Weird Doctrines: Movies, Popcorn, and Mind Control

Music Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, and friend, James Goad. And together, we're examining the very weird things that preachers say, the history behind what they say, and how it traces back through time, through the laterane healing revivals. James, I'm so excited about today's episode. This is one of my favorite subjects. It is fascinating to me. I grew up in this world where education was strongly discouraged, and had I not, I probably would have ended up being a

psychologist because I find so much of my research isn't really focused on psychology, but if you don't understand psychology, you really can't understand the research. And this topic that we're going to get into today, I just now heard the clip that you had given me in. You know, the words come to mind. I can't say it on the podcast, but this guy's full of something that I won't say. And I grew up under the same fear. It's interesting, and I won't go too deep yet, we'll get into the clip. But it's interesting that the very thing that they speak out against

is the strategy that they use. And it's, you know, it's really a sleight of hand technique that they're doing. But, you know, like I say, this is a fascinating topic to me. I'm so excited to get into it and, you know, just explore what they're doing to people's minds.

Right. So the topic that we have is subliminal messaging. And there's some interesting things that are said in this particular clip. And we definitely wanted to, once we found out about it, we definitely wanted to dig into this a little further, see what was going on. And try to figure out what the truth really was about what was said here. So, yeah, let's take a look at this clip and then let's discuss, because I'm really interested to get into this one. Religious, but there was a certain way it came. He said he was in the pulpit, and it was a little flash and a flash.

the flash and he said that spirit was so strong if he had not come if the pillar of fire had not come he said it would have knocked him out of the pulpit he said a man was trying to hypnotize him now 1957 we'll go back we're talking about our generation now 1957 they did a little experiment with the old real-to-real movies right every 50th frame goes by so fast you don't even see it in a movie theater they put in nice so Coca-Cola man nice cold drippy thing you know one frame out of every 50 and within 15 to 20 minutes

everybody in the theater couldn't even see it everybody in the theater was getting up to go back and buy a coke I'm talking 1957 first time I ever noticed it and I don't claim to have a gift but God sometimes shows us things it was back under a presidential election probably 15 20 years ago whatever it was I heard a commercial I went they're hypnotizing people with that on the radio there was a subliminal voice in vote for someone so there's so much I could say about this James it's it's unbelievable you know again I grew up in the

same world as the people who are sitting in the pews listening to this minister speak and as a child it's entirely different than as an adult I think a lot of the adults who come into this type of religion they really don't realize what they're doing to their kids but as a child when you're sitting they're listening to a man who's telling you that there are people that can control your minds I wasn't one of these people that wore ten full hats but I wanted to be man I heard this over and over and over again how they could

control your minds and you know we heard we heard sermons about how the government was using it against us they were weaponizing television and movies how the you know the film industry was working directly with Satan and all this weird stuff and on the other end of the spectrum we would hear them talking about how Satan was embedded in the film industry and if you watch the horror movie the demons that you saw in that horror movie could actually come out of your television and grab you yeah yeah it's it's crazy because you know when you when you dig in to what's

what he's talking about here. He's using the story that was perpetrated by a man named James Vicari and he was a market researcher back in the 1950s and he purported to have done this experiment where he had dropped in the words to an unsuspecting group of moviegoers like every 50th frame the words eat more popcorn and drink more Coca-Cola. Now the claim was that a large percentage of the moviegoers went and got refreshments and the idea was that the campaign had forced them to actually go out and do that. Well here's the problem. He later had after everybody had

gone out and like oh this is great this new this new subliminal advertising everybody's trying to to recreate it. Well the problem is that he later has to recant and say that he just made it all up and it wasn't even real. I believe it. Yeah it's so strange man. You know I grew up in this world like I said and I believed this nonsense. I really did and I'm embarrassed to say it but hey I'm out there people can make fun of me if they want. But after I left this I started studying how the mind works because early in my research I knew that they had done something to my head. I

really didn't know what at that time. I had no idea that mind control was actually a real thing like could be weaponized against people and I had no idea that they had done this thing to my mind and I was just curious what's happening to me right. So I started studying and one of the basics if you talk to like even if you go to college and you take a psychology class they'll recommend this book by Edward Bernays called propaganda and interestingly I was on a flight for my business. I think it was to North Carolina for a business meeting and I was sitting I just

happened to be sitting next to a psychologist and I was early out of the message and I started telling him you know what I was in at that time I really didn't know the extent but I knew something was wrong. I explained it to him a bit and he said oh you need to read propaganda and I said what's that and he said oh it's it's like psychology 101 you read it. Well it's written by Edward Bernays who is Sigmund Freud's nephew and Bernays if you he's a fascinating study and of himself he was named one of the top 100 most influential Americans in the 20th century.

He's the father of public relations and this book of propaganda It was written for ministers like this who are abusing psychology. It is explaining how mass psychology can be achieved, how they're doing it, what they're doing, why they're doing it.

And it's really weird when you read it because when you read it, you realize that there is an element of truth to what this man is saying, but he himself, this minister who said this stuff about the popcorn, he himself is using the same techniques that he's speaking against in Sigmund Freud's nephew's book Propaganda, which I would recommend everybody read this if you, even if you weren't in a religion, you need to read this book.

But it exposes the strategies and it breaks it down into simple terms where you understand and you're no longer afraid of it. And that's really the key, I'll read a quote from the book, he said, it is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity.

It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern demographic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest it's gradually evolving code of ethics and practice. So James, the premise of his book is basically to describe how mass psychology has achieved and he breaks it down into different audiences.

You've got religious propaganda, politics, business, women's rights, education, you can even manipulate stock prices with this. And I guess the best way to say it, the underlying framework of this is herd psychology. In other words, humans by nature are creatures of a herd, they want to conform, they want to adopt and that's how group think works.

But there are techniques which he gives in the book and one of them, you'll be familiar with, if you get a person alone by themselves with a something that you want them to believe, whether it's true or not, but get them alone and convince them before they get alone that everybody else believes this thing, right?

And then don't tell them that it's true, but lead them to their own conclusions, which is exactly how a call works here. Take this recording of this quote unquote profit or this book. The book is fascinating, I can cover the whole show on just a book, but I'll let you read it.

If you want to read it, it's a great book. It's called Propaganda by Edward Bernays. Yeah, and something that's so fascinating when you... start looking into some of this stuff, is that just the idea of flashing some a couple of frames at you every so often, and that it's going to completely rewire your brain, and to such an extent that even to what this minister claimed, making people rush out of the movie theater to go get the refreshment, it's just not how things work.

You know, what they found is that it's like, you know, if you ever have seen an advertisement, if you see something on there like a juicy steak and an advertisement, it's not going to have an effect on you unless you're already in a state of hunger. Then you might be like, well, I'm kind of hungry, but it's not enough to motivate you to get out of your seat. That's one of the things that they found about this sort of thing is that they just can't force you to act.

And so what you find is where you get into these things is more of a controlled environment. If you can create a sort of controlled environment, or you can control the pressures upon a person, and a lot of times to make something effectively stick, there's outside stimuli like even in, you know, you look at stuff like MK Ultra and stuff where there's use of drugs and all these sorts of things to manipulate somebody on such a larger scale than just throwing a 50th frame in a movie screening. It just doesn't work. But yeah, it's, yeah.

And you know, of everything that I heard in that quote, the most powerful words are

the word they, for instance, they did this, they achieved this, they went and bought popcorn. When you're in a group setting, and you're in the herd mentality, you're in group think, and you hear the word they, you think, oh, these people are doing this. I wonder if that affects me.

And it's, you know, again, it's the same exact thing that he's condemning. He's actually using in this technique. They went and bought popcorn because they went and bought it. Oh my gosh, I can be manipulated too. It's the same type of psychology that he's using on, on the crowd.

And you know, it's really weird because the underlying premise of this statement, you know, they're trying to build fear against television and movies because in this particular minister's version of religion, television and movies are condemned outlaw, discouraged, whatever.

They want you to believe that if you go watch these things, be in fear because they're going to wreak havoc with your brain. Yet the man is standing there wreaking havoc with their brain.

So odd. Yeah, it's amazing because I can remember in my time in these groups when there, there was all this, this, dress put on what the outside world was going to do to your brain if you know your mind if you wandered outside of the pearly gates of the group and you know it's like you know here there be dragons you know don't don't go out there you're unprotected you know the the world will have its way with you and it's such a it's such a bad way to look at things because if you think about it in these groups they're telling you that what they're

giving you is so much more powerful than what anybody else in the world has and that it's going to protect you in all these things but then if you go to a movie theater and you encounter this 50th frame of a of a subliminal advertisement it's going to completely rewire your brain and make you go purchase something that you didn't think that you could purchase.

So it's like is this thing more powerful than what everybody else has or are we just susceptible to everybody else it you can't have it both ways yeah I'm a businessman if that power existed you can be assured I would be I would create a product a product that's worthless and try to sell it you know here slip this frame in this movie for me and I'll pay you $100,000 it just doesn't work like this and more to the point what this man is trying to do he is manipulating through fear he's trying to make the people afraid that they might slip in this one frame you've

probably seen it I've seen it too these they've got these memes where Disney is slipping in this one frame and that one frame that you didn't even notice has some I don't know they have all these agendas of demons or homosexuality or whatever it is and they're they actually convince real people that if that one frame just happens to be in the movie even if you didn't see the frame you are being manipulated and it's the same technique this minister is using it's a fear that something can control you without your knowledge while at the same time it is controlling you without your

knowledge it's using the same psychology techniques and it's very powerful these men who do this and women they do not want you to know how it works they do if you understand how it works they have lost their power to do it over you and that's really the irony of all of this one of the most interesting studies for me is just televangelism in general because once they realize the power of the media for achieving mass psychology no longer where they can find these evangelists confined to tents or auditoriums with say 10,000 people now they can put it on the radio they can put it

on television and they can use the same exact techniques to mass hypnotize eyes is, you know, to one extreme, it could be hypnotism, but basically to achieve mass psychology over large audiences, and it was because of this that televangelism was birthed.

Right. And, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, and like you said, you know, studying psychology, understanding what's going on in some of these situations is very, it's very, it can help clue you in a lot into what's going on.

It's something that you'll hear, you'll hear some of these people, they'll condemn psychology over the pulpit, they'll say that this is the devil's work, and that that's where the devil is going to entrap you, and I remember hearing a minister, and I forget how long ago I was, but I remember this clearly as like, reason is the devil's playground.

I believe is how he phrased it. And, you know, I was young and professional, I may have been in my early teens, you know, I don't know, I was young, and I just remember hearing that, and I was so confused, but at the same time, I didn't know really what reason was, I didn't really know the purpose of reason, but the older you get, and the more you examine a statement like that, you're like, that is just complete lunacy.

How are you going to make it through life if you can't reason things out? But in some situations, you know, some of these groups would rather you rely on the preachers understanding or the central figures understanding.

Don't reason for yourself, if you have a question, just rely on what I'm saying, because the Lord is using me to speak to you and help guide you. So if you don't quite understand it, don't reason for yourself.

Let me sort of guide you in the way that it's framed, you know, it's not quite framed that way, but that's kind of where they're getting to, but, you know, yeah. It's especially prevalent in the cult mentality.

Whenever you have a central figure who is wanting to manipulate the minds of his people, to rise above them in power, they do things like this. They use the same tech, the same propaganda techniques.

One of them will say things like, I never said I was a prophet, you said I was a prophet. And what they're doing is the person who's sitting there in the pew and listening to them say this, they're thinking, wait a minute, I never said that.

I never said this guy was a prophet. I wonder who did. And they start looking around and then they see everybody nodding like this and they think, oh, all of these people think he, well, wonder why I don't yet.

And then they start, they start conforming to it because why not? There's no critical thought. There's no reason to think that he's nod. If everybody else is thinking that he is, and that's the power of mass persuasion.

These guys manipulate the minds by throwing in little subtle hints that somebody else thinks something and it's just like the popcorn. They saw the frame and they went out and bought it. You too might go out and buy it.

And everybody's sitting there out and thinking, oh wow, I hope I don't see that frame because I don't want to buy a popcorn. Yeah, that's something that I remember happening quite a lot as I was coming up in the message was that there was all this lore that came packaged with it, that predated me. And I'm sitting there in services trying to be open, trying to be discerning and trying to just listen and just be intent to what I'm hearing. And then you hear the minister say something like, they'll mention something like this wonderful thing or this

miraculous thing that happened. And then they'll like mention it by name and then they'll go, oh well, you know, we all know about this or we all know about that. And then as a young person, you're sitting there going, well, I don't even know what this is. But then everyone else is nodding and going along and you're like, okay, well, I guess everyone else seems like they're cool with this.

So yeah, I believe it too. Yeah, sure, you know, and you're just going along with everybody else. And then you start to look into some of these things when you start coming away and you start reading and all the history and stuff. And you're like, I think I begin to understand why they don't always go into this stuff because it's a whole lot harder to defend when you have to explain it. But if you just persuade everybody to believe that everybody agrees, then you've got the buy-in already. Yeah, one of the most powerful evidences of that we see, I'm sure you've seen it too,

but whenever we post a video that's highly critical, that there is no explanation why this absurd thing has happened and why they've covered it up, you'll find somebody who posts, but and William Brannum as the example, William Brannum said these things years ago before you were even born and hundreds of ministers rose up against them. They couldn't even stop it. How can you today rise up against them? And it's that's the same manipulation techniques that you're describing.

We were told that hundreds of ministers rose up against this and not just William Brannum. We were told that the Laterane movement in general would had risen up and it was the Laterane to Pentecostalism's former reign and it was a movement by God and nobody could suppress it.

Well, they left out the part where the assemblies of God started sanctioning anybody was working with William Brannum, the leader of the Laterane Revivalists. It's just so absurd. In our podcast that Charles and I are doing, we discovered through the course of research, that that exact instance that they're referring to, there's some history behind it that if they were to include that history, people would run screaming.

It was, they don't tell you that when all these ministers rose up against William Brannum, he was working with Jim Jones. And the reason that they were rising up is because William Brannum was introducing the Christian identity white supremacy doctrine.

And everybody rose up and said, no, this white supremacy is evil. Don't do this. That's what they're rising up for. And they actually won. It wasn't William Brannum that won. But years later, after all of this is said and done after that history has been whitewashed, they tell the listeners that all of these men rose up against William Brannum and he stood in the face of them and succeeded and spreading his message.

They don't tell you that he actually lost that battle. But that would go against message, Canon, John. You can't have the hero be undefeated by these forces of Satan, can you? No. You know, you mentioned MK Ultra and that of all of the fascinating things that we could get into, that's a rabbit trail that would an entire podcast might spin off of that one.

But I came across that by accident whenever I watched the worst movie ever made called Men Who Stare at Goats.

It had all of these famous actors. I mean, great actors. And I thought, what's this? I looked at the cast and, oh my gosh, everybody's in it that I likened. I watched the movie waiting for it to get good and by the end of it, I'm like the whole premise of this thing, man.

Men who are actually taking the heads of goats and staring at them, trying to manipulate their minds, this is ridiculous. And it wasn't until probably, I wanna say five years later that I learned that this was actually a thing.

The United States government realized the power of mind control after Hitler basically brainwashed a nation to hate the Jews that propaganda started spreading into the United States, which, you know, it's mentioned through the works of Edward Bernays that I mentioned earlier.

They realized that this was a problem and they tried to weaponize various techniques of mind control. They actually started working with some of these religious leaders before Paul Kane died. And he actually mentioned to this to me on the phone when I talked to him.

Paul Kane was involved in this and he called it. He was in the CIA supernatural division as how he called it. It was basically MK Ultra. And the government was... trying to learn how that these ministers in this movement were controlling the minds of the people.

That's how effective this thing is. Right, you know, and it sounds like such science fiction, you know, because the way we normally encounter stuff like MK Ultra in today's world is we see the it in popular culture through media.

I think one of the most recent depictions of it is through the Netflix show Stranger Things. The whole, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but there's this whole plot where they're creating pretty much super humans through a sort of spinoff of an MK Ultra sort of division.

And it really goes and it really kind of really stretches the reality aspect of it to like the craziest degree. But at the core, there are some really dark and sinister things that do, that did happen in reality with some of these programs to by people trying to figure out, like you said, what they could do and what could happen.

And so it is kind of, you look at this and you see ministers using tactics of mind control

on unsuspecting groups of people and it really makes you one, you want to understand more what's going on and two, to wonder, is this safe? What are the people I know and care about?

What are they being subjected to? And especially against their will because if half these people knew we're able to even decipher what was going on in the sermon, they would run from that, they would run from there faster than they were trying to go get some more popcorn.

Yeah, it's just so unreal. And like I said earlier, once you understand what it is, how it works, why it's used and how it's used, it takes the element of fear away. And when you take the element of fear away, it's like the emperor with no clothes, right?

The guy on the platform, once you see that he's using the same exact techniques that he's condemning, he's the emperor with no clothes and there is no fear. You're sitting there thinking, okay, well, he's doing this to me and he's telling me, I should be afraid of it.

Well, I'm not afraid, man, it's just so weird because it can be a good thing. You know, again, read the book propaganda, but education, they've got these educational programs, some of which they play in school, where they're using many of these same techniques for learning and learning good things.

You know, I know there's this big debate on, to religious communities over education or homosexuality and gender, take all of that away and just think mathematics, arithmetic, letters. Look back to Sesame Street, how they put the big block of the today is brought to you by the number five. At its simplest form, that is one of these techniques that show you the five and they're getting the children to remember the five. Whenever the child hears five out in the real world, they think, oh, that's that block that I saw. It looks like this. It's really the same technique in Sesame Street and you can find marketing strategies

that are based on this. Like the man said with popcorn, it's not a bad thing. Watch the Super Bowl and you're going to see some funny commercial that the next day you're going to be laughing at and you're going to be thinking, oh, that's incredibly funny. I've never tried that, I don't know, pretzel, whatever it is. I think I'll try the pretzel. It's not a bad thing that you tried the pretzel. It's actually not a bad thing that you bought the popcorn. But what the minister is doing is so unethical because they're trying to take something that is widely used in every arena,

even in religion. Like I said, this man is doing this to his people. Every business, every, every form of life uses some form of this. But what he's trying to do is make you be afraid of it and in doing so because it's so widely used, when you pick up that it's happening, you start to be afraid of everything. Right. And the fear is the thing that has stuck out to me the most as I've sort of deprogrammed from these things because the fear will keep you from thinking rationally.

And when you're not able to think rationally, you can't parse this stuff properly. And so, yeah, you look at these things and you think, well, I can't go to the movies because they might reprogram my mind while I'm there. And all the while, if you're in a group that is using these things on you, it's happening to you already. You're just being, you're just being refocused to think it's in the outside world. It's not happening here. Here's the safe place. You know, we wouldn't do that to, to each other. So yeah, that fear is one of the, one of the things that breaking

free of that. It's almost like the scene from the Wizard of Oz where you've got, when they finally figure out the man behind the curtain. And it's just all like, oh, you know, don't worry about the man behind the curtain. And you see this fraud going on. And, you know, once you wipe that fear away of this mystical thing that's going on, you really get to see it for what it is. And it completely undermines everything that it's trying to uphold in your mind. Yeah. And they are irony. You know, I mentioned televangelism earlier. What's interesting is this doctrine of

manipulating your mind through popcorn. This thing originated ironically with the British Israelism movement in the United States, which is the foundation that was laid for white supremacy to rise through Christian identity. Serpent seed doctrine originated because of this.

And the notion was that the 12 tribes of Israel, the lost 12 tribes of Israel, were actually the white people, people with white skin and the British Isles, and the Jews that we see today are the bad guys. And they've taken over the government, they've taken over Hollywood, they've taken over the movie industry, all of this stuff, right? So in the early years before televangelism was birthed, they believed many of these men, not all, but many of them believed that these people were, quote unquote, communists, and the commies had taken over.

And they were manipulating minds through film and later when television came, it's the television, the box, the evil set. So they're preaching against television, they're preaching against films. And then once they learned the power of this thing, they started using these techniques for themselves and televangelism was birthed. And believe it or not, it was birth from many of the same men who were earlier condemning it as communists. I think if you go look at history of televangelism, I think they list Rex Humbart as the father of it. But go back during that era, you're going to find oral Roberts. His broadcast in 1957 reached 80% of the possible

television audience. That's how widespread this was. AA Allen, you know, he was, he either came before oral Roberts, shortly after the two men were, were basically using television as their means of spreading this propaganda through media. And you know, it could have been used for good.

I'm not, I didn't watch any of that. So I'm not saying that they're manipulating heads. But to some extent, they're using in the later versions of televangelism, they're using the same propaganda techniques. And they're saying you too, if you, if you give money to us, you too will get money. And they're using these propaganda techniques. So the very platform that they condemned, the very reason why this guy is telling you that your mind will be manipulated to buy popcorn was created by the movement that he's a part of, which is so ironic. I know, and it's so fascinating, because I remember, I remember growing up and hearing about, you know,

they talk about the bitty hands. and the, you know, all these other guys. And they talk about them in such a derogatory way. And they say that they are the imposters. And Brandon was the original.

Brandon was the original, the one that had it right. And everybody else came after him was just imposters. And then you go and dig through all the history. And you find that these guys were running together.

These guys were promoting each other, including William Branum. And it's a completely different picture than I was raised to believe. Which has been so fascinating to learn and dig into, you know, beyond the scope of what's actually going on and what's being said, that alone had was something that just really blew my mind that when I encountered it for the first time, because I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

I was always told that these guys were imposters. And they're out just, and they were buds for the most of them. Yeah, you know, it's so weird, because I'm the same way. They made fun of these people.

And I grew up thinking that those were the evil guys. And I had no idea that they were so deeply connected. And honestly, head William Branum not died. He would have been part of this, because everybody he was working with became part of this.

His sponsors were part of this. And even, you know, they've got the film 20th Century Profit and Deep Call to the Deep. This was the early stages of the formation of what would become Televangelism.

And he's doing the same thing. So while they're condemning the Benny Han for slinging his jacket and, you know, this Televangelistic thing, well, William Branum is being promoted. And they're giving you these videos and they're selling them to you of him using his own form of Televangelism, which, again, had he not died, he would have been a big part of.

And, you know, it's so weird, because whenever people are in front of this type of audience, with all of this hype in an auditorium, when Benny Han swings his coat, they're in this state of euphoria, which is brought on by the psychology.

And when he swings the coat, you've probably seen the videos where people just fall over backwards. Well, it's because of the psychological techniques that he's using. And this is proven fact. This is not even somebody who's just against Benny Han that's saying this.

This is a very common thing. Well, take that to a much larger scale with Televangelism. It's a different technique they use because you don't have the same in the arena type of mass psychology, but using a different form for Televangelism to manipulate people to send in their money.

It's just, it's so weird, man. So funny how this always comes down to money. Even in some of the churches that I... grew up around. You could always tell when the ties weren't coming in as strongly as they should because the old anionisensifier sermon was right around the corner. Yeah.

I never will forget when we left them called. We started trying new churches and one of the churches that we tried was one of these great big massive buildings. To this day I call it six flags over Jesus. He was a huge thing and they had multiple campuses and you go in. The one that I went to, they actually had a, I think it was a hologram of the preacher. It was really weird. But the preacher, I will say that the very first, you know, maybe 10 sermons that we heard were really good. He was

preaching grace and he was preaching history and he was talking about how we're in a new covenant and described perfectly how the old covenant, why it failed, how Jesus had to come down the cross.

And he's giving this broad history that we never heard in the cult that I grew up in. And ironically it's just the Bible. That's all he was, you know, it's in the Bible. If you go read it and I'm not saying he, but specifically, but many of them don't even understand what's in the book.

They just pair it whatever is said by the cult leader. Well, what was odd to me is they also fell into this condition or they needed money. They were building a new campus. And so we heard all of these sermons, how the old covenant has passed away and how, you know, today's world is, there is no old covenant tithing system. There is cheerful giving when you see somebody that is in need and we can help you with this, you know, some family who needs food, give, and that's a good thing. I can be fully on board with this, right? But when this place needed money, I'll never forget,

I was sitting there. The minister comes out on the platform and he says, now today we're going to bring up a subject that's going to make a lot of people a little bit uncomfortable, but we have to do it. Today, we're going to talk about tithe and totally reversed the past 10 sermons that I heard brought back the old covenant, everybody's under whips and chains of bondage and give me your money. And that was the last sermon that I heard there I laughed in. Yeah, it's really hard to build a mega church empire without the study stream of ties from all your unsuspecting members.

It really is. Yeah, one of the most interesting things that I came across years ago and I actually put the video of this on my website. There's this guy named Darren Brown, who it's a different form of psychology that he's using, but he was an atheist who wanted to show people how getting in the hype of the group thing and the mass psychology could actually create a religious atmosphere in which people would have faith on something that did not exist.

And the premise of it, in the scope of Christianity, I understand there will be Christians who are very troubled by this fact. But I'm talking about specifically with faith healing, which is what he was exposing properly.

There's this thing where people are in a group and they see other people who are claiming to be healed, which is the same thing as this minister with a popcorn. These other people are buying popcorn.

You too might be susceptible to this still frame in the video, right? Well, Darren Brown sets up this whole elaborate scheme where he's coming into town as a faith healer. And people are in the audience and they witness other people.

Some of them, I believe, were even planted by him. I'd have to go back and look. But they witness other people claiming to be healed of various things. Well, people who had actual diseases and afflictions were actually getting better.

And the news media interviewed them and Darren Brown interviewed them. And these people claimed to have been healed by this faith healer who they thought was a Christian. And this guy was just producing a documentary.

He was an atheist producing a documentary. And he was correctly showing how these people were having faith and something that didn't exist. And because of this, they were believing that they were being healed.

And for me, you have to separate it into a few categories, right? On the one hand, God can heal. And these people came with faith in God. So some of them were healed. But there was a whole subcategory of people, which he went through in the documentary, who were claiming to have been healed, who weren't, who believed that they were healed, and weren't, who would have gone to their grave saying, that man helped heal me, and he didn't.

That was one of the most fascinating clips that I've come across in researching. Because what you find is that a lot of the things that we've sort of gone through and looked at, the problems in Brannum's own faith healing ministry, you know, you see that a lot of these things are happening across all these other ministries as well.

You know, and one of my favorite ones is that character, WV Grant, where there's that famous example where he takes, he goes to the man in the audience. And he takes the cane, and that's beside him, and he says, you know, you no longer need...

this cane, you're healed, get up and walk and leave. And the man gets up and from the whole audience and gets gets out, goes out and leaves. And then the people that are there that are catching this go out and interview the man afterwards and say, so were you healed what's going on? He said, no, that wasn't even my cane. He said, that was the lady beside me. And he says, well, why did you get up? He said, well, he told me to. And so I just got up and left. And you know, that's something that, you know, you have all these people

that say, oh, well, all these people said such and such happened or this or that. And there's a, you have to have room for situations like that where, you know, people were just caught up in the moment or caught up in the group think like we were talking about earlier.

And they act in ways that they normally wouldn't in their right mind because you get out in front of people and there's all this of this pressure to act or he's saying this. And but I'm here for the healing anyways. And so I don't want to, I don't want to hinder God. Maybe this is how God's going to do it. Maybe my act of faith is going to show God how sincere I am. And then God will heal me. You know, so yeah, it's, it is kind of funny when you see someone like Darren Brown go and look at the different tricks that some of

these people use. And then sort of show how people react to it and then go and show them what's really going on here in the situation that in the moment it looked like this, but what I really was doing was this. And it, yeah, it's, it's very eye-opening. And I, it's definitely something that's, that's definitely a good watch. I definitely recommend it. Yeah.

It's interesting. There are people in our support groups who grew up in, actually went to the church that I, my grandfather's church in Jeffersonville. And they witnessed people who were standing in the lines waiting to be healed and some of them were elderly.

And the, the ushers would come up and they would give you a wheelchair. They apparently had wheelchairs just sitting there for people. And here sit down, take this load off your feet while we're waiting and we'll push you up. Well, to the person who sits, they're thinking nothing of it. Oh, thank you. I have a place to sit now. I've been standing in my legs tired, are tired. But then whenever they get up to the platform and they rise up out of the wheelchair, every single person sitting in that audience is being manipulated by the same technique because they're, they have a visual aid of somebody who's suddenly

being healed. And then they get in this hysteria, this hype that people are rising up out of the wheelchairs, right? Yeah. And like, and like you said, this, the, the scene the people rise up out of the wheelchair. And there's so much stuff going on in these meetings and you can't quite keep track of everything. You see some get out of the wheelchair. Everybody gasp and who's an oz. And it creates this sensation and kind of takes a hold of your, your, normal reasoning factors and you start to believe because everybody else seems to believe

in getting in this sort of sort of a panic almost over everything that's going on. And it makes it feel more. real in the moment. Um, but yeah, it's, uh, it's definitely, uh, some of these things are just, you look at them and, you know, it seems so silly when you look at it now. Yeah.

And more to the point, when you look at it with information and you understand how it works and why they're doing it to the many of the ministers who are doing this thing, even though it is highly unethical, they believe that they're manipulating minds for a good purpose. This person whose healing has been faked, now these other people who really have something wrong with them, they can feel better. That's how they do this in their minds.

I think that's how they justify the unethical practices that they do. But on the flip side, I don't realize that this whole framework of fear that they've introduced by doing something unethical, even though it is, you know, it's a tool that they're using that they think is good. It wreaks havoc on the minds, especially of the children. And that's really for me.

That's where I get a little bit angry. The minister who's talking about the popcorn, again, it's not a bad thing. If you want to sell popcorn, and this actually worked, which I'm going to tell you right now, it does not work. But if you want to sell popcorn and you throw a slide in, hey, that's fine. You know, do what you want to do. Go buy some popcorn. But to use it in such a way that you're making people afraid of being manipulated without their knowledge and manipulating them without their knowledge. For me, that's really

the problem because this man is doing that. And I grew up in this world, right? I know how it works. I grew up in the cult elite. I've seen the manipulation of minds. I know how it works.

And it's so unethical. Once once I was able to get away from this and understand that, hey, this is wrong. What we're doing to people's minds is wrong. I started realizing that just simply educating people into how it works, whether you say it's right or wrong, just the education of it takes away the element of fear. Once you understand how these things can manipulate your mind, you're not afraid of it because in some cases, you may want your mind to be manipulated. You may want to go buy the popcorn. You know what I'm saying? It's not

a bad thing. But taking away the fear for me is just the most critical part of all of this. And that's why we have our show, James. Yes, we do. So we've, we've asked in the previous episode, and we've actually got quite a few good questions coming in. But if you have questions that you want to be brought up.

on the show, send them in to us. You can go to William-Brandom.org and click on the contact and just send it to us there. Or even in the comment feeds of the video, if you have some questions you wanna address, just post them in there and we'll bring them up and this is James, this is turning into something that's incredibly fun for me, I don't know about you, but I'm out of glass going to the history behind some of this weird things.

Like, I had never really processed it even myself. I knew that some of these things were just ridiculous, but until I go back and I say, okay, that's where that came from and study the history behind it, I'm starting to realize that, A, it's incredibly fun to figure it out, but B, it's incredibly fascinating to know that this weird thing that existed in our history resulted in this weird statement that was made by a minister.

Right, and comedy can really be a way of dealing with traumatic situations. It really has a way of doing that and just the fact that we can get on here and go through some of these things and have a lighthearted tone and just not make fun of people, but make fun of the situation and what's going on and be like, this is ridiculous and this is not a boogie man, this is just silly, this is slapstick comedy, if you will.

And I think that can be helpful, maybe not in all situations, but for some. And yeah, like I said, for me, this has been fun. I hope people enjoy it and I'm very curious to see where we go with this in the future because we've got a lot of fun things that we can dive into.

We're not laughing at you, we're laughing with you. You're just not laughing as you preach it.

If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at www.William-Branum.org and for an overview of the historical research of William Branum and the healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William Branum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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