Weaponized Religion: The Secret Christian Nationalist Origins of the NAR

Hello and welcome to another episode. How's 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 together we're discussing weaponized religion, how Christian identity fused with early Christian fundamentalism and politics to form the foundation for the new Apostolic Reformation.

John today we have hit the epicenter for the combination of all of the research, the birth of what would become the NAR. If you look back at this event, there are so many trails that lead back to this event, and I will never forget I was working closely with not going to give his name, but a pretty big name in the message.

He had sent me a tip that Roy Davis was the later the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and I didn't believe it. I was like, no, there's no way. And I had all the research of Davis's criminal past. I knew that he was a, you know, at that time I thought he was a two-bit leader of the 1915 clan.

I saw him holding public debates and that kind of thing. I did not know yet he was the second in command, but I kept researching and I kept following the trail forward from, I guess it was around 1917, 1915 all the way up to, you know, Roy Davis connecting with Branum. And then suddenly I discovered this thing that happened out in California, and I began scratching my head, oh my gosh, this, this was like in the grand scheme of the puzzle, it's like building two separate sides of the puzzle. And finally you find that one piece that connects everything together. And honestly, this was it.

Yeah, John, your research and finding that key, that piece of the puzzle that started blue the whole thing open, and started you on that trail for the research really has made a huge impact.

And it does tie everything together, you know, this becomes the epicenter, as you say. And we got several details here to share on this. but on Davis's experiences in California. But it's the time when California was the hotbed of all this and Pentecostalism, Christian identity and all the revivalism going on.

There was a lot of revivals up and down the coast of California. So there was a lot going on at this time. Plus the nation was involved in a war. And so it just came together.

Like you said, all coming together. We'll find out that that Brannum was hugely involved with this and he was one that spearheaded the revival when he broke out onto the scene. So we'll find that he comes together and there's very interesting things that happen between him, Upshall and Davis, that connects the three together.

And my mind, it finally connected the three together when I saw that. It just was no doubt that there was some issues going on here with this ministry. But Davis stays in California a while, then moves on to Dallas later on.

We'll find out and really gets the attention of the FBI and he does appear in some documents because he tries to start the Clucleus clan again calling it the original Knights. And he also forms citizen councils.

We'll find and those were very instrumental and really big in trying to prevent integration and keep segregation going on. But he did this in several states. He's got Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and I think he's even in Florida later on in time.

Yeah, there's so much here that honestly, we won't even be able to skin the surface. There are too many moving parts to all of this, but to lay the foundation. So we're approximately 1944 in the timeline.

And 1944 was a pivotal moment in the United States. You had Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who the Christian identity movement had laid a finger on as what they believed to be the head of the Jewish conspiracy in the United States and believed that whenever FDR was elected for a third term, they believed he was forming a dictatorship in the United States.

And now the third term by 1944 was turning into a fourth term. And Christian identity leader Gerald L. K. Smith rose to fight against this. He had minimal effect because he didn't win very many votes.

But in California, where we're talking about, he was quite popular due to the fact that the clan was being rebirth as an opposition to this Jewish conspiracy, this alleged Jewish conspiracy. So out in California, you have leaders of the clan and leaders of Christian identity working together.

One of the most significant figures would be Wesley Swift, from which William Brannum developed his two sons. seed or he called it Serpent seed doctrine. Swift became Gerald LK Smith, right hand man in many ways, and continued to carry that torch for years to come. And we have identified him working directly with Roy Davis in places like Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Little Rock 9 event would later happen.

So we've got Swift, we've got Gerald LK Smith, you've got Davis, who is birthing the next wave of the Ku Klux Klan. Like you said, he's bringing it back to call it the original Knights. He's he sees himself as another William Joseph Simmons. He believes that he can birth the original movement. He believed that the you know, the movement had gone astray when they outed Simmons, according to Davis's themes. And so he was wanting to connect he connected with William Upshaw, who is also a ranking member of the clan, and they were going to birth it, but they needed

money. And here lies the problem and the solution. And literally this became the prototype for what religion and politics would do later. They found a way to get money. It wasn't quite on the up and up, but they were blending religion, politics, Christian identity, clan. And honestly, they were laying the framework for many things that we'll see later in the NAR. The prophetic claims, the you know, you could even trace to some extent, you could probably trace the word of faith movements, because as we'll get into this episode, it was largely influenced by what would come.

So many trails. I can't even list them all for this episode, but it all happened right here in 1944. Yeah, California where Roy Davis was. He was in the news quite a bit. And they, you know, in April of 43, it was Davis began organizing singing conventions and bringing the churches together. So that was really the start. I once he got there and married Allie Lee. You know, they got their start, you know, organizing these things and these singing conventions were pretty popular. There were many groups that came to join that because everybody liked singing

and gospel singing was becoming real popular. Southern gospel and so forth in America. And so everybody would live to get together over that. So Davis wouldn't have been successful. Had he got together with his Baptist church and said, we're going to get the churches together. But by organizing singing conventions, it brought churches of all denominations together, because they were very careful to say, we're welcoming everybody. Anybody that wants to come and join us. So it was all going to be a front. So later on he could promote his, you know, white supremacy and, you know,

Christian identity, which a lot of them held, anyway, a lot of those churches were a part of that anyway and held those type of beliefs. But he held conventions. was quite a bit March and April of 1943, and organized and promoted Christian identity of white supremacy, but he was using a religious movement.

Once he got the people together, he could get their names, and they could all be joined together in one unified front. But the front was used to put this together, it was wartime, the American needed singing to help ease the stress of the war.

So it all became a very good time for all this to happen, and unite people and bring them together. And that's how Roy was able to do that there. And also to need money, like you said, they needed money to be able to pull this off.

So Davis, he had tried this back in, I guess, Nashville or Knoxville, and why was in Tennessee and maybe even in Louisville, Jeffersonville, but he always wanted to form an orphanage. And because he knows that orphanage can bring in money now, he definitely wanted to do that again, and they were able to get this resort, this closed down resort, and turn it into an orphanage to be able to raise it money.

And he was able to find, I've been a fractist named Elizabeth Usher, she was not married, I don't know if she was a widow, but she had quite a bit of money. She'd come into some money, I guess, through family, leaving her money.

And he was able to get quite a bit of money back in those days from her several donations, and she became the secretary of the, what they call the Davis Usher Foundation. And during that time, they took in a few children, and some of them were half orphans, they called them because they had one parent living, but back in those days, I guess, being hard times to parents would allow them to live in the orphanage so they could be raised.

So he took in only nine children, but then Davis does something crooked to get more funds and money, and even food back in those days when food was a little scarce and they even had to ration it, he misrepresented the number of children.

So he inflated the number of children so he could get all that money from the government, and then he got in trouble over that and we'll find, so he took funds from this wealthy woman under false pretenses. He pretended to be the FBI, and I believe Upshall was very much involved in this because him and Upshall was in touch, he was in touch with Upshall this time. Upshall became the treasurer, I believe, of this foundation right before it sprang into and got in trouble with the law, then Upshall quietly got away pretty quickly enough so that Davis said he doesn't have any contact with his organization.

I'm sure he was trying to protect Congressman Upshall because if Upshall would have been arrested, it would have been bad publicity in his days would have been over far speaking before the public. So his old friend from the clan days were now back together, they were back together in the same thing, just working together to promote their ideas.

One thing key to mention in all of this, it's not just this developing pre-cursor to the laterane movement that is connected to this, Upshall was the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and it ties to the Pentecostals, the Baptist, the fundamentalists, all of these different movements, they all knew Upshall's name.

When William Brandham said, Upshall, I've never heard that name, I've never knew who this was, it had to have been an outright lie because Upshall was one of the most popular men among all of this, and connected directly to Davis, so there's no way that William Brandham working with Davis would have not known Upshall.

In fact, there's a strong possibility that Brandham was holding revivals with Upshall, and knew that he did not need a wheelchair whenever Upshall was pushed to the stage, or pushed into the revival to be allegedly healed while sitting in a wheelchair.

But before we get into that, I want to go back to that singing convention, because for me, this is just eye-opening, and it's unbelievable. Me being a music fan, it holds even more interest.

I grew up with the National Quartet Convention, which I can't really trace it back to this being the origin, because there were other conventions. But to date, this is the largest singing convention that I've seen and witnessed, and there were big names of groups that I had records of these people going to meet with Roy Davis to sing at this convention.

And in this article that's describing how Davis had established all of this network of singing conventions, it was actually an organization that was founded in San Diego by Davis. It is mentioned that he was a member of the original Stamps quartet.

Another group that I grew up listening to, I heard JD Sumner in the Stamps. I had records of those, I played those constantly. JD Sumner was, I can't remember what year it was, but he held the world's record as the lowest basing or known to man.

He could go down to the bottom note of the piano, and I think it was either three or seven notes below, he could actually go below the bottom note of the piano. And hearing that was just, you know, for me, it was crazy cool.

But so Davis sets up this convention, and there are a few key things to note. There are names that are dropped in this. Whenever it is mentioning the Stamps Baxter quartet, there are four names that are mentioned and they're significant when you think of Christian identity.

Davis obviously was, you know, was of interest, upshall also was of interest, but it also William Jennings Bryan and Bryan was the champion of this movement against the evolution. You can go to the Scopes trial. He was a big backbone to why the Scopes trial against evolution came to be. And the way it mentions it, there's a question for me as to whether or not those four people were part of the original Stamps quartet. The fourth one being Dr. Caleb Ridley who was the supreme religious chaplain of the Ku Klux Klan back when Davis was the second

in command. It says that Roy E. Davis, upland president of this convention, will be master of ceremonies. He was one of the original Stamps quartet when it traveled out of Dallas and which staying on Chautauqua programs featuring William Jennings Bryan, Congressman Upshaw, and Dr.

Caleb A. Ridley. So the way it's written, it's very difficult. I've tried to go back and find records and see exactly what it meant. It sounds like that's the quartet, but it could also mean that Davis and his quartet sang on the Chautauqua trails with these guys. But at any rate, it's significant that those names are dropped because as this thing is developing, these are key figures in how all of this would be birthed. And you can see some of that research if you go to my website. But there's another, there's a little phrase and not many people would have

caught it. There's a little just one sentence news right underneath this article. It said youths under 21 accounted for 15% of all arrests for murder, 34% for larceny, and robbery, and 50% for burglary in 1942, youths. So I read this and you know, my mind just works like this. I saw this and I'm like, well, that's an odd thing to say here in the newspaper. Why did they do that?

And that led me down the trail of why Davis chose to set up this orphanage. This was one of the biggest problems in California at that time. The youth were turning evil. And not because they were just inherently bad, like most people back then probably thought.

There was a large influx of orphans that came in to California because of the war of all nationalities. And there were so many coming in. In fact, that California was becoming inundated. And there was no place to put all of these orphans. And so you had orphans from overseas. You had orphans from California. You had this growing number of just children who their parents were so busy trying to just earn a living that they weren't getting proper to parenting.

and they were turning to crime, and some of it's serious crime. When you think of 15% of all arrests for murder, that's a very high number for children. It's unbelievable, honestly. So Davis, when he's setting up his orphanage, he's setting it up at a time that California really needed orphanages.

And that likely would have attracted usher to participate in this, because, oh my gosh, 15% of all murders were committed by children. So she invested in this, and we'll get into a little bit deeper the details of how she was snuckered into this.

But another key point of interest is that William Upshaw, former congressman and former presidential campaign leader, he ran under the prohibition ticket, Upshaw, convinced usher that Roy Davis was a federal agent. And when I first saw that, I thought, well, it's just an outright lie.

There's no way that Davis is obviously not a federal agent. And with his criminal history, he couldn't be. But when you consider what the Christian identity movement during those years was doing, they believed falsely that the Jewish people had launched this plot to take over the world and had put FDR in.

And so there was a rising underworld of government that was really rising up to overthrow the actual government in the United States. So Davis was being painted by all of these people in Christian identity as a federal agent going to overthrow the government.

And when you think of the NAR 7 mountain mandates, one of the mountains is government, this, you know, this theme carries on for years and years and years. You can even find quotes from Branum where he's talking about how he spoke out so heavily against the government that they were going to arrest him.

Well, in 1944 also you had the great sedition trial of all of these people who were siding with the Nazis over Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his policies. There's so many connections back to this.

But to set the stage for all of this, the reason for the orphanage was significant, 15% of all murders were committed by children. Yeah, that's right. I don't remember that phrase in the newspaper. It's good that you caught that because it does mean a lot as far as why the why it was done.

So I'm a little collector myself and I was able to get the original photo from the internet. You can see here this was the photo that appeared in papers with Roy Davis and his orphans is nine orphans not 75.

And then also the we have very few pictures of Davis himself, but I also have the original press photo of Mrs. Usher and Davis himself when she was. is accusing him of the taking the money under false pretenses, but you can see all the steps on the back.

It's official. So these were the pictures they put in the newspaper, but I was able to get those and just being a collector, I kind of keep those as momentos. But it's interesting that Congressman Upshall, how they came together and, you know, they had to, how could you have been planted any better than their, their old friends?

You know, Congressman is now 79 years old. He's getting to be an old man and they live 25 miles from each other. I was looking on the maps from where Davis is in Upland and Congressman is in San Bernardino, California, but they're 25 miles from each other.

That's not very far. You know, it's, they could spend time, you know, fellowshiping a lot. So they were, they were connected again. And Congressman was giving talks after the singing conviction in March and April.

He gave a talk at Los Angeles, the Church of the Open Door in June called, Who Shall Rule the World? So you can see is what you were saying, you know, I'm sure it has something to do with the Jewish conspiracy, perhaps, and the communist takeover of the United States and FDR being in office and promoting it.

So he was now speaking in churches about topics such as that. So that was one thing he did. Of course, Roy Davis starting his orphanage was another big thing. So in September, you see, this is the orphanage was slated open in September of 43.

So they had a big opening and ceremonies and the former Monte Vista Resort is where it was hailed at and that was where they took over to have the orphanage. So John D Williams, Dr. John D Williams of San Diego, San Diego was named Superintendent.

Davis even said he was going to get, you know, instructors from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to come and instruct there at the orphanage. I'm not sure how successful he would have been at that.

But Roy Davis probably meant to use the orphanage if he could have continued it as more of an indoctrination tool, not only getting money, but using it to indoctrinate the children. Into his beliefs and values.

Upshall was taking an active part also and he was to be in charge, believe it or not, for the Department of Americanism. It says that in the newspaper here, he was, that was what he was going to be in charge of.

And we know that Americanism was a buzzword, a term used in those days to speak of this very thing, Christian nationalism. It was another way to describe it. And so that was going on.

And then all of a sudden, the things just fall apart, you know, the usher gets a little bit suspicious of Davis because here he was posing as an FBI agent and she was being eased out.

She said. that she was gradually being eased out of the organization. So not only did he get her money, he was trying to push her out once he got the money that she could offer up, then she was out.

So Davis gets in trouble with the Office of Price Administration. That was an organization established in 1941 by the president to control money. It was price controls and rents after the outbreak of World War II to prevent skyrocketing prices. And so under that, you could actually get money for things such as orphanages and children. So when he inflated the number, they found out about an investigator found out because they did investigate these things. They had to make it valid that you were actually getting money under the right calls. So it's the newspaper supported. The orphanage gets too much money or too much food. Minister draws for 75 and has nine. So that's

when it all started. It broke, broke open around February of 1944. So here we are almost a year later. And he was arrested. At first, Ali Lee, his wife was arrested and others. And then they held him in there in the prison quite a bit. He was held in jail until the trial. And he was trying to get free on bond. But the fundraiser Usher, she became disillusioned. She was, it was being investigated by police chief. And they were, Miss Usher was questioned. And she just described herself as being disillusioned over the whole thing because she was being, it was being represented

to her as a worthy cause. And so she was innocent in the whole thing. She wasn't guilty of the things Davis was. He was hiding everything from her and and doing things under the cover. So as we get into this, after all these arrests, then Davis keeps getting charged after charge against him, not only from the food, but from taking money under false pretenses. And also there's this lady that was that were charging parents $35 a month. And Davis said at the opening ceremonies that we're going to do this free. We're taking in children without charging them. And that's,

and that was the whole purpose for raising money. And Davis had been throughout the whole state of California on radio in various places to raise money for this orphanage. So by this time, he probably has a pretty good cash flow going and probably has a pretty good bank account.

But they only mentioned this $8,500 that he gets from this Usher is really what brought him down. But but taking money from parents for $35 a month, that was, you know, he was already supporting their supporting their own children. Plus he's taking money elsewhere. So Davis was questioned by Muller and said, and after this arrest, he said, upshall was not connected with the foundation at the present time. So there's Davis covering for upshall to so he could just ease himself out and not be charged.

But Davis received money from all over California who'd heard his programs and solicitations over a Riverside radio station. So then there was also a lady that charged him for taking the money that she actually sent to her son there.

You know, he was a half orphan or her, I guess the dad was passed away maybe through the war. But she had sent a dollar a week to her son and coming to find out Davis was pocketing the money.

He didn't even bother to give him the money. He received either the letter she sent nor the money. Now that sounds to me like a little boy was in prison. You know, in prison they don't give you the mail.

Usually if they don't want you to have it and they definitely don't give you the money. But it sounds like it was a dictatorship. And so he got even more charges over that. So he was charged with stealing the thousand dollars.

She invested in the foundation that Usher invested. And then she made the complaint against him. That made the eighth complaint against Davis. So just all these things charged against Davis. And then Davis was charging that one of his associates there had stolen some money from him.

So there was some back and forth. And then the trial started. So around April 20th of 1944, Davis starts writing stories about how this orphanage came to him. He said it allegedly came to him after he had a vision after he ate a peach.

So that was reported in the papers. And I bet Davis relates this story because you know the supernatural and signs and wonders were real big in the state of California with all the revivals going on.

So he was doing that probably to get the sympathy of the jury that was going to be trying him. And he reports this vision and he said it was a true story. And as we see, there's so much of that going on nowadays.

You know, people report they they went to heaven and you know met Jesus. They played and did whatever up there in heaven and came back down. And they got a free pass to go back and forth to heaven.

Or they have great visions or they're receiving this mantle from some minister that's passed away. So there's just so much of that going on. And this was the very start of it. You know, we have people reporting false stories like this.

You know, that it just it just was a spearhead of all this whole thing. You know, Brandon, Brandon was very famous for that. He spoke many things in his life story that were proven not to be true because actually Davis interjected in the voice of healing things that were contrary to his life story.

So you don't really know what's true and what's not true anymore. And I think that's how it is today with all the stories going around with the churches. They just don't know, you know, they have to believe their leaders.

And they tend to believe those that set themselves up as apostles and prophets as their leaders. So they tend to believe all these wild stories. And there's been so many of that so much of that.

But in 1944 and April, he ends up getting a... acquitted on several counts. It says three counts. He was acquitted on the charges of impersonating an FBI agent, three counts of that. And so little by little Davis worms this way out of spending gel time here. It's amazing that he was able to do that. I don't know what arrangements they eventually had that made him become acquitted. But he did. These charges were dropped. And perhaps it was the sympathy he was able to get from the jury.

You know, through those stories. Yeah, I have a little bit of a different take on it. This, this was a criminal organization. And what they were doing, make no, make no mistake. They were funding the next wave of the Ku Klux Klan to build the clan. They had to have money. They were thinking of throwing, overthrowing the national government. So they needed weapons and weapons cost money. And if you go through the history of what happened with the next wave of the clan, they often use this type of strategy. One of the things that it might have been you that told me somebody else pointed out to me, but the Louisiana Rifle Association. That was a funding operation for the clan. And when people would give money to the LRA, then if the government were to have investigated, they could clearly say that they weren't funding the weaponization of a domestic terrorist group. They could say, no.

I just donated to the Louisiana Rifle Association. And so their hands are clean. There's this separation between them and the really evil thing that's going on. Similarly, whenever people donated to the orphanage, knowing what they were donating to, then they could say, I simply donated to an orphanage. I had no idea that this was a growing domestic terrorist organization.

And we're not talking about small sums of money. You mentioned the numbers there. And the $1 a month, for example, that comes out to about $17 in today's money. So when you add those up, it's almost $100 a month that this person was giving. And this was just one of many people.

When Miss Usher gave her, what was it, $7,500, I think that's, it's over $150,000 in today's money. So that's a large sum of money. And upshall manage the books, according to that first article you read. And they were keeping two sets of accounting books.

One, where the money was actually going, which I don't think they ever fully identified where that, you know, that book and where the ledger of where that money was going. But they did note that they had a witness that said there were two sets of books kept. So they were collecting money. They were funding the clan. And as we'll get into future episodes, this was, you know, this was brought down and the clan started funding in other ways.

And it's really really sketchy when you see what happened whenever Laterane was birthed because William Brannum, while going through all of these revivals saying, I never take an offering. And you know, in the early days he dressed very, very fancy, but over time he got a little bit smarter and he started the Kentucky Hillbilly dressing poorly stage persona, which was all in act, but in the earliest revivals, the newspapers were shocked that it took two very, very hefty men to carry the boxes of money from those revivals.

And you look at the way Brannum lived, the cars that he drove, even though some of them were fancy in the early years, you can't really account for the volume of money that flowed through those.

Where was the money going? And we know that Brannum was working directly with Davis, Davis was, Brannum had two significant mentors on his theology, one of them Davis, the other one FF Bosworth. And whenever you consider that Brannum was working with Davis from as early as 1929, probably earlier than that, all the way up until he knows as Davis is the Imperial Wizard of the Clan, the National Imperial Wizard, Brannum knows his travel itinerary when even the US government doesn't know the itinerary of Davis where he's going to be.

So we know that he's working closely. We know that this large sum of money is going into the revivals, but yet if you look at all the numbers, you can't account for it. And even when the IRS investigated Brannum and tried to find where all the money went, they put a large, large number, which still doesn't account for all the money that he would have got.

And it got paid off from what I'm told. There's no record of what happened, but apparently the government got settled from another party. But at any rate, you had all this money going in to this usher Davis orphanage.

It was clearly to fund, quote unquote, Americanism, which was the Christian nationalism, like you said, the clan used it, the, you know, all of these organizations and white supremacy used that term because they wanted to overthrow the government.

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I'm sure like what you said, the money trail was a hard thing to follow, especially when you're tilting cash and back then, you know, the cash was worth a lot more than it is to be about today's standards.

And actually that lady that sent her son a dollar, I think it was a dollar a week. So you're talking about $100 a week or, you know, that's quite a quite a sum of money.

And I'm sure Davis was glad to get that. But the Pentecostal Revival was taken off about this time in 1945 to 47. You know, Brannem was going to hit start about 1945 or earlier when he was becoming well known.

And like you said in early days, you know, I think he realized very early on when he started recording his sermons that the people were going to hear these sermons. So he had to present an image to the public of what he wanted them to know.

And he learned these techniques from Davis very long time ago, back in the 30s, you know, that what you presented the papers, what you write about, people are going to read it. And it's come become the truth to them.

So early on, he was written about in the newspapers as being Natalie Dressed. He appeared. I believe it was when he was with Avakagopi and he had a very, he wore these white suits like the little David Walker did.

And they tended to wear suits like that that looked, you know, pretty, pretty well dressed. And he even talked about his watch. I guess that would stop when the gift was operating. It would be a very expensive watch and what I would probably never buy it, it might be like a Rolex.

But he quickly got away from that. I'm sure after you read the newspapers, papers and maybe some people probably told him, you got to change your appearance here because you're being seen as a rich man in which he was.

So he began to hide his, his wealth. And he hit it for a long, long time in the IRS, like you said, finally caught up with him, you know, in the 50s. And they, and he was owing a lot of money by that time.

I mean, he had taken all these checks and he said he ran him through his organization. He signed off on them, but I'm sure a lot of the money went to him. And to me, very little of it went to the actual organization.

If you look at how he promoted, if we could go into that detail sometime, how he promoted his India trip coming up to South Africa, India, you know, he was taking offerings all over the United States.

He would mention his, the vision he had of going to India with the 300,000 souls that was to be saved. And he was taking offerings everywhere because every, and on tape, you'll hear him say, thank you for your offering.

It's all going to go to foreign missions. But the trip that actually went, it was no more. or than a team of four or five people and maybe an airplane hotel bill. And so how much money does that take?

It wasn't a big convention and they had the convention and basically a church. So that, but all the money he took over all the United States, where did that go? That was something that was, I'm sure it went into his organization and made him pretty wealthy from all that.

Then he had to come back after the failure of that and try to explain and try to make it sound like that it was a great meeting. When in fact, it was much smaller and it didn't cost as much as what he took in.

So the money trail, very hard to follow, but we know that William Brown took many expensive hunting trips. He was widely traveled. I mean, going to Colorado, Montana, you know, New York, upstate New York to hunt.

Those things take a good bit of money even back in those days. So in February of 1951, upshall being kind of out of the picture after this orphanage blew up. He came back into the picture in 1951.

Several years later, we'll mention pretty briefly, but he was set to the meeting, and even Brannum mentions this, set to the meeting by Roy Davis. Now, to me, when these things came together, you got Brannum on tape saying, I never knew upshall, but it was Roy Davis that sent him to the meeting.

So why was upshall and Davis together again? You know, Davis being the head of the Klux Klan and then upshall, no, when they were connected back in the thirties and then Brannum saying, he never knew him.

And all he did was relate a vision. And here we got a sermon here that he preached in 1954, talking about seeing a boy playing on the haystack. So he describes this vision that he supposedly had in the meeting and was seeing the man get out of the wheelchair.

And start walking. So that is exactly, you know, what he used is, you know, they're using these visions, these experiences to convince the audience that, hey, I really saw something, when actually under the scenes, behind the scenes, he actually knew the man.

He actually had very much acquainted with him. There's to me, there's just no way with him being so connected to Davis and that being his first pastor that he would have never heard of upshall.

So anyway, you know, Brannum has this story about how he came in in the wheelchair and then how he's seen him in the vision and then how he raised up out of the wheelchair.

So that was, to me, the linchpin for me is when that all came together and seeing, you know, how that was probably fake because upshall was very much not using his crutches too much even back in the twenties when he was in Congress by that time, by the, his injury, I got healed enough to where he could generally lightly touch his crutches to the ground and get around pretty good.

So that would, that would really was the linchpin for me. Now, Davis from, in California, probably until the 1950s because of that meeting in 51. And then he, of course, he moved back to Texas and continued to work within the churches. He worked within these organizations. He, like you said, started the original Nice of the Clucleus clan trying to get that revived. And then other white supremacy circles, he was never, never stopped his fight with that. It was all over the southeast in Texas, Louisiana, Florida. And then eventually reconnecting with Brannum, because Brannum mentioned it's him on tape several times in the 50s and

60s about him even being in the meetings. And during this time, you mentioned Wesley Swift, he was becoming the chief propagandist for Christian identity and Swift influenced Gerald AK Smith who became a right wing political operative and started spreading the doctrines as well.

But like you said, wasn't very successful, but did make a run for trying to get him to government, get into politics. So he could have an influence in politics. But all this came at the time, you know, the US was under a fear of communism. Hitler's rise to power, taking over the world, the Jewish influence, all of that came together. And then, and then Brannum, of course, in the 50s starts mentioned in his prophecies where he said he saw, you know, Roosevelt rise to power and bring us into a war and things like that. So it all came, you know, there's another vision.

There's another, and as we see this, the visions changed over time. You know, there's no, there's no credibility to it. You know, him saying he was written on a piece of paper and the the papers never produced or him saying the visions were put in the cornerstone of the tabernacle of his church and it was never found. So, so we see how this was a spearhead of all these things going on today with the NAR and these the the charismatic world. The ones that are not true, the ones that are making up stories just to build up their credibility before the audience so

they could be some type of great prophet or apostle. They've got to come up with some great story to to build their spirituality, you know, because behind the scenes, they don't have a lot of spirituality to them. You know, how could they when they when they don't live the life, you know, that's the way it's written and the Bible, the way Jesus would want them to live.

So here's where it gets weird. You've got all of these connections. And, you know, like I said, from a historical standpoint, from a doctrinal standpoint, from just simply connecting people and movements, this is the epicenter and we could literally spend two whole episodes talking about all of the many connections back into this event. But here's where it gets weird. So, Davis escaped all of the charges. Upshall did he came out so clean that you can't even find him mentioned once it turns into a criminal trial. And in the United States, you're innocent until proven guilty. And once you go through the court of law, it is assumed that you're innocent

because the jury of your peers found you to be innocent. However, Those lines get really, really blurred when you consider the fact that in the 40s, as they're birthing the clan, as all of these people think that the United States government has been overtaken by a Jewish conspiracy and judges, attorneys, many in the jury pool. All of these people are now tainted a tainted jury pool, and they're all not all, but many were members of the growing and developing clan, or Christian identity, or at minimum adherence to it, because this was dominating California at the time. So Davis escapes almost clean, and he actually sued Los Angeles,

and he got a large sum of money for it. But also at the same time, in this area, in Los Angeles, you had the Kardashian family, which had immigrated into the United States, and they were deeply, deeply involved with the early Pentecostal movement. They believed in prophecy, so Davis is, we can't connect them directly to Davis, but there's so many trails that we can point out the fact that they had to have been connected based off of the history that developed after this.

The Kardashian family, you mentioned Avalk Hagopian, they sponsored Avalk Hagopian to come into the United States. They also sponsored Clim Davies, and promoted his ministry. Davies was a clan recruiter from California, open white supremacist. He worked, he was in many of the conferences that Wesley Swift would have been in, and I think it's Gordon Lindsay, I can place him in a conference with Gordon Lindsay, where Lindsay was the speaker, a Christian identity conference. So the Kardashian family are sponsoring Christian identity people. William Brannum says, the same people that sponsored Hagopian sponsored my ministry, and for me that raised the biggest question. So here's William

who claimed to be this hillbilly nobody from Indiana. How in the world did the Kardashian family hear his name? Well, they're in Los Angeles at the same exact time that Roy Davis and his highly publicized trial is in Los Angeles. Davis is building the clan up, and the Kardashian patriarchs nephew, Dima Shekarian, starts the Full Gospel Businessman's Association. It is the one entity after everyone else abandoned William Brannum in the latter years. It is the one single organization that continued to sponsor Brannum's meeting. And you mentioned Brannum going to all these different countries and how he overexaggerated all of the revival numbers. Well, he Brannum himself mentioned

that he was helping plant FBGMR. I organizations in multiple countries. So he's doing this. At the same time, he's working with people like Baron Ferry von Blumberg, who is involved into the cult that's called the family that hosts the National Prayer Breakfast, which, if you think about the government and politics and religion, all of that blend of weirdness that's happening, all of this is connected.

And you can trace it all back to this 1944 event where Davis is out here, wooing all of the religious, the political, the Christian identity, the clan, all of these various movements. And they set the standard for donating large sums of money to the Christian organizations.

So if you think the word of faith movement, you think the prosperity gospel, all of this, there's only a few different ministries that I can see that were prior to this, that that large of a sub of money was coming in.

You can go back to AB Simpson, which was also, he was also tied to all of this through various connections that we'll probably get into later. He was collecting very, very large sums of money, and he too kept two sets of accounting records.

So it seems Davis took that same strategy, and he set up his two sets of accounting records, one going to the clan, one going to this orphanage. And now you bring in the Kardashian family, which brings the lights, camera, action, entertainment, focus, and agenda to this thing.

And honestly, I can, I can look at the patriarch's eyes lighting up with a dollar signs because this was a good way to bring in money, and no matter the cause, whether it's Christian identity, and he agreed with it or not, I'm not going to say he did or didn't.

If he were just to take a percentage of that money, he would become a very rich man, and we see what happened with the Kardashian family. So we can see that there was a lot going on here, just to say the least.

Yeah, I would say there's, there was so many things coming together, and it was just a unique time, and these men were very skilled in what they were doing. It's amazing that you had this kind of group that they all had the same, they come together in a core belief systems, and they were all able to work together, it didn't matter what the nomination they were from, because really that was just a front for what they were really wanting to do underneath.

So I think my thoughts here just now was that the conspiracy was really was within this group with Davis, and all of them working together. That's where the real conspiracy was, rather than a Jewish conspiracy to take over the government.

So they were here trying to point to a conspiracy outside of themselves when they were really conspiring to do all these things within our own government, and it was very, very evil at the time.

And these groups were very skilled. They knew what they were doing and the power of the media and the power of these things and these meetings they were having. They were actually creating the worldview of people.

You know, the worldview that we had in our minds, that's why once that's solidified in your mind, it is very hard to disconnect from that because you tend to believe, this is how I see the world.

And we talked about years ago coming out of the message, we have cognitive dissonance. Well, once you've implanted those beliefs into somebody's mind and you have a worldview, anything coming against that is very hard to change your mind.

So this worldview is being created in the minds of the people, mostly white Christians, the Pentecostal charismatic world. So it's been created by all these things. They've thrown in the Jewish conspiracy, communism, Christian identity, end of the world and then at that time the flying saucers and we know how Gordon Lindsay published that people were just remaining in fear about what's coming next.

And so once you got them under that cloud of fear, then they're looking to their leaders, well, you're hearing from God. So you're the prophet, you're hearing from God, tell us what we need to do.

You know, and that's what's happening today is people are looking to other people to tell them what to do. And I guess that's what helped birth the Shepardy movement or right out of this very thing.

The Shepardy movement and with the NAR, with the churches there, they set themselves up in what they call the fivefold ministry of the apostles and prophets and they're in charge of the church, so they're really in charge of the worldview of the people.

That's a very dangerous thing because, you know, as you look back to the days of Jim Jones and as he came out of this very thing, he set himself up as being the man.

So whatever he said was their worldview. So he convinced a thousand people just to take their lives. We see that happen in Africa most recently, the man that was, you know, of course we believe Jesus is coming soon, but you don't go out and starve yourself and kill yourself just so you can be with Jesus.

You know, we're supposed to stay on this earth and be a light to the world until he comes, not to go kill yourself so you can go early. You know, God holds life and death in His hands, not us.

So all these things are being birthed from this very movement here because it's very dangerous to give these men power over your mind. So the only thing that me and Christians need to look to is the Word of God and pray to God directly, not to trust any man.

We shouldn't put our trusted man. But it gave these Christian identities, believers in the latter-ranked Pentecostals a way to make sense of the world and all this coincided with World War II, end of the world prophecies, things that were coming.

So they always kept the people guessing, you know, the end of the world's coming. They always set dates too, as we saw it, even in message churches and Charles Paisley, mentioned this, they always would sit at date where they thought the rapture was occurring.

But this happened throughout all of the churches that are into that, they do sit. eights and then they don't come to pass, but they still remain with their leader. So the 1950s had that huge influence there with all these things, and it was all involved to keep the groups wanted to keep the races separate, segregated, and also the introgation of black people in schools, they wanted to stop that and have separate schools.

So even Brannum mentions that on tape, a lot of times he'll say, it's better, you know, the woman that actually said, I want to keep my children out of the white schools. He actually had a good idea.

You know, that was his ideas that, hey, it's better for you to stay separate. He seemed to go along with that. And Davis led these groups. One was called the White Citizens Council. They actually called them Citizens Councils, and that was in Dallas, Texas, and he also was involved in the Mother's League.

That was on an FBI document I found. That was a thing called the Mother's League and the Mother's League. That was a council set up by this mother to be, it was an important segregationist organization during the Little Rock Central High School desegregation.

It was established in 1957 by a salesman, Merrill Taylor, and other members of the Capitol Citizens Council, that's one of those white Citizens Councils to give birth to that. And then the League combined traditional segregationist enthusiasm for the racial status quo states rights and anti-missedination initiatives.

And then anti-missedination means interracial marriage. They didn't want that. So that was Margaret Jackson eventually took that over, but there's an FBI document that mentions, you know, Margaret Jackson and Davis being connected. And so they use these organizations really to fight integration.

One thing I came across that was really interesting. I don't know if you've ever heard of this minister, but he was in Texas, Dallas, Texas, the pastor of the first Baptist Church of West Dallas, Texas.

He published a pamphlet called God, the original segregationist. He was highly racist pastor and Dallas, and he published it after a series of sermons. He compiled them all together and published this pamphlet in 1955.

And it found very popular amongst the conservative white Christians in Southern states who opposed to the integration. And even the Dallas Morning News published it in a bridge version of the pamphlet in August of 1955.

And Roy Davis' councils distributed amongst their network. So it went throughout all the network and believe it or not, Daniel himself carried Daniel, the pastor there. He was actually a vice chairman of the Dallas chapter of the Texas Citizens Council.

And of course, Davis was the president of that. And it says here, over a 10-year period now, this pamphlet sold a million copies. Can you imagine a million copies going out amongst the Southern states there?

And the pamphlet was later published in the collection of sermons. So who carried Daniel had a very wide spread influence when he wrote this pamphlet. I can't even read it because it would be so hateful to read what's in it, but you can't get copies off the internet today.

It's very easy to get, just to do a search, but it's a very highly racist set of sermons that he published, and it's so bad, I couldn't even read what's there. But interestingly enough, you know, while segregation was going on, you know, Brannum of course was mentioning that in his sermons.

He mentions in 1961, up in British Columbia, he says, yeah, come out from among unbelief. This was in May 20th, a sermon called from that time. He said, separate yourself segregation. God is a segregationist, called Israel out.

He called his people out. The very word church means called out. Now he's a segregationist. God don't want his children mixed up with the world or things of the world, but they had the baby just the same.

So he was not really saying outright overtly that we need to keep the races segregated, but he didn't say that he didn't. He was not for interracial marriage. So obviously he was for the principles of segregation while not openly admitting it in his sermons but he did mention segregation a lot in 1964 and December in New Mara, Arizona.

He mentioned God, the word in the beginning, he was independent from all other, everything else, all other people. I don't mean to say this to be different. God is a segregationist. You know that?

You talk about integration. God is a segregationist. He certainly does. So even as sermons, Brannum sprinkled in things like that. And I think under the scene, you know, people more or less knew what he was talking about because of his serpent seed doctrine and because of his preaching against interracial marriage and because of all the other groups that was associated with him, such as Davises and the Pentecostals that were associated with all the Christian identity, I think it was very well known what he was really referring to there about being segregated and as his very being for, you know, not integrating the schools.

I mean, by him saying that the woman was right when she said she didn't want to see the schools integrated, you know, he was definitely not for the integration of schools as well. So that's about where we are, you know, it's a hot bed going on.

It's a lot of tensions in the nation and now that the war is over and even the Korean war that was fought to 1953, it's over. So in the mid-50s, you've got a lot of tensions building in America over racial integration.

You know, I get often asked, what does all of this matter? Because we live in 2024 and all of this happen, you know, we're talking about things that happen in the 1940s and people say, yes, that history exists, but that history exists among all of the denominations.

and you can find bad people among all of them. And the irony is that the people who are saying this, many of them are either in the Brannum cult or the NAR. And so they're equating the bad people with William Brannum and these figures that we're mentioning.

But all of that aside, it's very important. You have to understand that these leaders in the NAR, they obviously see that William Brannum's pattern that he established and he established it largely because of the influence of Roy Davis.

They want to mimic this. They see that it gains power, sex, and money. And that's usually one of the three is how these people are gonna fall. And I don't know if people have caught it yet or not, but in some of the videos I've been putting out, I have identified key figures in the NAR who are actually taking Brannum sermons and copying them not verbatim, but structurally from start to finish.

And if you examine their sermon and I can pull up the Brannum sermon that they're copying it from, you can see that they are clearly plagiarizing William Brannum. Not realizing that at least one of the same sermons, Brannum was plagiarizing another person.

And so there's this weird trail of plagiarization that happens. So people here today in 2024 are plagiarizing William Brannum and the sermons that they're copying, these are Christian identity sermons that include some very, very, very hateful statements.

And the answer that I give these people, so the people who contact me in the message, they'll say William Brannum wasn't racist. He had black people in his congregations and he spoke highly of black people.

But he also spoke highly of segregation and he also spoke out of both sides of his mouth. And one of his core doctrines came from this white supremacy, the Serpent Seed doctrine. It is clearly establishing the notion that people with black skin cannot marry people with white skin or their offspring cannot go into heaven.

William Brannum says for 15 generations they can't, which is a racist thing to say. You don't say this if you're not a racist. And like you said, the influence is long lasting. I grew up hearing sermons from ministers who have congregations that write into me and say, yes, you're talking about Christian identity and a lot of these people may have been connected, but we no longer discriminate against Jews in the cults today.

But I've heard sermons from ministers who use the word Jew as a verb. And it's usually used as a verb about conniving people out of money. That's usually what they're using it for. I grew up listening to sermons like this.

And it's... my head, I've heard so many of those sermons that sometimes, if I'm not careful, it will almost slip out of my mouth because it was a verb. I heard continually, not just from ministers, but also from family who are also ministers.

So this is a very bad thing that they're teaching people and they're continually teaching this today. In fact, one of the leaders of the NAR, I did share a video of this and I think I've got the person's face.

But he used the term false Jew against Ruth Ginsburg. In the false Jew, that whole phraseology comes from this Christian identity movement. It is the notion that a set of false Jews have invaded government.

So he is clearly identifying himself as a Christian identity minister. And it's a key figure in the NAR. You can tie him to multiple churches and multiple organizations that are spreading this type of hate.

So I could go on forever. We've got so many connections. They all come back to this epicenter, this 1944 epicenter in Los Angeles. But it grows from here. So where we go from here, John, honestly, there is not enough hard disk space in all of the computers to contain all of the podcasts that we could do off of where this went.

But in the end, if you look at the NAR today, if you look at the charismatic movement that birthed it, look at where to faith, look at the health and wealth gospel and how that transition to the prosperity gospel, you get all of these movements that developed right here from 1944, the epicenter of the merging of Christian identity, religion, politics, white supremacy, and the list goes on.

So I'm excited for the next episode, which we'll get into and hopefully untangle that a bit. 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-Branum.org. For more information about Roy Davis and William Branum, you can read The Persuasive Preacher, The Gifted Profit, and The Noble Politician. For more about the dark side of Latter-Rain, read Weaponized Religion from Latter-Rain to Colonia Dignidad, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.