Today, Dan takes Jordan for a hard side-tour to talk all about the time that Jim Bakker had Paula White-Cain on his show and revealed how badly he wants to have sex with a pen. Also, Dan tells a fun story about church camp. Also...turns out the band Journey sucks more than you think.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We are a couple dudes that sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Dan. | ||
| What? | ||
| If you were just some fucking guy, just like taking a motorcycle ride from the East Coast to the West Coast. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Intercontinental. | ||
| Across the continent. | ||
| I used the wrong word. | ||
| Intracontinental. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| You derailed the whole thing. | ||
| Dan, who are we? | ||
| I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| I don't know anything about Alex Jones. | ||
| We gotta get a new introduction for this show. | ||
| Yeah, this one's getting unwieldy. | ||
| I'm tired of it. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I feel like you're tired of it based on you having to do all the heavy lifting of it and me just respond to you with the same thing. | ||
| And also, I think that... | ||
| I think that the criticism has been levied that you do know a lot about Alex Jones, and that's fairly accurate at this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| And then also I think we need to even just change the introduction of we sit around and drink novelty beverage and talk about Alex Jones, because at this point there are much more topics that we're covering. | ||
| Yeah, we have evolved a long, long way. | ||
| I think that maybe two years ago, whenever we started this whole thing up, about two years ago, I was a bit more... | ||
| Mentally unwell. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| And I had a much bigger tolerance for listening to Alex Jones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he wasn't nearly... | ||
| Almost as a self-flagellation kind of situation. | ||
| And he wasn't nearly as awful as he is in the present. | ||
| And when I say awful, I mean boring. | ||
| Like, I could still listen to his 2016 shit. | ||
| I wouldn't have a problem with that. | ||
| But something has changed, and it's not as satisfying to me anyway. | ||
| It's very boring and a waste of my time. | ||
| And further, as we've gone along, I've come to the point where, and we've talked about this here and there, that the bigger revelation that we've learned from watching him and studying him is that he is a piece of a larger ecosystem. | ||
| And this is really our bigger message, I believe, is that almost everybody who is in a speaking role, On the right is a con person. | ||
| They're all trying to defraud people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is the name of the game. | ||
| He is a symptom of a bigger thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As we go through, you might want to say that Project Camelot isn't right-wing, but boy, it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| If you look at the Venn diagram of guests who have been on both, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's that end of it. | ||
| We've expanded it even more, and I want to expand it to talk about other very... | ||
| Very clear hucksters. | ||
| Not to say that we're going to leave Alex Jones or anything like that, but I feel like we're in this... | ||
| I don't feel like it's a holding pattern or anything like that, but I feel like we're on the cusp of evolving into something new while not abandoning what we have been, but... | ||
| I think I can speak for both of us and say that it's not pleasant to do episodes about the present day. | ||
| I think what you just described is that we have outgrown the small pond that is Alex Jones' bullshit. | ||
| Maybe intellectually, yeah. | ||
| And again, that's not to say leave Alex in the dust, because I still think he's the easiest person to illustrate a lot of these truths about. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I need to, in order for me to treat this like a job and to continue moving forward, one of the things that I need to do is have some sort of intellectual exercise to it. | ||
| There needs to be some kind of rigor to it that makes it challenging and compelling. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm going through the motions of like, oh, here's Alex saying something that's not true that we've talked about over and then we try and fill. | ||
| So, what you're basically saying is that... | ||
| As Alex has gotten more and more boring to you, so has this job somewhat turned into a little bit of like a knowledge fight Starbucks, where it's like, really, I'm going in and I'm making coffee again. | ||
| No, that's not fair. | ||
| The same fucking coffee, huh? | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| The show isn't that. | ||
| I still love everything about this. | ||
| His show. | ||
| But yes, for me to sit down and listen to anything current, it is that. | ||
| It is a slog, and it's just like, why am I even doing this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need to bring you some fulfillment in life, Dan. | |
| So, this introduction, I guess, is my way of saying that as we move forward, there may be, I don't know, there might be tweaks. | ||
| We haven't really had a conversation about exactly what we need to do. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Because we don't really have off-air meetings or anything. | ||
| But I do feel the need. | ||
| And if, you know, I'm open to any input from listeners, if anybody has any ideas. | ||
| I would love to hear what you think. | ||
| We should become. | ||
| I'm not going to take your... | ||
| This is the problem with you millennial podcast hosts. | ||
| You're always talking about fulfillment. | ||
| You're always talking about all this shit. | ||
| You know, the older generation of podcast hosts, they would go to work, they would toil in their coal podcasts for eight hours a day, they would go home to a wife they hate, and they would fucking deal with it, Dan. | ||
| Goddamn millennials, you're ruining the podcast industry. | ||
| I really could hear Adam Carolla saying that. | ||
| Yeah, I wish I was farther away from what somebody might say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Back in my day. | |
| When I started podcasting. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why don't people think I'm relevant anymore? | |
| So anyway, no matter what, we're going to keep going full steam ahead as a show. | ||
| Maybe you won't even notice the incremental changes that happen. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Just like creeping fascism. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, something that is not creeping is a new donor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Love it. | ||
| Great transition. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'd like to give a shout out to a new donor. | ||
| Thank you so much, B. I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks, B. Generally, I hate things that are B's. | ||
| Because they scare me. | ||
| Flying little insects that sting you. | ||
| Because of Stand By Me? | ||
| No, not Stand By Me. | ||
| My girl. | ||
| My girl. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| It's the sassy sister film. | ||
| No, I think I got stung by a bee when I was really young and I assumed it hurt that much. | ||
| But I was just a kid. | ||
| Things hurt more when you're a kid. | ||
| I imagined that, like, getting stung by a bee as an adult would almost incapacitate me, but I realized, nah, it probably wouldn't be. | ||
| When I was a kid, I was, like, five years old, and this is a weird story about my dumb family. | ||
| Thrilled. | ||
| Thrilled to hear this. | ||
| I was playing, like, a little, like, a wiffle ball with my grandfather, and I was, like, five years old, and we had a bass system that was built around the trees. | ||
| And he decided that third base was the tree that had a giant beehive on it. | ||
| But he didn't tell me that. | ||
| He knew about it. | ||
| He specifically knew about this in advance. | ||
| This was not an unheard of thing. | ||
| Is this a prank? | ||
| He was like, no! | ||
| And he was like, yeah, yeah, we're just going to keep playing. | ||
| Don't even worry about it. | ||
| So I hit the thing. | ||
| I'm running around the bases, touching third, like a fucking baller. | ||
| B, bam! | ||
| Like, three of them stung me right on the top of my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, now that's a boring story. | ||
| That is. | ||
| However, I learned that my grandmother, at one point in time, either knew how to make a poultice, had heard of a poultice, or just put some shit into a boiling pan and then put it on my head. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It was one of the weirder things I've ever... | ||
| She has exhibited zero down-home country wisdom. | ||
| Except for that one instance. | ||
| Except for one poultice. | ||
| And thank God she was there. | ||
| It has never been... | ||
| I swear to God, it never happened before. | ||
| It has never happened afterwards. | ||
| I feel like if I knew how to make poultices, I would be doing that shit all the time. | ||
| I feel like you just want to say poultice over and over again. | ||
| I can't stop saying it now! | ||
| Well, you'll have many opportunities on this episode. | ||
| Dan, do you have a bug bite? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| If you did and I had poultice-making abilities, we would cover that shit. | ||
| It would be like Jack Spratt and his wife. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, Jordan, like I said, we're not going to be talking about Alex Jones. | ||
| Today we're going to be dipping our toe into another weird world. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we all know this guy. | ||
| We met him a little bit in a recent episode. | ||
| And here's an Out of Context drop from today's episode. | ||
| It does get weary raising money all the time because you just got to do it to pay the bills. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that is rough, Jim Baker. | ||
| Thanks, Jim. | ||
| We really... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boy. | |
| It does get weary. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| Boy, that is the most ridiculous thing that you could say as a rich, dumbass fucking human being. | ||
| Right, absolutely. | ||
| As someone who most of your life is co-opting scripture and shit like that in order to get money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your primary motivation is getting the money. | ||
| It's not really about the Christianity aspect of it, so I imagine that would be tiresome. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Yeah, it's very wearying to do this job. | ||
| And I can't tell you what that job is, because this job is scamming you by asking you for money. | ||
| But I wish I hadn't said that last part. | ||
| Hey, it's tiring to ask for money! | ||
| So today, Jordan, on our first venture into the world of Jim Baker, the new Jim Baker show, we went over an episode where he had fellow Alex Jones guest Steve Quayle on. | ||
| To give a sort of a concrete bridge between the Alex Jones show and the Jim Baker show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And today I have a different guest that will create more of a philosophical bridge. | ||
| Ben Jaker. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Oh, that'd be great. | ||
| If you just had an upside down version of him. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Like a Mr. Mixleplix. | ||
| Or if you just came out like Rainbow Snatch. | ||
| I could totally see him doing... | ||
| If he did like a count... | ||
| Point-counterpoint bit that didn't... | ||
| Even Stephen? | ||
| Colbert, didn't Colbert? | ||
| Yeah, even Stephen. | ||
| Him and Steve Carell? | ||
| If he did that, that'd be fucking fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| No! | ||
| That'd be fucking fantastic. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Oh, man, that was some good parody. | ||
| It was good stuff. | ||
| Didn't change anything. | ||
| No, he really nailed it, and so far it has still kept going. | ||
| Everyone's still just yelling no at each other. | ||
| So, here is where we start and we get the announcement of this guest who I'm almost certain you've never heard of, but will infuriate you to no end. | ||
| It'd be amazing if I do this guy personally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello and welcome to the Jim Baker Show. | |
| I'm your co-host, Tammy Sue Baker. | ||
| Today's very special guest, Paula White Kane. | ||
| And her husband, Jonathan Cain. | ||
| Now, please give a warm welcome to my parents and the host of The Jim Baker Show, Jim and Lori Baker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| Their announcer is their kid. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also... | ||
| Holy fucking shit! | ||
| Also, co-host is putting it incredibly strongly. | ||
| Tabi Sue Baker doesn't say word one through this fucking thing. | ||
| She's very silently just at the table. | ||
| But, so do you know who Paula White Kane or Jonathan Kane are? | ||
| No. | ||
| I will start with... | ||
| I'm really unhappy about this whole... | ||
| She's the announcer. | ||
| The kid is the announcer for the show. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| But she's there. | ||
| Yeah, she's usually there, but she's an adult. | ||
| So if I understand correctly, she, as an adult, did not divorce her name from her parents' name forever and ever in perpetuity. | ||
| No. | ||
| Instead, she was brought back in like a return to the dynasty of evil peddling con men, and she becomes her own fucking mafia, Don, below that level. | ||
| I'm sure she gets to wet her beak. | ||
| Yeah, exactly! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| On the food bucket. | ||
| Oh, gotta get that food bucket money. | ||
| She gets a year's worth of food every time she opens up her mouth. | ||
| And only one time a show when she says, here are my parents. | ||
| So I'll start with Jonathan Cain, because this is going to blow your goddamn mind. | ||
| Jonathan Cain doesn't talk much during this episode, so we're not going to talk extensively about him. | ||
| On a Christian show, the man not talking does blow my mind a little bit. | ||
| Would you believe that Jonathan Cain is one of the main members of the band Journey? | ||
| He's not the original. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this right now, Dan. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's not the original keyboard player, but he was the keyboard player during their main run. | ||
| So he has a writing credit on Don't Stop Believing. | ||
| So he's Don't Stop Believing, Jonathan Cain. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And they do have him play it live. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, they have him sit down at a piano and play Don't Stop Believing. | ||
| I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| But he's not the guy who sings. | ||
| He has a decent voice, but he's no Arnel Pineda or Steve Perry. | ||
| Steve's not coming to this show. | ||
| Steve is not coming to that show. | ||
| But it's really weird because it's like, well, I mean, this is a guy. | ||
| This is like a big... | ||
| He has writing credits on most of their hits. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| He's loaded. | ||
| There's a difference between... | ||
| Yes, he is rich as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, that's why... | ||
| Because I hope you're not saying that he's, like, a famous guy. | ||
| He is. | ||
| I mean, he's... | ||
| Not in, like, terms of, like, recognizability or anything like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Most people don't know his name or couldn't pick him out of a lineup. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But he's super rich. | ||
| And people who love Journey know who he is, so he probably could get a lot of backstage action. | ||
| And people who love Jersey are really easy to get rid of, to divorce from $40. | ||
| That is what I know about Journey fandom, is that they will send $40 to just about anywhere. | ||
| I mean, if they pay $40 for tickets to see Journey at this point, they'll send $40 in for food buckets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Give me a year's worth of food or a shot at Journey, whatever you got. | ||
| So I don't know what his story is, necessarily. | ||
| They talk about how he and Paula White Kane met, and apparently they, I don't know, something about they were on the same plane, and she talked to him the whole time, and I think, from what I... | ||
| From what I can imagine, he probably was tired of the rock star life or something like that. | ||
| Maybe had some problems, and she's a very strong woman, let's say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Commandeering, perhaps. | ||
| She's a bit motherly? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I wouldn't like that. | ||
| If she was my mother, I wouldn't like that at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| But I think that maybe she... | ||
| He corrected some of his lifestyle issues that he might have had. | ||
| Oh, did he even... | ||
| Wait, did he convert? | ||
| Like, is he a... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, he's gone evangelical. | ||
| Like, he's born again. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, he's that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, that guy's fucked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| That guy never had a chance. | ||
| And from what I can tell, he's still in Journey, so good for him. | ||
| Not for much longer after this. | ||
| I mean, this is from 2017, so it's a little ways back, this appearance. | ||
| But also, the only other thing I really know is they got married three times, which is, they have a nice, fun line. | ||
| It's like, you know, he said we were never going to get married, and then we married three times. | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| We just had three wedding ceremonies. | ||
| We just love weddings. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Well, then you just got married once and then had three parties. | ||
| My prediction is that it's actually also Paula White Cain's third husband, and so maybe she's trying to undo the other ones. | ||
| Like, yeah, I've been married three times, but I married you three times. | ||
| She gets a redo. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| She's got to undo all that. | ||
| That's a loophole in the law I did not expect. | ||
| And God's Law. | ||
| Yeah, even God's like, shit, I didn't think of that. | ||
| So you don't know anything about Paula White Cain? | ||
| I do not know anything about... | ||
| I do like saying Paula White Cain. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| So we'll get... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Let's see if you can have some context clues you can pick up as we go along. | ||
| I don't like your Cheshire Cat grin. | ||
| We're so grateful that you could come by. | ||
| I know your schedule's extremely busy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You were preaching last night till almost midnight. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And so here you are here. | ||
| You're catching a plane in another hour or so going somewhere else. | ||
| But you have unbelievable energy. | ||
| You know, God is so good. | ||
| It says He gives us boundless energy. | ||
| And I believe when we really surrender, of course we do the right things. | ||
| We try to eat right and exercise and take care of ourselves. | ||
| But also, it's really the life of Christ in us. | ||
| And I've got to say, how could I not come here? | ||
| I am sitting with one of the greatest generals that God has ever raised up in the earth. | ||
| One of the greatest rapists. | ||
| And I honor you. | ||
| I thank God for you. | ||
| I have always, the countless lives, you've paved the path for so many of us and sometimes people forget really the significance and who you are spiritually. | ||
| So, what I think she's saying there that I find very interesting is, like, you've paved the path. | ||
| I just wrote that down. | ||
| You've paved the path. | ||
| Wrote that down so fast. | ||
| The moment she said that, I was like, oh, we're in for a you guys are gonna fucking do your dance on us. | ||
| Well, because the path that he paved is a really lucrative business out of religion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Duh! | |
| Of course he paved the path. | ||
| It has nothing to do with, like, some sort of... | ||
| Joel Osteen isn't around if it works for this motherfucker right here. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| So, she is a televangelist and also adherent of the prosperity gospel. | ||
| Oh, what a surprise! | ||
| It's almost like they know each other. | ||
| Yeah, and, you know, of course, the idea of, you know, you paved the path is that you made it possible for people like me to scam millions of dollars from people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, yeah. | ||
| On TV. | ||
| Now, let's not lie. | ||
| Evangelicalism has been scamming millions upon millions upon millions of people. | ||
| It has scammed almost as many people as malaria has killed throughout Christianity's history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just... | ||
| Go back to the beginning, man. | ||
| The revivalist tents of the early 1900s were fucking packed. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| Yeah, it's ridiculous. | ||
| Christianity is all a scam, but these guys are so fucking good at it. | ||
| And they put on a good show, they do a little dance, they do some singing, then you gotta worry about... | ||
| The guy from Journey in there? | ||
| Oh, the guy from Journey's there! | ||
| Wait, the guy from Journey married a televangelist. | ||
| We gotta really hammer this thought home for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| You just gotta let that go. | ||
| I don't know if I can. | ||
| I don't understand people who marry televangelists. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| It seems suspicious. | ||
| So she used to be the pastor of this Tampa church called Without Walls International Church. | ||
| And this story here from 2014. | ||
| Citing millions in liabilities, Without Walls International Church is seeking bankruptcy protection. | ||
| A move a major lender asserts in court papers is an attempt to dodge a foreclosure judgment. | ||
| The California-based Evangelical Christian Credit Union says the Tampa... | ||
| The megachurch owes it $29 million. | ||
| It calls Without Wall's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 5th a, quote, litigation tactic to prevent foreclosure on the West Columbus Drive Church and also a shuttered church in Polk County. | ||
| So, at the time, she was preaching the prosperity gospel and, you know, making tons of money from this church. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, mysteriously, somehow they're $29 million in debt when she's living an amazing lifestyle. | ||
| Jet-setting. | ||
| It does seem odd. | ||
| Well, the prosperity that God is providing for her has nothing to do with the church itself. | ||
| The church itself is like $29 million in debt. | ||
| No, but God wouldn't allow that church to go $29 million in debt. | ||
| It's the congregant's fault. | ||
| He appointed his very own credit union to lend her money. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's the congregation's fault. | ||
| She had plenty of faith. | ||
| But she was let down by the parishioners and the people who came to church, and that's why the church would be able to be $29 million while she still is doing quite well. | ||
| Because her faith is too good. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then she, after that, ended up running a church, which she still runs now, called the New Destiny Christian Center in Apopka, a city near Orlando. | ||
| Has that church been, like, are the proceedings still, is it still litigated? | ||
| Are they still fighting it out? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| Is that even her real name anymore? | ||
| Did she change her name and burn everything down? | ||
| Like Kaiser Soce? | ||
| Like, what's going on here? | ||
| She's Paula White Kane. | ||
| So, look, my point is more like, you know, alright, we got the sort of traditional backstory of huckster preachers who end up wrecking everything in their wake. | ||
| Much like Trump bankrupting businesses and walking away with money or any of these abusive capitalist fucks. | ||
| Just like it says in the Bible. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So she has that in her background, and that only makes it make crystal clear sense why this happens. | ||
| It seems like you're at the White House every day. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| We're on a little committee thing for pastors, and we call in, and you're always on the phone from the White House, too. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I try to make it up at least every week. | ||
| We do. | ||
| Sometimes I'm up there several times. | ||
| And you guys pray. | ||
| We pray. | ||
| I know the world don't like praying. | ||
| But we love praying. | ||
| You know, a lot of people, our president loves prayer. | ||
| I will never forget, we were, oh, John wasn't doing a show still, so I went to the Kennedy Center for the Faith and Freedom, and I loved it because he went off script for a while, and he just said, let me tell you something. | ||
| As long as I am president, you will pray, and you can always pray at your football games. | ||
| You can pray in school. | ||
| You can pray. | ||
| And I loved it. | ||
| I was just like, you go. | ||
| You go. | ||
| Whoever thought of making prayer illegal? | ||
| No one. | ||
| I am. | ||
| Now. | ||
| Not super much now. | ||
| Not private. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, so illegal. | ||
| If I catch you praying, unless it's to any number of gods, just this one. | ||
| Just whatever prayer you are saying to Jim Baker and Paula White's God, illegal. | ||
| Illegal. | ||
| Well, see, here's the thing. | ||
| Paula White is maybe Trump's spiritual center. | ||
| She's the one who gave... | ||
| Oh, you mean empty. | ||
| Morally and just empty. | ||
| She gave the benediction at Trump's inauguration. | ||
| She gave a... | ||
| Really? | ||
| She prayed at Trump's inauguration. | ||
| Really? | ||
| She was one of the pastors that came and laid hands on him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| All the photo ops and shit like that. | ||
| She's not a pastor, though! | ||
| She's a con woman! | ||
| Well, but that's part of it, man. | ||
| This is all, like, this is endemic. | ||
| This is the system that we have operating right now. | ||
| The right wing, and especially, you know... | ||
| Things like this. | ||
| This version of the right wing is all beholden to cons. | ||
| Everyone's running cons, and so they work together on these cons. | ||
| How can I elevate you while you elevate me, falsely? | ||
| It's all interconnected con people helping each other. | ||
| Didn't we used to have a system where it was every con man for himself? | ||
| We got fucked whenever they teamed up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They teamed up like a motherfucking blockbuster, and they are running rampant on us. | ||
| They didn't realize that they could Ocean's Eleven the world. | ||
| They went from politics, or they started a religion or politics or whatever, they just fucking expanded everywhere like a goddamn evil octopus. | ||
| Fucking crazy! | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's wild. | ||
| So one other problem is that, and I mean this literally, Paula White is a heretic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like, she was excommunicated from a church and she'll be put to death as soon as possible ability? | ||
| I don't know about the death part, but she should be excommunicated because she's made many statements that deny the Nicene Creed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which, if you don't know, is one of the foundations of Christian dogma. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| The Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed are foundations that pretty much every branch of Christianity follows. | ||
| I only respect the Assassin's Creed, Dan. | ||
| I understand that, and I respect your... | ||
| Bleh. | ||
| Everything is permitted, Dan. | ||
| So the Nicene Creed goes basically a little something like this. | ||
| We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and things visible and invisible. | ||
| And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of Father, and God the Father, the only begotten, that is the essence of the Father. | ||
| God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten and not made, and of the same nature of the Father, and by whom all things came into being in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. | ||
| So there's a lot more. | ||
| And this is the Armenian version, but it's the same as... | ||
| It's spiritually the same as the other versions, which the... | ||
| The essence of the Nicene Creed comes down to the idea that Jesus Christ was the only Son of God, and he was of the same material as God. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Those things are incredibly important for every branch of Christianity. | ||
| It's pretty big. | ||
| Pretty much every branch of Christianity. | ||
| There's probably a couple examples that are way on the fringe. | ||
| Do you really want to talk about how great that Jesus got without ever, like, hey, what Jesus did was great? | ||
| Let's not talk about that, though. | ||
| Let's not apply what Jesus did to anything else. | ||
| He was great. | ||
| Let's never talk about what he did. | ||
| So, multiple times, Paula White has made the statement that, quote, Jesus is not the only begotten son of God. | ||
| He is the first fruit. | ||
| And things like that. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Well, it's meant to imply... | ||
| It's sort of like a... | ||
| You're all Jesus? | ||
| Well, here's... | ||
| Are we going back to, like, the genetic line of Jesuses? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It comes back to cons. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because firstfruits is an idea that people from the prosperity gospel and the evangelical world really abuse. | ||
| They have this, and especially Paula White, she does this all the time, this idea that firstfruits belong to God. | ||
| So she encourages people who watch her shows to give their first month's salary of the year to the church because you give a sacrifice of the first fruits and that assures more plentiful harvest for the rest of the year because you know God's going to provide for you if you provide for the church. | ||
| So even the phrasing that she's using in these times when she's talking about... | ||
| Jesus wasn't the only son of God. | ||
| He was the first fruit. | ||
| That was God offering the first fruit as sacrifice in order to have a more plentiful harvest later, which would imply that there are more sons of God, which is a direct counter to the Nicaean Creed, and is part of the heresy that the Council of Nicaea came together to correct. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So all of this stuff, like, she is... | ||
| Way outside of Christianity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Even within the prosperity gospel, which is way outside of Christianity. | ||
| I don't think Creflo a dollar would be heretical. | ||
| Nah. | ||
| It's one thing to lust after money so much that you make it this overt about, like, you know, give me all this money and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You show up on Jim Baker's fucking show. | ||
| It is wearying to ask for so much money. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So tiring. | ||
| It's so tiring. | ||
| But that's, you know... | ||
| It's super important. | ||
| A lot of people have written about this, about how it's so offensive that Trump would have her give the prayer. | ||
| And even Christian folk are like, if he had a Buddhist or a Hindu person or a Muslim give a prayer, that is not offensive. | ||
| What is offensive is someone who believes in a heretical version of Christianity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Presenting themselves as Christians in a way that is dangerous to the faith of the church. | ||
| No, Alistair Crowley gave my benediction whenever I was baptized. | ||
| Perfectly fine. | ||
| Yeah, totally fine. | ||
| No problems there. | ||
| There's only one true law. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| It's a good prayer. | ||
| So this is a bit of a problem. | ||
| Fucking yeah! | ||
| This is a bit of a problem for Paula White. | ||
| She is a heretic who has apparently also bankrupted churches. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now is Trump's favorite preacher. | ||
| I don't know why they would see a lot of themselves in each other. | ||
| Kind of like game-recognized games. | ||
| It's a little bit like that. | ||
| So, in this next clip, she talks about how she's been friends with Trump for a really long time. | ||
| I don't like that either. | ||
| And, man, I'll tell you what, you might not know this, Trump loves prayer. | ||
| I've known our president for 16 years. | ||
| I'm sure we'll get into that, but in 2011, to show you... | ||
| That's the next question, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| To show you how much our... | ||
| President loves prayer in 2011. | ||
| By this time, I've had an extended relationship with him. | ||
| He calls me up and he says, Paul, I'm thinking about running for president. | ||
| He said, would you bring some men and women of God to really pray? | ||
| I need to hear from God. | ||
| Now, he wasn't saying bring them around because I want to vote or I want this. | ||
| He said, I really want to hear. | ||
| So I brought about three friends. | ||
| We went in and we stayed for six hours praying. | ||
| Talking about God. | ||
| Praying. | ||
| Talking about where our nation was. | ||
| Praying. | ||
| Six hours. | ||
| This was back in 2011. | ||
| So the next day he calls me up. | ||
| He says, what do you think God's saying? | ||
| I said, I don't believe it's time. | ||
| I said, let's keep praying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me too. | |
| Because he had to make a decision within 24 hours that affected some things with the network and some businesses that he was doing. | ||
| And so we continued to pray. | ||
| And he said, Paula, just have the prayer groups pray. | ||
| And what he was asking was, I really want to do what God has for me. | ||
| So we should talk a little bit about 2011. | ||
| So Trump did really play around with running for president in 2011. | ||
| Oh yeah, I recall. | ||
| He's played around with running for president since he was like nine. | ||
| Yeah, in an article from The Guardian, quote, in a statement he said, quote, after considerable deliberation and reflection, I've decided not to pursue the office of the presidency. | ||
| This decision does not come easily or without regret, especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country. | ||
| Nice way to end it, Trump. | ||
| In spite of Trump's claims about being frontrunner in the polls, one published Monday by Politico and George Washington University showed 71% of those surveyed thought he had no chance of becoming president. | ||
| Simpler time. | ||
| Oh, much better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Much better. | |
| In 2011, Donald Trump got roasted on Comedy Central by such comedy heavyweights and real-life Donald Trump friends as Snoop Dogg, Larry King, and The Situation from the Jersey Shore. | ||
| That did happen, didn't it? | ||
| Also, Trump was a real asshole during that roast. | ||
| This is from someone who was there behind-the-scenes information. | ||
| Quote, Trump complained that the woman he was supposed to hand his coat to on stage wasn't hot enough. | ||
| He demanded the jokes implying he's not as rich as he says he were were off-limits. | ||
| him only as Mr. Trump. | ||
| Hair jokes were also apparently off limits until one was written that managed to tie in his wealth into the punchline, and even then, the net worth used in the joke became a negotiation. | ||
| He was a complete shithead. | ||
| Doesn't sound like a man of God. | ||
| This lady I give my coat to isn't hot enough. | ||
| Yeah, but he was talking in spiritual terms. | ||
| You could feel that she wasn't praying that much, Dan. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Her heat for God? | |
| Cole! | ||
| Interesting theory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cole! | |
| That's a possible theory. | ||
| I need a godly matron to hand me my coat when I walk up there. | ||
| I want a woman wearing, I'll be goddamned if it isn't, a fucking... | ||
| Shit, what's the show? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| The Roast? | ||
| Handmaid's Tale. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Handmaid's Tale. | ||
| That's what I was reaching for. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Isn't it also funny that Snoop Dogg was one of the people who roasted him, and now in the present day, Alex Jones screams about Snoop Dogg making that video where he puts a gun to Trump's head and the bang flag comes out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't it funny that it's kind of like, oh, everyone's just, this is all fake? | ||
| I think it's funnier that Snoop Dogg hosts a game show. | ||
| I think he's hosted a few. | ||
| Has he? | ||
| He's very charismatic. | ||
| I've never watched one. | ||
| I kind of want to. | ||
| So, also, in 2011, that was the year when President Obama and Seth Meyers humiliated Donald Trump at the correspondence dinner. | ||
| And a lot of people believe that's what motivated him to try and run for president in earnest. | ||
| I don't know if I necessarily believe that 100%, but... | ||
| It fits. | ||
| It's something that a lot of people seem to believe. | ||
| Also... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is so stupid. | ||
| The idea that he's like, I just need everybody to pray. | ||
| Back in 2011, we know what he was doing in 2011. | ||
| This is all bullshit. | ||
| And let's talk about what he would have done in 2011. | ||
| First of all, he was never going to run because he knew Barack Obama was going to fucking win against anybody. | ||
| He didn't want to be humiliated by losing in that election. | ||
| God, if only he had. | ||
| No, I don't think any amount of cheating could have bolstered that. | ||
| No, he would have gone down that one. | ||
| And the social media infrastructure they had probably wasn't nearly as good as it needed to be in order to sway people as well as it did. | ||
| But Trump, in 2011, talked about Dreamers on Fox& Friends. | ||
| Quote, You have people in this country for 20 years. | ||
| They've done a great job. | ||
| They've done wonderfully. | ||
| They've gone to school. | ||
| They've gotten good marks. | ||
| They're productive. | ||
| Separate them from their parents. | ||
| Now we're supposed to kick them out of the country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't believe in that. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| I mean, he does now. | ||
| Yeah, well, he spent another six years watching Fox and Friends. | ||
| Having this crazy broad pray for him. | ||
| Wait, so this story she just told is... | ||
| Complete fabrication. | ||
| I mean, I bet... | ||
| There's no way any of this is true. | ||
| I bet they knew each other. | ||
| I don't think Trump has an attention span that he... | ||
| According to every report we've heard from his... | ||
| Outgoing staff. | ||
| It's like, he has an attention span of, hi Trump, and then he runs away and scurries under a hole and cries. | ||
| His dementia might not have been as bad seven years ago. | ||
| Well, that's possible. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| That's an element to consider. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's possible. | |
| But then also, like, yeah, I think most of the fundamentals of this are the embellishment of televangelism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't think this is true at all. | ||
| I think it's like, I have my horse here. | ||
| I have my guy. | ||
| That is my guy, and I'm going to do everything I can in order to create this backstory where we're intimately involved and he's been on the right side of things forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because if I don't, I have to wrestle with the fact that I have chosen to take this con man and believe all these positive things about him when the evidence is... | ||
| All to the contrary. | ||
| And in 2011, he didn't even believe in the principles. | ||
| I'm thrilled he's enacting now in terms of what you do with immigrants. | ||
| But what she's got to rely on is the rules of the code. | ||
| She's got the con man's code. | ||
| As long as she's helping him out, he's going to... | ||
| Corroborate whatever dumb shit she says. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Just doesn't even matter. | ||
| Like, oh yeah, no, we prayed for seven hours. | ||
| Wait, did she say six? | ||
| It was ten hours! | ||
| It doesn't fucking matter. | ||
| She probably just didn't realize she was in a prayer trance. | ||
| Yeah, this is a... | ||
| Lost a few hours. | ||
| This is imaginary televangelist bullshit. | ||
| But of course it is. | ||
| They're all liars. | ||
| This is such a lie, though. | ||
| It's so bleak. | ||
| Why do you expect truth from liars? | ||
| How do you buy this? | ||
| Who are these people? | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| So, at this point, Paula goes on to talk a little bit. | ||
| The crowd went, yeah, prayer! | ||
| They love it. | ||
| Prayer! | ||
| So, Paula wants to, she's in the middle of a story here. | ||
| The rest of the story isn't really all that important. | ||
| It's kind of just more about praying with Trump and stuff like that. | ||
| So you'll notice that it's a little bit jarring. | ||
| We come in in the middle of the story, but the only thing that's really important is what she says at the end, which is one indication that everyone should be like, this person is nuts. | ||
| And then within minutes, right, he calls in and he says, send Paula out to pray. | ||
| So now I'd already been praying for six hours because the Lord said, you're going to lay hands on him. | ||
| And so we go in, of course, Melania Barron and some others were around him and the family. | ||
| And I just started praying. | ||
| And I'm just telling you, I'm going to say what I did. | ||
| I started prophesying. | ||
| I started speaking prophetic declarations and praying. | ||
| Paula, you're healthy. | ||
| No, don't clap yet! | ||
| Don't clap yet! | ||
| Wait until the prophecy is said! | ||
| They made a cut there, too, in the video that Jim Baker put out. | ||
| They just went to applause and then him changing the subject. | ||
| I don't know if she explained. | ||
| So she may have said what prophecy she said, and then they cut it so it looked like people were clapping that she had done it in the first place, not what she had prophesied was like, and this guy, I believe that Trump is going to make this a whites-only nation, and then everybody clapped. | ||
| But in the broadcast, you can't clap. | ||
| Yeah, you can't let her say that part. | ||
| I don't know if she ever gives any specifics on the prophecy stuff. | ||
| And I know that she does talk about one thing. | ||
| I don't know if I have the clip of it here. | ||
| But she talks about how, like, when she came to God, when she was a wee 18-year-old or so. | ||
| I think that's her backstory. | ||
| After she heard Don't Stop Believin' for the first time. | ||
| Heard those soft keys. | ||
| Also, he has a writing credit on Faithfully. | ||
| That's pretty exciting. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| There's a clip. | ||
| There's a clip that I don't have because it was from a different video that they put out. | ||
| But Lori Baker is talking about how back when she... | ||
| She apparently has a real rough backstory. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| She did some drugs in the past. | ||
| Oh, so she's also born again. | ||
| She's born again. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so, like, she's talking about how they used to listen to Journey. | ||
| And she's talking about, like, back in that day, I was living wild. | ||
| We had, like, drug paraphernalia on the tables. | ||
| But we would be... | ||
| We would be up late. | ||
| We would be up late with our drug paraphernalia. | ||
| But even though we were doing drugs, we would still turn on Christian TV. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And I'm like, I can relate to that. | ||
| Yeah, you can enjoy that as long as you're doing drugs. | ||
| It's when you're not doing drugs and you put that on that you're in real trouble. | ||
| Well, back when I first started smoking weed, me and my buddies, what we would do is we would try and sync up music to this guy. | ||
| I don't remember his real name, but we called him The Rev. He was a televangelist in central Missouri. | ||
| And he was very, like, he did a lot of hand gestures and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So we tried to find music that would sync up perfectly with him so we could mute him and watch him dance to music. | ||
| See, now that's great. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| We would do that. | ||
| I don't think that's what she's talking about. | ||
| I don't understand why drugs are illegal, period. | ||
| What should be illegal is whatever it is she's doing. | ||
| Drugs that make whatever she's doing impossible to look at, I'm fine with. | ||
| So, anyway, when she was younger, she had a prophetic vision that she said God gave her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that was that she was going to be on all continents and that whenever she would speak... | ||
| People would be saved and miracles would happen, but if she closed her mouth, all the evils of the world would happen and shit like that. | ||
| So basically just like a sort of a allegorical explanation for why she doesn't shut up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I don't mean this to be like this lady is mouthy. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| The problem is she has got a spot where it's hard to attack her without... | ||
| Without dipping into the misogynistic language. | ||
| I'm not on board with any of that, but I will say if anybody wants to go listen to these episodes, please go for it, and then feel sad for me trying to edit this stuff together, or trying to find points where I can stop it. | ||
| Because she doesn't ever stop talking. | ||
| She just takes little breaths and then goes to new thoughts. | ||
| It is just a rambling, like it's clearly she's on something. | ||
| She's probably on Adderall or something like that. | ||
| Well, she's got a long flight. | ||
| She's traveling a lot. | ||
| She's got to do some uppers. | ||
| It turns out that her husband is the guy from Journey, so she knows a guy. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| There's pressured speech elements to it. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| So, now, I believe that I have thoroughly called myself out at this point for... | ||
| The minimal and unfortunate slight misogyny that I expressed by saying this broad earlier. | ||
| But hey, look, this is a setup for the next clip. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Fair enough. | ||
| So I apologize for that if anyone's offended, but you should be more offended by this. | ||
| Some of the ladies especially, men too, need this book. | ||
| I don't know why I'm really feeling this thing with women today. | ||
| They need it because that obedience. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| That's my whole life. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| That's what I've been saying. | ||
| Yes, sir, to God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you, if you, if you, people say, why does God use you, Jim? | |
| You're so fumbly, bumbly, and old, and everything. | ||
| God uses me because I say yes all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| And that's all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all. | |
| But that was that obedient, and the minute you hear it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh, I love it. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Go ahead now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's cringy. | ||
| Oh my god, this hurts me physically. | ||
| This hurts every part of the way they speak? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I actually kind of like how Jim speaks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| I hate it. | ||
| I think there's something cute about his vocal patterns. | ||
| Every time he speaks, I believe less in God. | ||
| If God was real, he would shut that mouth he brought up and let Paula White talk. | ||
| Yeah, shut up, Jim. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| What I'm more interested in as a whole is, boy, I got real red flags whenever con men preach obedience. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That always seems to me like, hey, maybe you just want people to be malleable and follow your every command. | ||
| I just feel like women should really listen to this, and some men too, but I think women really should read your book because it's that obedience. | ||
| That's what women don't, and some men too, but women don't understand obedience. | ||
| I don't know why I'm feeling to the women today. | ||
| Women don't understand obedience. | ||
| Do you hear me, Lori? | ||
| And Tammy Sue. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's something that you can't get away from that's really there that you're expressing. | ||
| I don't know why I'm feeling it. | ||
| I don't know why I'm feeling like telling women what to do so much today. | ||
| God, that sounds right. | ||
| So the book that she wrote is about Esther. | ||
| Oh, no, that's not good. | ||
| That's a blank slate. | ||
| We'll get to that here in a second when she gets to it, but it's important that she's really idolizing Esther and being like, we need to raise up Esthers. | ||
| Yeah, that's not a good idea. | ||
| Why don't you choose Ruth? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Yeah, I think we both know why she doesn't choose Ruth. | ||
| We'll get to that in a little bit. | ||
| But first, Paula White wants to tell you a little bit about what kind of man Donald Trump is. | ||
| He's a good man, and she knows it because of a couple really innocuous details about his behavior. | ||
| And one of the best ways that I can describe him is if he says, I'm going to be there at 12 o 'clock, he will be there at 12. I can tell you the story just like Mark Burnett will of Wednesday. | ||
| Mark Burnett came in and he says, he's pitching, you know, he's got the survivor and he's pitching the show called The Apprentice. | ||
| And he says to him, he pitches it and now President Trump, then Mr. Trump shakes his hand. | ||
| This is important. | ||
| He takes it and he shakes his hand. | ||
| He says, deal. | ||
| I can't tell the amount because it wasn't nearly what he'd be making later. | ||
| And he says yes. | ||
| And even Mark Burnett's told this to a certain degree. | ||
| And afterwards, I was in his office not many months after that, and he's telling me the story. | ||
| They call his agent, and he's with one of the big agencies, and there's two, basically William Morrison, CAA, and he's with one of the big agents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like preachers who know a lot about agencies are probably not good. | |
| And he says to his agent, But I shook his hand. | ||
| You aren't hearing what I'm saying. | ||
| He said, but I shook his hand. | ||
| And the expert's saying, don't do this. | ||
| This is absolutely disaster. | ||
| It didn't turn out to be too disastrous. | ||
| He said, don't do this. | ||
| He said, but I shook his hand. | ||
| So, he's punctual and loves a handshake. | ||
| Great. | ||
| President! | ||
| Because I know a lot of contracts that he's not honored. | ||
| You know, historically. | ||
| No, but he didn't shake his hand, Dan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a lot of contractors and stuff that he hasn't paid. | ||
| Yeah, but they didn't shake his hand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that's more important, though, the handshake of a contract. | ||
| Right, but they didn't physically shake his hand. | ||
| It doesn't count. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| God can't read English, Dan. | ||
| He didn't invent that shit. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| He doesn't know? | ||
| As long as you write it in English, God can't... | ||
| Follow up on it? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| He's like, okay, we'll translate it back into ancient Sumerian, and then we'll figure it out from there. | ||
| But for Christ's sakes. | ||
| Yeah, I should have thought about that. | ||
| Also, I think God says that all the time. | ||
| For Christ's sakes! | ||
| Fine, you can't take away his punctuality, though. | ||
| You can't take away his punctuality. | ||
| That's a man who knows how to be on time. | ||
| This is how I would describe him. | ||
| He's on time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Awesome. | ||
| It's a sincere talent. | ||
| There's no equivocating I can make. | ||
| It's a sincere talent to make a guy being on time one time, that story, into a like, and this is what kind of a great man he is. | ||
| He can go somewhere and you will say to him, we should meet at 12 o 'clock and he will meet you at 12 o 'clock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, can you imagine a man who can do something like that? | |
| And the way she says it, you're like... | ||
| I guess I can't. | ||
| I can very easily. | ||
| It might. | ||
| I would argue that when you pull out punctuality, that means you're having a tough time coming up with good attributes. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| He was on time. | ||
| That seems like a really low-scale sort of good character trait. | ||
| No. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| He was not warm. | ||
| He did not particularly enjoy my or I, his company. | ||
| He kept talking about not wanting to rent to black people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He really, really wanted us to shut up when we were praying after our sex. | ||
| He kept talking about genes. | ||
| He did talk about genes a lot. | ||
| He really mentioned how white he was and how white he wished everyone was. | ||
| He's really German. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| That's not bad because now he's blaming the Germans for not taking advantage of another Holocaust. | ||
| But he's on... | ||
| He was on time. | ||
| Much like the trains in Germany. | ||
| He was on time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Those were in Italy, right? | ||
| All over the place. | ||
| Not a lot of trains on time. | ||
| Mussolini made the trains run on time. | ||
| So did Hitler. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Any authoritarian leader loves trains. | ||
| Anyway, Jordan. | ||
| And so does Ayn Rand. | ||
| Trains are a big part of fascism. | ||
| It seems that way. | ||
| So, Jordan, we know one thing. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| That is that Jim Baker's got a lot of products that he likes to push. | ||
| Or at least years worth of them. | ||
| So we talked a bit about the food buckets on the last episode. | ||
| Which will never not delight me. | ||
| We don't learn anything more about the food buckets today, but he does do probably a ten minute irresponsible commercial for a water bottle that he's got. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| We have all of this food, but clothes rot? | ||
| Well, let me tell you something. | ||
| If you send in $700, we will give you one bucket of clothes. | ||
| That's not a bad bucket. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you get it now, we will give you a second bucket of clothes. | |
| Somehow you still have to add water to make the clothes. | ||
| Very weird. | ||
| Dehydrated clothes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We suggest pairing a white wine with these. | |
| So we got a water bottle commercial on this show. | ||
| They do a very long commercial for this water bottle. | ||
| And this is what I would describe as probably the most irresponsible part of it, because if anybody else does what they do, I think there's a chance they'll get sick, and this is very dangerous. | ||
| Don't do this. | ||
| Do you remember going into the rainforest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We went to the rainforest, and they said, do not drink the water. | |
| Well, we didn't know that. | ||
| Absolutely do not drink the water. | ||
| There was big signs that said absolutely do not drink the water. | ||
| But we read the signs after we drank the water from our water bottle. | ||
| So he just dipped his bottle right in the water. | ||
| Yeah, we did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here he sits. | |
| We sat in the rainforest in a little place with a roof on it, you know, like a picnic thing. | ||
| And we ate our lunch there. | ||
| We packed and everything. | ||
| And we drank our water from our bottles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Drank the non-drinkable water. | |
| You'd be dead right now if these bottles weren't good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They said there was pesticides and all types of nasty things inside there. | |
| We just drank right from it. | ||
| Well, it's a proven testimony that the bottles do work. | ||
| What? | ||
| Don't trust them. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Everything that Seychelles makes, they sell a big amount in Japan. | ||
| They have great soaps. | ||
| And all over the islands and armies, this is the number one bottle that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Armies. | |
| Use. | ||
| Why the hell did you drop that thought about Japan, and then why did that guy say, I'd hope so? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Is that a stereotype amongst white supremacist Christian evangelicals that I didn't know, that Japanese people don't drink enough clean water? | ||
| I'm guessing, if I had to guess, I don't know this, but I'm just guessing it has to do with Fukushima. | ||
| That's what I would guess. | ||
| I'm guessing that they believe that all water is unclean and radiated. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| That's my guess. | ||
| Because I can't think of any other reason. | ||
| You don't think it's going to go back to Nagasaki or something? | ||
| No, that's way too far back. | ||
| Or even if it's just like a random... | ||
| I like to imagine it now as more of like whenever you buy a movie ticket and somebody's like, hey, enjoy your show. | ||
| And you're like, yeah, you too. | ||
| And you're like, god, fuck, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| That, to me, sounds like... | ||
| He was just trying to find... | ||
| The guy's saying, I'd hope so? | ||
| He was just trying to agree in whatever possible way he could. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd hope everyone's buying this. | |
| And then it just got weird. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But don't do that. | ||
| Don't... | ||
| Hey, you know what? | ||
| I specifically hope the Japanese are using these. | ||
| Everybody else, I am ambivalent about it. | ||
| But the Japanese better be using these water bottles. | ||
| They could use it. | ||
| I would also just like to say a public service announcement. | ||
| Unless you have to, don't do this with Amazon water. | ||
| Don't ever do that. | ||
| Don't do this with any water you don't need to do that with. | ||
| It's probably very competent to getting out normal pollutants of water that you have with people who have Brita filters and shit like that. | ||
| It's probably very competent on that level. | ||
| Don't trust it to take poisons out of your water. | ||
| Here are our examples. | ||
| We have one story. | ||
| From a group of known liars and hucksters. | ||
| Who also have a financial interest in this lie. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And then we also have, I don't know, like Naked and Afraid? | ||
| If you don't even want to leave your house to find out how terrible bacteria in your water can destroy you? | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| Go ahead and watch Discovery Channel for a while. | ||
| You'll never drink water again. | ||
| That shit's gross. | ||
| Unless you're in Japan, in which case you better drink that water. | ||
| Drink the water. | ||
| It's like the reverse of that Dave Matthews song. | ||
| Do drink the water. | ||
| Do drink it. | ||
| There's no blood in the water. | ||
| So this commercial interruption, Paula wasn't there for it. | ||
| I guess it was probably pre-taped and they just dropped it in. | ||
| And so now we get back to Paula White. | ||
| If I was on the show and they started doing that water commercial... | ||
| And the guy from Jonathan Cain was there. | ||
| I'd just be like, yeah, man. | ||
| It's like there's a lot of smoke on this water. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about, Jonathan Cain from Journey? | ||
| That's deep purple. | ||
| Smoke on the water? | ||
| Yeah, but that's my point. | ||
| I'd just be fucking with him the whole time. | ||
| Every song. | ||
| Every classic rock song. | ||
| Every fucking one. | ||
| Throw it into his face. | ||
| Any references possible. | ||
| I was trying to come up with a way to bring in lights. | ||
| If I drank this water, me and my stomach would have to go separate ways.drawal.com So anyway, now Paula comes back. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I don't need no instructions to know how to drink water. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Foreigner. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| That was not a big hit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| No, fuck off. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Alright, now my classic rock is gone. | ||
| The boys are back in town, and they brought water filters. | ||
| If the boys are going to drink water, you better let them! | ||
| Alright, so Paula comes back, and she says some stupid shit. | ||
| I mean, what are you going to do? | ||
| I need to ask you, how can the president... | ||
| You can always get what you want, clean water. | ||
| ...withstand. | ||
| The hatred and the pressure. | ||
| Everything he says, they turn it around. | ||
| There's never been hatred like this to a president. | ||
| Never in my life. | ||
| They want to trip him up. | ||
| They asked for him to be assassinated even. | ||
| I'm going to even take it further, right? | ||
| I'm going to take it further because we're not wrestling against flesh and blood. | ||
| And there are people right now that are sending hate mail to me right now that are going to say, I can't believe you say this, but you've got to recognize what the real deal is. | ||
| Especially if you are a Christian right now, you have a responsibility that Jesus Christ gave you the infallible word of God and told you that you are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers. | ||
| She says principalities about 25 times. | ||
| She says principalities a lot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Against darkness, against wickedness. | ||
| And so you know the quadrants of the enemy and the principalities are going crazy. | ||
| Because principalities want to control nations by controlling a person. | ||
| And principalities cannot control this man because he surrounds himself with Christians. | ||
| He is a Christian. | ||
| He is a Christian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He loves... | |
| And like John said, he is fierce, he has a fortitude, he has an inner strength, but no... | ||
| Nobody could withstand in the natural this kind of pressure. | ||
| So I'm going to take it a step further. | ||
| We've got to pray. | ||
| I mean, not just pray, but fervently pray. | ||
| Men ought to always pray and not faint. | ||
| We have a responsibility. | ||
| Whether you like Him or don't like Him, you can't stand in God's Word and not be responsible to pray for those who are in positions of authority. | ||
| It is our God-given mandate. | ||
| It is our responsibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've got to pray the will of God to be done for him and through him. | |
| You've got to pray in alignment, not soulless prayers. | ||
| Whoa, still going. | ||
| Because if you pray soulless prayers, they're going to backfire and come back alive. | ||
| This is Whitney Houston holding the note at the end of the Bodyguard Band. | ||
| This is long. | ||
| No, but see, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I wanted to leave all that there to give a little bit of a taste of that's most of the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Her taking those little breaths and, like, keeping going and just being like... | ||
| With just... | ||
| Random as... | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Principalities. | ||
| She... | ||
| Quadrants. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is... | |
| Soulless... | ||
| Soulless prayers. | ||
| That's a soulless prayer. | ||
| That's Alex Jones. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That's exactly what Alex says. | ||
| It's 100%. | ||
| That's 100% Alex. | ||
| We don't wrestle with flesh and blood. | ||
| We wrestle with demons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| She brings in these code words that supposedly mean something. | ||
| Quadrants of the enemy. | ||
| You know the quadrants. | ||
| These principalities can't take over Trump because he's a Christian. | ||
| You've got 18 to 34 year old men. | ||
| You've got the elderly. | ||
| You've got, what are the four quadrants again? | ||
| Those are the ones that are important for selling movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| She's so talking in TV production terms. | ||
| And marketing. | ||
| She's so talking in marketing and TV production terms. | ||
| You know the quadrants of the enemy are the markets that we don't tap into. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Those are the ones who don't give me any money, so fuck them. | ||
| Fuck them. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's kind of the subtext. | ||
| Pretty much, yeah. | ||
| Well, maybe all of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think it's weird that she's giving up... | |
| Like, she's not even bothering to be better at hiding that she's talking about TV. | ||
| Like, everything she's talking about, she's not even bothering. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I wonder if that theme develops. | ||
| You should at least try to be like... | ||
| I am not talking about hitting a targeted audience of people who are both afraid of black people and also believe in a bullshit version of Christianity. | ||
| You know the demographics of our enemy. | ||
| They are in the non-white males. | ||
| Look! | ||
| Look out amongst yourselves in this audience, you old white people. | ||
| All. | ||
| All of you. | ||
| We know the demographics we're against. | ||
| Hey, look at you old white people. | ||
| Hey, all those old white people out there. | ||
| Choose any demographic you're against. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Ah, that's the ones we're against. | ||
| It's a bad quadrant. | ||
| Turns out it's about all of them. | ||
| So, you know how Alex Jones and all of these people put on victimhood as sort of a suit of armor? | ||
| Dude, Trump, when she said that Trump is withstanding a level of criticism that... | ||
| No man could withstand in the natural. | ||
| People fucking lynched Obama in effigy. | ||
| I was gonna say, have these... | ||
| And set it on fire. | ||
| Were they... | ||
| I mean, I get why they don't remember that. | ||
| And that's because they weren't doing it. | ||
| They don't want... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or... | |
| It's because she herself... | ||
| She herself had a lynched Obama effigy on her home, and then she's like, ah, no man could withstand this. | ||
| They're very keenly aware, whether they want to admit it or not, that the people who do support them are largely of that ilk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it does them no favors to admit that, so you pretend that piece of history didn't happen. | ||
| No one has ever... | ||
| And even if that's a small piece of history, think about the presidents who have actually been killed. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like who? | ||
| I can't think of any. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| No, I will tell you who did it, though. | ||
| The quadrants that we are against. | ||
| I'll tell you, that's who killed those presidents. | ||
| Except for the one that killed that one guy who was against slavery. | ||
| That was the quadrant that we were super for. | ||
| Let's not talk about those quadrants. | ||
| Those quadrants are great, though. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| It's not just presidents that are under attack. | ||
| It's people of God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like Jim Baker. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm standing up for Trump. | ||
| Pastor Trump. | ||
| President Trump. | ||
| I was in a warfare. | ||
| I became physically beat down. | ||
| I mean, just until I thought I was going to die. | ||
| And then I got injured from one of the watchers. | ||
| Who watches the watchers? | ||
| They said, if you don't stop, we're going to destroy you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And they got a hold of one of the members of my family and told them, so you tell your dad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He'll never preach again. | ||
| He'll never. | ||
| And I had to decide. | ||
| By the way, I know he's trying to be vague because this story isn't true, but he just sold out Tammy Sue real hard because he said your dad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you know what? | ||
| I've come too far. | ||
| He has more than one kid, though. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah, he has probably a shit ton of kids. | ||
| No, what he's really talking about is one of the many kids that are not his legitimate kids who are like, hey, for real, I'm here. | ||
| Could you please? | ||
| And he was like, ah, you're not real. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| You're one of the watchers. | ||
| We'll get into the details in a second. | ||
| He'll never preach again. | ||
| He'll never. | ||
| And I had to decide. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I've come too far. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| To turn back. | ||
| Thank you for not confirmation. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is the reason I was born. | ||
| America needs God. | ||
| We're in deep trouble. | ||
| I don't think there's another chance. | ||
| I think it's over if we don't win right now. | ||
| Allow a great global awakening. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| Global? | ||
| Global. | ||
| But, I mean, I don't think that they have the same stupid ideas about globalists and shit like that. | ||
| But, yeah, what do you think about Jim Baker being threatened, my dude? | ||
| To me, what that sounds more like is, while he was doing time, he had himself a thought experiment of, like, okay, well, I'm doing time for all the crimes that I committed. | ||
| And I can either get a job as a guy and just have a job, or I can just keep on doing them crimes but do them better. | ||
| That's what I'm hearing. | ||
| And I'm hearing him say, I don't like working at Macy's, so I'm going to keep doing them crimes. | ||
| I don't want to end up like some, you know... | ||
| Some celebrity, some minor celebrity who ends up working at Starbucks or something like that. | ||
| Whoa, what's that Jim Baker the Walmart greeter? | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Time for me and God to ride for the money. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I can't remember his name, but one of the WCW announcers, one of the old awesome WCW announcers works at a Starbucks now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and it's like one of those, like Jim Baker would never do that. | ||
| He would sooner start a doomsday cult, which he has done. | ||
| Or at the very least, he would sooner go back to jail for the same crimes that he has already committed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he knows that he doesn't have to go to jail, as Trump is in office. | ||
| As long as Trump is in office, he is a free man. | ||
| He will get a pardon if anything goes wrong. | ||
| For the pettiest of reasons. | ||
| So, I told you that Paula White has written this book about Esther, and what I think is more important is, I don't know if she likes Esther as much as she hates another character in that story. | ||
| She gets into in this next clip. | ||
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| Vashti is easy to be replaced because Vashti, who is married to the king, Vashti, and this is what people don't recognize. | ||
| You say, what is God doing? | ||
| Vashti did not serve purpose. | ||
| And because she did not serve purpose, when the king, and it seems, oh, this is silly, but he shouldn't have asked this. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| The king asked her to dance. | ||
| The king asked her. | ||
| But because she could not be obedient to what was asked of the king, because sometimes we think, well, We want to do it and we negotiate with God. | ||
| If the king asks you to do something, then you do it. | ||
| If the king asks you to stand up and to take your show and to be in support of President Trump, it doesn't matter. | ||
| If people troll you, if people lie about you, if people hate on you, if people leave you, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Because if God be for you, then who can be against you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because God is looking for someone who will say yes. | |
| To God's agenda. | ||
| To the king's agenda. | ||
| And so what it was, it doesn't matter if you understand the instruction of the king. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It matters if you are obedient. | ||
| Because God, Vashti could be replaced because she wouldn't serve purpose. | ||
| So God finds this young girl, Esther, whose name literally means myrtle tree. | ||
| Myrtle trees come from the bottom. | ||
| It means you come from bottom places. | ||
| It means you've been overlooked. | ||
| It means God will raise you up. | ||
| She was a character who, if I recall correctly, said no to a man and was thus appropriately punished for it in the time. | ||
| Well, the reason that she said no was she was the queen. | ||
| Of Asuerus, the king in Persia, he... | ||
| Look, the issue is that the translation, the scholars who study it, the understanding of the story is that the king got drunk and he called people to bring her to dance in her crown. | ||
| And the understanding of the text is that... | ||
| It meant that he wanted her to dance naked in front of them, which is an incredibly inappropriate request for someone to make of the queen, even if you're the king back then, in that culture especially. | ||
| It's incredibly inappropriate, period. | ||
| So she said no, and then Esther came in and was a replacement. | ||
| Once again, a great story about dudes. | ||
| I would argue that this is a bad story about obedience. | ||
| Look, ladies, ladies, what I'm just trying to tell you, what I'm telling you about Esther and obedience is that when the king tells you to do something, you do whatever it is. | ||
| Just like when my husband asked me to do something, I don't do what the fuck he tells me to do because fuck him. | ||
| I'm not in journey. | ||
| You don't tell me what to do. | ||
| Anyways, Esther, she did whatever was asked of her. | ||
| Dance naked in the crown. | ||
| It doesn't fucking matter. | ||
| Women, do whatever you're told to do. | ||
| People who have studied it, again, I just need this to be incredibly clear. | ||
| In the time and the context of it, this is an outrageously inappropriate request for a king to be making of a queen. | ||
| And the idea that she said no, like we know why he wanted her to come dance naked. | ||
| One, humiliation. | ||
| Two, to give his friends a boner. | ||
| Or to make his friends jealous or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Any of those motivations. | ||
| There is no higher purpose to that come dance naked for me and my drunk friends. | ||
| God asked her to do it, though, Dan. | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| But he did. | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| The king asked her. | ||
| God appointed the king. | ||
| Kings. | ||
| Gods. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| She was a Zoroastrian. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Yeah, well, she didn't even know about the god that she was supposed to be listening to, and that's another issue for me. | ||
| She should have known. | ||
| Yeah, but that's not important. | ||
| The important part is that god of a different faith, whom that guy didn't know, appointed him king to do shit the way that he said he should do it, and what was my point again? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think that the idea here, which I think is very dangerous... | ||
| Especially in a modern world. | ||
| Is that what she's advocating for is you say yes to this obviously inappropriate, confusing, humiliating request from the king because then you'll be able to stay around and maybe have some influence later. | ||
| Which makes me think Trump has had some really fucked up requests for her. | ||
| I'm not saying dance naked or anything like that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| My mind isn't in the gutter or anything like that. | ||
| No. | ||
| But the idea of shady business deals, the idea of she knows shit that she's not saying, that sort of thing, you keep your mouth shut, and then you'll have the ear of the king. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| That mentality, if that's the lesson that she's getting from Vashti and Esther's story, I think beyond even the heresies that she's guilty of, I think you have a really warped and dirty version of Christianity that you're peddling. | ||
| You're peddling a dangerous version. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Jordan, real quick, let me finish this thought. | |
| When you're the king, they let you do it. | ||
| You can run up on him like a bitch. | ||
| Yep, move on him like a bitch. | ||
| Yeah, you can move on him like a bitch. | ||
| No big deal, you're the king. | ||
| The other thing, too, is that I need to make this point crystal clear. | ||
| It's all about this idea of obedience. | ||
| That trend is not an accident on this show. | ||
| The show is so much about... | ||
| Quizzical obedience. | ||
| Obedience that you don't even understand why you're obeying. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Is very important to people with this sort of an agenda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This sort of message that they want to put out. | ||
| I remember it in youth group. | ||
| I remember it in church. | ||
| I remember it all the time. | ||
| And we'll get to the payoff of that here in a second. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But first. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Paula's about to say something really scary. | ||
| And then Jim is about to, I think, make the audience really uncomfortable. | ||
| We were not sent into this earth to fit in. | ||
| We weren't just sitting here to be a part. | ||
| We were sent here to take over. | ||
| Are you listening? | ||
| That's the church. | ||
| That's why we have the president we have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He doesn't fit. | |
| Amen. | ||
| He's not a normal president. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| And here's the woman who... | ||
| It's from the bottomlands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But God has raised her up. | ||
| So real quick, before we get into the rest of this, now Jim has stood up. | ||
| And the audience, there's a... | ||
| There's a thin line between excitement and discomfort going on in the audience. | ||
| Because Jim, I don't think, stands up very often. | ||
| No, I doubt it. | ||
| The spirit is really getting to him with this Paula. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because he knows that she has the ear of the president and also that she is one of the big mega church televangelist preachers. | ||
| Like, he's not slumming it here hanging out with Paula White King. | ||
| He's looking up to her right now. | ||
| This is like, what I would describe it as like, you know, on a podcast, like... | ||
| When Jimmy Pardo had Paul Reiser on, or something like that. | ||
| It's like, we got this guy to come into the show. | ||
| This is very exciting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jim is really excited that Paul is there. | ||
| Yeah, I can tell. | ||
| And I think he's trying to preach a little bit in order to impress her. | ||
| He's out of the game, though. | ||
| He's not at her preaching levels. | ||
| He's not doing ten sets a night. | ||
| So he's standing up now and yelling at the audience. | ||
| To the White House! | ||
| To the walls! | ||
| Paul White has gone through the valley of the shadow of death time and time again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| She now can walk into the White House anytime she wants to. | ||
| She has full access to, in the Bible days, the king, the president. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Used her and broke her. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And she's been through that brokenness. | ||
| But the Bible declares, can I keep preaching? | ||
| The Bible declares. | ||
| This is it! | ||
| This is it! | ||
| I love the messengers. | ||
| So when I said there was a discomfort, you could hear that, like, I think what was going on, if I had to guess. | ||
| I would guess that the teens that he has working the applause sign got confused by him standing up and yelling at the audience. | ||
| He didn't know quite where to punctuate his yelling with applause. | ||
| They're still learning. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| They're still in school. | ||
| And they haven't had sex for a long time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No masturbating. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| How would you even know where the applause sign begins or ends if you haven't come in a month? | ||
| So they're all fumbling with their boners and not being able to hit the right points. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so he yells like, she's in the White House! | |
| Silence. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the weird, gross, Scooby-Doo villain-esque. | ||
| It is ghostly. | ||
| Yeah, that is bad. | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| On another level, I kind of love it because it is one of those things that, like, you know, it's not every day you get to see Jim Baker try and pull his skills out. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's kind of like... | ||
| I don't know, an old former pro ball player going down to the park and trying to play pick-up ball with the kids? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Well, they do a good job or whatever, but maybe some guy's going to dunk on them. | ||
| Yeah, it's Rocky V. Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's go with that. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I'll allow that metaphor. | ||
| Can't be doing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Jim, good on you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| But now we get back to the obedience thing. | ||
| This reveal will not surprise anybody, but this is why they keep talking about obedience. | ||
| So that you can see what he's called you to do. | ||
| And somebody needs to obey God right now because you need to give a lot more than $45. | ||
| You need to give thousands of dollars in obedience for the word of the Lord that is coming. | ||
| I pray right now for revelation to come to you. | ||
| I pray right now that God would open your eyes according to Ephesians 1, 17 and 18. That the eyes of your understanding might be enlightened. | ||
| That you may know what is the hope of the riches of the glory of your inheritance as saints. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Putting on a show. | ||
| How impressive is that? | ||
| Putting on a show! | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But that's the payoff of the obedience. | ||
| You talk about obedience all the time, and now you're like, what you need to do is obey. | ||
| They've already earlier introduced a concept of $45 because it's the 45th president. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| It's an Easter sale. | ||
| They always do this. | ||
| Give your Easter sale gift to God or whatever it is. | ||
| They always do this with symbolic meanings of money. | ||
| If there's a Bible verse that's like 818 or something like that, this is a specific example. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Why not? | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about I give you a wand? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's all magic. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| And I don't think that asking people to support you in creative endeavors or whatever, like, that is a negative thing. | ||
| Like, I think that the way that this sort of... | ||
| Our economy has come up of supporting artists who create stuff and all the people who support our show. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| But if I were to come up and try and manipulatively trick people into donating to us, it would be as evil and ugly as this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They could do this on the level. | |
| There's no reason to do it like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, of course not. | |
| This is so manipulative and tricky. | ||
| No, there is a reason to do it like this. | ||
| Because it works better. | ||
| More people. | ||
| It works better. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Look, if we had a GoFundMe for our show, and the end goal was like, we're going to put out a better show. | ||
| People would not be as driven to that as opposed to if we all of a sudden were just like, Dan has cancer. | ||
| Dan is dying. | ||
| We need $50,000, which is the symbolic amount in Ephesians, $50,000 verse. | ||
| Dan needs money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We would get more money than that. | ||
| So of course you lie. | ||
| When you play on people's strings and their emotions and stuff like that, you're able to get them to, again, we've talked about this a bunch, you override the part of your brain that works on a rational system and you overwhelm it with this emotional response. | ||
| And I'll be honest, I didn't get into it as much as I did the last time listening to Jim Baker where he like... | ||
| The swelling music and the vignettes were like, oh man, this is great. | ||
| But listening to Paula, I kind of understood how you could be tricked into... | ||
| Almost a hypnotic state by the way she speaks. | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely. | ||
| The quick measure, like, the measure of her speech, the way she never ends a sentence, it always leads into something else. | ||
| There's always a reference to something, and, like, it's all ostensibly backed in some sort of biblical truth when she's just making shit up. | ||
| No, she's trying to run a nonstop guitar solo. | ||
| But it's very... | ||
| I see how it works, and I mean... | ||
| Take ethics and morality out of it. | ||
| I respect it. | ||
| Oh, no, I can feel it. | ||
| In the same way that I respect Alex's former gifts as an amazing broadcaster, I respect this in terms of, like, I know what you're doing. | ||
| You're trying to get people to give you money with the... | ||
| Sweet candy shell around the M&M of Christianity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| The shell is the Christianity, the chocolate is I want money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You trick people in with those bright colors of the M&Ms, and then they eat that subpar chocolate, and then they're like, all right. | ||
| I mean, it's so similar to if you've been doing stand-up for so long. | ||
| At a certain point, you stop seeing jokes, and you start seeing... | ||
| Oh, this person is just doing the sleight of hand. | ||
| This is just the rhythm. | ||
| This is just the, you pause for, and then, and that's all you need to do. | ||
| She has got the patter down so good. | ||
| And even now, even in my cynical, monstrous state of mind that I am in now, I can still feel that I went to God Camp when I was like 14, and I can still feel getting into that moment where that That preacher. | ||
| Revival spirit. | ||
| Yeah, just doing that whole, you gotta believe it. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, there's 314-year-olds going, yeah, we need to get baptized! | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| I used to have a bit about this. | ||
| I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but one time I went to Bible camp and I pretended to be overwhelmed by the spirit. | ||
| Did I ever tell you about that? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| So I went to, like, a Baptist megachurch when I was, like, formative years. | ||
| That's what my parents landed on after, like, the Mennonite church in our town didn't work out. | ||
| And Plymouth Rock. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Didn't land on us. | ||
| We landed on... | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we went to a Mennonite church, but it just didn't have the right feel, so we went to a bunch of places and tried to find the right fit. | ||
| We ended up at this Baptist megachurch. | ||
| And it was the sort of place where, I mean, there wasn't like snakes and talking in tongues or anything like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Boring. | ||
| But it was the soft version of that where like adults would be putting their hands up and some people would cry. | ||
| Getting holy ghosted. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, holy ghosted. | ||
| Sometimes you would see people like on their knees like during the songs and stuff like that because they had been overwhelmed by the spirit. | ||
| Or maybe they fall down in an aisle or something like that. | ||
| Not aggressively, not like over the top like where the preacher is touching them. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But so I had this sort of image in my head of what it meant to really feel God's presence, and it really bothered me that I'd never felt it. | ||
| And so I went to camp one year, and it was through the church. | ||
| We went to this camp, and I decided, I made a mental decision that I was going to force it. | ||
| And so, like, during one of the songs, I don't know what it was, but the only song I really remember they played every time was, Our God is an awesome God, he reigns on heaven above. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Our God is an awesome God, he reigns on heaven above. | |
| Don't stop believing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, what? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, Jonathan Cain was on the keys. | ||
| It was a great retreat. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, during whatever the song was, I just decided, I'm doing it. | ||
| And so I fell to my knees. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And, like, I acted like I was overwhelmed by the spirit. | ||
| You holy ghosted. | ||
| But then it dawned on me that, like, as I got down there, I didn't feel anything. | ||
| I thought that doing the act would force the feeling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I thought God would come in and be like, alright, you did it. | ||
| Somehow that would cheat code. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, A, B, A, B. I thought for sure it would work, and it didn't. | |
| And it introduced the worst feeling I've ever had in my life, which was, I cannot stand up now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just... | |
| I was completely fucked. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| I think you just wrote a short story that should be added to Winesburg, Ohio. | ||
| What the fuck just happened here? | ||
| I had artificially... | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| I had acted like I was overwhelmed by the spirit that led me to come to my knees. | ||
| That made you realize that the spirit isn't even real in the first place! | ||
| I'm surrounded by my peers in the youth group who are all like, oh my god, Dan's having an experience. | ||
| And I didn't want to stand up and be like, I was faking that. | ||
| Of course not! | ||
| Then I gotta still stay at camp. | ||
| I can't just go home. | ||
| What day is this? | ||
| This is like day two. | ||
| Oh no, you're fucked! | ||
| There for a week. | ||
| So I had to sort of play it out, and so what I did is I faked crying a little bit. | ||
| Like I put my head down on a chair. | ||
| That's always a smart move. | ||
| And then people came over and patted me and stuff like that. | ||
| And I was like, thank you, thank you. | ||
| And then I minded my own business and went to bed. | ||
| Because I didn't want to have the conversation. | ||
| That's actually how most Dan stories wind up ending. | ||
| But it was so disappointing on so many levels. | ||
| One is that like... | ||
| Well, that doesn't work, first of all. | ||
| But second, I was like, why did I do that? | ||
| Why was that an impulse that I had? | ||
| I thought that I could get around God on a technicality of it, and then just like... | ||
| Well, but isn't that what these people think? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| But that's the, like, that's the memory that comes up in my head when I listen to people like this who are, like, trying to get people into that state. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, because she's doing that. | ||
| She's trying to get people to, like, throw your hands in the air. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, trying to get people to overwhelm their limbic systems in order to get on her side. | ||
| And, I mean, we've been there. | ||
| See, this is why I don't understand these people. | ||
| I will never... | ||
| Now, anytime I'm at my... | ||
| I understand that too well. | ||
| They're all full of shit. | ||
| No, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| The innocent people are desperate. | ||
| I think maybe not all of them, but I'd say a vast majority of them are like me when I was 14 who really wanted to feel that thing that they saw other people feel and were willing to play along in order to... | ||
| Maybe try and have that experience. | ||
| Now, whether or not they're the same as me, and when they had it, they realized this is all artificial, what am I doing? | ||
| Or whether they're like, oh, I am going to tell myself I had a profound experience. | ||
| That's a whole other issue. | ||
| But I think that a lot of people are well-meaning people who want that extra human experience. | ||
| They want something super spiritual. | ||
| They want to feel something that's not the normal... | ||
| Day-to-day experience of life, and it's really abusive when you tell people that you know how to do it, and you've got to give them money to do it. | ||
| Because it's such a natural impulse that people have. | ||
| You go back and you read anything from history, it's something that everyone always feels. | ||
| You don't want to feel like an animal. | ||
| If you do want to feel like an animal, it's like Aleister Crowley. | ||
| You want to feel that enlightened animal, that visceral, wild animal kind of thing. | ||
| You don't want to feel like... | ||
| Eh, I'm just a biological accident. | ||
| You want to have a profound connection to something bigger. | ||
| And a lot of people understand that there is a way to make money off of that supposed hole in the human psyche. | ||
| And I think that that's maybe one of the most evil things that has ever happened. | ||
| That people are able... | ||
| Like, they know they can manipulate it, and they do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's so fucked up. | ||
| Eh. | ||
| We're alcoholics. | ||
| What else are we doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Like, I mean, what else is that? | ||
| But to me, if you can experience that feeling by meditation, right. | ||
| If you can experience that feeling by going to a fucking Kanye West concert, great. | ||
| If you can do all that stuff there, all of that stuff is great. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have no problem with the never-ending quest for human transcendence in a moment. | ||
| I have a problem with the... | ||
| Commodification? | ||
| The manipulation? | ||
| You know, I don't even have a problem with that. | ||
| I think I have a problem with the idea that it is... | ||
| Well, the commodification you should take away from it, because if we include going to the gym as sometimes being able to be a transcendent experience, there are shitty people who try and sell you abusive gym memberships. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But... | ||
| I mean, I guess... | ||
| It's not the same. | ||
| I guess it's... | ||
| It's not the same. | ||
| I guess it's... | ||
| Because the gym doesn't market itself as something for your soul. | ||
| Well, sometimes it does, though. | ||
| But that's a fucked up gym. | ||
| There are a lot of fucked up gyms out there. | ||
| That's a really, really fucked up gym. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And, I mean, this is a fucked up form of Christianity. | |
| Like, this is all... | ||
| This whole fucking thing is ridiculous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess my problem is whenever people try and tell you. | ||
| I think that's my biggest problem with all this stuff. | ||
| Because, look, if you're going for a fucking spiritual experience, human history has shown us that you can find one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I am fine with you trying all of them. | ||
| My problem comes when you deal with these people who say that I'm the only way you can have one of these spiritual experiences. | ||
| The other ones you have aren't real. | ||
| And if you don't have one through me, not only are you not, Having a spiritual experience. | ||
| You're worse. | ||
| You're the worst. | ||
| You're worse off for not even, you know. | ||
| Well, that's part and parcel of the prosperity gospel and stuff like that. | ||
| Because the idea is you give this seed of money. | ||
| And then it grows into more money coming back for you. | ||
| And there's a built-in trap door to explain why that doesn't work, and that is you didn't want it hard enough. | ||
| Or you didn't give enough. | ||
| You didn't give enough. | ||
| You didn't actually, somewhere deep inside your heart, you weren't doing the right things. | ||
| You didn't love God enough. | ||
| You didn't follow, you didn't obey enough. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| And so any preacher can just, any preacher like these people can just slip around that sort of thing. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Yeah, there's a built-in excuse to blame the person who's the victim of the con. | ||
| Always. | ||
| I have no words for how much I hate this. | ||
| It's cruel. | ||
| Yeah, and... | ||
| It's prey. | ||
| I guess the best word for it is prey. | ||
| They love turning people into prey because they are fucking animals. | ||
| They are predators. | ||
| She's friends with our president. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Who is also, he moves on her like a bitch, I'll tell you that right now. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Jordan, you were making an astute observation that I didn't know if you would pick up on as early as you did, that Paula White Cane doesn't seem to really be interested in hiding the fact that she's talking about, like, demographic stuff, the quadrants. | ||
| Of enemies and, like, TV terms and stuff like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| She might as well be asking what her Sunday ratings are. | ||
| I thought that this next clip was pretty, like, this is weird. | ||
| I think we're from the same tribe. | ||
| I know the system. | ||
| I know the system really well. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Listen, I know how to do TV blindsided. | ||
| I can close my eyes now, just like you, Pastor Jim, but we don't do it by the world's ways. | ||
| We don't do it by the system because we do it by the Spirit of God now that we are not afraid or intimidated or trying to fit in or trying to be popular. | ||
| We are being purposeful because we are doing what thus saith the Lord because we want to hear God say, well done. | ||
| Enlargement and deliverance is coming to God's people. | ||
| But then he turns around and says, but will you be the carrier of it? | ||
| Because it's coming. | ||
| But if you don't do this, then destruction will come to you and your father's house. | ||
| In other words, God is going to bring enlargement. | ||
| God is going to bring deliverance. | ||
| But the question is, will you be a part of it? | ||
| Will you get in the game? | ||
| Enlargement is... | ||
| Direct TV! | ||
| For real, why haven't you picked up my goddamn show yet? | ||
| We are bringing God to you at 4 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Central. | ||
| That's 1 p.m. Pacific time. | ||
| Greenwich Mean? | ||
| Yeah, what are we doing here, lady? | ||
| Well, enlargement is prosperity gospel code for the money that comes back when you plant those seeds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So she's talking very directly about the idea of, like, all this is coming. | ||
| Are you going to get on board with it? | ||
| And she started that fucking sentence by saying, we can do this in our sleep. | ||
| We know what to do. | ||
| I know how to manipulate these people. | ||
| She's essentially just pulling her dick out on air and just being like, hey, I know what to do. | ||
| I don't give a shit about you guys. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| You're so stupid. | ||
| You're so stupid. | ||
| Look at you, you dumb sheep. | ||
| I can manipulate you with my eyes blindsided. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's another level of brazenness. | ||
| Which only deepens and heightens my respect for her. | ||
| It's not that hard to con people. | ||
| It is really hard to tell people you're conning them and then have them believe you anyways. | ||
| Some people just like the thrill of the hunt. | ||
| She's like someone out there hunting boar with a knife. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Instead of a gun. | ||
| She's upping her degree of difficulty rating. | ||
| She's playing on New Game Plus. | ||
| Yeah, if we're doing dives here, Jim Baker barely able to do a straight swan dive without a splash. | ||
| She is fucking backflips and all the turns and all that shit. | ||
| Yeah, she's nailing it. | ||
| She's the Rodney Dangerfield in back to school of televangelism. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, in this next clip, man, this made me so fucking, this made me feel so weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| This made me feel so weird. | ||
| So there's a relic that ends up showing up on the show. | ||
| Relic! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Relic! | |
| They don't call it that, but that's how Jim is acting. | ||
| The Shroud of Turin? | ||
| It's so fucked up. | ||
| But then, at the end of this clip, we get something that is very familiar to our podcast. | ||
| And I would say, if there ever is a Jim Baker mic down clip, this is it. | ||
| This is a platform. | ||
| We're sitting on a platform. | ||
| This is what you call a stage, a platform. | ||
| But the platform of Donald Trump says, I'm against abortion. | ||
| The platform is also an album by the Dilated Peoples. | ||
| The platform says he wants to appeal the Johnson Amendment, which you were there when he signed it, right? | ||
| And there's the pin. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| This is the pin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I felt like... | |
| Like the heavens had opened. | ||
| I can't describe this moment. | ||
| And the inauguration in this were probably two of the highlights. | ||
| There we are with all those men back there. | ||
| And they're there in the pink dress. | ||
| I mean, when I say, I just give God all the glory because people don't, I think, fully understand this. | ||
| Can I touch that pen? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| This is what I waited for most of my life. | ||
| I have fought. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The government has tried to destroy the church people. | ||
| For decades and decades and decades. | ||
| And he said, as long as I am president, no more ground. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he signed with this pen. | |
| Can you see the pen? | ||
| Signed with this pen. | ||
| And then he reached over and handed it to this little lady. | ||
| I can call you a little lady because you are little. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So precious. | |
| What a major moment. | ||
| Now, I want to give... | ||
| Sit down. | ||
| For a 45... | ||
| I'm asking to help. | ||
| You've got to give it back, though, honey. | ||
| Obey. | ||
| For $45 to help us stay on the air, we need support. | ||
| Ad pivot. | ||
| Jim Baker just did an ad pivot after almost coming in his pants about a pen. | ||
| That's outrageous. | ||
| That's next level. | ||
| I am rooting for climate change to win. | ||
| You're going through some stuff. | ||
| I have now given up entirely on humanity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There is no point to any of this. | ||
| Those people were all going apeshit for a pen. | ||
| He turned a pen being signed for fucking whatever into an ad pivot. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why do we? | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Like, do we even need us? | ||
| Do you see this pen? | ||
| Do we even need us? | ||
| This pen is what I've been fighting for my whole life. | ||
| Good, then stop and die. | ||
| Die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| A pen! | ||
| If Obama handed me a fucking pen during the height of his tenure in the White House, I'd still be like, this is a fucking pen! | ||
| He's like, this is the pen that I used to sign the ACA. | ||
| Yeah, I'd be like, I don't... | ||
| It's a fucking pen! | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Why didn't you get single-payer passed, you piece of shit? | ||
| That's my response. | ||
| Who is impressed by... | ||
| Why are so many people impressed by a pen? | ||
| It's a relic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not! | |
| It's a... | ||
| Fucking asshole's pen! | ||
| It's like a shroud. | ||
| And their assholes! | ||
| It's like the shroud of tourists. | ||
| And your assholes! | ||
| Nah, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God, if I... | |
| I would not... | ||
| It's big stuff. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I could not... | ||
| You gotta worship that pen. | ||
| I have a dream now of just fucking going to one of these shows and just losing my shit. | ||
| I wanna go full streaker at the World Cup. | ||
| It's not gonna work. | ||
| Like, I wanna rip into there. | ||
| This shit is very edited. | ||
| Fucking tear everything apart. | ||
| It would not work. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Jim has, on one of these episodes that I watched, did say that people get paid to come and try and disrupt his show. | ||
| So he's aware. | ||
| He's got security. | ||
| Yeah, he does. | ||
| They're also 18-year-olds who are probably working for free. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I think we'd be all right. | ||
| I could probably just bang them. | ||
| Probably just bang heads. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| You ever have fun? | ||
| You ever have fun before? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Really not, because you work here. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| So, yeah, man. | ||
| Let's go have... | ||
| A beer! | ||
| So he's talking about the Johnson Amendment. | ||
| That's what Trump had in executive order loosening. | ||
| And the Johnson Amendment, for everyone who doesn't know, has to do with churches as part of their 501c3 status that they can't advocate for or in opposition to any candidate in public office. | ||
| That's the major part that they really hate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because it's almost like that part is trying to keep them from creating a theocracy. | ||
| And I mean, we can't have that if your entire religion is built around the concept of a theocracy. | ||
| That's one part of it, but it was put forth in 1954. | ||
| If you think about what was going on in 1954, you had a lot of... | ||
| World War II. | ||
| You had a lot of Christian organizations, in heavy quotes, who were not super into equal rights. | ||
| I can't think of any of them with three initials. | ||
| That were not into... | ||
| Amway? | ||
| Yep, that's it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you had sort of agitating groups hiding under the auspices of Christianity. | ||
| And I think a large portion of... | ||
| Lynching under the auspices of Christianity. | ||
| One of the good things that the Johnson Amendment is capable of is sort of trying to split up some of that. | ||
| And I don't think that a church is a place for political messages. | ||
| And if you think it is, I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what faith is and what our country is. | ||
| Anyway... | ||
| I think that's already been the case for a long time. | ||
| All this ding-dong. | ||
| Man, that ad pivot. | ||
| Pretty harsh. | ||
| That was a harsh ad pivot. | ||
| That was a really... | ||
| He went from... | ||
| God, and it seemed so sincere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He really seemed so stoked about it. | ||
| And then, immediately after the ad pivot, all of the pre-show screening showed up in my head of them being like... | ||
| Okay, we want you out here. | ||
| Do you have anything special? | ||
| And they're like, I've actually got this pen that Trump gave me. | ||
| And they're like, fuck yes. | ||
| We are going to turn that into a set piece. | ||
| Lie about it being what he signed the stripping of the Johnson Amendment. | ||
| Jim, we need you to really... | ||
| You're going to need to stand up for this one. | ||
| And then, Jim, we're going to need you to mumble that you want $45. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Time is now. | ||
| We need you to really incompetently do an ad. | ||
| Please give me $45. | ||
| If you thought that $45 wasn't worth it, let me show you a pen. | ||
| It's a great pen. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Alright, so, in this next clip, we have another moment where Jim actually tries to preach a little bit. | ||
| And this one, more unsettling than the first. | ||
| Oh, he's out of the game. | ||
| You know, I say this, you're the greatest woman preacher in the world. | ||
| Forgive me for saying that. | ||
| Again, a heretic. | ||
| I don't want to embarrass you, but it's true. | ||
| But you are. | ||
| And what you're saying is the message for this minute. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| In America. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| It's the brokenness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it is. | |
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to curl up and die? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Preach it, sir. | ||
| Because you made a mistake? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because something went wrong? | ||
| Are you listening to me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are. | |
| God sent his son to die. | ||
| On the cross! | ||
| Because you would blow it! | ||
| Also... | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Is that why God sent his son to die on the cross? | ||
| About his son? | ||
| Because you would blow it? | ||
| That's not the message. | ||
| Because you would blow it? | ||
| But also, about that son that you seem to love yelling about? | ||
| Paula has some weird ideas about him. | ||
| You should ask her about him. | ||
| Don't want to do that. | ||
| Well, she would blow it. | ||
| That's why God sent his son to die. | ||
| And he uses the weak things! | ||
| To confound. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That Donald Trump's to confound the wise. | |
| What is this? | ||
| That's why we love him so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why we stand up for Jesus Christ. | |
| That's why we won't give him up. | ||
| That's why we're not going to let him tear the crosses from our buildings. | ||
| It's the cross. | ||
| Forgive me. | ||
| You just got me too excited. | ||
| You are too excited. | ||
| No one's asking to tear your cross down, buddy. | ||
| Enjoy your cross. | ||
| Good health. | ||
| Man! | ||
| The only people that make me want to take the things away from them that they are afraid of me taking away from them are the people who are afraid of me taking them away from them. | ||
| They kind of know that, and you are facilitating the continuation of the circle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's just like, no, I don't want to take your cross away. | |
| You want to take my cross away! | ||
| Well, now I want to take your cross away. | ||
| You're making me want to take your cross away. | ||
| But see here, you've now touched into what he's actually talking about and why this has nothing to do with religion. | ||
| The reason that you want to take his cross away, I think, even though you don't care about Christianity and neither do I, is because he's not a church. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The reason that anyone would want to be like, hey, you need to shut down, isn't because... | |
| Though I would put myself more in the agnostic category. | ||
| I'm open to ideas of spirituality and shit like that. | ||
| I don't have a hard line like a lot of atheists do. | ||
| But I have no love lost between me and the Christian church of any denomination. | ||
| But at the same time, I'm super thrilled that they exist and I think they should exist. | ||
| Same as all Muslim churches, Buddhist temples, all of it across the board, Jewish synagogues. | ||
| I can name them all. | ||
| Shinto Hutts. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I like community baseball teams. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's the same shit to me. | ||
| Somewhat, but it isn't for a lot of people. | ||
| The reason that Jim is so much like people want to tear down our crosses and want to shut us down is because he's keenly aware that he's conning people. | ||
| He knows that the accusations that come at him are legal accusations. | ||
| They are like... | ||
| You are committing a very, at least unethical business practices. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Here, this is crazy what you're doing. | ||
| It has nothing to do with God. | ||
| It has to do with you using God as a method to sell your bullshit buckets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And what have you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's really utilitarian for him to be like, we are under attack because we love God so much. | ||
| Because then that frames the argument for anybody who believes what he's saying as like, these very measured, reasonable complaints. | ||
| That you or I would have about him is like, oh no, they just hate God. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But when you say, I want to tear down his cross, now it becomes you are the embodiment of exactly what he is lying about existing. | ||
| Yeah, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Of course it doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm already the embodiment, regardless of whether or not I do it, so I might as well fucking take your goddamn cross away, you piece of shit lying... | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| All of this would be fine... | ||
| I will shit on your cross. | ||
| Jim Baker, if you have a cross, I want to shit on it. | ||
| All of this would be fine if you just had a bit of transparency, I think. | ||
| I think Jim Baker's whole operation... | ||
| His whole show would just be really funny if there was just transparency about it. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Well, because I think that the real crime is the sleight-of-hand stuff about what we're using the money for. | ||
| The sleight-of-hand stuff about the abusive marketing tactics and shit like that. | ||
| The rest of it is just like, look, there are worse... | ||
| Problems in the world than someone going to a dumb church. | ||
| And if that's all, then that's all. | ||
| But if there was just an opening of those documents, I think he could skate on some stuff with me. | ||
| I wouldn't care as much. | ||
| What's weird is if these churches didn't exist, it would be an amazing adult film. | ||
| Adult Swim. | ||
| Not a pornographic film? | ||
| No, not a pornographic film. | ||
| Adult Swim show. | ||
| Like, if we didn't have so many fucking televangelist shows on at 2 a.m. in the morning or whatever it is, Adult Swim would have one. | ||
| It would be, word for word, the exact same thing. | ||
| Like, this is a parody of itself. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's wild that this exists. | ||
| And it's even wilder that Jim Baker is a person who did hard time for fraud. | ||
| Because of this exact same behavior. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In the past, he just tweaked a few things and now came back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And is doing the same game. | ||
| It's a redemption story. | ||
| It's not, though. | ||
| He's redempting himself. | ||
| It's like if someone did something bad, went to prison for it, got out and realized, all right, now I know the line. | ||
| It doesn't redeem themselves and just does the exact same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's no redemption story here. | ||
| No. | ||
| Look, I went to prison for selling heroin. | ||
| In prison, I got my pharmacology degree, and now I sell opioids to doctors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's a completely different thing. | ||
| There's no difference whatsoever. | ||
| I think that requires more effort. | ||
| It's more, I went to prison because someone snitched on me for selling heroin. | ||
| So I just murdered all the snitches. | ||
| Now I'm solo. | ||
| You know, or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's that sort of thing, because it's not like he got clean. | ||
| No, that's definitely true. | ||
| Like, the opioid stuff is unethical as shit, but, like, that's still legal. | ||
| What he's doing is still the same fraud. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| Like, just because he didn't pretend he was creating a hotel this time that he overbooked and shit like that, that they got him on the first time, that doesn't mean that there's any less, like, deceptiveness in this marketing. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| He's playing the same fucking game. | ||
| And that's why it is Adult Swimmy, in terms of, like, it's almost beyond the pale of, like, what you think is, like, this is nuts. | ||
| Yeah, this is a, like, when too many cooks... | ||
| Trump's favorite preacher is on! | ||
| Oh my god, that can't be real. | ||
| That's a lie that she tells him. | ||
| Or, no, that he tells her. | ||
| That has to be. | ||
| There's a bunch of pictures of her, and she did give the benediction at his inauguration. | ||
| Yeah, but he can't... | ||
| I don't know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| Well, her backstory on that is that she had a televangelism show that was on air that reached Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| And so when he was there, he would watch her, and he loved her. | ||
| All right, all the ice caps melt immediately now. | ||
| Flood. | ||
| This is the first time I've really believed that God was right whenever he got rid of... | ||
| That was Noah's ship? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He nailed it. | ||
| Except for he probably just let the wrong family... | ||
| Like, God just fucked up one time. | ||
| And that was when he killed everybody and then let Noah live. | ||
| Like, there was probably a guy... | ||
| When he allowed bees on that ship. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Well, you gotta have bees. | ||
| Where were the pollination? | ||
| God can make drones. | ||
| God could not make drones. | ||
| You'd be fine with that. | ||
| That is heretical belief. | ||
| If there's one thing I know about the Bible, it says that God can't make drones. | ||
| Well, then me and Paula are on the same page. | ||
| Heretics. | ||
| Two peas in a pod. | ||
| Heretics. | ||
| I'll say that me thinking that God can make drones is not directly a heresy against the most foundational doctrines of Christianity. | ||
| So I'm on better footing than her. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Man, it's crazy. | ||
| It's legitimately crazy that she rebukes the Nicene Creed and then is like, no I don't. | ||
| Yeah, you do. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You straight up do. | ||
| Well, listen, Dan. | ||
| I will stop denying the Nicene Creed if you donate $8,118,001 million to whatever it is I do. | ||
| I'll believe in anything for as much money as... | ||
| I will believe in anything for money. | ||
| Also, in case you're curious, the Apostles' Creed is the declaration that you believe in the reality of reincarnation of Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| And also a really good song by Jedi Mind Tricks. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, now we get to... | ||
| So, you know how... | ||
| You heard this a little bit. | ||
| Paula White likes to talk about how she does prophecy. | ||
| She likes to talk. | ||
| She does. | ||
| And she likes to do prophecy. | ||
| Here's a prophecy that she had that I think is ludicrous. | ||
| It's 2018, people. | ||
| It's 2018. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, we don't do prophecies. | ||
| Well, especially when you put yourself in a position of, I do prophecy, that puts you on shaky foundations with, I think, most mainline churches. | ||
| You would hope. | ||
| It's at least narcissistic. | ||
| I think most churches are like... | ||
| Look, we got a lot going on with our bullshit as it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's not throw prophecy. | ||
| Because prophecy is concrete, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you know what was great about the old prophecies? | ||
| They kind of didn't mean anything. | ||
| And you could just throw whatever you want on them. | ||
| And spoiler alert, a lot of them were written after the fact. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| A lot of them were, the dating on them is a little murky. | ||
| A little iffy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you don't give out, like, I'm going to prophesy this because it's not going to come true. | ||
| And look. | ||
| I'm sure Christians believe a lot of what they believe, and that's fine. | ||
| But even Christians are like, dude, don't put our names to a prophecy. | ||
| Don't put our business on the streets. | ||
| Because it's not going to come true. | ||
| We know we're not telling the real truth, but it's not the point. | ||
| The point isn't that we're telling the truth. | ||
| The point is that we're, like, feeling it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, baby! | ||
| Don't tell a prophecy that's, like, look, okay, yeah, so science found out that we revolved around the sun, and yeah, so somebody prophesied that we didn't. | ||
| But that's not the point! | ||
| The point is that we felt like we didn't. | ||
| Well, here's one of the things that's really interesting, is that, like, in terms of this Ms. White, Paula White... | ||
| Her prophecy that she talks about with her child... | ||
| Paula White Cain. | ||
| She is a Christian. | ||
| She would prefer to be referred to by her... | ||
| She's referred to by both. | ||
| Well, I think if there's anything that we have heard so far, it's that she would prefer to be subservient to her husband... | ||
| Who sits there silent through all of this. | ||
| ...and make sure that everybody knows that her choices are absolutely subsumed by his. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine. | |
| Paula Cain, then. | ||
| Yeah, there we go. | ||
| I don't even like... | ||
| I don't even like Paula. | ||
| Let's call her Mrs. Kane. | ||
| So, Ms. If you're nasty. | ||
| So, the idea that she has of her first, like, old-time prophecy is just this vague idea of, like, I'm going to be listened to, and if I stop, then people will be hurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's just a good origin story. | ||
| I don't begrudge that. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| No toxic Avenger, but I'm fine with it. | ||
| Well, the other prophecies that she gives are just counterfactuals of real things that did happen. | ||
| Like, here is one that she gives about what would have happened if Trump hadn't have won, which to me is a shitty prophecy, because it's like... | ||
| Great. | ||
| What are we on? | ||
| Alternate Earths? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| This isn't a multiverse Marvel comic here. | ||
| And God said to me, if I did open my mouth, then the Twin Towers would fall, so I did... | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| Fuck. | ||
| That was me. | ||
| They don't recognize how much we were on the verge of losing what we call religious liberties. | ||
| Or oppressions. | ||
| I believe, and I'm going to make a bold statement that I've never made publicly, but I believe that had God not divinely intervened through the church... | ||
| Through the church, praying through our obedience, through an awakening, and giving us this moment, this window. | ||
| And if we miss this, I believe the church in America would have been an underground church within five years. | ||
| I do! | ||
| Paula! | ||
| Five years! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paula, that's why God told me why I couldn't give it up. | |
| If they only understood... | ||
| How many believe that? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| We can't give up now. | ||
| We've come to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Almost fucking nobody! | ||
| That's how many people believe that? | ||
| Everybody was like, wait, five years? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah, but that's a delightful counterfactual prediction that is like, had things not gone the way they did in reality, here's a consequence, I imagine, for it to scare you. | ||
| About why we need to support Trump because he is in and is avoiding the churches becoming an underground church. | ||
| Like, fuck off. | ||
| And if you don't support Trump, then the majority religion that runs this entire fucking country will become an underground church in five years. | ||
| Five years. | ||
| Five years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would be fast. | ||
| I think that the reality is that if, you know, on a national level... | ||
| Conservatives, Republicans, have not done traditionally all that well in the last hundred years or so. | ||
| Last 50 years particularly. | ||
| They've not won a ton of elections, especially ones that didn't involve George W. Bush, his dad, or Nixon. | ||
| Which is why they learned how to cheat better. | ||
| Speaking of George W. Bush. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that what she's expressing is actually probably an accurate prophecy, but has nothing to do with the Christian church going underground. | ||
| Eventually, if people keep making liberal progress, our con is not going to be allowed. | ||
| At a certain point, people are going to get sick of this. | ||
| The word's going to get out on us, and our livelihoods are going to be completely busted. | ||
| At a certain point... | ||
| We will have to go underground, not the church. | ||
| If people's lives improve to the point where our fear-mongering bullshit... | ||
| Doesn't really make sense even to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| Yeah, we are straight fucked. | ||
| We need to make sure... | ||
| Why else would they join the side of the Koch billionaires and the like? | ||
| It's because if people's lives aren't shit, they're not going to go... | ||
| We get back to the... | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Now I can't remember. | ||
| Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? | ||
| If you have all of those needs fulfilled... | ||
| On the base level. | ||
| Then you are not afraid of, you know, somebody from another country is coming to take my job. | ||
| Do you know why I'm not afraid of that? | ||
| It's because I have my needs met and I'm comfortable in what I'm doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if I'm not afraid of immigrants coming to take my jobs or all of that shit, then I'm really not going to be picked it. | ||
| Picked up by the con men. | ||
| Nope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I don't have that fear to play on. | |
| I don't have that imaginary hole that these people are offering to fill for me. | ||
| So of course religions, of course all of these things are jumping in with that because they need a base level of misery. | ||
| Otherwise they're not going to be successful. | ||
| But I also don't think that it's most religions. | ||
| I understand that it's very easy and the numbers are real bad. | ||
| In terms of especially evangelical Christians and stuff like that. | ||
| But I also think that most of the evangelical Christians are under the sway of a really toxic version of Christianity. | ||
| I don't think Christianity as a whole is bad. | ||
| I think very smart Christians exist. | ||
| Very scholarly Christians who... | ||
| Write essays about how Paula White is a heretic. | ||
| Things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| What we've done is we've entered a world where anti-intellectualism has metastasized to include everything. | ||
| So you have these con men who are rebuking the very idea of knowing things. | ||
| You have Trump who doesn't... | ||
| I don't want to get briefed about stuff. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| My impulses are perfect. | ||
| So now you have this distrust of politics as a thing that... | ||
| Take politics out of it, because that is an inherently dirty game, but like diplomacy or international relations. | ||
| It's like, no, fuck that. | ||
| No one needs to study that. | ||
| I know better because of my great genes that I have. | ||
| So you have him infesting that sort of world. | ||
| You have someone like Paula White, who probably has much more influence than Jim Baker, if we're being totally honest. | ||
| And you have her, who she doesn't have a degree from a seminary. | ||
| She hasn't studied the Bible in a formal environment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No. | ||
| So she has, you know, fake accreditation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She's the doctor group of Christianity. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And she comes in with a heretical version of a misunderstanding of what Christians believe about Jesus. | ||
| And you have just like, hey, you know what? | ||
| She's super charismatic and fun. | ||
| And like, let's fucking let this become dominant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not just her, but there are tons of her. | ||
| There are tons of her within the evangelical community. | ||
| And they're leading well-meaning people into a complete idiotic world. | ||
| And that's what bums me out. | ||
| Because I think a lot of people who are... | ||
| And this is me going back to my dumb centrist roots. | ||
| But this is something that I care about a lot. | ||
| I know a lot of really good Christian people. | ||
| My parents are devout Christian folk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I can confirm they are the people that you say they are. | |
| They're great, and they're also very liberal. | ||
| They're progressive as shit. | ||
| They're very understanding of the ideas of the teachings of Jesus being adaptable and metaphorical on some level. | ||
| You don't have to be beholden to these dumb ideas about... | ||
| I watched a video where they were talking about... | ||
| Where Paula White was on another show, and they were talking about... | ||
| Why the prosperity gospel is the truth. | ||
| And that's because when Adam was sent out of the Garden of Eden, it was about the sweat of his brow. | ||
| He would work and it would mean nothing. | ||
| He would have all this work and it would never come to the middle. | ||
| It would never be made right. | ||
| But Jesus had the crown of thorns on his head and they humiliated him. | ||
| And he bled from the brow and it was the parallel of the... | ||
| Like, the poverty that was thrown on Adam, and so there's a metaphor of economic redemption that I'm bringing to you through Jesus. | ||
| That makes the least sense of anything I've ever heard in my entire life. | ||
| Well, it's just because the idea of the brow, the word brow being used in both contexts. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, one of those is, like, farming is hard, and then the other one is, like, getting murdered is hard. | ||
| Right, but you have stuff like that where people are trying to twist the literalness of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of scriptures. | ||
| And I think a lot of Christians get a really bad shake. | ||
| And I know that I have now abandoned my desire to defend Republicans. | ||
| No, and here's... | ||
| But I still think I hold out hope and I believe that there are a lot of great Christians in the world. | ||
| Look, you're talking to me. | ||
| My family is fucking nuts! | ||
| Like, they are... | ||
| Like, all of the shit that she is saying... | ||
| They would totally say. | ||
| And if they listened to this episode, if everybody in my family listened to this episode, I swear to God they wouldn't even hear the ad pivots. | ||
| Some part of their brains would just whip it out. | ||
| And they'd be like, no, what she's saying is good and true and prayer is good and honest. | ||
| And I believe that. | ||
| And I'm like, no, I get it. | ||
| You're just missing the ad pivot part. | ||
| You realize that you're being... | ||
| Tricked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they can't. | ||
| You're focusing on the fatty meat when you need to see the skeleton of what's supporting that meat on the animal. | ||
| And part of it is just like, they're not bad people. | ||
| My family is, they're wonderful, beautiful people. | ||
| I'm not going to paint my family as something awful. | ||
| They would give you a sandwich. | ||
| I don't fucking know. | ||
| No need to unpack all of that now. | ||
| Whatever your basis for an okay person is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But if... | ||
| You can't go back on it to them in their way at a certain point. | ||
| It's almost like they're pot committed. | ||
| They're playing poker and they're like, well, we've already put all of our chips in. | ||
| Why would we stop now? | ||
| It's money protecting bad money already spent. | ||
| I can't quit this job I hate because I've worked here 10 years. | ||
| And also, at the same time... | ||
| For so many of these people, even if my parents, even if my mom and dad, who have been with this church for like 20 years, even if they know it's bullshit, if they leave it, now they don't have any friends, man. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| Now what are they going to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What, are they going to go to a card club? | ||
| Like, they've got nothing. | ||
| There's a hundred possibilities, but it is tough. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| Yeah, you just let all of that shit go. | ||
| Oh, yeah, there's an ad pivot, but I'm not going to give them money, so it's really not about me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, it's a prosperity gospel, but I don't really worry about the prosperity part. | ||
| I'm just doing that for the God. | ||
| Like, it's, of course, I get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, you're fucking, you're ruining it. | ||
| Yeah, and unfortunately people like Apollo or people like Jim have much deeper things that they want. | ||
| They have issues that they care about that are not so much about being religiously based or anything like that. | ||
| Jim almost jizzes on himself with that pen that signed the stripping of the Johnson Amendment. | ||
| It was a great pen, though. | ||
| Is because what he cares about is using the church that he has in a political way. | ||
| Because that will allow him to open up so many more vistas of fundraising. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| There's so many more things that he'd be able to do. | ||
| In a tax-free environment if he's able to not have the IRS breathing down his neck about what you can and can't say. | ||
| Like, those sorts of things would be so... | ||
| I just want to thank God for making the crimes that I committed before legal now by electing Donald Trump! | ||
| There's so many benefits that he stands to gain from it, and it's fucking ludicrous to think that... | ||
| At one of my old jobs, I... | ||
| I had a... | ||
| something happened or whatever, and the corporate head sent me a pen. | ||
| Fuck pens. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Fuck pens. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| It's a fucking pen. | ||
| Nah, I disagree. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| What are you fucking doing? | ||
| On my last day of work at my old office, this guy named Trez came in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| This guy ran a couple coffee shops, and he was an awesome dude. | ||
| He's one of the only people I actually liked interacting with. | ||
| I worked in a role where I had to collect overdue amounts from people who bought our coffee and shit. | ||
| And he'd always be pretty behind. | ||
| That's because he was super busy. | ||
| He'd always come into the office about once a month or so with a checkbook and be like, here, I'm going to get even. | ||
| And he'd come in. | ||
| He was super awesome. | ||
| He was just a really... | ||
| Really fucking nice guy. | ||
| And cool and fun. | ||
| I liked him. | ||
| Every time he came in, very exciting to see Trent. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| He's the Paula White... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, because he wasn't a shithead. | ||
| But he came in on the last day, or around my last day of work. | ||
| I think it was my second last day. | ||
| And he's like, I want to give you this. | ||
| And he gave me a pen from his coffee shop. | ||
| I still have it. | ||
| I thought it was really sweet. | ||
| Very nice thing. | ||
| It has a thing on the end of it, so you can use it as a stylus. | ||
| It's a good pen. | ||
| It's a cute thing. | ||
| But also just the sentimentality of it meant a lot. | ||
| Whereas if Paula was saying, like, Donald Trump signed a bill with this, and I know it doesn't mean anything, but it's a sentimental artifact of my time or whatever, I'd respect that more than Jim Baker being like, I've waited my whole life for this pen. | ||
| That's very different, you know? | ||
| Anyway, enough pen talk. | ||
| Now let's get to historical revisionism. | ||
| Pens were invented by Americans! | ||
| What was the purpose of America? | ||
| What was the purpose? | ||
| Not for us to slaughter babies. | ||
| Not for us. | ||
| People will get upset if I start going on that. | ||
| I mean, I can continue to go. | ||
| The purpose was when our forefathers came over that we would not have a state religion. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They took their crosses when they landed at Plymouth and when they walked that beach area and they put their white crosses down and they dedicated this land and said it will be a lighthouse for God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And murdered all of the people. | |
| They dedicated this land with the blood of everyone who was here before them. | ||
| As a sacrament. | ||
| Thank God! | ||
| But even taking that aside, I don't think that the original intent was that, like, this will be a Christian way station on the way to other places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Eh. | ||
| Eh. | ||
| I think that what we have there, more importantly, whether or not that's... | ||
| Blatant historical revisionism or not. | ||
| What you have there is absolutely a declaration that what we want is a goddamn theocracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| We want this to be, and we believe that it was supposed to be, and it's not because of these demon folk who are you and I. But... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I... | |
| I mean, there's a certain part of me that respects it. | ||
| Because here's what you're doing. | ||
| Me? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, if you're them. | ||
| You're taking everything that humanity has ever done and are going like, ooh, no, that doesn't sound great. | ||
| And that really doesn't support my argument. | ||
| So I'm going to make my own up. | ||
| And my own human history supports what I want to do. | ||
| So let's just make that the real human history. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Like, that makes perfect sense, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, if I just convince enough people that reality isn't... | ||
| Then they'll do what I tell them to do. | ||
| And she's good at it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Like, I mean, I've had this conversation, I feel like I keep having this conversation more and more recently than I think I ever have before, which is just, like, what we've always talked about, which is, like, a conversation doesn't happen until there's an agreement of terms, an agreement of definitions. | ||
| It's a classic idea. | ||
| What is, when you say table, Are we talking about table? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we are no longer doing that. | ||
| Conversation can't happen without that. | ||
| There is no conversation to be had with somebody who believes that the Founding Fathers wanted a Christian theocracy. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| Well, here's a good... | ||
| Or you believe that God wanted the Founding Fathers to have a God with the... | ||
| You know, like, what do you say to that? | ||
| Well, here's a good concrete example of that. | ||
| Like, if you look at the reality of Trump going to North Korea... | ||
| And talking with that deal he made with a non-binding statement that they made. | ||
| Which has turned out to be one of the most hilarious things. | ||
| They are rubbing their asses in our faces, and I think it's hilarious. | ||
| But we get back to this idea of the beginning of a conversation is the definition of terms. | ||
| And you have denuclearization as being a term that has been agreed on in this... | ||
| A statement that they made. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But to us, or to Trump, denuclearization is a one-sided thing where he gives up all of his nukes and submits. | ||
| Whereas for him, the term denuclearization is a... | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| It's a more unilateral thing where South Korea gives up their weapons, the entire peninsula becomes de-weaponized, the United States scales back involvement and stuff like that. | ||
| So you can come to an agreement that says we believe in denuclearization, but if one side thinks it means X and the other side... | ||
| thinks why, then you don't have anything. | ||
| Nope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This agreement doesn't mean anything. | |
| It's not real. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's the impossibility of the conversation we keep having. | |
| It's the reason why bad faith actors like Alex Jones, all of his ilk, all of the commentators on the right, why they are such a big problem is that we... | ||
| We don't have a consensus about what we mean, and they are doing that intentionally. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| Because they can't have the conversation on a level playing field. | ||
| Of course not! | ||
| It doesn't make any sense! | ||
| Because when you nail things down, people can't wiggle. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You can't get around it. | ||
| You can't be like, what do you believe in? | ||
| And then make a hard declaration of what you believe in. | ||
| Well, and this has happened to everybody. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And it's something that we all, I think is one of the big things as far as growing is like getting over this is when you are talking to somebody, when you're having an argument and they start to pin you down, you start to feel it though. | ||
| Like there's a certain point where you start to feel like, oh shit, I might be wrong. | ||
| And instead of for, like this is humanity, like 95% of us, instead of saying like, Oh, no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Tell me more about that. | ||
| You're like, well, that's not what I was saying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you end it and dismount fast. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, I wasn't saying that. | ||
| And then that allows you to continue believing the same shit that you, for a brief instant, you had that chance. | ||
| You had that moment of like, maybe I could be wrong here. | ||
| And I could say I'm wrong. | ||
| And then I could change. | ||
| My two things that I do in that situation is... | ||
| Well, I mean, the first thing is universal, and that is I assess. | ||
| Then the second thing is either I reject your premise, this conversation's stupid, if that's the case, or I laugh and I'm like, ha ha, man, I was off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because who cares? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| If you're wrong about something, then you're wrong about something. | ||
| It's not the worst thing in the world. | ||
| I think that's one of the most fun things that I have experienced with this, with our whole podcast, is always just like, eventually... | ||
| I generally prove you're wrong. | ||
| I'm either like, no, yeah, yeah, you're right. | ||
| All of the stuff I said was dumb because it was based on information that I didn't really have, and you have that information. | ||
| But I also still don't think you're dumb. | ||
| Like, your reasoning is still there. | ||
| It's not that... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| It's not an indictment of you. | ||
| That's part of growth, though. | ||
| That's part of the thing that makes me excited to do this part. | ||
| Like, when we talk about it's boring for Alex to continue to say all this stuff, for me, it's really exciting because I... | ||
| Like not being wrong. | ||
| And when I'm wrong, that's just a super exciting opportunity for me not to be wrong later. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, it's great. | ||
| I like learning shit. | ||
| And so often, like with these people, you could tell them, you could, and you could rhetorically have an argument where they're like... | ||
| But maybe if I... | ||
| And you just keep pinning them down. | ||
| Just like, hey, stay in the pocket. | ||
| This is what we're talking about. | ||
| No way. | ||
| This is what we're talking about. | ||
| Not a chance. | ||
| You are staying right here with me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| This is what we're saying. | ||
| We'll not do that. | ||
| Until you and I agree that this is what we're talking about, we are not talking. | ||
| But this is why philosophers don't go on Infowars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is why people who are actually good at conversation, in that sense, don't go on these shows. | ||
| It's because... | ||
| See, but I think that's also one of the problems, is that... | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm not talking... | ||
| Why won't these philosophers debate? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Why won't they debate? | ||
| I'm not talking about it in that regard. | ||
| Why would they subject themselves to this level of bullshit? | ||
| No, I made a leap that I didn't let you in on. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| So apologies. | ||
| I understood the implied leap that you were making, but at the same time, just on its face, that was stupid. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no, it's dumb. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| It is a problem that smarter people don't go on these shows. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, that's not what I'm talking about. | ||
| No, I understand, but that was a piece of what you were saying. | ||
| And yes, it is a problem that... | ||
| This will never get better if these worlds... | ||
| What it is, is this is an infected tooth. | ||
| Jim Baker. | ||
| Alex Jones is another infected tooth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's not going to get better until you put some medication in there. | ||
| You do like a root canal. | ||
| And that root canal is probably smart people showing up and embarrassing them on their own show or something like that. | ||
| Right, but I think that's where one of the big disconnects happens. | ||
| And also, as we've seen... | ||
| Like, Dr. Dean Adele has gone on, that volcanologist. | ||
| So people go on, and they do a root canal, and then the behavior of eating candy all night happens again, and then you have another... | ||
| That's what I'm trying to say. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to say, is that it is not that smart people don't say this stuff to them. | ||
| It is that the way that you put it is what triggered it for me. | ||
| When you said, well, it's that people who are good at this kind of thing don't go on there. | ||
| And that's the way people view it too often. | ||
| You're not right. | ||
| You're just better at arguing than me. | ||
| Well, Steve Pachenik's really good at arguing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He's brilliant. | ||
| But that's the way that people get out of being in that conversation with you. | ||
| I've had this happen to me plenty of times. | ||
| Tons of people who are good at arguing go on Alex Jones' show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tons of them, but they're just beholden to the same ideas as Alex, so they never have an argument. | ||
| But if their argument is losing... | ||
| They will say it is not because their argument is bad, or it is because their argument doesn't make any sense. | ||
| They'll say it's because you're just better at arguing than me. | ||
| It's a question of who is dominating this argument, not... | ||
| Whether or not your ideas make any sense. | ||
| And that's the way that so many people view it. | ||
| I mean, that even goes back to Alex talking about when he was on that British show. | ||
| He's like, I dominated that interview. | ||
| Yeah, that's why so many... | ||
| That's the heart of so many fears about sending their kids to college with these evangelical communities is like, no, no, no. | ||
| It's not that they're... | ||
| You're going to think... | ||
| That they have knowledge that you don't know. | ||
| But what it really is, is they're just tricking you with better arguments. | ||
| Because we don't teach you how to argue. | ||
| You don't need to know how to argue. | ||
| God says don't argue. | ||
| They're sneaky, highfalutin city learning. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's the anti-intellectualism. | ||
| Is the idea that it is about a quality of argument being ill as opposed to... | ||
| A fact. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think some of that's certainly true. | ||
| But at the end of the day, Jordan, I really don't think it matters because all of these things that we're particularly concerned about, these issues that we've brought up here, certainly the anti-intellectualism, the nature of argumentation, the agreeing on terms, these sorts of things that are really important in having a conversation, it doesn't matter with these people because there's one thing that this is about. | ||
| So that you can see exactly what he is calling you, you right now, to get up on the phone and sell that $45 seed. | ||
| Not just to get the book, not just to get the prophetic series, but so that this message can keep going forth. | ||
| So that you can see what he is calling you. | ||
| Does it even bother them that it's really close to 40 pieces of silver? | ||
| Does it even bother? | ||
| Do they even for a single fucking second think about that? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| And we have one more clip where Paula goes a little bit too hard. | ||
| But I've had the same things, the death threats, and spiritually and naturally, they're spiritual assassins, and naturally, they've said there's things after your life, da-da-da-da. | ||
| But you know what I did? | ||
| John and I grabbed each other the other night. | ||
| We put our feet in oil. | ||
| We started taking communion. | ||
| All right, I like this. | ||
| We took a prophetic instruction and we obeyed because God told us to sow an amount. | ||
| We took the amount and God told us to sow it into a certain thing because he said it would be for the preservation of our lives. | ||
| life and for the preservation of our children. | ||
| We obeyed God and somebody needs to obey God right now because you need to give a lot more than $45. | ||
| You need to give thousands of dollars in obedience for the word of the Lord that is coming because it's going to preserve you and your family. | ||
| And when we did this and we preserved, here's how I prayed. | ||
| I didn't I can't pray. | ||
| Oh, God, will you just keep... | ||
| She's crazy. | ||
| She's sewed 45 bucks into a couch! | ||
| No. | ||
| I think that's what she just described. | ||
| She just described... | ||
| You're trying to make the metaphorical literal. | ||
| Here's what she just described. | ||
| She just described her and her husband, who controls all of her finances and who refuses to allow her to speak for herself. | ||
| Of course, she is subservient to him in every possible way. | ||
| They were told by God... | ||
| To sew some money into a place for the protection of their children. | ||
| I'm going to go with couch. | ||
| You're misspelling the word. | ||
| You're thinking it's S-E-W. | ||
| It's S-O-W. | ||
| I'm going to go with couch. | ||
| Sowing seeds. | ||
| This is just the basis. | ||
| Yeah, they sowed those seeds into a couch. | ||
| No, this is the basis of the prosperity gospel stuff. | ||
| We've talked about this over and over again. | ||
| But when I hear her say that, what I hear is, I'm going to lie and say that we put our feet in oil and then have communion. | ||
| Was they took a bath together and drank wine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which I love. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I hope your relationship is wonderful. | ||
| Sexy. | ||
| But the idea of her sowing this seed or whatever, what she's talking about is I made an investment. | ||
| And now I'm trying to imply to all of you that you need to do the same thing but with me. | ||
| You need to make an investment in me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, of course. | ||
| It's the same fucking thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I still kind of believe they put it into a couch or something. | |
| I do bet they have a safe or something like that in their house. | ||
| These folks never exist without a grain of paranoia somewhere. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's definitely there. | ||
| Hard cash on hand. | ||
| Not trusting a bank. | ||
| As much as that was a metaphor, that was also a very real story about a very real discussion that they had. | ||
| About oil on their feet. | ||
| Something... | ||
| No, I mean, like, for real, that does sound like her dramatizing a... | ||
| Like, we took a foot bath. | ||
| No, it's dramatizing a story of an investment decision. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not like God told us to give away a recognizable amount of our fortune. | ||
| Like, it's not that. | ||
| I don't believe that for a hot second. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But she wants to imply that it is in order to make it seem like you have to give more. | ||
| So anyway, the reason that I end with this is that, like, again, for all of our intents, And our pretenses of trying to have a real conversation about what these people are up to, it always boils down to this stuff. | ||
| It always boils down to... | ||
| $45. | ||
| Over and over again saying, give me $45, and then after that being like, that's not enough. | ||
| That's not enough. | ||
| It's thousands of dollars you need to give. | ||
| You need to give 10% of everything. | ||
| And the reason is because I have this magic pen, and I'm friends with our god king, who is the president. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| And this sort of behavior is going to lead down the road to a gross, gross theocracy. | ||
| I really feel like America was founded on like a... | ||
| Man, there was something about Kings. | ||
| I remember when America was started. | ||
| They had opinions about Kings. | ||
| I'll tell you, Kings is one of my favorite Steely Dan songs off of Can't Buy a Thrill. | ||
| It's a great album. | ||
| One of the deep cuts. | ||
| You know, everyone knows real and in the years. | ||
| Shit like that. | ||
| Which is the lamest one. | ||
| On that album, they had a song called Kings that was a fucking banger. | ||
| Kings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get along. | |
| That was Kid Charlemagne. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| That's a different song. | ||
| But that was from a later album. | ||
| But the song, Kings. | ||
| Kings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've seen the last of good King Richard. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Raise up your glass for good King John. | |
| I was thinking about the Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney classic Three Kings. | ||
| Well, see, Steely Dan's version of Kings was really all about the fall of Richard Nixon and the rise of JFK. | ||
| So is the movie Three Kings. | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I gotta go. | |
| I want to talk more about Steely Dan. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's time to wrap this up. | ||
| Man, they all had a nice song called Midnight Cruiser off that album. | ||
| Stop turning into a middle-aged man in front of me. | ||
| I like that now my new thing is going to be at the end of every episode talking about music I like. | ||
| I feel like I was a... | ||
| Scatman John last time, now Steely Dan. | ||
| I feel like I'm a 20-year-old girl cornered by a man talking about Steely Dan, which is not an uncommon feeling. | ||
| Have you ever listened to... | ||
| I already said Midnight Cruiser. | ||
| I can't think of a third song. | ||
| Too much. | ||
| Anyway, these people are a disgrace. | ||
| And hoo-hoo, good times. | ||
| Anyway, if you can't quite get it, the parallels are very clear in terms of where the con work is more important than the actual content being portrayed. | ||
| And that's why these sorts of things are very relevant to our show, even if they aren't Alex Jones. | ||
| But if you like our show and want to hear more of us talking ad nauseum about Alex Jones, you can go and find that stuff over at knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Indeed, you can follow us on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| We're on Facebook! | ||
| We are on Facebook! | ||
| You can go to iTunes. | ||
| You can like. | ||
| You can support the show. | ||
| You can leave a review. | ||
| You can do a whole thing. | ||
| Any of that shit. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| You can put us on message boards. | ||
| Like, where there are message boards, right? | ||
| Yeah, please do that. | ||
| We also have a Facebook group called Go Home and Tell Your Mother You're Brilliant. | ||
| Indeed, we do. | ||
| Which is a lot of fun. | ||
| And, Dan, I believe it is... | ||
| Your turn. | ||
| No, last turn. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Last time there was a cornucopia, and now you have narrowed it down to a few key players, one of whom plays the keyboard. | ||
| I'm certain of who I need to give the honors at the end of this episode. | ||
| There's a lot of musicians. | ||
| A televangelist married a member of Journey. | ||
| There's a lot of musicians in the world. | ||
| A lot of them are very credible musicians, and some of them have... | ||
| Technical talent, but also are pieces of shit for reasons that I don't know. | ||
| And actually, I'm probably speaking out of turn. | ||
| I have no idea what their life is like, but from the age of 19 or so, I decided this guy sucks. | ||
| And hey, he didn't come up on this episode, but he's involved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Neil Schoen from Journey. | |
| Neil Schoen, go fuck yourself. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Alex, I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. |