Utah? Who Knew?

Me, that's who.

I made a really great assessment of the laws pertaining to Covid recommendations and guidelines in this article I published in December of 2021, titled, My Most Important Revelation. In it, I noted that it was not merely the lack of strict laws forcing compliance with guidelines and recommendations made in the name of public health in regard to the latest “pandemic” that made a location more livable. Nor, I argued, was it the laws in place to protect the public from private businesses or agencies enforcing the restrictive codes and recommendations in compliance with guidelines that made a place more livable. Rather, I surmised it was the attitudes of the public, the general and generationally acquired mindsets of the majority of people in a region about personal responsibility, self-reliance and distrust in government that made a place more livable.

This is why I could tell my kids in good faith that I was living in the top state nationwide for freedom after listening to the perspectives and frustrations of others around the country on their own state (pun intended) of affairs.

Recently, a study was published by The Committee to Unleash Prosperity that completely validates all my aforementioned thoughts on the superiority of the people who inhabit the state of Utah. They found Utah to be the top ranked in all 50 sates by a large margin in the areas of health outcomes, economic performance throughout the pandemic, and impact on education. To read the full study click here.

Now, Utah has some really wacky politicians. We have made national headlines lately based on our ridiculous Governor Cox (locally nicknamed, Caillou by the group Defending Utah after the annoyingly, whiney title character with the bald head from the cartoon featured on PBS Kids) in response to various identity politics issues including a racist scholarship program and his veto on a state bill banning men from women’s sports. We also have acquired the mostly benign affliction called “Mitt Romney” in Utah government who recently referred to Tulsi Gabbard and Tucker Carlson as “traitors” for their pragmatic views on the interventionist actions of the U.S. government in foreign affairs, namely those of Russia and Ukraine. You can read a reasoned assessment of that spectacle in Glenn Greenwald’s Substack.

I think this all goes to show how little politicians either represent or control the public of Utah. The most vocal group of proponents of these absurd politicians live in the heart of one of the two most prosperous towns in Utah: Salt Lake City and Park City. These people often work for the handful of news agencies, the local county health departments or attend the local universities. On social media and media in general, they are loud, and dare I say, completely ignorant. If one followed the news that selectively features these proponents of the meat heads in office, one would start to assume our state was akin to Illinois, California or New York City. However, a quick stroll into towns outside of these two hotbeds for human domination, even 5 minutes out of Salt Lake City, in the local Walmart of West Valley City within Salt Lake County, one could find maskless customers defying the state mandates that were widely ignored in outskirt counties throughout the state for the six months they were instated starting October 30th, 2020.

The Church (this is how they refer to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Utah, and it is capitalized as a direct agency of God) is another group with strong ties to the politics of the state. The Church interests are also closely tied to the pharmaceutical industries as The Church holds close to two billion dollars in pharmaceutical and biotech stock shares (that we know of) as of February 2020. According to The Salt Lake Tribune from an article dated March 7th, 2020, “For the first time, the LDS Church’s biggest investment fund has disclosed its Wall Street holdings, revealing $37.8 billion in stocks and mutual funds.” The investment fund, called “Ensign Peak Investors” submitted a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealing nearly half of their $100 billion in holdings. I had a fun afternoon tallying up how many of the shares belonged to those in biotech and pharmaceuticals. I wasn’t familiar with all the various corporate names of biotech businesses, so I may have missed some. I personally found over 1.8 billion dollars by my calculations. With the last two years of LDS wards (aka Mormon sanctuaries) erecting vaccine stations on their front lawns (as witnessed by myself personally driving past one at our local ward), one might reasonably wonder how many more pharmaceutical shares The Church acquired over the course of the pandemic.

We’ve seen that it’s not just the non-LDS, Salt Lake Gay-borhood (that’s their name for Sugar House, not mine) residents pushing for militant, authoritarian takeover of every day life of the average Utahn. Before you ask, yes, we’re called Utahns. Is it pronounced with two, two and a half or three syllables? That’s a fun exercise. Nevertheless, the gay people I know personally from the “Gayborhood,” don’t particularly like the government up in their business either. So, you can’t put all or even most of this Covid hysteria on them. Not all the gay people in Utah are communist leaning, indoctrinated college students.

Another little known piece of interest about what makes Utah self-reliant, aside from those I mentioned in my other article, is that a lot of the LDS Church women have an extremely metaphysical bent on their spiritual practice. While often maligned by the non-LDS and the legalist LDS alike, their faith in spiritual healing, employing variations of meditation, crystals, tarot, herbology, massage, flower essences, gifts of spiritual sight, clairvoyance, yoga, essential oils, sound baths, reiki healing and other non-allopathic modalities, has made them distrustful and even immune to hysteria based, health crises. For health issues, they have managed to strike a balance between allopathic and non-allopathic modalities, not rebuking either in totality. Since it has served them by their experience in lowering medical costs and overcoming an over reliance and even addiction to pharmaceutical products, many of them embrace the value of stepping outside the medical industrial complex for answers to common or even not so common health concerns.

As a result of this weird, X factor, Utah maintained for the first 7 months after the vaccine deployment the lowest per capita vaccination rate nationwide. Utahns are clearly cut from a different cloth.

What has me the most giddy about this whole “specialness” of Utah was how the politicians here pushed so hard, aided by the aforementioned local, county health officials as well as the press agencies, the LDS Church and the communist college students to get everyone to adopt similar mandates and regulations to those instated in some of the farthest left leaning, authoritarian blue states. They really did. But the majority of people here have their own ideals. They overwhelmingly subscribe to family, faith and freedom. If that sounds familiar, that’s the foundation of my blog, The Sovereign Mom which you are currently reading.

When I say Utahns idealize faith, I mean something beyond what The Church refers to as “the arm of the flesh.” I mean, they have faith in a spiritual intervention to heal them. They have faith that they can be cooperative in their own health with Divine guidance, and that cooperation isn’t exclusively given to a highly marketed and propagated pharmaceutical product with deadly side effects. Many Utahns saw through that.

I suspect The Church has massively hemorrhaged memberships over the past five years that I have resided in Utah. Between The Church’s wild insistence on private, (often questionable and sometimes explicitly, sexually abusive) and personally invasive audits conducted by male Church leaders of every teen in their wards and now, The Church’s insistence on closing wards for safety, then pushing masks for attendance and later, portraying mass vaccination campaigns as the only salvation for humanity from a crisis of health, from what I have witnessed, Church members are simply fed up. To many LDS families with whom I have spoken, leaders in The Church are not reflecting what they believe to be strong, historic Church values.

At the beginning of two weeks to flatten the curve, Utah refused to declare an official curfew, mandate closures or tell its citizens who could work, who could leave their house, nor who were essential employees and what were essential items to purchase. With the exception of certain, close-quartered professions such as hair stylists and massage therapists, Utah largely said, “Here’s what we recommend. Make good decisions.”

Utah proposed ways of tracking people who traveled over state lines. In the height of “Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve” our family took our last commercial airline trip to date to Texas for a funeral. The flight was completely empty. Upon re-entrance to Utah, men stood on either side of our terminal exit toward the baggage claim area insisting we fill out a card asking where we’d been, who we had been in proximity to and what we’d done “by Governor’s decree,” they said. I said, “Governor’s decree is not law.” I took the card as it was physically foisted upon my person, wadded it up in front of the guys’ faces and blatantly threw it in the first available trash bin about six paces away from where the henchmen were stationed.

Utah’s mandates amounted to nothing more that what individuals were willing to step way out of their comfort zones to enforce. Most people here are too well programmed to make a good impression by being nice. They are taught to be welcoming ambassadors for The Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter-Day Saints who fear tarnishing their reputation as morally superior to outsiders. Thus, you won’t see people saying a word of caution nor protest about those who defy mask mandates, much less applying force.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t surprised that within the first month of the “pandemic,” Utah was receiving D grades and being admonished for having the lowest rate of compliance with CDC Covid guidelines. I wish I could now find those headlines. At the time, all the Salt Lake news agencies were constantly rubbing this in our faces, trying to get us to demand legal action to “fix” our noncompliance issue. I also wasn’t surprised that we came out as having one of the lowest death tolls and hospitalizations per capita among states nationwide. It seemed all along that regions with less panic were less inclined to attribute every death to Covid.

As 2020 drug on and the masking became more prevalent, a mandate for statewide masks was finally adopted into law. Even then, outside of the two tyrannical cities, one could walk around most of Utah mask-free without so much as a whisper. Many towns in Uinta Basin, according to friends who live there had little to no observance of the mask mandate. Yet, it became apparent that the towns with the most mask adherence had the higher occurrences of Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Furthermore, while the state dropped the mask mandates in April of 2021, the two counties that contain Park City and Salt Lake (Wasatch and Salt Lake Counties) extended their mask mandates for at least another few months off and on, and I recall no reports of discernable differences in their health outcomes.

While Utah did pass a prohibition law against mask mandates long after Texas and Florida in schools and among counties in Utah (which only effected Wasatch and Salt Lake as all other counties stopped mandates on their own), the law is almost unknown here by most residents as it effected nothing. Unlike Florida and Texas, the only place of business still mandating masks were hold out, government run institutions for only their employees such as the liquor stores and random schools within the two cities that typically adore government control, Park City and Salt Lake.

One last thing about Utah that makes it quite unique is that it is what I have always referred to as a Mecca for homeschoolers. The state guidelines for homeschooling are among the lowest nationwide. The people of Utah LOVE homeschooling. If one is situated (as most are) near Salt Lake or Utah Counties, the group activities designated for homeschoolers, wild schoolers or unschoolers are abundant. I could find no less than 5 various homeschool activities locally for my kids to participate in during the average “school day” prior to Covid, with attendance dropping a bit and now resurging. I have been to Outdoor Adventure Kids (OAK) events with enough parents and kids in attendance to fill 3 school buses. There’s also parents here who run rotating donation closets for kids where parents can drop off clothes their kids grew out of and pick through an assortment of clothes in their child’s new size! In so many ways of creating community outside of government, Utah rocks!

The thing of it is, with so much local support for homeschool in Utah, the public schools tread on very thin ice trying to mandate what the parents won’t tolerate. Parents here can easily homeschool, find co-ops and even trade off homeschool days with other homeschool parents to accommodate work schedules. Every student outside a classroom is less money for that school.

On the other side of this, I will say that Utahns are typically very compliant with laws, Church instructions and regulations. So when the mandate went into affect where I live in Davis county, just outside of Salt Lake, people did gradually adopt them. By the 4th month of 6 total under mandate, compliance in Davis with masks was virtually 100%. This isn’t a total negative indictment of the State. The good thing about the overall compliance of Church people is that because they are typically compliant and peaceful, rarely are laws required to get them to behave in a civil manner toward one another. However, on the down side, it can sometimes make them in many ways easy to control with the flick of a pen or an updated Church position.

However, as a person who ignored the mandates, I can personally attest that I was only questioned 3 times in the total of six months of mandates in Davis County, where I live. The first place I was stopped was a Home Depot in Centerville. Home Depot had a corporate wide policy preventing unmasked customers from entering the store. We switched immediately to Lowes, where we did see a higher volume of hold outs shopping with us. The next place was the Cracker Barrel in Layton. Cracker Barrel had a difficult time making sense of their policies. To order to go, pick up or wait for a table, one must walk through the entire gift shop. The manager and servers at Layton’s Cracker Barrel were particularly unprofessional in handling people with exemptions and after our personal protest, they served us inadequately with apparent hostility and irritation. The last place that stood out was my local Bountiful, Smith’s Grocery Market. After shopping there twice a week for months without so much as a look, a young, stock boy interrupted my shopping in the produce aisle to ask if I had a mask I could put on. I told him I was exempt and then asked him if there was a new policy to approach customers to ask. The embarrassed stock boy immediately apologized to me and pointed out the customer, a gray haired, 6’2” tall gentleman of about 60 (who coincidentally took off running like a 10 year old girl in the opposite direction once identified), who had insisted the stock boy demand I put on a mask. While these occasions might seem uncomfortable, three wee issues is a pretty outstanding record for a person who disregarded mask mandates for an entire 6 month period compared to other states.

My point in all this is to show, once again, it’s not the laws that make a state more economically prosperous, their schools more conducive to learning or their health outcomes better or worse. Rather, it’s the general attitudes of the people to adopt healthier lifestyles, to defy illogical government interference in day to day life, and to keep a high priority on working and being personally responsible for the care and feeding of one’s family and independent charitable giving to help and support others.

In the long run, this is how I believe Utah earned the overwhelmingly highest report card ranking of any state in their responses to Covid 19.

Unfortunately, Utah is facing a housing shortage and skyrocketing rental and real estate prices now making it an unattainable move. If you were thinking I was trying to sell you on moving here, nay-nay. However, it might behoove you to start your own “Utah” by finding or starting a Freedom Cell or creating a collective in which you may attempt to have greater influence in your community through outreach, common interests and sharing some of the Utah ideals of family, faith and freedom with people in your neighborhood. If there just aren’t enough people of like mind and values around you, then it’s time to consider a move to somewhere with a more Utahn value mindset.