OMG. I cannot emphasize how evil the Kingston Group - Davis County Cooperative Society is. This group is way worse than Warren Jeff’s FLDS - they are essentially running a massive economic and sexual slavery operation in the Western US. I did some research on them a while back for a novel I’m thinking about maybe writing someday and wrote the following article. It’s long but I’m going to paste it here, as you read it remember Trump’s are associating with these people. Crime families stick together.
There is a polygamous cult in Utah known as The Kingston Group., with an estimated 3500 members. Their church is The Latter Day Church of Christ and their business arm is the rather innocuous sounding Davis County Cooperative Society. They refer to themselves as ( no shit) The Order. They are very hierarchical, the men in the group all carry numerical rank —- not just the leaders, someone might be 74. Or 106. And they all pray in the direction of “The Home Place” 3 times a day.
Here’s a pretty good article with lots of background information.
They do not live in compounds or wear archaic clothing. They live scattered throughout the greater Salt Lake City area, wearing modern clothing, hiding in plain sight.They have white supremacist beliefs, believing ( as do many fundamentalists) that dark skin is a mark of sin. They believe in purifying bloodlines through incest. They claim not to engage in child marriages and that claim is suspect. However, most women are “spiritually married” to an older male relative as soon as they reach the age of consent and they have been groomed from birth for this role.
They are indoctrinated from birth to believe that The Order is everything and that the path to God and salvation lies in subjugating oneself to the will of the of the Order. They practice consecration, the practice of turning over of all of one’s worldly possessions to the Order.
The Kingston Group owns a vast network of mainstream businesses in Utah and the surrounding states, including a large restaurant supply chain. Members of the cult are assigned to work for one of these businesses. It is hard to untangle their holdings and no one really knows how many businesses they run although this article by Brooke Adams features an incomplete list of 47.
They are paid a pittance for their work and they aren’t paid at all in the traditional sense. ALL their pay is turned over to the Davis County Cooperative Society and it is used to fund an account that can be only used at the businesses owned by the Order ( the company store, as it were). They are taught from a very young age that if the Order doesn’t have it, they don’t need it. And if the Order doesn’t think you need something, you aren’t getting it,
This economic slavery is often used punitively and members that are out of favor are often given crappy jobs as punishment not only for their own acts but for the sins of their family members, in a dynamic that resembles North Korea more than anything else. One of the rare defectors left after he realized that his children would be locked into a life of minimum wage labor in the cult’s coal mine - just like he was, because his mother had briefly left the Order and married an outsider when she was young.
The cult doesn’t doom everyone to a live of minimum wage labor, some are gifted with a higher education to perform professional services and legal work for the Order. But the cult decides and many women live their lives as low wage baby machines , working low skill jobs for no money, servicing an older “husband” who stops by their crappy apartment few times a week, and popping out child after child to increase the power and influence of the Order.
But the leaders are educated and well-spoken, issuing statements such as this
Which is what makes them so much more evil than some of the other cult leaders. And that they are running a vast economic empire built on slave labor in the 21st century USA.
Utah has a fairly long standing policy of not prosecuting polygamy as a crime, and the portions of the bigamy statue that applied to plural marriage have been ruled unconstitutional. The argument is that the “spiritual” multiple marriages have absolutely no legal standing and it would be discriminatory to prosecute people for adultery or cohabitation simply because they are doing it for religious purposes.
So they can’t really arrest these guys for polygamy and they are so secretive that it’s really hard to nail them for other crimes. Every now and then they get them, there was a large fraud prosecution for a Kingston company this summer. Salt Lake TribuneFeds move to seize homes and businesses from polygamous Kingston Group as fraud defendants plead guilty
But, by and large, they get away with it .
show coming…