think that the Holy
Ghost was speaking to me, and I would write a letter.

(32:43):
So it's funny how that I wouldn't have said when
I was a member of the church that I was superstitious.
But in many ways I was superstitious. I was always
looking for signs. I was looking for a TV show
or a book, or I would sometimes just randomly open
up my scriptures and like, you know, whatever I prayed about,
I'm having this problem, should I divorce my husband or not?

(33:05):
And I'd open the scripture and you know, stay steadfast,
and the course that you're on. And well, there's my answer.
Heavenly Father just told me that I need to stay
stead fast and the course that I'm want. So I
certainly would if had said, I would have said in
the forty four years that I was LDS that I
did feel that God was working in my life because
I constantly saw signs and I constantly saw science, because

(33:27):
I was constantly looking for science. Because rather than using
critical thinking and just like I'm going to check out
a notepad and I'm going to write pros and cons
whether or not I should divorce this stouche bag, I
was always looking for you know, like Grandma died and
then there was a rainbow after her funeral. That was God.
Well maybe you know, we had the funeral on a
rainy day. Maybe that wasn't God. So I certainly would

(33:48):
have said that the Holy Ghost was always leading me.
And then also I think that when you are groomed
in some of these high demand religions Mormonism, where you
are constantly being put in situations where you have this
elevation emotion, that it's very easy for you to have
that elevation emotion. So an example of this, like the

(34:12):
Mormon Church is really good at having music, and a
very specific type. You know, we didn't have the rock
bands with drums and electric guitars. It's organ music, these
these very old fashioned, pioneer type of songs, and you
get accustomed to like this is the way that the
Lord speaks to me when I hear this type of stuff.

(34:32):
And so then you get those warm fuzzies, just like
I guess for people who aren't part of cults. You know,
when you take all the Christmas stuff out and you
smell the sunamond candles, and that feels like Christmas. Because
I had been so deeply immersed in this culture of
recognizing the spirit and listening to the still small voice,
just going to church and hearing that organ music, listening

(34:54):
to the prophets speak, opening up one of my church
books at home and just reading I'm turning on some
of my music and my CD player. It made me
feel like I was at home. So I certainly would
have said that I had a lot of spiritual experiences.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Interesting. I think I was very much the same way
when I was in high school. Constant, Like I would
turn on the radio and if I was thinking about
something and there was a song or a lyric that
somehow addressed it. I was like, that's God, that's God
talking to me, which just speaks to I don't know
the human condition or our mind or the evolutionary process
and how our minds came around that we look for,

(35:34):
you know, confirmation, We have confirmation biases. That's now what
I hope to be my logical mind speaking. But so
that you've talked about your husband a little bit there,
and that is a big part of your life. So
you married, I'm think quite young.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Right, I was twenty. I was seventeen when I was
engaged the first time, and nobody had a problem with that.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
So wow, said the first time. So there was a
a fiance before the husband.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yes, And I sent him off on a Mormon mission
after he soaked me. By the way, I know, there's
a lot of controversy around soaking, So the night before
he went on his Mormon mission, he kind of snuck
one in on me. So, I soaking is not what
everybody makes it out to be. But I was soaked.

(36:23):
I think that it's you don't soak, somebody soaks you. Anyway, Yeah,
he went off on a Mormon mission, and then I
was coerced. I discussed on my channel and have written
articles and done interviews about the bride trafficking, which is
one of the greatest percentages of trafficking. There's a lot

(36:45):
of bride trafficking there, always has been historically, and I
was specifically targeted, recruited, and then coerced to marry the
man that I was spent twenty four years with.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
Wow, just is because I think I know what you're
talking about, but I could use some clarification. When you're
talking about bride trafficking, so you know, my mind goes to,
you know, I don't know, trafficking like somebody being against
their will, stolen away from their parents or whatnot. But
that's not what you're talking about, obviously. Could you be
a little more clear about what you mean.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
So trafficking doesn't always have to mean stolen. You can
be trafficked by your own community. You can be trafficked
by your parents, You can be trafficked by school teachers,
camp leaders, whoever, government officials. I I was targeted by

(37:39):
a leader who was much older than me, who had
a friend that had recently come home from his mission,
and the Mormon doctrine teaches that you have to get married,
you Catholics. You don't have to get married right like,
you can die single, and that's actually preferable because then
you're not stained by sexual appetites or whatever. In Morganism,
to attain highest grief Heaven, to become a god and goddess,

(38:02):
you must be married. Single people cannot become gods and goddesses.
So that's always front and center in your little Mormon mind,
that I need to find my eternal companions so that
I can form my eternal family so that I can
live with God again and be like him. And when
missionaries come home from their missions, it's a big deal

(38:24):
to get them married quickly because Mormons also don't believe
in sex outside of marriage. It's the sad next murder,
like I already mentioned. And this guy, I call him Jake,
and my channel, he had come home from this mission
and his friends, who were priesthood leaders in my stake,
set me up on a blind date. But when they

(38:45):
first dialogued with me about it, they said, we want
to introduce you to your husband. This is your future husband,
the Holy Ghost has told us, and here's you know.
This is his name. You guys need to go out
on a date. And then our second date, he molested me,

(39:05):
non consensually and in a very shocking way. Because I thought,
because I was out with this return missionary that I
was in good hands. I had the expectation that he
was going to respect me, and he didn't. We went
hot dubbing together and he violated me in a way
that was absolutely jarring. And then he went and confessed

(39:28):
to the priestood leader our bishop about what had happened,
as though it was a mutual thing that me and
Jenny did this. And the priestood leader said, you guys
need to get married because of what happened. So our
eleventh date was our dumple way WHOA. So we were
set up by this much older priesthood leader Jason or

(39:50):
Jake needs a wife, Jake needs to get married. Jake
can't go to heaven if he doesn't have a bride.
And then after he molested me, I was forced to
marry him.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
That is heartbreaking, but it also speaks of I mean,
I've heard of that in other religions. Isn't say in
the Old Testament that if you rape a woman your
punishment is to marry her. I mean it's just it's
heart breaking. But I mean, where is your mindset at
this point you're marrying this man. Did you in your

(40:19):
did you convince yourself you were in love that he
was actually a good guy, or did you understand at
that time that this guy is a terrible, terrible human being.
And we'll get into how terrible he was leading up
to that Valentine he gave you, which blew my mind.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Pulled it out. I think I have it, do I mean,
I could go grab that from my desk.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, like you too.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
First of all, I was still engaged to the first
fiance when I was a mission so we'd had two
years we didn't see each other. Mormon missionaries, it's it's
a big deal. They're gone for two years. You can't
have phone calls or anything, so it's not even a
long distance relationship. The church just takes them. They send
them off across the world and they cut all ties

(41:07):
with their family and everything and back. Also, like this
was the early nineteen nineties, we didn't have email or anything,
so once or twice a month I'd get a letter
from my fiance, but we were still engaged and that
was so let me just let me explain the scene
for you. So I've gone on a date with this
guy because this priesthood leader says, the Holy Ghost is

(41:29):
telling me that he's your future husband. And I guess
that intrigued me because I was very obsessed with following
what the Holy Ghost is set to do. Right, So
I went on a date with him, and then on
the second date, he molests me in the hot time.
Then we go talk to our bishop to repent, to
give our confessional. We're sitting in this bishop's office, Jake

(41:51):
and me, just side by side, and when the bishop says,
let's hurry up and get you guys married before you
have full blown sex, and then mormonhelle, which is called
the celestial Kingdom for the rest of eternity, let's get
you married. I said in like, I'm this little nineteen
year old girl, super skinny, blonde hair. I didn't know

(42:15):
anything about anything. I lived this really sheltered life sitting
here alone in this bishop's office. I didn't even know
this bishop well at all. And I said, Bishop Bullock,
I am engaged. I have a fiance. He's on a
mission right now. So you know, I was just going
on the state because Josh Johnson told me to go
on the state, but we are not getting married. And

(42:38):
the bishop said, oh, you know, do you think that
your missionary wants to marry you now? Now you've done
this with Jake, he will never want to see you again.
So I don't think that it was that night. I
think that it was the next night when my family

(42:58):
was gone, because you know, I have little brothers and
sisters and parents at home and I didn't want them
to know any of this that was going on. And
they left and I was able to track down my
missionary fiance's phone number and I called him on his mission,
which was a big shock to him, and I told him,
I need to break up with you. I've met sybody.

(43:20):
The Holy ghost has told us that we're supposed to
get married, and we were getting married in a few weeks.
I never saw that.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
I take it.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
You know, we met, We didn't meet in real life,
but we met up online. He found me on Facebook
and he actually helped me escape domestic violence twenty six
years after this. Wow.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
So he's a great guy, or at least he's.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
A great guy. I would have had a great life
with him. And so when we when we crossed paths
again all those years later, I asked him and I said,
why didn't you fight more on the phone when I
called you that night? And He's like, I was missionary.
I believed in the Holy Ghost. I believed that God
had told you that you were supposed to marry somebody else,
and I didn't want to mess with that. So I

(44:11):
remember him just telling me like, I love you, I
hate this, but I hope you have an amazing life.
And if this is truly what she want to do,
then I'm wishing you just all of the happiness.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Wow, is he Is he still a Mormon? Or is
he no longer a Mormon?

Speaker 2 (44:24):
He is so in a way like it's a good
thing that he's en end up with him, because I
don't know that I would have ever jumped out of
Mormonism if I had had this good Mormon husband. Instead,
I had a bad Mormon husband, so it was a
little easier to jump ship.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, so you married your husband. Spoiler alert, he was
already cheating on you, which isn't surprising since he unconsensually
touched you on your first date. But he was cheating
on you from the go the get go.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
I didn't know that though, yep, I did not know
that right. So first of all, when we got married,
we had this pre wedding interview to go through the temple,
I had to get my temple recommend. The bishop cleared
us of that event. He's like, you guys are getting married,
so we're going to raise that you guys are repented
of that. And we had to have this pre wedding
interview so that we could get our temple recommends and

(45:17):
be able to go through the temple to get married.
And the bishop gave us some advice. He said, never
share any of your sexual past, if you've slept with
anyone else, if you've made out with anyone else, anything
that's happened in your past. You know, brother brother Brown,
you've repented of that because you've served your mission. So
anything that's happened prior to mission, that's behind you. And

(45:40):
you know, sister Fisher, anything that you've done, I'm sure
that you've repented up. And here's why this was his testification, Michael.
He said, you guys will be having sex with each
other and all you'll be thinking about is that other
guy that your wife slept with, or that other girl

(46:00):
that your husband slept with, and he says, I have
seen many a good marriage destroyed because they knew of
one another's sexual past. So we never even had a
single conversation around if you ever had sex with anybody,
are you a virgin? And I assumed that he was
a virgin because he had gone on a mission. So

(46:21):
the fact that he had done that to me in
the hot tibe was shocking, like, oh, say, it must
have really been tempting him, because why would he do that?
So I thought that I had been his first. I
thought that he was a virgin when we got married.
I did not know about the cheating while we were engaged.
And there was only one time in our marriage, which

(46:41):
was just the first few weeks after we got married,
that he came to me and well, brand new knew
he was right. We just went through the temple, We've
just moved in together. I'm twenty by then, and he
comes to me one day after work, tears rolling down
his face because I have to confess something to you today.
At lunch time, he had an side sales job. We
went to a strip club and I paid a stripper

(47:05):
for a sexual experience. I'm this little twenty year old
Mormon girl, totally sheltered. I didn't even know that strippers
were real. I thought it was just on movies and stuff.
I didn't know that they actually existed. I've never been
to a strip club. I'd never seen poor and I'd
never you know, this was prior to the internet, nineteen
ninety five, right, and it just completely crushed me, Like

(47:27):
what in the world. So I start crying and I'm like,
I have to divorce you, Like this is over. I
can't live with this. So I drive to my grandma's
house and I tell my grandma and I said, I
need a divorce. We've been married for three weeks now,
and you'll you know, you have a temple ceiling. There's

(47:48):
no divorce. You're sealed to Jason for time law, maternity.
You just got married than temple. I wanted a second opinion,
so I went and talked to our state president. Nineteen
ninety five, sat down with our state president. Said I
have to get divorced. And the state president said, well,
you can get a divorce, like you can go to
an attorney and you can get divorced, but you still
have a temple ceiling. And he says, Jenny, there's no

(48:09):
good missionary, who's going to want to marry you now?
Because you've already been married and you will still be
married to Jake for all of eternity. So another guy
couldn't take me to the temple and be sealed to me.
You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (48:25):
What he's saying is after I'm still married to Jake. Yeah,
after death, you you're gonna end up on your planet.
So even if you marry somebody, you guys have to
say audios in the afterlife. And they know this because
I'm not going to get into that, that's just talk.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
But so I spent one night at my grandma's house
and then I drove back home to Jake, and as
I remember, he went and like repented to the bishop,
and the bishop had him like say his prayers like
redescriptures a little bit more. And then for the next
twenty two years nothing, I saw nothing. And then twenty

(49:10):
two years into our marriage, I found out that he
had been cheating on me from the very beginning since
we were engaged. But only that one stripper did he
ever slip up on?

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Wow, that is I guess we'll just finish up the
story about your marriage, and then we'll kind of rewind
into your experiences as a white nationalist and white supremacist.
But so I'm thinking of the Valentine, which blew my mind.
Why don't we talk about that.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
For anyone who's listening. I just found this Valentine a
couple of years ago, and I've been talking about my
cheating husband and all the things he put me through.
And while I do have screenshots and voice recordings and
videos and other evidence, and when I found this Valentine card,

(50:02):
it just blew me away because it is just in
such I don't know, grizzly detail, the confession of a lunatic.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
And although we've said it three times, I'm going to
remind everyone one more time. This is a Valentine he
gave to his wife on Valentine's Day. Beautiful roses, ribbons.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
I love you always, Jake.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
Oh what a sweetheart.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
And what's funny is when I found this, I was
in a very different place. I had escaped domestic violince
about four years before. I found this in an old
rubber made box here a couple of years ago, and
at the time that he gave this to me, this
was the very last Valentine card that Jake ever gave me.
At the time I got this, I never thought anything
weird about it, Like Jake would do stuff all the time,

(50:56):
like a lot of the times I'd get a birthday
card or Valentine's herd of Mother's Day card, and it
would be a big confessional. You know, I'm sorry that
I'm such a creep for this reason or that reason.
I'm sorry, yell at you all the time. Sorry, I
moved out for the past six months. So they were
often confessionals. This was the one the year that I
discovered adultery and learned about his double life. But I

(51:18):
didn't think this was remarkable at the time. It's like, okay,
thanks honey, Like that's really sweet, thanks, thanks for apologizing, right,
And so I just stuck it in a box. And
this wasn't remarkable to me at the time. Two years ago,
when I found it again, it was extraordinarily remarkable.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
It's extraordinary, And there's a confession in there that you'll
read that just kind of blew my mind. It kind
of summarizes Jake, in my opinion, or at least how
a person could be like that. But go ahead, if
you don't mind. Can we What does it say do you?

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Jenny? I'm sorry. I cheated on you, I lied and deceived.
I've withdrawn love our entire lives. I've hurt you deep
should be deeply drives me crazy every time. I much
not even good. You suffer at my hand. I've destroyed
your innocent nature. I've failed as a husband. I didn't

(52:08):
offer the security you needed. I've caused major damage to
our family. I've worked against you. I didn't recognize you
as my equal partner. I never understood your needs. He's
just laundry listing. I don't know this confessional. Your needs
have gone and met for years. And this is my
favorite little bit, Michael. Most of all, you endure pain

(52:29):
and torment with me. I don't feel empathy, which leaves
you all alone, insecure and aluminum. And he underlines that,
and it's all capital letters. This is where I failed
most as your husband. I will always be forever deeply sorry.
You're an amazing Mercedes woman. I think he's meaning I'm
high value. I IQ successful, educated, classing, moral, well spoken,

(52:54):
feeding the homeless, volunteering in school, working your ass off
to always be incredibly amazing. I love you forever, Jake, Wow,
Happy Valentine's Day. Roses are red, violets are blue. I've
been cheating and cheating him.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Wow. So we both focused on the same thing, which
I felt like just so, I felt no empathy. I
feel what is the exact words, I feel no empathy? Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yeah, And anyone who wants to screenshot this if you're
watching on the video, and that really is like Jake
didn't feel empathy. I always had to explain to him,
like why is that baby crying? Or why am I
feeling this way or doing this thing? Jake has no
connection to other people's emotions. I used to say that

(53:45):
I had to teach him how to human.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
And I mean, that's it right there. And without having
any schooling in psychology, whatsoever is that psychopathic behavior? Who
exactly is it that has no empathy? Psychopaths?

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Right, I'm not allowed to legally state any of his
psychiatric diagnoses or the speculations from therapists who've worked with me,
with the two of us, but yeah, psychopaths don't have emotions,
aren't able to make assessments about the emotions of others either.

(54:23):
It is funny too, because this was February, and he says,
I love you forever. You know, I'm so sorry. I
will always be forever deeply sorry. Like, Michael, what does
the word forever mean? Yeah, he was cheating on me
at Yeah, he was still cheating on me at the time,
and by October of that year, I would catch him

(54:46):
picking up the nineteen year old prostitute. And that was
what ended our marriage, was that last nineteen year old prostitute.
And I know she was nineteen because that's what he
typed into the Google search bar, nineteen year old prostitutes Phoenix,
and then he got into a chat room found in
like how old are you? She said nineteen? So I
always say that on my channels. I'm like, yeah, our
marriage ended when he abandoned me for a nineteen year
old prostitute. People like, how do you know she was nineteen?

(55:08):
That was the Google search guys?

Speaker 1 (55:10):
How was the Google search special? He was fifty, he
was fifty, she was nineteen.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Yeah, So I forever doesn't mean the same thing to
Jake that it means to normal people.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
Since this is a political podcast and you and I
are of similar ideology, it just it seems so apropos
right now, that the psychopathic, unempathetic fifty year old man
was after teenage girls, which is dominating the news cycle
right now, and if anyone's listening years from now, because
this podcast will undoubtedly be one of the most famous

(55:48):
podcasts in the history of the world. We're talking Epstein
list or that's what I'm referring to, which is what's
hot in the news right now. Unbelievable. And you didn't
leave him at that time when he gave you that again,
is this the Mormonism? Yes, well, let's get into it.
You're a trad wife at that point.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
You have no.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Job experience at least I don't want to say you
have no skills or do you have no resume, but
you haven't been working, so it would be very difficult
for you to pick up the pieces at that point.
Was it that fear or was it the conditioning of
the role of a wife vis a villa husband due
to Mormon doctrine that kept you there or a combination.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
I have a really sad substack article. I'll lift the
paywall for your viewers. Am I able to give you
a link that you can put that in your destriction description.
I'll lift the paywall. In this one, I wrote in
my diary about the day that I found out that
Jake was cheating on me after twenty two years of marriage.
I was stunned. My whole world unraveled, and not just

(56:53):
cheating on me, like, oh, I've had an affair, but
he'd been picking up trafficked girls, and dozens and dozens,
by his estimation, between fifty and one hundred affairs of
the course of our marriage. And there's this really sad
moment where Jake is on a road trip and I've
just learned all of this, and I was standing in
the bedroom our luxury condo, folding my laundry and just thinking,

(57:17):
what do I do. Do I change the locks, do
I call him and tell him I'm going to file
for divorce? And what do I do? What's my path forward?
And as I was folding the laundry, it hit me
like a bag of bricks. I had never had a job,
I had no work experience. I had just survived in
a verian tumor. I was dependent on him for every

(57:38):
bite that I ate, for the food in the fridge
that was feeding the kids, for the car that I drove,
and even like this big beautiful bed. I had this
gorgeous bet, and it's like, if I leave Jake, then
I'm leaving the bed, the pillow, the sheets, my toothbrush.
He will take everything. He will end up with the kids.
I have no way to support myself, I have no

(58:00):
way out of this, and so instead for the next
three years. And I just did a videoing that on
my YouTube this week. There was this three year window
when I knew not only was I marritual and abusive
man without empathy who had harmed me and our children
and our pets and everyone he could get his hands
on for as long as I had known him, but

(58:23):
now I was married to this monster who had also
cheated on me in horrifying ways. Doing a little bit
of grizly details around that, around STDs and some things
that identify.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
I want them. I'm afraid of them, but I think
that it helps round out your story and complete it.
So let's have them.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
And ladies. This is also a really good time to say,
even if you're married, even if you're in a conservative
Christian type of relationship and you think that your husband
is exclusive to you. If I had had an annual
STD test when I went in for my physical then
I probably would have found out that he was cheating
on me just a couple of years in, but I

(59:06):
thought I had a yeast infection all one year and
it turned out that he had given me five STDs
because he was having unprotected sex with prostitutes off the street.
And this was during the time when I was recovering
from an ovarian tumor and a hospital quired superbacteria that
would actually almost take my life. I had a near

(59:27):
death experience. I was critically ill for several years, and
while I was trying to recover so I could be
here for my kids and just be a mom, he
was engaged in this dangerous behavior which would give me STDs.
He also put me at risk for HIV and C
two of his girls had known exposure to whether those
or were positive to those. And when I asked him

(59:50):
about it, during this time that I was discovering his
double life from that little window that I was stuck
with him for three years with nowhere to go, I
asked him, why would you have unprotected when you know
that I'm fighting for my life and Michael, this guy
right here, this, I feel no empathy. You struggle or
you're you're tormented with me, right. This man looks me

(01:00:13):
dead in the eyes, the mother of his children, his
wife of twenty two years, and he says, well, you
were already dying anyway. So I felt like if I
had hurried that along, I would have been doing favor.
And for three years I had to stay with this
man because I saund no way out.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
I am shocked.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
So it was.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
I thought I had my head around what a scumbag
he was, and then you said that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Speechless, while I was recovering from my tumor at my
parents' house, he had orgies in my bed. While I
was away, he bought me a new Mercedes that he
had actually bought so that he could pick up girls
and have sex in it because the seats laid down flat.

(01:01:11):
When I was discovering this stuff, I was speechless for months,
like literally.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Like I am so so sorry that you went through that,
and I'm so glad that you're out on the other
side now, obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
And he was in church every Sunday, every Sunday.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
And on the topic, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
On the topic of I know a lot of guys
like this. I know far too many of my husbands
or of my friends, my best friend's husbands, and people
in my own family that are like this on the
topic of Epstein Christian men, and I know that Epstein
wasn't Christian, but Christian men fetish I is a certain

(01:01:57):
type of woman, very young, very sweet, you know, the
church girl voice, very innocent, with the long, blowy hair,
and you know, the pink cheeks. There's no fetishizing of
like Grandma's people like Rosie O'Donnell. You know, like nobody's
fetishizing them within the Christian community. And unfortunately, I do

(01:02:22):
think that that leads to inappropriate behaviors. Like my Mormon husband,
he thought that a certain type of girl was attractive, young, sweet, naive,
innocent Mormon girls. He wasn't attracted to grown women. And
when I began to age, when I was in my
late thirties or the early forties, I was no longer

(01:02:43):
a tract up to him anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Yeah, this is I did an episode about trad wives
where it's just me talking, and I said something about
that where I was like, you're not like, you're so
into your husband, but your husband's only like these tradwives
on TikTok and Instagram. They're all twenty two, and it's like,
it's your husband is into that, Like they're not. They

(01:03:10):
don't love you for you, they love you for your
submissivenus and your youth and your prettiness, and they're going
to abandon you for someone who fits that bill when
you no longer fit it. It is an indictment to
some degree on the tradwife herself that she's allowed herself
into this situation sometimes, particularly these influencers. And I only

(01:03:31):
say because you know they're in there, that's they're literally
doing that. They're influencing other girls, so it makes it
easier to speak out against them because they're doing harm.
But it is such an indictment in my opinion, on
the husband of the tradwife, that that's what he's into.
Who doesn't, I mean whatever, who doesn't want an intellectual equal,
who doesn't want somebody to share this life with and

(01:03:54):
get and go through it with, Like I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Even serve me Christian men?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Yeah, it outs I mean, it's hard for me to
wrap my head around. It's very hard for me to
wrap my head around that reality that somebody would want that,
but reality dictates that that is something that guys are
into I feel bad for them to some degree, and
then again I want them all to you know, fall
off a cliff for being terrible people. But you know,

(01:04:24):
are they victimized as well by the Bible or the
teachings of the Mormon Church or society on the whole,
or culture or the boys will be boys mentality that
we all came up in. It's hard to say, And
it's also hard to care at that point, once you've
been crossed over and become a terrible human beings, it's

(01:04:45):
hard to say, well, he's a victim too, because he
grew up in a society that perpetuated this on to him.
But the fact of the matter is it's a vicious cycle.
And hopefully, I know you certainly are helping to break
that cycle. I hope I in some small way am
as well.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
I think there's a better way to be I have
to say. On that note, I love that Michael, like
we are. We're the cycle breakers here. When I was
in this culture conservative Christian community and living the trad
life life, I thought that it was the only path
to happiness. I thought, you know, I have the dream life.
This is this is how people are supposed to be
and the parts of it they worn't so dreaming. Why
I talked that up to Satan. Satan's tempting as he's

(01:05:25):
trying to make us stop. It's remarkable to me today,
seven years ago I left the religion first, and then
two weeks you're the douchebag of a husband. Every day
I wake up and it's like, I can't believe how
happy I am. Like I am unmarried. I'm happily partnered,
but I'm unmarried. I'm a working woman, fiercely independent, crazy
book feminist, and I'm so happy. I kind of wish

(01:05:47):
that I could go back and just give like a
little drop, a little video in the inbox of Jenny
in like twenty sixteen, nineteen ninety five, two thousand and two,
somewhere in there, like here's the future, here's the happiness
that you can have without the chokehold of this religious patriarchy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
Yeah, me too, trust me. I think about that time
machine all the time. Everybody does. If only I could
go back and warn the younger me against the traps
that lay ahead. But you know what, the time machine
doesn't exist. But we have plenty of time left in
this world. And you're making good and we're making right now.

(01:06:26):
And isn't that wonderful that you did escape that trap.
So let's get into a few of the other things
that Jenny is escaping from. You talk about the Christian
nationalism and the white nationalism or the white supremacy that
also came hand in hand. I think we can pretty

(01:06:49):
safely say that we can lay those at the doorstep
of Mormon teaching as well. But this was a mindset
that you were once in that you once you know,
you thought that way. So I think you're in North
Carolina at one point you posted a South Carolina South Carolina, uh,
and you posted a picture of yourself wearing a Confederate

(01:07:13):
flag pendant, and you talked openly about the fact that
that this was who you were at that time, and
this was the mentality that you had. I think we
could safely say that the Mormon Church at one time
taught that black people were the curse of Ham. I'm
not sure if that's.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
Caine and then the Curse of Ham.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
So yeah, that their black skin was a sign that
they were what affiliated with Satan and so uh, you
know that makes and and white people are what the
particularly American the white people are the chosen mind blowing
that this church is just still loud and proud. I mean,

(01:07:55):
then again, I'm Catholic. I came up Catholic and they
have the worst child abuse scandal in the history of
the world. At Catholicism seems to be growing, particularly in
the right wing right now. I can't believe how many
people JD. Vance has become Catholic. Candice Owens, they looked
at the Catholic Church and were like, hey, yeah, that
break me off a piece of that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
The Catholic Church doesn't openly teach people to be pedophiles,
though it doesn't teach people to groom children. The Mormon
Church taught me to be racist, and that that was
the ideal. The Book of Mormon says that the Lamanites,
who were supposedly the ancestors of the American Indians, that

(01:08:38):
they were cursed with the skin of blackness so that
the white people, and the quote from my Book of
Mormon is white and delightsome. The white and delightsome would
not be enticed by the people with the skin of blackness.
And I can remember being taught these concepts when it
was a three year old girl. I always post pictures
on my channel. This is me when I was three,

(01:08:59):
just for contact, because Michael, we have this picture of
people who become white supremacists. You're like in your college years, right,
like think you're in that like pot smoking, trying to
figure out who you are, a college type of era
of your life. And so you join some skinheads group
or you get mixed up and you know, whatever thing
is going on. But Idaho, in the back woods up there,

(01:09:19):
I was this little three year old girl when I
was learning that the Indians were brown skinned because they
followed Satan and they were cursed, and that I was white, delightsome,
and because I was born in nineteen seventy four, I
was born into a Mormon church where black people could
not go to the temple. They couldn't get married in
the temple, they couldn't become the bishop, they couldn't pass

(01:09:42):
the sacrament. The black people had to sit outside on
the bench during the priesthood meeting. And that was just
normal to me, like, yeah, well obviously they're cursed, Like come.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
On, and there were black people that would were Mormon
that would come and sit on the bench and oh, yeah,
I'm cursed. So but I'm still into this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
I just interviewed a really good friend of mine who
has been instrumental in me deconstructing my racism. He's been
in the ex Mormon community. His name Spencer. His dad
was the first Jamaican convert to the Mormon Church. So
he joined the church and they moved to Utah from Jamaica.
And his dad was totally happy, just sitting out in
the hallway, like, yeah, God cursed my lineage and that's fine,

(01:10:23):
I'll sit out in the hallway while all the white
people go. And that was just normal to him. So
I'm not a ton. They weren't a ton of black people,
but there were some I.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
Can't even get my head around that I can't even
get my head around that did they at least think
that they were going to get their own planet at
the end if they were Mormon, or what was the payoff?
What could possibly be the payoff for a black Mormon.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
So both the blacks and the Native Americans was the
same promise that if they joined the church and were
baptized and lived righteous lives, that they could eventually become
gods and goddesses, but they would also be turned white.
That was one of the teachings in the Mormon prophets
that Native Americans and Africans would be turned white in heaven,

(01:11:08):
which is really traumatizing. I just did an interview with
Spencer on my channel and that was one of the
really sad things to listen to, how that he was
taught as a child, growing up as a little Jamaican
Mormon boy, that your skin is brown because of the curse,
but don't worry because someday you'll be white. And he's like,
but I like being black, Like this, this is who

(01:11:30):
I am. This is my identity that I want to
be white.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Yeah, man, my head is spinning. So what was it
like for you though, as a young adult. I'm wondering, like,
when you saw like overtly racist stuff, did you agree
with it or were you of a different ilk like
like the KKK or the good Old Boys with the
Confederate flag on their car and their overt races and

(01:12:00):
their use of demeaning terms and things like that. Did
you associate with that or were you just did you
just believe that black people were cursed but they could
become white in the Kingdom of Heaven or whatever it is.
Did you affiliate with that did you Did that speak
to you in any way?

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
This is really hard to talk about. By the time
I was a teenager, young adult, and then an adult,
I was so deeply racist that I just felt like
that was Heavenly Father's plan, Like that wasn't me. But
if for instance, I've talked a lot about, I grew

(01:12:41):
up in the eighties, So Ethiopia was a big thing, right,
Like there was this huge famine and it was all
on the news. You know, we see what was going
on in Ethiopia all the time, and I believe etc.
All that, and I believed that that was part of
the curse, Like, yeah, well, God's cursing those people because
they're evil, they're satana, so that's kind of what they get. Yeah, duh.

(01:13:04):
And it kind of blunted me to compassion. I also
believed that any type of light and like inspiration, revelation
came only to righteous people through Heavenly Father. So for instance,
like the light bulb, at some inventing the light bulb,

(01:13:26):
that was because Heavenly Father revealed that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
True.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
I believed that the invention of the TV, the invention
of electricity, all of that was revelation Heavenly Father had
all of the knowledge and data, and he would reveal
to his righteous children. And I didn't think that black
people or Native Americans were capable of receiving any type
of revelation. That's why they were And I wanted to

(01:13:49):
say before these words come into my mouth, this is
not who I am today. But while I was a
white supremacist, I would think to myself, that's why you know,
Africa is such a hot That's why they were all
running around out there in the jungle in loincloths. That's
why the Native Americans never built complex civilizations, because they
were cursed. God didn't reveal any light knowledge. And I

(01:14:11):
believed from the time I was a young child, when
I was groomed into what I call America's friendliest white
supremacist cult, to the Mormon Church, I believed that people
with brown skin were not as smart as me, that
they were not as advanced as me, that they were
not as capable as me. Because I was white into

(01:14:32):
light and I was chosen, I was God's elect. I
was born into Mormon Church. It was white skin, blonde haircute.
I was multi generations of aldas, and I was righteous.
I went to the church all the time I got
married in the temple. I had this beautiful family. Obviously,
I was so much more righteous than anybody else. And
that's where that supremacy and that superiority comes in. I

(01:14:53):
looked down on people who were brown skinned for my
entire life until I started from the Norman Church.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
Wow. I mean, what a gift to be able to
walk away from that and free yourself from that prison
of that that those terrible thoughts. I mean, so I.

Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
Would have never I would have never dated anybody black,
because I wouldn't mix my seed was the word that
the scripture has used. And I did sneak in a
Mexican boyfriend when I was like fourteen, Dario Ramrez. He
was so hot, and my mom told my grandma that
I had this Mexican boyfriend. And my grandma called me

(01:15:40):
that night and she's like, your mom says that you
have a Mexican boyfriend, Jenny, my heart is broken. You
can't date a Mexican. They're cursed, so please break up
with him. And I did because it's like, oh yeah,
Mexicans because they're part Indians, so I can't date them.
So eugenics, I made sure that I married white boy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
So he asked about my sympathy for the KKK and
things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
We then moved to the South, so I'm an Arizona Gurley.
I'm already white supremacist. We moved to the South, and
I do and again, like I hate to talk about
these things, but I think it's important to dialogue about this.
I absolutely sympathized with some of our neighbors, with the clan.
Our neighbor Brian motor Lawn, he was the clan when
the shooting happened in South Carolina, and I went to

(01:16:30):
the country store that was run by like the grand
Wizard of our region who was clan, and I bought
up all the Dixie flags. And it's funny. I sent
my dad for his birthday a little like Dixie flag
tie pin. And I remember my family who didn't live
in the South kind of freaking out, like Jenny, this
is like, what the hell's going on with you with

(01:16:53):
this Dixie flag? And to me, it just made sense,
like we do have to protect our niche and from
the people who are cursed taking over. Man, Michael, I
hate talking about this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
I know you do, and stop the second you want
to stop.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
But can I give a little disclaimer on myself and
then if you have any questions about this. When I
left the church, this was one of the things that
I didn't even realize that I had to deconstruct. I
went straight into Christianity for almost five years, and there's
still the curse of Kan and Adam and Eve and
all of that stuff. And it wasn't until like I
was one of the pioneers of ex Mormon TikTok and
all of a sudden, I'm on TikTok and I have

(01:17:36):
hundreds and hundreds of ex Mormon creator friends and some
of them were black. And it wasn't until I started
to have conversations with the first ever black friends that
I'd ever had in my entire life about their experiences
within the church that I started to deconstruct and realize,
oh my God, like that's not okay to look down

(01:17:58):
on people just because of the color of their skin.
And then I started listening to some science so I
found this professor I can never remember she was like
Georgetown or Duke University or something like that, but just randomly,
like on Facebook, she had like classes that they kind
of broadcast. She do these lectures, and she was a geneticist,

(01:18:20):
So this was like two three years ago, and I
started listening to her lecture series and she was going
through how that we all came from the fertile Crescent
and then everybody was brown skin. And one day she
talked about the genetic mutation that was I think she
said six thousand years ago for the blonde hair, blue eyed,
and then the flat hair and white skin. And she's like, yeah,

(01:18:40):
this is the newest genetic mutation. We have some redheads
and then we have the blonde hair, blue eyed. As
people progressed further north, and this moment of realization that
everything that I had been taught my entire life by
my religion about the nature of the universe, like, oh,
all humans used to be brown because of the sun
as we developed around the equator, and my blonche ha

(01:19:04):
blue eye. I was not the descendant of a white
European Adam and Eve that was made in the image
of a white God and a white goddess Mother, which
is what the Mormon Church taught. I'm not part of
that pure race. We all start off brown. I'm actually
descended from people who you know, I'm as African as
anybody else. I'm just a mutation. That moment listening to

(01:19:24):
this lecture series is like, that's when it all fell
apart for me. That's the moment that white supremacy collapsed
for me.

Speaker 1 (01:19:30):
Wow, And that is such a great story and such
a great I mean that it is possible to reach
people and to change these long held beliefs. And you
just summarized what the problem with revealed truth is, Like
truth is not revealed. It's tough. It's hard to find
the truth. It takes data and evidence, and that if

(01:19:56):
you think you're getting truth by just you know, speaking
through empathy with a wizard in the sky, you're never
going to come up with the right answers. One thing
that I was a little bit curious about, which is
a side note, is just because as somebody who grew
up mostly in Boston and now lives in Los Angeles, California,
and we have certain stereotypes that I try and fight,

(01:20:17):
you know, in my life when you think about the
South and like I want to believe like the South
has changed. It's not like we believe it is. And
I have friends that you know, are very liberal and like,
fuck those racist Southerners. I'm like, no, I don't believe it,
but you said, like the Klan was all around you.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
We lived there until twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen. I'm an
East Coast girl and I'm Arizona almost my entire life,
and I was stunned by the blatant racism. I was
stunned by it. It was next level.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
And it's just still there. Huh.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
Maybe it wasn't there as we lived. We lived in
a little town called Camedon, Arkansas, and then we lived
said of Greenville, South Carolina. Greenville itself, you know, I
mean there were pockets where it was more so. But
we were out in the sticks in a little place
called Travelers Rest at thirty minutes away from North Carolina,
and everybody was racist, and they also hated Mormons. So

(01:21:18):
it was kind of like this double sword, like, oh, well,
I'm white, but I'm Mormons. So I kind of pretended
not to be as Mormon while I was living in
South Carolina.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
Yeah, I mean a lot of the I mean, having
debated many many a Christian in my day, they will
they are so quick to say like we're not a cult,
we're not crazy, We're not like those Mormons. No, they're nuts. Yeah,
just like no, there's all the same nuts, you're just
a different flavor. Yeah, the cashews, they're the you know, walnuts,

(01:21:51):
whatever it's you're all nuts. But but you are not
this person anymore. You are your life Take two, and
that is why you call yourself that online. And so
why don't we get into a little bit of that
that you are an advocate now and you are doing

(01:22:13):
you're doing the Lord's work, the atheist lord's work. Yeah,
so you were a Christian for five years after Mormon,
so baby steps, I guess. But although look as an atheist,
like I said, you're all nuts, I don't know that
that was any better, to be honest with you, But
now you actually as an atheist myself, I'm always so curious,

(01:22:37):
how did that come about? That you just said, Nah,
none of it, none of it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:22:43):
I know a lot of people who've had transitions, and again,
being on TikTok and the ex Mormon and ex religious
community for the past six plus years, I have so
many other creative friends. I've heard thousands of stories. I've
done so many podcasts and interviews with people, so I've
heard a lot of people, and it tends to be
people have little kinks in, you know, cracks in the

(01:23:03):
foundation of their faith. People put it as you have
a shelf. You know, I had the shelf. There's this
thing I didn't believe. I put it up on the shelf. Eventually,
there's so many things on the shelf that collapses. That's
not what happened to me. And I'm one of these
who if I do something, I'm going to do all
the way. I'm all in. And again like I lived
every aspect of Mormonism, I believed all of it. I

(01:23:25):
was a true believing, ultra orthodox member of the church.
And one Sunday after this time period where I found
out Jake was cheating on me, we've been separated and
we had just reconciled. It was just a couple of
weeks into us moving back in together. And I think
that in so many ways, I blame it on the

(01:23:48):
fact that I had had a therapist because for the
first time in my life, and during that time of
finding out that he was cheating on me and going
through all these stuff, all these things, my meant health
started to collapse. And I had a doctor who ordered
me to have a psych evaluation, and then I had
to start seeing a therapist. I was forced to see

(01:24:09):
a therapist, and this therapist taught me to kind of
listen to myself, you know, like actual use intuition and
self reflection. And it was the first time in my
life that such a concept had ever been introduced to me.
I always just felt like shit. I kind of operated
on a spectrum of dissociation to just depression because my

(01:24:33):
life was so difficult in so many ways. And then
I started seeing the therapist, and the therapists like, why
don't you actually listen to what your gut is telling Jenny?
And instead of praying about things and asking Jesus to
fix this, why don't we apply some critical thinking. And
for the first time in my life, he would sit
down and have me list things out, like, let's look

(01:24:53):
at the pros and cons being made to jig, Let's
look at the pros and cons of you not having
a job. Let's look at the pros and cons of
you looking all of your meals from scratch. And he
started to two things make me critically think. And then
the second thing was listen to my own gut. And
that's a very dangerous thing to teach a deeply devout
religious person, isn't it so? Jake and I are separated

(01:25:17):
and we have this horrible time, and then we moved
back in together. Everything is roses in fairy tales. Jake
has repented, Jesus is going to wash away all of
his cheating. He's not going to abuse me anymore. And
I don't have to mess up my life by getting divorced.
And so one Sunday we go to church. I have
nothing on myself, I have no doubts about Mormonism, and

(01:25:40):
the whole entire Mormon three hours of church was a
giant shit show. The first hour was sexist. It was
all of the women need to be tradwives, and for
the first time ever, that hit me funny. The second
hour was anti Semitic. Literally, the lesson in our Sunday
school class was the Holocaust happened because the Jews had
rejected Jesus Christ in the altem trip Cross, so that's

(01:26:02):
what they got. And the third hour, I that was
our Sunday school lesson that day. And Gilbert Arizona twenty
eighteen October said October eighth, twenty eighteen. The third hour
I had been sitting there for ten minutes, this little
twenty three year old teacher is teaching this lesson and

(01:26:23):
she introduces with this story about her sister in law
who's bisexual, and she's like, I'm so embarrassed because I
know she keeps them to church and she's wearing pants
and she's also bisexual. And she introduces the lesson, and
the lessonson is entitled The Evils of Homosexuality, And ironically,
I had always believed that homosexuality was wrong, and sitting
there in church that day, I think, like Michael, the

(01:26:47):
way that I describe it to all of my subscribers
is I think that we have this hate, this fascism
of this evil bucket, and once it gets filled up
as human beings, we can no longer take it. My
bucket full of bullshit reached the limit that day and

(01:27:10):
I just couldn't swim and hate anymore. And I sat
them that class like shaking and ten minutes and I
raised my hand and I was like, I think that
this lesson is so horrible. And I come to church
to learn how to love people because I'm really good
hating people. I don't need to come to church to
learn how to hate people. I come to church to
learn how to love people. This is not loving. I
don't think Jesus would support this. And I was forty

(01:27:31):
four years old. I was fifth generation, my kids were
seventh generation women. I said, I'm going to go get
my kids and I'm leaving the church today. And I
didn't even have a plan. It was such this like
emotional decision. And I walked out the door and I
texted Jake from like by the drinking fountain. I was like,
maybe by the drinking fountain. I just told him, I said,

(01:27:51):
if this was the first time Sunday that I'd ever
been to this church, I would never come back. This
is so hateful. Do you want to raise our kids
in this? And he's like no, And it's like, can
me either go get the kids? And we drove home.
And I've never been back to Mormon Church after forty
four years, never missing a Sunday, thousands and thousands of
days that I have attended Mormon Church, deeply devout, this
was my entire identity. That was it seven years ago

(01:28:14):
October twenty eighteen.

Speaker 1 (01:28:16):
Wow, I mean you must know that that is incredible
and the strength it takes to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
I mean that was the easy part. It was rebuilding
the life. It was a take too. That's the hard part, Michael.

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
I know, but you know what, that actually was the
hard part for a lot of people too, particularly to
do it publicly, to raise your hand yeah and say
I think I don't know. I mean, I'm not I
don't know that I was in that situation. I fell
away from my remer.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
I'm shy. That was hard.

Speaker 1 (01:28:42):
Yeah, And that's why I'm saying you are brave, you
are you are my hero. I'm like, I'm so so
impressed with everything you've said so far and your ability
to talk about like the person you were back then,
and the fact that you were able to just raise
your hand and say, and it's such an such a
great statement. I don't need help learning to hate like

(01:29:05):
and as somebody who appreciates science as tribal beings, you know,
this is something that's kind of in us and we
don't need help with it. Hate. Hate hate comes natural.
Love you have to work at. And you were strong
and raised your hand and you said I'm done, and
you said it publicly and you walked out. I mean,
that is that is so admirable.

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
Thank you. I still remember like I can close my
eyes and picture driving to church that morning. My life
was in such a precarious position. I'd had this cheating husband,
he had lived out of state for me for a
couple of years, and we had just moved back in together,
and I was just I was kind of treading water
and my expectation going to church that day. I was

(01:29:51):
going because, oh, I want to hear some amazing music
and inspiring message, and just thinking I'm doing this so
that three hours from now I can come home feeling
filled up, like my cup is going to be overflowing
with love, and instead my bullshit bucket got filled up
and it wasn't the love and the light and the
inspiration that I had needed it so desperately to be.

(01:30:15):
And just having that awareness too, of my therapist making
me look at how I felt in search certain situations,
I think was really important because there may have been
a day that I would have just thought, well, Satan
is trying to tempt me to leave church, or Satan
is trying to make me unhappy with this, and I
would have just said a little prayer and helped Jesus
to make me get into lying with what was being said.

(01:30:37):
A really dangerous thing too that had happened was I
had made friends with some lesbians. So and it was accidental.
I've never talked about this anywhere, but I started a
little doTerra business. It's a multi level marketing essential oils
company that a friend had gotten me into. You know,
I was child wife, I didn't have a job, but

(01:30:58):
I had this little essential oil business and I kept
having lesbians sign up in my downline. I wasn't marketing
to the lesbians, but I had customers and some of
their friends were lesbians. So I ended up with a
team of the essential oils reps that were almost fifty
percent lesbian, right, and hearing this little Mormon girl who

(01:31:19):
thinks that homosexuality is of the devil, And we start
going to conventions together, and we start doing massage training
and a Roman therapy training together. And they had been
boogeymant right, like everyone had taught me that days and
lesbians were the biggest boogeyman out there. And as I
started spending time inadvertently, It's not like I had gone
out of my way to make these friendships. They just

(01:31:40):
signed up and I couldn't make them go to somebody
else's you know, downline, and they were some of the kindest,
most beautiful, delightful people I'd ever met in my life.
And in part not just you know, not because lesbians
are better than everybody, although maybe they are, but because

(01:32:01):
I think that in that era, you know, in the
early two thousands, mid two thousands, to come out as
lesbian and be married and some of them had children
and staff, you really have to know who you are.
You have to be a deeply introspective and grounded person,
and they were. This my huge DONTEA team of lesbians
was just truly grounded and insightful people. So that day,

(01:32:25):
sitting in that class, I actually had a comparison point.
I had a team of lesbians who were remarkable human beings.
I had this little Mormon teacher who was teaching that
homosexuals are the most satanic thing in the world. And
that comparison point in a way, made my brain explode.
So you can't keep people in a cult when you

(01:32:45):
don't have walls and they're out there in the world
and they're actually making friends with autooliberals, feminists, lesbians.

Speaker 1 (01:32:51):
What next, Yeah, lesbians will save the world or lesbians,
I say, I love that. But that so that was
walking away from Mormon just out of curiosity. When was
it that you walked away from religion altogether? Do you
remember that moment? Was there a moment or was that
a slow, gradual walk away.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
I think I was afraid to leave religion altogether. So
the next week, the week after that, I was in
a Christian church with Jake and it's like, Okay, the
Book of Mormon's been lying to me. Jesus is real.
Now I get to have a true relationship with Jesus.
But I had already learned to critically think, and unfortunately,
as I was deconstructing Mormonism, then I'd go to Christian

(01:33:36):
church and we'd have Bible study and it's like, oh uh, well,
if I really apply my critically thinking and bringing to this,
then you know, I don't think the flood could have
really happened. There's no evidence for Adam and Eve. And
then again, unfortunately for Mormon me, for Christian me, I
started reading science and the actual data around the creation

(01:33:56):
of the world and evolution, and you know, everything everything
denoted that the Bible cannot possibly be correct. And more
than anything, I just had this inner voice that told
me that I have no reason to listen to some
man made thing that tells me what I should be
thinking or where I'm going to go after I die.
An interesting thing about me is that I did have

(01:34:17):
a near death experience while I was fighting an ovarian tumor.
It was actually my six year now my twelve year
anniversary yesterday of the day that I temporarily died. Had
a near death experience, and not a lot of people
have indes. I had a secondary indie where I thought
that I saw things outside of the hospital room and stuff.
Not a lot of people have indes and then become atheists.

(01:34:37):
But my indie actually made me more convinced than ever
that there's not some divine mind in the sky. So
I think just deconstructing as I deconstructed everything and applied
critical thinking to the Bible and listened to my inner voice.
But towards the end, I was going to Christian church

(01:34:59):
hoping that it was true, in part because I have
a beautiful Christian partner and I wanted to be Christian
for him so bad. It would have just made it
so easy. I fell in love after my divorce. Kevin
and I have been together We've had a remarkable relationship.
He's such a kind man, and I wanted us to
be Christian together. But I was going to church and

(01:35:20):
just feeling like such a sense of dissociation and from
that perspective of othering and making people into boogeymen. Even
the nicest of Christian churches. Every Sunday, you're sitting there
talking about somebody who's going to hell, somebody who's not
as good as you, somebody that we need to be
the light on the hill for. I don't particularly think

(01:35:40):
that I should be a light on a hill for anybody. Yeah,
So it's just all kind of fizzled. And then we
had to run in with my son's Christian school, and
it's like it's time for me to just suffertice completely
and coming out atheist was Michael's rough?

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (01:36:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:36:02):
I mean yeah, you're still in. I mean you posted
a video not long ago of you at church and
you said, like, you know, loud and proud atheist at church,
and you were digging it. You were sway into the
song that was your partner up on stage performing music.

Speaker 2 (01:36:16):
So obviously you know how many hours of therapy I've
had to have to be able to walk in the
doors of those church again.

Speaker 1 (01:36:23):
Oh wow. So coming out as atheist was rough whate
for not just so, I mean, yeah, I uh. I
had an aunt who had cancer and was a beloved
aunt of mine who saw that I listed myself as
atheist on Facebook some years ago, and she called me

(01:36:44):
up and said that, you know, it was her dying
wish that I not be atheist anymore. So I took
it off of my Facebook page because I'm not I'm
not going to torture some person that I love if
it's hurting them that much. And all I did was
remove where it said you know, a religion atheist And
I just just said nothing now. And she called me
up and said, thank you for not being an atheist anymore.

(01:37:06):
I'm like, that's not not quite how it works. Facebook
isn't the determinant, but good enough. But it's not like
a relationship status, right, yeah, but my relationship with Jesus
you could say that. But so, I you know, I know,
you're still in a relationship with a Christian. But how

(01:37:27):
was it just out of curiosity? How was it difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:37:30):
The relationship with hearts? And I finally came clean to
Kevin that I no longer believed in Jesus, And he's like,
what do you mean? Like you're just not feeling like
you're just your testimony is not as strong. You just
feel like you need to go to church more. And
it's like, I think it's all bullshit. I burned my
Bible last week. I'm never reading it again. I won't

(01:37:50):
go to church anymore. And I believe Jesus was fake,
the flood was fake. Aademy. You know, I just laid
it all out here's where I am, so you know
everything read. I barely made it through that. It crushed him.
He saw me differently, and it's taken, you know, two
and a half years of work for us to come

(01:38:13):
to a place where he doesn't think I'm going to
hell and I don't think he's nuts for being Christian. Right,
So my relationship was really difficult. I had already lost
all of my Mormon community when I left the Mormon church. So, Michael,
I have not seen my mom, my dad, anybody for
seven years. The last time I saw my mom, I
was Mormon. My entire family shunned me. Pioneering ex Mormon

(01:38:36):
TikTok is not a good way to be popular with
Mormon fans and families, so those who still want to
have any type relationship with me. Once I started talking
about the Momon church, all dropped me like a hot potato.
So I had lost everybody, and I had replaced that
community with my Christian community. And then when I said
I don't believe in Jesus, I lost everybody. And it's

(01:38:58):
funny my Mormon and some of them are like, well,
at least Chinese Christian, but then when you go from
Christian to atheists, the Christians are lying your its to
the double you know. So that was really hard. And
my partner works at a Christian school, so he had
families who were like, he can't work here anymore because

(01:39:19):
his wife is an atheist. You know, she's promoting satan
And it's like Satanism and atheism those are not Those
are very distinctively different worldviews. I went through time period
where I was waking up and on my personal Facebook
pages and like my emails and stuff. I had families
from the school and families from the church who were
sending me these horrible emails and letters and stalking me

(01:39:44):
and running into people around town who had things to
say about me walking away from Jesus. The most awkward
was a woman who was kind of friendly towards me,
but she just stopped me. We were at fries one day.
We're at this grocery store here, and she hadn't seen
me a church. I know she'd heard that I had

(01:40:04):
left the Christian church, and she asked us she could
pray with me. She's like, can I just hold your
hand and can we pray together? Can I pray for
Jesus to come back into your heart? And I said
absolutely not, Thank you so much, Patty Bin, I'm not
doing that, wow, And she was furious.

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
So yeah, I've had a lot of Christians pray over
me in the last few years since I started hosting
an atheist podcast. I just want to quickly point out
because I've said it on the show before, but that
was such an perfect example of it. Whenever I'm talking
with religious people and they say that homosexuality is unnatural,

(01:40:42):
and I always say, you know, well, a, no, it's not.
Look at the Animal Kingdom, clearly, it's everywhere. But I
always say, what is unnatural is a parent taking a
child they love and pushing them out of their life
because of who they love in the case of a
gay person, or even because they stopped believing and god like,
that's unnatural. Parents shunning children for such minor things like

(01:41:07):
what they believe. It's it's not an action, it's you're
still the same person. You're still the good person that
you always were, and you're still their daughter. And the
fact that they would shun you, that is the poison
of religion right there.

Speaker 2 (01:41:23):
My mom wrote a letter, put it in the mail,
typed it out, put a stamp on it. Sent it
to me. You're no longer my daughter, seeing what you
do on TikTok, the way you fight against the church.
You're burning all your bridges with your family. Have a
nice life. I never want to see you again. So
my children have not had grandparents. I have not had parents.
All the things that I went through after my divorce,

(01:41:45):
the homelessness, sleeping in my car, I lost everybody. And
you know, it's one thing, like it's kind of funny
to me if I'm in a grocery store when somebody
comes up and says, let me broth with you, that
I can laugh at. But it's the way that everybody
ghosted me. It's the absolute loss of the community. I've
gone through surgeries, I've gone through struggles, We've had, you know,

(01:42:05):
all kinds of challenges, and we are alone. I am
completely alone. I don't have anyone that I can turn to,
and that loss of community has been the hardest thing.
That's that's the bit that I haven't completely rebuilt back.
I am making more friends now, making sure all of
them are not Christians that are just trying to convert me.
But yeah, that's that's a real struggle of leaving Christianity.

(01:42:28):
But I do have to say that that transition, when
I finally stopped trying to figure out who God was
and where I'm going after I die, where I came from,
what it all means, When I finally literally just plunged
into the nihilistic void, you know, maybe it's utterly meaningless.
I found more freedom and happiness than I've ever had

(01:42:49):
in my entire life.

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
Me too, Me too, and which gets me too. I
guess we can kind of close on this because you
and I talked recently and you're friends with Brittany Hartley,
who we had on the show recently.

Speaker 2 (01:43:04):
Oh, I am obsessed with Brittany. I love her. I
make all of everybody has to read her book, No
Nonsense Tuality.

Speaker 1 (01:43:10):
She's fantastic. But she and I discussed, you know, is
religion good for society, whether or not it's true, and
she made an argument that it is. And one of
the things is community, and you know, and that the
atheistic world doesn't have that community, the every Sunday and
and all that stuff. And you made a point of sayings,
by the way, that's what she said. You said, by

(01:43:33):
the way, And even after everything you went through leaving
religion and how difficult it was, you made a point
of writing to me and saying, by the way, I
think Britney's wrong. The world is better off without religion.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
All of the data, all of the studies. And I
love Britty and I think that her IQ is at
least ten points higher than my, and she's extremely well studied.
She knows what she's talking about. So I don't ever
want to discredit Brittany, and I do just want to
share my viewpoint on the data that she talks about
and the other people like her discuss. It's like if

(01:44:08):
we wanted to learn about elephants, and we were going
to the zoo to learn about elephants, and let's say,
elephants have only existed in zoos. For the next sixty
thousand years, we didn't have any wild elephants anymore, and
we were studying how they behave in certain enclosures versus
other enclosures, and what type of zoo food they like

(01:44:28):
to eat versus not eating. When you're studying elephants and zoos,
you're not truly studying the nature of elephants. All of
the data, all of the studies around the impact of
religion on humans only studies the impact of humans. And
once we have civilized, once we've had great technology of

(01:44:50):
written language and paper and things that we can actually
glean information from past people, but we're not able to
actually go back into a time before civilization hijacked humans.
And when humans began to create religion, then we also
saw the decay of tribes. We moved from small tribes

(01:45:12):
into larger civilizations where we had stratification and status, and
you know, then totalitarian leaders that were ruling everybody's lives
and you know, creating human sacrifices and war and all
kinds of things like that. So I certainly think that
in societies where our tribes have been hijacked where we

(01:45:33):
have widespread tribal decay, and we live in this structure
with the stratification and status, and those leaders at the
top have a lot of power. That religion does make
our lives better. In the United States of America right now,
I don't know a lot of my neighbors, and my
family is all spread out. Intergenerational connections have been corroded

(01:45:53):
by our late stage industrialized capitalistic system. And so yeah,
going to church might make my life a little bit better.
My argument against the argument for religion making their lives
better is that in a time prior to all of that,
and we still had cohesive tribes in a time that
we don't have any research for that. There's no writings

(01:46:14):
that there's no record of that humans did better without religion.
I think that we can exist in truth and happiness
and peace the way that any other creature does. The
squirrels are little Arizonader ground squirrels. They don't have a Bible.
They don't believe in a god that we know of.
The rattlesnakes, the bearsing and some of the more advanced

(01:46:34):
creatures have no evidence of believing in a higher power,
and they are happy and satisfied. I don't think that
the fact that modern people seem to exhibit more happiness
within a religious structure means that humans are designed to
live within religious structure. What we need to do is
we need to knock it all down. We need to

(01:46:55):
recreate those close, organic, natural connections. And in many ways
religion has supplanted that. Religion has pushed tribes out, and
that is what it did as religion spread around the world,
Like look at what Christianity did across Europe. They obliterated
all tribal structure and replaced that with the church, replace

(01:47:16):
that with the priests, and they were making many bye
people supplanting their tribes.

Speaker 1 (01:47:24):
Wow, you did it again. You blew my mind again
in this episode. That elephant analogy was so good, and
it really the minute you started. I was like, of course,
of course, and of course because of an egomaniac. I
was like, why didn't I think of that?

Speaker 2 (01:47:39):
But you'll think of something better.

Speaker 1 (01:47:42):
No, that was fantastic, and you've been just such a
fantastic guest. Do you want to remind everyone where they
can find you? You're on you have a sub stack,
and everything is life, take too.

Speaker 2 (01:47:52):
Correct, Everything is life take too, So find me over
on YouTube. That's where I'm doing most of my content
right now. I have some incredible guests over there. I
need to have you on because I'd love to hear
your life, take too. I'd love to know more about your.

Speaker 1 (01:48:03):
Story and how you got I would be honored.

Speaker 2 (01:48:06):
That'd be so fun. Maybe we can do a little swappero.
So I'm over on YouTube. I do some YouTube lives.
I also have some documentaries. I can give you links,
and my substack is just a nice place for me
to write. I do poetry, I do essays. I write
about some of the things that I don't necessarily feel
like sharing with the general public. So my substack is

(01:48:28):
more of a deep dive into some of the topics
around adultery, white supremacy, and things like that, so I
can just put it out on the page instead of
having to do a video.

Speaker 1 (01:48:36):
Excellent, Jenny Gage, an absolute honor, What an amazing episode.
Thank you, What an amazing guest, and what an amazing person.
I mean, really, your bravery and your ability to talk
about these things is it's inspirational for me. So thank you,
not just for coming on the show, but thank you
for moving me and for inspiring me.

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):
Thanks for everything that you do. I think it's important
for us to realize that there is definitely a war
going on, and not a battle of good me. Well,
it's not Satan's minions, but there are certainly ideologies and
ways that different individuals envision the future of America and
of the world. And I'm always very conscious of the

(01:49:20):
fact that there was no God or Jesus who's going
to receive us. All we right now, you and I,
all of the people listening, we are literally writing the future.
The world that our children are going to grow up
in is in our hands. And as we put that
pinned paper and write out what the future is, we
do have to realize that we are in a war
against people who very viciously want to keep the white supremacy,

(01:49:44):
want to keep religion, want to keep the control, want
to keep people very much immersed in some ideology that
has proven to be quite toxic. So we have to fight.
We have to fight with our words, we have to
fight with our hearts. We have to do everything that
we can to turn this tide. So I appreciate everything
that you do. I think your channel is an incredible

(01:50:04):
instrument for.

Speaker 1 (01:50:05):
Change, Thank you Jenny. I look forward to our next
engagement