An Early Look at a Certain Bestseller: "Motorhome Prophecies” with Carrie Sheffield

This is a different kind of episode of The Bill Walton Show. My guest is the charming and insightful polymath Carrie Sheffield who is a columnist and broadcaster now with the Independent Women’s Voice. 

We were slated to talk about economic and women’s issues, which we do for the first 25 minutes and cover a lot interesting ground: 

• Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Board

• The Biden Administration’s massive spending and its obsessive focus on diversity equity & inclusion and its climate change agenda.

• The Women’s Bill of Rights and IWV’s work with a more traditionally leftist feminist group called the Women's Liberation Front.

• Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and the roots of “trans theory” in cultural Marxism. 

• The lockstep leftist narrative that journalists are expected to fall into and her determination not to toe the party line. 

But at this point in our conversation, we wandered into her extraordinary personal story, the subject of her soon to be published memoir:

Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. 

More than curious, I decided to call an audible, forget about Jay Powell, and take us “Backstage” to learn about her book and where my format is to explore personal and cultural issues.

Carrie Sheffield grew up fifth of eight children with a violent, mentally ill, street-musician father who believed he was a modern-day Mormon prophet destined to become U.S. president.

She and her mother and her seven siblings lived as vagabonds as he moved them across the country preaching, and subsisting in sheds, tents, and motorhomes. 

It was a dysfunctional drifter existence, camping out in their motorhome in Walmart parking lots. Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-brimstone religious pamphlets.

“My father had amazing credentials,” shares Carrie. “He was a hand selected protege of Andrés Segovia, who was the world's premier classical guitarist from Spain. He was a professor of guitar at Brigham Young University, and he won the National Young Composers Contest.”

“But he got radicalized when he served on a Mormon mission to England and was eventually excommunicated by the LDS church for his extremism.”

Listen Here:

Carrie was the first of her siblings to escape the toxic brainwashing of her father’s creed. 

Declared legally estranged from her parents, Carrie struggled with her mental health for most of her adult life. 

But she eventually seized control of her life, transcended her troubled past, and overcame her toxic inner voice (and a near death experience) - thanks to the power of forgiveness, cultivated through her conversion to Christianity. 

How she evolved from a scared and abused motorhome-dwelling girl to a Harvard-educated professional is a riveting story. 

That’s the story she tells, in part, in this episode.

Carrie Sheffield In Studio B (the "Speakeasy")