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

Robert sits down with Jake Hanrahan to discuss the recently busted cult / call center of Bishop David Taylor's, Jesus Christ's Best Friend. (2 Part Series) Check out Sad Oligarch - https://open.spotify.com/show/5n4CUGYYZ4fc4L5yWYX7gK https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sad-oligarch/id1691403387 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-sad-oligarch-116754842/episode/a-family-annihilation-in-moscow-117331449/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

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

• 0:27Speaker 01

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

• 0:31Robert Evans?

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

• 0:39Speaker 01

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

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're really speedrunning things, huh? Yeah.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Everyone's saying it for years and I was like, oh no, they are. It's happening.

• 0:49Robert Evans?

  Oh, no. Yeah.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fucked up, man.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

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

• 0:58Speaker 01

  No, it's straight up like it's, it's, 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.

• 1:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's happening and it's happening at the kind of speed that almost it seems farcical. So that's, that's good. I feel upbeat. I don't, I don't know. Like it's, it's weird too, cause it's one of those like you would, I'd always kind of expect in the back of my head that if things got this bad this quickly, there'd be stuff to do other, like beyond just like work, like that that wouldn't be the primary concern is still like making rent and, and, and getting by. But everyone I know is walking around being like, yeah, it's crazy how fast things are going. Also, like, I gotta take my kid to a doctor's appointment at three.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  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. Like it's just happening and that's it.

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I'm still go to like birthday parties and stuff like, okay.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  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, you're coming back to England. Like, what the fuck?

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  No.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  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 gonna have to hand it over to Border Patrol. And I don't want anything interesting to be on there, you know?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And now we're like, oh shit, we have to do it too.

• 2:41Robert Evans?

  Well, in this, I'm glad I read, there's a good book about like authoritarianism in Russia called, um, Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 2:50Robert Evans?

  More or less the title. Yeah, which is, which, which did help, actually, reading it years ago was like, okay, well, at least there's a rubric.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the way he, he kind of, um, explains it through the reality TV. How like, almost in, in the West, you show them something fake and everyone goes, oh, wow, look, look at that. 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. 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.

• 3:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's just impossible to know like, what is, uh, I mean, like, the, just the ability of regular people to, to differentiate between truth and lies and like a video now. I mean, this goes down to the AI and stuff, but like, there's so many more tools for just lying to everybody. It's great.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very scary, yeah.

• 3:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I, I think in some ways about what's happening just here and across a lot of other Western, like you said, it's happening in the UK too. As like, it, it, part of what's going on, because I, 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?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, MAGA.

• 4:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. MAGA is like a great example of that. Um, and so I, I, I keep turning back to cults. Periodically, and this is not, this is not, we've just started this with kind of a political discussion about everything that's going on. This is not a cult that is particularly tied in to politics in the US or elsewhere, but it's a cult that just got on my radar. They just got busted by the FBI. Like, the week that I wrote this episode, there was this massive multi-state FBI bust cracking down on like a mansion that had been owned by Nelly that was a cult property and a bunch of other crazy shit.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Nelly, Nelly, like, the rapper.

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  And Nelly's not involved.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, good.

• 4:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Nelly is uninvolved. This is just a house that Nelly owned that later got purchased by a cult. But the Nelly connection does exist. This is a cult that I hadn't heard about before the FBI raided all their properties, but had been, there had been some stuff written about them. So I had to do some real digging to get a story here. But it's a group called the Kingdom of God. Have you heard of these people?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  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 one of those.

• 5:21Robert Evans?

  It's such a cult name.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Very much, yeah. Oh, the Kingdom of God Church, you're like, no, don't go there.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I had to check to see, because there are like four different cults I thought this might be, and I was like, nope, nope, nope, those are all slightly different names. This is a new one. This is a new one. And it's, you know, I try to be compassionate when I like, look at cults and study them and talk about them on this show, because I do tend to believe that anyone can be taken in by a cult at some point in their life, right?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  That doesn't mean that like, everyone is always vulnerable to being, I think, and in fact, I think most people grow out of it and reach a point where that's a thing that can't happen to them anymore. But I think most people have a point in their life where if the right cult were to come along, they'd be vulnerable to it, right? I think that's generally accurate. And so I generally try to find some understanding with how people get involved in something like the Church of Scientology, or like Synanon. And I don't really understand the, this cult, the Kingdom of God, all that well. Like, I don't understand how someone can like, talk themselves into letting the things that were being done to them be done to them. But I'll do my best to explain it here.

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  You know, this may just be one that like, was never, 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.

• 6:48Speaker 02

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• 6:52Speaker 03

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• 7:20Robert Evans?

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• 7:55Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So as I said, not a well-known cult. If you haven't heard of these guys, you're probably in the norm. If you had, you probably found out the way I did, reading articles published just recently about this massive multi-state FBI raid of several cult properties. Prior to that, the only real interest this group attracted was internal criticism in places like Charisma Magazine, which is like charismatic Christianity is like a type of evangelical Christianity, right? Like, these are, to kind of summarize it, these are the people who do like the crazy eating snake or getting, letting snakes bite them kind of shit, right? Like Pentecostals are charismatics. Charismatics are not all just Pentecostals, but like, it's the weird stuff, right?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I'll 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?

• 8:46Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. That I agree with. The snake church stuff sounds like more fun. Initially, kind of the internal criticism of this group before they reached legal intention was other people who were kind of in lighter versions of the cult, who were like, well, these guys are really, this is just a pure cult, right?

• 9:06Robert Evans?

  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. God wants him to have that.

• 9:25Robert Evans?

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

• 9:32Robert Evans?

  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? 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? You know, somewhere in there.

• 9:56Speaker 01

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

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  No, they're kind of starting with, yeah, with, you're not going to get paid and we'll make you homeless if you don't meet your numbers. And what's weird enough is that this is the work they're doing, this is a call center cult. Like, that's what they're being made to do, is operate a call center as slaves?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I worked in a call center. It's so bad, man. Fuck.

• 10:23Robert Evans?

  It's only marginally better if you're getting paid, right?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, not even barely. Yeah.

• 10:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. 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? Which is, you know, a bummer, but pretty normal for a cult. And the cult leader obviously lived in luxury with a handful of his lieutenants and off of the strength of tens of millions of dollars in donations brought in by the sophisticated network of call centers and this network of online stalkers. 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 interested in talking about is that it's not just, uh, we're just throwing out a wide net and asking a million people for money in the hopes that like a couple hundreds send it.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  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.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Just like, um, Facebook.

• 11:23Robert Evans?

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

• 11:25Speaker 01

  But I mean, that's like even part of their model as well. Like they will advertise things to young girls that are like perhaps looking at pages about, you know, eating disorders and they'll be like, oh yeah, we'll use that to advertise to them. It's like the darkest thing ever. Doesn't surprise me a cult would be doing it, you know?

• 11:43Robert Evans?

  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. But I would love to know what percentage of their profits is just a mix of like inciting little kids to have eating disorders and directing people into cults? Like how, cause it's not nothing. It's not zero percent of the Facebook income. It's like destroying people's lives at scale. It's gotta be like 40% at least, right?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%, yeah.

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like it's at the point where I get advertisements every week for like illegal suppressors for firearms and like, that's not close to the worst thing on Facebook. It's like, that's, that's, that's wholesome, honestly. That's just somebody who wants a quieter gun to shoot people with.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's one of those things. I ethically, I guess I should totally cancel it. I still go on about once every two, cause there's like friends that I knew 25 years ago. And for work too. So like when there's a mass shooting, I need to be able to look up someone's family, right? Like or someone's posts. So I find use for it once every like, but every time I'm on there, I'm just constantly like, oh my God. Like are, is, what percentage of this traffic is even real people watching shit? Cause this is all just insane.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I love the boomer stuff where like they'll fall for like, there'll be like a fucking dolphin on roller skates and like, wow. Look what the dolphins are doing. It's like, uncle, like, shut up. Go back to bed.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or like a poorly photoshopped or like a poorly AI-generated image of like a soldier with like his hands bleeding from stigmata and like, most people won't share this. Why would anyone share this?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the best.

• 13:33Robert Evans?

  What is this? Yeah, so we're talking about the kingdom of God. And like all cults, this story starts with the cult leader, one David E. Taylor, who is, as of today, 53 years young. We know tragically little of David's early life. There's been no real in-depth reporting on this guy as an individual. So like 90% of what I've got to work with here is what he wrote or had ghosts written on his church website in a 2009 self-help book that he wrote about talking to Jesus, right? That's that. Those are our sources on this guy's early life. So take all of this with a grain of salt, right? Because this is not, yeah. Per these sources, I can tell you, he was born on August 3, 1972, in Memphis, Tennessee.

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  I doubt he's lying about that because I, I really can't think of a reason for him to lie about being 53 years old. His parents were in the church business. His dad was an evangelical pastor, or his dad is a Baptist pastor, right? So that is evangelical, but it's a very different chunk of the faith from like the Pentecostalism that he's going to come to as an adult, right? Like Baptists are not the same kind of evangelicals.

• 14:40Speaker 01

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

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  There are some chill Baptists, yes. I don't know that his dad was, but it's very different, right? Or somewhat different, we should say.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  And yeah, and it's 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, and at the time, he was the youngest child in this family, but his parents had two more kids after him. So that's, you're really putting in, putting in the work when you're having nine kids. That's, that's not insignificant.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  No. Virile.

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  He would later, yeah, virile. And also really relying on those middle kids to raise the youngest ones. Now, he would later write that his mother told him. While she was pregnant with him, that she spent hours a day praying at her husband's church. And I haven't found much about his father, other than that he was a pastor for close to 40 years. The only detail from his life that his son seemed interested in repeating is that when his dad was 23 years old, he stopped a gunman on a bus. And here's the version of the story that David published on one of his church websites about his dad. One day, as he was riding the Memphis bus transit, a young man pulled out a gun and stuck up the bus, robbing the people of their money. Minister Taylor boldly came on the bus and began to speak the word of God to the robber. He then commanded him to give

• 16:00Robert Evans?

  him the gun and put it in his hand in Jesus's name. The man's instantly obeyed. Minister Taylor also commanded him to give the people their money back, which he did. Later, after he was arrested, Minister Taylor went and visited him in prison. When they saw each other, they both wept. He then led the young man to the Lord, resulting in him surrendering his life completely. Racial barriers were also broken at a time when racial tensions were high. The newspaper openly declared that a black man and a white man cried together. And in a shocking twist, this is a true story.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Really?

• 16:29Robert Evans?

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

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 16:34Robert Evans?

  And the, yeah. There's a photo from the Memphis Press Cemetery with a picture of Minister Taylor and the robber. And the robber, he's wearing like a, one of those striped prison shirts. It really looks like a scene from Cool Hand Luke. And the actual text of the news article is pretty close to what David said. The story, written by Paul Vanderwood, starts with the sentence, "A Negro and a white man cried together today," which tells you a lot about where race relations were, that like, that's your lead?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't look good.

• 17:06Robert Evans?

  Things were bad, if that's where we're starting. But yeah, seems to be true. And his dad seems nice, because his dad, like, the article's about his dad testifying on the robber's behalf to try to get him leniency, because like, he stopped, rather than continuing with the robbery. So, good on him. That seems like a nice story.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:24Robert Evans?

  And David is going to be raised with this tale of his father's heroism. But apparently the example wasn't enough from, to stop him from falling into an adolescence of sin and debauchery. His early life is summed up on the church website this way. Raised in a Christian home in Memphis, Tennessee, he fell away as he was seduced into the gang life as a teenager. But everything drastically changed one night at the age of 17, when Jesus appeared to him face to face in a dream. Now, one thing I noticed straight away when I was going into this guy's life is that he spends a lot of time talking about how bad he was as a teenager while admitting that his father was this like great man who made him go to church three times a week. And I, this is kinda normal for guys in this chunk of Christianity, especially who take

• 18:08Robert Evans?

  to preaching as a family business, because you, you both wanna burnish your credentials that like, oh, my family's always been preaching. But you also have to be able to, you have to have a rock bottom narrative. You can't just be like, and so I was always a good, godly man.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  I was about to say, they never do that, do they? They're never like, yeah, everything was fine, but that was cool. Now I'm doing, it's like, no, like I did heroin for three years. And it's like, did you just do that? Or say you did that to have this like cool backstory?

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Or is it, is it like how, you know, some politicians will like join the army or the Marines to get like a tour in so that they can campaign off of it for the rest of their career?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  Is it like, all right, I gotta spend three years doing heroin at Skid Row?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like the law building, you know?

• 18:53Robert Evans?

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

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just like, yeah, base. I've seen shit.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So anyway, in his first book, Face to Face: Appearances with Jesus, David Taylor claims he was visited by Christ. And visited, he means in person. Like, he means that they have like a physical relationship. In December of 1989, this was around a week before Christmas Eve, and David was, by his account, a pretty tough customer. He described himself in his book as, "Your typical unsaved teenager, smoking dope, marijuana, using bad language and cursing, partying and having premarital sex. I was even involved with gangs and hung around cocaine dealing drug lords."

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Hmm. I love that he went from swearing to drug lords, like, mate, fuck.

• 19:40Robert Evans?

  Swearing to drug lords? Yeah. That's the, that's the real gateway drug is cursing?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:48Robert Evans?

  Straight to cocaine dealing drug lords?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  One day I said shit, the next I was Pablo Escobar. Like, yeah, that happens all the time, fucking idiot. You know, he's making this up, like surely?

• 19:58Robert Evans?

  It's, it's gotta be lies, right? Gotta be, a 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 I'm not, I'm not impressed with the pot if you were smoking like fucking horse, right? Like, the pot doesn't even register if you're doing, if you're smoking heroin.

• 20:19Speaker 01

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

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like being like, yeah, you know, I, I used to shoot up forty eight hundred dollars worth of heroin a week. Also, one time I took too much Benadryl to get high.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:38Robert Evans?

  I'm not impressed by the other one.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  I also, I might be able to buy this guy, partied as a kid, smoked a little pot, maybe he did a couple of lines of coke again at a party. A lot of people do, right? I would go so far as to say that like, the average person has probably at least once or twice experimented with a harder drug in their life. It's very normal. Maybe not more than fifty percent, but a lot, a lot of the population, you know? That said, there's no evidence whatsoever that he knew cocaine dealing drug lords. Maybe he knew a coke dealer. Again, a lot of people know, but a coke lord, that's a high level.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  That's a man who has money to buy a hippopotamus.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  I'd 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.

• 21:27Robert Evans?

  I, 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. And number two, if you're a coke lord, you have to have been able to buy like African wildlife.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:45Robert Evans?

  You know, like, that's the level I need. If I'm gonna call you a coke lord, right?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I think you gotta be like a killer too. Like a really horrible killer.

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and a lot of bodies, a lot of stacked bodies. Yeah. The only real detail he provides us anywhere about his supposed life of crime as a child is this paragraph. "I remember one time before the Lord came to me and saved my life, I was caught in the crossfire of a shootout. There were bullets flying everywhere and I could have possibly been shot and killed. Thank God he spared my life and protected me." And this is one where like, he doesn't say this was involved in the drug game? And this is America? So yeah, maybe he was in the middle of a shootout. That happened. A lot of people have been in this country, right? That's not a, an uncommon experience is just being uncomfortably close. I've been around like three different mass shootings in the United States.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 22:34Robert Evans?

  Shootings at least.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  You've been like in that shit? Yeah. Yeah. That's not unusual, right?

• 22:38Robert Evans?

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

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, is that it?

• 22:44Robert Evans?

  It just happens. It just happens.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, I've been jumped. I thought that was bad. Like fucking hell.

• 22:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that sounds bad. That sounds fucking horrible.

• 22:53Robert Evans?

  And I can, I can believe that he was just uncomfortably close to a shooting and that maybe that did spur him to get more serious about the religion thing. You know, that's a, that's not a wildly, that's not a huge leap, right?

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  David then says that Jesus appeared to him for the first time during a dream, right? This is in 1989. It's like a week or so before Christmas. Uh, and here's how he describes it. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna preface this by saying he, it's a weirdly erotic description of Jesus. Like, I gotta tell you that right now. Suddenly he was there with eyes glowing full of love. Standing in front of me was the man I'd heard about as a little boy my entire life. I'd heard about this man from my mother and father and was taught that he died on the cross for my sins and rose again on the third day from the dead. He was not truly real to me, only a religious opinion. He was just someone my parents told me about because of their religious beliefs. Then out of nowhere, he was standing there in front of me, face to face.

• 23:49Robert Evans?

  And that's not the horny part of the story, right? That's, that, that's, and I'm bringing in the intro. The next passage here, he describes Jesus using the word ecstasy more times than a drug dealer on Telegram.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  It was ecstasy. For the first time, I was standing in front of Jesus. My whole being felt him. You can imagine the ecstasy I felt. It was a feeling of intense glory. It's like wherever he stands, he fills the very atmosphere, air and molecules all around you. Even the atoms inside your body and being respond to him. It was total ecstasy, indescribable, blistering with a static eruption. My whole being felt like it was caught up into heaven. The very atoms in my body made me feel like I was about to explode.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Mate.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

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

• 24:32Speaker 01

  I think that's a guy that did fuck Jesus by the sound of it.

• 24:36Robert Evans?

  He might have fucked Jesus.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's weird.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, uh, he's projecting ever so slightly there, definitely.

• 24:45Robert Evans?

  Maybe a little bit, and we'll continue with the uncomfortably horny descriptions of Jesus Christ. Uh, but first, here's some ads.

• 24:56Speaker 03

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• 25:24Robert Evans?

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• 26:06Robert Evans?

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• 26:29Robert Evans?

  And we're back. 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. Quote, "Standing in front of me was an awesome man, handsome and perfect in stature. He was just a little taller than me, about six feet or more, the perfect height of a normal man. As I gazed upon him, I saw that the color of his hair was sandy brownish and parted at the top, coming over the sides of his face and down his shoulders in waves."

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Alright, who's that? What is that?

• 27:03Robert Evans?

  Okay, man.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I love the normal man.

• 27:05Robert Evans?

  The normal man's, yeah, above six feet is a normal man. Little bit of height shaming there.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, come on, man. This is very erotic. I mean, it's fine.

• 27:15Robert Evans?

  It's fine. It's cool if you're into that. Jesus is thousands of years old, so it's not problematic, right?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  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 gonna be like, yeah.

• 27:27Robert Evans?

  He's pretty cut.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, perfect cheekbones, beautiful eyes. Like, come on now. Like, yeah, I mean, it's fair, but let's, let's, let's know what you're really thinking, son. And I'm, I'm laughing because I'm gonna guess, I'm gonna take a wild guess that this guy went on to be wildly homophobic in his cult.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, yes. I would say not, not to the point where like, it's the main thing, but it's just the normal thing in that chunk of the thing, right? Like, this is not, Pentecostal Christianity is not super great on gay people, you know? These aren't the Episcopalians. Um, 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? That's kind of what I was expecting to come here. And that does happen, but what surprises me is that David Taylor's Jesus opens things up, not just by like, telling him, you're marked for something special, I need you to speak the word to the masses, but he talks like a cult leader, like a, like a real world

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  cult leader. And I've run into a lot of different Jesus cults, right? Which is not to say, like, Christianity doesn't have a worse cult problem than the other chunk of our society. People make cults for no reason at all, right? People make cults- Without a God being involved with a God, every religion has its cults. I'm not being particularly shitty to anyone faith. What's weird is that his Jesus talks exactly like a 21st century cult leader, which I haven't come across in the many different like accounts like this that I have read. Because the first thing Jesus tells him to do, because he's like, I'll do anything, Jesus. Tell me what I need to do to serve you. And the first thing Jesus says is you need to cut off all ties with your best friend. You need to immediately like cut the closest person to you out of your life.

• 29:11Robert Evans?

  And that's just straight cult leadership, right?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jesus.

• 29:15Robert Evans?

  Thanks, Jesus.

• 29:18Robert Evans?

  Now, the way Jesus in the dream explains this is that David's best friend is a really nice guy. He says he's a good guy. He's a really good friend. He was a good influence. But he's not Christian, so he's not saved, right? And so Jesus tells him, David, forsake your best friend. Give your life to me and follow me. And again, I mean, I hate to, I'm not much of a Bible knower, but I went to church as a kid. I was confirmed. Jesus was friends with lots of people who were not good followers of their faith. Right? Like, that's just the text of the Bible.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  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. It sounds like he just-

• 30:02Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, it's a lie, of course.

• 30:03Speaker 01

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

• 30:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And he's like-

• 30:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Jesus sure did.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sorry, bro. Jesus said, you know, like, you gotta go fuck yourself. Like, that's how it is now. Nah.

• 30:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we can't be friends anymore because the Son of God doesn't like you.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  Well, that's gonna make me become Christian.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I'd be like, oh, God, Jesus.

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is weird to me that he describes Jesus as like the leader of a high control group, right? Because like, yeah, that's a normal thing. Cult leaders tell you to cut off your friends and your family, right? If they don't follow you.

• 30:37Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, David writes in his book, "You can't truly follow Jesus and maintain worldly relationships or friendships you once had. You must be willing to give up even your best friend if Jesus requires you." You too. 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, you know? So I guess what I'm mostly surprised is that I haven't seen another cult leader do this. I've seen a lot of people put words in Jesus's mouth, but I haven't seen them do it this blatantly. And that's kind of like, oh, wow. I guess for me, it's a marker of like, you can get away with a lot more now, huh?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:14Robert Evans?

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

• 31:18Speaker 01

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

• 31:22Robert Evans?

  Jesus, yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  You know, oh, I found these golden plates. I mean, that was pushing it. And like, this guy is just like

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  That was really pushing it.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can tell just nothing matters anymore. You can just be like, oh, yeah. Jesus said, you know, I need a Porsche and you're my best friend's a dickhead. Like, it's very

• 31:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  It's just, yeah, unimaginative now.

• 31:39Robert Evans?

  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. He had to come up with some lies real quick.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of write it. You know, like, oh, it's like borderline sci fi. Like, yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 31:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's the, you know, there's the, they're all bad people. Please don't mistake me. Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard, but I respect them. Like, the craft. I respect the craft, you know?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Put in some work, you know, like, obviously, yeah, they're fucking, they're not doing really evil stuff, but like, at least at the start, it was like golden plates, not just like fucking chat GPT tear.

• 32:21Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, this is a very chat GPT-esque cult. And I'm sure if it had been made a little bit later, he would have made heavier use of chat GPT because he does use a ghostwriter regularly. And that's, that's basically an evolution of that.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  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. A few days after his first vision with Jesus, he decides to try and summon the Son of God, this time like purposefully and outside of a dream. So at about 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.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:06Robert Evans?

  So about 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve, he begs Jesus to come to him in person and prove that he was really as alive as he'd looked in the dream, which feels to me like maybe you don't have enough faith. Like, part of the point is faith, right? And if you're like, no, you gotta come when I'm awake, otherwise I can't believe that you weren't just a dream. That just seems kind of sacrilegious to me, but you know.

• 33:24Speaker 01

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

• 33:31Robert Evans?

  He's literally the son of God.

• 33:32Speaker 01

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

• 33:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah. And it really comes across in the book because he orders Jesus, if you are truly real, manifest yourself to me more. David relates this moment in a chapter of his book titled, "The Supernatural Heavens Invade My Room", which sounds like some drug experience I had right around the same age, you know? Like, I could, I could characterize an acid trip or two that way.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Like sniffing solvents or something.

• 34:03Robert Evans?

  Right, right? Yeah.

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  After this, God comes to him, you know, he follows the summons and he blesses him with the ability to speak in tongues. And then his bedroom is transformed into some sort of strange ethereal masturbation cave. Quote, "My room was engulfed with the atmosphere of heaven in a cloudy mist. My room was literally lifted to the atmosphere of heaven. My room did not actually have a door, so I had to put a bed sheet at the entryway. Often, before I put the bed sheet up every single day, a glistening angel with a sword would be standing at the door of my room. It was like I was not even at home. My mother was worried about me because I stayed in my room for hours and days at a time. I would come out in fellowship with the family at times, but I was caught up in experiencing heavenly things in my room. My room was literally filled with the celestial air or an electrical atmosphere."

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Gooning.

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's gooning. That, I'm sorry, man. You're gooning with God in your bedroom?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the word, that's terrible.

• 34:55Robert Evans?

  Seventeen-year-old boy won't leave his room for days at a time. Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, not good.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  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. 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. 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, and it just like, if you have a bunch of churches who say, "We're part of an organization, we're appointing bishops," right? So it's, it's not, doesn't have quite as much of like, a history as, as the Catholic term of the word, right? But he's a bishop in the, but, yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

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

• 35:45Robert Evans?

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

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:58Robert Evans?

  I'm not saying this is a better thing, or a worse thing. I'm just saying, it's different. And yeah, Bishop G. E. Patterson was an American Pentecostal leader who founded the Temple of Deliverance Cathedral of Bountiful Blessings, which was one of the largest, I think it still is, he's not around anymore, largest Pentecostal churches in the country. Since Taylor's dad was a Baptist preacher, Patterson acted as David's entryway into the Pentecostal faith. 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. So he has another talk with Jesus where he demand, he makes demands of Jesus. He's like, "Look, I'm not gonna just sit up here and preach the Bible

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  and repeat the same old stories everyone else preaches. That's not enough for me. You have to give me the real Old Testament shit. Like, I want visions, I want magic powers, I want it all, baby. Otherwise, I'm not gonna be a, a member of your faith." To kid, he's like, he's like, putting the screws to Jesus here?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I, yeah. I, I'm Team Jesus in this.

• 37:02Robert Evans?

  I don't think you're supposed to do this, but, okay.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 37:07Robert Evans?

  Again, not an expert on Christianity, but I'm pretty sure this is sacrilegious. But Jesus appreciates the moxie, I guess. So he's like, I'll give you the full Old Testament experience, but you got to give up everything you own first. So next, per an article published by Taylor's Kingdom of God Global Church, quote, shortly thereafter, he was given a series of dreams showing the future of the nation. Apostle Taylor was desperate to see 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. In the dream, America did not win this war. Now, in modern times, he made a big deal after like the

• 37:51Robert Evans?

  Trump got elected of the whole predicted a war on US soil against Russia thing. Because I think in light of the whole Russiagate stuff, that seems compelling to people, right? But reading older articles prior to Trump's election, all that stuff about Taylor's prophecies, it made, made, his dream of America fighting a war with Russia on foreign soil had nothing to do with Russian influence campaigns or anything that's happening recently, right? He foresaw 9/11 and the global war on terror and thought that the Russian government incited them all.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Huh. He, I mean, pretty creative.

• 38:27Robert Evans?

  Creative, not accurate. You could say a lot about who was involved in 9/11. Not really Russia. Not really their back, as far as I'm aware.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. Well, yeah.

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And anyway, so it's one of those things. He's pivoted more recently to being like, oh yeah, all this stuff with Russia today. I predicted it, you know, 30 years ago. He didn't. He thought 9/11 was the Russians. Yeah. 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. 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. 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.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Don't be caught unprepared for what is about to hit America. Again, he's just completely wrong. Like, he, he, he does say before nine 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? He thought that W was going to go to war with Russia. And we kind of do the opposite.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:49Robert Evans?

  Like, we literally actually do the opposite.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  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 gonna stick.

• 40:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  And it didn't even stick. It was so wrong, yeah, so.

• 40:04Robert Evans?

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

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he'd been saying that like for years before it, you know?

• 40:15Robert Evans?

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

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:24Robert Evans?

  I'll be right, there will be somewhere, right?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  It's like me being like, you know what? I think there's gonna be a school shooting.

• 40:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's gonna 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.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:41Robert Evans?

  Like, of course. So this guy, he's got about as much claimed accuracy as Alex Jones. In 1997, Taylor claimed that Jesus visited him and handed him the literal keys to the kingdom of God. Quote from his church website, "And now everywhere he goes, mighty regional ministries and deliverance take place to the kingdom demonstration. Drug busts take place by the kingly decree. Human trafficking rings have been completely dismantled by the kingdom and power of God." And he's actually correct about this, but not in the way that he wanted to be. Because as of late 2025, I can say that everywhere David Taylor goes, there are arrests of busts of human trafficking rings. It's just that there is.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's loads of them. That's why.

• 41:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's loads of them. You are correct. There's a definite correlation between where you are and where human trafficking rings get busted.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, you know, if you're in London, you're probably gonna see a rat because they're fucking everywhere.

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And not all of them at Parliament.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  But um. Also, the same can be said about sex trafficking rings.

• 41:50Robert Evans?

  Right, yes.

• 41:53Robert Evans?

  Look, you know, whose government isn't involved in some sex trafficking? I'm asking that question genuinely. I'd like to move there.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, generally not. Like, maybe like fucking, there's a place off the coast of England called Seeland.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  Where Seeland might be okay?

• 42:10Speaker 01

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

• 42:18Robert Evans?

  Sure, maybe Seeland doesn't have a sex trafficking ring.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 42:22Robert Evans?

  I want to believe the adorable president of Ireland doesn't have any involvement there, but I know politics too well. I'm sure there's something.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  There's something, right?

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So the September 11 attacks did help to supercharge his fanbase, right? This is kind of why he starts to become a popular pastor is in the wake of that. He's really able to play his predictions and start drawing people to him. And he spends a lot of the early aughts, collecting the kind of accolades and awards that allowed him to draw in more money and followers, often peeling people off of more reputable Pentecostal organizations. In 2009, he wrote his Face to Face Book, which not only detailed his own conversations with Jesus, but was structured as a guide for worshippers to have their own in-person conversations with Christ. And if you want to have an in-person conversation with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, just

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  purchase the products and services that support this podcast. All of them will give you a direct line to God. That's a promise we can absolutely make.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Hmm. I don't know about that.

• 43:27Speaker 04

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• 43:57Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big-time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after-show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there, finding a doctor who's not so judgy, and so much more.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 45:03Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Jake, did you have a face-to-face meeting with the Lord during our ad break?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Is it really called the Face-to-Face Book?

• 45:14Robert Evans?

  It's called Face-to-Face: My Meetings with Jesus Christ or something like that.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I see.

• 45:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I'd say I did. I don't think he did either.

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think he did either.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  Um, 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, uh, during, which is like signed by Barack Obama, uh, the Apostle David E. Taylor gets this award. And that, that's gonna sound more impressive than it is. So yeah, you can see that award, Jake.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that looks like a real award, you know?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  I was about to say, that's like Canva looking award.

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not a great looking award, I'll be honest. Um, and it's not really a real award. I mean, it's technically a real award, but it's not like the Barack Obama didn't like single this guy out for an award. The Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award is something, it's a volunteer service award anyone can apply to if they've done more than 4,000 hours of volunteer service for an organization in their lifetime. Um, 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, right?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Right. So there's hundreds of these, thousands.

• 46:45Robert Evans?

  And, 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. Like, I, 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.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I, I love that, um, he speaks face to face with Jesus, but he got his congregation to plug him to get the Obama Canva Award. Like, it's talking to Jesus wasn't enough.

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  Obama's a little harder to talk to, you know?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Very, very interesting guy.

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  He's a busier man than Jesus, uh, at this point in time. Um. So again, and a big part of his, 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 his cult, most of the people who are listening to his churches, who are watching him, you know, watching like the videos of his church services or going in person, they're not full-on cult members. They're giving him money and stuff. He needs thousands of those people.

• 48:10Robert Evans?

  His actual cult members are just a few dozen people. And these are the folks who, they're like, hey, this book, I'm still not talking to God. I really want to meet Him in person. And David's like, well, then you gotta come work for me. You have to give up all of your money, sign it all over to me, everything that you're worth, cut off your friends and family, who don't recognize me as a prophet, and join the church, right? And he promises, I can get you a connection directly to Jesus Christ, because, and this is the official stance of his church, David Taylor is the best friend of Jesus Christ. That's his actual title.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Really?

• 48:48Robert Evans?

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

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 48:55Robert Evans?

  Which like, I would have guessed Paul, maybe?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  I feel like they went through more together, but, okay.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  It's such a funny thing to go for as well. 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.

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  No, we're super tight, though. Yeah, I'm not God myself, but I am his best friend.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 49:22Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 49:25Robert Evans?

  So, uh, through his church organization, JMMI, which stands for Joshua Media Ministries International, Taylor starts buying up properties during the Obama years. 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. And these people are some of the, 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. It's kind of hard to tell, because I don't think we have a great accounting. Some of the sources are like, there were 60 people in one of these

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  buildings, and they own buildings in multiple states eventually. They start with this property in Taylor, Michigan, um, but they're gonna wind up buying properties like all over the United States. By the time they get raided, in addition to the property in Taylor, they have a property in Chesterfield, Missouri, they have one in Eureka, Missouri, Wildwood, Tampa, Florida, Ocala, Florida, and Houston, Texas. Um, 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, uh, in St. Louis, or near St. Louis, is like, one of the places they're occupying. Some of them are like warehouse spaces. So it's a variety of different kinds of properties,

• 50:52Robert Evans?

  but they are in like five or six states, right? Um, so they're, 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 in, on the way into and out of town, that are like plugging both their churches and the services they're doing. He brings in other people as pastors under him, because he can't preach at more than one church at a time, right? So, this does expand to be a, a sizable organization. Um, and the people who are full-time cult members have to give up their bank accounts, they have to sign over their retirement accounts and inheritances, in order to serve the apostle in his world historic mission, which is, God

• 51:32Robert Evans?

  wants him to prepare seven billion souls for a great heavenly harvest, you know? Like, that's the, that's what his ministry's going to do.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  That sounds, uh, like things are getting a little bit darker.

• 51:46Robert Evans?

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

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  And yeah, now, if you're trying to save 7 billion souls, you can't do that by having people come into a physical church, right? You can't even really do that just by having a TV channel. 7 billion is a lot of people. There's only one way to reach that many people, by using the most efficient form of outreach in existence, a call center.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  I knew that was coming.

• 52:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, zooming God, basically.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, zooming God. The cult starts operating in the early 24/7 prayer line, and they have online ads, they have billboards all over in states like Missouri, right? Where they direct worshippers to call in if they needed a miracle. And so this is framed as like, are you desperate? Are you maybe suicidal? Are you in like, serious need of like, some sort of help? You know, call this number and we can help you, right? Like, and again, it's kind of almost framed as like a suicide hotline, or are you about to get evicted? Is your life in shambles, basically? Like, this cult can help you, right?

• 52:57Robert Evans?

  The kingdom of God can fix whatever the hell is wrong with you, just give us a call. So they are deliberately going after the most vulnerable people, right? Like, that's obviously what's going on here. And yeah, the whole purpose of the prayer line isn't to actually help anyone. It's not even to really pray for anyone. The entire reason for this is to get people talking to his church's unpaid workers, who were, like, they were each supposed to talk to hundreds of people a day, and bring in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, right? This is just a donation thing, because it becomes clear, once you're talking to the prayer line, that if you really want your prayers to work, if you want God to listen to you, you gotta pay up, you know? Otherwise, how does he know you're serious?

• 53:41Robert Evans?

  Per an article in St. Louis Magazine, "According to the indictment against Taylor and Brandon, Brandon's like, his top number one lady, Taylor instructed followers working the call centers to lie and say that collected money was to be used to build wells in impoverished parts of the world and fight human trafficking." So, you have to put in some money to prove to God that you're serious, but we're only gonna use it to help people, you know, to further our great work. And from what I can tell, a lot of the appeal here is the promise that David is going to intervene directly with Jesus and use his friendship to save the lives of your dying loved ones, right? If you have a serious problem, largely family members who are sick, David can intervene on your behalf for enough money.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  And this is a claim that they made specifically.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sorry, like, this is where, for me, it's just become so evil. Like, it's just so nasty to do that to people, you know?

• 54:35Robert Evans?

  It's disgusting, right? Because people, I've had a loved one who had, thankfully, it wound up being benign, but had a brain tumor. And we didn't know if it was cancerous or not for a while. We just knew it was affecting her memory, it was just really fucking her life up. And obviously, we went to doctors, we like, did, 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 desperate and terrified, you know? You read on, 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.

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  Like, I do have empathy for the people being conned here.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  It's so easy to be like, oh, that's fucking stupid. If you've ever been in like, that dark fucking trench of just like misery and fear, absolutely, it is exactly that, yeah. And you, it's incredible how quickly you will go, right, yesterday, that was the craziest thing ever, now, today, I'll try it, whatever it is, you know? It's really sad.

• 55:43Robert Evans?

  Fuck it, anything.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, who knows, you know? It's very sad to pray on people like that, it's just vile, yeah.

• 55:49Robert Evans?

  It's the evil-est thing I think that you can pretty much do, outside of like, murder, like, directly murdering people or whatever, I guess. It's on the, I don't know, we don't need to quantify it, but yeah, it's pretty hideous. So, he is making these claims very directly, and my favorite specific example of this is a claim repeated in numerous cult propaganda videos and articles. Here's one example published on his church's website. "A pastor received a text message that his cousin had dropped down dead while taking a shower. He sent a text to David E. Taylor explaining the situation. Right after he released that command to 'get up,' he being David Taylor, the young man's heart started beating again."

• 56:32Robert Evans?

  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." 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. I'll show you one example here. You can kind, 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, uh, before and after. It says, "Young man raised from the dead by the Lord, working through David Taylor."

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sorry, actually.

• 57:06Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  The thumbs up is fucking killing me.

• 57:09Robert Evans?

  The thumbs up to let you know that he's okay, cause David Taylor prayed for him. Obviously, I'm convinced, this seems like proof to me.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Came back from the dead and he's like, "Yep, thumbs up."

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  Thumbs up, I'm good. I do want to play you one of the YouTube propaganda videos the cult put out, which focused on a different claim of power over life and death. And actually gives you, you get to see some of David Taylor, uh, and his wife preaching in this. And as a bonus, Jake, keep an eye out, David Taylor is wearing what I can only describe as the most incredible outfit I have ever seen in my life.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:44Robert Evans?

  It is, this is, this is special.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Sure. Experience the dead being raised. Critical condition tonight after a shooting outside a Georgia restaurant.

• 57:53Speaker 05

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

• 58:02Speaker 06

  Four people had already died around him. The doctors said, "Chris is not gonna make it." The young man went into a coma and died for 20 minutes. 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, he's gonna live."

• 58:25Speaker 05

  This was a resurrection.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  Yes, it was. Shot me twice. And here it is a year later.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Standing before you. Your dead can be raised. 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. 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 Pass or at least the command, my cousin was raised from the dead.

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  Okay. Well, uh, 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 in that incredible outfit. But Jake, how would you describe him looking?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  You know, uh, you know, Beauty and the Beast, like the, there's a, 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 like fancy dinner. And it's basically that. It's literally that outfit, man. I'm telling you.

• 59:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's literally, it's, it's something Michael Jackson would have worn.

• 59:23Speaker 01

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

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  I do want that jacket, right? Like, I do want to wear that.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  And just people looking at you like, what? Jesus is my best mate. Fuck off. Can wear what I want.

• 59:39Robert Evans?

  Incredible stuff. Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  The, uh, the production of that is kind of wild though. Like I've, I'll be honest.

• 59:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  It's pretty clever. Like, uh, it's kind of presented. Yeah, it's well made. It's presented as a news report, kind of. I've actually not seen a cult do that. I don't think maybe not to, not that level. Like that was pretty dark, but unique in that sense.

• 1:00:02Robert Evans?

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

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. That is exactly.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  Interesting. Yeah. Now, I should say before we close out here, the actual story of what happened to that young man who dropped dead and supposedly got brought back to life because Taylor commanded him to over the phone. This is a, there was a real young guy who like had a heart attack and I think was legally dead for a period of time. It was not his claim, the claim made by the church and all of David Taylor's websites is that like a pastor called him and told him about this. This member of his church who had dropped dead. The young man was actually the cousin of a JMMI employee, by which I mean an unpaid worker named Joseph Buch. So one of what actually happened here is that this dude,

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  who's a member of the cult's cousin, has a heart attack and is dead for a while, and then gets brought back and is okay and recovers, because that happens to people sometimes. And Joseph tells Taylor, and Taylor's like, oh, I saved him. Right? And then he starts massaging the story from there, right?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Right, right. So this kid was in hospital with his thumb up, but it was not the reason.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  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. 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. And yeah, I think that he either told this guy, you know, basically lie so that we can use this to recruit, or this guy is just enough of a cult member that he was like, yeah, that was me who saved him. And the guy was like, oh, my God, Mike, thank you. You know, something like that happened, one of the two. But it's not the story that's being told here. And this is all like silly and fucked up, but it does get to like the central darkness at the core of what is otherwise a pretty standard Pentecostal cult movement.

• 1:02:03Robert Evans?

  The whole appeal of David E. 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 to do his prayer line, the appeal was that this guy could save your loved ones from death. And for most people, the extra bit of hope they got sending in a donation or getting a prayer to Taylor's ears was enough. Right? 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. And you're like, probably helped, right? But for the folks who actually made up the manpower of his cult, the people who he is actually trafficking, right? The folks who are effectively enslaved, working for him.

• 1:02:49Robert Evans?

  The situation is a lot more serious, right? These are not just people calling in when they're worried and sending in a few bucks. And David isn't just promising that he can save the people they they care about from dying. He's also threatening them, right? He's telling them that, you know, I can save your loved ones, or I can make God take them away, right? I can have God curse you or the people you care about and destroy them or you if you're not bringing in enough money and donations. That's 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.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I saw I saw this happen before in a cult, and I found someone really interesting explaining, and maybe not always, but they were saying like, the reason that happens is because they get really angry that they're not, like, they get rich and then they want more, and they get angry that they're not getting it. And it's like they process the anger through being like, yeah, I'll smite your whole family or whatever. Like, it's it's like directly linked to their own little feelings, you know?

• 1:03:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I I I agree entirely. Um, and, you know, Jake, that's uh, that's the episode. That's part one. You got anything you want to plug here at the end?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Uh, well, Jesus is actually my best friend. So there we go. And also, um, listen to Sad Oligarch. We just got season two out. It's it's some of the most, it's it's some of the most work I've ever done on something in such a difficult way. Like, since we did season one, I'm not saying it's because of us, but since we did season one, it's extremely hard to get any info on anything right now. So I'm really proud of the work we've done, uh, me and Sergi and Victor Mahal, and we've just absolutely smashed it, man. Really, really enjoying it. I think people like it. So, yeah, man, Sad Oligarch, season two, it's out now.

• 1:04:38Robert Evans?

  Sad Oligarch, season two is out now. Uh, is Jake responsible for the deaths of any of these oligarchs? You know?

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:04:47Robert Evans?

  We can't say no. We can't say no.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I promise, no.

• 1:04:51Robert Evans?

  Jake Jake says no. All right. Uh, that's it, everybody. Come back in part two and we'll hear more cult shit.

• 1:05:02Speaker 07

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