Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about illness
Speaker 2: by the sickest man in podcasting, Robert evans Uh. We're
Speaker 2: recording this about a week after our TV Joshua Part
Speaker 2: one episodes with the Great Miles Gray. Miles take an
Speaker 2: audio bow. Wow, what a bow, beautiful microphone. I'm technically better,
Speaker 2: I guess. I have this fun thing that happens with
Speaker 2: sinus infections where my nose is mostly better, but now
Speaker 2: my jaw hurts like hell. It's like a I think
Speaker 2: it's partly related to coughing, but it happens when you're
Speaker 2: when your sinuses get completely fucked. So I'm feeling great.
Speaker 2: Miles how Yeah, yeah, I'm always putting silver in various parts.
Speaker 1: Do you watch sorry, did you watch that documentary?
Speaker 3: Miles?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Any any time?
Speaker 4: He was a crip.
Speaker 2: My favorite thing is people taking quack medicine that turns
Speaker 2: them different colors. Dude, that's it's so good. Every time
Speaker 2: it's funny.
Speaker 3: I it's like it's fucked up. But like I was
Speaker 3: taking so many screenshots when I was watching that that
Speaker 3: I use as memes among my friends, like just this
Speaker 3: one where the guy was playing guitar. She was in
Speaker 3: the bed. Yeah, I said, just like the energy of
Speaker 3: playing guitar for a corpse like that.
Speaker 2: You're like, oh, this is what's the BES needs.
Speaker 1: I quite literally forced Jamie to watch that all the
Speaker 1: way through. In the middle of the night. I was like,
Speaker 1: I was like, I can't be awake tomorrow and you
Speaker 1: have not watched this for me to talk to you
Speaker 1: about this shit.
Speaker 3: It was mean mile when they were wheeling her through
Speaker 3: that the whole thing was out of whatever.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it was great because it led me after I
Speaker 2: was watching it with friends and afterwards we were very
Speaker 2: much like, well, I still want more cult content, and
Speaker 2: we we found fucking I think it was Netflix. We
Speaker 2: were on I forget whatever thing we were on. The
Speaker 2: algorithm was like this. It was here's a show about
Speaker 2: like this commune that might be a cult or might not.
Speaker 2: It was like a mystery show and I put it on.
Speaker 2: In the first episode feels kind of like a documentary.
Speaker 2: There are a couple of weird moments and I'm like,
Speaker 2: what's going on with this? And then the second episode
Speaker 2: it's it immediately transitions to being a reality show fully,
Speaker 2: and I was like, they tricked us. They tricked us
Speaker 2: in the thinking that we were watching like a documentary
Speaker 2: about this commune that got accused of being a cult,
Speaker 2: and it's just a reality show where people have to
Speaker 2: live on a commune, right, And I was like, you
Speaker 2: tricky bitches. This is this country, this fucking country. Horrible
Speaker 2: speaking of this country. You know it's not this country, Miles.
Speaker 2: Where Nigeria? Yes, yeah, you know. I'm not an expert
Speaker 2: on Nigeria. The of my research suggests different country than
Speaker 2: than we live. And to be honest, thank you, I
Speaker 2: thought it was good.
Speaker 4: It connected with the main thought.
Speaker 2: Which was it's not this country. Yeah, it's not this country,
Speaker 2: but it is where TB. Joshua lived. And most great
Speaker 2: cult leaders, Miles have a title or an alternate name
Speaker 2: they prefer to be known by. I'm not gonna say
Speaker 2: every cult leader, but a lot of them do, right.
Speaker 2: Al Ron Hubbard was the Commodore because he loved navies
Speaker 2: and making people pretend to be in his navy. Keith
Speaker 2: Rniery was known as Vanguard to his followers. I had
Speaker 2: a beance joke in here, but I really like, why
Speaker 2: would I that? I don't need I don't need that
Speaker 2: kind of game. We're gonna bleep it out anyway, like
Speaker 2: they did in that Donald Glover's show, Sophie. So it's fine, right. So,
Speaker 2: in keeping with the fact that he was a general
Speaker 2: creep and monster TV, Joshua had the most unsettling cult
Speaker 2: leader nickname imaginable Daddy. That's just mm, that's the good stuff.
Speaker 2: Not like their father sometimes too, but like Daddy specifically
Speaker 2: is what most of his followers refer to a mass,
Speaker 2: which is just an extra level I don't know why
Speaker 2: it's worse than Father. I guess it's not. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: just like exposure because of the Catholic Church. We're all
Speaker 2: used to religious figures being father, like.
Speaker 3: Daddy is creepy, right, No, Daddy is because it's like
Speaker 3: it's juvenile, but also there's it's sexually charged in different.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, And I mean, and it is in
Speaker 2: this context because like the people who he was most
Speaker 2: insistent call him Daddy were the young female followers that
Speaker 2: he was fucking right.
Speaker 4: Why did first?
Speaker 3: Second, I forgot I was on behind the Bastards, and
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, I finally said, chill, We're just
Speaker 3: like we're just gonna talk about Mother God. And then
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, that's right, we're talking about TV. Fucking
Speaker 3: Joshua again. We wait, I thought I was watching a
Speaker 3: Netflix documentary about a cult and now I'm on a
Speaker 3: fucking reality show.
Speaker 2: That's such a fun cult documentary because like it's I mean,
Speaker 2: it's a story about a woman destroying herself and like dying,
Speaker 2: but she's also the cult leader. And it's like interesting
Speaker 2: because it's a cult leader where the primary victim was
Speaker 2: the cult leader. Yeah, like the cult leader was the
Speaker 2: victim of the cult in a way that's really fun. Yeah,
Speaker 2: as opposed to this, which is just horrible. But you
Speaker 2: know this is Yeah, we're not going to give you
Speaker 2: the fun story. You're not going to hear about Mother God. Here,
Speaker 2: go watch HBO if you want.
Speaker 3: Is there coidal silver at the very least in this one?
Speaker 2: There there is quack remedies. But those quack remedies are
Speaker 2: just praying until your cancer eats you alive. Okay, all right, yep,
Speaker 2: So I'm still in stuff. Yeah, I'm still in Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 2: you're contractually obligated to be. We have we have ironclad
Speaker 2: tracks with our kids. Hey, don't don't reveal the process here.
Speaker 4: I know I'm locked in.
Speaker 2: We're represented by one of those Epstein lawyers, and it's
Speaker 2: it's just anyway. Speaking of abusive relationships, let's talk about
Speaker 2: the tale of one of TV Joshua's followers. Ray Ray
Speaker 2: is an english woman. She Brighton, England, where she went
Speaker 2: to university for Nigeria. In the winter of two thousand
Speaker 2: and two, she traveled there with a friend to see TB. Joshua. Now,
Speaker 2: both Ray and her friend were strict Christians who had
Speaker 2: seen videos of TV Joshua's miracles, passed around in tapes,
Speaker 2: and heard stories from other evangelicals who'd gone to his church.
Speaker 2: Right again, as you noted, it's very much like I
Speaker 2: don't know the way that like, you know, back in
Speaker 2: the early odd's, late nineties, like punk bands, you'd get
Speaker 2: like some burnt like you get like a tape or
Speaker 2: something from a friend of yours. Right, it's like a
Speaker 2: live session from this band no one else has ever
Speaker 2: heard of. And yeah, that's how that shit spread. It's
Speaker 2: the same way with this And in Ray's accounting, she
Speaker 2: watched these videos for the first time with her church
Speaker 2: congregation when she was sixteen, so a couple of years
Speaker 2: before she went over there, and quote the whole room
Speaker 2: went completely still when they first watched TV Joshua cure people. Now,
Speaker 2: it's one thing to say these people were convinced that
Speaker 2: TV Joshua could work miracles and wanted to see that
Speaker 2: for themselves, but that doesn't get at the essential horror
Speaker 2: of what was going on here. Ray, Like a lot
Speaker 2: of TV Joshua's foreign volunteers was homosexual, and because of
Speaker 2: the religious environment she was raised in and the time again,
Speaker 2: you got to remember, this is the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: were in a very different period for a lot of
Speaker 2: this stuff. She believed that this was immoral and she
Speaker 2: wanted to pray the gay away, right, Like that was her, Like,
Speaker 2: she recognized this about her. She's raised in this culture
Speaker 2: and she wants to be cured of this, and whatever
Speaker 2: she's doing at home is not getting rid of this
Speaker 2: thing that is part of her, right right. And she
Speaker 2: sees these videos of this supernaturally powerful preacher in Nigeria
Speaker 2: and is like, maybe he can do it, right, I'm
Speaker 2: seeing you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's like fixing this guy's like leg or whatever
Speaker 3: we saw last time. Yeah, yeah, And obviously that doesn't work,
Speaker 3: but you can see why she would get hope for
Speaker 3: this for the first time. Right as a result of
Speaker 3: like watching these videos, Ray Letter told him it later
Speaker 3: told an I thought, well, maybe this is the answer
Speaker 3: to my problems. Maybe this man can straighten me out,
Speaker 3: Like if he prays for me, I won't be gay anymore.
Speaker 3: And so after she and her friend went and visited
Speaker 3: Scone for a week, her friend goes back to the UK,
Speaker 3: but Ray elects to stay to like drop out of school,
Speaker 3: to basically leave her family and to join his church.
Speaker 3: She recalls thinking this is what Jesus would have done.
Speaker 3: An article published based on a BBC Africa I report
Speaker 3: states neither Ray nor many of the young people who
Speaker 3: left their home countries to meet Joshua in the early
Speaker 3: two thousands paid.
Speaker 2: For their tickets. Church groups across England raised funds to
Speaker 2: send pilgrims to Lagos to witness these miracles, and Joshua
Speaker 2: contributed scone money himself. Senior former church insiders say later,
Speaker 2: once the church was well established, he charged high prices
Speaker 2: for pilgrims to come and stay. So it's really like
Speaker 2: a bait and switch type thing, right, Like we'll put
Speaker 2: money into bringing people over here until we've established demand
Speaker 2: in the industry because there's so many people coming back home. Right,
Speaker 2: he's a good business man, right, evil business man, but
Speaker 2: most goodness susmitter evils.
Speaker 4: So yeah, there's no.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't make the line go up unless you
Speaker 3: have truly despicable aliams or are You're just like no,
Speaker 3: I'm just good at getting the people here and making
Speaker 3: the money.
Speaker 2: And the line is going up for Scone.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Bisola, a Nigerian woman who spent fourteen years inside these
Speaker 2: Scone compounds, says that courting Westerners was a key tactic. Quote.
Speaker 2: He used white people to market his brand, and it's
Speaker 2: worth noting that miracles were also marketed, as we've said
Speaker 2: to other Africans, and that TB. Joshua was an equal
Speaker 2: opportunity abuser, but the abuse looked different depending on where
Speaker 2: you were coming from. And this brings us to how
Speaker 2: he treated members of the Nigerian LGBTQ community. I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from an article by Open Democracy here. Hans
Speaker 2: Lean Davids, who works with the Inclusive and Affirming Ministries IAM,
Speaker 2: a Pan African network that champions LGBTIQ rights and religious organizations,
Speaker 2: says that Joshua promotes the notion that LGBTQ people are
Speaker 2: bad spirits blocking prosperity. Parents from poor communities bring their
Speaker 2: children that are lgbtiq' identifying to Joshua's services and the
Speaker 2: hope that their bad omen child will be turned into
Speaker 2: something good and they will start to have good luck
Speaker 2: and prosperity, says David's who is a former reverend with
Speaker 2: the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. And so again
Speaker 2: for kids like Ray, the preacher is that like this
Speaker 2: can fix you. This guy is so much more powerful
Speaker 2: than any of the religious leaders you've seen in your country,
Speaker 2: and he can actually fix you where they can't. And
Speaker 2: when they're talking to like when he's sort of like
Speaker 2: preaching to queer Nigerians, what he's saying is that like
Speaker 2: if you send your kids here for me to fix them,
Speaker 2: the bad luck that your family has incurred because you
Speaker 2: have a gay child in the family will be wiped
Speaker 2: away and your family will start making more money. Right,
Speaker 2: Like that's literally the pitch. Yeah, And both of those
Speaker 2: things are evil, they're just a bit different, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Which we're just using.
Speaker 4: Different motivators to get people there, right.
Speaker 2: And it showcases that this is someone with a pretty
Speaker 2: keen understanding of both cultures. He understands the Western cultures
Speaker 2: that he's recruiting from, and he understands like his own
Speaker 2: community right and that different approaches are going to work better.
Speaker 2: Right now, This gets us to another interesting difference between
Speaker 2: sorry and I think like it's kind of key to
Speaker 2: note that when it comes to how he preached to
Speaker 2: poor Nigerians, to Ghanians, to peoples in West Africa, and
Speaker 2: largely the people he is recruiting from there, not exclusively,
Speaker 2: but a lot of them are very poor. He focuses
Speaker 2: on prosperity, right, and not just in terms of like
Speaker 2: promising that if you come to the church, if you
Speaker 2: send him your kids for him to fix them, your
Speaker 2: family will be prosperous. But he does this sort of
Speaker 2: thing that's very common in the US among prosperity gospel churches,
Speaker 2: where you have to tie a huge chunk of your income.
Speaker 2: He asks for ten percent from the incomes of all
Speaker 2: of his church members, and that will ensure that God
Speaker 2: blesses your finances. So the way this is and again
Speaker 2: a lot of this is prosperity gospel shit. You get
Speaker 2: this in the US all the time. You have to
Speaker 2: give money to the church. But that's how you guarantee
Speaker 2: God will increase your income, right, Like, that's the only
Speaker 2: way for you to make more. I'm one of God's
Speaker 2: official agents, man, So here's a deal. Give me about
Speaker 2: like ten give me a ten percent kind of your shit.
Speaker 2: I'll fucking tell God, Yo, make sure you hooked them
Speaker 2: up this month, and we're good. We're good. So, over
Speaker 2: the first twenty or so years of operations, gone perfected
Speaker 2: the practice of reaching out to people in different ways,
Speaker 2: and of course the practice of faking miracles. And this
Speaker 2: is what all of these tactics rely upon, is faking miracles.
Speaker 2: Witnesses have claimed two press that not only were some
Speaker 2: miracle recipients actors, as we've already discussed, but it was
Speaker 2: also common practice to trick actual sick people into playing
Speaker 2: their part. TV Joshua's agents would comb logos for people
Speaker 2: with health problems that were easily treated. But like, these
Speaker 2: people couldn't afford to treat those health problems, right, So
Speaker 2: it's you've got some sort of you know, bacterial sickness
Speaker 2: or whatever, a virus even that we can treat, you
Speaker 2: just can't afford to treat it. These people will be
Speaker 2: brought in and then in the food or water they're
Speaker 2: being given, they would be drugged and treated against their
Speaker 2: knowledge and told that what was fixing them was them
Speaker 2: being prayed over right. They were gaslighting people into believing
Speaker 2: that they had been cured.
Speaker 3: So like someone like has some kind of like maybe
Speaker 3: like parasitic infection or something like that, and they're like, dude,
Speaker 3: just fucking hit them with the antibiotics and they're fucking yogurt.
Speaker 4: And then yeah, wow.
Speaker 2: Because if you've got you know, because of you know,
Speaker 2: the water, the lack of good water, and a lot
Speaker 2: of especially these poor communities. Yeah, there are a lot
Speaker 2: of people with with parasitical and with that sort of shit,
Speaker 2: with these certain sorts of like intestinal parasites. Once you
Speaker 2: get people good medicine, the degree to which people like
Speaker 2: improve is it will it does feel magical. I fel
Speaker 2: like you don't know what's being done right right, Like
Speaker 2: it's such a quick change, and yeah, it's I've never
Speaker 2: heard of anyone doing that. And it's like, I guess objectively,
Speaker 2: it's better than the other thing he's doing, which is
Speaker 2: like lying to people about the fact that he can
Speaker 2: cure their cancer because this is an HIV.
Speaker 4: They're like, yo, don't do the meds. Just pray, just pray.
Speaker 2: This is get I don't know why it disturbs me
Speaker 2: more because it's objectively not as bad, but it is like,
Speaker 2: weirdly more fucky. I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you're completely you're using the their own distress
Speaker 3: over their their health to then like supercharge your shitty
Speaker 3: belief factory to then be like, yeah, man, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: take your stress about this, and I'm going to convert
Speaker 3: that into just devotion to what I'm telling you, and yeah,
Speaker 3: staying in line and promoting my message all the while
Speaker 3: when it's like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just gave you fucking a Marxis cylind or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, or literally like I've remect them. I'm
Speaker 2: sure that is like what we're giving them a lot
Speaker 2: of times because it's it's an effective anti parasitic Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also for com Yeah, and also for of course here's
Speaker 2: COVID poidal silver too. Yeah. Yeah, I just you know, myles,
Speaker 2: I just take silver. When if I start to feel
Speaker 2: under the weather, I keep a pile of silver in
Speaker 2: my gun safe, and I just eat one of those
Speaker 2: little silver bars, you know. Yeah, it's like an extended
Speaker 2: really capsule. But yes, he's eating silver bullets.
Speaker 4: No, I need those for werewolf's minds. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spread this information on
Speaker 4: the show.
Speaker 2: It gets a lot worse somehow. So I mentioned last
Speaker 2: episode that given Nigeria's problems with HIV, a lot of
Speaker 2: TV Joshua's claimed miracles had to do with curing people
Speaker 2: of that illness. Here's the thing. It's actually kind of
Speaker 2: hard to convince someone who is dying of AIDS that
Speaker 2: you have fixed them, right, because they continue to be
Speaker 2: really sick, so they opted to go and obviously, like
Speaker 2: HIV and AIDS are not the same thing. But someone
Speaker 2: who is untreated HIV it will eventually progress and become
Speaker 2: clear that they have not become cured, and that that's
Speaker 2: a potential danger.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: If people do eventually realize that you were lying to them,
Speaker 2: they could you know, speak out about it and cause problems.
Speaker 2: So the much safer thing that the church eventually lands
Speaker 2: on is bribing doctors to tell congregants they've tested positive
Speaker 2: for HIV and then curing them having them go get
Speaker 2: a real HIV test and an actual clinic and it
Speaker 2: comes back negative because they were not sick fucking out
Speaker 2: of here, you know, right, that's so fucking evil, Holy shit, Jesus,
Speaker 2: every this is such a different kind of bastard.
Speaker 3: You know, like the past, we've talked about all kinds
Speaker 3: of Nazis, child abusers, just general edgett. This guy is
Speaker 3: just completely fucking with people's realities in a way that's
Speaker 3: a just it's like it's I hate using the word,
Speaker 3: but it's like genius.
Speaker 2: It is, it's it's.
Speaker 3: And it's fucking it's fucking with me that like he's like, no,
Speaker 3: this is what you gotta do.
Speaker 4: You get the people who don't have it.
Speaker 3: It's get them. If pop on a fucking fake test,
Speaker 3: then you go take the real thing and then guess
Speaker 3: what we fucking won. But it feels like also something
Speaker 3: like how probably like finance works at higher levels too,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean of this same thing of like, no,
Speaker 3: just make it look like this and then why I
Speaker 3: think it's key to understand stuff like this because it's
Speaker 3: so easy, especially when people talk about cults like this
Speaker 3: that are operating in like Nigeria, for folks to have
Speaker 3: the wrong idea that like, well, you know, maybe these
Speaker 3: people are not like are getting tricked or something because
Speaker 3: they lack access to education that people have. And I
Speaker 3: would hope that the degree of misinformation around shit like
Speaker 3: COVID in the US would disabuse you of that. Like,
Speaker 3: it's not it has very little to do with your
Speaker 3: level of education. In this case, it's even less because
Speaker 3: you're dealing with people who probably can't afford a lot
Speaker 3: of medical care. And so the church says, as churches
Speaker 3: often do legitimately all throughout the world, we are offering
Speaker 3: medical tests to see if you have HIV or whatever.
Speaker 3: People who do not have access to much money go
Speaker 3: and get the test. It tells them they're sick. They
Speaker 3: get cured, so they think by you know, they by
Speaker 3: TV Joshua, and then they become dedicated members of the
Speaker 3: church and give them what little money they have, you know,
Speaker 3: and like what other options do A lot of these people.
Speaker 2: Half right, you know, like, yeah, that's an insane thing
Speaker 2: they have to deal with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what makes it, I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just doubly vile because you're already you're already
Speaker 3: taking advantage of the inequity that exists within your country.
Speaker 4: To then be like, yea, let me just exacerbate this
Speaker 4: even more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like one of the most comprehensively evil things
Speaker 2: I've ever heard of someone doing.
Speaker 4: It's it's pretty bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But you know what isn't comprehensively evil, Miles, It's
Speaker 2: just a little evil. Tell me the sponsors of this podcast. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's our guarantee. Just a little evil. Ah, We're back.
Speaker 2: So put up against all of this perfectly managed spectacle,
Speaker 2: confused young people in their teens and twenties, who'd already
Speaker 2: bought into a fundamentally delusional strain of a miracle ridden
Speaker 2: chunk of the faith had no defense. And I'm speaking
Speaker 2: about the Westerners here primarily. I want to quote again
Speaker 2: from the BBC discuss in the story of our friend Ray.
Speaker 2: When Ray landed in the seething heat of Lagos, she
Speaker 2: saw miracles. Two dozens of people came and testified to
Speaker 2: having been healed of serious illnesses. I had a really
Speaker 2: involuntary reaction. I just broke down in floods of tears,
Speaker 2: she said. It was then that Ray was chosen. Joshua
Speaker 2: singled her out to become a disciple an elite group
Speaker 2: of followers who served him and lived with him inside
Speaker 2: his compound. Ray thought she was going to study under
Speaker 2: Joshua to cure her sexuality, to learn how to heal people.
Speaker 2: The reality was very different. We all thought we were
Speaker 2: in heaven, but we were in hell, she says, and
Speaker 2: in hell, terrible things happen. TB. Joshua sexually abused Ray,
Speaker 2: and not just here, but numerous other disciples. That was
Speaker 2: largely the point of being at least the female disciples.
Speaker 2: The male disciples got abused too, but I think it
Speaker 2: was more like literally just getting physically beaten and tortured
Speaker 2: and shit when they didn't, you know, do things because
Speaker 2: he's you know, he's an abusive asshole, right in addition
Speaker 2: to being just calculated evil. We don't know how many
Speaker 2: of these women there were, at least dozens. Most most
Speaker 2: of the people who were inside and have gotten out
Speaker 2: suspect that the number of women he sexually abused is
Speaker 2: in the hundreds. I mean, it could be higher than that. Like,
Speaker 2: this guy was in power and wealthy for a long
Speaker 2: time and had access to a lot of people. By
Speaker 2: this point the early aughts, the Synagogue Church of All
Speaker 2: Nations had expanded into a compound of several full city
Speaker 2: blocks wide, with massive towers of apartment buildings, a grand
Speaker 2: stadium capable of hosting tens of thousands of worshippers, school shops,
Speaker 2: and theaters. It was effectively a city within a city.
Speaker 2: The women chosen by Joshua were isolated, locked away from
Speaker 2: friends or family and from each other. They were often
Speaker 2: kept in total isolation, right, locked in individual cells effectively.
Speaker 2: Ray claims that she believed firmly she was the only
Speaker 2: disciple in a romantic relationship with TV Joshua, and so
Speaker 2: great was his control, and I mean that's how she
Speaker 2: described it. I don't think romantic would be the right
Speaker 2: way to actually describe this, but at the time, that
Speaker 2: was how she was looking at it, right. She also
Speaker 2: claims that his control was so great that he was
Speaker 2: able to make it impossible for most of the women
Speaker 2: he was abusing to know that other women were being abused. Right.
Speaker 2: This is something you'll hear from a few of his victims,
Speaker 2: so it seems to be probably pretty consistent. Joshua, like
Speaker 2: most cult leaders, was not a big fan of condoms,
Speaker 2: and as a result, a lot of the women that
Speaker 2: he slept with wound up pregnant, often repeatedly. Dozens of
Speaker 2: women have claimed to the BBC that they were forced
Speaker 2: to have abortions by TB. Joshua, who seems to have
Speaker 2: had no desire himself to father multiple children. He does
Speaker 2: have some kids, but most of the time he seems
Speaker 2: to have just ordered these women to get abortions. One
Speaker 2: of his former victims told an interviewer, if any of
Speaker 2: us got pregnant, he said, you cannot betray the man
Speaker 2: of God. We have to do something about it. I
Speaker 2: never had a choice whether I could keep a potential
Speaker 2: child or not. I felt like I didn't own my body.
Speaker 2: And for an idea of how prevalent this was, how
Speaker 2: consistent a thing this was for him, TB. Joshua's evangelical
Speaker 2: Christian compound had a secret on site abortion clinic just
Speaker 2: to service his victims. WHOA, yeah, oh my god, yeah
Speaker 2: it see okay, yeah, yeah. He has like an underground
Speaker 2: abortion clinic in this like little city that he's built
Speaker 2: just like for his victims.
Speaker 3: Right, and all the money that he's raking in just
Speaker 3: goes to creating this like bubbled reality city to do this.
Speaker 2: Kind of shit in yeah, where he exercises total control.
Speaker 2: And when I say abortion clinic, don't picture a clean,
Speaker 2: competent plant parenthood facility. TB. Joshua is still an evangelical
Speaker 2: Pentecostal and believes that abortion is wrong, but he primarily
Speaker 2: seems to have believed that it was wrong for the
Speaker 2: women that he was assaulting to get pregnant at all. Right,
Speaker 2: and thus he saw the procedure not just as necessary
Speaker 2: for his own benefit, but as a punishment for them, right.
Speaker 3: Holy shit, Like because they like, how dare you get
Speaker 3: again exactly unprotected sex?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am like God's prophet, and there's nothing more
Speaker 2: important than my work, and you're putting it at risk
Speaker 2: with your selfish decision to get preg That seems to
Speaker 2: be from the way they talk about it. That seems
Speaker 2: to be how he treated this, right, Okay. Jessica Kimu,
Speaker 2: who is one of his African victims. She's from Namibia,
Speaker 2: says that she was taken by Joshua at age seventeen,
Speaker 2: raped and locked away to what amounted to a dungeon.
Speaker 2: He kept her there for five years and forced her
Speaker 2: to have as many abortions over the years. Quote. These
Speaker 2: were backdoor type medical treatments that we were going through.
Speaker 2: It could have killed us. Another follower went into more detail.
Speaker 2: You know it, you skip your first period, you skip
Speaker 2: your second period, and you have to talk in secrecy.
Speaker 2: You'd be taken by one of these elder moms to
Speaker 2: this clinic of his. And he's referring to part of
Speaker 2: the facilitation process that this whole cult runs by is
Speaker 2: he's got some of these elder women who do a
Speaker 2: lot of the work of handling the younger women that
Speaker 2: he's abusing, right, because he's not going to do that himself. Right,
Speaker 2: he's got cult leadership to do. You know, he has
Speaker 2: had more important things to handle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's taking medical diagnoses.
Speaker 2: Yeah right. TB. Joshua had a ferocious temper, probably not surprising,
Speaker 2: and the man his followers called Daddy was prone to
Speaker 2: fly into rages at the drop of a hat. The
Speaker 2: most severe punishment he meted out was forced isolation, because
Speaker 2: that's pretty close to the worst thing you can do
Speaker 2: to somebody, and this was often prescribed for the women
Speaker 2: he had he was abusing. Ray says that she was
Speaker 2: locked alone in a room at one point for two
Speaker 2: years and was visited only by TB. Joshua for reasons
Speaker 2: I probably don't need to explain. She attempted suicide several
Speaker 2: times while imprisoned in the compound, but again, that's not
Speaker 2: easy to do because of the degree of control he has. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like I said, this is one of the worst stories
Speaker 2: I've ever come across, and it sure is.
Speaker 3: And like it has it's like any conceivable way to
Speaker 3: be a despicable person. He's like, Oh, like I'm engaged
Speaker 3: in that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Imprisonment, trafficking, a sexual assault, sexual violence, yeah, medical gas lighting,
Speaker 3: like fucking literally anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I don't want to say, you know, when
Speaker 2: you're talking about like really bad cult leaders, it's making
Speaker 2: like a moral distinction, like this one was worse than
Speaker 2: this one. Yeah, I've never been more disturbed by a
Speaker 2: cult story than this. This is like the most unsettling
Speaker 2: cult shit I've ever read about. I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and someone who's like because a lot of the
Speaker 3: times it's like it's just like an unwell narcissist with
Speaker 3: like great charisma who's like racist. Yeah, and then this
Speaker 3: guy is so deeply thinking about the myriad of ways
Speaker 3: he can control and abuse people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's when you're like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like it's a completely different level, or not
Speaker 3: a different level, but it's just a different level of severity.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. More common punishments were meted out to regular
Speaker 2: followers or the prophets of people that he's not having
Speaker 2: sex with. Right. These would include whipping with chains or horsewhips,
Speaker 2: the use of electrical cables to whip people for punishment,
Speaker 2: and of course it was also just there was a
Speaker 2: level of average abuse that all of the people who
Speaker 2: lived on scone property were forced to go through. Everyone
Speaker 2: living on this compound is made to wake up early
Speaker 2: and go to sleep very late. They are often forced
Speaker 2: into physical labor. All of these buildings, which are massive constructions,
Speaker 2: are built by his followers who are living on site
Speaker 2: at least as much as possible. I'm sure they had
Speaker 2: to pull in contractors for some stuff. But he's and
Speaker 2: the reason he's doing this, and this is normal cult stuff. Right.
Speaker 2: You keep everyone sleep deprived because that reduces their general
Speaker 2: level of defense. You know, it's a pretty common cult tactic.
Speaker 2: Men were also given roles as his close disciples, and
Speaker 2: they were used to abuse women and other men. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a lot of the men who are his enforcers
Speaker 2: who are doing these physical punishments, but they were also
Speaker 2: comprehensively abused as well, as this passage from one of
Speaker 2: the BBC's investigations makes clear. Former disciple Giles Hurst thirty
Speaker 2: one says at first that he was love bombed, a
Speaker 2: term that can be used to describe when culture group
Speaker 2: shower or a g recruit with love and accolades to
Speaker 2: get them to join. But when he became a Disciplehurst
Speaker 2: said he saw the other side. Competition was fierced among
Speaker 2: the two hundred or so disciples for Joshua's attention, and
Speaker 2: they were encouraged to report each other for behaviors deemed wrong.
Speaker 2: He said, Sinser confessed in front of others, recorded an
Speaker 2: archived According to Hurst and other former disciples, passports are
Speaker 2: taken along with novels and any medications, including mild painkillers
Speaker 2: or malaria pills. Permission from Joshua in the form of
Speaker 2: assigned pass is needed just to make a phone call
Speaker 2: or email. Hurst said, so again, that kind of speaks
Speaker 2: to the overall level of control that everyone's under in
Speaker 2: like kind of the central part of the compound where
Speaker 2: he's got his closest followers.
Speaker 3: Is there, how many people like lived in that city.
Speaker 2: It's really unclear to me, at least hundreds. I think
Speaker 2: it fluctuates over time, in part because the amount of
Speaker 2: facilities available, and like an onion, right, you've got this
Speaker 2: kind of the area closest to him living around him,
Speaker 2: and like the most secure facilities a couple hundred people,
Speaker 2: you've got some less secure facilities where people are under
Speaker 2: less control, and you have a larger number of them,
Speaker 2: and you have a much larger number of people who
Speaker 2: are coming into the ceremonies, who are probably volunteering their time,
Speaker 2: who are certainly tithing money, but they live outside of
Speaker 2: the property, and to them it maybe doesn't feel like
Speaker 2: and maybe it just does kind of feel like a
Speaker 2: normal church that you give money to and you volunteer at.
Speaker 2: You know, that's certainly the way it feels for the
Speaker 2: majority of people, I think who are contributing to this.
Speaker 2: You know, the number of people it's it's it's a cult,
Speaker 2: but it's not recognizable as being in a cult to
Speaker 2: the majority of people who are aware of TV Joshua
Speaker 2: and think that he's a man of God, right right, right,
Speaker 2: because like, why would you there's no need to have
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of people in that kind of control.
Speaker 2: You don't have that kind of time, you know, like,
Speaker 2: why would.
Speaker 4: You any fake COVID tests I can get.
Speaker 2: Ye, yeah exactly, that's just exhausting. Obviously, this is only
Speaker 2: possible because the Nigerian government was a full patsy to
Speaker 2: TV Joshua's activities. The amount of money he brought into
Speaker 2: the country was seen as worth whatever harm he did.
Speaker 2: Immigration officials even acted to smooth the passage and long
Speaker 2: term visas of Westerners who came to join his church.
Speaker 2: There was effectively an accelerated entry program into the country
Speaker 2: just for TV Joshua followers.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you get like your visa extra fast if
Speaker 2: you're coming in, you know, because they know the officials
Speaker 2: in Lagos number one, they're getting paid directly, and they
Speaker 2: also know these people are bringing money into the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, It's like it's not like we're just getting bribed.
Speaker 3: It's like there is a tangible effect on the economy.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this is a benefit for like the country.
Speaker 2: You know, two ros do make a right exactly exactly,
Speaker 2: that's ours. As a result of this situation, speaking out
Speaker 2: against scone was dangerous, you know, because the authorities are
Speaker 2: on their side. It was not until the BBC Open
Speaker 2: Democracy Joint Report, published in January of twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: as both a series of articles and a documentary that
Speaker 2: any of this information came out. In one of many
Speaker 2: articles on the subject, the BBC notes a number of
Speaker 2: our witnesses in Nigeria claim they were physically attacked and
Speaker 2: in one case shot at, after previously speaking out against
Speaker 2: the abuse and posting videos containing allegations on YouTube. A
Speaker 2: BBC crew that attempted to record footage of the church's
Speaker 2: Lagos compound from a public street in March twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two was also fired at by the church's security and
Speaker 2: was detained for a number of hours.
Speaker 3: Holy shit, Yeah, the state's involvement is only just in
Speaker 3: so far, like it's just because of the bribes that
Speaker 3: they're looking the other way or other people like in
Speaker 3: like you know, Park, I think that's probably more than
Speaker 3: just bribes. I would be surprised if no one was twined.
Speaker 3: I would surprise if I'd be surprised if he wasn't
Speaker 3: kicking other benefits to to some people, you know, right right,
Speaker 3: I don't know that we have like a perfect context
Speaker 3: for precisely how the relationship worked, Yeah, but it's clear
Speaker 3: that they were.
Speaker 4: Like, no, we like we like tuberculosis, Joshua.
Speaker 2: Yeah, old tuberculosis Joe. So the sheer volume of rapes
Speaker 2: and the abortions that came with them, along with the
Speaker 2: physical and psychological abuse of disciples, created the potential for
Speaker 2: legal consequences. So yeah, TV Joshua, he's got to maintain
Speaker 2: control locally through bribery. But it's also kind of worth
Speaker 2: noting that since so many of his victims are Westerners,
Speaker 2: there is this risk that international condemnation might erupt, right,
Speaker 2: you know, because you can't you can't bribe every government.
Speaker 2: That's some you've got followers on and theoretically they're going
Speaker 2: to get concerned when they realize, like, wow, a lot
Speaker 2: of people have left our country and live with this guy,
Speaker 2: and seems like they've been the ones that come back
Speaker 2: to hell. Yeah. And so how he would shield himself
Speaker 2: from this was with the use of charities. Prior to
Speaker 2: his death in twenty twenty one, any article about TV Joshua,
Speaker 2: incredible outlets would note that he was controversial and they
Speaker 2: talk about some of these allegations against him, but then
Speaker 2: they would be like, well, he also puts a lot
Speaker 2: of money into good causes and maybe so maybe he's
Speaker 2: faking miracles. I think based on a lot of the
Speaker 2: articles I read prior to this, I think how you
Speaker 2: might have interpreted this guy prior to this BBC Open
Speaker 2: Democracy report is he's faking a lot of miracles and
Speaker 2: he's kind of a fraud, but he's he's committing that
Speaker 2: fraud to get money that he then puts into really
Speaker 2: useful charities around the world. So like, it's kind of unethical,
Speaker 2: but the ends are good. Who's this? And I want
Speaker 2: to quit? There's a segment I've got from a Daily
Speaker 2: Mail article that's a decent example of this. Followers are
Speaker 2: expected to give about ten percent of their paychecks, and
Speaker 2: the payments are monitored and people are ranked and seated accordingly.
Speaker 2: T shirts, books and frames and photos promoting Joshua are
Speaker 2: also for sale. However, even former disciples agree that Joshua
Speaker 2: himself does give a lot of money to charity and
Speaker 2: in scholarships. Joshua defended his church's resources. Without material and money,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be able to carry out so much. Huge, huge,
Speaker 2: huge people come here for support, Joshua said, So that
Speaker 2: kind of gives you the idea of how this is
Speaker 2: sort of justified, and you know that's bad.
Speaker 3: He's like, it's just like, fuck, man, this guy takes
Speaker 3: like the learnings from so many predatory companies, industries, states, whatever,
Speaker 3: like the whole thing of like how like BP is
Speaker 3: like and that's why we're investing in like renewable blah blah.
Speaker 2: Right, right, he's doing a chevron here, dude, what are
Speaker 2: you talking about?
Speaker 3: We're fucking the earth.
Speaker 2: I just told you.
Speaker 3: We just put up like seven fucking min windmills in
Speaker 3: fucking Indiana.
Speaker 2: Man, what the.
Speaker 3: Fuck, dude, this isn't Why are you fucking with me?
Speaker 2: Part of what's frustrating about this guy's early life is
Speaker 2: it's such a black box. I am really curious. How
Speaker 2: much access did this guy have to like the internet.
Speaker 2: Did he spend a lot of time in libraries? Like
Speaker 2: what was his studying? What was the process of Because
Speaker 2: this is the complexity of how he kept this all
Speaker 2: going speaks to somebody who did read really widely, right,
Speaker 2: it'd be weird if he just came up with all
Speaker 2: of this on his own, rather than being inspired by
Speaker 2: other abusive organizations doing similar things.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean you know, it's not a lot of
Speaker 3: foreign companies operate in Nigeria, so I'm sure. Yeah, his
Speaker 3: first interaction is seeing how Western companies operate in West Africa. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know, like he probably took a couple lessons
Speaker 3: from Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum and I was like.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay, I see how y'all do? Okay, Yeah, I
Speaker 4: might be to use some of that in some of
Speaker 4: my shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just like I think it's sort of
Speaker 3: like a game, recognized game and like a fucked up
Speaker 3: demonic predatory life.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh wow, I'll take a little bit of that.
Speaker 4: I'll take a little bit of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good stuff. So former Highwranking followers alleged that
Speaker 2: this was part of a concerted plan to protect himself
Speaker 2: by making any attack against him look like something that
Speaker 2: would threaten money that was helping suffering people all around Africa.
Speaker 2: So basically the question they're asking people having people ask
Speaker 2: themselves is is going after TV Joshua for a little
Speaker 2: bit of being a con artist worth hurting all of
Speaker 2: these people? Right? How else are they going to get
Speaker 2: the money? Right now? This didn't always work, and so
Speaker 2: TB Joshua's first line of defense was something he cribbed
Speaker 2: from a character in his favorite book, The Bible. On
Speaker 2: his compound, he constructed what amounted to his own personal hell,
Speaker 2: a high rise living structure that could fit hundreds of worshippers.
Speaker 2: And again, this is where you've got these like punishment
Speaker 2: cells where he can lock people for behaving badly. And
Speaker 2: I want to play you with clip from that BBC
Speaker 2: documentary with his hours talking about how these places is run.
Speaker 5: There was a steming day that he used to abuse,
Speaker 5: this woman said. The building of his purpastments, he designed
Speaker 5: it God, the whole building was just designed to keep secret,
Speaker 5: multiple doors, multiple entries and exits. The tacase you can
Speaker 5: use to get to his five story was like four.
Speaker 5: I call him, Lady properly wants to see you. He
Speaker 5: would tell you the specific take is that this person
Speaker 5: should come.
Speaker 2: He would always tell you which entrance to take, which
Speaker 2: door to get into.
Speaker 5: He can ask the ladies to come try any of
Speaker 5: the door so people don't see them. You would always
Speaker 5: ask you when you come, did anybody see you?
Speaker 2: You bea looser?
Speaker 5: Then you grape me again.
Speaker 2: It was a process, a very nasty cycle we cauldn't
Speaker 2: see it right under our nose. He designed a system
Speaker 2: for deceiving all of us disciples.
Speaker 1: A lot of women were being abused by this man.
Speaker 1: I had no idea. I thought I was the only one.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that that thing had happened to anybody else.
Speaker 2: So that's pretty bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The guards who are running this hair in prison were
Speaker 2: often teenagers themselves. They're said to have often been like
Speaker 2: boys were sixteen, seventeen, fifteen years old. So they are
Speaker 2: again both victims because they're subject to discipline and beatings themselves,
Speaker 2: but they're also being used to facilitate this abusive system
Speaker 2: and part because they're younger and easier for him to influence. Right.
Speaker 2: One of these boys after leaving told the BBC that
Speaker 2: TV Joshua usually raped four to five in each week,
Speaker 2: sometimes more. Former church officials. The highest number of estimates
Speaker 2: that you can find are like in the thousands of
Speaker 2: victims over the years that he was doing this, So
Speaker 2: really just like a kind of incomprehensible scale, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the fact that the root of TV josh was recruiting
Speaker 2: power are these miracles forced some action from Nigerian regulators. Again,
Speaker 2: the Nigerian government's not a monolith. There's a huge amount
Speaker 2: of corruption, which is how he gets away with this.
Speaker 2: But he is constantly subject to resistance, not just in
Speaker 2: the government but from other Pentecostal leaders in Nigeria who
Speaker 2: don't know all of this. They don't know the extent
Speaker 2: of what he's doing, but they.
Speaker 3: Know that he's taking the right right, right, that he's
Speaker 3: just a bullshit artist, and that's right.
Speaker 2: Yes, and probably I'm sure they had some idea that
Speaker 2: there was more going on, right, but certainly we're not
Speaker 2: aware of like the full dimensions of it. But there
Speaker 2: was resistance, and this kind of culminated in two thousand
Speaker 2: and four in the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission officially banning
Speaker 2: the air ring of videos about of miracles that could
Speaker 2: not be verified. Right, so you can't publish on television
Speaker 2: unverified miracles. Now, what does it mean to verify a miracle?
Speaker 4: I was going to say, say, you.
Speaker 2: Get a blue check, this is a verifying miracle. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know precisely what that would mean. I haven't
Speaker 2: found good explanations to like what kind of process they
Speaker 2: might have had for verifying miracles. Right, we'll get to
Speaker 2: the primary with his works. It doesn't wind up functioning
Speaker 2: to actually stop him from putting out these miracle videos.
Speaker 2: It just changes the way he's going to do it, right, Oh, right,
Speaker 2: And it's interesting I read some articles about sort of
Speaker 2: the reaction of the Pentecostal community in Nigeria to this
Speaker 2: law banning video miracles. There's not as much comprehensively like
Speaker 2: negative reaction to it as I would have expected. The
Speaker 2: Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria or PFN, who had long made
Speaker 2: it clear that they did not consider TV Joshua to
Speaker 2: be a legitimate pastor, supported the ban, arguing we don't
Speaker 2: harbor bastards in our fold, people who have failed in
Speaker 2: other businesses and who see the church as a better option,
Speaker 2: which is a respectable stance. For his part, TV Joshua
Speaker 2: claimed in public that he was the target of the ban,
Speaker 2: and I think this is true. I do, in fact
Speaker 2: think he was the target of this ban. And I
Speaker 2: should also say, all of these pastors who are supporting
Speaker 2: the ban and who are against TV Joshua, some of
Speaker 2: them are legitimately decent people. Some of them are just
Speaker 2: protecting their own business interests. Right. That's also a factor here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right right.
Speaker 2: I found one quote from a contemporary article on the
Speaker 2: bill attributed to a pastor, and it does seem to
Speaker 2: be an only slightly veiled attack on TV Joshua quote.
Speaker 2: According to him, the nation has reached the level where
Speaker 2: people now have billboards with messages like comfort treatment of
Speaker 2: all blood diseases. That is unethical, that is unhealthy, and
Speaker 2: that is ungodly, he said, adding I think probably the
Speaker 2: fear we have is that they shouldn't have a carpet ban.
Speaker 2: Jesus said, we should allow the chaff to grow with
Speaker 2: the wheat until harvest time, where God will sift the
Speaker 2: chaff from the wheat. So this guy is being like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's really fucked up that they're advertising they can cure
Speaker 2: your blood disease, but it's up to God. It should
Speaker 2: be up to God to make let people know who's
Speaker 2: legit and not, which is such a weird stance.
Speaker 4: Dare you yeah, dare you yeah? That's God's department.
Speaker 2: Yeah, That's God's job. One preacher, Thomas Audu stated, as
Speaker 2: a Christian, the Bible is the basis. I mean, we
Speaker 2: must take cognizance of the fact that not all that
Speaker 2: call the name of the Lord will enter the kingdom
Speaker 2: of heaven. The devil himself has been shown to showcase
Speaker 2: some miracles too, so we have to be careful not
Speaker 2: to be carried away, which is a really fun way
Speaker 2: of like threading that needle. You know that it's both
Speaker 2: sides of it. Yeah, And I did find a very
Speaker 2: fun quote from a guy who doesn't support the ban
Speaker 2: that I actually un ironically agree with, although maybe not
Speaker 2: in the way that that Reverend Henry Awonye meant it. Quote.
Speaker 2: If they must ban miracles, they should also look into
Speaker 2: some advertisements like alcohol, films, cigarettes, and movies that are
Speaker 2: beyond the level of children. And yeah, I'm totally fine
Speaker 2: with that. Let's bad adds to kids.
Speaker 4: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: That's the thing I love about people with bands. They're like, well,
Speaker 3: if you ban this, you might as well ban the Bible.
Speaker 4: Yeah right.
Speaker 2: I don't believe in banning any particular book, but I
Speaker 2: believe I'm fine with banning fake miracles on TV.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, but I'm saying the way the logic always
Speaker 3: eventually comes back for the thing they're trying to protect,
Speaker 3: where it's like, well, then we might as well do this,
Speaker 3: Like yeah, maybe you do. I mean, like you can
Speaker 3: find a sense of destruction or you know, negativity and whatever.
Speaker 4: You look for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what's interesting to me about
Speaker 2: this is this ban is clearly crafted to stop TV
Speaker 2: Joshua from recruiting people, but he kind of pivots. And again,
Speaker 2: maybe the worst thing about this guy is how smart
Speaker 2: he is. Right because one of the things he is
Speaker 2: early on is realizing the value of social media, and
Speaker 2: so he makes kind of a seamless pivot. He launches
Speaker 2: a satellite station, a manual TV that's like a YouTube channel,
Speaker 2: and so he gets over the benefit on televising. Shit.
Speaker 2: He's like, oh, yeah, TV is not even where it
Speaker 2: is anymore. I'm just gonna start a fucking YouTube channel.
Speaker 2: We'll get the videos out that way, We'll get him
Speaker 2: out to even more fucking people. He is considered maybe, Uh,
Speaker 2: there's definitely some expert qute in the BBC. Here's like
Speaker 2: he was the first of these pastors in Nigeria at least,
Speaker 2: and one of the first in the world to really
Speaker 2: recognize how to use the Internet to spread this kind
Speaker 2: of propaganda.
Speaker 3: God damn it, Like, is he ever gonna fucking slip up? Uh?
Speaker 2: I mean yes, but it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 4: Yeah right right, yeah.
Speaker 3: But it's like every single thing, it's like he but
Speaker 3: like his instincts are just like spot on. It's like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, okay, can't I'll pivot to digital video, I'll
Speaker 3: pivot to this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The two thoughts you have reading about him is like,
Speaker 2: what a monster? And also, man, this guy was fucking smart, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he knows what he's doing. He's got like seamless instincts. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So in following years, he would become one of the
Speaker 2: first pastors in Nigeria to create a Facebook account and
Speaker 2: again to start uploading his videos to YouTube. And I
Speaker 2: think a manual TV starts as like a satellite TV station,
Speaker 2: but like they start up a YouTube account very quickly,
Speaker 2: He's putting videos on Facebook and they get to the
Speaker 2: point where both of these accounts have millions and millions
Speaker 2: of followers and subscribers, and this really supercharges the growth
Speaker 2: of his flock to an astronomic level. By twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: Scone has branches in London, Greece, Ghana, South Africa, and
Speaker 2: a number of other countries and millions of followers around
Speaker 2: the world. His prominence only increased in the years since
Speaker 2: the TV miracle ban. In twenty twelve, he was declared
Speaker 2: one of the fifty most influential people on the entire
Speaker 2: continent of Africa by the Africa Report. Scone became host
Speaker 2: to powerful people from across the region. Ghana's president, Zimbabwe's
Speaker 2: Prime minister, Nigeria's first lady and the wife of Nelson
Speaker 2: Mandela all attended services. Big names you.
Speaker 4: Know, yeah, yeah, I've heard of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard of them. So many Pentecostal pastors in
Speaker 2: Nigeria and elsewhere, or like many Pentecostal pastors not just
Speaker 2: in Nigeria but in the United States. He sold prayer
Speaker 2: cloths and holy water to followers. He claimed that the
Speaker 2: water itself was treatment for a number of illnesses, and
Speaker 2: as usual, he primed worshippers with videos of people cured
Speaker 2: of AIDS and other endemic illnesses with his holy water,
Speaker 2: and then he started hawking it to crowds of people
Speaker 2: at churches in Ghana, Sierra Leone and elsewhere in a
Speaker 2: West Africa. Here's one worshiper testimonial on the power of
Speaker 2: this anointing water. I myself have bought the anointing water
Speaker 2: and I have seen the miracles it performs. My father
Speaker 2: was suffering from pain in his leg when I sprayed
Speaker 2: the water, and after praying, the pain went away. So
Speaker 2: that's good. This guy continued, It's like in Jesus's time,
Speaker 2: he did a lot of miracles, so a lot of
Speaker 2: people followed him. Now we see that God can manifest
Speaker 2: again when people come to the church if they pray
Speaker 2: and they believe, they are healed. And I might say, like,
Speaker 2: I don't think Jesus charged anybody, Like I don't tend
Speaker 2: to believe in supernatural hearing. But at least my recollection
Speaker 2: of the Bible from when I was a Christian is
Speaker 2: he was not charging people.
Speaker 3: No, that was kind of the whole thing. It was like,
Speaker 3: here's just I mean, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 3: he's hooking people up, you know, yeah, just because.
Speaker 2: Striking things attached to his phone that starts asking you
Speaker 2: for tips.
Speaker 3: He's like, all right, what's going on? What's his dude's name, Lazarus?
Speaker 3: Hold on what y'all want?
Speaker 4: Oh? Hold on, hold on, man, he's gonna.
Speaker 2: Sell me that paper table taped over the stigmadel hole
Speaker 2: in his hand. That's got a venmo qr codes.
Speaker 4: The stigmata is a QR code.
Speaker 2: The stigmata is Yeah, just scan this nail.
Speaker 3: Size hole right there.
Speaker 4: Uh huh, there you go.
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, I can get your boy las up real quick.
Speaker 4: You know what I mean. But that's just gonna look
Speaker 4: like five. That's like five rex all right.
Speaker 2: So, like any good business man, TV Joshua knew that
Speaker 2: both hype and scarcity were critical for driving up demand,
Speaker 2: but those two factors also have a tendency to make
Speaker 2: people crazy, and in Ghana this resulted in a massive stampede.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna quote from an article in The Guardian. Here
Speaker 2: the worshippers were hoping to obtain Holy New anointing water,
Speaker 2: which a manual TV had announced would be distributed for free.
Speaker 2: The anointing water usually costs eighty seti's, but we learned
Speaker 2: on Sunday that it would be given out for free.
Speaker 2: Said Joseph Adenvoor fifty two, who witnessed the fatal stampede.
Speaker 2: I have never seen anything like it before. People had
Speaker 2: come from Togo, been in and even from Kenya. They
Speaker 2: tried to close the church, but people were climbing over
Speaker 2: the walls and breaking in. The police and army were there,
Speaker 2: but they couldn't control the crowds. The police who are
Speaker 2: investigating the deaths so that they had not anticipated the
Speaker 2: number of people who would attend the church and worshipers
Speaker 2: arriving with as early as two am. All of us
Speaker 2: were caught by surprise. Police spokesman Freemonteta told the BBC
Speaker 2: World Service, no one knew the crowd will be so huge.
Speaker 2: Four people died and more than thirty were injured. So
Speaker 2: you know, good, I get stuff now.
Speaker 3: In this one, he took a lesson out of like
Speaker 3: hype beast, like Black Friday, doorbuster sale culture.
Speaker 2: Right yes. And in fact, a few weeks before this,
Speaker 2: he made an unannounced appearance in the capital of Ghana,
Speaker 2: which shut the city down for a full day because
Speaker 2: he was selling stickers for cars that he promised if
Speaker 2: you put these stickers on your cars, they'll free you
Speaker 2: from poverty. And it caused such a stampede that it
Speaker 2: like shuts the whole city because he doesn't warn authorities,
Speaker 2: you know, right, Yeah, It's like it's like if the
Speaker 2: president started showing up in cities with his motorcade and
Speaker 2: like no, no warning was given to like local police,
Speaker 2: so you're just it would, it would be even I
Speaker 2: mean it's already pretty bad. If you've ever been in
Speaker 2: a city when the.
Speaker 3: President's like, yeah, man, we can we'll forgive your debt. First,
Speaker 3: fifty people here forgiven your debt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll give you.
Speaker 2: I'll give you like a passport too. How far away
Speaker 2: could we possibly be from that?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: Oh god, God, I don't want to think about I
Speaker 3: don't want to think that too far.
Speaker 4: In the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good. Let's just stick to twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: when in a Bola outbreak ravage sections of West Africa,
Speaker 2: and government officials had to go to TV Joshua not
Speaker 2: for help treating the disease, obviously, but because they needed
Speaker 2: to tell him to tell his followers from other West
Speaker 2: African countries don't go to Lagos for healing right now. Right,
Speaker 2: They're being like, look, man, we know the benefit, like
Speaker 2: the deals you have do not like, we cannot encourage
Speaker 2: any religious tourism right now because that's just gonna spread
Speaker 2: a Bola to the fucking capital, right Yeah. And I
Speaker 2: will say TV Joshua was a rational and a person
Speaker 2: to be like, well, yeah, that's probably not good for anybody.
Speaker 2: That's probably gonna be bad for me if that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, He's like, I'm gonna be at the Prime Minister's
Speaker 3: house tomorrow hooking people up.
Speaker 2: Come through. He does cancel a bunch of upcoming healing sessions,
Speaker 2: which is the minimum he could have done, but he
Speaker 2: also sends four thousand bottles of anointing water to Sierra
Speaker 2: Leone with a claim that it would cure anyone suffering
Speaker 2: from a bola. The water was flown in on a
Speaker 2: private jet that cost as much to make the trip
Speaker 2: as the cash donation TV Joshua's church made to buy
Speaker 2: food for victims of a Bola from an article in
Speaker 2: The Independent Quote. The preacher's TV channel, Emmanual dot TV
Speaker 2: showed video of a man called Joe Faya Numa, who
Speaker 2: claims to represent Sierra Leone's High Commission, accepting the donation.
Speaker 2: Numa says on the video that the water will be
Speaker 2: used to curb the deadly Ebola yoke that is about
Speaker 2: to destroy our nation. So that's good. You love spreading
Speaker 2: disinformation about fucking Abola?
Speaker 3: Yeah and yeah, and turn it into a little bit
Speaker 3: of marketing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit of marketing. Now, miles, you know
Speaker 2: who can cure your abola. The only people who can
Speaker 2: cure your abola the good folks at who make Yeah,
Speaker 2: so uh, you know, purchase it.
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 2: Like all true prophets, TV Joshua made numerous predictions about
Speaker 2: the future with perfect accuracy, at least according to him.
Speaker 2: One of his chief claims to fame was correctly anticipating
Speaker 2: the maybe not so tragic in retrospect death of Michael Jackson.
Speaker 2: Starting in January two thousand and nine, he told his
Speaker 2: followers to expect the death of a great star when
Speaker 2: the King of Pop died a mere six months later,
Speaker 2: he told everyone that's who I was referring to all along.
Speaker 2: And this is a he does this a lot.
Speaker 3: This.
Speaker 2: This is one of the more fun bits of TV
Speaker 2: Joshua lore, like Bob of.
Speaker 3: Wanga type shit, where it's yeah, like, oh, you're in there.
Speaker 3: We got something coming this year, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: In January twenty thirteen, he told followers, I am seeing
Speaker 2: flame in America. Just a quarter of a year later,
Speaker 2: the Boston Marathon was bombed. And although that didn't really
Speaker 2: involve a tremendous amount of flame, yeah, I think it
Speaker 2: was more of just like a brief explosion in trapnel
Speaker 2: but like whatever, he claims victory again, right, I might
Speaker 2: also say like three months later, four months later, Like
Speaker 2: if you're saying, I think America is going to be
Speaker 2: subject to a deadly attack that happens like every week
Speaker 2: or so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one way to be fair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and even flame like at the rate of forest fires,
Speaker 3: Like you're lucky to you know, get at least a
Speaker 3: couple of year, you can claim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you claim some sort of attack or a
Speaker 2: deadly thing is going to hit a bunch of Americans,
Speaker 2: you know, three months ahead of time, something will happen, right.
Speaker 4: There's their own health care system.
Speaker 2: There will be a crash, you know whatever. Yeah. Critics
Speaker 2: claim that there's not even any evidence that he made
Speaker 2: the prediction in January, just a video published months later
Speaker 2: that Scone claimed had been recorded in January, so who knows.
Speaker 2: That same year, he predicted an attack in France, telling
Speaker 2: the people of the country that they should pray against
Speaker 2: suicide bombers or any attack of any kind that will
Speaker 2: affect many. Two years later, Isis militants carry out a
Speaker 2: series of attacks on the Botoclon nightclub in areas around
Speaker 2: it in Paris, killing like one hundred something people. And
Speaker 2: he's like, this is what I was referring to two
Speaker 2: years previously ago. Just like yeah, like, France is a
Speaker 2: big country. If you're like, sometime in the next two years,
Speaker 2: a bad thing will happen in France, it will.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's probability at that point.
Speaker 3: But hey, he's you know, he's seeing things he is
Speaker 3: as an intermediary.
Speaker 2: One of his few fuck ups is in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: he calls the US presidential election for Hillary Clinton. Now, ah, man,
Speaker 2: I know what you're saying, Miles, I'm pretty sure Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton did not in fact win the twenty.
Speaker 4: Sixteen Hillary one. Hillary won, the election was stolen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you are a big Hillary truther. Scoon had a
Speaker 2: response to that when people were like, it seems like
Speaker 2: he was wrong about this. And this comes from the
Speaker 2: Nigerian magazine Punch. TV Joshua has set his prophecy on
Speaker 2: US election was not off the mark. He added that
Speaker 2: people need spiritual understanding to be able to interpret it.
Speaker 2: During a service at the headquarters of his church at Ikuotun,
Speaker 2: Lagos and Sunday, Prophet TV Joshua said there was nothing
Speaker 2: controversial about the prophecy. It is human beings that are controversial.
Speaker 2: He stated that his words were misinterpreted because we're not
Speaker 2: on the same level of spiritual understanding, an explanation which
Speaker 2: drew Applaus from Sky. Literally he's like, Oh, you just
Speaker 2: don't get how right I was because I'm built different. Baby.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's on you.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I can't.
Speaker 3: I can't get you up to this level you Yeah,
Speaker 3: or just kind of like the dude from Big Lebowski's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's just like your opinion, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, God, that's good. That's just that's just quality
Speaker 2: shit right there, Miles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's shiitthousery to the maximum right there.
Speaker 2: Now. By far, TV Joshua's favorite use of his gift
Speaker 2: of prophecy was to engage in his by now well
Speaker 2: established tradition of fucking with Ghana for absolutely no reason.
Speaker 2: That same year, twenty sixteen, he proticts a massive terrorist
Speaker 2: attack in Ghana, which provokes widespread panic among people in
Speaker 2: Ghana and like the police and security surface services have
Speaker 2: to keep issuing assurance as being like, we have no
Speaker 2: evidence that anything is wrong. Police, don't panic that you're
Speaker 2: about to die because of what the I don't even
Speaker 2: there's not even a I think the only reason is
Speaker 2: that he's like, well, you know, probably there will be
Speaker 2: some sort of terrorist attack in Ghana at some point,
Speaker 2: like most countries have them occasionally. So if I just
Speaker 2: call one now, eventually, I'll be right and I can
Speaker 2: add this to my list of correct prophecies. Who gives
Speaker 2: a shit if it causes a panic in the short term, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He made a similar prophecy later in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: warning that South Africa's Orlando Stadium would be the site
Speaker 2: of a massive terrorist attack during an upcoming rap concert.
Speaker 2: Didicted twelve thousand deaths from this attack. Nothing that's your called.
Speaker 2: I think he was getting He's kind of he's getting
Speaker 2: sloppy at this point. That's what the hell would they
Speaker 2: do that?
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, come on, babe, Ruth, Yeah, you're not them all.
Speaker 2: What would the what what weapon would even cause a
Speaker 2: death toll like that? That's four nine elevens right? How?
Speaker 3: And like, what's the capacity of that stadium? He's basically
Speaker 3: saying like a third of it or whatever? How many people?
Speaker 2: Like, it's a big stadium, you could certainly hold more
Speaker 2: people than that, But how would you kill everyone in
Speaker 2: the stadium? Yeah, and right, like why a rap vocal
Speaker 2: haram isis neither of them have access to that kind
Speaker 2: of weaponry.
Speaker 3: Wait, but what's the like he said a rap concert?
Speaker 3: Like was that meant to be? Like a specific artist?
Speaker 3: There was a rap concert right right?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm not enoe of an expert
Speaker 2: on like the dynamics of the rap industry in Nigeria
Speaker 2: and how it relates to the evangelical movement to know
Speaker 2: if there was more going on?
Speaker 3: Right, well, this is South Africa. Maybe he wasn't a
Speaker 3: fan of deantword.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe who could blame him for that? We all
Speaker 2: saw that fucking movie?
Speaker 4: Right, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: Good god?
Speaker 3: Was it?
Speaker 2: Chappy? My god? That's the real crime making champy?
Speaker 4: Why why did they allow them in here?
Speaker 3: Also, he's like the guy's a monster and the girls
Speaker 3: a Nepo baby.
Speaker 4: Apparently I ain't hip hop.
Speaker 2: I haven't kept up with Dean Twards since that movie.
Speaker 2: Why William?
Speaker 3: I think I think you you may be able to
Speaker 3: do an episode on them?
Speaker 2: Oh good, okay, cool, that'll be fun. Yeah. So obviously
Speaker 2: twelve thousand people are not killed in the stadium and
Speaker 2: when nothing happens he announces that the post on his
Speaker 2: Facebook page predicting this had been fake news, so you
Speaker 2: loved it again, he keeps learning he's paying attention to Trump.
Speaker 2: At this point he's like, well, shit, I can make
Speaker 2: money on.
Speaker 4: This, right, my god.
Speaker 2: So by twenty fourteen, TV Joshua was forty nine years
Speaker 2: old and worth I think the estimates of his wealth
Speaker 2: are all fucked because they usually say ten to fifteen
Speaker 2: million dollars, but like, he has a private jet that's
Speaker 2: worth like sixty million dollars. He's in the Panama Papers,
Speaker 2: he and his wife for having incorporated a company in
Speaker 2: the British Virgin Islands. And like, you don't the Panama Papers.
Speaker 2: I don't think. I don't think you're noteworthy among that
Speaker 2: crowd at ten to fifteen million dollars. No, that's like
Speaker 2: what their gardeners make. Yeah, exactly, my steriously. Yeah, your
Speaker 2: daughter's your gardener. Yeahah yeah, I'm gonna guess he has
Speaker 2: a lot more cash than this. But he's just smart
Speaker 2: about like he is about most things about like protecting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, his presentation of it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he has a lot more to hide than
Speaker 2: just money. This kind of prison harem conflex. He built
Speaker 2: for this purpose, or at least one of them, because
Speaker 2: there are, you know, several you saw the video of that,
Speaker 2: several large buildings in the compound, and one of them
Speaker 2: that he plans himself, is initially four stories tall, and
Speaker 2: this is the height of the building that the foundations
Speaker 2: had been poured to support. As time went on, scone
Speaker 2: keeps growing and he's like, I want to make this
Speaker 2: building taller, so add another couple of stories to the top.
Speaker 2: There all designed them right. All the construction on the
Speaker 2: property is carried out by cult members because that saves
Speaker 2: time and money. And he's the one designing the building
Speaker 2: himself and basically bribing the governments and architects to ignore that,
Speaker 2: like nothing is being done up to spec and this
Speaker 2: becomes a problem. Miles. I don't know if you're aware
Speaker 2: of this, but if you add more stories to a
Speaker 2: building that it's meant to support, that could cause some
Speaker 2: serious issues.
Speaker 3: Ata, No, that's just I think you're kind of like
Speaker 3: on a different level of spiritual understanding that I'm on
Speaker 3: when it comes to geometry or physics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're a big I don't know enough about
Speaker 2: physics to make a good joke about this. So maybe
Speaker 2: it's fine, but it's not going to be fine. It's
Speaker 2: got to kill a lot of people.
Speaker 3: You know who else they said, couldn't keep adding stories.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. And then we got the Book of Revelations.
Speaker 3: Praise to now scan my stigmanor.
Speaker 2: For someation. So as Ray related quote, he just kind
Speaker 2: of kept pushing and saying, I want it higher. It
Speaker 2: must go higher, it must go higher. So that's that's great.
Speaker 2: This is not going to end well, miles hot.
Speaker 3: Wait, so what was it built for and what are
Speaker 3: the building?
Speaker 5: Ends?
Speaker 2: Were stories? And it winds up being six So they've
Speaker 2: got like fifty percent more weight on that foundation than
Speaker 2: it should have, and one has to assume other corners
Speaker 2: are being cut to. People were aware from a fairly
Speaker 2: early period that the building is not safe. It would sway,
Speaker 2: like you could see and feel it swaying in heavy wind.
Speaker 2: Followers reported that the staircases and the building around the
Speaker 2: staircases would wobble when you went up, which is a
Speaker 2: bad sign on something.
Speaker 4: You've ever been on a wobbly staircase?
Speaker 2: No, now, fuck that shit. I mean maybe if I was.
Speaker 3: Like tripping or something, maybe I've been on a few while,
Speaker 3: but like never in my right frame of mind.
Speaker 2: And yeah, firmly in reality. No, yeah, it's you. You
Speaker 2: would not want to be in a building like this.
Speaker 2: On September twelfth, twenty fourteen, one of TV Joshua's disciples
Speaker 2: warned him that the structure of the building was showing
Speaker 2: imminent signs of failure. He ignored the warning and ordered
Speaker 2: two hundred foreign visitors, mostly South Africans, into the ground
Speaker 2: floor dining room so that they could eat lunch. Two
Speaker 2: hours later, the building collapsed, and the video of this
Speaker 2: like it looks like you know, if you've seen like
Speaker 2: nine to eleven footage, it's like that kind of collapse.
Speaker 2: It just is, it's there and it goes down and
Speaker 2: it's like pancakes on It's just like, yeah, it pancakes.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: If you remember back in Florida, there was that condo
Speaker 2: building a few years back, it looked a lot like
Speaker 2: that where it's just down. Dozens, perhaps more than one hundred,
Speaker 2: were killed instantly. More than eight hundred people are also
Speaker 2: trapped inside. These numbers are really vague. We have no
Speaker 2: idea how many people were in the building when it collapsed,
Speaker 2: or how many died. Really because first responders are blocked
Speaker 2: from entering the compound itself for twenty four four hours,
Speaker 2: right what he attempts to have his own people carry
Speaker 2: out the rescue efforts and blocks the government from entering.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah. From one report quote, some church workers attempted to
Speaker 2: save lives in reckless and amateur ways without the use
Speaker 2: of mechanical equipment or medical training. They use tools from
Speaker 2: the church's maintenance department. In one instance, a church worker
Speaker 2: allegedly used a chainsaw to amputate the leg of a
Speaker 2: man who was trapped under a fallen beam. He was screaming,
Speaker 2: says a manual visually shaken during his interview. He is
Speaker 2: not sure if the man survived. I saw a lot
Speaker 2: of things that really traumatized me. Faces were crushed, says Michael,
Speaker 2: a disciple who was in his late teens at the time.
Speaker 2: Followers have since told reporters that they were told during
Speaker 2: this like twenty four hour period where he's kept the
Speaker 2: authorities out, that some of his followers are ordered to
Speaker 2: drive vanloads full of corpses out of the compound to
Speaker 2: be buried in secret. What we can verify is a
Speaker 2: death toll of at least one hundred and sixteen.
Speaker 4: Sh what can be fair ify?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, almost certainly more than that. How much more
Speaker 2: is unclear, but like that's a lot, you know, that's
Speaker 2: all out on its own, a really bad disaster, you know.
Speaker 3: Right, and especially when you have to add the caveat
Speaker 3: where it's like, look, these are the ones we can
Speaker 3: confirm because we've also heard that they were absconding with
Speaker 3: corpses in that night.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were driving vans of dead people away to
Speaker 2: god knows where. A coroner's inquest found that the church
Speaker 2: was culpable for criminal negligence and recommended that TB. Joshua
Speaker 2: will be personally charged. But once again he bribed local
Speaker 2: officials and reporters and nothing was done to placate his
Speaker 2: own followers. TB. Joshua turned towards the well worn authoritarian
Speaker 2: tactic of spreading conspiracy theories, and I mentioned in episode
Speaker 2: one he was generally better on like not being racist
Speaker 2: against Muslims than most Pentecostal preachers in Nigeria are kind
Speaker 2: of known to be. This is where he turns on that,
Speaker 2: because he decides the best way to try to put
Speaker 2: this away is to claim that Boko Haram had carried
Speaker 2: out a terrorist tack to destroy the building. It wasn't
Speaker 2: that he ordered them to make it in a way
Speaker 2: that was unsafe. And he even he has his people
Speaker 2: edit together a loose change style documentary that claim to
Speaker 2: show either Nigerian government or terrorist Boco Horam jets flying
Speaker 2: over the complex before the structure failed.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, they're doing like he doesn't Alex Jones, and
Speaker 3: they're they're putting like it was doctored footage or that's
Speaker 3: what they're just saying, like they have a count I.
Speaker 2: Have seen clips from this documentary and it doesn't even
Speaker 2: sound or look like there's like there's a plane in
Speaker 2: the air, but like it's the capital of Nigeria. There's
Speaker 2: always planes in the air. There's certainly it doesn't show
Speaker 2: a jet fighter bombing this.
Speaker 3: Building, right, And I'm sorry, that's a Boco Haram fighter jet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that really think Boco Haram have fighter jets.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they've got some like planes like prop planes
Speaker 2: and shit, you know, they're not a tidy organization. But
Speaker 2: I don't think there of carrying out an aerial bombing
Speaker 2: on the capital of Lagos. I think that's beyond Boko
Speaker 2: Haram's capacity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think, yeah, the Nigerian government may have
Speaker 3: something to say to if that actually happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the Nigerian government probably say something like
Speaker 2: Boko Haram did care. I believe they carried an attack
Speaker 2: on like a mall in Nigeria around this period, and
Speaker 2: it was not like hushed up. It was a pretty
Speaker 2: big deal. Yeah, Jesus, So it works well enough. TB.
Speaker 2: Joshua continues to preach and Scone continues to rake in
Speaker 2: money for another seven years. He would likely still be
Speaker 2: making money to this day. But on June fifth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, right after carrying out a life broadcast, TB.
Speaker 2: Joshua dropped dead. He was fifty seven years old. His
Speaker 2: wife claims that he had shown no signs of illness previously,
Speaker 2: but like that doesn't mean anything. These people are all liars,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, maybe he had cancer, maybe he had
Speaker 2: like a hard condition, who knows. I don't. It's not
Speaker 2: clear to me that we will ever know precisely, but
Speaker 2: thankfully he's fucking dead.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The one thing we know is that it wasn't karma,
Speaker 4: because the case of these.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely not karma because he never really pays
Speaker 2: the price. I guess you could say he died earlier
Speaker 2: than is normal for a man of his level of wealth,
Speaker 2: but not early enough that I'm like good, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's good that he's dead, but it took
Speaker 2: God took a sweet time on this one. He has
Speaker 2: a massive funeral, obviously well attended by local celebrities and politicians.
Speaker 2: An enormous crowd marches his coffin through the streets. His wife, Evelyn,
Speaker 2: has taken over scone and his wake. I think it's
Speaker 2: probably suffered without him, as he never left a clear successor.
Speaker 2: And I think the general consensus from people who know
Speaker 2: more about Pentecostals in Nigeria than I do is that
Speaker 2: he's probably The church is probably slowly on its way
Speaker 2: to fading into irrelevance, but you know, it's still around.
Speaker 2: And yeah, TB. Joshua never really brought to justice for
Speaker 2: his crimes, so that's cool. Maybe something will happen to
Speaker 2: Evelyn now that some of this stuff is come out,
Speaker 2: But I don't have a ton of faith in it
Speaker 2: in that No, No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Seldom the bad guys seem.
Speaker 4: To win a lot, yes, yeah, a weird way. But
Speaker 4: who knows, Maybe maybe that'll change, Maybe that'll change.
Speaker 2: Maybe that. Yeah, maybe we'll finally get a handle on
Speaker 2: the human race this year. Maybe this will be the one,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we're starting not strong, this is Yes, it's
Speaker 3: been a good year so far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like everyone's doing really well. Speaking of
Speaker 2: doing well, Miles, why don't you do well by directing
Speaker 2: our listeners towards your pluggables.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much again for listening to me
Speaker 3: right now. And I will I will count on your
Speaker 3: continued support with my miss my missionary my mission church
Speaker 3: evangelicalism podcast called The Daily Zeitgeist. It's about news, politics, comedy,
Speaker 3: and and just a little bit of good old christ
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Speaker 4: Uh and you can.
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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll get better at like fucking video games. It's
Speaker 3: not really for health. I should say that, it's not
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Speaker 2: So okay, Wow, that's very responsible, Miles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it'll make you a better freestyle wrapper. Yeah, graffiti,
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