It should be noted that on Feb. 6th, 2019, Mike posted his first entry on his Neville-Neville Land blog with this:
Come on, everybody! Here we go!
By Peter | Tags: Administrative notices
When there’s a smile in your heart
There’s no better time to start
Think of all the joy you’ll find
When you leave the world behind
And bid your cares goodbye!
(words by Sammy Cahn)
To me, the title is telling. If Mike were some rando shouting into the wilderness on a blog nobody would ever read, it’d seem strange. Yet, it appears to me he’s talking to a group of people who know what to expect. “C’mon, gang! I set this blog up. Let’s get started!” But if you scroll through his blog, post after post, what jumps out is the sheer lack of interest in his material. Comment section after comment section garner exactly zero replies. Some, here and there, get a solitary reply. Even fewer get 2 or 3 comments, sometimes PP is simply replying to an inane comment. But the overall tenor and, really, intent of his blog is to poison the well with this kind of rhetoric:
One cannot, however, ascribe to the Heartland hoax that Jonathan Neville and Rod Meldrum are peddling and avoid that label. Their brand of belief is exclusivist, fundamentalist, closed-minded, nationalistic, jingoistic, and deeply lacking in responsible scholarship and science. (See the previous posts on this blog for dozens of examples of this.)
And there it is. “See the previous posts on this blog for dozens of examples of this.”
And for a blog that gets so little readership, it seems to me to exist solely to destroy Meldrum’s, Nelson’s, and Neville’s reputations. It exists to provide content so other, more well-known Mormon apologists, can point to it as a sort of ‘anti Heartlander’ source. Who cares enough about the Heartlander movement to want to take it down? Take this slide from the Q15 for example:
The Church has a far-Right (and Left) problem on its hands. Why is this particular blog shilled so hard by DCP and Smoot? Why is a fellow FAIR and Interpreter contributor, who also teaches ‘adult education classes’ in southern Utah, so prolific with regard to to exposing the “Heartland hoax?”
Could it be an obsessive pet hobby? Maybe. Could the apologists have gotten together to work an ‘anti-far-Right strategy’ online? Maybe. What’s the point of identifying far-Right’ism as an existential threat, as seen above, and then doing nothing?
Anyway, the blog comes across as a little too polished, too consistent, and shilled too hard by the apologists to be the work of just one motivated guy in southern Utah. It comes across to me as a collaboration. But then again, maybe it’s Mike Parker pounding out post after post that hardly anyone reads, toiling away with a deep antipathy toward a theory that runs contrary to his own. Weird. But not unheard of, after all there are a lot of Mormon history scholars putting in a lot of time for a very niche topic. *shrugs*
- Doc
