It's a small, lightweight keychain with a message: tax the rich.Poverty is a policy choice, not a personal choice. We can end poverty. We should start with taxing the rich.Public domain for your u...

The Official U.S. Congressional website of Bonnie Watson Coleman

When I first started doing this work, I was already aware of the horrors of the U.S. So when I learned that Mormons actively fought against the U.S. I got excited that I may come from a people who fought against Imperialism, settler-colonialism, and genocide. According to the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s prophecies Euro-Mormons were meant to ally with converted Indigenous peoples to overthrow the U.S. Even the first civil war here was fought between Mormons and the U.S. But unfortunately, I only had a part of the story. As I learned the rest, I realized my ancestors were fighting the U.S. not against the violences of white-Christian-supremacist domination, but because they wanted to be the ones ruling this system of white-Christian-supremacist domination. Mormons weren’t persecuted by the U.S. so much as they picked a fight with them over who should rule this land and they lost. When Northern-European-U.S.ian Mormons were rendered non-white by their fellow Euro-U.S.ian protestants and white-supremacy was weaponized against them, did they realize the flaws of white-supremacy and band with other racialized groups to fight against the U.S.’s white-supremacist violences? No. First, rather than arguing against white-supremacist eugenics, they argued that Mormonism’s classist, ableist, patriarchal, white-Christian-supremacist system of polygyny was in fact a better way to build a “superior race of men and … purer state of society.” Then, over a few decades, they fully assimilated to WASP-culture and over the next century became the model of WASP-y U.S. culture. So, if any reader here is waiting and wanting for the Mormon church to show up against this iteration of U.S.-white-Christian-nationalist fascism, you may exhale because that won’t happen. And IF they ever did, it would be to displace the U.S. government and fulfill their founding goal of taking over domination of this land in order to establish a white-Mormon-nationalist state on stolen Indigenous lands, to fulfill their Zionist prophecies.