Part One: Bishop David E. Taylor: Jesus Christ's Best Friend

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we've got one of my favorite guests and the host of the podcast on our network, Sad Oligark, which just got a new season, Jake Hanrahan. Jake, welcome back.
How are you doing?

Speaker 3 Thanks for having me, mate. Long time no speak, man.
How How have you been?

Speaker 1 Ah, you know, I've been all right. Tired, like everyone, I think, especially where I am.
Lots going on. How about you?

Speaker 3 Yeah, like your country's like actually fascist now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 We're really speedrunning things, huh? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Everyone's saying it for years, and now it's like, oh, no, they actually, it's happening.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's fucked up.

Speaker 1 It has been fun to see all of the like debate go out the window and like, no, no, yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 No, it's straight up.

Speaker 1 like it's it's yeah it's actually like very scary because it's happening here as well like 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 uh almost it seems farcical uh yeah so that's that's good i i feel upbeat i don't know i don't know like it's it's weird too because it's one of those like you 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.

Speaker 1 Like, that that wouldn't be the primary concern is still like making rent and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, no, that's actually, I was talking to my friend about this the other day. I was like, The kind of rapid descent into state control and authoritarianism is actually really boring.

Speaker 3 Like, it's just happening and that's it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
And I'd still go to like birthday parties and stuff. Like,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Like 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 citizen.

Speaker 3 You're coming back to England. Like, what the fuck? No.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Talking to, and I'm in the same boat planning overseas trips and being like, well, now I have a phone I 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 you know?

Speaker 3 I mean, this must be what it's like for people in like you know, countries that have been doing this a little bit longer, a little bit more direct, you know, and now we're like, oh shit, we have to do it too.

Speaker 1 Well, in this, 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 that's more or less the title.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which is, which, which did help actually reading it years ago, was like, okay, well, at least there's a rubric.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I love the way he kind of

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But then in the East or in Russia, when you show them something fake, the people go, yeah, wow. Like, they already knew it was bullshit.

Speaker 3 And it's like, I think we're coming to that level now where we're like, oh, right. We already have to be cynical because we kind of realize it's all nonsense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And it's just impossible to know like what is,

Speaker 1 I mean like the just the ability of regular people to to differentiate between truth and lies and like a video now.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 That's very scary.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, because part of what's going on is a growth in sort of like cultic behavior and cultic abuse techniques becoming like normalized across the political spectrum right

Speaker 1 there's a lot of these

Speaker 1 yeah yeah yeah exactly maga's like a great example of that um and so i i i keep turning back to cults periodically.

Speaker 1 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 in to politics in the U.S.

Speaker 1 or elsewhere, but it's a cult that just got on my radar. They just got busted by the FBI.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Nelly, Nelly, like the rapper.

Speaker 1 Nelly's not involved.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay, okay, good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Nelly is uninvolved. This is just a house that Nelly owned that later got purchased by a cult.

Speaker 1 But the Nelly connection does exist.

Speaker 1 This is a cult that I hadn't heard about before the FBI raided all their properties, but there had been some stuff written about them. So I had to do some real digging to get a story here.

Speaker 1 But it's a group called the Kingdom of God. Have you heard of these people?

Speaker 3 Do you know what? I feel like I have, but there are so many cults with similar names like that that it could just be.

Speaker 1 It's such a cult name.

Speaker 3 It very much, yeah. Oh, the kingdom of God church.
You're like, no, don't go there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I had to check to see, because there are like four different cults I thought this this might be.
And I was like, nope, nope, nope. Those are all slightly different names.
This is a new one.

Speaker 1 This is a new one.

Speaker 1 And it's, you know, I try to be compassionate when I like look at cults and study them and talk about them on the show, because I do tend to believe that anyone can be taken in by a cult at some point in their life, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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 Synanon.

Speaker 1 And I don't really understand the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But I'll do my best to explain it here. You know, this may just be one that like

Speaker 1 was never,

Speaker 1 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.

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Speaker 1 And we're back. So as I said, not a well-known cult.

Speaker 1 If you haven't heard of these guys, you're probably in the norm.

Speaker 1 If you had, you probably found out the way I did reading articles published just recently about this massive multi-state FBI raid of several cult properties.

Speaker 1 Prior to that, the only real interest this group attracted was internal criticism in places like Charisma magazine, which is like

Speaker 1 charismatic Christianity is like a type of evangelical Christianity, right? Like these are.

Speaker 1 to kind of summarize it, these are the people who do like the crazy eating snake or getting letting snakes bite them kind of shit, right?

Speaker 1 Like Pentecostals are charismatics. Charismatics are not all just Pentecostals, but like it's the weird stuff, right?

Speaker 3 I'd be honest, like, if I had to join a cult, I would rather be doing like Snake Church stuff than like fucking Scientology, you know?

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 That, that I agree with. The Snake Church stuff sounds like more fun.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And when you're getting called out by other members of like that chunk of Christianity, you really have to be going 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, plated in gold.

Speaker 1 God wants him to have that.

Speaker 1 So the fact that like these guys got attacked by that community means they were really out of fucking pocket.

Speaker 1 When the FBI raided Kingdom of God properties, they found at least 57 people who had been forced to work for the cult in conditions that at least approximated slave labor, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, somewhere, somewhere in there.

Speaker 3 Very heavy. Like normally cults start with like, here's a pamphlet, you know?

Speaker 1 No, they're, they're kind of starting with, yeah, with, you're not going to get paid and we'll make you homeless if you, uh, 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

Speaker 1 like that's what they're being made to do is operate a call center as slaves i worked in a call center so bad man fuck it it's only marginally better if you're getting paid right yeah like not even barely yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 1 um already on the spectrum of yeah being forcibly forced to labor so some number of female members were also sexually trafficked for the cult leader, right?

Speaker 1 Which is, you know, a bummer, but pretty normal for a cult.

Speaker 1 And the cult leader obviously lived in luxury with a handful of his lieutenants.

Speaker 1 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 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 in the hopes that like a couple hundred send it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Just like

Speaker 3 Facebook.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, Facebook is where a lot of this happens. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 But I mean, that's like even part of their model as well.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's like the darkest thing ever. Doesn't surprise me, a cult would be doing it.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 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 Facebook's books.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, how, because it's not nothing, it's not 0% of the Facebook income.

Speaker 1 I bet it's mad. It's destroying people's lives at scale.
It's got to be like 40% at least, right? Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's, that's, that's wholesome, honestly. That's just somebody wants a quieter gun to shoot people with.

Speaker 1 It's, it's a dark, but I haven't had Facebook for like over 10 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 months because there's like friends that i knew 25 years ago yeah 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 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 are is

Speaker 1 what percentage of this traffic is even real people watching shit because this is all just insane.

Speaker 3 I love the boomer stuff where like they'll fall for like, there'll be like a fucking dolphin on roller skates. And they're like, wow,

Speaker 3 look what the dolphins are doing. It's like, uncle, like, shut up.
Go back to bed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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. Why would anyone share this?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the best.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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, 53 years young.

Speaker 1 We know tragically little of David's early life. There's been no real in-depth reporting on this guy as an individual.

Speaker 1 So like 90% of what I've got to work with here is what he wrote or had ghost written on his church website and a 2009 self-help book that he wrote about talking to Jesus, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Per these sources, I can tell you he was born on August 3rd, 1972 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 53 years old.

Speaker 1 His parents were in the church business. His dad was an evangelical pastor, or his dad is a Baptist pastor, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 I think you could be chill and be a Baptist still, right? They're like pretty chill Baptists.

Speaker 1 There are some chill Baptists, yes. I don't know that his dad was, but it's very different, right?

Speaker 1 Or somewhat different, we should say.

Speaker 1 And yeah, and

Speaker 1 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 multiply because David was born the seventh.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's, that's not insignificant. No.
Um,

Speaker 1 he would later, yeah, virile, um, and also really relying on those middle kids to raise the youngest ones.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I haven't found much about his father other than that he was a pastor for close to 40 years.

Speaker 1 The only detail from his life that his son seemed interested in repeating is that when his dad was 23 years old,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 One day, as he was riding the Memphis bus transit, a young man pulled out a gun and stuck up the bus robbing the people of their money.

Speaker 1 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' name.
The man instantly obeyed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When they saw each other, they both wept. He then led the young man to the Lord, resulting in him surrendering his life completely.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this actually happened. There's a newspaper clipping about it.

Speaker 1 And the yeah,

Speaker 1 there's a photo from the Memphis Press Scimitar with a picture of Minister Taylor and the robber.

Speaker 1 And the robber, he's wearing like one of those striped prison shirts. It really looks like a scene from Cool Hand Luke.

Speaker 1 And the actual text of the news article is pretty close to what David said.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh boy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it doesn't look good.

Speaker 1 Things were bad if that's where we're starting.

Speaker 1 But yeah, seems to be true.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So good on him. That seems like a nice story.

Speaker 1 And David is going to be. raised with this tale of his father's heroism.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Raised in a Christian home in Memphis, Tennessee, he fell away as he was seduced into the gang life as a teenager.

Speaker 1 But everything drastically changed one night at the age of 17 when Jesus appeared to him face to face in a dream. Now,

Speaker 1 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 while admitting that his father was this like great man who made him go to church three times a week.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 You can't just be like, and so I was always a good, godly man.

Speaker 3 I was about to say, they never do that, do they? They're never like, yeah, everything was fine. My dad was cool.
Now I'm doing it. It's like, no, like, I did heroin for three years.

Speaker 3 And it's like, did you just do that or say you did that to have this like cool backstory?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or is it,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Is it like, all right, I got to spend three years doing heroin and Skin Row so that I can. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's like the law building, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
I got hepatitis from a dirty needle and that's like my combat action ribbon.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just like, yeah, base. I've seen shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So anyway, in his first book, Face to Face, Appearances with Jesus, David Taylor claims claims he was visited by Christ and visited, he means in person.

Speaker 1 Like he means that they have like a physical relationship

Speaker 1 in December of 1989.

Speaker 1 This was around a week before Christmas Eve and David was, by his account, a pretty tough customer.

Speaker 1 He described himself in his book as, your typical unsaved teenager, smoking dope, marijuana, using bad language and cursing, partying and having premarital sex.

Speaker 1 I was even involved with gangs and hung around cocaine-dealing drug lords.

Speaker 3 I love that he went from swearing to drug lords. Like, mate, fucking.

Speaker 1 Swearing to drug lords? Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the real

Speaker 1 gateway drug is cursing. Yeah.
It leads you straight to cocaine-dealing drug lords.

Speaker 3 One day I said, shit. The next I was Pablo Escobar.
Like, yeah, that happens all the time. Fucking idiot.

Speaker 3 You know what I'm making this up, like, surely.

Speaker 1 It's got to be lies, right? It's got to be. Part of that is he goes, I was smoking dope, comma marijuana.
So is he saying that he was smoking dope as in like heroin and marijuana? Because

Speaker 1 I'm not impressed with the pot if you were smoking like fucking horse, right?

Speaker 1 The pot doesn't even register if you're doing, if you're smoking heroin.

Speaker 3 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've smoked weed. It's like, you probably fucking haven't.

Speaker 3 Like, he sounds like one of them kids, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like being like, yeah, you know, I used to shoot up $4,800 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I also, I might be able to buy this guy partied as a kid, smoked a little pot, maybe did a couple of lines of Coke again at a party. A lot of people do, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Maybe not more than 50%, but a lot of the population, you know? That said, there's no evidence whatsoever that he knew cocaine-dealing dealing drug lords

Speaker 1 maybe he knew a coke dealer again a lot of people know but a coke lord that's a high level yeah that's a man who has money to buy a hippopotamus i love to know his remit like what's his remit for like just dealer to drug lord you know it's like come the fuck on man maybe it was a jesus thing i don't know i you there's two things for 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.

Speaker 1 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 going to call you a Coke lord, right?

Speaker 1 I think you go back to the better.

Speaker 3 Like a really horrible killer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and a lot of bodies, a lot of stacked bodies. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The only real detail he provides us anywhere about his supposed life of crime as a child is this paragraph.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Thank God he spared my life and protected me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, shootings at least.

Speaker 3 You've been like, yeah, shit. Yeah.
Yeah, that's not unusual, right?

Speaker 1 I don't know. One of them was two victims.
The other two were one. So not mass, but like three different shootings, right?

Speaker 3 Oh, is that it? It just happens.

Speaker 1 It just happens.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's like, I've been jumped. I thought that was bad.
Like, fucking hell. Right.
Yeah, no, that sounds bad. That sounds fucking horrible.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, that's not a wildly, that's not a huge leap, right?

Speaker 1 David then says that Jesus appeared appeared to him for the first time during a dream, right? This is in 1989. It's like a week or so before Christmas.
And here's how he describes it. And

Speaker 1 I'm going to preface this by saying it's a weirdly erotic description of Jesus.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 I got to tell you that right now.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I had 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 that, that's, and I'm bringing in the intro.

Speaker 1 The next passage here, he describes Jesus using the word ecstasy more times than a drug dealer on Telegram. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 It was ecstasy. For the first time, I was standing in front of Jesus.
My whole being felt him. You can imagine imagine the ecstasy I felt.
It was a feeling of intense glory.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Mate.

Speaker 1 That's a guy who wants to fuck Jesus, right?

Speaker 3 I think that's a guy that did fuck Jesus by the sound.

Speaker 1 He might have fucked Jesus.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's weird.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 he's projecting ever so slightly there, definitely.

Speaker 1 Maybe a little bit. And we'll continue with the uncomfortably horny descriptions of Jesus Christ.

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Speaker 26 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 26 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 26 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 23 Okay, if you thought season 2 of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

Speaker 20 Season 3 is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 22 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

Speaker 4 This season, they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans.

Speaker 19 No stone is left unturned.

Speaker 23 And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze.

Speaker 4 So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to crew smart in a wild political climate.

Speaker 1 Oh, and this season, they want to hear your stories.

Speaker 22 Their call-in segment is getting even hotter, and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

Speaker 19 No pressure.

Speaker 8 So if you're ready for round three, just push play.

Speaker 20 Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 24 New episodes every Thursday.

Speaker 25 This is Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 25 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 25 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber. They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 25 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust. And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 25 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there? And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 25 Right now, in between naps to dinner, or you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy. If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 25 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too.

Speaker 25 It all comes down to this: with Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me. So grab your little ones, Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 1 And we're back.

Speaker 1 So, Jake, as I promised, that uncomfortably horny vibe continues 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 in waves.

Speaker 3 All right. Also, what is

Speaker 3 the normal man?

Speaker 1 The normal man's, yeah, above six feet is a normal man. A little bit of height shaming there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, come on, man.

Speaker 3 This is very erotic. I mean, it's fine.

Speaker 1 It's fine. It's cool if you're into that.

Speaker 1 Jesus is thousands of years old, so it's not problematic, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, if you saw Jesus, you'd be like, oh, yeah, I don't know, like long hair, like robes, fucking halo. I'm not going to be like, pretty cut.
Yeah, perfect cheekbones, beautiful eye.

Speaker 3 Come on now.

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, I mean, it's fair, but

Speaker 3 let's know what you're really thinking, son. And I'm laughing because I'm going to guess.
I'm going to take a wild guess that this guy went on to be wildly homophobic in his cult.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
I mean, yes.

Speaker 1 I would say not to the point where like it's the main thing, but it's just a normal thing in that chunk of the culture. Right, right.
Right.

Speaker 1 Like, this is not Pentecostal Christianity is not super great on gay people, you know?

Speaker 1 These aren't the Episcopalians.

Speaker 1 So, given that this guy becomes a money-grubbing cult leader, I'd expected Jesus to like mark him out as special and tell him he had some sort of great purpose to fulfill, right?

Speaker 1 That's kind of what I was expecting to come here. And that does happen.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Which is not to say like this, Christianity doesn't have a worse cult problem than any other chunk of our society. People make cults for no reason at all, right?

Speaker 1 People make cults without a god being involved, with a god. Every religion has its cults.
I'm not being particularly shitty to any one faith.

Speaker 1 What's weird is that his Jesus talks exactly like a 21st century cult leader, which I haven't come across in the many different

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the first thing Jesus says is, you need to cut off all ties with your best friend.

Speaker 1 You need to immediately like cut the closest person to you out of your life. And that's just straight cult leader shit.

Speaker 3 Right. Thanks, Jesus.
Fucking hell.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Jesus.

Speaker 1 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 was a really good friend. He was a good influence, but he's not Christian.

Speaker 1 So he's not saved. Right.
And so Jesus tells him, David, forsake your best friend. Give your life to me and follow me.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, that's just the text of the Bible.

Speaker 3 I mean, this guy obviously is just, I mean, you know, I give him the benefit of the doubt, but I think it's pretty clear this guy just made this up.

Speaker 1 It sounds like a lie, of course.

Speaker 3 It sounds like he just had a problem with his best mate. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Jesus sure did. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, bro. Jesus said, you know, like, you got to get, go fuck yourself.
Like, that's how it is now.

Speaker 1 Nah. Yeah.
We can't be friends anymore because the son of God doesn't like you. Yeah, right.
Well, that's going to make me become Christian.

Speaker 3 I'd be like, oh, God, Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Cult leaders tell you to cut off your friends and your family, right? If they don't follow you.

Speaker 1 So yeah,

Speaker 1 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 even your best friend if Jesus requires you to.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I guess what I'm mostly surprised at is that I haven't seen another cult leader do this. I've seen a lot of people put words in Jesus' mouth, but I haven't seen them do it this blatantly.

Speaker 1 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.
But I thought you still had to be a little more cunning about it.

Speaker 3 Right. Like, look at, you know, I mean, no offense to Mormons, but like, look at the guy that.

Speaker 1 Jesus, yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, oh, I found these golden plates. I mean, that was pushing it.
And like, this guy is just really pushing it. Yeah, you can tell just nothing matters anymore.

Speaker 3 You can just be like, oh, yeah, Jesus said, you know, I need a Porsche, and my best friend's a dickhead. Like, it's very,

Speaker 3 it's just, yeah, unimaginative now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. 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.

Speaker 1 He had to come up with some lies real quick. Yeah, they're kind of right.
It's just creative. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, like, oh, it's like borderline sci-fi. Like, yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.
Like the craft. I respect the craft, you know?

Speaker 3 Put in some work, you know.

Speaker 3 Like, obviously, yeah, they're fucking, they end up doing really evil stuff, but like, at least at the start, it was like golden plates, not just like fucking chat GPT tier.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, this is a very chat GPT-ass cult.

Speaker 1 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 ghost writer regularly. And that's basically an evolution of that.
Yes.

Speaker 1 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's saved, all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So at about 11, 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.

Speaker 1 So about 11 p.m. 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.

Speaker 1 Like part of the point is faith, right? And if you're like, no, 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.

Speaker 1 But you know,

Speaker 3 you don't start telling the son of God like when and where to appear, right? You just go, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 He's literally the son of God. Yeah.
Yeah, like, you know,

Speaker 3 no, I'm not getting it this time. Yeah, this guy's clearly like a massive narcissist, which I guess you have to be.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.
And it really comes across in the book because he orders Jesus, if you are truly real, manifest yourself to me more.

Speaker 1 David relates this moment in a chapter of his book titled, The Supernatural Heavens Invade My Room, which sounds like some drug experience I had right around the same age.

Speaker 1 You know, like I could, I could characterize an acid tripper or two that way.

Speaker 3 Like sniffing solvents or something.

Speaker 1 Right, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 After this, God comes to him, you know, he follows the summons, and he blesses him with the ability to speak in tongues.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 My room was literally lifted to the atmosphere of heaven. My room did not actually have a door, so I had to put a bedsheet at the entryway.

Speaker 1 Often, before I put the bedsheet 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.

Speaker 1 My mother was worried about me because I stayed in my room for hours and days at a time.

Speaker 1 I would come out in fellowship with the family at times, but I was caught up in experiencing heavenly things in my room.

Speaker 1 My room was literally filled with the celestial air or an electrical atmosphere.

Speaker 3 Gooning.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's gooning. I'm sorry, man.
You're gooning with God in your bedroom. Yeah, the words.
The 17-year-old boy.

Speaker 1 You leave his room for days at a time? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, not good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Um

Speaker 1 so after this so-called face-to-face meeting with God, our boy's life story is pretty nondescript for the next couple of years.

Speaker 1 We know he's an active pretty much the entirety of the 90s, working as a preacher and a religious motivational speaker. He claims the Lord led him to the work of Bishop G.E.

Speaker 1 Patterson, who isn't a bishop in like the Catholic sense of the word. I would say not a, I mean, real or not.
There are Pentecostal bishops, but they're not, there's a bunch of them.

Speaker 1 And it's just like if if you have a bunch of churches who say we're part of an organization, we're appointing bishops, right?

Speaker 1 So it's, it's not, 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.

Speaker 3 You don't really, you don't really have to like work towards it sort of thing.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you, it's, but it's, it's certainly not the same degree to, because you can just get appointed, right?

Speaker 1 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, right?

Speaker 1 I'm not saying this is a better thing or a worse thing. I'm just saying it's different.

Speaker 1 And yeah, Bishop G.E.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Since Taylor's dad was a Baptist preacher, Patterson acted as David's entryway into the Pentecostal faith.

Speaker 1 Taylor graduates from a Bible school at age 19, and he claims that Jesus came to him in another vision where Taylor demanded the real thing as in the real Bible experience.

Speaker 1 So he has another talk with Jesus where he demands, he makes demands of Jesus.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 going to be a member of your faith.

Speaker 1 He's like putting the screws to Jesus here.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm team Jesus in this.

Speaker 1 I don't think you're supposed to do this, but

Speaker 3 absolutely not.

Speaker 1 Again, not an expert on Christianity, but I'm pretty sure this is sacrilegious.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Apostle Taylor was desperate to see a change come to America. He saw 9-11, 10 years before it happened, in a dream.
In addition to that, he also saw a coming war upon America's soil from Russia.

Speaker 1 In the dream, America did not win this war.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 in modern times, he made a big deal after like the Trump got elected of the whole predicted a war on U.S.

Speaker 1 soil against Russia thing, because I think in light of the whole Russiagate stuff, that seems compelling to people, right?

Speaker 1 But reading older articles prior to Trump's election, all that stuff about Taylor's prophecies,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 He foresaw 9-11 and the global war on terror and thought that the Russian government incited them all.

Speaker 3 Huh.

Speaker 1 He, I mean,

Speaker 3 pretty creative.

Speaker 1 Creative, not accurate. Yeah.
You could say a lot about who was involved in 9-11. Not really Russia.

Speaker 1 Not really their back, as far as I'm aware.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 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, 30 years ago.
He didn't.

Speaker 1 He just thought 9-11 was the Russians.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 In a 2018 article for the Tennessee News Herald, Colin Mahoney included posts from an employee of David Taylor's summarizing the over 150 face-to-face visitations with Jesus and prophetic dreams that he had.

Speaker 1 Quote: In a series of dreams that he has prophesied for over 12 years, God revealed that Russia was going to attack America and that this war would begin during the presidency of George W. Bush Jr.

Speaker 1 In one of these dreams, the financial centers of America were attacked, and this dream was fulfilled with the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center in New York.

Speaker 1 Don't be caught unprepared for what is about to hit America.

Speaker 1 Again, he's just completely wrong. Like,

Speaker 1 he does say before 9-11 that the World Trade Center will be attacked, which is not that much of a prediction because it had been in 93. And he thinks the Russians are going to do it, right?

Speaker 1 He thought that W was going to go to war with Russia. And we kind of do the opposite.
Yeah. Like, we literally actually do the opposite.

Speaker 3 I imagine he said like a hundred other things that were completely off as well. It's that, it's that thing, right? Like, if you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it's going to stick.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 And it didn't even stick. It was so wrong.
Yeah. So.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's the same thing. It's like Alex Jones in 2000 saying that there's going to be an attack on the World Trade Center.
Well, there just had been.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and he had been saying that for years before it, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's like if I'm going to be like, Jake, I'm getting a vision from God right now.
There's going to be an attack on a U.S. military base at some point in the next five years.

Speaker 1 I'll be right. There will be somewhere, right?

Speaker 3 It's like going to be like, you know what? I think there's going going to be a school shooting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's going to be a school shooting somewhere in the United States, you know? Like, yeah, these are easy predictions to make. The stock market will go up or down.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, of course.

Speaker 1 So this guy, he's got about as much claim to accuracy as Alex Jones. In 1997, Taylor claimed that Jesus visited him and handed him the literal keys to the kingdom of God.

Speaker 1 Quote from his church website. And now everywhere he goes, mighty regional ministries and deliverance take place to the the kingdom demonstration.
Drug busts take place by the kingly decree.

Speaker 1 Human trafficking rings have been completely dismantled by the kingdom and power of God.

Speaker 1 And he's actually correct about this, but not in the way that he wanted to be, because as of late 2025, I can say that everywhere David Taylor goes, there are arrests of human rings, busts of human trafficking rings.

Speaker 1 It's just that there is. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 There's loads of them. That's why.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's loads of them.

Speaker 1 You are correct.

Speaker 1 there's a definite correlation between where you are and where human trafficking rings get busted yeah it's like the you know if you're in london you're probably gonna see a rat because they're everywhere yeah exactly exactly um and not all of them at parliament but

Speaker 3 also the same can be said about uh sex trafficking rings right yes

Speaker 1 look you know who's whose government isn't involved in some sex trafficking

Speaker 1 i'm asking that question genuinely i'd like to move.

Speaker 4 I know, yeah, generally not.

Speaker 3 Like, maybe, like, fucking, there's a place off the coast of England called Sealand where Sealand might be okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like, it's basically like an old oil rig, and some people like come commandeered it and declared it to be a sovereign nation, and it kind of is.

Speaker 1 Sure, maybe Sealand doesn't have a sex trafficking.

Speaker 1 Who knows?

Speaker 1 I want to believe the adorable president of Ireland doesn't have any involvement there, but

Speaker 1 I know politics too well. I'm sure there's something.
That's something.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the September 11th attacks did help to supercharge his fan base, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In 2009, he wrote his face-to-face book, which not only detailed his own conversations with Jesus, but was structured as a guide for worshipers to have their own in-person conversations with Christ.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 All of them will give you a direct line to God.

Speaker 1 That's a promise we can absolutely make.

Speaker 3 I don't know about that.

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Speaker 26 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 26 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 26 Head over to globalgaming league.com.

Speaker 23 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

Speaker 20 Season three is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 22 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

Speaker 19 This season, they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans. No stone is left unturned.

Speaker 23 And let's be real, 2025 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze.

Speaker 4 So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate.

Speaker 1 Oh, and this season, they want to hear your stories.

Speaker 22 Their call-in segment is getting even hotter, and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

Speaker 19 No pressure.

Speaker 8 So if you're ready for round three, just push play.

Speaker 20 Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 24 New episodes every Thursday.

Speaker 25 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 25 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 25 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber. They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 25 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust. And you can certainly trust Gerber.

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Speaker 1 and we're back Jake did did you have a face-to-face meeting with with uh with the Lord uh during our ad break is it really called the face-to-face book It's called Face-to-Face, My Meetings with Jesus Christ or something like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Answer did. I don't think he did either.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think he did either.

Speaker 1 Now, it is worth noting that kind of during the Obama administration, one of the things he does that kind of burnishes his reputation is he receives the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award,

Speaker 1 which is like signed by Barack Obama. The Apostle David E.
Taylor gets this award. And that's going to sound more impressive than it is.
So yeah, you can see that award, Jake.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that looks like a real award.

Speaker 3 I was about to say that's like Canva-looking award.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not, it's not a great-looking award, I'll be honest. Um, and it's not really a real award.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award is something, it's a volunteer service award anyone can apply to if they've done more than 4,000 hours of volunteer service for an organization in their lifetime.

Speaker 1 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 4,000 hours or more for any organization will get.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 There's hundreds of these, thousands.

Speaker 1 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 4,000 hours at the organization that pays him.

Speaker 1 Like, if I just were to frame this podcast as a volunteer effort, I could get this award, right? I've spent 4,000 hours on this job.

Speaker 3 I love that he speaks face to face with Jesus, but he got his congregation to plug him to get the Obama Canva award.

Speaker 1 Like, it's talking to Jesus while Obama's a little harder to talk to, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Very, very interesting guy.

Speaker 1 he's a busier man than jesus at this point in time um

Speaker 1 so again and a big part of his this in 2009 this book face-to-face comes out and it's a guide for how you too 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 his cult

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's the best. Like, that is his title.
He is an apostle and the best friend of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 which, like, I would have guessed Paul, maybe, yeah, you know, like,

Speaker 3 yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I feel like they went through more together, but okay, it's such a funny thing to go for

Speaker 3 like a lot of these guys are like, I am the new Jesus, or like, you know, like, God is this guy is like, no, we're just best mates.

Speaker 1 No, we're, we're, we're, we're super tight, though. Yeah, like, I'm not God myself, but I am his best friend, Jesus Christ, exactly, yeah.
Um,

Speaker 1 So through his church organization, JMMI, which stands for Joshua Media Ministries International, Taylor starts buying up properties during the Obama years.

Speaker 1 In 2011, they purchase a 29,920 square foot industrial building in Taylor, Michigan, and they move at least 10 people onto the property to start, although it's sometimes occupied by more, you know, up to a few dozen.

Speaker 1 And these people are some of their, they're somewhere, I think 60-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.

Speaker 1 It's kind of hard to tell because I don't think we have a great accounting.

Speaker 1 Some of the sources are like there were 60 people in one of these buildings and they own buildings in multiple states eventually.

Speaker 1 They start with this property in Taylor, Michigan, but they're going to wind up buying properties like all over the United States.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 Wildwood,

Speaker 1 Tampa, Florida, Ocala, Florida, and Houston, Texas.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 in St. Louis or near St.
Louis is like one of the places they're occupying. Some of them are like warehouse spaces.

Speaker 1 So it's a variety of different kinds of properties, but they are in like five or six states, right?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 on the way into and out of town that are like plugging both their churches and the services they're doing.

Speaker 1 He brings in other people as pastors under him because he can't preach at more than one church at a time, right? So this does expand to be a sizable organization.

Speaker 1 And the people who are full-time cold members have to give up their bank accounts.

Speaker 1 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 7 billion souls for a great heavenly harvest.

Speaker 1 You know, like that's the,

Speaker 1 that's what his ministry is going to do.

Speaker 3 That sounds like things are getting a little bit darker.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a little darker. It's a big job you're taking on.

Speaker 1 And yeah,

Speaker 1 now, if you're trying to save 7 billion souls, you can't do that by having people come into a physical church, right?

Speaker 1 You can't even really do that just by having a TV channel. 7 billion is a lot of people.

Speaker 1 There's only one way to reach that many people by using the most efficient form of outreach in existence, the call center.

Speaker 3 I knew that was coming.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Zooming God, basically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Zooming God. The cult starts operating in the early aughts a 24-7 prayer line, and they have online ads.
They have billboards all over in states like Missouri, right?

Speaker 1 Where they direct worshipers 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?

Speaker 1 You know, call this number and we can help you, right? Like,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 and it again, it's kind of almost framed as like a suicide hotline. Um, or are you, are you about to get evicted? Is is your life in shambles, basically?

Speaker 1 Like, we can this cult can help you right the kingdom of god uh 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Otherwise, how does he know you're serious? Per an article in St.

Speaker 1 Louis magazine, according to the indictment against Taylor and Brannon, Brannon'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 in impoverished parts of the world and fight human trafficking.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 If you have a serious problem, largely family members who are sick, David can intervene on your behalf for enough money.

Speaker 1 And this is a claim that they made specifically. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 19 It's disgusting, right?

Speaker 1 Because people, I've had a loved one who had, thankfully, it wound up being benign, but had a brain tumor.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And obviously, we went to doctors.

Speaker 1 We like did the like 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're just you're 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 i do have empathy for the people being conned here it's it's so easy to be like oh that's fucking stupid.

Speaker 3 If you've ever been in like that dark fucking trench of just like brain damage and fear, absolutely, it is exactly that. Yeah.
And it's incredible how quickly you will go, right?

Speaker 3 Yesterday, that was the craziest thing ever. Now today I'll try it, whatever it is.
You know, it's really sad.

Speaker 1 Anything.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Like, who knows? You know, it's very sad to prey on people like that.
It's, it's just vile, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the evilest thing I think that you can pretty much do outside of like murder, like directly murdering people or whatever, I guess.

Speaker 1 It's on the, I don't know, we don't need to quantify it, but yeah,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so this is the claim he's making, that this like pastor calls and said, my cousin just dropped dead from a heart attack.

Speaker 1 And Taylor yells, get up into the phone, and his cousin's heart starts beating again. And there's like, give us proof, like in articles and stuff like this, there's pictures generally shared.

Speaker 1 I'll show you one example here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It says, young man raised from the dead by the Lord working through David Taylor.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Sorry, actually. Great.
The thumbs up. He's fucking killing me.

Speaker 1 The thumbs up. To let you know that he's okay because David Taylor prayed for him.
Obviously, I'm convinced. This seems like proof to me.

Speaker 3 Came back from the dead and he's like, yep, thumbs up.

Speaker 1 Thumbs up. I'm good.

Speaker 1 I do want to play you one of the YouTube propaganda videos the Colt 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 and his wife preaching in this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It is, this is, this is special.

Speaker 29 Sure.

Speaker 1 Experience the dead being raced.

Speaker 30 Critical condition tonight after a shooting outside a Georgia restaurant.

Speaker 31 How many of you heard about this year of NFL Super Bowl? A young man was shot point blank for rooting for the 49er. It was national news.
This is the young man.

Speaker 1 Four people had already died around him.

Speaker 32 The doctors said, Chris is not gonna make it.

Speaker 1 The young man went into a coma and died for 20 minutes.

Speaker 32 And they said never in the history of the hospital have they lost four patients with a fifth expected. I text Apostle Taylor.
He said, Chris is not gonna die.

Speaker 29 He's gonna live.

Speaker 31 This was a resurrection.

Speaker 32 Yes, it was.

Speaker 1 He shot me twice, as here it is a year later, and I'm standing before you. Your dead can be raised!

Speaker 29 My cousin had just dropped down dead while taking a shower, and I'd seen the Lord use David E. Taylor to raise the dead.

Speaker 29 I sent him a text, and he sent me a text and said the Lord told him only two words to say, and that was get up. And shortly after, Apostle released the command, my cousin was raised from the dead.

Speaker 1 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 throw in a screen grab of David and that incredible outfit.
But Jake,

Speaker 1 how would you describe him?

Speaker 3 You know, Beauty and the Beast? Like,

Speaker 3 there's a bit, yeah, there's a bit where he gets really dressed up to, like, take Belle to like, well, not take her out, but they do some fancy dinner. And it's basically that.

Speaker 3 It's literally that outfit, man.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you. Yeah, yeah, it's literally, it's something Michael Jackson would have worn.

Speaker 3 It's fucking mate. It's something like Prince would have worn if he had a kid with Michael Jackson.
Like, it's like next level.

Speaker 1 I do want that jacket, right? Like, I do want that jacket.

Speaker 3 It's the right to wear. And just people looking at you like, what? Jesus is my best mate.
Fuck off. I can wear what I want.

Speaker 1 It's incredible stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The production of that is kind of wild, though. Like, I'll be honest.

Speaker 3 It's pretty clever. Like, it's kind of

Speaker 3 presented. 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 that level.

Speaker 3 Like, that was pretty dark, but unique in that sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's pretty novel, right? And it's a cross. You said, yeah, there's a, it's a cross between like a, a network news broadcast and like a movie trailer.

Speaker 1 Exactly, which is exactly what is interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is a, There was a real young guy who had a heart attack and I think was legally dead for a period of time.

Speaker 1 It was not his claim, the claim made by the church and all of Taylor's websites is that like a pastor called him and told him about this, this member of his church who had dropped dead.

Speaker 1 The young man was actually the cousin of a JMMI employee, by which I mean an unpaid worker named Joseph Butch.

Speaker 1 So one of what

Speaker 1 actually happened here is that this dude who's a member of the cult cousin has a heart attack and is dead for a while and then gets brought back and is okay and and recovers because that happens to people sometimes 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 right so this 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 possible.

Speaker 1 He found out about it because one of his cult members was the guy's cousin. It's not a fucking other church or whatever.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the guy was like, oh my God, thank you. You know, something like that happened, one of the two, but it's not the story that's being told here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Taylor, both to the dedicated cult members who staffed his call center and to 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.

Speaker 1 And for most people, the extra bit of hope they got sending in a donation or getting a prayer to Taylor's ears was enough, right?

Speaker 1 And I'm going to guess that in a lot of cases, it's somebody's sick and you're worried about them. So you call and you send some money and then they get better because generally people do.

Speaker 1 And you're like,

Speaker 1 probably helped, right?

Speaker 1 But for the folks who actually made up the manpower of his cult, the people who he is actually trafficking, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And David isn't just promising that he can save the people they care about from dying. He's also threatening them, right?

Speaker 1 He's telling them that, you know, I can save your loved ones or I can make God take them away, right?

Speaker 1 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 and donations.

Speaker 1 That's where this kind of morphs in fairly quick order over the course of like the late aughts, right? That's where David E. Taylor's ministry goes.

Speaker 3 I saw

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I, I, I, I agree entirely. Um,

Speaker 1 and you know, Jake,

Speaker 1 that's the episode. That's part one.
You got anything you want to plug here at the end?

Speaker 3 Well, Jesus is actually my best friend. So there we go.
And also,

Speaker 3 listen to Sad Oligarch. We just got season two out.
It's some of the most

Speaker 3 of the most work I've ever done on something in such a...

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So I'm really proud of the work we've done. Me and Sergi and Victor Mahail, and we've just absolutely smashed it, man.
Really, really enjoying it. I think people like it.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, man, Sad Oligarch Season 2, it's out now.

Speaker 1 Sad oligarch season two is out now.

Speaker 1 Is Jake responsible for the deaths of any of these oligarchs? You know, no. We can't say no.
We can't say no.

Speaker 3 I promise no.

Speaker 1 Jake says no. All right.

Speaker 1 That's it, everybody. Come back in part two, and we'll hear more cult shit.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Speaker 11 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

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