The Billion Soul Hoax: How Vague Visions Build Empires

Hello and welcome to another episode, have the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend Adam Short, host of the grit and the wild podcast. Adam is good to be back and to talk about profits and prophecy. I was thinking as you were mentioning what we were going to talk about today. I was thinking about how much this has the single thing, the single topic has impacted my life so much and the lives of those around me and the

frame of reference that we have for profits and prophecy is just so vastly different than the rest of Christianity and you anyway this is your topic I'll let you run with it but I just want to say that for me this impacted me in a significant way and I'm still trying to work to detangle what it was that they put in my head. Well yeah I'm curious to hear more about your experience John but yeah the phrase that came to mind and it could be a new phrase I don't know if other people have used this phrase but what I thought is most

appropriate to call this is retroactive prophecy and then to sort of build upon that it's kind of like back to the future right the movie back to the future and I think what I mean by that is there are so many examples especially here recently I'd say recent being in the past five years particularly as these high-profile prophetic people in the NAR people like Chris Balaton and others who have Jeremiah Johnson's another one that comes to mind who they've they've made specific prophecies about political events right some of those being around the elections and it's so interesting to me if you go and

look at this from a current event standpoint and a historical slash timeline standpoint this is what they do they'll come out let's say today July 25th they come out and they announced that they had this vision I had a vision I had a dream three months ago that John Collins and Adam Short would do a podcast on July 25th but they they announced the dream and the vision that they had after they had it and after the event was supposed to happen so that they can validate the very event that they reportedly foretold.

So it's kind of like you've got to jump back and forth on the historical timeline to make this stuff make sense. But I look back on my experience in hypercarsomatic church and I realized how normal it was for my brain to just accept it at face value, right?

So like you hear a leader giving a prophetic experience they had, they give the experience after the event that supposedly was fulfilled in their prophecy. So I think your question is very pertinent. Like how do you know if, how do you know if the leader had the actual, maybe they had the actual vision, but maybe they interpreted their vision or dream based on the actual events that really happened and said, hey, I'm right because what I prophesied or what I experienced and then now I'm prophesying was this, this and this.

And it actually happened. So I'm validating, it's like a feedback loop that just never ends, it's like this. You know what I'm saying? Like it's 100% validation of the data because they get to interpret it exactly how they choose to because they're retroactively, I don't know if this makes sense, but looking back retroactively about an experience they had that then supposedly was foretold.

So the best thing I can call it is retroactive prophecy John. I don't know if that made me sense at all. It does. A lot of people call it prophecy after the fact. I grew up in this weird world where I get to be around some of the quote unquote spiritually elite.

And this is fascinating to me, the subject because it's so far more complicated than people realize. It isn't just simply that some guy randomly or girl randomly claims prophecy on something in the past.

There's a lot more to it than that and there's a lot more people involved than that. One of the most powerful tools of persuasion and you can get this if you read some psychology books.

I got it from reading book by Sigmund Freud's nephew, what was his name, Bernays, I think it was. It's a book on mass psychology, how you can achieve mass psychology. One of the techniques is you actually the best technique.

If you can give people bread crumbs to where they can come to their own conclusion, rather than you giving them that conclusion, they will believe it for a lifetime. But if you try to force your opinion and force your conclusion on them, they just kind of step back and they say, wait a minute, let me think about this first and they may not adopt that opinion.

So as a tool of persuasion, you leave bread crumbs and you lead people there. Well, complicate that even further by the cult mindset. You have a bunch of people who are manipulated already. to see things that aren't there, to try to grasp things that aren't yet fulfilled and try to lift a single person or group of people into a spiritual plane that is higher than themselves.

So they're expecting something that isn't there. What happens is you get these people who, I was around people who were a quote unquote prophetic and they would say things like we'd be at a ballgame and they would say things like, you just watch, the chiefs are going to win this game. And to the casual person, like if I were to say that, you would say, if I was wrong, you'd say, let's see John, you're wrong, the chiefs didn't win. And if I was right, you'd go, oh, wow, you called it. I mean, it would be that simple. But when you're in this mindset,

what happens is those people who hear it, they go home and they think that there's some big expectation by God, oh, God must be surrounding this game of the chiefs. We all need to watch it.

And so then it turns into like this miniature doctrine, we all have to watch the chiefs game. Then they do, if the chiefs happen to win, which is a 50-50 chance, right? If they happen to win, they say that was a prophecy. Did you know that? Well, later in sermons, what happens is the quote-unquote prophetic individual who didn't really prophesy, they just said some random statement.

But because that random statement came true, they will mention things about the past and then claim that they had prophesied it when they didn't, they just randomly said something. And they will mention it in such a way that the people that they knew who heard them say it will immediately connect the dots. So then those people will uplift whatever was said as prophecy.

So suddenly the chiefs game becomes a prophecy in this scenario. Well, if you're around these kind of people, which I have been, you start to notice that they don't talk like normal people. They say things like that. You just watch, the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates. It's a random statement. It doesn't really have any meaning whatsoever, you know, unless you're wanting to play the stock market. And if it fails, the casual person would say, well, you're wrong, that failed. But the way that they say it is setting them up for there's a term in basketball called an alley-oop. They basically throw the ball up so that somebody else

will do the alley-oop and claim that, oh, that was a prophecy. Yeah, that's interesting. It's kind of like the exploited version of, you can show a man, you can give a man some fish, but you can teach a man to fish and he can eat his whole life, something like that. It's almost like an exploited version of that where, like to your point, where you're leading people to make their own conclusions. But it's the very conclusions that they want you to make, right? It's like, it's kind of like what we've talked about in the past of this primed fate.

concept where, you know, leaders will use all kinds of different mechanisms and trickery of what have you to prime people's faith to then grab a hold of whatever that, you know, cutting edge at the cusp supernatural experience or event is whether it's a healing or whether it's a release of a, you know, corporate anointing or whatever. But like, yeah, it's, it's like taking things like the chief game, some very ordinary, common event in life and charging it with so much meaning and spiritual and supernatural like, couching to where it becomes such a significant event in people's minds that, that like, they do like, that you're right, they build a doctrine

around it, they build this meaning around it that, um, that like, okay, I'm a part of this because the prophet, I was under the, um, hearing of this prophetic word, this purported prophetic word, so I'm caught up in this very exciting prophetic phenomenon or this unfolding of events.

And I'm actually a person who believes that prophecy is a, is a real thing and it's a biblical thing, but it's just that I think a large percentage of what we see now in hypercarysmatic churches is not biblical prophecy. It's like, it could be a mixture, I know we talked about this before on sources, it could be a mixture of just 100% trickery. It could be a mixture of divination coming from dark sources or it could be even, some of this could be even people who were gifted in mentalism. You know, there are magicians that are gifted in this kind of stuff like David Blaine,

we've talked about him before, where, you know, he's really well known for going on the streets and doing these face-to-face, you know, magic, this magic stuff that is honestly pretty mind-blowing, but he incorporates mentalism in there and it's like he can read people's minds. Now, whether he's doing that from, you know, a supernatural source or it's just a skill he's developed or a combination too, I'm not sure, but like if you translate that over to the hypercarysmatic church, I feel like there's a mixture of all of those different things in there. And then, but ultimately, what is the,

I think the question, the deeper question is what is the outcome or what is the impact to the greater body of Christ and the people at large? And I think the impact is these prophets are bolstered up even further on their pedestals and they're seen as even more credible because, hey, this man or woman can predict the future, they are walking in a level of super for human capability that most of us don't walk in.

And so the logical outcome of that is these people end up getting more and more influence, more and more money and more and more God-like status and they're practically a worship. And I'll say this, Bob Jones was, I told Richard more this lately recently, Bob Jones, the prophet Bob Jones, I would say is probably about as close to worshiping a person as you can get.

Like when you, like I was in Morningstar, I was at Bethel, I was at the IHOP circles, he was practically worshiped. I mean, I think probably a close second would be Bill Johnson as far as like people actually worshiping a person.

But I mean, Bob Jones was like seen as this larger than life.

I don't know. I don't want to say omniscient, but pretty close to omniscient person that could literally see everything's going to happen in the future. And you know, there are different theories about him, was he, did he just have this uncanny ability to speak in gobbledygook to convince people that he knew the future?

Or was it all a concocted plan where he and others conspired to like convince people that he was prophetic or did he actually have supernatural experiences? And I mean, Bob Scott brings us up in his book that Bob Jones was struck by lightning early on in life.

And I think if I remember correctly, Bob Scott thinks that that has something to do with Bob Jones' kind of weird wiring or whatever. So I don't know, there's all these theories out there, but I just think that for those of us that have been in these circles who have sat under the ministries of the prophetic people,

it's very disingenuous actually. Now I will give Chris Valatton credit. He did come out and acknowledge that he was wrong about his prophecy about, I think it was a 2020 election. Is that all right?

I might be getting that wrong. But he did make a video and explain to people that he got it wrong. So I appreciate that. I think that was a good thing. But the fact is amongst the sea of prophecy, that was an outlier where Chris actually acknowledged that he was wrong.

Most of the time that doesn't happen, like people just, you know, if you prophesize something and it doesn't happen, then what they could do is they go back and they revised the meaning of what the prophecy was.

Well, when we prophesied this the first time, that's not actually what we mean or what we meant by it. Even though you can go back and listen to the recording and see that that was what they meant by it.

But it's like, you reinterpret the meaning to mean something else entirely. Like this has a different fulfillment or a separate meaning. in the future that we have not yet seen, so it's like, I mean, literally they could take one prophecy and recycle it and use it over and over again to their liking and to, like, basically form a conclusion however they want to do. So I don't know, it's like retroactive prophecy, but then retroactive and reusing your prophecy. It's the three hours. Retroactive, reuse and recycle prophecy. Well, it's actually four hours and recreate. Recreate. Okay. So

here's the thing. These movements, these type of movements have recreated what is the meaning of prophecy. If you understand the Bible and if you read the Bible, it's very plain. Prophecy is whenever God is speaking, speaking using a human as a mouthpiece. So this is God who doesn't exist in time and our time, who knows the future, the past, the present, who sees everything that we don't see. And when speaks through the mouthpiece of a prophet in the Bible, there are examples of how the prophecies were given in symbolic meaning and they may have seen somewhat vague at the time

they were given to the people. However, there's a significant difference between what they're calling prophecy today and what you see in the Bible. In the Bible, the prophecy given was for the instruction and betterment of the people. Usually in the Old Testament, it was given because I have given you the set of commandments, I being God, you have deviated from the mosaic law, you've started to fall into idolatry. And here is the consequences of doing that. So usually it was, it was not even a future futuristic prediction. It was just simply, you did this bad thing and I promised you

these blessings if you did the good things and these curses if you did the bad things. Usually that's what it was. There were some things that were pointing out events that would happen in the future, but they were for Israel as a whole. It wasn't just simply some guy said, some guy claimed to be a prophet and walked up to this other guy and said, I expect that you're going to get a bunch of new cattle in your herd because God is going to bless you specifically.

It was never something like this and they do that today. They will go up to a businessman and say, God is going to prosper your business. So give me more tide because you're going to expect it.

I mean, that's usually, that's usually how weird this gets. But prophecy was given to the people in this vague symbolic form. But whenever the event happened, it fit so perfectly that they would identify, this is the fulfillment of that prophecy. So it was vague and become more clear and that was the progression. So they had scribes that would write down exactly what the prophecy was.

They never had to change it. It was set in stone because this came from the mouthpiece. of God. When the event happened, they could go back to what was written down by the scribes and compare, oh, well, this is the event. Clearly, this is the event. I don't even look at it anymore as though this is some demonic spirit. I know a lot of people do, but if you understand what these guys are doing and how they're doing it, they are trying to speak in vague terms because they're using the vagueness of the prophecies in the Old Testament

as their strategy, basically. But what they're doing is they're giving it so vague that it could apply to many different situations. And then whenever a situation comes that almost fits, nearly every prophecy that I have examined by this movement, it never fully fits, but little certain pieces will fit. And they'll say, see, this was my prophecy and this one element of my entire prophecy fits, so ignore everything that doesn't fit, and we're going to say this is a prophecy. Well, then whenever the next situation occurs, which may fit a different element that didn't fit the first time, they'll reuse that prophecy,

but what they're doing essentially is they're recreating the prophecy. So the prophecy is given vague, it becomes more vague and more obscure as time goes on because they're trying to retrofit it for whatever was the event. But again, if you go back to the Bible, it was given in symbolic form. When the event happened, it was so perfectly every detail would line up and they'd say, this was our prophecy. This is exactly what happened.

Yeah, yeah, no, there's so many layers to this. And yeah, the subjectivity slash sort of, I think big target that they paint with the original prophecies is very much the flavor of what happens in the hypercarsomatic churches. Now, there are occasional prophecies that you hear that are very specific like, and the examples I'm thinking of are more around the prophetic history of Ahop, like specifically the white horse prophecy, which related to Pat Bickel, Mike Bickel's brother, who had the accident in the 70s and he became paralyzed. Bob Jones had this white horse prophecy where related to the man on the board

and this whole prophecy that when Pat Bickel was healed, it would begin this one billion soul harvest in Kansas City Chief for involving that and all that stuff later on. If people still look at that and said, well, look, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl a few times. That was part of the prophecy in its later form. But here's what people skip is. And I have prophetic history. They actually stopped talking about that portion of the prophecy related to Pat Bickel. It sort of got scrubbed from the...

fed a history as you move forward and it was reinterpreted and reinvented and whatnot. And so this is an example of a very specific prophecy centered around one particular man and his healing, which actually did not happen.

He was not healed. And so then the part two of the prophecy relates to the billion so harvest. It's like, well, I think that's probably pretty well disproven at this point, isn't it? The specificity of it was quite specific, but the event that was prophesied did not happen.

What's interesting, though, is how are you going to validate the one billion so harvest? Think about this. I've thought about this over recent years. You know, why, okay, first of all, why is it one billion?

Okay. And how do you measure that? If you're going to have a prophecy that has a number attached to it, there has to be, it doesn't, there have to be a way to be able to measure that number.

And if the answer is yes, then how do you measure that number? Do you measure the one billion so harvest by the number of people who heard the gospel, from people who preached the gospel?

Do you measure it by numbers of people who filled out a card in a church service and said they want to believe in Jesus or they raised their hand in a service? Like, how do you actually measure the one billion so harvest?

I think it's, the one billion so harvest has been made such a larger than life concept in the NAR that it's like, we just take it for granted. We just like, oh, yeah, the billion so harvest, yeah, yeah.

But we don't actually stop to think about what does that actually mean? How do we know if that prophecy is fulfilled? And I think that this is another example of a vague prophecy that you actually cannot validate.

Whereas if you look at like the one that comes to mind from the Old Testament, Isaiah 9.6, where he talks about, it's actually a prophecy about Jesus many, many years before Jesus even was born.

And that's the one where it says the government will rest upon his shoulders. And it's a, it's a foretelling of Jesus Christ. Very specific, you know, and, but yet here in this example of the one billion so harvest prophecy, we have a very specific trigger sort of event around Pat Bickel.

But then this sort of the, the event that was prophesied like the one billion so harvest was very, very large target that again, I think it's very difficult to validate whether or not that actually happened or will happen.

I mean, I'm of the opinion it's, it's not a real prophecy. I think it's, it was made up. But anyway, just trying to kind of compare, like back to what you said, comparing the exact...

Imples of Prophecy, we have now to what's in the Bible. So anyway, yeah, those are just my thoughts on that around subjectivity and specificity. There's another aspect of this to consider. Whenever these stage acts, and that's literally how I look at all of these guys, they're just simply stage acts.

Whenever they do their prophetic gift or whatever it is that they say that they have, they also combine other verses to negate the testing of that gift. Touch-knock God's anointed as one example. They'll use that phrase and they'll say, this means you can't test us, you can't question us.

Touch-knock God's anointed means, I'm superior and you're inferior. That's essentially what it's saying. But there were multiple descriptions of how to treat prophecy in the Bible. Deuteronomy, I think it's 18, it talks about testing the prophecies.

And essentially, if the prophecy came true, then it was a prophecy from God and if it was false, it was definitely not. You had to test and see, did all of the prophecy come true?

In the laterane movement, Brannum started claiming that he had predicted, that he had this vision of this bridge falling and 16 men fell to their deaths. And there's several elements that you can use this as an example of how this movement was swayed in this wrong direction.

So we were able to go back through the records. Fortunately, there was a Coast Guard station set up that was monitoring the entire construction of this bridge. And we were able to determine that 16 men never died on this bridge.

It was actually a bridge further upstream that the event happened on. But Brannum said in the vision, I saw a man holding a sign 22 and 22 years to that day, 16 men fell to their deaths.

So the first question one must ask is, does it come true? According to the Bible, you have to test it. Was there such a thing? Was it 22 years? And if you go back to, there's actually a lot of documentation on this bridge because the Coast Guard was involved.

If you line the dates up, 22 years would have Brannum prophesying before he was even born. The bridge wasn't built 22 years later. So it fails the test, right? Yeah, that's a great example.

He said 16 men would falter the death and drown. Well, not a single person were we able to confirm drown. The Coast Guard kept logs of everything right down to the, we need sandwiches, so we're sending somebody for bread.

That's the detail of these logs, right? So it failed the first test. The, there are other passages, I think it's Deuteronomy 13. It talks about how, even if the prophecy comes true, the prophet can still be false if they're, leading people away from God.

If you examine this bridge prophecy, and this applies to almost all of the prophecies in the NAR, not a single one of those prophecies are leading people to God. They're instead leading people to the prophecies.

I prophesied this, I'm the one you should look at. Look at me, look at me, I did the prophecy, right? So it fails number two, there's nothing that could possibly lead me closer to God by learning that 16 men felt are the deaths off of a bridge.

Has nothing to do even with me at all, or the city, or, you know, the whole thing is ridiculous. Also, not many people are aware of this, but if you understand the language that is written about prophets and prophecy, Jesus said, you'll know them by their fruits.

That whole passage is referring to examining a prophet. You have to look at also the moral character of the prophet. They have planted this idea in the minds of the congregations that if they can prophesy and it sounds true and it comes true, then they must be of God, no questions asked.

But that's not necessarily true. If you look in the ancient world, you had countless prophets. You had the Oracle of Delphi, which is one of the greatest, you know, set of prophets. It wasn't a single person, it was multiple, but very, very accurate, according to the histories of the ancient world, and they're not leading people to God.

So you can't say this is a prophet of God. This was definitely something else, right? So you have to look at the moral character and the big thing that is really missed, and I find this odd, because if you look at how the Pentecostal movement developed, they were trying to recreate the what is described in the New Testament about how the day of Pentecost came, and how what happened when the Spirit fell?

Well, it is, I think it's Corinthians. It says let the prophets speak, let two or three of them, and let others weigh what is said, which is meaning you're gonna have multiple people prophesy, and then people are going to be dedicated to testing the prophecy.

Is it 100% accurate or did it fail? And remember, this is God speaking through the mouth of a person, so if any single detail is off, you can tell that this guy is making it up or this girl is making it up, because God doesn't miss details.

That's not how this works. And those simple four things, there's probably more, but if you read through the Bible and you understand how to treat prophets, it's not that you treat them as though they're this untouchable superior being, they're one among you, they're a human like you are, and there might be wolves among the sheep, you have to test them and make sure that they're not a wolf.

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 contribute

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You know, going back to Deuteronomy 18, I actually opened that up here to just take a glance at it. And yeah, it's some pretty strong language that God gives for prophets that come that claim to be speaking for God. And here's a quote just to put us all at ease. Verse 21 of Deuteronomy 18, N-I-V, you may say to yourselves, how can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?

Verse 22, if what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message that the Lord has not spoken, that prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed. I mean, that's a pretty clear test. Now, some people might say, well, that was the Old Testament. We need to now go to the New Testament to see what does prophecy look like in the New Testament? And I mean, I think that's a fair point. We have the prophet Agabus in the New Testament in the Book of Acts, which he actually prophesied, I believe it was to Paul,

that you would be bound up with ropes if you go to such and such place. So there were specificity in what Agabus said. It wasn't like, you, Paul, the Apostle, are going to be bound in spiritual ropes and struggles in the demonic principalities, like some flowerly language. It was a very specific indicator that you could actually look at and know whether it comes to pass or not.

Right? So very measurable and very objective. And as you're talking, John, I was thinking about what came to mind back to the specificity thing, and you're probably familiar with this. It is the, at least in our worlds of the NAO.

Or it was the prophecy of Paul Cain about the earthquake in 1988 and Jack Deer and his son Steven Deer in particular have talked about this publicly in the past couple of years, you can check out the article on divine detours and I know you've talking to you've talked sorry that was incorrect English you've talked to Steven before John on your podcast but there's the story.

We're told about when Paul Cain asked Jack Deer to introduce him to John Wimber and then you know the meeting was scheduled in the summer of 1988 when the Deers moved out to Anaheim, California to be on John Wimber's staff and Paul Cain said that the Lord showed him that there would be an earthquake in Southern California on the day.

He arrived in Anaheim and the interesting thing is is there was an earthquake as I understand it, there was an earthquake that happened in Armenia and then there was another earthquake that happened, I believe in SoCal, correct me if I'm wrong, but the one in Armenia was very, very destructive, it was, there were a lot of people that died.

The one in Southern California, I don't know, but the thing about Southern California has everybody who's living in California knows this and I have lived in California, Northern California, but even in Northern California we had a lot of seismic activity.

To a Southern California especially, you have a ton of seismic activity happening all the time, so here's the question, what is the probability, like statistically I would love to know on any given day in Southern California in 1988, what was the probability of a large earthquake hitting that region?

Is it one out of a million, is it one out of 10,000, is one out of 1,000, one out of 100, and then you take a step further, you're going to like, well, define large earthquake, how do you know what is a large earthquake, is it 4.0 on the Richter scale, is it 5.0, and then the next question is how deep is the earthquake, because we know that you can have a very high rating on the Richter scale of an earthquake, but if it's really deep it won't create as much damage.

So these are all the questions I'm asking, in my brain, was it coincidental that not just one, but two earthquakes happened that actually did, record in history, you can look it up, is that coincidental, did Paul Caine have some kind of, and I can just tell John, you've got a lot of opinion about this, I can't wait to hear.

What is that, what's going on here, is this an example of coincidences? Is this an example of maybe Paul Kane got one right? I don't know. I legitimately don't know. I'm dying to know what you think.

Back to my chiefs game. If I were to have set there and watched a pre-show game where I was watching about the other team and I saw that the star quarter back is out.

They had to put in second string and their defensive line. A couple guys are sick or broken legs. And I knew that the other team was heavily crippled. Then if I were to randomly say you watch the chiefs are going to win this game.

It really means nothing because I've watched the pre-game show and I know that the other team has a strong disadvantage. Well, to anyone who doesn't live in Southern California or hasn't spent any significant amount of time who is unaware how many earthquakes happen in California per day.

It's not just one or two. I mean we're talking right. You can pull up a map and you can see it is if I were to predict that an earthquake is going to happen tomorrow I might actually get it right.

Because it just can't continually happens. It sits right there on the San Andreas fault. Well, a lot of people also didn't know this one. Kane was throwing these random predictions. Armenia also has a fault line going right through it.

So what you see in Southern California, you also see an Armenia. And if you apply that to the global scale which he did, I can predict that tomorrow an earthquake is going to happen.

And I'm going to be right because somewhere in the world some country is going to have an earthquake. That's the way that that's the way the world we live in works. But that's how these people do it. And again, take it back to those criteria that I mentioned before. How does it help the church to know that there is an earthquake going to happen?

What good does that do? What value is that to the church? How does it better the church? Instead, it's pointing to prophecy as basically pointing to the prophet as the old authority. And it's pointing people to him instead of God.

So this is actually failing one of the criteria. That's a great point. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, it's not just about the event. Like, let's say, okay, let's give them a benefit out. Let's say it was potentially a legit prophecy.

Okay, but like, yeah, part two, like, how many people came to the Lord or who chose to follow Jesus Christ because of this earthquake prophecy? That is a great point. And so, and I mean, and then, then, you know, my next sort of snark comment question is, well, how do you know, like, how do you know somebody's getting pointed towards God in this situation?

And I don't know. I mean, that's probably a subjective question that's probably, it's probably a different answer for everybody, every different person, just spending on that person's experience, but still like. If you bowl it down and you just look at it face value, like, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I think probably the result was that Paul Kane was elevated in his sort of position and his believability and validation as a profit, you know?

And it wouldn't be long after this that we're actually, it was during this time that the Kansas City Profits were sort of in their heyday in Kansas City and so sort of helped to, I think probably bolster his position in that sort of circle and, you know, contribute to the prophetic history of IHOP and then other circles and groups too.

But yeah, it's very perplexing. Like, I like to look at both sides of the argument and really give it an honest look and not just, you know, say, okay, well, it's all just bad.

Let's throw it all out. Like, I actually want to give each side of the argument the benefit of the doubt and think about it critically. I would love to know what the statistical probability is, though, of an earthquake, a major earthquake happening at any given day in Southern California, more specifically 1988.

And I'm sure GROC or chat GPT could tell us. According to chat GPT, the probability is 100%, 100%. I mean, if you look at the map, you understand why it's like this. Every single day, there's going to be an earthquake somewhere.

And, you know, so let's take a step back at this. Kane was William Brannem's protege. Brannem got, he ejected from Germany and, I don't know how many other countries. Kane is the one that Brannem would send in his stead.

He was literally that guy, right? He started working with Brannem in the mid 50s. I think it was the mid 50s. He started working with Brannem. So he would have been around for what I'm about to say.

Around the mid 50s, there were a lot of things that started to happen quickly. One of which was Brannem took on the leadership of the homosexual, William T. Ferry von Blumberg, who was one of the directors for the Fellowship Foundation, otherwise known as the family.

And they were planting family organizations all around the globe, apparently. And he was openly homosexual to his inner circle. Kane was also, and other people we have connected to this were as well. And all that to say, each one of the men who were involved in this inner circle was preaching strongly against homosexuality while working with known homosexuals.

So all that to say, they were speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They weren't doing what it was that they were saying, which if you understand by their fruits, you should know them.

and all of the passages that are related to that, they're actually failing one of the critiques for being a prophet. Jim Jones is one of the people who started working with them at the same time.

That's the level of nasty that this gets. Well, it is during the mid-50s that William Brannum took one of his old alleged prophecies and kind of twisted and rewrote it. During the early, gosh, wouldn't that what it would have been in the early 40s to mid-40s, there were men who were claiming that Mussolini was going to lead people to the end of day's destruction because of the Christian identity doctrine.

They believed that the false Jews had invaded the United States. Mussolini and Rome was the other part of this equation that would lead to Armageddon, et cetera. And Brannum admits, or you can find this on recording, he admits to almost having been arrested for this, why there were several people who were involved in this conspiracy that were part of what became the great sedition trial of 1944.

They were essentially trying to sway the American public against the government and cause a mass sedition. So Brannum admits to being part of this and he claims that he had some prophecy surrounding this, well, he was one of hundreds who were making the same claims.

Fast forward to 1950s, Brannum then in the mid-1950s claimed that he had a series of prophecies in the year 1933, which included that Mussolini prophecy. He claims that he wrote them all down on a piece of paper and then buried it for no one to see.

So if you go back to the scriptural example of a prophet, the prophets had scribes that would write things down so that when the event happened, they knew that that was the event that happened by God.

They didn't hide them for no one to see. And years later, we have discovered that not only did he not bury them, the cornerstone that they were buried in was dug up twice in the history of it and found to be empty.

The details that he got in those prophecies weren't the same from retelling to retelling of what are the seven prophecies. They changed and evolved over time, they grew, they morphed, where I'm headed with this is, people like Paul Cain were there with Brannum when he would say, do you remember, when I prophesied about this female vice president, which wasn't one of the original seven, people who were with him, who thought him to be the end of day's messenger from God, they were studying what he said, everything that he said.

So in the 50s, they suddenly came, to be aware of these 1933 prophecies, they would have scrambled to learn more. Well, why didn't he tell us this until 1950s? Then when they got the original seven, the moment in which he mentions an eighth and drops one of the first original seven, they would have stood back and said, what in the world? That's not the seven that I have.

I'm studying this because I think this is the messenger from God, but the way that Brannum did this was, and with the men that he was working with, was with such deception, that the men who were with him, Kane included, were fully aware that he wasn't being truthful about even having the seven prophecies. There's clear evidence that he never even had a single prophecy. They were aware of this, but what they did was they watched the way that he introduced after the fact, retroactive, or whatever is the word that you used in the beginning of

this. Retroactive prophecy. Retroactive prophecy. He did this, and they watched the people believe it, but not only that, they watched the people believe it and start sending in large sums of money. Then this turns into this big scheme, this basically religious racketeering is what this is.

It turned into this, and they saw the power of claiming prophecy, but more than that, they saw that the power he had over the individuals to believe him as a prophet, no matter whether it's true or not. They wanted to adopt this and create a movement that was far larger in scope than even what Brannum created. Kane helped create this. This is mind-blowing. Okay. What you're describing here, among other things, is first and foremost, spiritual abuse at the highest level, right? Because yes, you're talking about deception that it's deception that intersects with human agency, and it hijacks a person's belief in God, and it causes that person's agency to be exploited

and supplanted by the man of God, you know, prophet person, and then you wake up 20 minutes, or 20 years later, after being in it, and you're like, my entire internal spiritual structure has been hijacked, right? And you multiply that by like hundreds of thousands of people that have now been impacted by the offshoots of these, of the original message organization, the NAR, but like back to what you said, that is a perfect example. That's crazy, though. I've heard you talk about this before, like with the 1933 prophecy with William Brannum, and how they dug up the,

you know, the stone, and there was no paper, you know, there was no, there's nothing there that was recorded. This is a perfect example of retroactive prophecy. And And other prophetic people have done this around other geopolitical events, namely 9-11.

Okay. I can't even tell you how many people I've run across. I'm sure you have two prophetic people who conveniently announce to the general public that they had a dream or vision after the fact about 9-11, right?

So even years later, like some of these are even recent, like in the past five years, hey, by the way, y'all, I had a dream where I saw the towers get hit by airplanes.

And they all, you know, fell down and disappeared and exploded. And these are all these people died. And it's like, I mean, really like, you know, this is probably the most severe terrorist attack our country has faced ever.

And you're getting on the horn and saying, oh, yeah, I knew about this beforehand. Well, if you knew about it beforehand, why didn't you tell us? Why did you not bother to warn us?

And, you know, and I think some of these guys are so steeped in their, believe it, you know, drinking the real Kool-Aid that they actually say, well, I did warn y'all. I gave y'all all these prophetic words beforehand.

You know, if you were spiritual, you would have been able to interpret this and you could have avoided loss of life or something or some whatever. You know, and it's like, this to me is the ultimate grift because you're using, you're actually using events that happen already in the past.

Okay, again, going back to my original point, it is 2025. And I could get on YouTube or some other platform and say I'm a prophet and I could tell y'all, you know what, I had a dream that COVID was going to happen.

I had a dream that this virus was going to, this new virus that nobody has ever heard of, that doctors have never even seen before, was going to take over the world, was going to be this worldwide pandemic and all these people are going to die.

And I saw all this back in 1994, you know, and I saw dark clouds coming over the United States and all these people dying from this virus that would make you cough and you would lose, and I hate to be graphic, but this is the kind of stuff they say.

Like, people can't breathe, they have to have respirators. And then, and the next thing you know, you've got family members that are dying of a virus that you've never heard of before. And, but like, this is exactly what they do.

They will take a historical event that has already occurred. They will claim that they, they knew about it beforehand by reason of prophetic revelation, whether it be vision dream or visitation or something else.

And, because I knew about it, I validated as a prophet, I am to be f- followed, I am to be listened to, I am to be believed. And by the way, to your point, I am to be given much money to like, you need to write your checks to me because I need to be able to fund my ministry to be able to continue telling you about all the future events that haven't yet happened.

So let me blow your mind even further. Please. So in the late 1940s, right about the time Laterane is getting ready to explode. William Brandham starts to say, you may not have known this people. He's speaking to the audience. But the very day that the Lord sent his angel down to me and met me in that room alone with this angel to give me the gift of divine healing, that day was the same exact day that Israel became a nation. And he gives it a year. And people who are listening think, oh my gosh, this is symbolic. This is spiritual because Israel.

Well, the year he gives wasn't the year that Israel became a nation. He was just pulling it out of his butt. So what year did he claim that Israel became a nation? I'll just read you the quote. He says, an estranged thing of that that you might not know, the very day the angel of the Lord called me out, May the 6th, 1947, and issued the gift to pray for the sick was the very same day that Israel became a nation for the first time. So he's using the date May the 6th, 1947.

Here's where it gets a little bit funny. The very first recording of a faith healing ministry that we're allowed to hear. There are recordings that pre-exist this. The very first one that is in the tape index is April, 1947. So he's having these these divine healing lines before the alleged alleged angel met him. But where I'm headed with this is somewhere entirely different. Interesting.

William Brannum, we came across a book that was written by William Brannum, a little pamphlet, that was dated 1945. And he gives the date and his letter. He's got a preface letter. And he says, this day this angel or this vision has come to me and has given me this new commission to heal the sick.

So that's in 1945. He's mentioning that he's healing the sick. So he's got a divine commission way before his 1947 claim. In that letter, he describes having a gift of healing, starting I think the date goes back to 1936. And he says, and then the gift left me and then it came back. But there's a critical point that he mentions in this book. He says, in the vision, I was told to go out west because the people in the tabernacle would no longer eat my bread.

So symbolically, he's saying that the people in his church aren't listening to him. And people who are not familiar with the history of the Brannum Tabernacle do not realize the Brannum Tabernacle had this significant turnover. People were coming and they would sit for a while and then they'd never return again. So whenever he says things like, do you remember back in that day when a prophet said, you people were there, you were hearing it. Well, most of the people that he's speaking to weren't there. They didn't know it. The ones who were there, they quit

coming because they knew that this guy just lied through his teeth. Why would I come back to this liar who's saying this? But those statements are recorded. So every future generation that hears those recordings, they think that he's being truthful. And here's the point I'm trying to make, which not many people understand this. For these types of people, Brannum, Bickel, all of the ones who are pulling this prophetic nonsense, they don't really care if what they say is true.

They don't even care if the audience believes that it's true because the audience that do not believe will leave eventually and they'll be replaced with people who do. And the people who are replaced can go back and they can see it's either written form, it's recorded form, whatever it is. They'll go back and say, wow, everybody that I'm in this new church with, not knowing that this turnover exists. They all believe the same thing. I must put it to. Okay, you learned me something. You learned me something, John. So, okay, let's go back. May, you said May 6th, 1947.

Right. He said it was May the 6th, 1947. And you can go back. I mean, this is fully documented. You can go to the state of Israel. It was May, I think it was May 14th, 1948.

48. Yeah. I'm looking at the office of the historian of the US State Department. It says May 14th, 1948 was when Israel became a nation. So he was one year and seven days early.

Yeah. But keep in mind, like he's saying this to people who have already just kind of adopted everything that he said, those people who recognize that, wait a minute, that's not even true. They would have just left there. They're not here anymore. Yeah. Okay, this is what, yeah. Okay, this is what I want to say, that the thing that you learned me right now. So when I go back and I look at the structure and organization of all three trifecta, hypercars, mathematic churches, other part of it, right? So for me, it was Morningstar, Iop KC,

slash metricers, bellship, and then Bethel. Every one of those organizations orbits is very similar to what you did. described in that, but it's anchored around now, schools of ministry, uh, and conferences, right? And so you've heard the concept conference church.

Well, what happens is just what you described in the brand of organization, you have volumes and volumes of people coming and you have volumes and volumes of people leaving. It's literally like a revolving door. Now, you do have some people that are long, you know, lifers or whatever, people that stick around for a while. And you know, we still know a number of them at Bethel that are in leadership and staff and what have you, they've been there for a good long time. But by and large, people come and people go in great number, you know, whether it's they spend a year, they spend six months,

they might spend three weeks or five years or whatever. For us, it was four years at Bethel, but it's, it's a great observation because

because to exactly what you said, like the people that would have been there at the time that these original things were spoken, they're, they, a lot of them may not be there anymore. Um, even though now I think we have a lot more volume of material that's recorded, both audio and video, then they did back then. So it's easier to kind of, you know, it's easier to see through that than it was back then, probably, but still like there are plenty of people who are still drinking the Kool-Aid, like they're coming in, they're staying and then maybe

they get disillusioned or they leave or whatever and they, you know, and they're out and you got a whole crop of new people coming in. But I will say this about Bethel. I've been hearing from credible sources that, and this is just what I've been hearing, I don't know if it's true or not, I'm just saying, like take this as a grain of salt, um, that enrollment of BSSM, Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry is kind of going down. It's kind of on a downtrend. Um, and I just wonder like, is it because word is getting out that more and more of the scandals is, you know,

being made public, there's been more hubbub at Bethel here this year around Sean Bolts, the Griff, the, you know, the fake prophecy data mining that Sean Bolts did. There's been stuff with Bob Hartley over there. And, you know, and so you just wonder like, is that impacting the incoming pipeline of people? And I'm just interested in the numbers like, and it's hard to prove this because these numbers aren't really public like as far as how many people are coming into the Bethel orbit now versus like maybe five years ago, for example. And is, is that notably different? Is it comparable or,

or what? I would love to know what those numbers are. I don't know what they are, but I would venture to say based on what I've heard that the numbers have decreased. But that being said, Bethel still has tremendous influence and resources worldwide.

in their reach. So, even if they did have a down tick in pipeline of people coming in, you know, that may not make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things as far as their influence on large numbers of people.

I think it's a combination of things and it brings me actually to my last point. So, you have this turnover. People who recognize that this whole thing is a scam. They leave and new people come and anybody who's in the prophetic can say, do you remember when I said, we'll have the people weren't there so they didn't hear it.

But the people who were who come, who believed this, they get under this level of mind control where they're part of the system, even though that they can recognize there are cracks in the walls of the system.

They have been indoctrinated. So, when they do leave, when they come across something that causes them to leave, they don't throw it all away. They don't realize that they've been scammed. Instead, they'll take whatever is the thing that they found wrong and they'll say, well, this is problematic. I'm going somewhere else.

When they do, they take with them their indoctrination. And because they're in this apostolic network that is under the umbrella of the NAR, they usually go to another church that's in the same network, who's doing the same exact thing.

They're saying, do you remember when I said, well, then they're already indoctrinated from the first church. They go to the second and they immediately accept it and believe it, rather than use critical thinking.

So, it's a problem that cascades and grows over time with the individuals that go from church to church. But that is a topic, I think, for another day. Yeah, we should talk about that more like the migration.

I know we've talked about cross-pollination before. And that's definitely part of my story, too, like a hop between three different ones and then some. So, yeah, it happens, yours truly did that. So, guilty is charged, but yeah, we should talk about that sometime.

Awesome. Well, this has been fun. Thank you for doing this. Of course, I'm absolutely happy to be here. 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-Branum.org and the grit in the wild podcast. 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.