Kishkumen wrote:Kevin Graham wrote:This is the same guy who attacked me for calling Wells Jakeman an idiot. Once you understand what a whack-job pseudo-scholar Jakeman was, and how Dan Peterson likened him to Einstein, suddenly it doesn't come as a surprise that he has decided to bond with William Schryver. This is the same guy who considers despicable characters like Lou Midgley, close friends.
I think you have really hit on something here. What we see at work here in the vestiges of FARMS that lived on in the editorial staff of the Review was a little clique of apologist-warriors who were also ideological bedfellows. As much as they are the intellectual children of Hugh Nibley, they are also the spiritual children of Ezra Taft Benson, who implicitly equated Soviet communism with the secret combinations in the Book of Mormon.
Moreover, it is my considered opinion that, truth be told, Will Schryver did more to bring about this setback, and potential downfall, of Daniel Peterson than any other single person in his association. As others tried to pull Dr. Peterson forward into the current times and the expedience of dialing it back a few notches, Will, as he boasts, was filling Dr. Peterson's head with conspiracy theories and parables about the modern sons of Mosiah. You see in all of this a bunker mentality, one that reflects Schryver's own paranoia and narcissism.
Doctor Scratch may have been a clearinghouse for information on the Maxwell Institute, but it is Schryver who held forth day after day on MDDB, spinning his tales of betrayal, turncoats, enemies, conspiracies, and secret actors working against Mormonism. All of this helps bring along the disastrously ill-timed attack on John Dehlin, and the paranoid backlash of the Deseret News piece (which Schryver takes credit for). I might add that Peterson was not the only victim of Schryverology; he was merely the most prominent one.
Of course, all of this will be laid at the feet of the alleged external enemies as it usually is. But any objective observer will see in Daniel's blog and his posts over the past month on MDDB a growing anxiety and paranoia filled with images of Obama the anti-christ and Dehlin, son of Mosiah. He is the victim of his own apocalyptic scenario, which, much like other apocalyptic scenarios, is usually most disastrous for the people who indulge in them (Waco, Jonestown, etc.). Others look on in amazement wondering how this person could go off the rails so spectacularly, but I think the signs are all there. And Schryver was the evil genie spurring him on for his own selfish purposes.
This is very interesting. I haven't been around here for a long time, but you may recall that I know a little about Schryver. Anyway, I came back here today after reading Peggy Fletcher Stack's article in the Salt Lake Tribune.
What is interesting to me about what you wrote above is that I have seen, first hand, that Schryver
is actually quite charismatic and persuasive in the eyes of the same kinds of people who get all teary-eyed and proud at handcart pioneer stories and tales of how Lot Smith and Porter Rockwell "rode with the Lord" during the Mormon War, two putting to flight a thousand and all that.
What surprises me is that, if you're right about Schryver's influence on Peterson, then it occurs to me that Peterson is not nearly as intellectually sophisticated as he likes people to believe.
All the same, interesting post. If these "outcasts" decide to form some kind of writing club, I will be curious to see if Schryver has something in the first issue, fresh off the press at the local Kinko's.
