38.1. Ecosystem

When I decided to write my first book about a hyper-conservative subsection of Mormon culture, a question many people asked me was something to the effect of “why did you choose to write your first book about this?”

This summer has offered an extended answer to that question. It was the season parts of the fringe ecosystem that I wrote about in When the Moon Turns to Blood began to enter the mainstream. When? The day the Tim Ballard-inspired movie Sound of Freedom hit big screens across America, pushing a story The Nation called a “didactic vision of a demonic global network of powerful child predators [that] keys directly into QAnon folklore—and how the ironclad moral certainty of Ballard and his allies reflects back the deliriums of apocalyptic redemption now convulsing the conspiracy-minded American right.”