Also media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's about the worst people in all of history.
Uh.
And we've got one of my favorite guests in the host of the podcast on our network, said Oligark, which just got a new season, Jake Hanrahan, Jake, welcome back.
How you doing? Thanks having me mate, long time, no I speak, man, how have you been?
Ah, you know, I've been all right tired, like everyone I think, especially where I am. What's going on? How about you?
Yeah, like your country's like actually fascist.
Now, like yeah, yeah, yeah, we're really speed running things. Huh yeah.
Everyone's saying it for years and I was like, oh no.
Oh no, yeah yeah yeah. It has been fun to see all of the like debate go out the window and like no, no, yeah, okay.
No, straight on, like it's it's it's actually like very scary because it's happening here as well in England, and it's like, ah, there's like some consolidation of extreme authoritarianism happening.
Yeah, yeah, it's happening, and it's happening at the kind of speed that almost it seems farcical. So that's that's good. I feel upbeat. I don't. I don't know, like it's it's weird too, because it's one of those like you would I'd always kind of expect in the back of my head that if things got this bad this quickly, there'd be stuff to do other like beyond just like work like that that wouldn't be the primary concern. Is still like making rent and and and and getting by.
But everyone I know is walking around being like, yeah, it's crazy how fast things are going. Also, like I got to take my kid to a doctor's appointment at three.
Yeah no, no. I was talking to my friend about this too. That was like the kind of rapid descent into state control and authoritarianism is actually really boring, Like it's just happening and that's it.
Yeah yeah, yeah, And I'm still going to like birthday parties and stuff like okay, yeah yeah.
My friend came back from a holiday and he was like, oh yeah, I got fingerprinted and my mouth swabbed and everything. I was like, why, you're a British city and you're coming back to England, Like what the fuck now?
Yeah, talking to you and I'm in the same boat planning overseas trips and being like, well, now I have a phone I've bought just for flying that has like the minimum of everything on it because I'm going to have to hand it over to border patrol and I don't want anything interesting to be on there, you know.
I mean, this must must be what it's like for people in like, you know, countries that have been doing this a little bit longer or a little bit more direct, you know, and now we're like, oh shit.
We have to do it too well in this yeh, I'm glad I read there's a good book about like authoritarianism in Russia called Nothing Is True and Everything is Permitted. I think it's more or less the title, yeah, which is which? Which did help? Actually reading it years ago was like, okay, well at least there's a rubric.
Yeah. I love the way he kindind of explains it through the reality TV how like almost in the West, you show them something fake and everyone goes, oh wow, look look at that. But then in the East story in Russia, when you show them something fake, the people go yeah wow, like they already know who's bullshit. And it's like, I think we're coming to that level now where we're like, ah, right, we already have to be cynical because we kind of realize it's all nonsense.
Yeah, yeah, and it's just impossible to know like what is I mean, like just the ability of regular people to differentiate between truth and lies and like a video now, I mean this goes down to the AI and stuff, but like there's so many more tools for just lying to everybody. It's great.
That's very scary.
Yoh yeah. And I think in some ways about what's happening just here and across a lot of other Western like you said, it's happening in the UK too, as like it part of what's going on, because I think it's almost a mistake to purely couch it in terms of fascism. Of what's going on is a growth in sort of like cultic behavior and clttic abuse techniques becoming like normalized across the political spectrum right at the Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. Maggie is like a great example of that.
And so I I keep turning back to cults periodically, and this is not this is not We've just started this with kind of a political discussion about everything that's going on. This is not a cult that is particularly tied into politics in the US or elsewhere. But it's a cult I that just got on my radar. They
just got busted by the FBI. Like the week that I wrote this episode, there was this massive multi state FBI bust cracking down on like a mansion that had been owned by Nelly that was a cult property and a bunch of other crazy shit. And Nelly's not involved.
Okay, okay, okay, yeah.
Nelly is uninvolved. This is just a house that Nelly owned that later got purchased by a cult. But the Nell connection does exist. This this is a cult that I hadn't heard about before the FBI rated all their properties, but had been there had been some stuff written about them, so I had to do some real digging to get a story here. But it's a group called the Kingdom of God. Have you heard of these people?
Do you know what? I feel like I have? But there are so many cults with similar names like that that it could.
Just see such a cult name it very much.
Yeah, oh, the Kingdom of God Church. You're like, no, don't go there. Yeah.
I had to check to see because there are like four different cults I thought this might be and I was like Nope, no, No, those are all slightly different names. This is a new one. This is a new one, and it's you know what, I try to be compassionate when I like look at cults and study them and talk about them on this show, because I do tend to believe that anyone can be taken in by a
cult at some point in their life. Right, that doesn't mean that, like everyone is always vulnerable to being I think, and in fact, I think most people grow out of it and reach a point where that's a thing that can't happen to them anymore. But I think most people have a point in their life where if the right cult were to come along, they'd be vulnerable to it, right.
I think that's generally accurate, And so I generally try to find some understanding with how people get involved in something like the Church of Scientology or like sin and on. And I don't really understand this cult the Kingdom of God all that well, Like I don't understand how someone can like talk themselves into letting the things that were being done to them be done to them. But I'll do my best to explain it here. You know, this may just be one that like was never what wasn't
angled towards people like me, I guess. But yeah, we'll get into it. But that's the end of the cold open. So we'll come back in a second here and we'll talk about the Kingdom of God, and we're back. So, as I said, not a well known cult. If you haven't heard of these guys, you're probably in the norm. If you had, you probab found out the way I did reading articles published just recently about this massive multi
state FBI rate of several cult properties. Prior to that, the only real interest this group attracted was internal criticism in places like Charisma magazine, which is like charismatic Christianity is like a type of evangelical Christianity, right, Like these are to kind of summarize it, These are the people who do like the crazy eaten snake or getting letting snakes bite them kind of shit, right, like Pentecostals or
are charismatics. Charismatics are not all just Pentecostals, but like, it's the weird stuff, right.
I'd be honest, like, if I had to join a call, I would rather be doing like snake church stuff than like fucking scientology.
You know absolutely that I agree with the snake church
stuff sounds like more fun. Initially, kind of the internal criticism of this group before they reached legal intention was other people who were kind of in lighter versions of the cult, who were like, well, these guys are really this is just a pure cult, right, And when you're getting called out by other members of like that chunk of Christianity, you really have to be going a hog wild on the stealing people's money stuff, because like this is the chunk of the faith where it's normal to
be like, well, yeah, my pastor needs a private jet. Obviously played it in gold. God wants them to have that. So the fact that like these guys got attacked by that community means they were really out of fucking pocket. When the FBI raided Kingdom of God properties, they found at least fifty seven people who had been forced to work for the cult in conditions that at least approximated slave labor.
Right.
These are people who are working and having food and shelter withheld if they don't work, and they're certainly not being paid, right, So we're on that slave labor spectrum right somewhere somewhere in there.
Very heavy like normally colts start with like a pamphlat you.
Know, no, they're they're kind of starting with, yeah, with you're not going to get paid and will make you homeless if you if you don't meet your numbers. And what's weird enough is that this is the work they're doing. This is a call center cult. Like, that's what they're being made to do, is a call center as.
Slaves in the center. It's so bad, man.
Fuck, it's only marginally better if you're getting paid, right.
Yeah, it's not even bad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, already on the spectrum of yeah, being forcibly forced to labor. So some number of female members were also sexually trapped for the cult leader, right, which is, you know, a bummer, but pretty normal for a cult. And the cult leader obviously lived in luxury with a handful of his lieutenants, and off of the strength of tens of millions of dollars in donations brought in by the sophisticated network of call centers and this network of
online stalkers. There's a This is a really savvy cult in terms of like how they operate and utilize social media to find vulnerable people, which is one one of the things I'm more interested in talking about is that it's not just we're just throwing out a wide net and asking a million people for money and the hopes that like a couple hundred send it. They're actually going out and stalking people based on their social media to try to determine if they're vulnerable or not to be
reached out to, which is cool just like Facebook. Yeah, yeah, Facebook is where a lot of this happens. Absolutely, But I.
Mean that's like even part of their model as well. Like they will advertise things to young girls that are like perhaps looking at pages about, you know, eating disorders, and they'll be like, oh yeah, we'll use that to advertise to them. It's like the darkest thing. Have a doesn't surprise me A Colt would be doing it.
Yeah, I would love to. And this is the kind of thing. It would probably require that like there be some sort of Nuremberg like case that you know, opens up facebooks books. But I would love to know what percentage of their profits is just a mix of like inciting little kids to have eating disorders and directing people into cults. Like because it's not nothing, it's not zero percent of the Facebook income. It's straying people's lives at scale, it's got to be like forty percent at least.
Right, Yeah.
Yeah, Like it's at the point where I get advertisements every week for like illegal suppressors for firearms, and like, that's not close to the worst thing on Facebook. It's like, that's that's that's wholesome. Honestly, that's just somebody who wants a quieter gun to shoot people with. It's it's a doc.
But I have not Facebook for like over ten years, but whenever I see things from it, I'm like, is this like a fucking parallel universe kind of social media? It's next level.
Yeah, it's one of those things I Ethically, I guess I should totally cancel it. I still go on about once every two because there's like friends that I knew twenty five years ago, and for work too, so like when there's a mass shooting, I need to be able to look up someone's family right, like or someone's posts. So I find use for it once every like two, But every time I'm on there, I'm just constantly like, oh my god, like, is what percentage of this traffic
is even real people watching shit? Because this is all just insane.
I love the boomer stuff where like they'll fool for like there'll be like a fucking dolphin on roller skates and I'm like, wow, look what the dolphins are doing. It's like, uh cool, Like shut up, go back to bed.
Yeah, or like a poorly photoshopped or like a poorly AI generated image of like a soldier with like his hands bleeding from stigmata, and like most people won't share this. Anyone share this.
Yeah, that's the best.
Yeah. So we're talking about the Kingdom of God, and like all cults, this story starts with the cult leader, one David E. Taylor, who is as of today, fifty three years young. We know tragically little of David's early life. There's been no real in depth reporting on this guy as an individual. So like ninety percent of what I've got to work with here is what he wrote or had ghost written on his church website and a two thousand and nine self help book that he wrote about
talking to g Right. That's that those are our sources of this guy's early life. So take all of this with a grain of salt, right, because this is not Yeah, per these sources, I can tell you he was born on August third, nineteen seventy two in Memphis, Tennessee. I doubt he's lying about that because I really can't think of a reason for him to lie about being fifty three years old. His parents were in the church business.
His dad was an evangelical past or. His dad is a Baptist pastor, right, So that is evangelical, but it's a very different chunk of the faith from like the Pentecostalism that he's going to come to as an adult. Right, Like, Baptists are not the same kind of evangelicals.
I think you could be chill and be Abaptists still, right, and they're like pretty chill.
There are some chill Baptists. Yes, I don't know that his dad was, but it's very different, right, or somewhat different, we should say. And yeah, and is a big thing that you can tell from his family in terms of the seriousness with which they take their religion is that his dad really embraced the commandment that Christians should be
fruitful and multiplying. Because David was born the seventh and at the time he was the youngest child in his family, but his parents had two more kids after him, So that's you're really putting in putting in the work. When you're having nine kids, that's that's not insignificant, he would later Yeah, fierrile, and also really relying on those middle
kids to raise the youngest ones. Now, he would later write that his mother told him while she was pregnant with him, that she spent hours a day praying at her husband's church. And I haven't found much about his father other than that he was a pastor for close to forty years. The only detail from his life that his son seemed interested in repeating is that when his dad was twenty three years old, he stopped a gunman
on a bus. And here's the version of the story that David published on one of his church websites about his dad. One day, as he was writing the Memphis bus transit, the young man pulled out a gun and stuck up the bus, robbing the people of their money. Minister Taylor boldly came on the bus and began to speak the word of God to the robber. He then commanded him to give him the gun and put it in his hand in Jesus's name. The man's instant le obeyed.
Minister Taylor also commanded him to give the people their money back, which he did. Later, after he was arrested, Minister Taylor went and visited him in prison. When they saw each other, they both wept. He then led the young man to the lord, resulting in him surrendering his life completely. Racial barriers were also broken at a time when racial tensions were high. The newspaper openly declared that a black man and a white man cried together, and
in a shocking twist, this is a true story. Yeah, this actually happened. There's a newspaper clipping about it, and the Yeah, there's a photo from the Memphis Press scimitar with a picture of Minister Taylor and the robber and he's wearing like one of those striped prison shirts. It really looks like a scene from Cool Hand Luke. And the actual text of the news article is pretty close
to what David said. The story, written by Paul Vanderwood, starts with the sentence a Negro and a white man cried together today, which tells you a lot about where race relations were that like, that's your lead.
Yeah, yeah, oh boy, Yeah, it doesn't look good.
Things were bad if that's where we're starting, But yeah, seems to be true and his dad seems nice because his dad like the articles about his dad testifying in the robber's behalf to try to get him leniency because like he stopped rather than continuing with the robbery. So good on him. That seems like a nice story. Yeah, and David is going to be raised with this tale of his father's heroism. But apparently the example wasn't enough to stop him from falling into an adolescence of sin
and debauchery. His early life is summed up on the church website this way. Raised in a Christian home in Memphis, Tennessee, he fell away as he was seduced into the gang life as a teenager. But everything drastically changed one night at the age of seventeen when Jesus appeared to him
face to face in a dream. Now, one thing I noticed straight away when I was going into this guy's life is that he spends a lot of time talking about how bad he was as a teenager, well admitting that his father was this like great man who made him go to church three times a week. And I this is kind of normal for guys in this chunk of Christianity, especially who take to preaching as a family business. Because you you both want to burnish your credentials that like, oh,
my family's always been preaching. But you also have to be able to You have to have a rock bottom narrative. You can't just be like and so I was always a good godly man.
Say they never do that. They like, yeah, everything was fine, but that was cool. Now I'm doing It's like no, like I did Heroin for three year and it's like, did you just do that? We'll say you did that to have this like cool back story.
Yeah, Or is it? Is it like how you know some politicians will like join the army or the Marines to get like a tour in so that they can campaign off of it for the rest of their career. Is it like, all right, I got to spend three years doing Heroin and skin rows that I can.
Yeah, it's like the little building you know.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I got hepatitis from a dirty needle and that's like my combat action ribbon.
Yeah, just like yeah, but I've seen ship.
Yeah. So anyway. In his first book, Face to Face Appearances with Jesus, David Taylor claims he was visited by Christ and visited he means in person like he means that they have like a physical relationship. In December of nineteen eighty nine, this was around a week before Christmas Eve, and David was, by his account, a pretty tough customer. He described himself in his book as your typical unsaved teenager, smoking dope, marijuana, using bad language and cursing, partying and
having pre marital sex. I was even involved with gangs and hung around cocaine dealing drug lords. Hmmm.
I love that he went from swearing to drug lords, like mate.
For swearing the drug lords. Yeah, it's the that's the real uh gateway drug is cursing. Yeah, he just streak to go gain dealing drug lords.
One that I said ship. The next was Pablo Escobata. Yeah, that happens all the time. Fucking idiot. He's always making this up, like surely.
It's it's gotta be lies, right, it's gotta be part of that is he goes, I was smoking dope comma marijuana. So is he saying that he was smoking dope is in like heroin and marijuana, because I'm not. I'm not impressed with the pot. If you were smoking like fucking horse, right, it's like, yeah, the pot doesn't even register if you're doing if you're smoking heroin.
No, it sounds like the kid at school that's like, oh yeah, you know, like when you're like six and there's a kid that's like, yeah, I have smoked weed. It's like you probably fucking have him. Like he sounds like one of them kids, you know.
Yeah, it's like being like, yeah, you know, I used to shoot up forty eight hundred dollars worth of heroin a week. Also one time I took too much Benadryl to get high.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm not impressed by the other one.
Yeah yeah.
I Also I might people to buy this guy partied as a kid, smoked a little pot. Maybe he did a couple of lines of coke again at a party. A lot of people do, right, I would go so far as to say that, like, the average person has probably at least once or twice experimented with a harder drug in their life. It's very normal. Maybe not cools more than fifty percent, But what a lot of the population you know that said there's no evidence whatso that he knew cocaine dealing drug lords. Maybe he knew a
coke dealer. Again, a lot of people know. But a coke lord, that's a high level. That's a man who has money to buy a hippopotamus.
Like, what's his remit for? Like just dealer? It's a drug lord. You know, maybe it was a Jesus thing. I don't know.
There's two things for having known some drug lords. I have like two hard requirements. One you have to have been measuring your drug by either the kilo or the ton, depending on the drug you're talking about. And number two, if you're a coke lord, you have to have been able to buy like African wildlife. Yeah, you know, like that's the level I need if I'm gonna call you a coke lord, right.
I think you like a really horrible killer.
Yeah, and a lot of bodies, a lot of stacked bodies. Yeah. The only real detail he provides us anywhere about his supposed life of crime as a child is this paragraph. I remember one time before the Lord came to me and saved my life. I was caught in the crossfire of a shootout. There were bullets flying everywhere, and I could have possibly been shot and killed. Thank god, he
spared my life and protected me. And this is one where like he doesn't say this was involved in the drug game, and this is America, so yeah, maybe he was in the middle of a shootout that happened. A lot of people have been in this country, right, that's not an uncommon experience. Is just being uncomfortably close. I've been around like three different mass shootings in the United States, shooting.
Like yeah, shit, yeah, yeah, that's not unusual.
Right, I don't know. One of them was two victims, the other two were one, so not mass, but like three different shootings, right, like, oh, it just happened. It just happens.
Yeah, it's like I've been jumped. I thought that was bad, like fucking hell. Right, yeah, no, that sounds fad, that sounds horrible.
And I can believe that he was just uncomfortably close to a shooting and that maybe that did spur him to get more serious about the religion thing. You know. That's a that's not a wildly that's not a huge leap, right. David then says that Jesus appeared to him for the first time during a dream. Right, this is in nineteen eighty nine, It's like a week or so before Christmas,
And here's how he describes it. And I'm gonna preface this by saying it's a weirdly erotic description of Jesus, Like, oh God, Ja, I gotta tell you that right now, suddenly he was there, with eyes glowing full of love, standing in front of me. Was the man I'd heard about as a little boy my entire life. I'd heard about this man from my mother and father, and was taught that he died on the cross for my sins and rose again on the third day from the dead.
He was not truly real to me, only a religious opinion. He was just someone my parents told me about because of their religious beliefs. Then out of nowhere, he was standing there in front of me, face to face. And that's not the horny part of the story, right that's and I bring him the intro the next passage. Here he describes Jesus using the word ecstasy more times than a drug dealer on telegram. Oh God, it was ecstasy. For the first time I was standing in front of Jesus,
my whole being felt him. You can imagine the ecstasy I felt. It was a feeling of intense glory. It's like wherever he stands he feels the very atmosphere air and molecules all around you, even the atoms inside your body and being respond to him. It was total ecstasy, indescribable, blistering with a static eruption. My whole being felt like it was caught up into Heaven. The very atoms in my body made me feel like I was about to explode night. That's a guy who wants to fuck Jesus.
Right, I think that's a guy that did fuck Jesus by the sound, but he might have fucked Jesus Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's weird, I exactly, Yeah, he's uh, he's projecting EPISO slightly.
That definitely, maybe a little bit. And we'll continue with the uncomfortably horny descriptions of Jesus Christ. But first, here's some ads and we're back. So Jake, as I promised, that uncomfortably horny vibe continue for several pages, during which he repeatedly describes Christ in terms that would make an airport romance novelist say, okay, it's time to dial things back. A little quote. Standing in front of me was an
awesome man, handsome and perfect in stature. He was just a little taller than me, about six feet or more. The perfect height of a normal man. As I gazed upon him, I saw that the color of his hair was sandy brownish and parted at the top, coming over the sides of his face and down his shoulders and waves. Right, are the normal man, the normal man's Yeah, above six feet is a normal man. A little bit of height shaming.
There, yeah, yeah, yeah, come on, man, this is very erotic and it's fine.
It's fine. It's cool if you're into that. Jesus is thousands of years old, so it's not problematic, right.
I mean, you know it, so Jesus, I don't know, like long hair, like robes. Yeah, halo, I'm not gonna be like you pretty cut, yeah, perfect cheek bones, beautiful eye come on, yeah, like yeah, I mean it's fat. But let's let's let's know what you're really thinking. Son, And I'm laughing as I'm gonna guess. I'm gonna take a wild guess that this guy went on to be wildly homophobic in his cult.
Yeah, oh yeah, I mean yes, I would say not not to the point where like it's the main thing, but it's just a normal thing in that chunk of the right right, Like this is not Pentecostal Christianity is not super great on gay people. You know, these aren't the Episcopalians. So given that this guy becomes a money grubbing cult leader, I'd expected Jesus to like mark him out a special and telling me he had some sort of great purpose to fulfill. Right, That's kind of what I
was expecting to come here, and that does happen. But what surprises me is that David Taylor's Jesus opens things up, not just by like telling him you're marked for something special. I need you to speak the word to the masses. But he talks like a cult leader, like a like a real world cult leader. And I've run into a lot of different Jesus cults, right, Which is not to say like this Christianity doesn't ever worse cult than the
other chunk of our society. People make cults for no reason at all, right, People make cults without a god being involved with a god. Every religion has its cults. I'm not being particularly shitty to anyone faith. What's weird is that his Jesus talks exactly like a twenty first century cult leader, which I haven't come across in the many different accounts like this that I have read because the first thing Jesus tells him to do, because he's like, I'll do anything, Jesus, tell me what I need to
do to serve you. And the first thing Jesus says is you need to cut off all ties with your best friend. Oh you need to immediately like cut the closest person to you out of your life. And that's just straight cult leadership, right, Well, thanks Jesus, Thanks Jesus. Now, the way Jesus in the dream explains this is that David's best friend is a really nice guy. He says, he's a good guy. He's a really good friend, he
was a good influence. But he's not Christian, so he's not saved, right, And so Jesus tells him, David, forsake your best friend, give your life to me and follow me. And again, I mean, I hate to I'm not much of a Bible knower, but I went to church as a kid. I was confirmed Jesus was friends with lots of people who were not good followers of their faith, right, Like that's just the text of the Bible.
I mean, this guy obviously is just I mean, you know, I give them benefit now, but I think it's pretty clear this guy just made this up. It sounds like you lie.
Of course.
It sounds like you just had a problem with his best mate, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and yeah, Jesus sure did.
Yeah, I'm sorry, bro, Jesus said, you know, like you go to get go fuck yourself, like that's how it is now.
Not Yeah, we can't be friends anymore because the son of God doesn't like you. Yeah, right, well that's gonna make me become Christian?
Oh God, Jesus.
Yeah, it is weird to me that he describes Jesus as like the leader of a high control group, right, because like, yeah, that's a normal thing. Cult leaders tell you to cut off your friends in your family, right if they don't follow you. So, yeah, David writes in his book, you can't truly follow Jesus and maintain worldly relationships or friendships you once had. You must be willing to give up your even your best friend, if Jesus requires you to. So that's why he's putting this in
the book. As you said, it's fake. He's throwing this in there so that to use Jesus to justify the different rules he's going to have for everyone in the cult, right, So I guess what I'm mostly surprised is that I haven't seen another cult leader do this. I've seen a lot of people put words in Jesus's mouth, but I haven't seen them do it this blatantly. And that's kind of like, oh wow, I guess for me, it's a marker of like you can get away with a lot more now, huh.
Yeah, I thought you.
Still had to be a little more cunning about.
It, right, like look at you know, I mean, no offense to moments, but like look at the guy though, Jesus, Yeah, you know, oh I found these golden plates. I mean that was pushing it.
Like this, that was really pushing it.
Yeah, that you can tell just nothing as anymore. You can just be like, oh yeah, Jesus said I need a porstion, and you're my best friends a dick head, like it's very yeah, it's just yea unimaginative now.
Yeah, it is it. I mean it's because that's the thing about like Joseph Smith is at least the elaborateness of the golden plate and the weirdness is like, well, that's a man who was thinking on his feet. He had to come up with some lies real quick. Yeah, they're created. Yeah, you know, like it's.
Like borderline sci fi, like, yeah, it's a pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah, there's the you know, there's the they're all bad people. Please don't mistake me, Joseph Smith and l Ron Hubbard. But I respect them the craft. I respect the craft.
You know, put in some work, you know, like obviously, yeah that fucking ended up doing really evil stuff. But like at least at the Star it was like golden plates, not just like fucking chat gpt t here.
Right, Yeah, this is a very chatchy BTS cult and I'm sure if it had been made a little bit later, he would have made heavier use of chat GPT because he does use a ghost writer regularly. And that's that's basically an evolution that Yes, So after having this dream where Jesus tells him to cut off ties with his friend David, Taylor threw himself hardcore into his religion. He gives himself up to Christ. He saved all that good stuff.
A few days after his first vision with Jesus, he decides to try and summon the Son of God, this time like purposefully and outside of a dream so at about eleven and this is also the first one of these where I've heard where he is treating the cult leader is explicitly treating Jesus like a demon you summon,
which is also kind of weird. Yeah, so, at about eleven PM on Christmas Eve, he begs Jesus to come to him in person and prove that he was really as alive as he looked in the dream, which feels to me like maybe you don't have enough faith, Like part of the point is faith, right, and if you're like, now, you got to come when I'm awake, otherwise I can't believe that you weren't just a dream. That just seems kind of sacrilegious to me.
But yeah, you don't start telling the Son of God like when and why I had to appear? Right, you just got.
He's literally the son of God.
Yeah, no, I'm not getting any time. Yeah, this guy's clearly like a massive narcissist, which I guess you have to oh, oh my god.
Yes, yeah, And it really comes across from the book because he orders Jesus, if you are truly real, manifest yourself to me. More. David relates this moment in a chapter of his book titled The Supernatural Heaven's Invade My Room, which sounds like some drug experience I had right around the same age, you know, like I could characterize an acid trip or two that way, like sniffing right right. Yeah.
After this God comes to him, you know, he follows the summons and he blesses him with the ability to speak in tongues, and then his bedroom is transformed into some sort of strange ethereal masturbation cave quote. My room was engulfed with the atmosphere of heaven in a cloudy mist. My room was literally lifted to the atmosphere of heaven. My room did not actually have a door, so I
had to put a bed sheet at the entryway. Often before I put the bed sheet up, every single day, a glistening angel with a sword would be standing at the door of my room. It was like I was not even at home. My mother was worried about me because I stayed in my room for hours and days at a time. I would come out in fellowship with the family at times, but I was caught up and experiencing heavenly things in my room.
My room was.
Literally filled with a celestial air or an electrical atmosphere going, yeah, he's gooning. I'm sorry, man, you're gooning with God in your bedroom. Yeah, there was a seventeen year old boy. You will leave his room for days at a time.
Yeah, yeah, no good.
Yeah. So after this so called face to face meeting with God, our boys life story is pretty nondescript. For the next couple of years. We know he's an active pretty much the entirety of the nineties, working as a preacher and a religious motivational speaker. He claims the Lord led him to the work of Bishop G. E. Patterson, who isn't a bishop in like the Catholic sense of the word. I would say, not a real I mean real or not. There are Pentecostal bishops, but they're not.
There's a bunch of them, and it's just like if you have a bunch of churches who say we're part of an organization, we're ap pointing bishops. Right, So it doesn't have quite as much of like a history as the Catholic term of the word. Right, But he's a bishop in the Yeah, you don't.
Really have to work towards it sort of thing.
I'm sure, but it's certainly not the same degree to which because you can just get appointed, right if like five guys like you. You know, I think it's a little harder to become a Catholic bishop. You have to cover up a lot more child sex abuse. Say this is a wetter thing or a worse thing, just say it. It's different, and yeah. Bishop ge Patterson was an American Pentecostal leader who founded the Temple of Deliverance Cathedral of Bountiful Blessings, which was one of the largest I think
it still is. He's not around anymore largest Pentecostal churches in the country. Since Taylor's dad was a Baptist preacher, Patterson acted as David's entry way into the Pentecostal faith. Taylor graduates from a Bible school at age nineteen, and he claims that Jesus came to him in another vision where Taylor demanded the real thing as in the real Bible experience. He has another talk with Jesus where he
demands he makes demands of Jesus. He's like, look, I'm not going to just sit up here and preach the Bible and repeat the same old stories everyone else preaches. That's not enough.
For me.
You have to give me the real Old Testament shit, Like I want visions, I want magic powers, I want it all, baby, Otherwise I'm not gonna be a member of your faith. To kid, he's like putting the screws to Jesus here.
Yeah, I'm team Jesus in this.
You don't think you're supposed to do this. Again, not an expert on Christianity, but I'm pretty sure this is sacrilegious. But Jesus appreciates the moxie, I guess. So he's like, I'll give you the full Old Testament experience, but you got to give up everything you own first. So next, per an article published by Taylor's Kingdom of God Global Church quote, Shortly thereafter, he was given a series of dreams showing the future of the nation. Apostle Taylor was
desperate to see it change come to America. He saw nine to eleven, ten years before it happened in a dream. In addition to that, he also saw a coming war upon America soil from Russia. In the dream. America did
not win this war now in modern times. He made a big deal after like the Trump got elected, of the whole predicted a war on US soil against Russia thing, because I think in light of the whole Russia Gates stuff that seems compelling to people, right, But reading older articles prior to Trump's election, all that stuff about Taylor's prophecies, it made his dream of America fighting a war with Russia on foreign soil had nothing to do with Russian
influence campaigns or anything that's happening recently. Right. He foresaw nine to eleven and the global War on Terror and thought that the Russian government incited them all.
Huh. I mean, yeah, pretty.
Creative, creative, not accurate. Yeah, I could say a lot about who was involved in nine to eleven. Not Reallyrussia. They're not really their back as far as I'm aware.
Yeah, no, well.
Yeah, and anyway, so it's one of those things he's pivoted more recently to being like, oh, yeah, all this stuff with Russia today, I predicted it, you know, thirty years ago he didn't. He's caught the Russias. Yeah. In a twenty eighteen article for the Tennessee News Herald, Colin Mahoney included posts from an employee of David Taylor's summarizing the over one hundred and fifty face to face visitations
with Jesus and prophetic dreams that he had quote. In a series of dreams that he has prophesied for over twelve years, God revealed that Russia was going to attack America and that this war would begin doing the presidency of George W. Bush Junior. In one of these dreams, the financial centers of America were attacked, and this dream was fulfilled with a September eleventh attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Don't be caught unprepared for
what is about to hit America again. He's just completely wrong, like he does before nine to eleven, that the World Trade Center will be attacked, which is not that much of a prediction because it had been in ninety three, and he thinks the Russians are going to do it, right, He thought that w was going to go to war with Russia, and we kind of do the opposite. Yeah, we literally actually do the opposite.
I imagine, he said, like a hundred other things though, yeah, will completely off as well. There's that thing, right like if you far enough shits at the wall, some of it's going.
To stick, Yeah, exactly. And it didn't even stick.
It was so wrong. Yeah.
So yeah, it's the same thing as like Alex Jones in two thousands saying that there's going to be attack on the World Trade Center. Well there just had been so.
Yeah, and she had been saying that like for years before it. You know.
Yeah, it's like if I'm gonna be like Jake, I'm getting a vision from God right now, there's going to be an attack on a US military base at some point in the next five years. Yeah, I'll be right, there will be somewhere right.
It's like maybe, like you know what, I think, there's going to be a school shooting.
Yeah, there's going to be a school shooting. So we're in the United States, you know, like, yeah, these are easy predictions to make. The stock market will go up or down. Yeah, yeah, of course. So this guy, he's got about as much claim to accuracy as Alex Jones. In nineteen ninety seven, Taylor claimed that Jesus visited him and handed him the literal keys to the Kingdom of
God quote from his church website. And now everywhere he goes Mighty, regional ministries and deliverance take place to the Kingdom, demonstration, drug busts take place, by the kingly decree, human trafficking rings have been completely dismantled by the Kingdom and power of God. And he's actually correct about this, but not in the way that he wanted to be, because as of late twenty twenty five, I can say that everywhere David Taylor goes there are arrests of human busts of
human trafficking it rings. It's just that there is.
Yeah, there's loads of them. That's why.
Yeah, there's loads of them. You are correct, there's a definite correlation between where you are and where when trafficking rings get busted.
Yeah, it's like the you know, if you're in London, you're probably going to see a rat because they're fucking everywhere.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and not all of them at Parliament.
But the same can be said about sex trafficking rings.
Right, yes, Look, you know who's whose government isn't involved in some sex trafficking. I'm asking that question genuinely.
I'd like to be generally, not like maybe like fucking there's a place off the coast of England called Sealand.
Where Sealand might be okay, yeah, like it's.
It's basically like an old oil rig and some people like common data and declared like it to be a sovereign nation, and it kind of is.
Sure, maybe Sealand doesn't have ring who knows. I want to believe the adorable President of Ireland doesn't have any involvement there, But I know politics too well. I'm sure there's something that's something. Yeah, So the September eleventh attacks did help to supercharge his fan base, right, this is kind of why he starts to become a popular pastor. Is in the wake of that he's really able to
play his predictions and start drawing people to him. And he spends a lot of the early aughts collecting the kind of accolades and awards that allowed him to draw in more money and followers, often peeling people off of more reputable Pentecostal organizations. In two thousand and nine, he wrote his face to Facebook, which not only detailed his own conversations with Jesus, but was structured as a guide for worshippers to have their own in person conversations with Christ.
And if you want to have an in person conversation with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, just purchase the products and services that support this podcast. All of them will give you a direct line to God. That's a promise we can absolutely make.
I don't know about that.
And we're back. Did you have a face to face meeting with with with the Lord during our ad break?
Is it really called the face to Facebook?
It's called face to face my meetings with Jesus Christ or something like that.
Yeah, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sad. I don't think he did ei though.
Yeah, I don't think he did either. Now, it is worth noting that kind of during the Obama administration, one of the things he does that kind of get burnishes his reputation is he receives the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award during which is like signed by Barack Obama. The apostle DAVIDY. Taylor gets this award and that that's gonna sound more impressive than it is. So yeah, you can see that award, Jake. Yeah, yeah, that looks like a real award.
You know, about to say that's like canva looking award.
Yeah, it's not. It's not a great looking award, I'll be honest. And it's not really a real award. I mean, it's technically a real award. But it's not like the Barack Obama didn't like single this guy out for an award. The Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award is something it's a volunteer service award. Anyone can apply to if they've done more than four thousand hours a volunteer service for an organization
in their lifetime. So basically JMMI, which is his church, Like that's the like his church, the legal name for his registered nonprofit church sponsored him for this award that anyone who volunteers four thousand hours or more for any organization will get.
Right, Like there's hundreds of these thousands.
And I'm sure for like people who really volunteer for a good cause, this is a nice thing to get. But his own organization just said he volunteered four thousand hours at the organization that pays him. Like I if I just were to frame this podcast as a volunteer effort, I could get this award, right. I've spent four thousand and hours on this job.
I love the he speaks face to face with Jesus, but he got his congregation to plug him to get the Obama Canva Award, like it's talking to Jesus.
Imba was a little harder to talk to, you know.
Yeah, very very interesting guy.
He's a busier man than Jesus at this point in time. So again, and a big part of his this In two thousand and nine, this book Face to Face comes out, and it's a guide for how you two can talk to God one on one and if that doesn't work for you, if somehow just reading this book isn't enough and you're not seeing God physically in the flesh and feeling him, well, he offers a more personal touch, right.
This is how this is what he's like because because his cult, most of the people who are listening to his churches, who are watching him, you know, watching like the videos of his church services or going in person, they're not full on cult members. They're giving him money and stuff he needs. Thousands of those people. His actual cult members are just a few dozen people. And these are the folks who they're like, Hey, this book, I'm still not talking to God. I really want to meet
him in person. And David's like, well, then you got to come work for me. You have to give up all of your money, sign it all over to me, everything that you're worth, cut off your friends and family, who don't recognize me as a prophet and join the church, right, and he promises I can get you a connection directly to Jesus Christ because and this is the official stance of his church, David Taylor is the best friend of Jesus Christ. That's his actual title. Really, yeah, he's the
best Like that is his title. He is an apostle and the best friend.
Of Jesus Christ, right, Okay.
Which, like I would have guess Paul, maybe yeah, you know, yeah, I feel like they went through more together.
But yeah, okay, it's such a funny thing to go for. Like a lot of these guys were like I am the new Jesus or like, you know, like God, this guy is like, now we're just best mates.
Now we're super tight though. Yeah, like I have not God myself, but I am his best friend Jesus Christ exactly. So. Through his church organization jmm I, which stands for Joshua Media Ministries International, Taylor starts buying up properties during the Obama years. In twenty eleven, they purchase a twenty nine and twenty square foot industrial building in Taylor, Michigan, and they move at least ten people onto the property to start, although it's sometimes occupied by more, you know, up to
a few dozen. And these people are some of there. There's somewhere I think sixty ish is the average number of full time cult members that he has. I think it's sometimes more like in the hundred or hundreds. Even it's kind of hard to tell because I don't think we have a great accounting. Some of the sources are like there were six people in one of these buildings,
and they own buildings in multiple states. Eventually they start with this property in Taylor, Michigan, but they're gonna wind up buying properties like all over the United States by the time they get raided. In addition to the property in Taylor, they have a property in Chesterfield, Missouri. They have one in Eureka, Missouri, Wildwood, Tampa, Florida, Ocala, Florida, and Houston, Texas. So and these are a mix of
Some of these are just actual church buildings. Some of these are mansions, like again Nellie's old place in Saint Louis or near Saint Louis is like one of the places they're occupying. Some of them are like warehouse spaces. So it's a variety of different kinds of properties, but they are in like five or six states, right, so they're operating all over the place, and they're setting up
not just like they don't just own these buildings. They have billboards on the way into and out of town that are like plugging both their churches and the services they're doing. He brings in other people as pastors under him because he can't preach it more than one church at a time, right, so that this does expand to
be a sizable organization. And the people who are full time cold members have to give up their bank accounts, they have to sign over their retirement accounts and inheritances in order to serve the apostle in his world historic mission, which is God wants him to prepare seven billion souls for a great heavenly harvest. You know, like that's the that's what his ministry is going to do.
That sounds like things are getting a little bit darker.
Yeah, it's a little darker. It's a big job you're taking on. And yeah, now, if you're trying to save seven billion souls, you can't do that by having people come into a physical church, right. You can't even really do that just by having a TV channel seven billion is a lot of people. There's only one way to reach that many people by using the most efficient form about reaching existence, a call center.
I knew that was coming. Yeah, yeah, Zooming God.
Basically, yeah, Zooming God. The cult starts operating in the early adds a twenty four to seven prayer line, and they have online ads. They have billboards all over in states like like Missouri, right where they direct worshippers to call in if they needed a miracle. And so this is framed as like are you desperate? Are you maybe suicidal?
Are you in like serious need of like some sort of help, you know, call this number and we can help you, right like like and it again, it's kind of almost framed as like a suicide hotline or are you are you about to get evicted? Is is your life in shambles? Basically like we can this cult can help you, right, the Kingdom of God can can fix whatever the hell is wrong with you, just give us
a call. So they are deliberately going after the most vulnerable people, right like, that's obviously what's going on here. And yeah, the whole purpose of the prayer line isn't to actually help anyone. It's not even to really pray for anyone. The entire reason for this is to get people talking to his church's unpaid workers, who were, like they were each supposed to talk to hundreds of people a day and bring in tens of thousands of dollars
in donations. Right, this is just a donation thing, because it becomes clear once you're talking to the prayer line that if you really want your prayers to work, if you want God to listen to you, you got to pay up, you know, otherwise, how dos you know you're serious?
Per an article in Saint Louis Magazine, According to the indictment against Taylor and brand and Brandon's like his top number one, Lady Taylor instructed followers working the call centers to lie and say that collected money was to be used to build wells and impoverished parts of the world and fight human trafficking. So you have to put in some money to prove to God that you're serious. But we're only going to use it to help people, you know,
to further our great work. And from what I can tell, a lot of the appeal here is the promise that David is going to intervene directly with Jesus and use his friendship to save the lives of your dying loved ones. Right, if you have a serious problem, largely family members who are sick, David can intervene on your behalf for enough money. And this is a claim that they made specifically.
Yeah, sorry, this is where for me, it's just becomes so evil, Like it's just so nasty to do that to people.
You know, it's disgusting, right, because people. I've had a loved one who had thankfully it wound up being benign, but had a brain tumor and we didn't know if it was cancerous or not for a while. We just knew it was affecting her memory. It was just really fucking her life up. And obviously we went to doctors, we like did the and that's how we found out,
and we got it medicated and whatnot. But we were also trying all sorts of nonsense treatments, right, stuff that I would not have thought because you just you just desperate and terrified. Yeah, you know you read on the maybe this fucking helps. Okay, you know it's not smart. It's just when you're someone you love is sick and you have no idea what's wrong. It's very easy, Like I do have empathy people being conned here, it's.
So easy to be like, oh, that's fucking stupid. If you've ever been in like that dark fucking trench of just kind of mis damn and fear. Absolutely, it is exactly that. Yeah, and you it's incredible how quickly you will go right. Yesterday that was the craziest thing ever. Now today, I'll try it. Whatever it is, you know, it's it's really sad anything, Yeah, exactly, Like who knows, you know, it's very sad to pray on people like that. It's it's just vile.
Yeah, it's the evilest thing I think that you can pretty much do outside of like murdered directly murdering people or whatever. I guess it's it's on the I don't know. We don't need to quantify it, but yeah, it's it's pretty hideous. So he is making these claims very directly. And my favorite specific example of this is a claim repeated in numerous cult propaganda videos and articles. Here's one
example published on his church's website. A pastor received a text message that his cousin had dropped down dead while taking a shower. He sent a text to David E. Taylor explaining the situation. Right after he released that command to get up. He being David Taylor, the young man's heart started beating again. And so this is the claim he's making that this pastor calls and said, my cousin
just dropped dead from a heart attack. And Taylor yells, get up into the phone, and his cousin's heart starts beating again. And there's give his proof. Like in articles and stuff like this, there's pictures generally shared. I'll show you one example here. You can see there's a photo of the kid in the hospital giving a thumbs up, and then like a picture of him healthy outside of it. Before and after. It says young man raised from the dead by the Lord working through David Taylor.
Yeah, great, the thumbs up. Fucking killing the thumbs up.
Let you know that he's okay because David Taylor braid for him. Obviously, I'm convinced this seems like truth to me.
Came back from the dead, and he's like, yop, thumbs up.
Thumbs up, I'm good. I do want to play you one of the YouTube propaganda videos that cult put out, which focused on a different claim of power over life and death and actually gives you. You get to see some of David Taylor uh and his wife preaching in this and as a bonus, Jake, keep an eye out. David Taylor is wearing what I can only describe as the most incredible outfit I have ever seen in my life. Okay, it is this is this is special. Sure experience the
dead being race critical condition. Tonight after a shooting outside of Georgia restaurant. Tell me you heard about this year of NFL Super Bowl, a young man was shot.
Point blink rooting for the forty nine. It was national news.
This is the young man.
Four people had already died around him.
The doctor said, Chris is not gonna make it.
The young man win it to Acoma and died for twenty minutes.
And they said, never in the history of the hospital had they lost four patients with a fifth expected. A text apostle Taylor. He said, Chris is not gonna die, He's gonna lead it.
This was a resurrection.
Yes, it was shot twice.
That's here.
It is a year later, and I'm standing before.
Your dad can't be raised.
My cousin had just dropped down dead while taking a shower, and I'd seen the Lord and yours DAVIDY Taylor to raise the dead. I sent him a text and he sent me a text and said the Lord told them only twowards to set, and that was get up, And shortly after Posse released the command, my cousin was raised from the dead.
Okay, well, for those of you watching the video, we'll cut in here, like right now while I'm talking, we'll have our editor throwing a screen grab of David and that incredible outfit. But Jake, how would you describe him?
Look, you know, you know you in the Beasts, Like there's a there's a bit, Yeah, there's a bit where he gets really dressed up to like take Bell to like well not take her out, but they do something fancy dinner, and it's basically that. It's literally that outfit.
Man telling you, yeah, yeah, it's literally it's it's something Michael Jackson would have worn.
It's fucking mate. It something like Prince would have worn if you had a kid with Michael Jackson. Like it's like next level.
I do want that jacket, right, Like I.
Do want to wear And just people looking at you, like what Jesus is my best mate. Fuck off, can wear what I want.
Incredible stuff.
Yeah, the the production of that is kind of wild though, Like I'll be honest, it's pretty clever, like it's kind of it's well, yeah, it's well made, and it's presented as a news report kind of. I've actually not seen a cult do that, I don't think, maybe not so not that level. Like that's pretty dark but unique in that sense.
Yeah, it's pretty novel, right, and it's it's it's a cross you said, Yeah, there's it's across between like a network news broadcast and like a movie trailer. Is interesting. Yeah. Now I should say before we close out here, the actual story of what happened to that young man who dropped dead and supposedly got brought back to life because Taylor commanded him to over the phone. There was a real young guy who had a heart attack and I think was legally dead for a period of time. It
was not his claim. The claim made by the church in all of David Taylor's websites is that like a pastor called him and told him about this this member of his church who had dropped dead. The young man was actually the cousin of a JMMI employee, by which
I mean an unpaid worker named Joseph Busch. So one of what actually happened here is that this dude who's a member of the Colt's cousin has a heart attack and is dead for a while and then gets brought back and is okay and recovers because that happens to people some times. And Joseph tells Taylor, and Taylor's like, oh, I saved him, right, and then he starts massaging the story from there.
Right, you know, his kid was in hospital with his thumb up, but it was not the reason.
Yeah, had nothing to do with David E. Taylor. And he was not called by another pastor. He did nothing over the phone, like because that's just not possibly found out about it because one of his cult members was the guy's cousin. It's not a fucking other church or whatever.
And yeah, I think that he either told this guy, you know, basically lie so that we can use this to recruit, or this guy is just enough of a cult member that he was like, yeah, that was me who saved him, and the guy was like, oh my god, Mike, thank you. You know, something like that happened one of the two, but it's not the story that's being told here.
And this is all like silly and fucked up, but it does get to like the central darkness at the core of what is otherwise a pretty standard Pentecostal cult movement. The whole appeal of David E. Taylor to the dedicated cult members who staffed his call center and of the thousands of more casual members who came to see him speak at three day miracle raising events, or those who called into his prayer line, the appeal was that this
guy could save your loved ones from death. And for most people, the extra bit of hope they got sending in a donation or getting a prayer to tailor's ears was enough, right, And I'm going to guess that in a lot of cases, it's somebody sick and you're worried about them, so you call and you send some money, and then they get better because generally people do, and
you're like, yeah, probably helped, right. But for the folks who actually made up the man power of his cult, the people who he is actually trafficking, right, the folks who are effectively enslaved working for him, the situation is a lot more serious. Right, These are not just people calling in when they're worried and sending in a few bucks. And David isn't just promising that he can save the
people they care about from dying. He's also threatening them, right, He's telling them that, you know, I can save your loved ones, or I can make God take them away. Right, I can have God curse you or the people you care about and destroy them, or you if you're not bringing in enough money in donations. That's that's where this kind of morph's in fairly quick order over the course of like the Late Oughts, Right, that's where David E. Taylor's ministry goes.
I saw and I saw this happen before in a cult, and I found someone really interested in explaining. Maybe not always, but they were saying, like the reason that happens is because they get really angry that they're not Like they get rich and then they want more and they get angry that they're not getting it. And it's like they process the anger through being like, yeah, I'll smite your whole family or whatever. Like it's it's like directly linked to their own little feelings, you.
Know, Yeah, I agree entirely. And you know, Jake, that's uh, that's the episode. That's part one. You get anything you want to plug here at the end.
Uh, well, Jesus is actually my best friend. So the we go and also listen to sad Oligarch. We just got season two out. It's some of the most well, it's some of the most work I've ever done on something in such a difficult way, like since we did season one. I'm not saying it's because of us, but since we did season one, it's extremely hard to get any info on anything right now. So I'm really proud of the work we've done, me and Sergey and Victim Mihiel,
and we've just absolutely smashed it. Man, really really enjoying it. I think people like it. So yeah, Man, sad Oligarch season two, it's out now.
Sad Oligarchs Season two is out now. Is Jake responsible for the deaths of any of these oligarchs? You know, we can't say no. We can't say no.
I promise no, Jake.
Jake says no. All right, that's it. Everybody come back in part two and we'll hear more cult shit.
Behind the Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media. For more from Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards