Glad Tidings & Sad Truths: Tracing Spiritual Roots of Abuse - With Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson, the host of Laura Lynn Live.

Laura, it's good to have you on and to tell your story. We've been talking back and forth a good bit about your church and its connection to Branhamism, and you discovered this, had me on your show, and there's so many things that there's so many dots that we can connect that tie us together.

It's kind of weird, but I wanted to at least have you on the show to tell your story and I'm very glad that you came. John, you rocked my world once, I had you on my show, and I was so shocked by the content and what you were saying that I actually couldn't err the interview for a while, and JT and I put it almost on a shelf, that's my husband, and we produce, you know, our podcast, but I put it, like, I just, I couldn't fathom it because you had said, oh yeah, you know, William Branham, he'd been associated with our church and

bent to our church, and I'm like, no, like, I don't even know this name, so this just can't be true. And about two or three weeks ago, I ended up talking to the last known alive member that I know of.

She's now in her 80s, she is Regley Zell's daughter, and I called her, she's anti-marion to me, and I said, do you know the name William Branham? Oh yes, yes I do, yes, and so as we spoke, she said, and now she did not want to say anything bad, but she said, I did hear that some things went sideways, you know, he started out well, but some things, you know, went, went wrong, I have been told that, but I really don't want to discuss that here, and I went, okay, so that's pretty much the only thing I can disclose about this,

is that she was in 1948 with Regley Zell when he went to Saskatchewan, North Battleford, and she was 10, and she was sleeping underneath the chair, she remembers that, and she remembers it being sort of an odd, you know, there was odd things happening, you know, but the move of God was...

And that's when Regel got impacted by the latter reign, and then he came back to Vancouver, and you have information about how glad tidings was a hub and an epicenter of this movement. It's such a crazy history.

I think we could probably do 20, 30 podcasts and not even skim the surface of that history, but what you're describing is they would have been going to really the epicenter for the latter reign revival outburst.

Because what happened in a nutshell, William Brannum was this no name minister. He was working with, I think I mentioned this on your show. He was working with the second in command of the 1915 Ku Klux Klan.

His mentor's name was Roy E. Davis. This Davis figure was insanely popular from coast to coast. He was an awful, awful man. I could tell you stories that would just blow your mind, but that's another podcast for another day.

But as he's running from all of his sex scandals, he plants the church that became my grandfather's church. And he was trying to get in bed with the Pentecostal movement as the UPC was forming.

At the same time, this Iranian faith healer named Avak Hagopian was called to Palm Springs to heal a very rich owner of a vineyard son. And he was sponsored by the Kardashian family. When he came there, it made national news.

And this throng of people came to Palm Springs so much so that there weren't enough hotels, there weren't enough restaurants. They were having to sell, they were bringing in hot dog stands to feed all these people.

They were all coming to watch a miracle. And the Kardashian family apparently saw this as a big opportunity. And from that, he merged the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship Association, which is another organization we can talk about later.

But during that time, they started toying with the idea of sponsoring other evangelists. One of them that they sponsored was William Brannum. And it was not long after that. I want to say within maybe two months, Brannum goes up into Saskatchewan, he tours Canada.

He is writing the wave that was started by this Avak Hagopian figure. Goes from all the way from Saskatchewan to Vancouver and throngs of people were following them. The newspapers, the journalists just could not believe that this volume of people was going from town to town to town through Canada.

Wow. And so that is how you know. that it came to be, and I guess found North Battleford. I've always wondered, I've never really known North Battleford why that was the place, or did it just, God begin moving there, was there anything real about it?

What do you think? I have opinions, so I try, in my podcast, I try to separate what is my opinion, what I can't prove versus what I can historically say. So in my opinion, there's more to the story than anybody is letting on.

But what I do know is that this Roy Davis figure goes to right outside of Los Angeles, and he starts a scheme that would fund the third wave of the Ku Klux Klan. That scheme involved creating an orphanage and getting large donors while posing as federal agents.

And he and this famous congressman, which was also tied to this movement, they plant this orphanage and they start setting this thing up. At the same, pretty much the same exact time, Gordon Lindsay, which is the founder of Christ for the Nations, and he was William Brannum's campaign manager.

He was assigned by the four square, he was a four square minister, Amy Simple McPherson's. He was assigned to the district adjacent to North Battleford's Saskatchewan. And so he would have been in that area of influence, not long after the orphanage was planted by Davis, Amy Simple McPherson's church sponsored this orphanage in North Battleford called the Sharon Orphanage.

And that's really the epicenter where all of this happens. And it gets really weird when you go through the newspapers because I don't even know what you call this thing. They've got airplane hangers.

They've got the school and orphanage training centers, missionaries. It's as though they're setting up some big, massive operation and nobody can tell where the funding is coming from. Charles and I kind of put it together that we found that Amy Simple McPherson was funding operations there.

And it seems to be all connected to four square, which as I look at the map of your church, I'm also seeing four square churches in that area. I know them. They're still right here in Canada.

And this is so shocking to me. I love this origins and developments, this thing that you have. I'm going to have to literally go through every box and kind of try to piece together what happened.

But wow. So I had no idea about any of that that you just said, even if you maybe said it to me, it's actually been so overwhelming that I've had to figure out what happened.

And I realized that the Pentecostal church basically operator kicked a kicked Regel and our church out and anyone who would ascribe to this ladder rain movement, you know, as heretics basically and told them, well, what we understood was told them to stop waving their hands, stop singing like that. And of course, it was probably more the other manifestations that were happening, you know, a lot of some rolling on the floor or, you know, things like that that I heard about.

Yeah, there was quite a split in Pentecostalism. The assemblies of God, what year was that? I think it was 1949. They basically said that this new order of ladder rain is at Christian extremism and heresy and very dangerous. They could see very early that it was creating the ability to enable authoritarian structures within the church. And there wasn't really any governance over this. And you can kind of see the mess that evolved from it. But they denounced ladder rain. They said, we will not we will not put up with this and the assemblies of God churches. But what happened was it had already become so popular that it

almost drove a wedge right down the middle of it. You had churches that would separate and become this split off into the independent assemblies of God led by a W. Rasmussen and some others. They chose the Brannum side and those who stuck with the assemblies of God, they denounced Brannum, they denounced ladder rain. There was another figure who I have I've also seen him touring your church, which was Franklin Hall. So the catalyst that started ladder rain was Franklin Hall's fasting doctrine and William Brannum's spiritualism doctrine.

Those two were the catalysts. Well, the assemblies of God denounced it. But where it gets really interesting is there were several districts of the assemblies of God and even states that became rogue states within the assemblies. Indiana, for example, was a rogue state and the leader of the assemblies of God and Indiana defended Brannum on the house floor of the assemblies trying to trying to say this is a movement of God. This is not extremism. But what happened what years later what happened was it did lead into extremism and many people said that Brannum had gone astray. So the

things that were shocking to me is when I talked to Marion Peterson, which was the daughter of Regel and I confirmed. Actually, she knew the name. That was the bing that went off where I went. John Collins is telling the truth. He's not confused. He's like he, he knows what he's talking about. Oh my word. And that's when we took the old interview that we did. I think January or something like that of this year that I, I was so shocked and we aired it. And then so since then I've been on this quest and journey to try to figure out

you know, I know that the church that I went to it was all the same things and not to touch God's anointed. If you left our church, you would be walking out of the grace and mercy of the Lord.

You would be walking away from covering and it wasn't right. And I remember hearing that as kids, but I was like, well, where else will we go? Our parents drive us here. So, so it didn't mean anything to me necessarily until later when I was about 21 when the church had a split. And I left, I left with the split and I kind of had to consider for a moment. Am I, am I leaving the blessing of God by leaving? But I just had such confirmation, my spirit, that I was to go at that time. I later,

now the church came under different leadership and people that were not laterane followers, I suppose. But still maybe shepherding movement. Now that I think about it, because there was still some of that same thing, you know. So, I just, you know, John, you're awakening the masses, I guess, to the influence of William Brannum, how that all came about. But then recently, I've been running with a group of people that call themselves the RRA. And they're basically NAR, you know, the new apostolic reformation group. And they call themselves apostles and prophets. They operate in this control that thou shalt not touch God's anointed. And I didn't really know that because I would just

be invited to speak on their platforms. Specifically with one man, his name is Art Luciae in the BC area. And he would have these big events called Battle for Canada. And Art Luciae has now recently been taken to task in the Supreme Court of Canada by two young women claiming that he sexually assaulted them when they were young. And there's three others that also state such. They allege these allegations against him. And so he's got his hands full with that. But it was, I've had person after person come on my podcast to talk about how you weren't allowed to leave his churches in,

you know, 20 years ago, when he started. So I didn't know anything about Art Luciae or Steve Holmes from or Mark Brisbois. And Barry Maricle, who run in this circle in Canada. Anada, which is they honor William Branham, and they're like, oh, yeah, because he had all these dead people, you know, rise from the dead.

But I went back and looked, and maybe you could even help me with this question. How many dead people do they attribute to him rising? Because I saw one story, and basically it never lined up.

The family said, no, he was never in a morgue, and he didn't die. There's so much to unpack with everything that you've just said, but the bottom line for the, you know, for the raising of the dead, the problem was what Branham was trying to establish was the notion that he had the power to do what the apostles of the Old Testament could do.

And the way that he presented it, if you read the Bible, and he has that same level of authority over the demons, then he should be able to raise a person from the dead.

I'm certain that this came up into conversations, well, why can't you do this? So then he claims that he did. And he says, you can write back home to Jeffersonville, Indiana. You can ask.

He was laying in the morgue, and I believed it. I heard him say that. I believed that he did this. Well, years later, when I started this research, I found where there were, when he was touring through Canada, he was making these boisterous claims.

And what happens is word of mouth, because he said it, and because they're not critically thinking about what he says, they go tell other people, and other people tell other people, well, this guy can raise people from the dead.

But the journalists who were trying to understand this movement as it was emerging, contacted, took him at his word. They contacted Jeffersonville, found out that no, there is no such story like this. They went so far as they actually identified the very person that he claimed was raised from the dead, and the family said, well, he'd never really died.

And so the whole story was kind of made up. And then you can also find, I think I have it on my website. You can find articles where the Brannamites are trying to defend this locally, because this causes store in Jeffersonville.

If he's lying in Canada, well, now you've got people in Jeffersonville that are waking up and asking questions. So there's this big level of suppression that happens. And like you said, when you leave the movement, the problem is when somebody leaves, they're critically thinking, and when they're critically thinking, they'll tell other people their critical thoughts.

So there's this real agenda to cut people off once they leave, because their critical thinking might cause other people to leave. It's all about control. And that controls, so you mentioned the shepherding movement and the new apostolic reformation.

We'll get into this a bit further, but when I pull up the map, like you said, it's like this epicenter, this weird epicenter in Vancouver. Yes. Your church is about, it's less than 10 miles from earned Baxter's church.

Baxter was one of William Brandham's campaign partners and toured in the Baxter Brandham campaigns. Baxter went on to become his campaign manager and then later he helped found the Shepparding Movement, which you're aware of.

So Baxter's involved with this Baxter's secretary, basically packaged William Brandham's manifested sons of God doctrine into a book called The Feast of Tabernacles and this became primary learning for places like International House of Prayer in Kansas City, where Brandhamites like Paul Cain were working with Mike Bickel and established this organization that heavily influenced the New Apostolic Reformation.

So there's this weird, I was talking to somebody just yesterday, I said, it's like this weird spider verse that all the whole trails lead back to William Brandham. And that is what's shocking to me having grown up hearing, you know, the manifest sons of God, Joel's army,

you know, ladder rain and that were the last generation. And I was talking to my good friend this morning, Everett Gagnon and he is from Ohio for Freedom Podcast and he really, really wants to talk to you.

And he says, could you ask John, because I told him I was going to be on with you, could you ask John, like, isn't there sort of a connection with these cult-like groups? They all think they're the final hour, last day generation.

And Laiselle, they would say this, you know, the last days and a lot of talk about hell but like, Laiselle died several decades ago now, you know, I remember. And so his daughter, you know, I know her still, I mean, she's in her 80s now and she's precious, but we all did grow up in all of this.

And so Everett was basically wanting to know like Jim Jones, when you talk about Jim Jones being connected, well, you know, everyone's happy the day before they actually drink the Kool-Aid and die. There's a video of them all saying, yeah, we're the happiest we've ever been.

Like, this is great. This isn't a cult. And they died the next day, you know? You know, it's a different time and a different era. I talk about it some in my latest book, Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.

But there was this weird belief set that was emerging right before World War II, that the people of the British Isles and the United States and Canada were the descendants of the lost Tintra.

tribes of Israel, and that the serpent from the Garden of Eden had made it with Eve to produce a lesser form of human. And that was spreading throughout the United States. William Brannum called it serpent seed, but it's basically called the two seed doctrine of Christian identity.

And the Joel's army notion was in opposition to the evil seed. We have an army that's taking over the United States and Canada of the false Jews they would call them. Well we need an army of our own.

So the prophet Joel described our army, that's kind of how this mentality went. But I talk about it some in the book. I don't know that it's worth a full conversation here. But the things that they believed were insane, and they were teaching them in churches.

One of them was the notion that the great pyramid of Giza was actually not a tomb for Kufu, but instead was a Bible of sorts written to the end of days people. And that the passage leading down to the King's Chamber, every imperfection in that pathway as you go down marked a significant milestone in world history.

And as you're going down the chamber and you hit a bump and that might be the one of the examples that they use was the great depression was this bump. And we see the great recession before this.

And now we see World War I right here. We're not very far from the end of that passage. So we're about to enter into the end of days. And this was being taught in churches, they would actually bring, I found newspaper articles where they're bringing actual statues of the pyramid and they could pull it apart and they could show people in churches how we're at the end.

This is almost over. And so this was widespread. It wasn't just a random that was doing this weird thing. But because it was such a weird popular notion and because now we're seeing World War I, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars, didn't.

Now we see World War II coming and as that didn't settle everything, they're starting to say, World War III is going to be the end. And they're preaching that in churches, they're preaching the weird pyramid thing and they're saying that we have all the signs necessary to see that this is the end of the world.

So people that ascribe to these things, they pick up these terms like Joel's army and that was used 20 years ago in Kitimat, British Columbia, with a group of kids who ended up being under the leadership again of this gentleman that I've already mentioned.

And this whole group is quite upset with me because I'm like speaking up. on what we're finding out. And I'm telling the truth, like John Collins is telling the truth, and I'm the one getting in trouble so I can only imagine the kind of backlash you've had when you begin to go, wait a second, like this is all crazy stuff.

It's been a little crazy. I have had, I won't go too deep into the types of attacks, but they have technologically attacked my servers and equipment, I've had equipment stolen, I've had hard drive stolen.

They do not want the information out. And so when I built my website, I did not use any of the normal, like WordPress or anything like this. It is actually a very highly sophisticated technology simply to ward off all of the attacks to keep it up.

The problem is, each individual church doesn't pose much of a threat, but combined, you have all of these churches, now which are part of the Apostolic Networks within the NAR. All of these churches are built on this foundation that I am certain beyond the shadow of a doubt, many leaders know and are fully aware that it is a false foundation.

Everything about it was parts of fiction or parts of heresy, parts of spiritualism. We could talk for hours on just the weird spiritualist craze that hit the nation right as this thing was emerging and they adopted ideas from the spiritualist craze to put into the latter reign.

So people who've read the Bible, if you read the Bible, things like tied to that spirit, that pyramid doctrine was also the notion that before the pyramid was the Bible, before that was the zodiac as the Bible, which leads you into all kinds of weird spiritual notions when you think of that.

Anybody who's read the Bible knows that you're not supposed to worship the stars or anything of stone, but this movement had that false foundation. Leaders who are aware of it, the way that they're getting around it is that they're saying that in his later years, William Brannum went astray, so don't listen to him, but if you really critically think about what they're saying, that implies and suggests that for a period of time, what he said was correct and biblical and scriptural, therefore we've built our foundation upon it, but you find that it's built on the clan,

on Christian identity, on spiritualism, on heresy, on many, many things that we have uncovered with regards to false prophecy or failed prophecy, things like the raising from the dead that you mentioned, outright lies just to attract the people, that's the foundation that they're saying was the good foundation before he went astray.

And they don't like to listen to you. if you say, well, that was actually proven to be a false report by even the family of the man who was claimed to be raised from the dead. And then people don't like that, and they get mad. And then it's like, thou shalt not touch God's anointed. And this zodiac stuff, so the people, the fellow that I've been speaking about, you know, I recently was attending his church, and then allegations have come forward of these young women. But he has had teachings on this zodiac stuff. Or it's like there's a whole new era of bringing

witchcraft forward. And it's getting bad in all kinds of different denominations. Like with Bethel, we can see that they've opened the door to new age and things like that. But I don't personally remember this stuff. I do remember that our pastor Marine Galardi scared us all and said in 1982, I think, or something like that, there was going to be a certain amount of alignment of the stars. So we had this teaching going on for a while that maybe this was it, that Jesus was returning because the signs in the heavens were that everything was aligning, you know.

So, you know, we're still here. Now I, you know, I just don't know what to think about all of that. But I guess like you say, Brannum had certain things that he would teach. And then they say he went astray later. But they're trying to say that he was all okay in the beginning. And actually, it appears to be quite the fraud and linked with his buddies who support, you know, the Nazi or whatever, like the clan. I mean, this is so disturbing.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to

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surface of this, but as I mentioned, when Brannum's mentor, Roy Davis, came and planted what became my grandfather's church, he was running from the law for many different reasons, everything from theft to swendling, but the biggest thing was he was taking young girls across state lines for the purposes of sex, which is a violation of the Man Act.

So when he came to Jeffersonville, he had crossed from Louisville, Kentucky, across the Ohio River, he was literally running from the Man Act, which is why he came to Jeffersonville, but his platform for revival, which they held a revival, he claimed that he was a converted spiritualist, and so he was trying to expose the spiritualist movement, which was very, very popular during that time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually came to the United States to hold seances instead of writing Sherlock Holmes. That's how popular this was. When he comes to Jeffersonville, he gets arrested off the platform and they take him back

to Louisville because he had violated the Man Act with sexual contact with children. What he planted and that spiritualist connection started something very weird. In the state of Indiana, there was a spiritualist camp that was called Camp Chesterfield, and it was very popular during the spiritualist craze. We have evidence that strongly suggests that Branham attended that camp because he describes an event that was only held at that camp. So he comes back from the spiritualist camp and he, like Davis, sees the opportunity to appeal to the itching ears by claiming that he has this special insight of what the spiritualists

do and how to rightly divide his version of spiritualism with the pagan version of spiritualism. And what this essentially forms if you understand the concept, what Branham was creating was very similar to the ancient mystery cults. I have a divine mystery and only those who are in my inner fold who are aware of this mystery has this divine knowledge. And so therefore, we are different from all other Christians where elite, where the chosen ones we have this special knowledge.

That was the early years. After a period of time, when he, he starts bringing in this, he reinvented the five-fold ministry doctrine as a pyramid scheme. So there were levels and tiers of the authoritarian control, but the rank and file members were not equals. It was a authoritarian structure where at the very top was an apostle or prophet all the way down to rank and file. He brings that notion in and so the rank and file members can't question any of the spiritual aspects that were anti-biblical.

And it was clearly anti-biblical what he was doing. So it basically created a cult structure. And that structure and methodology spread throughout the entire movement. You find weird mystery. I had somebody write me just last week, I think it was.

They said that their apostle and their church had prophesied, written it down on a piece of paper and put it into an envelope. But anybody who reads what's in that envelope will die. So you're left with the question, well, if God's giving a prophecy for you to hear, how are you going to hear it if you don't open up the envelope?

And that, interestingly, was very common among these mystery cults. They don't want you to know if the prophecy is nonsense or even if it fails. They don't want the rank and file members to understand the gimmicks that they're using for their spiritualist craze.

Wow, wow, wow. It just brings me back to some of the things that would, like once in a while, we'd have demonic manifestations that would happen in the church, you know? And so the Marine Galardi would be casting out the demons and she said she had a special gift, certain things, like when, OK, there was two things.

First of all, she said if she's casting out the demon, we had to close our eyes, otherwise it would enter us. And so I remember later just trying to think through all the, because we'd all have our eyes super closed.

Oh, no, I hope the demon doesn't come into me. And trying to figure out what biblical passage that would actually be confirmed, necessarily by. And then the other thing was when she'd have words of knowledge, she said, she had a certain thing come over her and she couldn't tell what it was, because just like Samson lost his gift when he told what his gift was, he lost his gift, you know, he told the girl Delilah about his hair and then he ended up dying from that.

So she says she couldn't tell us, you know, like different things that were so mystical, right? Like everyone was held in such high regard. We were very fearful of the leaders. And you talked earlier about the authoritarianism that came in and that that's what the Pentecostals kind of said.

You can see how this is going to lead to people being elitist. And now I totally can see that, but I grew up in that. So that was normal that they are the great people that know everything at the front.

And we have to do, you know, what they say and get worried about 1982 if they say to get worried about it or all kinds of it and day stuff, you know, was all about that.

You know, even still today, in fact, this happened a couple of Sundays back. I enter into a church and they're in prayer. And I look at the minister and the assistant. and their heads are bowed and respect to God, and their eyes are open, and I'm just, I feel like out of sorts. This is not right. You have to close your eyes. One of the things this movement brought was you can't open your eyes and you can't see what's happening. If you do, the devil's going to get you. I remember being raised as a kid. You could not open your eyes during a prayer

because the devil might get you. That was one of the doctrines that they had. I have somewhere in my archives of video. I have a video where, see, they did this divine healing trick on stage, and it wasn't just Brannum. Many of them were doing it. Brannum's gimmick was he would have all of his ushers pass out what was called a prayer card. If your prayer card was called, you went up to the stage and they were called in order by that card. He would guess your name and your address, which just happened to be written on the card that they gave the usher. That was part

of the gimmick. There were times whenever he would guess the name and address without having called a card. I have one of the few videos that remains of Brannum where his son is walking up and slipping things in his pocket, and it's happening during a prayer. I'm starting to piece all this together. Wait a minute. If everybody has to have their eyes closed, which there's no scripture to support that that I've found whatsoever, if they have to have their eyes closed, you're not going to see the guy slipping him a paper on the platform. See, this is the early

Sean Bolts gig. Recently, Sean Bolts is outed because he's getting his information, birth dates, names, special information off of Facebook. He's down there at Bethel. You've got Bill Johnson touting him as one of the most powerful prophets they have ever seen because the guy can just read your mail like crazy. Then it all comes out. Yeah. He's calling guys out because they have a list of people at the event and then they look at their Facebook and they get their birth dates and they get all this information on them and give them words. He destroyed one guy's life,

who's recently been interviewed because he gets a word from Sean Bolts. He's supposed to complete this media project, create a film, but in his mind, he had actually laid it to rest and thought that the Lord had told him not to do the film, but because it was on his Facebook, Sean Bolts picks up this information and then relays it out to him that he is to do it. What are you going to do if the Prophet of God tells you to do that? He invests his life savings, he invests his friends money and others who wanted to invest in it.

And well, of course, it goes sour because it never was God, but this is the power of false prophecy. So what Brannum was doing, this is horrible. This is like exactly what they're doing in modern day with technology.

There was a book that somebody gave me and I'll be honest, the first time that I received the book. I was a little hesitant and scared to read it because we were also programmed that if you read something by somebody who's not of the same spiritual mindset as you or who is atheist, that you're going to catch a demon.

And so I actually did not read it for probably two or three years. But somebody finally convinced me to read this book by James Randy called The Faith Healers. And James Randy, if you're unfamiliar with him, was a magician who also during, right after the spiritualist craze, noticed that there were the sudden influx of all of these faith healers and they're all doing stage tricks.

And he, as a magician, knows how the tricks work. So he goes from revival to revival. And he's documenting what ended up in to be this book, The Faith Healers. Here's what this guy did.

Here's how he did it. This is exactly how I would have done it in my meetings and in my stage act. And he goes through and he just outs them all. And it starts from very, very simple things that you just would not think of.

Because as a person who's not expecting to be deceived by a minister on a platform, you're not looking to critically think in the same way as if you're sitting in a magician's show trying to figure out how the magician did it.

So he's just explaining common techniques, common sense, and how I'm reading it, thinking, oh my gosh, man, this is not right. How are they doing this? He mentioned Brannum in that book. But he goes on to try and remember the guy's name, but Peter Popoff, one of the last ones he did was Peter Popoff, who's got the device in his ear.

But if you understand how I call them parlor tricks, if you understand how the simplest of tricks work, those tricks can deceive many, many people. And there are environmental things or abilities that people have that can augment that trick.

For example, after we left, this is side story, but it was kind of funny. After we left the movement, we were caught up in this weird world where everything was angels and demons. If you stumped your toe walking down the street, it was because a demon had tripped you.

Well, I met with some people who had left the Brannum movement, and we were talking, and I said, it was just such an evil place. And my son's picked up black magic. And I said, really?

And I said, yeah, and I said, come here. And I've called my son over. And I said, my son can pick... out anything in this room. You just pick an object and he'll tell you exactly what it was.

I sent my son in the other room and they told me the object where he obviously couldn't hear. And I said, is it this object? Is it this object? Is it the next one? And my son said, yes, that's it. He got it right every time. Well, it was black magic. What I would do is I would say, I would point to a yellow object, a white object, a black object. Every time after the black object, I would be their object. So even though he's not hearing it, they're thinking he's got a gift. Well, these guys were doing similar tricks. I noticed

that Branum, remember, he has all these ushers and they're giving him papers and he would always go off script and he would say, now I'm going to go beyond the prayer card. You in the yellow shirt, you have such and such, you in the purple hat. And he's naming off associating colors with the people in their conditions. And I started to realize, that's a memorization technique. You just have to know the lady with the polka dot purple sweater, right? But then it got even weirder because I started studying memory techniques. And I started to realize that in his ministries, as he would go town to town, he would pretend to forget

things. For example, he claimed to a prophesied Marilyn Monroe's death and got it wrong, which is a funny story. But he would go to one town and say, what was that lady's name? Marilyn, and he would fumble the word, go to the next town, pretend the same fumble, go to a third town, pretend the same, he'd continue over and over, suggesting that his memory was better than he was letting on. Here's where it gets interesting in the point of building up to. I have had conversations with Paul Kane, who was one of the Kansas City Fellowship,

started the international house of prayer. He was Brannem's proxy to Germany, Brannem's protege. And I've had conversations with the people that work close with Kane. And one time, he was apparently allegedly caught in his hotel room, reading through phone books.

And he had stacks of phone books. And they said, why are you doing that? And I just read in the phone books. Well, he's doing the same tricks that Brannem's doing with the names and numbers and his meetings. And I started to realize he probably had a photographic memory, which if you're sitting in the audience and you're thinking spiritual, you're never thinking photographic memory. No, absolutely not. And then Brannem had this, he had this kid that would levitate or something like that. And when I was reading about that, I was kind of curious. Obviously, they were doing something weird.

It's a crazy, crazy time. Like I said, the spiritualist craze caught on. And the sad part of it is, the ministers appeared to want to appeal to the itching ears. So rather than go attend the spiritualist camp, instead come to our ministry and we've got a levitating boy, but it's also a sad story, not many people are aware of this.

The Brannum campaigns, which at that time was, it was ran by a man by the name of Raymond Hoekstra, who was closely tied to the formation of the UPCI, they actually owned that child.

They bought rights from the child, from the parents, and the parents actually had to sue to get their child back. And they were claiming neglect and overwork, but it's a horrific, horrific thing. But what happened was they got the child, the child claimed that he had spent seven minutes, I think it was in heaven.

And he would tell his, I went to heaven's story while levitating. And then Brannum would come and do his prayer card trick. That whole thing of just using people and deception and like what kind of whacked craziness is this.

And you know, one of the things like in our church that the outfall of it that we didn't really realize, but it was just the sexual crazy too. And I'm not certain if that showed up in Brannum's lifetime or his season of being at the helm of this, or if that just infiltrated, but definitely there's just been, you know, the whole movement has been racked with stories and painful things about, you know, molestations and things like this.

Yeah, it's awful and sad at the same time. With Brannum, it wasn't the same way. There were several men who were homosexual, who were in Brannum's campaign team. And even organizers of the big revivals were.

And so the accusations for Brannum was that he was having homosexual affairs and Brannum actually admits that he was accused of this on recording. But like you said, it seems to be a pattern.

You see from Brannumisms, you see all these splinter groups and there are groups in Africa, Brannumite groups, who they were teaching what's basically spiritual husbandry. And the minister was claiming all of the husband's duties with the wives in the church, got caught because he was filming it and he went to prison because of that.

But it's just, it's horrible when you think of all of these things that are done in the name of religion. You can't say that that's limited to Brannumism. There are all kinds of Catholic Church, for example, have huge problems.

But also I am aware of Baptist Church, they have the same problem, Methodist. church. It exists everywhere. The difference is, when you're in these types of destructive groups, there is a strong push to conceal it. Right now, in Arizona, there is a Branamite sect. It's called Golden Dawn. And the minister has covered up the abuse of minor sexual abuse and rape, I guess, of minors for years. And he is now charged with covering it up.

And the way that his church was structured, you could not talk about it, you could not question it. If you leave, you can't make contact with the family and they cannot contact you. So there's this level of control that goes beyond what humans should ever, ever do.

So John, like, this is so difficult because I guess this spirit of homosexuality then, so what happened was Regely Zell turned the church over to Marine Galardi. She eventually, after many years, there was rumors because she did look like a lesbian to some.

Now, I never thought of it until somebody pointed it out because we were kids and she was the pastor unmarried. But the leader, we feared her. She was definitely man-like in that her authority and her, the fear factor, she was a power-monger. And so the whole church would just like rise to attention and give her a standing ovation at different times, right?

So the big shock of all shocks, when we get to church, you know, the Morning Black Sunday, basically, we all call it, when we're told in 1982 that she has been found to have the sin of Romans 1. And the whole church just begins morning. And because it was such a shock, because this was, she was hailed as such a massive, powerful woman of God. Well, she'd been followed, I guess, and to Hawaii, where finally someone, one of the board members, hired a private eye, tired of all the rumors and innuendo, and they hired someone and they caught her. And they got

filmed, you know, pictures of her, obviously, with someone. And then what we didn't know until about

10, 12, 13 years ago was that her brother, Ray Galardi, was molesting boy after boy after boy in our church. So in looking back, it was said that there were rumors and people would report it or something, but then it was just completely covered up, or that, that family left, or no one was allowed to talk about it, because you did not go against Ray Galardi. Well, then he goes to on to other ministries and places, and apparently several different places, he's just molested all the boy.

is now he is married and his wife always defending him. And she was a lovely, beautiful person actually and she wants to just thought this wouldn't, couldn't possibly be true. So now he's in jail and I think he's in his 80s.

But that spirit of homosexuality and that, you know, my friends were harmed. I didn't know till 12 years ago. So it, like it's been so disturbing to look at the outfall and the fruit of this work.

And it's really odd when you think about it because while the movement was really strongly condemning homosexuals and homosexuality, many of the leaders were openly homosexual. I mentioned, so you mentioned the Nazi connection which I think we talked about on your podcast, but it also ties to Paul Cain to some extent.

When Brannum went to Germany, he was sponsored by the Baron Freire T. von Blumberg. This man was connected to the Fellowship Foundation which is known as the family. They hold the National Prayer Breakfasts and are influencing politicians.

He was on the board of directors of Bob Jones University. He was Brannum's campaign manager as well as several others. And the, the men who went on the campaigns openly knew that he was homosexual.

In fact, he was calling escorts into his room to the extent that there are now declassified documents where the government was watching him because he set up similar organizations in other countries like the Fellowship.

He and apparently Brannum were doing this where they're also influencing the other nations. So they're wondering is this guy a spy? He's a adopted German Baron and he was adopted, the adopted cousin of Werner von Blumberg which is Hitler's minister of defense.

So is he tied to this? We don't know. But while they're over there, something happens and it happens in the hotel room. Paul Cain is there who, as you know, was also exposed later as homosexual.

I think I mentioned this on your podcast. Paul Schaefer was also there. He was the head of security. Schaefer goes to Chile and sets up a compound where he's helping Nazis escape into Argentina.

Well, underneath all of this, he is molesting young boys. So you have this group of men who apparently something happened and they got caught in Germany to the extent Brannum was never allowed back.

And anytime there was a Brannum request for Germany, Paul Cain went in his stead according to what Paul Cain told me on the phone. So this weird thing happened. There was homosexuality involved but it was levels above that because they were praying on people.

It wasn't just that they had the attraction, they were actually predators. Unbelievable. And this is definitely exactly what my personal church experienced. And then what we've heard at different places. And we're still seeing the outfall of this now that predators, the allegations being made currently to this pastor from Colona.

I've talked to the girls. And so it's not homosexual things, nothing like that so far has emerged. But it's underaged people. Just the predatory manner. And then you wonder, how can you all be Christians?

And I think this is the hard part. I was saying on my broadcast yesterday, how can Sean Boltz with any? Who is he on the inside to think that it was so cool to deceive the world on the internet by pretending to have information on people?

And that's certainly far less brutal than molesting tons of people. But these people are sociopaths. Like it's a culture of narcissism allowed to grow and to have a harvest. It's so disturbing to me.

And then there's people like me and you raised in this that we basically, we have to find and figure out what is the truth in the midst of all of these lies. And I think that's the journey God's got us all on.

Well, I think the big thing to understand is that people really aren't educated in the history. And the history is important when you're thinking about the mistakes of the current. If they're repeating the mistakes of the past, if we're looking at, so the Seven Mountains Mandate, for example, people are shocked that this dominionism threat is coming to the United States.

But if they would look back in history, they would find that the very people that I'm talking about within the clan who influenced Brannum, they had established what was called the Supreme Kingdom. And they were saying we need to take back control of the government.

We need to take back control of education. We need to take control of the entertainment industry. They were doing all of these things. History is repeating itself. But the bad actors who set all of this up, it's their histories that are repeating because the common people are unaware that they're doing this.

They're trying to influence us in this wrong way. And the sad part about all of this is they're doing it in the name of religion. So people, unfortunately, who haven't really read their Bibles, they're hearing these things that ministers say and they're thinking it's actually in the Bible.

This is a biblical thing they're doing. When, in many cases, it's really anti-biblical. So there's, like I said at the beginning of this, there's a thousand different things. things we could talk about, I can think of 30 different podcasts just from the things that we've talked about in this one, would you be interested in doing more and talking through some of that history?

I would like to, because that's what's changed everything for me, is an understanding that is pretty pivotal. It helps you to understand why some things didn't make sense, why some things went so, so wrong, how there was an element of, you know, learning about the power of the Holy Spirit, but then there were these teachings that now we kind of go, not exactly biblical, I don't know, and it wasn't questioned.

And learning all of that helps us to be more clear about what we accept moving forward. And God seems to be doing something where He's empowering the sheep to be warriors. He's empowering us to be reliant on Him alone, not these great leaders, like God are the days where we're going to exalt man.

And this whole apostolic movement that is really about removing, like once again, pointing to man, we follow this apostle, we follow this prophet, and they turn out to be, you know, disappointments, and then we're disappointed in God when God is just saying, just, you know, be my sheep, hear my voice, follow the good shepherd, and forget all this other stuff that man tried to make it about, and I'm concerned that there's been a lot of bad actors, as you just said, sociopaths, you know, narcissists that have, have harnessed the power of people's love for God and used it to exalt themselves and to do terrible things

in the name of that. And so we have to expose it so that our next generation, there's a peer in spotless bride waiting for him to return. And, you know, I've loved this, John, I would gladly come back.

I would like to know more and more about this and I want to share your podcasts out because I know that my whole group that comes from Vlad tidings, we're, we're having an awakening and, you know, it's sad, but it's necessary.

And I just appreciate you. I appreciate that you have been so courageous and bold and it's been costly to you in order to do that. It's been costly for your life, but you've done it.

And so I'm grateful, you're, you're not a coward, so you're not going to hell. Cowards are the first ones on the list to hell in revelations, not, not the murders and liars, although the lake of fire will be able to handle all of that, but you're, you're very courageous and I thank you for that.

Well, thank you. And if anybody out of glad tidings wants to share their story on the podcast, there's an open invitation, just contact me on the website and you can share your story. So thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, you're welcome, John. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. 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 more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

You can find us at William-Branem.org, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

You can find us at William-Branem.org, available on Amazon.