EPISODE 240: An Early Look at a Certain Bestseller: “Motorhome Prophecies” with Carrie Sheffield

Bill Walton (00:00):

We’ve got about 35, 40, 45 minutes depending on how long we go. What’s your passion topic?

Carrie Sheffield (00:07):

I have a lot. How about this? Women’s Bill of Rights, economic issues, media bias. That’s something I could talk about for forever because I’m a journalist by training for my undergrad and that was a big part of why I eventually came to support Donald Trump was he was so spot on about liberal media bias.

Speaker 3 (00:32):

Bill Walton Show for July 13.

Speaker 4 (00:39):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers, fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:59):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. Well, today I’ve got a wealth of riches. Carrie Sheffield is with the Independent Women’s Forums joining us and I spent some time with her bio and it turns out she knows something about everything and her long suit, her primary focuses on economic issues, but the Women’s Forum also deals with the Women’s Bill of Rights and media bias. And basically their tagline is all issues are women’s issues. So that gives us a broad playing field to work with. Carrie, well-educated, went to Brigham Young, Harvard, she’s done stents at American Enterprise Institute, Competitive Institute, Americans Prosperity, the all-star lineup of conservative groups. So welcome.

Carrie Sheffield (01:54):

Thanks for having me, Bill. And thanks for all this beautiful art. I love it.

Bill Walton (01:57):

It’s my wife’s, she’s over there. She paints everything here, not the ceilings, but all the beautiful stuff she’s done.

Carrie Sheffield (02:10):

Wow, so talented.

Bill Walton (02:12):

Yeah, we’ve been very involved with the art world, so it’s nice to bring it into the show.

Carrie Sheffield (02:16):

That’s great.

Bill Walton (02:19):

I want to start with your power alley that you’ve been working with Independent Women’s Forum, which are economic issues. And then I want to go into some other of the women’s issues and Women’s Bill of Rights and things like that. You’ve written about Jay Powell at the Federal Reserve Board. And what kind of job is Jay doing there?

Carrie Sheffield (02:40):

It’s a family show, so I’ll keep it clean. I’m not a fan to put it mildly.

Bill Walton (02:46):

It’s a very tolerant family. He’s used to [inaudible 00:02:47] speaking.

Carrie Sheffield (02:50):

No, since becoming a Christian, I’ve learned to tell my… I had an anger phase of my life, but I am pretty zen most days. But I think Chairman Powell, I think he’s not leading. He’s really a laggard. I think he’s reactive. He completely was caught off guard with the inflation issue and now he’s playing catch up and 9% inflation last year is painful to families and we’re now 30 months into the Biden Administration. What we have is a $5,600 median household income pay cut for families because of inflation.

Bill Walton (03:33):

They claim wages are rising, but wages are not rising nearly enough to make up for inflation. So it’s $5,600 per family?

Carrie Sheffield (03:41):

According to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, they did an analysis and that’s what they found. And that’s why according to CNBC, 52% of households are using their savings to finance basic things like paying rent and buying groceries. This is unsustainable. And I blame not just Chairman Powell, it’s Bidenomics, it’s printing money both at the Fed but also in Congress.

Bill Walton (04:10):

Well, the thing I find stunning is we don’t seem to have anybody in the leadership, in the administration who recognizes what the real problem is and the real problem is spending.

Carrie Sheffield (04:19):

Yeah. Well, and I’d love to hear your thoughts because I know you were on economic issues in the Trump White House because this was a question I kept asking the Trump economic team in 2020, and I don’t know if you’re there toward the end, I know you were with the beachhead team, but I was asking, “Why are you writing such big checks during COVID?” We don’t know exactly if we need all the stimulus money. And Democrats will point to that and say, “Well, it started under Trump and we’re just basically finishing the job.”

Bill Walton (04:46):

Well, the thing that’s striking is that neither Janet Yellen nor Jay Powell, who are the two leading economic leaders, will face up to the fact that spending is really the issue. And they don’t even admit the economy is in trouble and that inflation is really hurting people. And we’ve got Biden out saying, “No, everything’s fine.”

Carrie Sheffield (05:11):

Yes. And his former chief of staff saying that it’s a high class problem, inflation’s a high class problem.

Bill Walton (05:17):

Who said that?

Carrie Sheffield (05:17):

It was Ron Klain had retweeted somebody saying that inflation is a high class people’s problem. So couldn’t be more out of touch than that, I think. And that’s why 72% of Americans, according to CNN, say that the economy is doing poorly and the spending is completely out of control. This bill that just passed, the deal with Speaker McCarthy, what was your take on that?

Bill Walton (05:45):

I asked you before we get started, you could ask questions. I didn’t realize we’d get into this right away.

Carrie Sheffield (05:53):

Well, I can tell you my take if you want.

Bill Walton (05:57):

I love having the tables turned, although we’ve got a round table here.

Carrie Sheffield (06:01):

A lazy Susan.

Bill Walton (06:03):

I invited a journalist on and the journalist is now… I’m the news. What’s my take on Kevin McCarthy? I think he was-

Carrie Sheffield (06:12):

No, no, no, the bill, the spending bill.

Bill Walton (06:16):

The thing that’s interesting about this administration is that everything’s about climate and everything’s about critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion. They’ve got a whole government approach to everything they’re doing. And even our foreign policy with China, they really see that as a climate issue. They don’t see China as a threat to our country. They see it as just, “Well, if we can just make nice but China and China will agree to go along with their climate agenda, then that’s going to be okay.” Ignoring the fact that President Xi seems to have China on a war footing and they’re really getting ready to do something about Taiwan. We don’t know yet what, but I’m veering away from the point I wanted to make though. When you think about their agenda, the whole government agenda climate, the bills they’re passing, the trillion-dollar bills, the last one, what was the Inflation…

Carrie Sheffield (07:12):

Reduction Act, which is Orwellian.

Bill Walton (07:14):

Orwellian. You couldn’t come up with a did anything but, but big chunks of that over a trillion dollars, I think maybe as much as a trillion a half is for the climate agenda. And they gave John Podesta a $400 billion venture fund to give to friends. And then if you look at the climate industrial complex, if you look at who benefits, it’s really all the Democrat donors, venture capital funds that have got interest in green energy and that sort of thing. The climate agenda has become a massive vehicle for cronyism and corruption.

Carrie Sheffield (07:54):

Absolutely.

Bill Walton (07:55):

So what do I think about the bill? I think it’s a catastrophe and we’re spending in all the wrong things. I don’t know if you know Mark Mills at Manhattan Institute?

Carrie Sheffield (08:03):

Oh, yeah. I worked at Manhattan Institute briefly. Yes, and he’s their energy-

Bill Walton (08:09):

Oh, I forgot. Well, he’s wonderful. And he’s analyzed the cost of all this. And he says, “Simply put, oil and gas, natural gas requires no subsidies. It meets the market test. Wind and solar, batteries for cars, all this requires massive subsidies.” And if you went 100% to wind and solar, our whole tax bill would be subsidizing energy that doesn’t make any economic sense.

Carrie Sheffield (08:42):

And we know that in Germany, Europe, this is not happening in a vacuum as far as US policymakers doing the exact same terrible mistakes that Europe has made. And Europe is now even more reliant on coal, more reliant on Russia. I think that’s a big part of why Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine was because he knew that he had a vice grip around Europe. It is true that NATO, I think, gave him a much more robust response than Putin was expecting. But I do think that he was incentivized not only by the spectacular failure in the pull-out in Afghanistan by the part of Biden, but also by the fact that he had so much leverage over Europe because of their green energy religion, which is not based in facts.

Bill Walton (09:33):

It is a religion. It’s a religion. And the thing about their vulnerabilities is that you’re now seeing it, now they’re a year and a half into this Ukraine thing, where they’re really not willing to do what’s necessary to complete this war because they’re afraid that Russia is going to hurt them. So I don’t know, we’re wandering into topics that… What I’d like to do is, since I’ve got a journalist here and you’re asking me all the questions, I want to turn around and ask you questions. The Women’s Bill of Rights, which is something you all are pushing. I did a show with Jay Richards just a few weeks ago, and we put it out and it looks like this whole notion of redefining biological sex and law and federal law and all the regulations is not as biological sex, but gender identity would just dramatically gut almost all the laws we have, especially Title IX in women’s sports and would also make the whole prison situation crazy. And your group has got something, the Women’s Bill of Rights, which would go take that head on and define this properly in law.

Carrie Sheffield (10:54):

Absolutely. So Women’s Bill of Rights, if folks want to check it out, it’s womensbillofrights.com. And sometimes when I say the phrase, people get a little nervous, they’re like, “Oh, you’re trying to create new rights.” No, actually what it’s doing is just basically defining what a woman is and acknowledging the case law in the United States. Case law recognizes that women are different from men. And what Women’s Bill of Rights does is defines what a woman is. And because of the biological difference that’s been recognized in case law for centuries now, there are inherent benefits to being a woman that the left wants to completely obliterate. And by benefits, I mean things like we don’t have to go into the draft as women. The court of law is very beneficial quite often to women and mothers in domestic disputes when it comes to custody and divorce settlements.

(12:02):

And then also as you mentioned with prisons and sports and battered women’s shelters, bathrooms, it’s just everyday pervasive common life women are recognized as biologically distinct from men. And so this bill codifies what a woman is. The Women’s Bill of Rights was written by my colleague, Jennifer Braceras, who is our director of our Independent Women’s Legal Center. She was a US Civil Rights Commissioner under George W. Bush. She’s a Harvard Law grad. And she and my colleague, her deputy, Inez Stepman, co-authored it as well. And it’s a piece of legislation that’s been signed into law in Tennessee. It was passed by the Kansas legislature. The female Democrat governor tried to veto it, but she was overwritten by the legislature. So it’s now on the books in Kansas, which we’re very happy about. And we are expecting some action in Oklahoma as well.

Bill Walton (13:00):

So what you would like states to do is every state to adopt Women’s Bill of Rights and make it a state law?

Carrie Sheffield (13:09):

Sure. We’re also doing it at the federal level as well. But given the political-

Bill Walton (13:14):

Would this be a the constitutional amendment?

Carrie Sheffield (13:15):

Not as an amendment, as a bill in Congress because again, it’s not creating any… The Constitution already has protections for women through the equal protection clause. And the courts have recognized the difference between men and women that in order to satisfy the constitutional protections of the equal protection clause, there needs to be distinct protections for women that have been enshrined in law now for centuries. And so by completely trying to eviscerate what it means to be a woman, it is, we believe, unconstitutional. It’s also really bad science. And then also, there’s the fact that public polling is on our side as well too. So I see it really as a three-pronged victory for us. We’ve got the Constitution, we’ve got science, biology, and we’ve got the public behind us.

Bill Walton (14:07):

Why haven’t feminists come out more against the trans movement?

Carrie Sheffield (14:12):

Well, it’s interesting. I think the term feminist, we like to reclaim it in some respects. I think that-

Bill Walton (14:19):

I understand it, they’re three or four or five or six generations of feminists. You’re a first generation feminist, a second, is that-

Carrie Sheffield (14:28):

Well, yes, when waves and things like that.

Bill Walton (14:30):

To wave, okay.

Carrie Sheffield (14:32):

Yes. We’re actually working with the progressive-

Bill Walton (14:36):

Wave of feminism is an Independent Women’s Forum.

Carrie Sheffield (14:41):

Well, we think the term feminist has been co-opted by the left, unfortunately.

Bill Walton (14:45):

It has. They take all the good words.

Carrie Sheffield (14:47):

We don’t usually use that word for us necessarily, at least in the way it’s used in this context in our culture right now. But we are working with a more traditionally leftist feminist group called the Women’s Liberation Front. Their acronym is WOLF. And they are at the forefront of sounding the alarm on women’s prisons in California because you can have a violent murderer rapist one day wake up who is a male and say, “Oh, I think I’m a female.” And no questions asked, he’ll be put on a bus and transferred over to the female prison. And so there have been reports to my knowledge of violence being committed against biological women from biological male prisoners who are transferred over. Again, I believe this is a fundamental violation of constitutional rights. But to answer your question on why our traditional leftist feminists not more engaged on it, the Women’s Liberation Front, we’re happy to work with them, but unfortunately, they are attacked by their own leftists. There’s a term that you might know. Are you familiar with the term terf, T-E-R-F, to be a terf?

Bill Walton (16:02):

No, T-E-R-F, terf.

Carrie Sheffield (16:06):

It’s a new lingo for you, terf.

Bill Walton (16:07):

Is this a verb or a noun?

Carrie Sheffield (16:08):

It’s a noun. It’s a noun.

Bill Walton (16:10):

Terf.

Carrie Sheffield (16:11):

T-E-R-F, a terf. So this slur now, it’s used all over on Twitter. JK Rowling is described pejoratively as a terf.

Bill Walton (16:23):

What does the acronym stands for?

Carrie Sheffield (16:24):

So it stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist. That’s a terf.

Bill Walton (16:28):

She’s a terf.

Carrie Sheffield (16:31):

She’s a terf because she has the audacity to say that women should be allowed to compete against other women in sports. Therefore, she’s a trans exclusionary radical feminist. So the left, again, is eating their own because she is very progressive in everything else from their perspective. And they think this is a portrayal because they have fallen under this neo-Marxist critical theory and critical gender theory as part of that.

Bill Walton (16:55):

This is Bill Walton, and this the Bill Walton Show. And I’m with Carrie Sheffield, Independent Women’s Forum, and we’ve started out with a very dry subject of the Federal Reserve. And now we’re moving into trans theory and cultural Marxism and the really deeper agenda, what’s going on in society. So Jay Powell can rest easy. We’re not going to go further into what we think about his job, but we are going to dig into the trans rights. And the deeper agenda is Marxist, you want to amplify?

Carrie Sheffield (17:29):

Oh, absolutely. Yes, so it really dates back, in my view, to critical theory, which started in Germany and the fact that-

Bill Walton (17:40):

Critical theory in the thirties.

Carrie Sheffield (17:42):

Yes, the Frankfurt school, was created by a bunch of Marxists because they didn’t like the way the world was run. They thought western civilization was too hierarchical. They wanted to disrupt the norma.

Bill Walton (17:54):

Unlike China or India. Anyway, it’s all Western civil. Anyway, there are other civilizations that have some similar issues, but anyway.

Carrie Sheffield (18:03):

Well, yes, yes. But it’s the self-loathing. It’s the suicide of the west. But critical theory was developed-

Bill Walton (18:15):

This is Doug Murray.

Carrie Sheffield (18:16):

Yes, to try to look through a critical lens. And look, I don’t have contempt for people. I think having contempt is a way to alienate people. So I hope I’m not trying to sound contemptuous. It’s more that it’s dangerous. It’s a dangerous notion.

Bill Walton (18:39):

It’s okay here to be contemptuous of the cultural Marxist.

Carrie Sheffield (18:43):

Well, I think in order to change minds, I think if someone is dabbling in this, it’s better to be persuasive as opposed to just dismiss it.

Bill Walton (18:52):

But we’re not going to change their minds because the agenda is really about power.

Carrie Sheffield (18:56):

Well, that’s true.

Bill Walton (18:58):

They want the power, they want the money. They’re using this theory as a way to deconstruct regular cultural institutions so they can be in charge. But these German theorists, we call them critical theory, well, they found a fairly hostile environment when Hitler was in charge of Germany. And so as I understand the story, they picked up and moved to New York and they found themselves at Columbia Teachers College, and that became Columbia University. And Columbia University remains the hotbed or the epicenter of this thing.

Carrie Sheffield (19:34):

Yes. No, you’re right. And it’s just gotten progressively infectious beyond just the faculty lounge, these absurd theories that a man can be a woman and that you’re an evil person for asking any questions about it. In some respects, I give them credit that a very small group of committed individuals has had such enormous impact. And in that respect, it gives me hope that a small group of committed people who believe in the truth can push back and also have an equal and even greater positive impact.

Bill Walton (20:20):

Well, you’re a great example. Heather Higgins, who founded your group, is a force of nature.

Carrie Sheffield (20:25):

Oh, she is firebrand. We love her.

Bill Walton (20:27):

If anybody could take a minority and take over everything, it would be Heather.

Carrie Sheffield (20:31):

Yes, absolutely.

Bill Walton (20:32):

And the talent she has recruited, is extraordinary. So let’s do it quickly. Did you all have a theory about how they’ve been so effective in taking over all the institutions?

Carrie Sheffield (20:47):

Well, certainly it was gradual. So it was incremental and it was comprehensive. I think the cultural battles really came to a head in the 1960s. That’s when you really had this massive cultural disruption with the norms of sexuality. Heterosexuality, the norms of heterosexuality were broken in the sixties in terms of premarital sex, extramarital sex, that’s when it started. And then drug culture as well. And I think what’s really sad about all of this, the phrase that liberal feminists like to throw around to dismantle the patriarchy, that’s one of their favorite phrases, is to dismantle the patriarchy. Well, they’ve actually done that in the Black family. They have won. They have dismantled the patriarchy in the Black family to the point where now we have around three out of every four Black babies born into a home that doesn’t have two parents.

(21:57):

And before the sixties, before LBJ and the Great Society Programs, the reverse was true, that the fathers were present and through the structures of these welfare programs, we were just talking about Vivek Ramaswamy, that was his big exchange that got Don Lemon fired. It was talking about these programs and how decimating they’ve been to the Black family.

Bill Walton (22:19):

And Don told him you couldn’t talk about Black people because he wasn’t Black.

Carrie Sheffield (22:23):

Because he wasn’t Black, yep. That’s racism. But the thing that got him fired was that he said that in whatever race you are, that he was dismissive of the Vivek because the Vivek was… And I’ve been on with Tom Lemon as well.

Bill Walton (22:37):

Vivek was brown, but he wasn’t Black.

Carrie Sheffield (22:40):

Exactly. So he had no credibility. I was actually banned from the Don Lemon Show because I had the audacity to stand up for President Trump, and I was told that it’s okay to be sexist but not racist. That’s basically what Don Lemon told me. And I said, I refused to accept the premise. I said, “They’re both wrong.”

Bill Walton (23:00):

Good for you. Being a Trump person is a very dangerous thing to be in in this town. Of course, this is up in New York when you were talking with him. When I’m in DC, which is where I spend an awful lot of time, I’m surrounded by people who I don’t agree with. And I find them wanting to talk as if they assume I’m with them. And I’ve found you can really shut them down pretty quickly when you say, “Well, I work for Donald Trump.”

Carrie Sheffield (23:32):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (23:33):

They go, “Oh my God, we got to get out of here.” It’s a great way to clear the air and clear the room. You mentioned you’re a journalist, and one of the things that got you involved in this was the media bias. And you’ve been right in the thick of all this for a couple decades now, so amplify.

Carrie Sheffield (23:57):

I was a journalism undergrad, as you mentioned, at Brigham Young University. I believe I did six internships before getting my first full-time job. They were journalism internships from covering the Utah legislature to Newsweek Magazine in New York City to The Shelby Star down in North Carolina near Charlotte. And I learned to talk like this.

Bill Walton (24:17):

I noticed this accent moving in, from moving south.

Carrie Sheffield (24:21):

Yes. And also for a newspaper in rural Missouri called the Kirksville Daily Express. So I had the whole gamut of urban and rural news media, and I was just in love. I was enamored with journalism and local journalism, and just the notion that it was journalism that really, in many respects, especially television journalism, it helped push forward a lot of the civil rights issues in the 1960s to have the visual image in the homes on people’s screens of what was happening with the hoses and the dogs, and just the violent beatings of African-Americans wanting the basic rights to vote. That was very moving to me in terms of understanding the power of journalism and storytelling, and so it motivated me to work in media and journalism. So I graduated with this shiny journalism degree, moved to Washington. And it was like the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I was just completely disabused of any notion.

Bill Walton (25:27):

Who was your first job?

Carrie Sheffield (25:27):

So I was working for The Hill Newspaper, but I spent a lot of time in the press galleries. I had my credentials. I was at The Hill Newspaper. I was at Politico. I was at the Washington Times, going to all of the junkets and the cocktail parties. And I truly did believe that I was part of the fourth estate, the informal, as the media calls themselves, the informal fourth branch of government that’s meant to be a watchdog on the other three branches. This was in 2005 when I graduated. This was George W. Bush Administration. And it became very clear, very quickly that I was not surrounded in the DC Beltway by journalists, but rather by activists who really wanted to tear down the Bush Administration and everything that he stood for, traditional values. And for me, I wanted to be objective.

(26:26):

I was working at Politico, I remember, and the Equal Rights Amendment under Nancy Pelosi when she got the gavel for the first time. I was in the press gallery when she gaveled in for the first time, and they said, “We’re going to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed.” And so I did video interviews with Eleanor Smeal and a number of radical feminists from the National Organization of Women, Ms. Foundation or Ms. Magazine. These were women who, as a journalist, again, I was wanting to tell both sides.

(27:02):

Growing up, I would’ve been like, “You’re going to melt if you’re in the same room as these women.” But as a journalist, I wanted to tell both sides of this issue, and I was committed to that. But it became very clear that in general, in Washington, that’s not the culture. That there is a lockstep leftist narrative that everyone must fall under. And when you look at political donations, self-reported ideological designations among journalists, it’s usually six or seven to one liberal to conservative. And those are just the ones willing to confess. So eventually, I just said, “At least I’m going to be honest, and I’m going to move from news reporting to opinion reporting.” And I became an opinion writer for Tony Blankley at the Washington Times.

Bill Walton (27:52):

He is wonderful.

Carrie Sheffield (27:54):

Yes, I adore Tony.

Bill Walton (27:57):

He is wonderful.

Carrie Sheffield (27:57):

Yes. And I’m happy to be a fellow with the Steamboat Institute, which is a fellow-

Bill Walton (28:02):

Didn’t you also work for Robert Novak?

Carrie Sheffield (28:04):

As an intern, yes. I interned for him, yes. He was my first segue into Washington. I came as an intern for him. And what I loved about his journalism was that he always brought in reporting, and he always had a new nugget. So he had news, in addition to his analysis. So he was always adding value while also voicing his opinion. And eventually, like I said, when I jumped from reporting to being an opinion writer, I wanted to keep that vantage point that Robert Novak always brought, which was, I’m a reporter first, and then I’m adding my analysis secondarily.

Bill Walton (28:43):

So one of the reasons we’re veering into the personal with you is as I did the research… We were talking about our show, and the reason I didn’t necessarily want to talk about interest rates in the Federal Reserve, you’ve got an extraordinary personal story and you’ve got a memoir coming out in a few months.

Carrie Sheffield (29:00):

I do.

Bill Walton (29:02):

Let’s talk about that, because I think it’s a heart of the matter issue, and you’ve gone through the whole… Well, anyway, you tell the story.

Carrie Sheffield (29:13):

Sure, well, thank you, Bill. So yes, as you mentioned, my memoir is coming out, and it’s funny, sometimes when I’ve told a couple of people older than me that I have a memoir coming out-

Bill Walton (29:25):

You are a little young. What are you 38, 39?

Carrie Sheffield (29:26):

40. I just turned 40.

Bill Walton (29:28):

Okay. All right. That’s a great age.

Carrie Sheffield (29:29):

But a couple of them roll their eyes and they’re like, “Why do you have a memoir? You’re too young for a memoir.” But then when I tell them what happened, they’re like, “Okay, yeah, that’s a memoir.” And it’s being published by Hachette, which is one of the major publishers. And I wish that I didn’t have to write it or that it wasn’t my life, it’s the family God gave me. And the publishers described it as a cross between Hillbilly Elegy and Educated by Tara Westover.

Bill Walton (30:07):

You grew up in Utah.

Carrie Sheffield (30:10):

Well, partially, yes.

Bill Walton (30:11):

Partially, okay.

Carrie Sheffield (30:12):

So the name of the book is called The Motor Home Prophecies. And the reason why is because my father, he has Alzheimer’s now, so he’s not mobile and doesn’t have his faculties. But growing up, he very much believed that he was a prophet called by God to become the President of the United States someday. And in order to fulfill that prophetic call, we had to go in our motor home and play music on street corners. So we were surrounded by amazing art. And in fact, we used to play Dvořák as one of-

Bill Walton (30:42):

You were a classical musician.

Carrie Sheffield (30:43):

Classical musician, yes.

Bill Walton (30:43):

What was your instrument?

Carrie Sheffield (30:44):

Violin and oboe.

Bill Walton (30:46):

So you’re on the street corners playing violin and oboe?

Carrie Sheffield (30:48):

Yes, yes, with my seven siblings. And my dad is the conductor, and my mom’s the singer and the percussionist and the pianist. So we’re having this little family orchestra. My father had amazing credentials. He was a hand selected protege of Andrés Segovia, who was the world’s premier classical guitarist from Spain.

Bill Walton (31:08):

So your father was a professional musician?

Carrie Sheffield (31:10):

He was. He was hand selected by Andrés Segovia to be one of Segovia proteges. Segovia was knighted by the king of Spain. He won a lifetime Grammy Award. He had 10 honorary doctorates for his classical guitar. And he hand selected my father to be, as I said, one of his proteges for not only performance, but also guitar composition. So my father has a master’s in music composition. He was a professor of guitar at Brigham Young University, and he won the National Young Composers Contest, so very promising.

(31:42):

But he got radicalized when he served a Mormon mission to England. And I must put the caveat that my father’s actions were not sanctioned by the LDS church. Eventually he was excommunicated by the LDS church for his extremism. And so I am very clear to make that distinction. He was certainly motivated by a lot of the Mormon theology, but he was not sanctioned or supported by… I wish as a child that the LDS church had done more to intervene to stop our abuse. So basically, he made us live, in many respects, in a third world condition throughout different parts of our childhood. So we had 10 people in the motor home. We also were living in sheds and tents.

Bill Walton (32:27):

How many brothers and sisters? You had eight kids. And you were the fifth of eight kids?

Carrie Sheffield (32:31):

Yes. I have four older brothers, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. So you have 10 people living in a motor home. My mother gave birth when we were living in Greenbelt Park, actually, in Maryland, in a tent. She gave birth in the tent, basically like biblical times or medieval times. When I took my ACT test, we were living in a shed with no running water. We had to get it piped in a little green hose from outside, a little faucet in the ground, and no heat. We had to use space heaters because he said that’s what God wanted us to do because God wanted us to be humble and to suffer basically because suffering brings you closer to God and that we as a family had a special calling and that Satan himself had reassigned lesser demons in order to personally attack our family because our father was going to be president, so Satan needed to stop that.

Bill Walton (33:25):

This had to be terrifying.

Carrie Sheffield (33:28):

It was to the point where two of my brothers developed schizophrenia and we’ve all suffered. I was diagnosed with PTSD, depression, fibromyalgia, anxiety. I was suicidal multiple times. It was hard.

Bill Walton (33:44):

But I want to remind us all that you’re here and you are extraordinary. And so you went through some journey where you went from that, and at the same time this is going on, you’re taking the ACT and you’re playing classical music. What a dichotomy.

Carrie Sheffield (34:03):

It really was. Living in a trailer park, a mobile home, and again, I make the point in the book that there’s no shame in being poor at all. I just got back from doing some service mission in Peru, in Lima, Peru with my church and very, very poor country. But there’s no shame in being poor. The problem with my father was that it was a combination of mental illness, egomaniacal, religious dogma, and that combined to create this poverty, it was self-sabotage basically.

Bill Walton (34:33):

Where was your mother in all this?

Carrie Sheffield (34:36):

She was very much supportive. She believes he’s a prophet. And so unfortunately-

Bill Walton (34:41):

She believed he was the prophet?

Carrie Sheffield (34:44):

Yes. And she still to this day believes what our family did was what God wanted.

Bill Walton (34:49):

What was he prophesying?

Carrie Sheffield (34:51):

Oh, all kinds of things. He would say things like, for me, he said, “God told him I had an abortion, but I was a virgin.” So I knew there’s no such thing as an immaculate abortion. So I was like, “Well, that’s false.” You’re not a prophet. You’re making this stuff up. He said that I had tried to seduce my brother to have sex with me, my other schizophrenic brother, because one of them did try to rape me. And then the other one said I tried to seduce him to have sex with me. And he said, “Yeah, you dress like a slut.” So he would make all these horrible pronouncements over my head, and eventually I just felt unsafe. And I said, “I don’t believe you’re a prophet anymore.” I go in detail of how I came to that discovery that I didn’t believe he was a prophet. And it was shattering to me because it’s your father, you want to believe what your father tells you. And he has a deep love-

Bill Walton (35:44):

How old were you then, 16?

Carrie Sheffield (35:48):

I think it was either 17 or I just turned 18, so my senior year and it was shortly after my brother had tried to rape me, he’s schizophrenic, it is mental illness, I don’t blame him, but I didn’t feel safe. And that was a crucible moment where I said, “If he’s a prophet, I have to figure out how to make this work. But if he’s not, then I need to leave because I don’t feel safe.” So it was actually my first investigative journalism project, is my father a prophet? So I investigated my father and I found some of his writings that convinced me that he was not.

Bill Walton (36:21):

Where were the other grownups?

Carrie Sheffield (36:24):

Well, and that’s something that I had to go through of forgiveness. So the subtitle of the book is A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. I had to forgive his siblings, her siblings. But the thing is my dad completely brainwashed my mom to hate her family and took us away constantly on the move. We were almost taken away-

Bill Walton (36:46):

To hate her parents?

Carrie Sheffield (36:47):

Yes.

Bill Walton (36:47):

Okay. So he took you.

Carrie Sheffield (36:51):

Yes. So I ended up going to 17 public schools and homeschool, so it was just disjointed education. And I knew that education, this is a policy… The book, I try to make it as apolitical as possible. There’s one policy that I endorse in the book, which is school choice because two of my schools that I attended were inner city and they were overwhelmingly African-American, and they were horrible, dangerous environments. And it’s sad that these children were trapped in that district, and I believe they should have been allowed to leave.

Bill Walton (37:30):

Go some place else. They shut down homeschooling, you were not homeschooling, but choice in DC.

Carrie Sheffield (37:37):

Yeah, no, and I think it’s a civil rights issue. I really do. It’s the new civil rights issue. It’s the same white Democrats who block the school doors for the children in the South are now blocking the children from leaving.

Bill Walton (37:50):

Well, isn’t the whole social services system broken because of this notion that you can’t intervene? My impression is that there should have been some interventions with people seeing what’s going on and that didn’t happen.

Carrie Sheffield (38:05):

Yeah, well, the thing is, we were always moving. When you’re in a motor home, it’s really easy to pick up and leave if someone starts to suspect anything. So when I was around four or five years old, we actually did have child welfare services come to our house. They interviewed us. They almost took us away, but we fled and we fled to Utah, and we were off to the next dysfunction.

(38:28):

And my aunts and uncles, I found out years later as an adult that one of my aunts had actually tried to plan to rescue us. But unfortunately, it didn’t work out. And my father can be very physically intimidating. He’s 6’2″. He was the University of Utah, which is the flagship school in Utah, public university. He was the intramural wrestling champion. So he’s barrel chested, very strong, and he can be very aggressive and domineering. And basically when I found out these writings and that I didn’t believe it was prophet, I told him that I needed to go away to college. And that’s when he prophesied. He raised his hand to the square, like making an oath. And he said, “I prophesy in the name of Jesus, you’ll be raped and murdered if you leave.” Which is what a cult leader would say.

(39:21):

So I had to make a choice because on the one hand, I had my brother who did try to rape me, and I have this, I’m getting raped. That’s basically very nihilistic. So at that point, I just decided to leave.

Bill Walton (39:35):

It’s got to be college.

Carrie Sheffield (39:35):

So I left and I got disowned and he said my blood changed. I wasn’t his daughter anymore. I had to get-

Bill Walton (39:42):

How’d you get into Brigham Young?

Carrie Sheffield (39:44):

Well, I actually transferred there my sophomore year. So I went to a state college in Missouri. So I graduated high school down in the Ozarks.

Bill Walton (39:51):

So you graduated from high school with good grades. You were functioning at a very high level all along.

Carrie Sheffield (39:56):

Yeah, to me, my education was my sanity. And to my dad’s credit and my mom’s credit, my mom had been an elementary ed teacher and my dad had a master’s degree. So on paper, I note in the book, they call it SES, your socioeconomic status, when you’re a sociologist or an economist, it’s all about the SES status. And a parent with a master’s degree and another parent with a college degree, that’s the highest SES when you’re looking at these quantitative studies. So on paper, we should have actually been just fine, but mental illness hits everybody. Mental illness hits all demographics. It hits wealthy people, it hits poor people. And that’s really what we were struggling with.

(40:36):

And I believe what’s happening now, just to put my story in a broader context of what’s happening to America, is that mental health is spiritual health. And so I struggled with mental health while I was simultaneously suffering with spiritual, just toxic abuse. And so for a long time I was agnostic and I was angry at God, and if there was a God, He probably hated me, and I probably hated Him too if He even existed. And so I was agnostic for about 12 years in part because religion was used to abuse me. And so I think when you see our society right now-

Bill Walton (41:16):

You were agnostic, not atheistic.

Carrie Sheffield (41:17):

Correct.

Bill Walton (41:18):

You believe there was-

Carrie Sheffield (41:19):

Well, I call it a fence sitter. You’re a cosmic fence sitter, so that you’re not willing to say that there is definitively no God or that there is a God, it’s just, I don’t know.

Bill Walton (41:30):

When you say 12 years, what happened in the 12th year?

Carrie Sheffield (41:33):

Well, I have a whole chapter that I start out saying that the two forces that brought me to Christianity were Donald Trump and science.

Bill Walton (41:47):

Well, I’ve always wanted Donald Trump to watch the show. I think this is probably that moment. He may already be listening.

Carrie Sheffield (41:57):

It’s not necessarily flattering. So it’s interesting, and I agree with Vivek Ramaswamy in his announcement video, the statements he’s been making about, and hopefully you’ll have them on your program soon, but we have a crisis of purpose and meaning in this country right now.

Bill Walton (42:18):

Oh yeah. This is a spiritual issue.

Carrie Sheffield (42:20):

It’s a spiritual warfare, absolutely. So as people are walking away from God, in part, as I tell people… Cardinal Dolan up in New York invited me on his podcast because I had written an op-ed for the New York Post about Gen Z inching their way to believing in God, in part because of COVID creating this existential crisis of meaning, that they were slightly more willing to believe in God, but not necessarily religion. And a big theme of my book is that God is not religion because so many people have been deeply wounded by religion.

Bill Walton (42:54):

Well, religion is a human institution. It’s not a spiritual institution.

Carrie Sheffield (42:58):

Correct. And the confusion in many people’s minds when they see religious abuse, whether it’s pedophilia or by priest or in my case, my cult leader father using a religious language to abuse me.

Bill Walton (43:12):

Did he have other people in the cult besides the kids, did he get any other joiners?

Carrie Sheffield (43:16):

We were moving so much that we didn’t have any groupies following us, but we would have people crop up. Now, they might come visit us in the campground, or maybe some people in the ward would… Overall, like I said, the Mormon church, they were skeptical of him. Unfortunately, they were not proactive in helping prevent the child abuse. And I firmly believe that my two brothers would not be schizophrenic if they had not been raised in this environment because they were healthy children.

Bill Walton (43:50):

It’s the Bill Walton Show and talking with Carrie Sheffield and her extraordinary personal story, and her book is coming out in a few months, and it can’t quite be a cliffhanger because you turned out so brilliantly. But there had to be a turning point. There had to be an epiphany.

Carrie Sheffield (44:12):

Well, the Donald Trump and the science.

Bill Walton (44:14):

The Donald Trump, let’s not forget the Donald Trump.

Carrie Sheffield (44:16):

My conversion, yes.

Bill Walton (44:19):

If we can have some humor here, we can think about the orange man as being part of your salvation.

Carrie Sheffield (44:24):

The priest, the orange man priest. No, so I think years later now just looking back, I think what had happened was, and God rest his soul, Tim Keller, I loved his work. He was very influential in my conversion. But Pastor Tim Keller, who was a longtime pastor in New York City, Presbyterian, his church, he said it’s a church for skeptics. He welcomed atheist. He welcomed agnostics. Years later I read a book that he had written called Counterfeit Gods, and each chapter is a counterfeit God that we as humans worship instead of God, that we’re worshiping the gifts instead of the giver of the gifts. So he has a chapter on, for women it’s marriage and family, for men it’s sex, money, power, politics. I ran the whole gamut. I tried all the Gods.

Bill Walton (45:16):

All these false Gods. I tried all the false Gods.

Carrie Sheffield (45:19):

Every single false God.

(45:20):

Yes, and they kept failing me. I tried career and then I got laid off. I tried finding a guy. I couldn’t find a guy, dated some abusive men who were really hurtful to me because as an abused woman, you don’t believe you deserve better. And so that’s another counterfeit God. Then finally, I thought I had settled on a God that wouldn’t fail me, and that was the God of politics. And I was agnostic. And I had got my master’s. I had a full tuition journalism scholarship to the Harvard Kennedy School, and it’s named after JFK, Kennedy. And I believe now looking back, that I had, in some ways, put JFK as almost like a Messiah type figure. He was assassinated for his people, just like Martin Luther King Jr, just like Abraham Lincoln, which I just recently learned he died on Good Friday, which is very symbolic. But these figures had become my religious icons, that had become my religion was my politics. And then Donald Trump happened and I was like, “I can’t worship that.”

Bill Walton (46:29):

There may be false Gods, but he’s not-

Carrie Sheffield (46:37):

No, I can’t worship this.

Bill Walton (46:38):

Okay, well then-

Carrie Sheffield (46:40):

So I was like, “I need a new religion.”

Bill Walton (46:55):

Well, I think all in the studio, we all want to come and hold hands right now.

Carrie Sheffield (47:00):

So it was by default, I realized, “Carrie-

Bill Walton (47:10):

So does that make you a never Trumper?

Carrie Sheffield (47:13):

I’m a recovered never Trumper, so yes.

Bill Walton (47:14):

You’re a recovered never… You now think he’s okay.

Carrie Sheffield (47:19):

I ended up getting baptized Episcopalian. I now have major theological concerns with Episcopalianism as is practice today. But it was a good middle ground for me.

Bill Walton (47:30):

The Episcopal church is the ultimate human institution that’s captured by the left.

Carrie Sheffield (47:33):

It has, it has.

Bill Walton (47:34):

It’s not spiritual.

Carrie Sheffield (47:37):

It has, but for me it was a good holding ground because again, I’m coming out of hostility toward organized religion. So to go from that to a more secular humanist environment, it was a good gateway for me. Again, I’m not-

Bill Walton (47:55):

Sure. You don’t have to go all in to-

Carrie Sheffield (47:55):

I don’t agree with it. Yeah, it was me putting my toe in the water and there are some wonderful Episcopalians and in fact, the head right now, Michael Curry, the presiding bishop, the African-American gentleman, he gave the sermon at the royal wedding. He’s a lovely man. He is a very loving person. He’s completely wrong on politics. I’ve interviewed him multiple times. His deputy was one of my godparents for my baptism. Lovely man. And the fact that he’s willing to even have a dialogue, he was actually under a lot of pressure because every inauguration, immediately after the swearing in, they have the inaugural prayer at the National Cathedral, and he was under a lot of pressure by the hard left to cancel Trump. And he said, “No.” He said, “He’s a child of God.” And he said, “He needs prayer the most.” So he’s like, “We’re going to do it.” So to discredit, he allowed that to happen.

(48:48):

But all that to say is when I went through my confirmation, one of the things they talked about was the divine order, which is God, man, things. That’s divine order. And I had been operating for that 12 years as an agnostic with man, things, don’t know about that.

Bill Walton (49:06):

Not even God’s on the scene.

Carrie Sheffield (49:07):

Yeah. So once I reoriented my worldview to understand divine order, I could totally handle Donald Trump because I don’t worship politics anymore. So once it became God, man, things, I don’t expect divinity from my politics.

Bill Walton (49:24):

And that’s where you’re now.

Carrie Sheffield (49:26):

Yeah, and I was happy to vote for Trump in 2020. I think he did amazing things to… Part of why I was skeptical in 2016 was that he had donated to Hillary Clinton. He had no track record. I just was like, “I don’t know if he’s conservative or not.”

Bill Walton (49:38):

He was the most Christian of all presidents and things like putting… I don’t want to get into the whole agenda, but he did all the thing… I was involved with Council for National Policy and we brought him in 2016 and we had a group of people in that room who just hated him. And before that, Steve Moore and I had given a talk to everybody saying, “Well, look, here’s his economic policy. We think you’ll really like it.” This was just before the convention. They woke up to that, that they could support him. And they became his most ardent of supporters because he delivered for what’s on their agenda.

Carrie Sheffield (50:18):

And that’s what the Bible says, “By your fruits, you shall know them.”

Bill Walton (50:20):

Yeah, by your fruits.

Carrie Sheffield (50:22):

Yeah, by your fruits like religious liberty. I believe he was the first US president to raise this issue at the UN. And the fact that globally you’ve got hundreds of millions of Christians, Christianity is the most persecuted religion globally. And it was the Trump Administration to raise this issue. It’s a human rights issue. And then even domestically as well with religious freedom, he delivered. He had the fruits and then obviously the economic policy and also just his arguments about media bias. That was very convincing for me. And then on racial issues too, to say that this is a country that you’re judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin. That’s what it means to be an American. And he reminded us of that.

Bill Walton (51:12):

Boy, so many places. So unfortunately, we’ve only got so much time to talk. So what’s your takeaway? You went through hell really. And you’re back now. You’re a bright young person. We’re a long way from the beginning of this conversation where I thought we might talk about modern monetary theory.

Carrie Sheffield (51:38):

We can do that next episode. How about that?

Bill Walton (51:40):

We can do that next time. All right, so if you’re interested in modern monetary theory, sorry, this is not your show.

Carrie Sheffield (51:47):

I didn’t get to the science part as well because it was Donald Trump and science in my conversion. So we can talk about the science.

Bill Walton (51:51):

Okay, let’s do the science. Yeah, let’s do it.

Carrie Sheffield (51:53):

Oh, okay. Well, so when I had the political existential crisis, that’s when I started to put my toe in the water. I was going Episcopalian church. I was going to Tim Keller’s church and I was hosting a talk show in New York at the time, a web talk show with Clay Aiken, who was the American Idol, co-star, very good friend. It was bipartisan because he’s progressive and I’m conservative, so it left, right banter show. And we had the publicist for Deepak Chopra who is very good friends with Oprah. And he’s big into new age. He was raised to Hindu. He’s actually on the board for AI issues for the Catholic Church. Being raised in India, he’s very connected with the Catholic Church, very well versed in Christianity. He wrote a book called The Third Jesus, which in his view is Jesus was not man or divine either/or the third way. He basically was like a Buddha, like a human who became enlightened. That’s his view of Jesus.

(52:50):

But anyway, he co-authored a book called You Are the Universe with a PhD physicist from MIT. And the book, it was all about metaphysics and probabilities and unknowable, scientific calculations and all of the ways that human measurement and knowledge were so limited and just unknowable. And then also that it actually takes more faith to be an atheist when you’re talking about the precision of the universe, as they say the fine-tuning theory. It’s such a small probability that this happened by random chance. It gave me a solid just… God gives us our minds. He wants us to look at the world around us. And just also knowing the heritage of Harvard University, for example, the first university in America was founded to train clergy. It is to glorify God by obtaining knowledge.

(53:49):

So when the left tries to paint Christians as anti-science, look at history, in the Catholic Church, as well in terms of this legacy of priests and monks and their commitment to science and the law and enlightenment. So anyway, I was very moved by that book in terms of just understanding, again, opening the door to believing a God through science.

Bill Walton (54:15):

To a spiritual.

Carrie Sheffield (54:16):

Yes. And then he thinks I went too far by becoming Christian. I’m like, “Come on Deepak, let’s get you through the Christian doors.” But I talk about him in the book and he’s given me an endorsement for the book.

Bill Walton (54:29):

That sounds right. So lessons for us, it sounds like we’re just at the beginning of the next big new chapter for you, what’s your lesson for today for us?

Carrie Sheffield (54:45):

Well, I think our institutions are under attack. I think that as someone who was a survivor of religious abuse… For a while, I was toying with some of these ideas of accepting, just throwing the baby out with the bathwater because I had been so hurt by western religion that some of those things, those siren songs were appealing to me. And so I think having compassion for people who are struggling, whether it’s with gender dysphoria or things like that, I responded and I changed. God brought me out of all of this through compassionate people, not through derisive, nasty tweets. People are going to turn away from that. So I think having compassion on people who are lost, not ridiculing them, not not excusing ridiculousness or danger or the threat, the very real threat that this is posing, especially to children, being very transparent and unvarnishly telling the truth about it.

(55:54):

But I think at the end of the day, as someone who is a very imperfect Christian, I think if we can… Jesus said, “Be wise as servants, but harmless as dove,” and finding that balance that Jesus punched up. He went after the religious authorities, but for people who were lower in society that were lost, he was very compassionate it.

Bill Walton (56:20):

Thank you.

Carrie Sheffield (56:20):

Thanks for having me.

Bill Walton (56:21):

Thanks for telling the story. Is this the first time you’ve had a chance to tell it in this forum?

Carrie Sheffield (56:27):

I gave a talk a few weeks ago in Long Island, but it was a private event. So here we go.

Bill Walton (56:31):

Okay, well, we’re out there and we’ve got a great book to read and learn from. And I expect a lot of people are going to be hearing from you about this because these are the real issues.

Carrie Sheffield (56:46):

They are. Once I understood, again, the divine order, God, man, things, everything made so much more sense politically. I like to say when I was agnostic, I thought of God as a bug, like a cell phone, got my cell phone here. You’ve got 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. You got all the operating systems that are always advancing. I thought the human race through enough science and technology that we would eventually get the God bug out, that God was just some made up mumbo jumbo sociological construct to make people feel good about themselves. But we didn’t need it, that we would get science and technology to, it’d never be perfect, but as close as possible, that we could get rid of God. And eventually, I discovered that I’m the bug. Humans are the bugs.

Bill Walton (57:38):

There are a lot of us.

Carrie Sheffield (57:38):

And you can’t work as out.

Bill Walton (57:38):

There are a lot of us bugs around. Well, thanks for sharing.

Carrie Sheffield (57:45):

Thank you.

Bill Walton (57:47):

Some way we’ll find our way back into the Federal Reserve, but not today. So this has been the Bill Walton Show. I’m here with the extraordinary Carrie Sheffield and her story, and I think there’s a lot I certainly learned and can take away from it. I hope you did too. As always, we welcome your comments on Substack or on our website. And please subscribe, tell your friends to subscribe and tell them we’ll take you on an interesting journey. And today we went from Jay Richards to Donald Trump as the catalyst to no longer think politics is God. Is that right? Carrie, thank you.

Carrie Sheffield (58:27):

Donald Trump, the missionary.

Bill Walton (58:30):

Okay, that’s the final word. So thanks for joining and we’ll be talking again soon. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to the billwaltonshow.com to choose from over a hundred episodes. You can also learn more about our guest on our Interesting People page and send us your comments. We read everyone and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right, and what’s next. Thanks for joining.