TB Joshua, the late Nigerian Pentecostal leader, built his empire on staged miracles and anti-Muslim rhetoric within the Synagogue Church of All Nations. Exploiting Western fascination with African mysticism, he weaponized exoticism to recruit wealthy tourists while orchestrating fraudulent healings using props like Alka-Seltzer and discouraging life-saving medical treatments. This strategy generated immense revenue through "love bombing" and celebrity treatment, yet it directly contributed to preventable deaths when followers abandoned chemotherapy or retrovirals based on his commands. Ultimately, Joshua's career exemplifies how religious corruption leverages cultural stereotypes to manipulate vulnerable audiences under the guise of divine authority. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Clayton Eckard Hoax00:01:31
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What's got the plague?
My Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the sickest man in podcasting.
I have some sort of non-COVID thing.
I did take the test.
So I have been mainlining, you know, I said I've been sober lately, but now I am a Theraflu addict.
I don't even mix it into my drinks anymore.
I just pour the powder straight out and rail that shit.
Good for you.
That's the good stuff.
Our guest who just congratulated me on my Theraflu addiction, Mr. Miles Gray.
How are you doing, Miles Gray?
I'm great.
I'm great.
Thank you for having me back.
Shout out to the BTB.
What do you call it?
BTB Nation?
Your little bastard.
Shout out the little bastards.
Yeah, yeah, the little bastards.
Sure.
Shout out to my little bastards out there.
Shout out to all the little bastards out there.
Love y'all.
And yeah, I just'm bracing myself for yet, again, the ups and downs of recording with you.
I'm like, what?
And then like crying inside for the rest of the day.
You said that.
It just made me think if we'd gone with my original plan for this podcast and made it all about Saddam Hussein, we could call our fans the Husseiniacs.
Oh.
Oh, yeah.
See, I just thought about that now, but that's a good one.
Yeah.
Miles, were you in the room when Robert pitched this show on the phone when he was running through what sounded like a wind tunnel?
Were you in the room?
I must have been.
I mean, that was such early days and like we were all working on all this shit together.
But yeah, I feel like.
Yeah.
And even, I mean, I remember all the fucking process of coming up with a title and the art and all that shit.
Shout out my boy Alan, you know, for the iconic cover art.
Yeah, Alan Lee.
Yes.
Miles.
How are you being a good day?
You happy?
Fuck off, dude.
I hate those just composing shit.
You in a good mood?
Yeah, I'm having a fucking good day, man.
My little boy has two little teeth coming in.
I'm like, oh, wonderful.
It's Balance Day.
I got to go get my fucking head kicked in by whatever tail of fuckery you're going to do.
Nothing goes with a nice, peaceful day, like a story of one of the most nightmarishly abusive people I have ever read about in my life.
See, God is punishing me with a sickness for taking such pleasure in making you unhappy, Miles.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, you okay?
Well, look, as someone who went to school where they tried to put the fear of God in me, but it didn't work.
You know, I'm kind of split.
I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if I want to talk ill of a man of God, but we'll have to see.
Have you heard of this man of God, a fella named TB Joshua?
First of all, no.
And when Sophie hit me up and was like, hey, you know, we might be talking about this or that.
And then she's like, okay, actually, Robert Robert's going to write something on TB Joshua.
I didn't Google it because I'm like, what the fuck is this?
I thought it was like, did he give a bunch of people tuberculosis?
That would be the fun version of this if he was just like the typhoid Mary of tuberculosis.
Exactly.
It's like the Johnny apple seed of tuberculosis.
It's like, oh, who's this?
TB Joshua?
Oh, that's old TB Joshua giving everybody TB.
Yeah, he's like, when he coughs, look at his little handkerchief he coughs into and tell me if there's blood.
But yeah, I was like, and then this morning, out of a morbid curiosity, I'm like, let me just see what the top line description of this person was.
And I was like, oh, no.
We got a pastor in Nigeria who I don't know what the rest is, but I know how evangelical things operate over there and they can be pretty wild.
Yeah.
And this is one of those, like, you know, there's like Africa, for whatever reason, like bastardry over there does not usually go as viral as like the very worst people from like, I don't know, Europe, the United, even like South America, Asia.
But like T.B. Joshua is not just, he's not just a bastard.
He was like, up until his death very recently, one of probably like the 20 or 30 most influential religious figures alive on the planet.
Massively influential Pentecostal preacher, millions and not just in Nigeria and not just in West Africa, but all over the world in Southeast Asia and Europe, the United, millions and millions of followers.
Huge, huge spoke in the international Pentecostal community.
Very, very important guy.
Yeah, I feel like the religious bastards, they're able to fly under the radar a little bit longer than everybody else.
Like if you're not like some dictator, despot kind of despotic leader, you're like, it's like, I don't know, like when you get the cover, when you're covered in the blood of Christ.
Yeah.
It is one of those.
Just roll off.
Yeah.
It's this mix of, I think they get protected from like members of the same faith, some of whom, like obviously a lot of times the people who do expose them are also members of the same faith.
But like, that's probably one reason why sometimes it takes a while to spread.
And I think also you get among like atheists or even, as we'll talk about, Pentecostals are kind of in an extreme sect of evangelical Christianity from like more moderate centrist, you know, Christians in like the West.
I mean, obviously the Pentecostal movement is huge in the United States, but even in the United States, I think a lot of like people who are Christians, but you know, they live in like the East Coast or they live in the West Coast or like just like big cities, they may not know how wild some of that shit gets.
Right.
And they may kind of write off stories about these guys as just like, oh, well, that's just, you know, normal in that chunk of the faith or whatever.
TB Joshua was not, to be honest.
Like I have a lot of issues with Pentecostal Christianity, but a lot of the people who were trying to expose him for years were other Pentecostal pastors.
But he just got ignored for in a lot of what he was doing.
Now, a lot of people who enabled him were other Pentecostals, don't get me wrong.
Side note, I feel like, you know, based on all the fuckery that's going on, you could have like a sister podcast behind the pastors.
Behind the pastors?
Yeah.
We could do an episode every week for the next 30 years.
I'm not joking.
Every fucking week, there's some freak somewhere who's like, yeah, this youth pastor is caught with child porn or some other dark shit.
And I'm like, man, we're still acting like these are the people that are above or beyond reproach.
But yeah, anyway, behind the pastors.
Behind the pastors.
Yeah.
We could also do a whole podcast series on the Catholic Church, on the Catholic Church in like the 70s.
You know, even if we just skip to one decade.
Yeah, we could really.
So here's the hard facts of this guy's life.
Timotope Balagun Joshua was born on June 12th, 1963 in a town called Aragidi Okoko in the southwest coastal state of Ando in Nigeria.
Aregidi Okoko is very poor, and it is unlikely that his family had access to any kind of like really meaningful wealth at any point stretching back in recent memory.
He is very poor.
Everyone around him is very poor.
He grows up in like a background of pretty desperate poverty.
Now, he does seem to have a fairly strong family, which is good.
It gives him a leg up on a lot of people who are like, like don't have that benefit, obviously.
But this is a guy who's going to have to fight for any amount of like wealth that he wants to have.
His family are Yoruba.
That is an ethnic group in Southwest Africa that encompasses the largest chunk of Niger-Congo language speakers.
Like many Yoruba families, T.B. Joshua grows up.
He has both Muslim and Christian relatives in his close family.
And one thing people will say about him when he's a pastor is that a lot of evangelical pastors in Nigeria are very anti-Muslim.
And he was not nearly as much as is common.
He said, not nearly as much.
As we get into, he's going to like, he's going to like throw Muslims under the bus at a certain point in his future.
But he does have like a lot of Muslims in his family.
And so for a while, at least, he's a lot better on some of that stuff than a lot of other people, than a lot of other like pastors, Christian pastors in the area.
His father, Kola Wole, was well educated and made a living translating the Bible.
So from a fairly early age, he's both taught that it's important to learn how to read and specifically to be able to read the Bible.
Like this is something that he's going to do obsessively from a very young age.
Praise God.
Praise God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He is big on that.
His father dies when he's young.
And he is, I think, when he's like 12 or something like that.
And he's raised after that by his uncle, who is a Muslim man.
Again, he's going to be kind of more tolerant than a lot of people on that sort of situation.
He grows up speaking a mix of Yoruba, English, and Pidgin.
His English is never going to be considered very good in part because he doesn't finish secondary school and he has limited formal education in general.
What time he does spend in school is at St. Stephen Anglican, which is a religious primary school.
His teachers called him little pastor because he was obsessed with the Bible from a young age and preached to his classmates.
That's not a red flag.
That's not a red flag at all.
Preaching to your class preacher.
Dude, kid preachers are the freakiest fucking creatures on earth.
Oh my God.
There's like, yeah, there's like this vibe of like, you're just showing, you're just regurgitating shit the adults are saying around you, but they do it with such passion and conviction.
You're like, I don't know.
Maybe fucking God is talking to you, but please, you were nine years old.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, take some of this with a grain of salt.
I think the stuff about him being called little pastor, I hear often enough, and is consistent enough that I believe it.
We don't have great sources on his early life.
Like they're all fan websites and the like.
Oh, wait.
So like, first of all, your research methodology for this is what, like, I don't imagine there's like a book on like all the shitty things T.B. Joshua did.
Read a book on him.
No, no, there's good, the best info on this guy's actual crimes comes from the BBC.
BBC, so the BBC can be a problematic entity in some ways, but they have a division of the BBC called BBC Africa Eye, which reports on Africa that does extremely good work.
They're some of the only people, for example, reporting on like war crimes by the Cameroonian government.
They do really good work and they did a long series on this guy.
So there's and interviewed a lot of people.
So there is good reporting on his crimes at this point.
There's just not a whole lot that we can absolutely verify about his early life.
Right.
Because it's always some form of like myth building or praise or yeah, just bias towards like how great he was.
Yeah.
The anecdotes we get are all shit that his fans pulled out of like speeches he gave during like religious ceremonies, right?
Because that's like a big thing.
You're talking about like when I was a kid, I did this and this and I saw, you know, the spirit of God came into me and whatnot.
That's where you get a lot of these details, which is like, there's a good doc.
If you people want to know the way in which these kind of pastors massage and just outright invent backstories in order to like make themselves kind of fit in with some of these common evangelical narratives, there's a documentary I always recommend called Marjo, and it's about a guy who started out as a child pastor.
His parents had him preaching when he was like four or five years old.
He was like doing marriages at like age four or five or something.
And it was all a scam for money, right?
He was like, I never believed in God.
And his parents abandoned him as soon as he was old enough that it wasn't cute, right?
So you can't make money once he's an adult.
There's nothing special about an adult pastor.
So they just fucking bounce.
And he like takes a film crew.
And this is in the United States and all these like evangelical revivals in the 70s.
It's a really good documentary.
It won an Oscar.
I recommend it to everybody.
Marjo, one of my very favorite movies.
Also, he grows up to be an actor and is on the A team.
So in an episode.
Marjo was?
Yeah.
He's a bad guy in one episode of the A team, I think.
Yes.
So there you go.
Praise Christ.
Through him, all things are possible.
You can start.
You could be the bad guy on the A team, type cash, probably.
Was this guy black?
No, no, no.
He's a white guy.
He's a white guy.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, look, maybe it wasn't God.
It might have just been white supremacy that guy either.
I don't want to conflate the two, but it was one of the two.
I'm going to say anytime you get to hang out with B.A. Barakas, that's the hand of God.
That's the hand of God.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Especially if you get, yeah, he'd be like, can I wear one of your chains?
He's like, yeah, man.
Oh, yeah.
Praise Christ, baby.
So the website, Who Owns Kenya, which I'm not sure about the provenance of, but it does seem to have a lot of detail on this guy.
They have an article on him titled The Man of God Who Stayed in His Mother's Womb for 15 Months, which gives you an idea of the kind of claims he makes.
And again, this is stuff he's saying during speeches.
He like claims that he was, his mom was pregnant with him for 15 months.
And so he's a miracle baby.
I guess when you're that holy, God needs an extra like six months to really make sure you get finished.
Yeah, you need that.
You need that way.
Yeah, man, you need two, just the, what is that, the fourth and fifth trimester?
So he's like, I'm as holy as 1.8 babies.
Yeah.
Roughly.
I'm not great at math, folks.
Don't come here and correct me if that's wrong.
He better have been walking and talking and shit.
Yeah.
He was in there that long cooking.
No, he'd better come out knowing how to read, goddamn it, and do my taxes.
Yeah.
So I do find that very funny because I even heard that claim that like, yeah, I took 15 months to be born.
What are you stunting on people with?
Yeah.
Is that really a brag thing?
Yeah.
You're like, you're clingy?
Yeah.
Are you like giving shit to kids who were born early?
Oh, you came out after eight months?
Not nearly as holy as me, baby.
I'm a 15-monther.
Yeah, my mom tried to get rid of me.
I said, no, I'm doing some Bible study in here.
I'm not ready yet.
On the weekends, he goes to just goes to like Nick U Wards and makes fun of the babies.
Ha ha, look at you.
Look at you.
Couldn't be me.
Couldn't be me.
I came out.
I came out 26 pounds.
Yeah.
I almost didn't come out at all.
I was going to stay in there.
I'm like, Sam, I would have physically killed my mother if I stayed in there.
I kept growing.
It would have been bad.
The parasitic baby.
Oh, that's funny.
So later in life, he would also claim that as a child, he became aware that his coming had been foretold in prophecy for more than 100 years.
I've never found what this prophecy is supposed to be.
Maybe someone was like, yeah, there's going to be a huge fucking baby someday.
Is that in the book of Revelations?
And that boy was me.
So anyway, this bulletproof source cites statements from Joshua that as a child, he would read the entire Bible every two months.
Quote, every two months, I would have read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
It was the only subject that interested me in primary school.
In exams, I scored 99% consistently, whereas I performed woefully in other subjects.
My excelling in Bible knowledge affected the other subjects where I performed poorly.
So basically, he was so good at the Bible that his brain just didn't work for anything else.
Yeah.
I can't do, I can't even do one plus two.
Yeah.
Because I'm so Christed up up here.
Now, what I do disbelieve is a claim that he made that one day whilst at school, a madman entered his class carrying a weapon.
The type is not specified.
Quote, everyone ran away, but he managed to calm the madman down through prayer.
From that day onwards, he knew there was something special in him.
I'm going to need more details.
Yeah.
How old is he?
I think this is like when he's in like middle school, maybe.
And a man came through with a weapon.
Just a weapon.
Weapon.
Just a weapon.
Okay.
Okay.
He prays him out of hurting anybody.
Colonialism and Faith Healing00:11:45
I'm guessing, I mean, it's West Africa.
Maybe it's a cutlass.
You know, it's a machete, maybe.
I mean, machetes are very, certainly very accessible, but who knows?
My actual guess is that this did not happen.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, he's acting like he's Kevin Spacey and the negotiator.
He's Chris Sabian or something.
I've got this.
I've got to pray with him.
So shortly before starting secondary school, his father died.
And again, he's raised by his uncle.
He drops out of school pretty soon after this, I think because he has to get a job to help take care of the family.
And he spends years working a series of odd gigs, like a lot of people who come from his level of like wealth and stuff in Nigeria and that part of Nigeria.
One of his jobs is a poultry attendant, which mostly consisted of scrubbing chicken shit with his hands and putting it in bags to be turned into fertilizer.
My new favorite Kenyan news and culture website says this job was so demeaning that no Nigerian did it.
It was mainly done by Ghanai.
Wow.
Shots fired at Ghana, your neighbor's next door.
In these articles, there's a lot of shots fired at Ghana, Miles.
It's wild.
I've been to Ghana and there is like this sort of back and forth where they'll be talking, they talk, they just chat shit about each other, like Nigerians?
I don't know.
I don't know about them.
This happens everywhere.
It's very regional.
Yeah, exactly.
Your neighbor is Texas and Oklahoma shit, right?
Like Nigeria and Ghana.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So at some point in his early 20s, he experienced a three-day trance in which God visited him and told him, I am your God.
I am giving you a divine commission to go and carry the work of the heavenly father.
This is the inciting incident of the TB Joshua story.
In the interest of trying to put together a more complete picture of the man, I opted to read a propaganda by what I thought was a propaganda biography by one of his followers.
Its title is Rejoice and See What Happens Next, The Life and Times of TB Joshua.
Now, this book does not give us the life and times of TB Joshua.
It's basically a big brochure for like going to visit his church.
And we will talk about why a little later, that he wanted people doing that.
Just marketing.
It was just marketing material?
It's all marketing.
You get very little on the guy's life.
It is kind of interesting to note that the preface of this book opens by saying, T.B. Joshua has shown every indication of following this anointed path.
He is worthy of careful study and emulation.
And then complaining, T.B. Joshua has been made out to be controversial and has become the subject of persecution, especially by fellow religious leaders.
This is puzzling to me.
I have been in his presence and I can say that he is disarmingly humble, gentle, and a generous man.
So that's good.
Glad, glad we're opening with like a real unbiased account of this.
Oh, yeah, he's so humble.
Yeah.
Well, he sounds great so far.
He sounds like he's, you know, he was cooking for 15 months.
Got a big talk.
He published about his miracles.
Yeah, he talked down a man with a machete or who knows.
It could have been a bazooka.
Any kind of weapon.
We have no idea.
Yeah.
He just had enriched plutonium maybe in his hand.
Who knows?
But he stopped it.
Okay.
Look, this doesn't just get to the bastard.
I don't even know.
This guy sounds cool, Robert.
So far, he's great.
Praise Christ.
Yeah.
So he starts preaching.
At some point, he's probably in his early to mid-20s when he starts preaching.
And this seems to have been a fairly like humble start.
There's some grainy footage that exists, apparently.
I've heard it reported on.
I haven't seen it that shows him somewhere started with something like a dozen, maybe 20 followers under a bamboo marquee in the early 1980s.
So he starts out small, but his flock grows fairly rapidly.
And the mid-1980s is a pretty terrible time for most things, except for cocaine and being a Pentecostal preacher in Nigeria.
And especially for the latter, it's basically the best time ever.
And this merits a little bit of explanation.
First off, on Pentecostalism.
If you've ever seen a video, if you're wondering like what the fuck is he talking about when he says Pentecostals, because I do think a lot of like, even a lot of people who are Christian, right, but who are like a fairly mainstream like Kay Christianity and like normal, you know, believe in evolution, live a normal modern life, they just like, you know, they're Christian, whatever, may not know much about this.
It's, it's something you really encounter a lot, particularly if you grow up in kind of the deep south and rural areas.
It's, it's, it's gotten more common, obviously, as, as we've gotten older.
If you've ever seen videos of like some wild seeming Christian religious ceremony where people are chanting in tongues and or screaming, flopping around on the floor, looking like they're seizuring, that's a Pentecostal service, almost certainly.
There are some other denominations where you'll get stuff like that.
In popular culture, they're often called snake handlers.
This is because a lot of Pentecostals used to pass around venomous snakes.
And basically, the idea is if you get bitten, like it means that you weren't faithful enough.
And also, if you get bitten and die, it means that God just wanted you to die.
Yeah.
That was his plan.
That was his plan for you.
A lot of times they're using non-venomous snakes and it's like, it's a show, right?
Right.
And a lot of times they'll like defang the snakes, especially for like the pastor, because the pastor, you want to like.
Could you imagine?
He's like, look, snakes bit me, but I don't have any wound on my hand.
I don't let through Jesus.
Yeah.
Where's that?
Wait, I didn't give you the stunt snake pastor.
Oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Okay.
There's definitely motherfuckers who died from that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There has to be.
I mean, I feel like there's, there were headlines about like some snake handling preacher who, you know, somehow, who'd have thought his handling of a copperhead ended with his demise?
It was also common.
You still find this sometimes, but like people would drink strychnine during these ceremonies.
And again, it's like a, you know, if you have faith, you'll know God won't kill you unless it's your time.
Yeah.
Now, Pentecostals are not the only Christian sect to do snake handling.
It actually probably started.
I think the first snake handlers on the Christian historic record are the second century Ophites, which is a Gnostic sect.
I do not know much about them, but I came across that when I was looking up snake handlers.
So that's neat.
Pentecostalism has its origins in the 1800s with radical evangelical movements that focused on faith healing and the imminently coming end times.
One description you'll hear a lot is that regular Christians kind of, as modernity comes in, they stop believing in miracles, or at least not miracles as a thing that like people can incite, you know, through their direct faith, you know, but as a thing, you know, maybe it's a thing that happens sometimes, but you're not, you can't make miracles by like praying for God and stuff, right?
That's not a thing I think a lot most people believe, but Pentecostals do.
And this obsession with miraculous happenings is a hallmark of that kind of worship.
Pentecostal churches started to spread in Nigeria around the turn of the 1900s.
It was really given a shot in the arm by the influenza epidemic.
A lot of early Nigerian Pentecostal preachers engaged in faith healing of influenza victims.
They started out as kind of an Anglican offshoot because obviously the Anglican church is British and the British, you know, owned them in Nigeria for much longer than they should have.
Yeah, and Agana, yes, and Aghana.
And yeah, the breaks kind of between the Anglicans and the Pentecostals became more defined in the 20s.
And they started, like Nigerian Pentecostals started to affiliate with U.S.-based churches more, like the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia.
One characteristic of this particular segment of Christianity is a near constant conflict with medical science.
I'm not going to say that's every group of Pentecostals, but it's very common to find Pentecostals who preach against like certain, at least certain kinds of modern medicine.
You know, faith is supposed to handle it.
It's not like an across-the-board thing like it is with Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's not uncommon.
And early Nigerian Pentecostals were extreme, even to their British cousins, in their rejection of modern medicine.
A lot of this is tied into colonialism.
I think a lot of it also has to do with the difficulty of obtaining good medical care in a lot of the areas where this is spreading.
A study in Pew Research notes: originating in evangelical student revivals, a wave of Pentecostal expansion spawns new churches in the 60s and 70s.
The leader of this expansion is Benson Idahoza, one of Africa's most influential Pentecostal preachers.
Idahoza establishes the Church of God Mission International in 1972.
In 1974, the Pentecostal umbrella organization, Grace of God Ministry, is founded in eastern Nigeria.
The Deeper Life Bible Church founded in 1975 and soon becomes one of Nigeria's largest neo-Pentecostal churches with an estimated 350,000 members by 1993.
So this is a pretty rapid expansion, and these are very big churches.
I mean, it's, yeah, just all lining up for that.
Man, the faith healing part is just, yeah, it's like, I mean, because there's already, you know, this culturally, there's a lot of thinking that sort of goes beyond the bounds of like science, right?
So to even for these, you know, these very opportunistic sort of faith healers to really get in on that and be like, no, man, just fucking believe, maybe that's all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, that's where Chibi Joshua is going to stitch in.
So T.B. Joshua's church, which also began in 1986, was called Synagogue Church of All Nations or Scone.
And I think the synagogue, this is very common.
I made a comment once that like Christians reincorporate.
Some groups of like particularly fundamental Christians like to reincorporate bits of Jewish religious tradition, like the use of shofars.
Reincorporate was the wrong term.
People got rightfully frustrated.
This is cultural appropriation.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
That's what's going on.
And I'm guessing, because I don't, I have never heard of synagogue used outside of the tradition of the Jewish faith.
So my guess is that just a lot of people.
Shorthand for me, that's what that would imply.
Yes.
10 times out of 10 in my mind.
Yeah.
So that's what I'm guessing they're doing here.
So people will call it scone, and that's what we will usually call it because synagogue church of all nations is a bit of a mouthful.
And in fairly short order throughout the mid, like mid to late 1980s, scone goes from dozens to hundreds to hundreds of thousands of regular attendance.
It becomes common for there to be more than 15,000 people attending services at once in a single day.
Obviously, this necessitates the building of a massive like stadium-sized church.
You know, these are huge events every time.
And he's out there every day, basically, he or some of his disciples.
A lot of the appeal of these neo-Pentecostal churches in Nigeria is the ability of worshipers to witness and participate in miracles, right?
Not just that miracles are happening, but that your pastor is able to call down miracles and you get to be right there and watch this shit, you know?
And some of this, there's some like Kfabe here.
Some of this is like what people get out of wrestling, you know?
Right, right, for real.
Yeah.
And it's, it's not coincidental that the massive expansion of these churches that are all doing these very big, and we'll talk about how these look, these big like miracle shows, coincides with a huge expansion in the availability of televisions for working class Nigerians, right?
That has hit like it hit saturation by the 80s.
And so these preachers, and not only that, but it also becomes a lot easier to make your own TV and get it on the air, right?
So all of those things kind of have to happen and that takes a period of time.
But by the 80s, all of those things are possible.
And so any of these preachers with big congregations have access to enough capital to purchase cameras and airtime, which they use to air slick videos of different ill people being miraculously healed.
And Miles, you know what will miraculously heal our listeners?
Saturation of Televangelism Ads00:03:55
I hope it's some kind of product.
Yes, yes.
The only guarantee we make on this podcast is that if you are sick, buy someone something that advertises on our show and you will be healed of anything.
Just rub it on your head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You cannot die if you purchase the products that advertise on our show.
Unless that was God's plan, praise you.
Unless that was God's plan.
Obviously.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ridiculous, ridiculous ad transition, both of you.
Weaponizing African Mysticism00:15:39
We're back and we're thinking about how, unless that's God's plan, really, really gives you a lot of leeway.
You can get away with anything with those words.
Yeah, but people, I just, you know, if it's really funny, please, please send us what, what, what ad pops up, please.
Yeah.
If it's really funny, please.
That's a good like parenting tip.
Can we go to the playground, daddy?
If it's God's plan, you know?
If it's God's plan, let's see if it's.
Yeah, I mean, but that is the kind of shit like super religious parents will say.
Like, just to like avoid the responsibility.
They're like, I don't know.
I mean, maybe you didn't, maybe I forgot your birthday because that was God's plan.
Yeah.
And you do.
It is like, it's used very differently, but like it's used a lot in the Muslim world as like if you're like, hey, do you think, you know, we'll be able to do this or this will happen?
Like, you know, inshallah, right?
Which means like, probably not.
Yeah.
I'm not looking to go.
I mean, but you know, it's the same thing.
People say that too.
They're like, yeah, man, Lord willing.
You know, but God willing.
We'll see.
We'll see what happens.
Miles, I'll never forget your birthday.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Never.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Robert.
You don't have the same privilege as Miles.
Sorry.
Wow.
I don't remember my own birthday.
Not after all this Theraflu I've been dropping.
I don't even know my name.
Let me do a fat line of the peach flavor.
Oh, yeah.
That's white stuff.
Hey, what's he snorting out of that bullet?
Dude, it's Theraflu.
It's kind of funny.
Theraflu brown round bullet powder and theraflu.
It opens the capillaries, gets the NSA IDs into your system faster.
Street, streaming.
Straight to the vein, baby.
Yeah.
Just like cooking flare of theraflu on a spoon.
You're like, hey, hand me that dialysis tubing really quick.
I'm going to tie it off.
What?
Cops come in.
Yeah, we couldn't arrest him.
There's no law against ejecting Theraflu in a parking lot.
I don't know.
There's no law against just freaking people the fuck out.
It's fucked up.
So spectacle was always part of the deal at Scone.
Healing the blind is like easy shit, right?
You can have someone pretend that they're blind, right?
And then they can see, you know, super easy.
But that doesn't look exciting, right?
What looks exciting, he would love to have like parades of people who were missing limbs like roll in on wheeled boards and stuff to get like the healing touch and claim like their pain went away or something.
He would love to have people who had like, he would like skin lesions and stuff come in and then they all fall off, right?
And this kind of shit, like these are, these are staged, right?
Like they're using makeup.
They're doing all this kind of shit, but his, it works.
His flock goes from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands over the course of like the 80s to the 90s.
Like it gets massive.
Their team is wiping off people's skin conditions.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That's a big one.
That's a big, and there's, there's too many stories of this time to count.
So I'm going to focus on one really well-documented recent case.
And I'm focusing on this because this is someone who got arrested by the Nigerian government for miracle fraud recently.
But it gives you an idea of how this industry has always worked.
Miracle fraud.
Wait, is that a law we have on our arms?
Oh, yes.
Oh, no, we don't have that shit.
You can, you could, that's, Nigeria is so far ahead of us in punishing miracles.
And that way they're like, no, you guys don't understand.
These people are going to fucking bring down our entire society.
Like, if we don't get that shit under control.
Yeah.
God damn.
Cause who's the guy who sells those fucking buckets, those end time buckets?
Oh, yeah.
Fucking, we did episodes on him, but I'm spacing on his name right now.
What the fuck?
But yeah, one of the through lines in the story, obviously he gets away with a lot because of corruption in the Nigerian government, because of bribing people.
But there's also like the Nigerian government has like passed laws and shit that I wish we had in the U.S. to try to limit some of this stuff.
We're talking about Jim Baker, aren't we?
Jim Baker bucketed.
I'm like, we did several episodes over there.
Yeah, yeah, those buckets, though, they look like absolute shit.
Like, I have to say, the Nigerian government fails in a lot of ways.
The U.S. government has also failed to contain this stuff, but they have also attempted to limit it in more ways than we have.
So I'll give them some credit.
Could you imagine if someone tried to put forward like a bill for miracle fraud?
Oh, no, they would get shot.
They would get literally fucking shot.
Somehow, like, that's the fucking lie.
Oh, they're like, that would piss people off so much.
So I want to detail the story of one specific miracle fraudster, 44-year-old Mrs. Bose Olasukanmi, I think is how that's pronounced.
She was arrested by the Nigerian government in 2020 for being a fake miracle actor who would sell her services to different pastors, right?
Basically, she was really good.
She was able to dislocate her arm in an unconventional way that made it look like it was shattered and in pieces.
Like there was at least, I saw, there's like one picture of it out there.
Like she's pretty good at it.
This is a legit skill.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Nigerian Guardian here.
Once she enters the stage, she would pretend that the broken right arm had been hanging and all medical efforts to heal her in both Orthodox and native hospitals proved abortive until one of her friends who was a member of the church advised her to try the church.
At this point, one of the ministering pastor or the general overseer would step forward and demonstrate as if the Holy Spirit had entered him.
After speaking in tongues for some minutes, he would order the woman to come very close to him while the congregation would be silent, anxiously waiting to see the broken right arm that has been hanging.
The pastor would ask the woman, do you want to be healed?
Have you been born again?
If she answers in the negative, then he led her to Christ in prayer.
He would then order the evil spirit that bent her arm to depart and be destroyed by fire.
As he is ordering the evil spirit to depart, the hanging broken arm will be coming back gradually to its form until it is completely stretched down and normal.
And then he would ask the congregation to praise the Lord.
While the congregation is busy praising God, one of the church members whose role is to take the woman away would appear and whisk her away.
And then she gets paid.
Wow.
And so she's just like the meryl streep of fucking miracle fraud.
There's a bunch.
You know how there's a, there used to be like a circuit of people who would do the Jerry Springer style talk shows because they had something like marketable, you know, in a weird thing about them.
Like, I think it's like that, right?
Yeah.
They're like, oh, did you get the arm lady?
It's like, no, I got the dude with the buggy eyes.
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to explain?
Like, it's because his blood pressure is so high, his eyes are bulging.
There's too many demons in his blood.
They pop the pressure right up.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Now, this is one woman, but like, she gets arrested because the Nigerian police have like units dedicated to busting miracle crimes, which is, I do want to see that TV show.
I want to see like a law and order, miracle fraudsters unit.
It would give people the wrong idea, like, dude, law and order, MCU.
Yeah.
It's like, no, not Marvel asshole miracle crimes unit.
They don't own those letters.
So Joshua and other pastors like him would not just like have these people over and do these miracle shows, but they would make videos of them.
And Joshua is really going to be like the number one pastor for pioneering making videos out of this stuff and distributing them around the world.
The basic way this works is that, you know, within kind of Nigeria, if you have these people being healed in your shows, it will convince people who are really injured or sick that they or their loved ones might get healed, right?
Obviously.
But Joshua took this tactic several steps further, right?
From an early date, he starts filming videos of these healings, picking the most sensational and impressive and putting them in videos not meant for Nigerian domestic consumption.
But these were sent over to Europe, to Great Britain, and to the United States with white missionaries returning from Nigeria.
For decades, Nigeria has been a hot destination for missionary tourists, young Christians and professional missionaries traveling to minister to the poor in a relatively friendly climate.
Joshua was not the only person to see this as a profitable endeavor, but his matter of fishing for them was unique at the time, sending out propaganda to evangelize British Christians in particular.
The BBC documentary that I cited earlier includes interviews with several young British and South African Caucasian women who were enraptured with and then terribly abused by TB Joshua.
Their journeys all start the same way.
Members of their local religious communities came back from Nigeria with VHS tapes of miraculous healings.
To give you an idea of what some of these healings were and how they looked, I want to return to that book, Rejoice and See What Happens Next, which is centered around numerous case studies ranging from poor people getting good paying jobs.
And I think that shit is meant mainly to like evangelize them to locals, right?
Like this is a thing that can improve your financial situation, to shit like this, which is very much geared towards Europeans that they're trying to get to come over and join the church.
Right.
Jude Oraka showed up at the Scone with a life-threatening disease.
The case, which I originally viewed live, has now been archived by Emmanuel TV.
That's his TV channel and includes a commentary.
The story opens with the camera zooming in from a full body shot, then to a medium shot of a man sitting in a chair.
He is separated from others, his body quivering in the sunshine and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.
A close-up shot reveals horrendous skin damage.
Narrator, a shocking condition brought this man to the synagogue church of all nations, his body riddled with sickness.
Right from the crown of his head, his entire body has been engulfed in a plague, shattering his skin into scale-like fragments.
There is not a hair left on his head as the frightening sickness has completely destroyed his skin.
From his head, the disease rages across his body, damaging every inch and rendering his arms useless.
The skin flakes and peels horribly all the way down his arms to his fingers.
Not one inch of his skin has been left unaffected.
Jude's sister, man of God, help my brother.
He has skin disease for the past six years.
We have taken him all over.
There is no solution.
Neither the herbalists' homes nor hospitals have provided any solution.
Joshua talks to him briefly, and when he sees Araka is too sick to even talk, he asks him if he can accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, which the man is able to answer.
In the name of Jesus Christ, I command that infirmity out.
Begin to vomit it out.
TB Joshua watches the man intently for about 15 seconds.
Then he speaks again.
I say to you, disease, you can hear me.
Come out of this man's life.
In the name of Jesus, come out.
Out.
TB Joshua.
The man begins to shake uncontrollably and bends forward to throw something white and foamy up.
You can see what the name of Jesus can do.
Out, I say, out in the name of Jesus.
So, gives you an idea, right?
Dude, this, yeah, okay.
It's wild.
Foaming at the mouth, he's like, yo, dude, don't put this Alka Seltzer in until I get it.
It's definitely, it's got to be Alka Seltzer.
No, that's the oldest trick in the fucking book.
Yeah, it's good shit.
And again, when we're talking about his appeal, obviously, as a preacher, he appeals to Nigerians as a preacher, but to a lot of these like Europeans, these British people, you know, he's not speaking their language fluently.
The appeal is not the specifics of what he's saying.
It's that he is promising them that if they come to see him, they will get a direct physical connection to a miracle, right?
And if you are one of these evangelicals from a wealthy country, like you're going to, you know, you reading the Bible, you're watching Veggie Tales or whatever, but you're living like these, this, what you would probably consider compared to these videos, a fairly boring, safe life.
And then you see this man physically fighting demons, right?
And you're like, right, right.
Well, of course I want to be a part of this.
This sounds so much more exciting than like going to church and doing like fucking youth group shit, right?
It reminds me of like 90s skate culture where like you would be like, oh, you get the new toy machine tape and you're like, yo, I'll bring it over.
You're like, oh, dude, let me see the bail scenes or whatever.
And like, there was always this culture being like, yo, just check this tape out.
I got this tape.
Except in this version.
I also, I mean, it's clever that he's also using the way the Western world views Africa in this like exotic, mystical way and weaponizing it to be like, watch this shit, because they are, they're already on some bullshit, thinking that this is some fucking magic shit is happening here.
It's like, no, I'm just a next level scammer that was in the womb for 15 months.
Yeah, that time really let him prep.
But no, you have anticipated something.
We'll get to.
He deals with this very directly.
He is very consciously taking advantage of the way Westerners look at Africa, right?
So I do want to, I want to give you an idea of what it looks like when he's because he's, these are not just, he's not just doing healings.
He's doing exorcisms.
And these take the place of like Gandalf Saruman magic fights.
Like at the most extreme level, he'll like walk in and people will lunge at him and he'll like put his hand forward and use the name of G and they'll go flying backwards.
Like it's so, it's, it's pretty cool, actually.
It looks like like kung fu film like wire stunts.
They're like, that's high production.
You know actually what it looks a little bit like if you've watched the fake Steven Seagal Aiko videos or like the Vladimir Putin fake Aikido videos where they're just like touching guys and flinging them through the air or like Russian systema videos.
Exactly.
Oh, tap your fucking shoulder blade.
You're like, ah!
Yeah.
God, it's so funny.
I want to play you a video of this, Miles.
Look at it.
Oh, shit.
Watch the screen.
He's on the ground rolling like a python.
That's pretty, that's like wrestling grade, you know?
Hell yeah.
That's fucking school play level fake scene.
Of course.
Of course a bunch of like fucking sheltered like teenage evangelical kids are seeing this and they're like, well, I want to go fight demons in Africa.
Oh my God.
Did you see that?
He just like used a closed fist swiped in front of his chest and blew the guy down.
Yeah.
It's so fun.
I mean, a lot of people get horribly abused.
It's actually not, but this part of it is fun.
Look, you got to enjoy these little moments, right?
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
I want to note here again, I don't want to fall into the thing of being like, wow, look at this African preacher and all these people believe this.
Shit like this goes down in the U.S. all the fucking time.
Oh, shit.
Members of Congress go to churches that are not all that different from this.
Okay.
Like, you know, people who are this is not a Nigerian thing.
This is a thing.
This is just that.
That's what religion gives you.
And we've got a whole bunch of people that are working in the government.
They're like circle jerking for the end times.
Like, this isn't like mainstream religious stuff necessarily, but it's not like wildly uncommon evangelicals.
I mean, like, especially when you see people prophesying, you know, or speaking in tongues and shit, you're like, oh, boy.
This is a derivation on a theme, right?
And I think it's also probably, my guess would be, this is pretty close to what used to be a lot more common back in the day, right?
Like when you hear about these stories of like demons and exorcisms and shit.
And like, you know, someone, someone in the town water supply, like someone will get like some fucking air gut poisoning and everyone will hallucinate and you'll have like a big demon fight in some medieval French village.
I'm sure like there's versions of that to explain it.
Like these kind of, there have always been people who have known that like, well, if you really want to make some money in the religion business, you got to put on a fucking show.
Demons in the Village Church00:08:34
Yeah.
And nothing's a better show than fighting demons.
Yeah.
You got a pyrotechnics guy?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I got one, dude.
I'll fucking fire my fingers.
I'll say Satan demon get out with the fires of hell.
Fucking full plume of fucking flame shoots up his back, dude.
It's sick.
Anyway, he's like $500 a gig.
It's pretty affordable.
It's cool.
It's good stuff.
So again, what I want to note is that like, while what he is doing is not unique to him, he is maybe the best I've seen at it.
He's good.
Like these are these are well-orchestrated shows.
Well, yeah, it's also the Riz, bro.
Yeah.
He's got it.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
He seems like so cool.
He's like, watch me hold this mic with my vest on.
I don't give a fuck that this dude's a python.
Watch this shit.
Yeah.
Like it feels like Superman-ish kind of thing.
I was like, damn, he's super cocky about it.
Yeah, some Superman, some Vince McMahon.
Like, you got some of that going in there.
Yeah.
Now you can see in some of his videos from the aughts that he's very deliberately taken framing techniques from Western reality television.
And I'm going to play you a segment from a different Scone video about a secret demonic infiltrator, Mr. Annie, being caught by one of TB Joshua's disciples.
And it just feels like something I would have seen on MTV in like 2001.
Here is Mr. Ennie pretending to be a Christian, but is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
What is his mission here among the people of God?
Can darkness be in the midst of light?
No.
Capital no.
Look at Mr. Enny praying.
Capital no.
Who is he praying to?
There is prayer and there are prayers.
And it's like highlighting him in like the crowd shot every time.
Like it's like surveillance footage.
Yeah, or like funny, like back when hard copy was a show.
Yeah, hard copy.
Yeah.
60 minutes hard copy.
That's a better, that's a better than the current affair from our old head.
Yeah.
And the rest of the video proceeds.
It's like this big choreographed exorcism because obviously he's like a secret devil infiltrator in Scone.
All of this goes on.
80 plus writing, though.
It's great.
It's great shit.
Yeah.
It's really good.
Like, you have a Marvel movie fucking unfolding at your church.
So it's like, dude, last week, a fuck three dudes came out of a fucking portal.
Yeah, of course.
Up this infiltrator.
And then TB Joshua turned this woman's droopy leg into a muscular one.
It was wild, man.
You had to be that.
You had to be there.
So what happened in your church this Sunday?
A priest told us we shouldn't have sex before marriage.
Oh, yeah.
Guy turned into a snake at my church.
No.
No.
Yeah.
And then he fucking punched him in the head and a flame came out of his ass.
Of course I'm going to the snake church.
Yeah, fuck all.
So dude, I can barely stay awake at my fucking church.
Now, this all goes over really well with these young white evangelicals from Western countries who are just not used to services being this exciting.
You will hear comments from the story.
You'll hear comments from a number of them that are like, I felt like this was where real biblical Christianity was still going down, right?
And I wanted to be a part of it, you know?
I cannot exaggerate the extent to which a lot of this was a conscious attempt by TB Joshua to recruit white people.
And I'm going to play a clip from a BBC documentary on TB Joshua called Disciples.
The guy talking here is his former right-hand man who helped him start the church.
He had special interest in the Oyebo, Oyibo, the whites.
Are you surprised that God is using a black man to do all these things?
Sorry, I'm sorry.
I'm not surprised that God is using a black man.
What are these motherfuckers wearing?
Yeah.
Wow.
In 1996, one of the major pastors came from South Africa.
When they were living, he gave more than 200 VHS videos to take home to give to people.
Videos of miracles, videos of confessions, videos that will fill their head.
Wow.
I said, this is too expensive, bro.
He laughed.
You think I'm a fool?
I know what I'm doing.
A time will come.
This synagogue church is going to shoot out from South Africa to the whole world.
Now, this guy also will claim that TB Joshua basically said to him, What I am doing by recruiting these people, I want to take advantage of them.
I want to get revenge for what white people have done to us, which is, I think is part, I think is largely him, because as a spoiler, this guy is not some sort of like anti-colonial hero.
Most of the people he abuses are black African women, right?
Like he is not at all actually like a hero, but I think he understood that this guy who worked with him might respond to that.
That's how I read it, right?
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, we taking them, we take them from them because for years they've been taking it from me.
Yes.
And the BBC documentary does a very, very good job of obviously a lot of the victims it sites are white people from South Africa, from England, but most of the victims that I see are black Nigerian Ghanian women, you know, which is, I'm glad, like, they clearly put in an effort to not just be like, look at what this guy's doing to white women, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
But rather to highlight the differences between how he approached like which would have been the way people first sort of had outrage.
Like, he thought he could get one over on us, the white people.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
And it's interesting.
There's also, there's a lot of very interesting racial dimensions here.
You saw in that video, the guy he asks, like, are you surprised to see a black man, you know, preaching the word of God?
That, like, I think that's a South African pastor.
Did you see what he was wearing?
That dress?
Oh, yeah.
Very traditional.
That is, yeah, traditional African dress.
And I think what is happening here is that these kind of established South African and Western white pastors were being feted by TB Joshua.
He was giving them basically like, you can have an authentic African experience, right?
Like, I'm going to give that to you if you endorse me as legitimate.
I can't have any other explanation for the way that man is portraying himself.
There's also, I mean, I saw this when I was in Ghana.
Like, there is like this Canadian expat that lived in this village that like nearby where I was visiting.
And he kind of became like the elder, like the chief of the village, only because like he like was married to a Ghanaian woman, but like built like a property there.
And like he dressed like that.
Like he had the whole vibe.
Like he was like, no, I'm here to do the African thing.
So I wonder if like on some level, they like, they just really loved the LARP of it all, you know, too.
Or they're like, yeah, look at me, bro.
I look like a goddamn fucking god from West Africa right now.
Yeah, some of this is maybe beyond like my pay grade, but that was my read there in that particular scene.
That like that's kind of what he's offering some of these established white pastors.
Is that kind of legitimacy?
I'm sure.
And I'm sure that's a very attractive proposition for someone who probably finds himself very self-important, like a pastor.
And then like, watch me enter all of these spaces.
And I'm accepted with open arms, like no fucking friction at all.
Like, yeah, T.B. Joshua is, yeah, man.
Fucking Machiavelli over here.
To kind of highlight the experience that he is offering to a lot of these white visitors, I want to play you another clip.
Believe you me, brothers and sisters, Brigadier was the last place on earth that I ever wanted to come to.
They brought peddlers.
And I say, God, sorry.
Yeah, he's a piece of heaven on earth.
The greatest in the Pomton Gook Church was when the foreigners had a coming.
This was strategic.
And it was planned.
I just got a confession to make that I want the whole world to know.
In the past, I've always hate blacks.
I really hated them.
When I got back over here, I saw the love that we received from black people.
He used the white people to market his own.
This goofy dude is every white man or white woman around is like, you have achieved.
He just say, look at these people.
Confessions of a Former Hater00:03:38
They don't know where they are.
The white people dancing video there.
It's like, there's some good, good like 80s dudes shuffling about.
Yeah, doing some kind of footloose shit.
Some kind of footloose shit.
What the fuck is going on?
But yeah, man, geez, I mean, like, it's interesting, you know, like there are these people who become predatory like this.
It's because they understand the predation that exists around them at many different levels.
And he's just able to, like, he has such a mastery of it that he's like, no, watch this.
And then I can use white people to legitimize it.
He's like, I already know how this works.
I already know how this works.
I've seen it.
I've seen this shit a hundred times.
You know what I know how works, Miles?
Sponsoring a podcast.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Outsiders with Secret Powers00:07:43
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
I just wanted to say that product, thank fuck for that.
Did that save you?
Did that cure yourself?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, it cleared my ear chlamydia.
Yeah.
All my hair grew back, too.
Oh, your ears.
I'm no longer bald.
Uh-huh.
You even have several other people's hair.
Yeah, just from listening to the fucking ad, that's how powerful that is.
So I'm definitely going to buy it.
Yeah, absolutely, folks.
Spend your money, please.
So from the end of the 90s to the early 2000s, Scone expanded rapidly, driven by the surge in foreign religious tourists who flooded into Nigeria to see the man deemed a prophet and miracle worker.
According to former associates, he often paid for the plane tickets of these white evangelicals because he saw their presence as the best marketing his church would get.
Every youth group leader or pastor from the U.S. or Europe who visited came back enthralled and directed funds and more followers TB Joshua's way.
White followers, again, also acted as marketing for his church within Nigeria.
It was important to him that the synagogue church of all nations be seen as a world church.
And this made it more appealing to Nigerians for the same reason people are always drawn to international celebrities, right?
Are you more impressed with like the guy who like he's got like a teat local access TV show and he owns a car a lot?
Or are you more impressed by like the NFL dude who owns a series of car dealerships, right?
I don't care about the NFL dude, but I mean, if you're like a, if you're some dude named T.B. Joshua, dude, and you got some South Africans doing Footloose shit?
Doing yeah, you got him dancing?
You got South Africans dancing?
You got him doing Footloose?
Well, hey, now you got my attention.
I might get to meet John Lithgow, and I've always wanted to meet John Lithgow.
Oh, that would totally change my opinion of this guy.
If there's John Lithgow in the mix, yeah, I'll do anything to meet John Lithgow.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he's in the best season of Dexter.
He's in the best season of Dexter.
He's in Buckaroo Bonsai.
What's going on?
Yeah, just a rich, rich history of being John Lithgow.
So, yeah, it was all brilliantly executed.
Footage from the church in this period is distinctly uncomfortable.
You can see very small groups of ravenously excited white evangelicals given positions of honor at the front of huge stadium crowds of Nigerian citizens.
Like, look at this picture here.
Like, it's very stark.
Like all the white people in one area, everyone else in another, and the white people are right next to TB Joshua.
Yeah.
It's sort of like kind of like the same logic of like the like a MAGA rally where it's like, please help the people, like the few people of color, please give them prominent spaces, even those the same five people.
Just please, we need them there.
We need them there.
Yeah.
So TV preaching was and is huge in Nigeria, but TB Joshua took it to another level, filming much more than most of his colleagues and theming his videos for an international audience.
One interview he recorded features a white Englishwoman asking him why he makes so many videos.
And his answer is fucking amazing.
Because if Jesus was not recorded in the Bible, you would not believe that.
Jesus is the same today.
I fucking love that answer.
I fucking love that answer.
That is.
I like that.
That's a smart man.
That's a smart man.
Like, he either had that in the chamber or he just extemped that shit.
But that is good.
What a fucking clap back.
Yeah, that man knows his business.
I'll give him that.
It's a horrible business, but he fucking knows it.
Fucking knows it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's fun stuff.
So I want to play a clip for you here of a woman.
You're about to hear from this lady is the church's head of foreign visitor relations.
And she's talking about kind of bringing in these like foreign white religious tourists to Scone.
So we're going to press play here.
For TB Joshua, it was a game and a trap that he sets for the white people.
Yeah.
That's fun.
Yeah, there's no ambiguity around that.
Yeah, no ambiguity around that.
He sent for the white people.
Okay.
TB.
We're going to continue in a second, but there's a couple of things going on here.
One is that for these young people traveling from other parts of the world, these are mostly kids who are more affluent.
They are seeing the whiter world for the first time, and that's intoxicating.
Anytime you go to a country that's not like the suburbs, right?
Yeah.
And you're so sheltered too.
And probably in such a homogeneous fucking environment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a drug.
And in addition to just like, yeah, you're in Africa after a lifetime in a place that is not at all Africa.
And that's like this whole fascinating journey.
And then you get love bombed too.
You are the focus of thousands of locals who are not, it's not just like going to a country and being like a tourist.
It's going to a country and seeing a crowd of locals overjoyed that you're there.
Yeah.
And then after you get love bombed, over the next several days, these tourists, the first like couple of days you spend at Scone, you're just watching hours of miracle videos every day.
It's like a clockwork orange style thing.
And then after you're treatment.
Yeah.
And you prime them with the videos and then you do live miracle shows, right?
Because you don't want them to just see that shit when they're like kind of tired and exhausted.
Like you want them in the most suggestible mind state possible.
You prime that shit.
Yeah.
Horny for a miracle.
Horny for a miracle.
Absolutely horny for a miracle.
And it's wild that he's using the same playbook as like Andrew Tate and all these other people.
It's like traffic them in.
Yeah.
Love bomb them and then and then run your playbook.
Cult leaders only ever work what, like, there's variations based on the tech available to you and the time period, but it's all the same, you know, VHS, DVD, streaming, whatever.
Or the way L. Ron Hubbard did it, you know?
Yeah.
The classic way with boats.
We're going to play you one more clip explaining how this process goes.
I've never seen a local African town before, and it was a hustle and bustle, and street cellars and food, and it was very colorful.
I was just taking everything in.
So you kind of went down a driveway in these vehicles that had other foreign visitors in.
There were tour groups going up from South Africa in quite large numbers.
I'm Angelique, and I'm from South Africa.
Even before I went, I had these VHS tapes that I'd watched and I'd seen the most incredible things.
And I was so beyond excited to see this in real life.
I was coordinator of international visitors.
Anytime this visitor comes, TB Joshua will call and say, Go and meet your visitors.
Najaran disciples with these beautiful smiles welcome you.
There's just people smiling.
Everyone looks so happy.
We make you feel like celebrity.
Convincing Tourists of Cures00:02:48
Oh, man.
Yeah.
That's Jesus.
It's so smart.
Like, it is such a slick operation.
I'm just very, I'm, as, as evil as a lot of this is, I'm very impressed.
Right.
This is the point at which the bastardy hits full swing because one of the chief things he'll do when he's like showing people life miracles is he'll cure HIV, right?
And the way you, the way you do this is you have someone come up with like a piece of paper that looks official that says I have HIV.
And then you pray over them and then they get a test and they come back with the sheet of paper that says I don't have HIV, right?
You know, I don't have to explain to you how to fake that, right?
It's not hard.
Like you have a printer, you can bribe a doctor, right?
But it's very impressive to these kids.
And I'm going to have Sophie play you one more clip here.
When I came here, I had been suffering from asthma.
And after a short time of ministry from the prophet TB Joshua, I felt my breathing come totally clear.
God had healed me.
So I see you've got a medical report here.
Can you please just show the camera then?
Praise be to God.
Negative data for HIV and HIV 2.
So it's not that fucked up to just like, it's fucked up, but like the amount of damage you can do by convincing like these evangelical tourists that you've cured someone's AIDS, you're mainly just going to be able to abuse them more, right?
Right.
But you're not necessarily causing a public health crisis with that.
What does cause the public health crisis is that he is also convincing his Nigerian followers of this, right?
And they are actually the people who have HIV at a heightened rate, right?
Certainly higher than these like evangelical tourists.
And not only is he convincing them that he can cure them by praying over them, part of what he's convincing them is that they should not go get medical treatment or take retrovirals for their HIV.
Oh my God.
HIV retro virals are very available.
HIV is very treatable.
It is not a death sentence when you have access to retrovirals.
And one of the things he is doing to members of his flock is telling them, do not take these.
God doesn't want you to take these.
I can cure your HIV.
And we don't know how many people he got to stop taking their retrovirals as a result of this, but we do know that in 2011, in one publicized case, three women in London died when they were convinced by preachers to stop taking their retrovirals.
And one of those preachers was TB Joshua.
And I think these women were immigrants.
When reporters asked TV Joshua if he advised followers to avoid treating their HIV, he gave this answer: Let me tell you, I am a medium in the same way doctors are mediums to bring treatment.
Rejecting Retroviral Treatment00:05:13
So he's basically saying, Hey, I'm just a doctor too.
You know, one follower I read an interview with, because he's not just doing this with HIV.
He's telling people to avoid all sorts of modern medicine in favor of paying him, you know, to pray over them.
One of his followers, a devoted member of the church who was like helping to run the church, his mother was enthralled with TB Joshua and refused to take chemotherapy for her cancer after Joshua healed her and told her that she did not need it.
Within six months, she was dead.
This follower, who again was a dedicated volunteer of the church, calls TB Joshua.
He's close enough to this guy to have his phone number.
He calls him to let him know that his mom is dead.
And TB Joshua hangs up on him.
And he later, he like asks one of the other workers there, like, he hung up on me.
Like, what the fuck?
And that guy's like, well, the prophet doesn't listen to bad news.
Hey, you're going to fuck up the prophet's confirmation bias.
So don't fucking tell him about that shit.
He's just going to, oh, yeah, you're just going to hear the click.
It's wild stuff.
Anyway, that's the TB Joshua story.
You got anything to plug at the end of part one, Miles?
Please, you know, when appropriate, listen to your healthcare providers and not someone named TB Joshua or whatever, TB Jakes.
I don't care who it is.
ATT.
Don't get health advice from any of them.
Yeah.
Plug, yeah, just listen to the daily Zeitgeist.
You know, that's my daily news and politics and comedy shit show.
And if you like 90 Day Fiancé, look, one of your other favorite guests, Sophia Alexandra, that's a show I host with her.
And this is us getting high and talking about 90 Day Fiancé.
That's how we kind of blow steam off between bastards recordings and, you know, just the general world of it all.
Well, blow off some steam with that and blow off some steam with steam.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And we at CoolZone Media have a new show.
The Theraflu is really starting to fuck me up now.
Will you plug Ed show?
Oh, yeah.
Ed's got a show.
It's called Better Offline.
It's about all the fucked up tech industry shit that you probably need to know because they're actively trying to destroy your life and everyone else's life.
So, you know, keep an eye out for that.
Anyway, I'm going to go, Miles.
I'm going to go hang out at a fucking playground with a spoon and some foil and a packet of Theraflu.
Yeah.
What?
You're going to go to like a needle exchange and they're like, no, man, this is the people that actually need it, man.
That's your fucking weird old Theraflu shit, dude.
Yeah.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Gonna take a needle from one of my diabetic friends to shoot Theraflu up.
You're like, my EpiPen, where is it?
Oh, sorry.
I needed the needle.
Yeah.
No, I emptied the epinephrine from my EpiPen and just Theraflued that shit up.
Didn't get that right into the meat.
Jesus Christ.
The episode is so over.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.