Under the Banner of Heaven and far-right extremism in later 1900's Mormonism.

So I'm loving the way Under the Banner of Heaven is tying the violent extremism of Mormonism's founders to the Lafferty murder, but what I've yet to see is the series pointing to the influence of prophets contemporary to the Lafferty's--specifically Ezra Taft Benson who was President of the Quorum of the Twelve the year of this murder.

Most of the Lafferty boys were born in the 1940's. During their teens & early 20's (the 1960's) ~75% of Benson's General Conference talks were on a far-right/ constitutionalist/US. exceptionalist/libertarian political topics.

In the decades between the Lafferty brothers' births & the 1884 murder, W. Cleon Skousen taught religion (mixed with far-right politics) for 15 yrs at BYU, and wrote different books combining far-right politics and Mormon history. Skousen was also chief of SLC police during the Lafferty's teen years.

Skousen and Benson were friends and followers of the far-right, anti-communist, constitutionalist hate group--the John Birch Society.

Beginning in 1967, 17 yrs before the Lafferty murder, Skousen also founded the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS). Skousen's NCCS still exists and is hugely influential to far-right Mormon activists & politicians like the Bundys, Glenn Beck, Orrin Hatch, & Mike Lee.

“No one is better qualified to discuss the threat to this nation from communism.” -Ronald Reanan, United States President

His books are popular among conservative politicians broadly thanks to Glenn Beck. Orrin Hatch eulogized Skousen (an early contributor to Hatch's campaigns) from the senate floor. Ben Carson marks Skousen’s book, "The Naked Communist" as one of his favorites. Carson liked it so much he even plagiarized from it when writing his own book. Ezra Taft Benson told Mormons from the General Conference pulpit that they should all read Skousen's "The Naked Communist" in tandem with the church's official pamphlet on communism. 

"According to the NCCS, the founding of the United States was a divine miracle. As such, the NCCS worldview and program are based on two major pillars: (1) understanding the divine guidance that has allowed the United States to thrive and (2) rejecting what it views as the sometimes tyrannical or sinful deviations of the modern U.S. federal government from that divine mold. Skousen's NCCS follows Mormon ideology that the founding of the US was a divine miracle & that it is up to Mormon to save the constitution when it is "hanging as if by a thread'" because of modern deviations from the founding purposes.

This supposed divinity of US constitutional & Mormon originalism is what led the Lafferty's & leads the Bundys & DezNats to radical extremism & justifies their violent, patriarchal white-settler-suprmacist, US-exceptionalist beliefs and actions.

Obsessing over the divinity of the violently white-supremacist founding fathers of both the U.S. & Mormonism is inherently tied.