This is the website and personal blog of Sheldon Rampton: former Mormon missionary, journalist, writer, entrepreneur, software engineer and decrepit has-been.
https://linktr.ee/sheldonmrampton
I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, the son of two musicians. I was also an aspiring Superman, inspired by episodes of the original TV show starring George Reeves. For my birthday, my mom hand-sewed the costume I’m wearing in the photo below. I was disappointed to discover that wearing it did not actually give me the ability to fly.
My father worked as a percussionist in Vegas showrooms and enjoyed the various pleasures of Sin City, but the Ramptons came from Mormon stock, and my mother was fairly devout while I was growing up. I began my freshman year at Princeton in 1975, but in 1976, I took a break from college to serve a two-year Mormon mission in Japan. In the photo below, Elder Rampton is the blond guy on the right.
That brainwashed look you see on his face was no accident. By the end of my two years, I spoke passable Japanese, had read the Book of Mormon and the Bible at least half a dozen times, and I could bore you to tears with memorized spiels explaining Joseph Smith’s First Vision and God’s Eternal Plan for Eternal Life and Celestial Godhood. I have relatives and high school friends who are still active Mormons today, but when I got back from Japan I discovered that the Church had excommunicated one of my uncles, and I got really, really MAD! — especially after they also excommunicated Sonia Johnson, a Mormon feminist who had become a friend. By the time I graduated from college, I left Mormonism and became a leftist and a generally Very Opinionated Guy.
My experiences as a missionary have given me a lifelong interest in the way our opinions can be shaped by other people. I worked for a couple of years as a newspaper reporter, became an anti-war activist, and have written some books with lefty titles that explore the role of propaganda in shaping public opinion:
- Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the PR Industry
- Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future
- Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq
- Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State
These days I work as a software engineer. I think my view of the world is a little more nuanced than it was in the days when I wrote those books, but I’m still an opinionated cuss with an abiding fascination about the ways that human beings — myself included — manage to deceive ourselves even about things that really matter.