Also media, h what's got the plague? My Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the sickest man in podcasting. I have some sort of non COVID thing.
I did take the test.
Uh, so I have been I've been mainlining, you know, I said, I've been sober lately. But now I am a theorough flu addict. I don't even mix it into my drinks anymore. I just pour the powder straight out and rail that shit, you know, for you, that's the good stuff. Our guests who just congratulated me on my theorough flu addiction, mister Miles Gray, how are you doing, Miles Gray?
I'm great, I'm great. Thank you for having me back. Shout out to the bTB what do you call a BTV nation, your little bad Shout out the little bastards.
Yeah, yeah, the little bastards. Sure, yeah, shout out my little bastards out, shut out all. Shout out all the little bastards out there, love y'all. And I'm yeah, I just uh, I'm bracing myself for you again, the ups and downs and recording with you where I'm like what hah and then like crying inside for the rest of the day. You said that, it just made me think if we'd gone with my original plan for this podcast and made it all about Saddam Hussein, we could call
our fans the Husseiniacs. Oh oh yeah, see I just thought about that now. But that's a good one.
Yeah, Miles, were you in the room when Robert pitched the show on the phone when he was running through what sounded like a wind tunnel. Were you in the room?
I must have been.
Yeah.
I mean that was so such early days and like we were all working on all this shit together. But yeah, I feel like yeah, and even I mean I remember all the fucking process of coming up with a title and the art and all that shit. Shout out my boy Allan, you know, for the iconic cover art.
Yeah, Alan Lee.
Yes, Miles, are you been a good day?
You happy dude? Just oppose a ship?
Yeah?
Yeah, I'm having a fucking good day.
Man.
My little boy has two little teeth coming in. I'm like, wonderful. Yeah, I gotta go. I gotta go and get my fucking head kicked in by whatever tale or fuckery you're gonna do. Nothing.
Nothing goes with a nice peaceful day like a story of one of the most nightmarishly abusive people I have ever read about my life. See, God is punishing me with a sickness for taking such pleasure and making you unhappy Miles.
Oh yeah, oh you okay. Well look I'm as someone who was went to school where they tried to put the fear of God in me, but it didn't work. You know, I'm kind of split. I don't know if I want to talk ill of a man of God? Yeah, to see have you heard of this man of God? A fellow named TB. Joshua. First of all, no, And when Sophie hit me up and was like, hey, you know, we might be talking about this or that, and then she's like, okay, actually Robert Robert's gonna write something on
TV Joshua. I didn't google it because I'm like, what the fuck is this? I thought it was like, did he give a bunch of people tuberculosis?
And that would be the fun version of this if he was just like the typhoid Mary if tuberculosis, Johnny apple seed of tuberculosis. It's like, Oh, who's this TV Joshua, Well that's whole TV Joshua giving everybody TV.
Yeah, he's like when he coughs, look at his little handkerchief he coughs into, and tell me if there's blood. But yeah, I was like, And then this morning, out of a morbid curiosity, I'm like, let me just see what the top line description of this person was. And I was like, oh, no, yeah, we got a pastor in Nigeria, and I don't know what the rest is, but I know how evangelical things operate over there, and they can be pretty wild.
Yeah, and this is one of those, Like you know, there's like Africa for whatever reason, like bastardry over there does not usually go as viral as like the very worst people from like I don't know Europe, United even like South America, Asia.
But like TB.
Joshua is not just He's not just a bastard. He was like, up until his death very recently, one of probably like the twenty or thirty most influential religious figures alive on the planet. Massively influential Pentecostal preacher millions not just in Nigeria and not just in West Africa, but all over the world, in Southeast Asia and Europe unit millions and millions of followers, huge, huge spoke in the international Pentecostal community very very important.
Guy. Yeah, I feel like the religious bastards, they're able to fly under the radar a little bit longer than everybody else. Like if you're not like some dictator, despot, kind of despotic leader, you're like it's like, I don't know, like when you get the cover, when you're covered in the blood of Christ. Yeah, it is one of those.
Yeah, it's this mix of I think they get protected from like members of the same faith, some of whom obviously a lot of times the people who do expose them are also members of the same faith. But like that's probably one reason why sometimes it takes while to spread. And I think also you get among like atheists or even as we'll talk about Pentecostals are kind of in an extreme sect of evangelical Christianity from like more moderate
centrist you know, Christians and like the West. I mean, obviously Pentecostal movement is huge in the United States, but even in the United States, I think a lot of like people who are Christians, but you know they live in like the East Coast, do they live in the West Coast or like just like big cities. They may
not know how wild. Some of that shit gets right, and they may kind of write off stories about these guys as just like, oh, well that's just you know, normal in that chunk of the faith or whatever.
And TB.
Joshua was not, to be honest, like, I have a lot of issues with Pentecostal Christianity, but a lot of the people who were trying to expose him for years were other Pentecostal pastors. But he just got ignored for in a lot of what he was doing. Now, a lot of people who enabled him were other Pentecostals. Don't get me wrong.
Side note, I feel like, you know, based on all the fuck real that's going on, you could have a like a sister podcast, Behind the Pastors.
Behind the past Yet we can do an episode every week for the next year.
I'm not joking every fucking week. There's some freak somewhere who's like, yeah, this youth pastor is colledge, child porn or some other dark shit, and I'm like, man, we're still we're still acting like these are the people that are above or beyond reproach. But yeah, anyway, Behind the Pastors look Behind the Pastors.
Yeah, we could also do a whole podcast series on the Catholic Church, on the Catholic Church in like the seventies. You know, even if we just skicked to one decade, Yeah, yeah, we could really So here's the hard facts of this guy's life. Timatope Balligan Joshua was born on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three, in a town called Araghiti a Coco in the southwest coastal state of Ondo in Nigeria. Arigedi a Coco is very poor and it is unlikely that his family had access to any kind of like really
meaningful wealth at any point. Stretching back in recent memory, he is very poor. Everyone around him is very poor. He grows up in like a background of pretty desperate poverty. Now he does seem to have a fairly strong family, which is good. It gives him a leg up on a lot of people who are like like don't have that benefit obviously, But this is this is a guy who's going to have to fight for any amount of like wealth that he wants to have. His family are Yoruba.
That is an ethnic group in southwest Africa that encompasses the largest chunk of niger Congo language speakers. Like many Yoruba families TV Joshua grows up. He has both Muslim and Christian relatives in his close family, and one thing people will say about him when he's a pastor is that a lot of evangelical pastors in Nigeria are very anti Muslim, and he was. He was, not nearly as
much as is Commons, not nearly as much. We'll get into he's going to like he's going to like throw Muslims under the bus at a certain point in his future. But he does have like a lot of Muslims in his family, and so for a while at least, he's a lot better on some of that stuff than a lot of other people then a lot of other like
pastors Christian pastors in the area. His father, Kolaole, was well educated and made a living translating the Bible, so from a fairly early age, he's both taught that it's important to learn how to read and specifically to be able to read the Bible, like this is something that he's going to do obsessively from a very young age.
Oh God, yeah, yeah.
He is big on that. His father dies when he's young, and he is I think when he's like twelve or something like that, and he's raised after that by his uncle, who is a Muslim Man. Again, he's going to be kind of more tolerant than a lot of people on that sort of situation. He grows up speaking a mix of Yoruba, English and pigeon. His English is never going to be considered very good, in part because he doesn't finish secondary school and he has limited formal education in general.
What time he does spend in school is at Saint Stephen Anglican, which is a religious primary school. His teachers called him Little Pastor because he was obsessed with the Bible from a young age and preached to his classmates it's not a red flag. That's not a red flag at all. Preaching to your kid.
Preachers are the freakiest fucking creatures on Oh my God. There's like, yeah, there's like this vibe of like you're just showing, you're just regurgitating shit the adults are saying around you. But they do it with such passion and conviction. You're like, oh, I don't know, maybe you fucking God is talking to you, but please you were nine years old.
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, take some of this with a grain of salt. I think the stuff about him being called little pastor right here often enough and is consistent enough that I believe it. We don't have great sources on his early life, like there are all fan websites and the like.
Oh wait, so like, first of all, your research methodology for this is what, Like, I don't imagine there's like a book on like all the shitty things to you.
I should read a book on him. Now there's good. The best info on this guy's actual crimes comes from the BBC. BBC So the BBC can be a problematic entity in some ways, but they have a division of the BBC called BBC Africa Eye, which reports on Africa that does extremely good work. There are some of the only people, for example, reporting on like war crimes by the Camerooney and government. They do really good work, and they did a long series on this guy, So there's
and interviewed a lot of people. So there is good reporting on his crimes at this point. There's just not a whole lot that we can absolutely verify about his early life.
Right, because it's always some form of like myth building or praise or yeah, just bias towards like how great he was.
Yeah, the anecdots we get are all shit that his fans pulled out of like speeches he gave during like religious ceremonies, right, because that's like a big thing you're talking about, Like when I was a kid, I did this and this, and I saw, you know, the spirit
of God came into me and whatnot. That's where you get a lot of these details, which is like there's a good duck if you people want to know the way in which these kind of pastors massage and just outright invent backstories in order to like make themselves kind of fit in with some of these common evangelical narratives. There's a documentary I always recommend called Marjoe, and it's about a guy who started out as a child pastor. His parents may had him preaching when he was like
four or five years old. He was like doing marriages at like age four or five or so, and it was all a scam for money, right. He was like, I never believed in God, and his parents abandoned him as soon as he was old enough that it wasn't cute, right, So you can't make money once he's an adult. There's nothing special about an adult pastor. So they just fucking bounce and he like takes a film crew and this is in the United States and all these like evangelical
revivals in the seventies. It's a really good documentary. It won an oscar. I'm recommend it to everybody. Marja one of my very favorite movies. Also, he grows up to be an actor and is on the A Team. So Marginal was, yeah, he's a bad guy in one episode of the A Team.
I think yes. So there you got praise Christ praise through him.
All things are possible.
You can starting, Yeah, you can be a bad guy on the A Team type cast.
Probably it was this guy black. No, no, no, he's a white guy. He's a white guy.
Oh wow, okay was Look maybe it wasn't God. It might have just been a white supremacy that guy either. I don't want to conflict the two, but it was one of the two.
I'm gonna say, anytime you get to hang out with Barakas, that's the hand of God.
That's the hand of God. Yeah, oh yeah, most if you could. Yeah, he'd like, can I wear one of your chains? He's like, yeah, man, oh yeah, raised Christ baby.
So the website who owns Kenya, which I'm not sure about the providence of, but it does seem to have a lot of detail on this guy. They have an article on him titled the Man of God who stayed in his mother's womb for fifteen months, which gives you an idea of the kind of claims he makes. And again, this is stuff he's saying during speeches. He like claims that he was his mom was pregnant with him for
fifteen months, and so he's a miracle baby. I guess when you're that holy God needs an extra like six months to really make sure you get finished.
Yeah, you need you need that way, Yeah, man, you need to just the what is that the fourth and fifth trimester?
So one eight babies? Yeah, roughly, I'm not great at math. Folks, don't come in here and correct me if that's wrong. He better have been walking and talking and shit yeah that long coaching. No, he'd better come out knowing how to read God.
Damnah into my taxi. Yeah.
So I do find that very funny because I even heard that claim that, like, yeah, I took fifteen months to be born.
What are you stunting on people?
Yeah?
Is that really a brag?
Thing like, yeah, you're like, you're clingy? Yeah, are you?
They giving ship to kids who were born early. Oh you came out after eight months, not nearly as holy as me.
Baby, I'm a fifteen month there. Yeah, my mom tried to get rid of me. I said, no, I'm doing some Bible study in here. I'm not ready yet.
On the weekends he goes to just just goes to like nick you wards and makes fun of the babies.
Ah, look at you, look at you. Couldn't be me, couldn't be me. I came out. I came out twenty six pounds.
Yeah.
I almost didn't come out at all.
I was gonna stay in there.
I'm like, I said, I would have physically killed my mother if I say it in there, I kept growing. It would have been bad the person. Maybe, Oh that's funny.
So later in life he would also claim that as a child, he became aware that his coming had been foretold in prophecy.
For more than one hundred years.
I've never found what this prophecy is supposed to be. Maybe someone was like, yeah, there's going to be a huge fucking baby someday. Is that in the Book of Revelations, And that boy was me so anyway, This bullet proof source cites statements from Joshua that as a child, he would read the entire Bible every two months. Quote, every two months, I would have read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. It was the only subject that interested me
in primary school. In exams, I scored ninety nine percent consistently, whereas I performed woefully in other subjects. My excelling and Bible knowledge affected the other subjects where I performed poorly. So basically, he was so good at the Bible that his brain just didn't work for anything else.
Yeah. I can't. I can't do I can't even do one plus two. Yeah, so I'm so christ it up up here now.
What I do disbelieve is a claim that he made that one day, whilst at school, a madman entered his class carrying a weapon. The type is not specified.
Quote.
Everyone ran away, but he managed to calm the madman down through prayer. From that day onwards, he knew there was something special in him. I'm gonna need more details.
Yeah, how old is he?
I think what this is like when he's in like like middle school.
Maybe and a man came through with a weapon, just a weapon, just a weapon.
Okay, okay, praise he praise him out of hurting anybody.
I'm guessing. I mean, it's West Africa. Maybe he's a cutlass, you know, so it's a it's a machete.
Maybe, I mean, machetes are very certainly, very accessible, but who knows. My actual guess is that this did not happen.
Right right, right, Yeah, he's acting like he's Kevin Spacey and the Negotiator. He's Chris Saviian or Shocks.
So shortly before starting secondary school, his father died and again he's raised by his uncle. He drops out of school pretty soon after this, I think because he has to get a job to help take care of the family. And he spends years working a series of odd gigs, like a lot of people and who come from his level of like wealth and stuff in Nigeria and that
part of Nigeria. One of his jobs is a poultry attendant, which mostly consisted of scrubbing chicken shit with his hands and putting it in bags to be turned into fertilizer. My my new favorite Kenyan news and culture website says this job was so demeaning that no Nigerian did it. It was mainly done by Ghanians. Wow, shots fired at Ghana.
Your neighbor's next door.
There's all in these articles. There's a lot of shots fired at Ghana.
Mya, it's wild. I've been to Ghana and there there is like this sort of back and forth or they'll be talking. They talked, They just chat shit about each other like Nigerian m I don't know, I don't know. Write them. This happens a regional Yeah, exactly. Your neighbor is.
Texas and Oklahoma, shit, right, like Nigeria and Ghana, right right right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So at some point in his early twenties, he experienced a three day trance in which God visited him and told him I am your God. I am giving you a divine commission to go and carry the work of the heavenly Father. This is the inciting incident of the TV Joshua story. In the interest of trying to put together a more complete picture of the man, I opted to read a propaganda by what I thought was a propaganda biography by one of his followers. Its title is
Rejoice and See what Happens Next? The Life and Times of TB. Joshua. Now, this book does not give us the life and times of TV Joshua. It's basically a big brochure for like going to visit his church. And we will talk about why a little later that he wanted people doing that.
Just marketing. It is marketing material.
It's all marketing. You get very little on the guy's life. It is kind of interesting to note that the preface of this book opens by saying TB. Joshua has shown every indication of following this anointed path. He is worthy of careful study and emulation, and then complaining TB. Joshua has been made out to be controversial and has become the subject of persecution, especially by fellow religious leaders. This
is puzzling to me. I have been in his presence and I can say that he is disarmingly humble, gentle, and a generous man.
So that's good.
Glad, glad we're opening with like a real unbiased account of this.
Oh yeah, he's so humble. Yeah, well he sounds great so far. He sounds like he's you know, he's cooking months talked about his miracles. Yeh, yeah, he topped down a man with a machete, or who could have been a bazooki, any kind of weapon.
We have no idea.
Yeah, he just had an enriched plutonium maybe in his hand, who knows, but he stopped it. Okay, look, this doesn't just get to the bastard. I don't even know this guy sounds.
Cool, Robert, Ye, so far he's great.
Praise Christ.
Yeah, so he's he starts preaching at some point. He's probably in his like early to mid twenties when he starts preaching, and this seems to have been a fairly like humble start. There's some grainy footage that exists, apparently, I've heard it reported on. I haven't seen it, that shows him somewhere. It started out with something like a dozen, maybe twenty followers under a bamboo marquee in the early nineteen eighties. So he starts out small, but his his
flock grows fairly rapidly. And the mid nineteen eighties is a pretty terrible time for most things, except for cocaine and being a Pentecostal preacher in Nigeria, and especially for the latter, it's basically the best time ever and this merit's a little bit of explanation. First off, on Pentecostalism.
If you've ever seen a video, if you're wondering, like, what the fuck is he talking about when he says Pentecostals, Because I do think a lot of like even a lot of people who are Christian right, but who are like a fairly mainstream like kayaks Christianity and like normal you know, believe in evolution, live a normal modern life. They just like you know, they're Christian whatever. May not
know much about this. It's something you really encounter a lot, particularly if you grow up in kind of the Deep South and rural areas. It's gotten more common obviously as we've gotten older. If you've ever seen videos of like some wild seeming Christian religious ceremony where people are chanting in tongues or screaming, flopping around on the floor looking
like they're seizuring, that's a Pentecostal service. Almost certainly. There are some other denominations where you'll get stuff like that. In popular culture, they're often called snake handlers. This is because a lot of Pentecostals used to pass around venomous snakes, and basically the idea is if you get bitten like it means that you weren't faithful enough. And also if you get bitten and die, it means that God just wanted you to die.
Yeah, that was his plan.
That was his plan for you. A lot of times they're using non venomous snakes and it's like it's a show, right right, And a lot of times they'll like defang the snakes, especially for like the pastor, because the pastor you want to like, could you imagine? It's like, but I don't have any wound on my hand the fruit Jesus, Yeah.
Where's that? Wait? I didn't give you the stunt snake pastor? Oh fuck? Oh fuck, Okay.
There's definitely motherfuckers who died from that, Like oh.
Yeah, yeah, there has to be. I mean, I feel like there's there were headlines about like some snake handling preacher who you know, somehow who'd a thought his handling of a copper head whended with his demises.
It was also common you still find this sometimes, but like people would drink strych nine during these ceremonies. Again, it's like a you know, if you have faith, you'll know God won't kill you unless it's your time.
Yeah.
Now, Pentecostals are not the only Christian sect to do snake handling. It actually probably started. I think the first snake handlers on the Christian historic record are the second century o Fights, which is a Gnostic sect. I do not know much about them, but I came across that when I was looking up snake handlers, So yeah.
That's neat.
Pentecostalism has its origins in the eighteen hundreds with radical evangelical movements that focused on faith, healing, and the imminently coming end times. One description you'll hear a lot is that regular Christians kind of as modernity comes in, they stop believing in miracles, or at least not miracles as a thing that like people can can incite, you know, through their direct faith, you know, but as a thing.
You know, maybe it's a thing that happens sometimes, but you're not You can't make miracles by like praying for God and stuff, Right, that's not a thing. I think a lot most people believe, but Pentecostals do, and this obsession with miraculous happenings is a hallmark of that kind of worship. Pentecostal churches started to spread in Nigeria around the turn of the nineteen hundreds. It was really given
a shot in the arm by the influenza epidemic. A lot of early Nigerian Pentecostal preachers engaged in faith healing of influenza victims. They started out as kind of an Anglican offshoot because obviously the Anglican Church is British, and the British, you know, owned them in Nigeria for much longer than Yeah, and Aghana, yes, and Aghana and yeah.
The breaks kind of between the Anglicans and the Pentecostals became more defined in the twenties and they started, like Nigerian Pentecostals started to affiliate with US based churches, more like the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia. One characteristic of this particular segment of Christianity is a near constant conflict with
medical sens. I'm not going to say that's every group of Pentecostals, but it's very common to find Pentecostals who preach against like at least certain kinds of modern medicine. You know, faith is supposed to handle it. It's not like an across the board thing like it is with thinking, like Jehovah's witnesses. But it's not uncommon, and early Nigerian Pentecostals were extreme, even to their British cousins in their rejection of modern medicine. A lot of this is tied
into colonialism. I think a lot of it also has to do with the difficulty of obtaining good medical care in a lot of the areas where this is spreading. A study in Pew Research Notes Originating in evangelical student revivals, a wave of Pentecostal expansion spawns new churches in the sixties and seventies. The leader of this expansion is Benson Idahosa, one of Africa's most influential Pentecostal preachers. Idahosa establishes the
Church of God Mission International in nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy four, the Pentecostal umbrella organization Grace of God Ministry is founded in eastern Nigeria. The Deeper Life Bible Church founded in nineteen seventy five and soon becomes one of Nigeria's largest Pentecostal churches, with an estimated three hundred and fifty thousand members by nineteen ninety three. So this is a pretty rapid expansion and these are very big churches.
I mean, it's it's all line enough for that. Man. The faith part is yeah, it's like I mean, because there's already you know this culturally, there's a lot of thinking that sort of goes beyond the bounds of like science, right, So to even for these you know, these very opportunistic sort of faith healers, to really get in on them, be like, oh man, I just fucking believe.
Maybe that's all.
Yeah, yeah, And that's that's where Chibi Joshua is going to stitch in.
So TB.
Joshua's church, which also began in nineteen eighty six, was called Synagogue Church of All Nations or SCONE, and I think the synagogue this is very common. I made a comment once that like Christians reincorporate, some groups of like particularly fundamental Christians like to reincorporate bits of Jewish religious tradition, and like the abuse of Showfars, reincorporate was the wrong term. People got rightfully frustrated. This is cultural appropriation, right, right, Yeah,
that's what's going on. And I'm guessing because I have never heard of synagogue used outside of the tradition of the Jewish faith.
So my guess is that stand for me, that's what that would imply, Yes, ten times out of ten in my mind.
Yeah, So that's that's what I'm guessing they're doing here. So people will call it scone, and that's what we will usually call it, because Synagogue Church of All Nations is a bit of a mouthful, and in fairly short order throughout the mid like mid to late nineteen eighties, scone goes from dozens to hundreds to hundreds of thousands of regular attendants. It becomes common for there to be more than fifteen thousand people attending services at once in
a single day. Obviously, this necessitates the building of a massive, like stadium sized church. You know, these are huge events every time, and he's out there every day. Basically he hears some of his disciples. A lot of appeal of these Neo Pentecostal churches in Nigeria is the ability of worshippers to witness and participate in miracles. Right, not just that miracles are happening, but that your pastor is able to call down miracles and you get to be right there.
And watch this shit.
You know, some of this there's some like cafe here. Some of this is like what people get out of wrestling, you know, right for real? Yeah, yeah, And it's not coincidental that the massive expansion of these churches that are all doing these very big and we'll talk about how these look, these big like miracles shows, coincides with a huge expansion in the availability of televisions for working class Nigerians.
Right that has hit like it it hits saturation by the eighties, and so these preachers and not only that, but it also becomes a lot easier to make your own TV and get it on the air, right, So all of those things kind of have to happen, and that takes a period of time, but by the eighties, all of those things are possible, and so any of these preachers with big congregations have access to enough capital to purchase cameras in airtime, which they use to air
slick videos of different ill people being miraculously healed and miles you know what will miraculously heal our listeners.
I hope it's some kind of product. Yes, yes.
The only guarantee we make on this podcast is that if you are sick, buy someone something that advertises on our show, and you will be.
Healed of anything. Just rub it on your head.
Yeah, yeah, you cannot die if you purchase the products that advertise on our show unless that was God's plan. Unless that was God's plan.
Obviously obviously obviously.
We're dallas ridiculous ad transition, both of you.
We're back and we're thinking about how ematic unless that's God's plan really really gives you a lot of you're going away with anything with those words.
Yeah, but people, I.
Just you know, if it's really funny, please please send us what what what that pops up?
Please it's really funny. Please, that's a good like parenting tip. Can we go to the playground, daddy? If it's God's plan, you know, if it's God's.
I mean, but that is the kind of ship like super religious parents we'll say to like avoid the responsibility. They're like, I don't know, I mean, maybe you didn't maybe I forgot your birthday because that was God's plan. Yeah, and you do.
It is like it's used very differently, but like it's used a lot in the in the Muslim world as like if you're like, hey, do you think you know we'll be able to do this or this will happen like you know inshallah, Right, which means like probably not.
I'm not looking go I mean, but you know, it's the same thing people say that to their like yeah, man, yeah, we'll see, we'll see what happens.
I'll never forget your birthday.
Thank you, thank you never Yeah, thank you.
You don't have the same privilege as Miles.
Wow.
Yeah, I don't remember my own birthday. Not after all this THEO flu I've been dropping. Let me do a that line of the of the peach flavor. Oh yeah, why does he stuff?
Hey?
What's he snorting out of that bullet? Dude? It's kind of fair.
Round bullet bullet power that opens the capillaries, gets the N s A I DS into your system faster, straight to the vein. Baby. Yeah, just just like cooking flair the on apoo.
You're like, hey, hand me that dialysis to being really quick, I'm gonna tie off what.
Yeah, we couldn't arrest him. There's no log against dejecting the aflu in parting.
I don't know, there's no log. It's just freaking people the funk out. It's fucked up.
So spectacle was always part of the deal at Scone. Healing the blind is like easy ship, right, you can have someone pretend that they're blind, right, and then they can see. You know, it's super easy. But that doesn't look exciting, right, What looks exciting? He would love to have like parades of people who were missing limbs, like roll in on wheel boards and stuff to get like the healing touch and claim like their pain went away
or something. He would love to have people who had like like skin lesions and stuff come in and then they all fall off, right, and this kind of shit like these are these are staged right, like they're using makeup, they're doing all this kind of shit, but it works. His flock goes from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands over the course of like the eighties to the nineties, like it gets massive. There are two is wiping off people's skin conditions. Oh yeah, yeah, that's a big one.
That's a bit And there's there's too many stories of this time to count. So I'm going to focus on one really well documented recent case. And I'm focusing on this because this is someone who got arrested by the Nigerian government for miracle fraud recently. But it gives you an idea of how this industry is always worked miracle.
Wait, is that a law we have on all?
Oh?
Yes, Oh no, we don't have that shit. You can, you can. That's Nigeria is so far ahead of us and that way.
They're like, no, you guys don't understand. These people are gonna fucking bring down our entire society. Like if we don't get that shit under control. Yeah, god damn, because who's the guy who sells those fucking buckets, those end time buckets?
Oh yeah, fucking we did episodes on him, but I'm spacing on his name right now. But yeah, the one of the three lines in the story. Obviously he gets away with a lot because of corruption in the Nigerian government, because of bribing people. But there's also like the Nigerian government has like passed laws and shit that I wish we had in the US to try to limit some of this stuff.
We're talking about.
Jim Baker, aren't we Jim Baker?
I'm like, we did.
We did seeveral episodes.
Yeah, yell those buckets though they look like absolute shit.
Like I have. I have to say, the Nigerian government fails in a lot of ways. The US government has also failed to contain this stuff. But they have also attempted to limit it in more ways than we have, so I'll give them some credit.
Could you imagine if someone tried to put forward like a bill for miracle fraud and oh no, they would get shot.
They would get literally get fucking shot.
Like somehow, like that's the fucking life. Oh God, that.
Would kiss people off so much. So I'm going to I want to detail the story of one specific miracle fraudster, forty four year old missus bows Olasukanmi. I think is how that's pronounced. She was arrested by the Nigerian government in twenty twenty for being a fake miracle actor who would sell her services to different pastors. Right basically, she
was really good. She was able to dislocate her arm in an unconventional way that made it look like it was shattered and in pieces, like there was at least I saw.
There's like one.
Picture of it out there, like it's pretty good at it.
This is a little bit of skill.
And I'm going to quote from a write up in the Nigerian Guardian here. Once she enters the stage, she would pretend that the broken right arm had been hanging and all medical efforts to heal her in both Orthodox in native hospital proved abored of until one of her friends, who was a member of the church, advised her to try the church. At this point, one of the ministering pastor, the General overseer, would step forward and demonstrate as if
the Holy Spirit had entered him. After speaking in tongues for some minutes, he would order the woman to come very close to him, while the congregation would be silent anxiously waiting to see the broken right arm that has been hanging. The pastor would ask the woman, do you want to be healed? Have you been born again? If she answers in the negative, then he led her to Christ in prayer. He would then order the evil spirit that bent her arm to depart and be destroyed by fire.
As he is ordering the evil spirit to depart, the hanging broken arm will be coming back gradually to its form until it is completely stretched down and normal, And then he would ask the congregation to praise the Lord. Well the congregation is busy praising God, one of the church members whose role is to take the woman away, would appear and whisker away, and then she gets paid.
Wow, and so she's just like the Meryl Streep of fucking miracles.
There's a bunch you know how there used to be like a circuit of people who would do the Jerry Springer style talk shows because they had something like marketable, you know, in a weird thing about them.
I think it's like that, right. Yeah, they're like, oh, did you get the arm lady? It's like, no, I got the dude with the buggy eyes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what.
Are you gonna do?
What?
You can explain that it's because his blood pressure is so high his eyes are bulging and then there's.
Too many demons in his blood they pop the pressure right up.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Now this is one woman, but like she gets arrested because the Nigerian police have like units dedicated to busting miracle crimes, which is I do want to see that TV show. I want to see like a Law and Order some miracle c frauds Jersey.
In it and we get people the wrong. I did, like do Law and Order mc U Yeah no, not marvel asshole miracle crimes. Yeah they don't. They don't own those letters.
So Joshua and other pastors like him would not just like have these people over and do these miracle shows, but they would make videos of them, and Joshua is really going to be like the number one pastor for pioneering making videos out of this stuff and distributing them around the world. The basic way this works is that you know, within kind of Nigeria, if you have these people being healed in your shows, it will convince people who are really injured or sick that they or their
loved ones might get healed. Right obviously, but Joshua took this tactic several steps further. Right from an early date, he starts filming videos of these healings, picking the most sensational and impressive and putting them in videos not meant for Nigerian domestic consumption, but these were sent over to Europe, to Great Britain, into the United States with white missionaries
returning from Nigeria. For decades, Nigeria has been a hot destination for missionary tourists, young Christians and professional missionaries traveling to minister to the poor in a relatively friendly climate. Joshua was not the only person to see this as a profitable endeavor, but his matter of fishing for them was unique at the time. Sending out propaganda to evangelize
British Christians, in particular. The BBC documentary that I cited earlier includes interviews with several young British and South African Caucasian women who were enraptured with and then terribly abused by TV Joshua. Their journeys all start the same way. Members of their local religious communities came back from Nigeria with VHS tapes of miraculous healings. To give you an idea of what some of these healings were and how
they looked. I wanted to return to that book Rejoice and See what happens Next, which is centered around numerous case studies ranging from poor people getting good paying jobs, and I think that shit is meant mainly to evangelize them to locals, right like this is something that can improve your financial situation, to shit like this which is very much geared towards Europeans that they're trying to get to come over and join the church. Jude Orakas showed
up at the scone with a life threatening disease. The case which I originally viewed live, has now been archived by a manual TV that's his TV channel and includes a commentary. The story opens with the camera zooming in from a full body shot, then to a medium shot of a man sitting in a chair. He is separated from others, his body quivering in the sunshine and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. A close up shot reveals her inndous skin damage. Narrator. A shocking condition brought
this man to the Synagogue Church of all Nations. His body riddled with sickness right from the crown of his head. His entire body has been engulfed in a plague, shattering his skin into scale like fragments. There is not a hair left on his head, as the frightening sickness has completely destroyed his skin. From his head, the disease rages across his body, damaging every inch and rendering his arms useless. The skin flakes and peels horribly all the way down
his arms to his fingers. Not one inch of his skin has been left unaffected. Jude's sister, Man of God, help my brother. He has skin disease. For the past six years, we have taken him all over. There is no solution. Neither the herbalist's homes or hospitals have provided any solution. Joshua talked to him briefly, and when he sees Iraka is too sick to even talk, he asks him if he can accept Jesus Christ as his Lord
and savior, which the man is able to answer. In the name of Jesus Christ, I command that infirmity out. Begin to vomit it out.
TB.
Joshua watches the man intently for about fifteen seconds, then he speaks again. I say to you, disease, can hear me? Come out of this man's life, and the name of Jesus come out out TB.
Joshua.
The man begins to shake uncontrollably and bends forward to throw something white and foam me up. You can see what the name of Jesus can do out, I say out in the name of Jesus. So gives you an idea, right, dude, this yeah, okay, it's wild.
Foam me at the mouth. He's like, yo, dude, don't put this Alca Seltzer in. It's gotta be Alca Celtic. No, that's the oldest stricken the fucking book. M Yeah, it's good shit.
And again, when we're talking about his appeal, obviously as a preacher, he appeals to Nigerians as a preacher, but to a lot of these like Europeans, these British people, you know, he's not speaking their language fluently. The appeal is not the specifics of what he's saying. It's that he is promising them that if they come to see him, they will get a direct physical connection to a miracle.
Right.
And if you are one of these evangelicals from a wealthy country, like you're going to you know, reading the Bible, you're watching veggie tails or whatever, but you're living like these this what you would probably consider, compared to these videos, a fairly boring, safe life, And then you see this man physically fighting demons, right, and you're like, right, well, of course I want to be a part of this.
This sounds so much more exciting than like going to church and doing like fucking youth group shit.
Right.
It reminds me of like nineties skate culture, where like you would be like, oh, you get the new Toy Machine tape and you're like, yo, I'll bring it over. You're like, oh, dudelet we see the bail scenes or whatever, and like there's always this culture being like yo, to
check this tape out. I got this tape, except in this version, I also, I mean, it's clever that he's also using the way the Western world views Africa in this like exotic, mystical way and weaponizing it to be like watch this shit, because they are they're already on some bullshit thinking that this is some fucking magic shit is happening here. It's like, no, I'm just a next level scammer that was in the womb for fifteen months.
Yeah, that time really let him prep. Yeah, but no, you have anticipated something we'll get to. He deals with this very directly. He is very consciously taking advantage of the way Westerners look at Africa. Right, So I do want to I want to give you an idea of what it looks like when he's because he's these are not just he's not just doing healings. He's doing exorcisms, and these take the place of like Gandolf Saromon magic
fights like that at the most extreme level. He'll like walk in and they're like people will lunge at him and he'll like put his hand and use the name of GM. They'll go flying backwards like it's so it's it's pretty cool.
Actually it looks like kung fu film, Like they're like, yeah, high production.
You know, actually what it looks a little bit like if you've watched the fake Steven segal a keto videos or like the Vladimir Putin fake a keto videos where they're just like touching guys and flinging them through.
The air like Russians video exactly.
Ah, yeah, god, it's so funny.
I want to play you with video of this.
Miles okah oh ship play as an lad a party.
I got this shorty by the dome piece Python. Watch. That's great.
He's on the ground rolling like a Python. Boss.
It is boss.
It's boss.
Yeah, it's Boss.
Of the Boss of the Boss.
That's pretty. That's like wrestling grade, you know. Hell yeah, that's fucking school play level. Of course. Of course, a bunch of like fucking sheltered like teenage evangelical kids are seeing this and they're like, well, I want to go fight demons in Africa?
My god, did you see that? He just like just a closed fish swiped in front of his chest and.
Blew the guy down. Yeah, Christ, it's so fun. I mean a lot of people get horribly abused. It's actually not. But this part of it is fun. Look, you got to enjoy these little moments, right, yeah, yep, yeah. I want to note here again, I don't want to fall into the thing of being like, wow, look at this African preacher and all these people believe this shit like this goes down in the US all the fucking time. Members of Congress go to churches that are not all
that different from this. Okay, Like you know, this is not a Nigerian thing.
This is a thing. This is just that that's what religion gives you. We've got a whole bunch of people that are working in the government. They're like circle jerking for the end times. Like this isn't like mainstream religious stuff necessarily, but it's not like wildly uncommon evangelical. I mean, especially when you see people prophesying, you know, or speaking in tongues and shit, you're.
Like, oh, this is this is a derivation on a theme, right, And I think it's also probably my guess would be this is pretty close to what used to be a lot more common back in the day, right, Like when you hear about these stories of like demons and exorcisms and shit, and like you know, someone someone in the town water supply like someone will get like some fucking air got poisoning, and everyone will hallucinate and you'll have like a big demon fight in some medieval French village.
I'm sure like there's versions of that to explain it, like these kind of there have always been people who have known that, Like, well, if you really want to make some money in the religion business, you got to put on a fucking show. Yeah, and nothing's a better show than fighting demons.
Yeah you got a pyrotechnics guy, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I got one, dude, you cat fingers. I'll say, Satan demon get out with the fires of hell. Fucking full plume of fucking flame shoots up his back. Dude, it's sing gig.
It's pretty affordable, It's it's cool, it's good stuff. So again, what I want to note is that like, while what he is doing is not unique to him, he is maybe the best I've seen at it. He's good, like these are these are well orchestrated shows.
Well, yeah, it's also the riz bro he's got. Yeah you know what I mean.
It seems like so cool. He's like watching me hold this mic with my vessel.
I don't give a fuck. That this dude's a python. Watch this shit. Yeah, Like it feels like superman ish kind of thing. I was like, Damn, he's super cocky about it.
Yes, some Superman, some Vince McMahon, Like you got some of that going in there?
Yeah.
Now you can see in some of his videos from the arts that he's very deliberately taken framing techniques from Western reality television. And I'm gonna play you a segment from a different scone video about a secret demonic infiltrator, mister Anny, being caught by one of TV Joshua's disciples, and it just feels like something I would have seen on MTV in like two thousand and one.
Here is mister Annie pretending to be a Christian, but is a wolf in sheep's clothing? What is his mission here among the people of God? Can darkness be in the midst of light?
No?
Capital?
No, look at.
Mister Annie praying capital? Who is he praying to? There is here and they're on prayers.
And it's like highlighting him and like the crowd shot every time, like it's like surveillance footage, yeah, or.
Likeny, like back when a hard copy was a show.
Yeah, hard copy is as Yeah, yeah, sixty minutes hard copy.
That's a better. That's a better. The current affair from our old heads and.
The rest of the video proceeds. It's like this big choreographed exorcism because obviously he's like a secret devil infiltrator in scone. Oh, this goes it's it's great, it's great.
Ship.
Yeah, it's really good.
Like you have a Marvel movie fucking unfolding. Yeah, at your churtzers, Like dude, last week, a fuck three dudes came out of a fucking portal, Yeah, and fucked up this infiltrator and then TV Joshua turned this woman's droopy leg into a muscular one. It was wild man. You had to you had to be.
So what happened in your church? This Sunday priest told us we shouldn't have sex before marriage. Guy turned into a snake at my church.
No, yeah, and then you fucking punched him in the head and a flame came out.
Of his As of course, I'm going to the snake church.
Yeah, I can barely stay awake. Now.
This all goes over really well with these young white evangelicals from Western countries who are just not used to services being this exciting. You will hear comments from yeah, no seasoning. You'll hear comments from a number of them that are like, I felt like this was where real biblical Christianity was still going down right, and I wanted to.
Be a part of it.
You know, I cannot exaggerate the extent to which a lot of this was a conscious attempt by TV Joshua to recruit white people. And I'm going to play a clip from a BBC documentary on TV Joshua called Disciples. The guy talking here is his former right hand man who helped him start the church.
He had special interest into Ubu.
You will the whites.
Are you?
Are you surprised that God is using a black man to do disince?
Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm not surprised that God is using a black man. What are these motherfuckers worried?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Wow.
Nineteen ninety six, one of the midior parcels came from South Africa. When they were living. He gives more than two hundred videos to take home to give to people, videos of miracles, videos of confessions, video.
Videos that will feel their head.
Wow, I say this is too expensive?
He left. You think I'm a fool. I know what I'm doing. A time will come this synagogue. Josh is going to shoot out from South Africa to the whole world.
Now this guy also will claim TV. Joshua basically said to him, what I am doing by recruiting the people, I want to take advantage of them. I want to get revenge for what white people have done to us, which is I think is part. I think is largely him because as a spoiler, this guy is not some sort of like anti colonial hero. Most of the people he abuses are Black African women, right like, he is not not at all and actually like a hero. But I think he understood that this guy who worked with
him might respond to that. Right, That's that's how I read.
It, right right, right right? Yeah, Yeah, we're taking them. We're taken from them because for years they've been taken from me.
Yes, And the BBC documentary is a very very good job of Obviously, a lot of the victims at Cites are white people from South Africa, from England, but most of the victims that I see are black Nigerian Ghanian women, you know, which which is I'm glad, Like they clearly put in an effort to not just be like, look at what this guy is doing to white women, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, but rather to highlight the differences between how he approached.
Like which would have been the way people first sort of had outraged, like he yeah, he could get.
Over on us. Yeah no, no, no, yeah. And it's interesting. There's also there's a lot of very interesting racial dimensions here. You saw in that video the guy he asks like, are you surprised to see a black man, you know, preaching the word of God? That like, I think that's a South African pastor. Did you see what he was wearing?
That dress? Oh yeah, very traditional?
That is, yeah, traditional African dress. And I think what is happening here is that these kind of established South African and Western white pastors were being fited by TB.
Joshua.
He was giving them basically like you can have an authentic African experience, right, Like I'm going to give that to you if you endorse me as legitimate. I can't have any other explanation for the way that man is portraying himself.
There's also I mean I saw this one when I was in Ghana, Like there is like this Canadian expat that lived in this village that like nearby where I was visiting, and he kind of became like the elder, like the chief of the village, only because like he like was married to a Genan woman, but like built like a proper there, and like he dressed like that, like he had the whole vio, like he was like, no,
I'm here to do the African thing. So I wonder if like on some some level they like they just really loved the larp of it all, you know too, or they're like, yeah, look at me, bro, I look like a goddamn fucking god from West Africa right now.
Yeah, some of this is maybe beyond like my pay grade, but that was my read there in that particular scene that like that's kind of what he's offering some of these established white pastors. Isn't that kind of legitimacy?
I'm sure, And I'm sure that's a very attractive proposition for someone who probably finds himself very self important like a pastoro and like watch me enter all of these spaces and I accepted with open arms, like no fucking friction at all, Like yeah, yeah, TB. Joshua is uh yeah, man, fucking Machiavelli over here.
It to kind of highlight the experience that he's he is offering to a lot of these white visitors. I want to play you another clip.
Believe you me, brother Ridia. It was the last type on uth that I ever wanted to come to, Thy broadst, thy money, Launders, thy drag pedness, And I say, God, sorry, Yeah, he's a piece of heaven honor.
The greatest and.
The prompt and I got church was when the foreigner started coming. This was strategic and it was planned.
I just got a confession to make that I want the old world to know. In the past, I've always I really hated them. When I got back, every year I saw the love that we received from black people.
He used the white people for markets is bad. I mean white a man or white woman around is like you have achieved. He just said, look at these people, they don't know where the Yeah.
The white people dancing video there, it's like there's some there's some good good like eighties dudes shuffling.
About, yeah, doing some kind of foot loose.
Shit, some kind of footler shit.
What the fuck is going on? But yeah, I mean geez, I mean like it's interesting you know, like, there are these people who become predatory like this. It's because they understand the predation that exists around them at many different levels. And he's just able to, like he has such a mastery of it that he's like, no, watch this, and then I can use white people to legitimize it. It's like, I already know how this works. I already know how
this works. I've seen it. I've seen this shit a hundred times.
You know what, I know how it works. Miles sponsoring a podcast and we're back.
I just want to say that product, fank fuck for that. Did that save you?
Did that cure your your arm? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no, it cleared my ear chlamydia?
Yeah, clear it right. All my hair grew back to.
Your uh huh you even you even have several other people's hair.
Yeah, just from listening to the fucking ad. That's how powerful that is. So I'm definitely gonna buy it.
Yeah, absolutely, folks, spend your money please. So from the end of the nineties to the early two thousands, Scone expanded rapidly, driven by the surge in foreign religious tourists who flooded into Nigeria to see the man deemed a profit and miracle worker. According to former associates, he often paid for the plane tickets of these white evangelicals because he saw their presence as the best marketing his church
would get. Every youth group leader or pastor from the US or Europe who visited came back enthralled and directed funds and more followers.
TB.
Josh was way White followers again also acted as marketing for his church within Nigeria. It was important to him that the Synagogue Church of All Nations be seen as a world church, and this made it more appeal to Nigerians for the same reason people are always drawn to international celebrities. Right, are you more impressed with like the guy who like me, he's got like a local access TV show and he owns a car a lot or are you more impressed by like the NFL.
Dude who owns a series of car dealerships?
Right?
I don't care what that NFL do, But I mean if you're like, if you're some dude named TV Joshua do and you got some South Africans doing footloo shit.
Yeah you gotta dancing. You got South Africans dancing? You I might get to meet John lyfth Gow, And I've always wanted to meet John left Gow. That would totally change my opinion of this guy. If there's John in the mix. Yeah, I'll do anything to meet John Lythgow. Oh yeah, I mean he's in the best season of Dexter, He's in the best season a Dexter, He's in Bukaroo Bonzai. What would Yeah, just a just a rich, rich history of being John Lyftgow. So yeah, it was all brilliantly executed.
Footage from the church in this period is distinctly uncomfortable. You can see very small groups of ravenously excited white evangelicals given positions of honor at the front of huge stadium crowds of Nigerian citizens, Like look at look at this picture here, Like it's it's very stark, like all the white people in one area, everyone else in another, and the white people are right next to TV Joshua.
Yeah, it's sort of like kind of like the same logic of like the like a Maga rally where it's like, please help the people, like the few people of color, Please give them prominent spaces, even though it's the same five people. Just please we need them there, we need them there. Yeah.
So TV preaching was and is huge in Nigeria, but TV Joshua took it to another level, filming much more than most of his colleagues and theming his videos for an international audience. One interview he recorded features a white english woman asking him why he makes so many videos and his answer is fucking amazing because if Jesus was not recorded in the Bible, you would not believe that Jesus is the same today. I fucking love that answer. I fucking love that ads there. That is like that.
That's a smart man. That's a smart man, like he either had that in the chamber or he.
Just extempt that ship. But that is good. What a fucking clap back.
Yeah, that man knows his business. I'll give him that. It's a horrible business, but he fucking knows it.
Fucking knows.
Yeah, Yeah, it's fun stuff. So I want to play a clip for you here of a woman you're about to hear from. This lady is the church's head of foreign visitor relations and she's talking about kind of bringing in these like foreign white religious tourists to Scone. So we're gonna press play.
Here for it was a game on a trap that hecets for the whites people.
Wow, yeah, it's fun around that, yeah for the white people. Okay, TV, Well we're gonna continue in a second. But there's a couple of things going on here. One is that for these young people traveling from other parts of the world, these are mostly kids who are more affluent, they are seeing the wider world for the first time, and that's intoxicating anytime you go to a country that's not like the suburbs, right, yeah, and.
You're so sheltered too, and such a homogeneous fucking yeah environment. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a drug. And in addition to just like, yeah, you're in Africa after a lifetime and a place that is not at all Africa, and that's like this whole fascinating journey. And then you get love bombed too. You are the focus of thousands of locals who are not It's not just like going to a country and being like a tourist. It's going to a country and seeing a crowd of locals overjoyed that you're there, and then
after you get love bombed. Over the next several days, these tourists, the first couple of days you spend at scone. You're just watching hours of miracle videos every day. It's
like a clockwork orange style thing. And then after your treatment. Yeah, and you prime them with the videos and then you do live miracle shows, right, because you don't want him to just see that ship when they're like kind of tired, and it's like you want them in the most suggestible mind state possible, right, you prime that shit.
Yeah, horny for a miracle horny And I'm absolutely horny for America.
Yeah.
And it's wild that he's using the same playbook as like Andrew Tait and all these other people's like traffic them in. Yeah, love bomb them and then and then run run your playbook.
The court leaders only ever work, what like, there's variations based on the tech available to you in the time period, but it's all the same, you know.
HS DVD streaming whatever. Ron Hubbard did it, you.
Know, yeah, the classic way with boats. We're going to play you one more clip explaining how this process goes.
I've never seen a local African town before, and it was a hustle and mustle and street sellers and food and it's very colorful. I was just taking everything in.
You kind of went down a driveway.
In these these vehicles that had other foreign visitors in.
There were tour groups going up from South Africa in quite large numbers.
I'm Angelique and I'm from South Africa. Even before I went, I had these VHS tapes that I had watched and I'd seen the most incredible things, and I was so beyond excited to see this in real life.
I was coordinator of international visitors. Anytime this visit dot com SI Videosha will call and say, go and meet your visitors.
Nag your own disciples with these beautiful smiles, welcome you. There's just people smiling. Everyone looks so happy.
We make you feel like like celebrity.
Oh yeah, that's that's it's so smart, like it is such a it's such a slick operation. I'm just very I'm as evil as a lot of this is. I'm very impressed. Right, this is the point at which the battery hits full swing, because one of the chief things he'll do when he's like showing people life miracles is he'll cure HIV.
Right.
And the way you the way you do this is you have someone come up with like a piece of paper that looks official that says I have HIV, and then you pray over them, and then they get a test and they come back with a sheet of paper that says I don't have HIV. Right, you know, I don't have to explain to you how to fake that, right, it's not hard Like you have a printer, you can bribe a doctor, right, But it's very impressive to these kids.
And I'm gonna have Sophe play a one more clip here.
When I came here, I had been suffering from asthma, and after a short time as the ministry from the Prophet TB, I thought my breathing come totally clear. God had healed me.
So I see you've.
Got a medical report check.
Can you please just show the camera that, right be to God?
Negative states it for HIV and HIV two. So it's not that fucked up to just like it's fucked up, but like the amount of damage you can do by convincing like these these evangelical tourists that you've cured someone's AIDS, you're mainly just going to be able to abuse them more, right, Right, But you're not necessarily causing a public health crisis with that.
What does cause the public health crisis is that he is also convincing his Nigerian followers of this right, and they are actually the people who have HIV at a highd rate, right, certainly higher than these like evangelical tourists. And not only is he convincing them that he can cure them by praying over them, part of what he's convincing them is that they should not go get medical treatment or take retrovirals for their HIV only right, HIV
retrovirals are very available, HIV very treatable. It is not a death sentence when you have access to retrovirals. And one of the things he is doing to members of his flock is telling them, do not take these. God doesn't want you to take these. I can cure your HIV. And we don't know how many people he got to stop taking their retrovirals as a result of this, but we do know that in twenty eleven, in one public sized case, three women in London died when they were
convinced by preachers to stop taking their retrovirals. And one of those preachers was TV Joshua and I think these women were immigrants. When reporters asked TV Joshua if he advised followers to avoid treating their HIV. He gave this answer, let me tell you, I am a medium in the same way doctors are mediums to bring treatment. So basically saying, hey, I'm just a doctor too, you know.
Yeah.
One follower I read an interview with because he's not just doing this with HIV. He's telling people to avoid all sorts of modern medicine in favor of paying him, you know, to pray over them. His followers at devoted member of the church who was like helping to run the church. His mother was enthralled with TV Joshua and refused to take chemotherapy for her cancer after Joshua healed her and told her that she did not need it.
Within six months, she was dead. This follower, who again was a dedicated volunteer of the church, calls TB.
Joshua.
He's close enough to this guy to have his phone number. He calls him to let him know that his mom is dead, and TB. Joshua hangs up on him, and he later he like asks one of the other workers there, like he hung up on me, Like what the fuck? And that guy's like, well, the prophet doesn't listen to bad news.
Oh hey, you're gonna fuck up the prophet's confirmation bias, so I don't fucking tell him about that shit. He's just gonna Oh yeah, you're just going to.
Hear the click's wild stuff. Anyway, that's the TV Joshua story.
Oh got anything to plug at the end of part one.
Miles please you know, when when appropriate, listened to your healthcare providers and not someone named TV Joshua or whatever TV.
Jakes, I don't care who it is at T don't get don't get help advice for many of them. Yeah, uh plug, Uh yeah, just listen to the Daily Zeitgeist. You know, that's my daily news and politics and.
Comedy shit show. And uh, if you like ninety Day Fiance, look one of your other favorite guests, Sophia Alexandra. That's a show I host with her, and this is us getting high and talking about ninety Day Fiance. That's how we kind of blow steam off between Bastard's recordings and you know, just the general world of it all.
Well, blow off some steam with that, and blow off some steam with steam I don't know. Yeah, and a new show Sarah flu is really starting to fit me up.
Now will you plug edge show?
Oh yeah, Ed's got a show. It's called Better Offline. It's about all the fucked up tech industry shit that you probably need to know because they're actively trying to destroy your life and everyone else's life, so you know, keep an eye out for that.
Anyway, I'm gonna go, Miles, I'm gonna go. Uh, I'm gonna go hang out.
At a fucking playground with a with a spoon and some foil and a pack of a thera flu Yeah.
Watch, You're gonna go to like a needle exchange and they're like, no, man, this is the people that actually need it. Man, that's your fucking weird old theraflu shit. Yeah yeahould be ashamed of yourself.
I got to take a needle from one of my diabetic friends to shoot the.
Flu up, like my EpiPen. Where is it? Oh sorry I needed the needle. Yeah no, I empty.
I emptied the epidephyrin from my EpiPen and just theorough fluid that ship up. Get that right into the meat.
Jesus Christ.
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