Chapter 1: What cult is Bishop David E. Taylor associated with?
Thanks for having me, mate. Long time no speak, man. How have you been? Ah, you know, I've been all right. Tired, like everyone, I think, especially where I am. Lots going on. How about you? Yeah, like your country's like actually fascist now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're really speed running things, huh? Yeah. Everyone's saying it for years and I was like, oh no, they actually- Oh no, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fucked up, man. It has been fun to see all of the like debate go out the window and like, no, no, yeah, okay. No, straight up.
It's actually very scary because it's happening here as well, in England, and it's like, ah, there's some consolidation of extreme authoritarianism happening. Yeah. Yeah, it's happening, and it's happening at the kind of speed that almost seems farcical. Yeah. So that's good. 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 like that that wouldn't be the primary concern is still like making rent and and and and getting by but everyone i know is walking around being like yeah it's crazy how fast things are going also like i gotta take my kid to a doctor's appointment at three
Yeah, no, 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm still going to, like, birthday parties and stuff. Like... Okay. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did the FBI raid impact the Kingdom of God cult?
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? Yeah. 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.
Cause I'm going to have to hand it over to border patrol and I don't want anything interesting to be on there, you know?
I mean, this must be what it's like for people in, like, you know, countries that have been doing this a little bit longer or a little bit more direct. Yes, it is. And now we're like, oh, shit, we have to do it too.
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 is more or less the title. Yeah, which did help, actually. Reading it years ago was like, okay, well, at least there's a rubric.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love the way he kind of explains it through the reality TV, how like almost in the West, you show them something fake and everyone goes, oh, wow, look, look at that. But then in the East 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. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and it's just impossible to know what is, I mean, just the ability of regular people to differentiate between truth and lies in a video now. I mean, this goes down to the AI and stuff, but there's so many more tools for just lying to everybody. It's great. Yeah, that's very scary, yeah.
Yeah, and I think in some ways about what's happening just here and across a lot of other Western, like you said, it's happening in the UK too, as like 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?
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Chapter 3: What are the alleged practices within the Kingdom of God cult?
And so I keep turning back to cults periodically. And this is not ā 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. or elsewhere, but it's a cult that just got on my radar. They just got busted by the FBI, like the weak ā 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. Nelly, Nelly, like the rapper. Nelly's not involved. Okay, okay, okay, good. Yeah, Nellie is uninvolved. This is just a house that Nellie owned that later got purchased by a cult. But the Nellie connection does exist.
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. But it's a group called the Kingdom of God. Have you heard of these people? Do you know what? I feel like I have, but there are so many cults with similar names like that that it could just be one of those.
It's such a cult name. Very much, yeah. Oh, the Kingdom of God Church.
You're like, no, don't go there. Yeah. I had to check to see because there were 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.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What claims does David E. Taylor make about his interactions with Jesus?
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?
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 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 this cult, the kingdom of God all that well. I don't understand how someone can 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.
This may just be one that 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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Chapter 5: How does David E. Taylor justify financial demands from followers?
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Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. And I didn't kill him.
From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 uh getting letting snakes bite them kind of shit right like pentecostals are are charismatics charismatics are not all just pentecostals but like it's the weird stuff right i'd be honest like if i had to join a cult i would rather be doing like snake church stuff than like fucking scientology you know
Absolutely. That I agree with. The snake church stuff sounds like more fun. Initially, kind of the internal criticism of this group before they reached legal intention was other people who were kind of in lighter versions of the cult who were like, well, these guys are really, this is just a pure cult, right? Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 6: What role does social media play in the cult's outreach?
Mm-hmm.
No, they're kind of starting with, yeah, 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? I worked in a call center. It's so bad, man. Fuck.
It's only marginally better if you're getting paid, right? Yeah, like, not even barely. 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 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. They're actually going out and stalking people based on their social media to try to determine if they're vulnerable or not to be reached out to, which is cool. Just like Facebook. Yeah.
Yeah. Facebook is where a lot of this happens. Absolutely. But I mean, that's like even part of their model as well.
Like they will advertise things to young girls that are like perhaps looking at pages about.
you know, eating disorders. And they'll be like, oh yeah, we'll use that to advertise to them. It's like the darkest thing ever. Doesn't surprise me a cult would be doing it.
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.
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Chapter 7: How do cult leaders manipulate vulnerable individuals?
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, because it's not nothing. It's not zero percent of the Facebook income. I bet it's destroying people's lives at scale. It's got to be like 40 percent at least. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Like it's at the point where I get advertisements every week for like illegal suppressors for firearms. And like that's not close to the worst thing on Facebook. It's like that's that's that's wholesome. Honestly, that's just somebody who wants a quieter gun to shoot people with.
It's, it's a 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. 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 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 it what percentage of this traffic is even real people watching shit because this is all just insane i love the boomer stuff where like they'll 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 yeah
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? Yeah, that's the best. 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of cult dynamics in modern society?
So like 90% of what I've got to work with here is what he wrote or had ghost written on his church website in a 2009 self-help book that he wrote about talking to Jesus, right? That's- 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 ā yeah.
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. Yeah. His parents were in the church business. His dad was an evangelical ā 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 ā
evangelicals i think you could be chill and be a baptist still right they're like pretty chill there are some chill baptists yes i don't know that his dad was but it's very different right um or somewhat different we should say um and yeah it is a big thing that you can tell from his family in terms of the seriousness with which they take their religion is that his dad really embraced the commandment that christians should be fruitful and multiply because david was born the seventh
And at the time, he was the youngest child in his family, but his parents had two more kids after him. So that's, you're really putting in the work when you're having nine kids. That's not insignificant. Virile. Yeah, virile. And also really relying on those middle kids to raise the youngest ones. Mm-hmm.
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 him the gun and put it in his hand in Jesus' name. The man 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. Really? Yeah, this actually happened. There's a newspaper clipping about it. Fair enough.
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