Weaponized Religion: Identity to the NAR - An Interview with Andre Gagne

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org and with me I have my very special guest, Andre Gagne, professor in theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

Andre, it's very good to have you. I'm so excited today to have you on the show. I have wanted to do this forever but I'll be honest, your research is so at the time I was studying it, it was so complicated. I wanted to wrap my head around it so I didn't look like a fool when I hadn't you on the show to talk. But you expose me to the world of the NAR and how latering connected to it and you were one of the first people that I heard mentioned William Brannum's name in all of that

research. Stephen Hassan, Dr. Stephen Hassan connected us years ago. I don't even remember what year that was. I was digesting your videos one after another after another. For the people who are on the video podcast, I'll throw the link up and you guys will just go nuts with all of the research that Andre has. But I'm so excited to have you today. Maybe you could just tell a little bit about yourself and wanted to have a casual conversation of where this podcast is headed this year.

Yes, thank you so much, John. I'm so happy that we are finally meeting, finally talking, and it really warms my heart that the work that I've been doing for the past couple of years has been useful for you somehow. I'm sure that it's propelled you to even more in-depth work on your interests. And I'm extremely honored and happy to be here. It's great, really.

And like I said, maybe I can say just a few words about myself. As you mentioned, I'm a full professor in theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal. So I'm a bit of an outsider when it comes to things about American politics and theology. And I've just recently released a book as you know, American evangelicals for Trump, the Midian spiritual warfare and the end times.

And yeah, I've been very much, my initial training actually, as a as an academic has been in biblical studies. So I did my BA, MA, PhD in biblical studies,

trying to understand and wrestle with historical questions about the Bible, where did the Bible come from, how did it originate, who wrote it, why are there tensions in scripture and things like that. And at one point in my journey, and eventually I became an academic and became a professor.

But at one point, we also ask ourselves questions pertaining to our own research. How can our own research be useful somehow? Because we can be very much buried in our own interests about exegesis and original languages and left and right studying manuscripts.

But sometimes it's hard for people that are not in that world to actually connect with what you're doing. So this is when I started being interested in how people were reading the Bible today.

How Christians were reinterpreting scripture and applying it to their particular context, sometimes using it in a legitimate way, but sometimes misusing and abusing scripture and hurting themselves and their loved ones in a very profound way.

And of course, this brought me eventually to the issue of evangelicalism and evangelicals in the context of American politics. Of course there were infatuation, I would say, with Donald Trump. And all the biblical language and justifications that surrounded that did a lot of work around the new apostolic reformation, as you know, the NAR, Neo-Carrismatic Pentecostals.

Again, there were worldview ideas around spiritual warfare, notions of dominion and so on. So for me, it's really about, of course, we do have research interests, but it's also showing how those research interests really tie in with what people are experiencing in their lives.

And I think, you know, in the past couple of years, this is what I tried to do. Well, it is certainly amazing, very amazing. You know, whenever I first began this journey for myself, I, I can't remember if you were before the new website or after I had, the cult actually attacked my YouTube site and brought it down a few years ago.

Oh my. It might have been the old one, in fact, that you, that whenever I was connected with you, but anyway, anybody who has studied my progression as I'm going down this journey, it's all over the place, man, because, In the early days I was studying theology and I was trying to research and document it and then I went into the, you know, kind of the esoteric world because we were in a religion that was based on very esoteric premises and I was trying to piece to get, well why is that?

It doesn't make sense. When I realized what Christianity was, you know, after we left and started going to new churches, once I realized that what they were teaching wasn't even really compatible with Christianity, I began to ask the question, well, what was this?

And that got me into studying the history so I could uncover how it began and right before we started this podcast, I told you that I was going to save all the big explosive secrets for the podcast.

I could see your face, but we have reached a point where honestly and to the listeners who can see me bubbling up with excitement, all of these different pieces were just kind of scattered pieces, did not go together at all.

But as I'm researching and using the research of others, your research was kind of the glue that bounded all together and once I started understanding what it was that you were saying and understanding all these many different pieces, and suddenly I realized that the theme that we're heading towards this year is weaponized religion, because that is what we came out of.

And once I connected it to, I understood British's realism, how it developed. Once I connected the leaders of Laterane directly to the Christian identity movement, speaking at conferences that were Christian identity, I began to understand that there was a political aspect to it.

And so I started diving into, like you said, the evangelicals and politics, I did this before they were even called evangelicals. I started studying the populist movement. How did it begin and grow? And there were key names, which some of those you may know, some you may not, but Gerald Burton-Winrod, who was a, he was somewhat of a father to the Christian identity movement.

He was spreading the protocols of the learned, elders of Zion, which was the Jewish propaganda. He was spreading it all throughout the United States. And he had audience directly with leaders in Nazi Germany and right after connecting with them, suddenly, he's got all this money, he's coming to the United States.

And he's spreading propaganda through a religious platform. Well, he was on the board of directors for the National Fundamentalist League in the United States. One of those directors was Roy E. Davis, who was basically the mentor, he's the one who planted my grandfather.

the church. Roy E. Davis was the second in command of the 1915 Ku Klux Klan. He worked directly under William Joseph Simmons, who was the founder of the 1915 Klan. When the Klan separated, when it exploded into all of these various underground, you know, hidden Klan sects. And there was a period of time in which the Klan was thriving in Indiana after this. There was one man who helped or tried to, you know, defend the Klan in Washington who was named Congressman William D. Upshaw. He worked closely with Roy Davis, who was the guy who planted my grandfather's church. These two figures were deeply involved with

William Brannum. And I started connecting all these dots. And I could spout off like 50 other names that are like this. But they were developing what eventually ended up to be the first iteration of what was called the America First Party. There was a man in Indianapolis at the height of the Indiana Klan named Gerald L. K. Smith, who founded the Christian First Party. He, right after the Klan was exposed in Indiana, he went down to Shreveport and worked directly with the people in the ministerial board with the father-in-law of Jack Moore, who was basically the guy who started William Brannum's

organization there in Shreveport, right? L. K. Smith, he ran for president, didn't succeed, but he moved to California at the same time that Roy Davis and Congressman Upshaw, the guy I mentioned before, moved, they moved out to California as well, began silently funding to grow the third wave of the Ku Klux Klan. L. K. Smith became the Imperial Wizard of the California Klan.

And under him was Wesley A. Swift, his second in command, and he is the most notorious Christian identity figure in the nation in nation's history. From Swift, you birthed the neo-Nazis, the Aryan nations, all of these weird political sects that came out, and it came directly from this guy who's connected to Latter-Rain. And this was the name I'd never heard of, and in fact, I think it was only last year, I began to realize that, wait a minute, William Brannum, who was our prophet in this cold ice cave, he is claiming to have all these divine revelations of the serpent seed,

for example, these doctrines that are white supremacy doctrines. Well, I did not realize it, but he is simply rebranding the content from Wesley Swift, giving a different name in his serpent seed. He took out the names black or the words black and Jew, but he gives, he gives the same historical lineage that Swift used.

So anybody who understands that, you know, the lineage that he's talking about, they understand that he is talking about the black people, right? So he's rebranded Swift's, you know, theology, and even to the extent Swift's celestial bodies theology, that's something I grew up with, Swift's UFO theology.

I grew up with this and started realizing, wait a minute, Wesley Swift was, he was working closely with these guys, if not the parent, to what will your brand name was bringing us theology.

This is phenomenal. This is kind of mind blowing because you've done really profound genealogical historical work. And this is important, you know, making those connections between topics and themes and how these are rebranded because this is constantly what we're seeing.

You know, speaking of any kind of ideas that emerged, for example, out of the early Pentecostal movement, you know, they use terms. They use expressions, these eventually get picked up, but rebranded in another way.

And then you end up later on through, you know, of course, you have the healing revivals in the 40s and 50s, and then your charismatic movement in the 60s, and then the kind of third wave and what we see with the NAR, but a lot of these ideas are constantly going through some form of rebranding, but at the core, it's what you're saying.

You see, at the core, a lot of it is about wife supremacy. And when I think about what you're saying in terms of even notions of, you know, ideas of the serpent seed that we find in Brenham, for example, but these are ideas that you found that can be found also very early on with people like Charles Partham, who is really the, because when we talk about early Pentecostalism, let's say in the context of American society, of course, we can talk about different, I would say, genetic origins of Pentecostalism across the world.

But you know, when we talk about Pentecostalism, often we tie it to a Suza street, 1906, with a J William Seymour, but we often forget Charles Partham, who actually at first is the one that really emphasized the idea of this idea of baptism and the Holy Spirit.

He's at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. He actually experienced that earlier than... but Parham was a racist. You see, Parham's lineage and heritage or legacy is one of racism out of which a lot of people are often forgetting is that you have out of the Parham lineage the largest penicostal, you know, the largest penicostal denomination in the world, the assemblies of God.

This is Parham's lineage. When Parham talks about, for example, even ideas of speaking in tongues, he understands this in the context of last day's world evangelism that he has, and his group has received this gift to go and preach to the heathens of other countries, especially black people in other countries so that they could be exposed to the light of the gospel and maybe be saved, you know, and maybe be saved. So, so you have a form of he had even a kind of a theology of creation that evaluated like there was a first creation and the second creation

and that second creation was was tied to cane. It's very very similar to what you find in Brennan's own view of the Serpent Sea, but it was it was spelled out a bit differently with Parham. So, you see these ideas are constantly rebranded and and when you had the spectacular move of a Suza Street under William Seymour, who was a an African-American and he was the pastor of this church and he had been what's very interesting. He had been a disciple of Parham, but so you know, left Parham at one point decided to go to Los Angeles beginning his own church and it was a mixed

race church. When Parham discovered this, he started accusing Seymour of stealing his idea because Seymour has been popular, you see. So, what you see in American like American Pentecostalism and the way that people want to talk about that history of American Pentecostalism, there is a willingness to throw aside the Parham lineage and stick to the William Seymour lineage because it's the most positive, less racist lineage, but in reality, you know, the founder, the originator of what we understand Pentecostalism to be was Charles Parham, you see. So it's very interesting, this notion of labeling and rebranding because

this is something that constantly happens in these types of movements because they can't reinvent the wheel. What they'll do is they'll take what's existent and adapt it and try to make it more more acceptable. And it's a bit deceitful because in the end, when you do the work, you do, for example, when you scratch the surface and you go deeper like the kind of work that you've been doing, this is all the dirt that you're uncovering is quite traumatic, I should say.

Yeah, and the dirt has been swept under the rug. It's really unbelievable. I think you were one of the first people that I heard that Parham was a racist. I want to say it was you. If not, it was somebody shortly after I came in contact with your research. When I heard this, I thought, no, man, because I came out of this religion that I thought was somehow linked to Pentecostalism and even that in itself is absurd now that, now knowing the history and having dug through it.

There's some other things that I've not, I've not had this conversation with you since we spoke last, you know, William Brannum, when he entered into the Latter-in Revivalist, he posed as a Baptist minister claiming to have got the Holy Ghost and stumbled onto it by accident. And every single biography that you find of William Brannum will say this. They'll say he was a Baptist minister that converted. And they will tell you, he had these series of prophecies in 1933 and that's what made him famous. Well, even on my grandfather's church, there's this concrete inset that says, dedicated in 1933. Well, when we went to the courthouse and pulled the deed,

the deed to the building is 1936. And so I'm scratching my head and wait a minute. This doesn't make any sense. So I spent, I can't tell you how many thousands of hours going through microfish.

I went through every newspaper that existed. And in this area, believe it or not, there was a lot of newspapers. On the Louis side of the river, you had, you know, I went to the Louis of a library and they've got just rows and rows of microfish. Went through the Jeffersonville, Indiana library.

Well, when I started putting together everything into a timeline, I realized that in 1933, Brannum was still in Davis's church, which was advertised as Pentecostal. And it was really odd. But it was, it was advertised as Pentecostal Baptist. And I'm thinking, what is this? One of the big things that came out, see, they're two years ago or maybe last year we found this, Roy Davis, who was Brannum's.

mentor of the clan guy. He was coming into Indiana right after the fall of DC Stevenson, which was the head of the Indiana clan. He was arrested for, I can't remember the lady's name, but cannibalization and sexual molestation, all kinds of weird stuff. He goes to prison, what left avoid in leadership. And so Davis comes into this area during the void in leadership.

And he's in the same faction of clan. So he's poised to become a leader. He didn't, but he was poised to. He got, he was in criminal suits of himself and he went to prison. So he lost his chance at leadership. But there was a Pentecostal, very well respected Pentecostal man named GT Haywood. And Haywood was in Indianapolis at a time when it was the largest clan in the United States. Everybody was, you know, there were people who weren't even racist who were part of the clan because it was the in thing to do in Indiana,

right? Well, Haywood was having interracial revivals, which the clan leadership doesn't like this, right? No, of course not. And he published this tract called Victim of the Flaming Sword, which was highly popular, spread throughout the nation. I wish I'd have brought it out. I actually got a copy of one of the old tattered versions of it in my library. He published this tract, Victim of the Flaming Sword, Roy Davis and William Simmons, the two guys that were created the clan, when they're, when that part of the clan imploded, they created a new white supremacy group in opposition to Haywood called the

Knights of the Flaming Sword. And they were going to grow it. It was to become a replacement for the clan, but it imploded after the financial schemes were uncovered. And Davis fled the state comes to Louisville, then to Indiana. But when he came, he created a new Pentecostal sect called the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God. And he was, he was the general overseer of this sect. We can place William Brannum at Revivalos with Caleb Ridley, the Imperial Club, which is the Imperial Supreme, Supreme Chapel of the clan. Roy Davis, who was the clan guy, William Brannum was there in Memphis, in Nashville, Tennessee in 1929. So Brannum

was working with the Pentecostals as early as 19, in the 1920s. So then they come to, they come to Jeffersonville, they plant the Jeffersonville Church. And all this to say, whenever Brannum gives these fabulous fictional life stories about how he was a Baptist.

He was in Mishawaka, stumbled onto this revival, and became a Pentecostal. I have a friend who's another researcher who identified what church that was at, and I went and visited the church and went through their archives.

We pieced together through newspapers, their archives, their newsletters, that it looks very much like they were attempting before the UPCI to build a sect that could be included in the UPCI, and they were working very closely with men who did become UPCI leaders.

But the revivalists that were coming to this area in Jeffersonville, while Brannum was in a Pentecostal church, he was a bishop right under the leader of this, he's working with people in that church before he even goes to this alleged accidental encounter of Pentecostalism.

So he's a Pentecostal leader in a Pentecostal church, and all of this is happening before even his church is planted, but the dates don't line up. The church doesn't exist yet, the one that's supposed to be dedicated in 1933, and he's holding these revivals with the clan guys in 1933, all of this, to say, once I realized that there was a threat of racism embedded in Pentecostalism through these guys, it made me want to dig deeper and see, okay, maybe you're right, let's investigate Parum.

Yeah, exactly, and the fact that, you know, because you're absolutely right, if you read any biography, whatever on Brennan, he's an independent Baptist, supposedly independent Baptist. So when you come across what you've discovered, like Baptist Pentecostal, that doesn't jive, at least with the information that we find in a lot of these academics, scholarly biographies, but it's not surprising in the sense that you could also have the connection of Baptist Pentecostals, because there were very early on an opening on the part of Baptists to the move of the spirit.

So in a sense, it makes sense at the same time. The information is erroneous in terms of, he's not an independent Baptist, maybe not, and probably not. But being a Baptist Pentecostal, that could be a possibility, because there's this openness amongst Baptists, even in the late 19th century, to the idea of...

of, you know, embracing gifts of the spirit and even experiencing some of these, you know, gifts that are more supernaturally oriented somehow. So it's interesting because I didn't know this like because we always rely on, you know, these people that go and a lot of them do research and supposedly they go in the archives and they go to places and they visit the actual place. But so I'm pleasantly surprised. But it does explain a lot of things in terms of his idea of being connected and having even an openness because if you're a hard core Baptist,

you're not going to even consider that as a possibility. And you have it in some testimonies, you know, during the healing revival years, you have these Baptists that are discovering who Brenna is, you know, they encounter him through his ministry and all I'm a hard core Baptist and I, you know, I wasn't open to the spirit gifts and all of that and eventually they do open themselves up. But it's very revealing that they're saying very clearly that there stands as not about the operation of the of the gifts of the spirit. You were mentioning something

the connection, like when you read, like when you led, you, you, you explored the podcasts that or the vlogs that I was doing around Laterane and you saw this connection with, with Brenna. What, what specifically stood out in terms of how Laterane people function, at least those that came out from north battles for them and Saskatchewan, people like the Houtens, for example, who had visited, who had been very much influenced by Brenna's crusade, his time in Vancouver.

They went, a bunch of people who went to see Brenna there came back that were all excited with what had happened in Vancouver and they want to kind of bring the revival back to north battlesburg. So when you were kind of listening to this stuff, what caught your attention with what you knew about Brenna and what you saw, I'm a bit intrigued about that with, with Laterane people.

Yeah, so this is where you can laugh at me, right? We were, what's the word, I'm trying to think of a nice way to label myself, but other than just outright saying, we were brainwashed.

We were in this thing under mind control and I, to be real honest, I had no idea Brenna was connected to Laterane.

fact, if you go listen to his recordings, which as a child, I listened to these recordings in my car, you know, we would travel with them. I listened to them at my bedside stand, had a little walkman that I would go through school at work, you know, I listened to these things to where I could quote them almost as much as I can now quote the Andy Griffith show.

So towards the later years, when Brandon was being, you know, Brandon was ousted by the assemblies of God and he was, you know, all that history, well, as people would separate with him, he would denounce them.

And part of the people he denounced were the laterane people. We were taught, we were conditioned to think of it as one solid, unified from 1947, which is the earliest tape we have access to here, in 1965, one unified message that is thematically the same.

So if he denounced laterane, we have to believe he always denounced laterane. Okay. Now there were, there were the splintered into many splinter groups, so some splinter groups did understand this, but where it got really, really interesting is once I realized from you that, no, he is not only connected to laterane, he's one of the two catalysts that created laterane.

I think that's what I really picked up from you was that laterane could not have existed without Brandon, it really, for it to have developed, there had to be a brand, right? So I wanted to know why, and you know, as I'm going through Pentecostalism, like you said, parham, parham is, for me, he's one of the founders, but I actually go back before parham.

I went deeply into study, okay, what made parham. So parham goes, as you know, on the tour to see John Alexander Dowey and Zona, for example, Frank parham, or Frank Sanford, so I am, I'm beginning to, as I'm formulating all these pieces, which is leading to this change in the podcast, Sanford was a strong advocate for British israelism through C.A.L.

Totten. He actually advertised Totten's work, right? Well Totten was on the cusp of whenever British israelism was converting to identity. And so I began tracing these trails. How does that lead to Sharon Orphanage?

I'm starting to go through all these pieces and, again, I have all these scattered pieces and your work was the glue, the kind of tie them together. The biggest of which, which is another shocker that I'll give you, Gerald Burton-Winrod, who's a name that I'll be continuing to mention.

This is an infamous character in the United States. known as the J. Hawk Nazi, the Kansas Hitler. He was in a vowed Nazi, not Pentecostal, but fundamentalist. And he created what was called the defenders of the Christian faith. William Jennings Brian, who you're familiar with that name, the snow. He went on this final campaign right before his death. And he said, we are the defenders of the Christian faith. Well, when he died, when Rod carried his torch. And so when Rod became very, very popular among the early fundamentalists and created, you know, he's on the board of directors in the

fundamentalist leagues. He starts the defenders of the Christian faith fundamentalist group. You have that connected to, I mean, very key figures like the founder of the fuller theological symbol, right? Well, in Los Angeles, at the Angeles temple, Amy Simple MacPherson, when she gets too sick to carry on her duties as pastor, she has Gerald Burton, when Rod fill, fill her seat. And I'm scratching. What on earth? I got photos of preaching, right?

Are you kidding me? So then Charles, who is, he does the podcast, when we start, when we realize this, we're like scrambling, anything we can find on this, because another piece of the puzzle that I had when I had your research, but I didn't understand it all, Amy Simple MacPherson's church was funding the Sharon Orphanage. And so we started digging into the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, started digging into this. And we find out Gordon Lindsey was, his wife was in Amy Simple MacPherson's seminary. He was part of four square.

His district was right below the North Battle for District. So he would have been in conferences with these people. And he is speaking at Anglo-Saxon Federation conferences at the time in which those conferences had shifted to Christian identity. So here's a man speaking in the theological seminary that trained Wesley Swift. He's working with the key figures in identity, which is the, you know, the Anglo-Saxon Federation. He is there, you know, like Brannum, claim to have accidentally stumbled on Depentecostalism. He claims this whole thing with a Sharon Orphanage was kind of accidental too. But as we start piecing together

the timeline, we see the clan has gone underground. They are... Right immediately prior to its formation is whenever Gerald L.K. Smith and Rory Davis are out in Los Angeles, where the Angeles temple is.

You've got all of these things coming together and the clan starts this initiative to create fronts in various ways that are unsuspecting to the government, one of which is orphanages. And Rory Davis and William Upshaw, the congressman, created this financial scheme called the Usher Davis Foundation, which was an orphanage funding the clan out in California.

I want to say it was just a few weeks prior to the establishment of the Sharon orphanage. So all of these pieces are kind of connected. I cannot say directly that they influence one another, but look at the number of pieces that are in this puzzle that are right in the same area at the same time.

Yeah, you almost wonder, it's almost impossible that some of these people did not see each other. When you're talking about individuals that are in the same conferences, you know, denominational district conferences, it's almost impossible that, you know, there's no kind of connection per se.

You're talking also what's fascinating is that this year you're looking at weaponized religion and weaponized Christianity religion, and it feels very well with, I know that, you know, this is really a topic of great interest for me because of my work on spiritual warfare.

But how it, you know, you see it emerge, and if you remember when I was talking about the latter rain, how some of the, you know, some of the key things that emerged out of the latter rain, of course, were ideas that have been promulgated by Franklin Hall, his prayer and fasting book, which was very, very popular, very popular amongst the healing evangelists, extremely popular with the people of the latter rain.

Like Brennan and Franklin Hall stuff together became like the kind of catalyst that really kind of sparked a lot of what you see with the latter rain. The ideas of laying on of hands, of transference, of spiritual gifts, of course, the ascension gifts, the fivefold ministry idea of, you know, apostles' prophets, evangelist pastors and teachers, and the biggie, which makes a lot of people react, and a lot of people that don't see sometimes the connections with what is actually happening now with the type of, I would say triumphalist and supernaturalist language that is attached to,

the idea of dominion, the idea of manifest sons of God, which was something that Brennan also mentions, like he talks about this, which is he didn't invent this by the way, because these are things, like when you dig up and I did some work, archival work on terms of, in terms of, you know, the work with Carham, and Carham uses this language very, very early on, the end of the 18th, the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, he uses this stuff in some of his publications, the idea of manifest sons of God, the idea of the overcomers,

which are similar, similar terms, which really can be tied to the notion of the superior race, all of this, you know, idea that, you know, supernatural groups of Christians and the end times that will become this supernatural army of God that will bring about dominion and exercise their authority. Can you speak a bit about Carham here? I'm curious of your take on, you know, this connection, especially this idea of manifest sons of God, how it ties in with the latter reign, and eventually how it spills into, you know, the kind of what I call charismatic dominionism with its emphasis, again, on ideas of Joel's army, or, you

know, end times supernatural and bound Christians that will eventually, you know, exercise dominion according to God's will. Yeah, the manifest sons of God has been a heavy concept that we focused on during the last year's podcast, as we're trying to understand it. We actually, we realize, Brannum is not the inventor of it, but the biographies also have it incorrect.

They place his learning of it, you know, well into after the latter reign started. We can go back to some of the earliest recordings, and we can see those themes existing. And at first, I thought, you know, Brannum's version of manifested sons of God, ironically, are almost the same exact, even some of the same verbiage that is used by Wesley Swift, and Swift predates Brannum in some of these things. So we see what I've come to conclude is it's a lot of cross-pollination. It's not really that one single person came up with this. This was,

these men were in the same conferences and the same groups, and my method of research is a bit unusual in that I put things together into a chronology, and I don't care where the information comes. In fact, a lot of really good information I've got in the atheists, and I use it, you know, I do cross-pollination themes.

If what they say is true, I take the pieces of truth and I just I collect them in the random facts. I don't know how the facts facts fit together. Put them chronologically and I go through and I'll write a book for example, this book, Weapon Eye's Religion from Mattering to Colonia, Dignidad. When I discovered that Brannum's campaign manager after Gordon Lindsey kicked Brannum out, basically. Yeah, of course, healing. Brannum's campaign manager was the adopted cousin of Adolf Hitler's Minister of Defense, Warner von Blumberg. And then I learned that they were working directly with Richard Nixon. And Nixon eventually staged

a covert World War III in South America. And the military version of the CIA, which is called the DIA, had embedded themselves in a William Brannum cult compound in Chile called Colonia Dignidad, which was referred to by Germans as the colony. Because as a Nazi escaping into Argentina, you first landed into the William Brannum message cult compound called Colonia Dignidad, which looked like this little Amish community at the top on the surface.

And underneath had this whole military array of bunkers and tunnels. And they had set up the, you know, the similar to the DIA here, they set it up in Chile, taught them how to do the espionage. And they had something like 50,000 bugs planted in politicians to entertainers, all over the nation operated from this place as a headquarters and a training facility. When I learned all this, like this is weaponized religion, I did write the book. But as I go through the chronology, I realized that now that I've went through it, now there are pieces that I understand

that I didn't understand when I wrote the book and I go back through a second time and a third and a fourth. We're getting ready this year. One of my researchers that helped me on the Davis research, we're starting over and going through another pass because of this weaponized religion understanding. Now that I understand what this was and what it became, we realized that the impact that this has had not only on Americanized Christianity, but also American politics is significant. And the people, like most of the people when you study William Brannum, they won't tell you that Richard Nixon was working directly with these guys. And even to the extent there

are Brannum sermons named after initiatives that Nixon gave Brannum. We've identified. Good and hard. You see my goodness gracious. It's like, wow, wow, and you know that and it's hard to write about these things.

Would you say, John, that it's very difficult to write these things about these things even without even us sounding conspiratorial? You know, like it's almost like, because this is something, you know, like my book that I just came out, one of the comments that came out from an interview that was published recently in Salon was that the person was saying, you know, one of the things, like when you talk about the NAR, there's a, you know, there are now, today, neo-caromatics or Pentecostals that have been, you know, involved with, with CP to Wagner and all of these people

from, from the beginning of what we understand to be the NAR, at least in the, in the American context. And they kind of want a whitewash in a sense, the history, they want to say, no, we weren't part of this, the NAR, the way it's pictured or it's, it's portrayed, it's, it's, it's portrayed like this boogie man underground dominionist movement that's trying to conquer the world, it doesn't exist.

You know, they kind of want to de-legitimize people that are actually working on this. Having them also almost sound like conspiratorial, you know, and, and the person was saying, you know, the way that, that Andre managed to write this book is, how do you write about a conspiracy in a non-conspiratory way, you know, it's like, it's like, it's very difficult to do that, because people think like, what is this, like, this is coming out of anywhere, and this is why it's important, I think what you said about how, you know, we can't always trace a perfect lineage between ideas, you know, we can't like, okay, he knew it before,

and it, like, he read that person, and it's because of that person that we get, we can't always do that, but we can see that there are parallel ideas, that we can see that, you know, in, at a particular time, there are particular individuals that are in contact with each other, did they talk, did they read each other, we don't necessarily have all the details about that, but these ideas circulate, and they cross-pollinate like you say, and I think that's, that's what we need to show, we can't, like, we can't pretend these ideas have not been rebranded in a way that, you know, that makes them sound a bit different,

but at the core, it's essentially the same thing, you know, so I, I was wondering if you feel that way sometimes, you know, people will say... You know, my goodness, are you, are you into a conspiracy yourself or because it's hard to write about these things because people think, you know, and this is what we're faced with.

You know, when I talk about this stuff to people, people think that people that are engaged in this stuff don't really believe it. They just, they just use it for the, for the sake of power or whatever.

You know, they don't really believe in spiritual warfare. You know, it's just, it's just rhetoric, it's just this and that. And the reason why they say that, John, it's because for them, it's ludicrous.

You see, for them as individuals, it's just crazy to believe that. So it's impossible for a person to actually believe that because for them, it's crazy. You see, for them that judged others, it's crazy.

So it's not true. They don't believe that. So people become the measure of everyone else. You see, those are critiquing that. They think that everybody else thinks like that, but it's not true. You were a part of this, you know, movement for many years and you believe this, like you, you adhered to the message.

You believed it. You embraced it. You thought it was true. You didn't pretend like it wasn't true. You thought it was true. At the point in my life, I went to, you know, I was a panocostle too and I had, I engaged in some of these types of practices of spiritual warfare and things like that.

And I was sincere in what I was doing. I believed it. You see? So, you know, it's, that's what's a bit sometimes frustrating as scholars. And even like as academics, because sometimes they're going to say, my goodness, is this really academic?

Like, are you nuts? I don't know if you can counter any kind of thing like that sometimes. You know, you're kind of what you want to say, you know, it's, it is what I'm saying, but you think I'm, I'm conspiratorial somehow.

You know, I grew up in a world where it was black or white, you know, cult, the cult mindset is black or white. There is no gray. Right? There are old things like, you'll know these, you'll know them by the company that they keep, referring to the enemy, the outsiders, and how if somebody is mistruthful, you can't trust them at all, because if they're lying to you about one thing, don't lie about another and God hates liars, you know, so I was raised with all of these fundamental concepts, which have ironically helped me in a very weird way, because once I started connecting

these dots and realizing that when you peel back the rug and you see the dirt that swept underneath, there's some, these are some very bad people, right? I was accused of being... a conspiracy theorist far and wide when I first started this, but I handled it incorrectly.

I would discover things like William Brande, I'm working with the guy who became the Imperial Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan, I've got his picture right here, well they would say this is conspiracy theory. No, he's not part of this. And me saying it is not good enough, me showing a picture of it is not good enough. What I have done, whenever I write a book, I have taken it so far to extremes because what we have to do is rewrite history that has been written incorrectly. So whenever I have a footnote, I don't know if you can see

it, but half half of my page, half of my page, half of the pages of the footnote. Yeah, what I do is I will give you the exact quote where it came from. And so you'll get not only the reference, you'll get the actual quote, you can go read the quote itself. And in this over time, what you're establishing is truth. It doesn't matter who John is, what John says, what you're looking at the reference, right? Well, it probably took I don't know, seven years. Now at this point, if I mentioned William Brande was working

very closely with high ranking members of the clan, now those who defending, defending Brande will now say, well, you can't have that. That's guilt by association. It doesn't matter if he's working. So we have correctly established now that Brande is working with clan guys. It may take me five or 10 years, but the things that I've just mentioned to you about Nixon and the Nazis and the colony, I'm working with scholars in Chile who are working in, you know, they're in the university right next to this place. So they have given me now the government documents. We know that William Brande when he went with his adopted

cousin of Warner von Blumberg, when he went with this, this guy who was, what was it? Ferrari, William T. von Blumberg was his name. He was also on the board of directors for the family called. I can't remember the official name, but the one in Washington, right?

The guy is, yeah, yeah, yeah, he centers. He is also on the board of directors of theological seminaries. So this guy is well connected. And he's, he's a fundamentalist leader and homosexual at the same time, which goes against all of the standard. He doesn't even believe what he's saying, right? He is the one who connected Brandeum to Paul Schaefer, who was the head of the colonial Dignidad cult. Paul Schaefer was William Brandeum's head of security when in Germany.

And because we have this on record in the government documents in Chile, now I have a government record that I can source and I'll put it in the book, right? As through this, what we're doing is we're establishing facts of truth that cannot be denied.

You can, if I were to give an opinion, you can deny my opinion, but there's an established fact. And the next, I've got a photograph of William Brannum in the convention with Nixon. So it's kind of with, with, oh my goodness. And Nixon, his speech, here's what happened.

I won't give you all of the highlights. It's in the book. Nixon was wanting to, this was when he was vice president. He was working with these guys at this National Prayer Breakfast and gave them the initiative that we need to use religion to instill a psychological warfare against communism. And he's speaking to these guys who are Christian identity leaders. When they hear the word communism, they think Jewish conspiracy.

So it's weaponizing the wrong people. Nixon himself didn't even realize he's doing this. He's weaponizing the bad guys in the nation. So they took it and ran with it. But to your point, what do you do about the conspiracy theorist? My point is I just continually release facts.

And if you follow my website or my YouTube site, you'll see even sometimes it's a two-minute video. Here's a fact. And over time, as the facts are established, now you have a foundation of truth that you can build truth upon. Yeah, you can actually write history in a proper way. Because what you said about the accusations of guilt by association, we have that now. Because more and more in my world, like when we've been doing work around the NAR, for example. And I've co-written a couple of pieces with you know very well, Fred Rick Clarkson from Political Research Associate.

One of the first pieces that we co-wrote together, there was a reaction by Michael Brown, who was a kind of pedocaustal podcast star, whatever. I don't know what you know, a teacher and very popular in those circles. And like the article, but he said, you know, you should talk about charismatic, not NAR stuff. It's not, it doesn't exist. You know, telling us it doesn't exist, but when you're talking about it doesn't exist, you know, and guilt by association. This idea that because someone has been close to someone else or oh, you're choosing us of being part of this. But you supported these ideas, you know. It's like

these people are at a time where they... They see that they lost control of what they instigated at the beginning. They were all for CB2Wagner, you know, apostolic networks, NAR, all of that. They were all for that.

This is great. This is great stuff. Even embracing the type of dominion ideas that come out of the coalition on revival with Jake Rimmstead and they had these documents on their website and, you know, and now things are going bad politically.

You see, they, you know, many of that evangelical supported Trump and they don't want to be identified with, with these people. So they're backing out, you see? And they're trying to rewrite their involvement with that.

They are saying, no, we were really always against that. But you were there. You supported that. You were part of the thing. Admit it at least. You know, own it. Be man up, like we say.

And just admit you were wrong. Admit it. That's already half the damage that is at least, I don't know, pardon, but at least, you know, you're able to say, OK, you know, I was wrong.

I was part of this. You know, people are not perfect. But that's what we're encountering a lot. And, you know, with the work on the NAR and what I'm very happy about now. Is there is more media attention around these questions?

People are more aware of ideas about dominion, a spiritual warfare. I've given a lot of interviews where, you know, I wouldn't never imagine, John, like three, four years ago being able almost to, in a course, like in an interview, almost give a course on spiritual warfare.

And the interviewer reproduces it in his article. Like I would have never, never imagined that, like four, or five years ago. But now they're worried, you know, American public, I think, is very worried with the situation, the political situation in America.

And they see how many of these neo-charismatic pentacostals associated with this idea of new apostolic reformation have been instrumental in pushing for Trump in 2016 and are still very much instrumental with trying to have him back in the White House.

But the problem is they don't understand why, first of all, why would they support this guy? They don't understand the theology that underpins everything that they're doing. They don't get ideas about dominion and the profound implications that this has for American democracy and for pluralism in American society.

But you see, that's where we come in. That's where, as scholars, we have to take advantage of this opportunity that's given to us and speak out. And I'm very, very happy, John. can't say how much I'm happy to have connected with you.

And for this opportunity that you've offered me to have this very, very laid back chat about your work,

about what I do, even helping me understand what you've been doing and how, and what really amazes me is that, because we don't get a lot of feedback about things we do sometimes, like these podcasts that I did, these video logs that I did, how they could have been useful for you.

For me, that is amazing. It's my reward. You see, hearing you say that is my reward. So I want to thank you for that, John. Well, that's great. And thank you for putting it out there.

You know, one of the things that you said, what we see now politically, they realize their problems with it. And so now they're examining, that's another way in which you get unbranded as a conspiracy theorist.

Recently, this is probably another surprise so you I don't know if you may know this or not, but we connected William Brandham to Jim Jones and you know, the Jones town. I mean, I heard about that.

And I heard people actually people really being impressed with the work that you've done. I've seen comments from people being extremely impressed with that connection that you made. Right. Well, and you know, we even have letters directly connect.

Anyway, one of the ways in which truth gets grounded and you get overturned as this conspiracy theorist, there was another Jones town event just last year in March and Kenya. There was a, I don't know if you're familiar with this, the shock of old massacre, right?

They discovered all of these tracks of William Brandham. And so as newspapers are scrambling to find, okay, what is this thing that they found covered? What, who is this William Brandham guy? Well, now because we've established all of these, we've got podcasts, we've got all these two minute videos, they were able to find the research and wait a minute.

This guy who had death by starvation came from a sect that originally was created by a guy who had the fasting and prayer book, right? This was the ring of it, right? So what happens is no longer is a conspiracy theory when you can tie an actual event to an actual fact.

So by publishing the research and the history, it makes everything, even for the journalist, whenever an event happens, now they have actual information to go off of. So I'm trying to do, like you did for me, I'm trying to do for the next guy.

So we passed the torch forward, right? No, your website is just phenomenal. I found stuff on that, like, I... like mind-blowing stuff. Really, really, I really encourage people to visit your work and to follow your work. I'm stunned with the genealogical historical work that you've done. What you've shared with me today is mind-blowing, literally mind-blowing, but I can see connections with some of the stuff that, you know, like parham and others, and it's, it's, it's, uh, wow. It's, it's just wow. That's, that's the only thing I could say. Well, and to blow your mind even further, because we're,

we're putting this into a podcast, right? So we, we have, yeah, I can't tell you all the surprises right now. We've got more to come, so. Yeah. This has been great fun. If our listeners want to find your information, where can they find you? Uh, they can find me. Of course, there's my YouTube channel. It's very easy. You type in Andre Gagne, uh, and you have a bunch of videos there, uh, that you know, uh, very well, uh, John. Uh, you can find me also on, uh, X, formerly Twitter.

Uh, so you type in my name, Audre Gagne, uh, and you'll find me just in the search. You'll, you'll be able to find me. Um, and, uh, yeah, I have a sub stack also, but I don't publish it enough. I just, I just recently added something on the manifest sons of God, uh, a bit of an expansion of what I had written with, um, with, um, Fred Clarkson, uh, but I should get more on it.

It's just that, uh, you probably know this. I'm also chair of my department at Concordia. So that's, that's an administrative position. Uh, so it takes, it takes a lot of, uh, time, uh, to take care of a faculty and, and give a vision and take care of administrative duties. So I, I'm less present than I was in terms of even creating new videos and stuff like that, but I got to get back to it because I have a lot of fresh, new ideas, things that I want to explore.

And, uh, you know, my discussion with you today has been, uh, you know, an inspiration and it will, propel me probably into, you know, a lot of, uh, very interesting, um, avenues of research that I need to delve into. And I will, uh, definitely get my hand on, on, uh, your latest, the latest book that you just showed me. This is the, the latest one that just came out.

It is the weaponized religion. Okay. Yes. So I have to get that, definitely. And, and this one, I'll, I'll be honest with you. It's, it's kind of thinner than the rest of them because once I got towards the end of this, I realized, you know, this goes even deeper than this book. Yeah. At the time I began this, I did not fully grow.

the connection between British Israelism and the cult that we escaped, how it converted to Christian identity. So this is an intermediate book, but it does give you the history of Colonia, Dignidad, and I've got the Nixon information in here, so you'll get a good bit of that.

But you'll probably expand that. You'll probably re-edit it or expand it later on. Actually, I'm thinking about having a follow-up companion book that this is a story in of itself, it is complete, but there's a bigger picture that created this story, so I want to dive into the bigger picture. That's where I'm headed. I've actually started to manage.

Okay, my goodness. All right. So many things. So thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll have to do it again sometime, either on your platform or mine. I'm happy to. For sure. It would be great.

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