October 1, 2024 • 62 mins
Robert sits down with Prop to discuss Apollo Quiboloy, the Pentacostal cult leader known as 'the Jeffery Epstein of the Philippines'.
(2 Part Series)
Sources:
Quiboloy et al - Indic Dup.pdf (courthousenews.com)
Who is Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, the pastor on the FBI Most Wanted List? : NPR
Duterte himself offered to look after Quiboloy properties | Philstar.com
Filipino Genealogy Project: The Pastor and the President (archive.org)
How a Filipino preacher wanted by the FBI held police off for weeks (nbcnews.com)
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
You see Costco be like, hey man, we don't sell.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
That, we don't sell that baby oil.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, hey, look, don't be speaking on my name. Don't
be speaking keep my name out your fucking mouth.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I can't believe you tried to throw fucking uh Costco
into the back.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Costco is like, hold up, hold up, this shit you
got going is not with us. That is true. To
keep my name about your mouth.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
See if I if I was dead to rights and
only lying about Costco could get me off, I would
I would take the fall for Costco.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
I mean, yeah, what did Costco do to you?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Except for Costco's Costco has done so much for me exactly,
mostly provide me with olives.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
But you know, I feel like if there's somebody that
you don't go after in America, it's Costco.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I feel like it's it's it's the closest thing. We
have Costco in the post office. Like that's what we
have as like beloved institutions in this country.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, honestly, yes, Like you what what have they done
wrong except for provide to us everything that feeds our decadence?
Like this is all this is, It's the most American thing,
Like you know what I'm saying, like, Hey, you want
some mayonnaise, why don't you get a drum of it?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Personally, I don't. I don't enjoy going to Costco because
the aisles are really high, and as a person who's
very short, I'm like, this feels like a bad way
to go, like the fear of this argument. M hmm.
Plus it's just there's too many.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Fucking people anywhere where you could buy some dickies and
like you know, wild caught salmon in the same place.
I'm like this, this is American man.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I often just think about that man that got that
shirt made of the sticker for the barcode for the
rotisserie chicken. You know what I'm talking about? Yes, Okay,
I think about I think about him quite often. Like
I hope you're well, sir.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It's a hero, bro Robert, we've been recording.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
This entire time. Are we keeping this Costco conversation? In
I I.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
We're not allowed to cut the Costco conversation? Yeah, prop
we're talking about the Jeffrey Epstein of the Philippines. His
name is Apollo Cloid. Anyway, Cold Open's fucking done. Oh
we're back, boy, we really just kind of dropped media
res into this. Motherfucker didn't we didn't We Are the
(02:37):
kids learning words like that anymore? Do they have that
on the tiktoks? I assume if it's not on the tiktoks,
the kids aren't learning it anymore. I've become one of
those old men who's angry at the kids for not
having read the same things I read when I was
in high school, coming like the great Gadsby.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I feel like you were a you've been you've been
an old man since you're junior year of high school.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It is, it is, yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I have nothing to say.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
No.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
My brother was like that.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
He was just like I was, like when he turned sixteen,
we were like, you're forty. Yeah, you are a forty
year old, sixteen year old mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of us are
like that. And my knees have always been forty. Jason Petty,
host of Hood Politics, also guest on Behind the Bastards Today.
Prop Yeah, buddy, we go back a bit at this point.
You and I have been friends friends for a spell,
(03:37):
and this year, you know, I've called on you a
couple of times for some real tough episodes, the Bobby
Lee episodes, and the Thomas Jefferson episodes, not easy ones.
And I was like, I want to do something fun
for my friend Jason when he comes back on the show.
We're not going to do, you know, some fucking slaveholding
monster from American history. We're not going to do. You know,
(03:58):
We're gonna We're gonna steer clear of the United States entirely.
We're gonna do a fun one. I'm gonna find him
like a nice cot beater or something. Anyway, I fucked up,
and we're doing the Jeffrey Epstein of the Philippines. It
was not Jeffrey Epstein. If it was just a guy
named Jeffrey Epstein in the Philippines, that would be probably
responsible of me.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
You just got me a ballique Bayon box of trash
that you just brought over. That's shot out to all
my penoise y'all, I'm gonna throw just tell y'all right now,
my stepmom's Filipino.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
You know she's beside it. She's from Domaghetti.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My best friend who I toured forever, DJ Fectol Rest
in peace, Filipino. I'm from the part of town that's
like a good forty percent Filipino, So there's gonna be
a gang of Filipino jokes. I'm gonna drop in here.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
That's good, that's good.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
So many references that I'm gonna drop in this.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, and I yess yeah. Well, I guess there's nothing
to do but get into it. The guy we're talking
about today as a man, I'm gonna guess most Americans
have not heard of, although he committed a decent number
of his crimes in the United States. His name is
Apollo Kiboloi, which I checked on Google. Right before this.
I listened to two different pronunciation videos that both said
(05:14):
it differently. Hopefully that's right. But I did just my
background research here.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
We could call him, we could just call him the
like weird.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, anyway, it is.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
This is finally an Apollo episode I've been wanting to
do ever since a Greek man punched me out at
a Delhi, I've been wanting to do an episode on
men named Apollo. Unfortunately, this is not a Greek Apollo,
nor does the name have anything to do with Greek mythology.
That's a little bit weird at least it I don't
think it does.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Okay, that's not. The weird part is what happened right
before you said that you got punched.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Why you get.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
A lot of deli's So yeah, that's just what happens
at a deli. If you're someone who feels about cured
meats as strongly as I do.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, like there's some sort of there's some sort of
accidental insults you did.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Oh it was purposeful.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Oh never mind, Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
No, he that his saying is wrong. Yeah, yeah, we
had a scrap. So I'm not gonna say a whole
lot about Jeffrey Epstein in these episodes. I bring this
up because like that is what a lot of people
write when they've been doing articles. As a spoiler, A
bunch of shit blew up with Apollo very recently. His
life has collapsed this year, and so when because his
(06:35):
story is crazy, news media all around the world wants
to cover it because it's just the kind of thing
you got to cover. But because it's a Filipinos story
and most people are not familiar with this guy. He's
very famous within the Philippines, but most people are not
familiar with this guy, you know, in other countries. The
touchstone that the news has picked is he's the Jeffrey
Epstein of the Philippines, and I can say, you know, look,
(06:57):
that's a little bit you know, grow but also I
want your clicks too, you know, I'm not too proud
to go for those clicks. Right, Listen, listen, listen.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
When you can neatly package something that it may be
a little rough around edges, I'm maybe cutting out a
lot of factual things, but it's but it's a digestible pill.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
I'm with you, Yeah, absolutely with it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, that's that's the way. And it's also there's something
appropriate in terms of like we're never going to give
Jeffrey the punishment that he deserved because he punched out early,
but making his name like he really has in very
short order. He's not like a Hitler level, but in
terms of like name that is a recognizable shorthand for evil,
he's gotten shockingly close in a very short period of time.
(07:46):
You'd be like, yeah, that guy's a motherfucking Epstein. Everyone's like, oh,
I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, I
love it. He's a proper now now, you know, like, yeah,
I love it. And that's appropriate, That's that's what he deserves.
So wow, we Yeah, that's a reference. Was it's a
it's a TV show kind of a game. Anyway, google
(08:07):
it one day.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Wow. We it's a fun time.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I want to go to the Philippines, especially now that
our former Bastards Pod alumni Uhrigo to Terte is no
longer running things there. Always wanted to see it but
haven't been. It doesn't enough.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, my dad, my dad said he's gonna move with
with with my stepmom to the Philippines.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
And I was like, brother, no, you not. I'm just
looking at him, like, you're not leaving the city. Your dad,
your dad, my dad?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, my dad. I was like, Sir, I get it.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I feel you. He's like, man, I'm retired.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
He's like, bro, we got it, son, we got Helsa.
Guy like two cows. I was like, so you're gonna
move to the Have.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
You taken care of a cow? Because he's not as
fun as I was like, Dad, you from I grew
up with a lot of cows and they are a
mixed bag. You are a.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
City boy, Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I don't think you're ready for the amount of poop
you're gonna have to deal with. Great for heat, sir,
this is a jungle. Yeah, anyway, So Apollo carry on.
Kibbeloi was born on April twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, about
you know, four years out from the end of the
US withdrawal from the Philippines. Right, so you know, the
(09:21):
World War two happens, right, Japan is like, hey, we'd
like the Philippines, and the US is like, here's Douglas MacArthur.
He'll stop you. And then Douglas MacArthur's like, no, I
won't actually, And so Japan, Japan has the Philippines for
a little while, and then we come back, right, and yeah,
that's the that's the way it goes, you know, eventually
(09:43):
we leave anyway. Kind of. So his hometown Apollos was
de Vos City, which is where Rodrigo ju Terte got
his start as mayor, right like, that is where he
kind of you know started his political career too. And
these two men are very strongly tied together, right. Terte
is the guy who killed thou probably of drug users
and associated people during his time as this brutal authoritarian
(10:05):
president he did leave office, so not really dictator, but
very bad strong man type president. And Apollo in here
very close, so I'm not bringing him up just because
like he's the other guy from the Philippines we've covered
so far, right, Yeah, I know two guys from the Philippine. No,
he is directly tied in this story. So Apollo, the
(10:25):
youngest of nine children, was named again, not after the
Greek god or the much more impressive Apollo Creed, but
after Mount Oppo, a dormant volcano that, at almost ten
thousand feet above sea level, is the highest peak in
the Philippines. I should note here that I read on
Apollo's churches website that he had been named after a mountain,
(10:46):
and when I went to look up the first result
for Apollo Mountain, I found this book, which has nothing
to do with the story, but it made me laugh.
Mountain min Eventswood Valley, Aaron Havoc. That can't be a name.
So if you're trying to imagine what young child Apollo
(11:06):
CIBOLOI looks like, this is exactly I'm assuming this is.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
A picture of him. Yeah, yeah, totally nice soul.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yes, So yeah, anyway, I pointed this out. I put
this up also to point out that Google is just
really knocking it out of the park these I don't know,
great results always relevant to my search queries.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Like if there's anybody that say, hey, let's do something
good and then start not doing it good and see
if y'all stick around.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, it would be like if I started a podcast
about all of the worst people in history and then
at a certain point pivoted to just doing ads for
the Church of Scientology, just long extended ads for the Scientology.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Why is you doing this?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Even wanted to clean Tom Cruise's house. Well, there's a way, sorry, anyway.
Decade after his birth, the website for the cult that
Apollo would come to lead said this about the day
that he was born at home quote.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Hey, holdo, holdo, hold on, you slipped in the cult
he was about to lead that no point was there
a warning.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
That this was he had a cult? I did not.
I think I might have mentioned he had a cult.
He's got a cult.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
You said no, no, no. You said you were going
to try to find a nice little cult episode.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
For produde, and then you said you failed.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
You failed that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Well I failed at it being nice because those.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Wait time out.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
But it is a cult episode.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
I appreciate getting the cult.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah I did. There's a certain point at research it
which you can't turn back around and pick another topic.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
I feel like you we're doing it. You just give
a politicians answer, but us Okay.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Thank you, Sophie. I'm getting ready for my big presidential run.
Uh And I just want to let you guys know
I'm not going to be responsible with the nukes. That's
my promise. You're not going to have nowhere about it nevermore.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I've never been more convinced to not vote for somebody
than if Robert was running.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Like, I think this is going to go well with
a lot of people because look, you know Donald Trump,
who knows what he's going to do with the nukes, right,
Joe Biden, Oh, sleepy Joe. We just don't know much
about his mind state. Me. You know I'm going to
use them, and you know I'm not going to use them. Well,
that's a promise. You don't have to worry about it anymore.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean I feel you know, some people you
want cooking, some people you won't, cleaning.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Some people don't dropping the H bomb on Lake Superior. Okay, anyway,
he's the script. So from the club site for his cult,
this is what it said about the day that he
was born night. I should say that he was born
at home. The knight suddenly turned to day moments after
his birth, and a huge eagle had perched in the
trees outside their home and had stayed there until he
(13:50):
was born. So let's you know, God turned night into
day and eagle watched over him. All the good stuff
on some.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Found.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Okay, Yeah, so yeah, his family had was poor, or
at least that's kind of what the stories say.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
You get the feeling maybe they were closer to I mean,
the middle class was not really a big thing in
the Philippines at this time, but I don't think they
were as poor as he kind of likes to portray
them as. But his parents may have been prior to
having him. They had immigrated from the family's ancestral home
in Lubao after World War Two in order to find work,
which is what brings them to Da Vos City. By
(14:30):
the time Apollo came into the picture, they seem to
have been solidly working class. His biography claiming that though
the family was poor, they were happy. Now, I found
what appears to be a picture of his family from
a news report. It's into Galog, it's not translated, but
from what I can tell it looks like the kid
in the middle because it zooms in on him is
the our center. So and you can see just looking
(14:52):
at the hair, you can tell to own a cult
like that, that kid winds up a cult leader. I'm sorry.
Kid on the left probably not kid on the right,
maybe you know, but kid in the middle, that's a
cult leader. Yeah. For so you can just tell.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
You can look at all of his days in Quias
he was.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Although that baby in the back looks kind of like alive,
not alive. Maybe that's a doll. I can't really tell.
I don't know if I love the very incense skin
tones there. That baby does not look well.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Right, maybe the.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Flash was on. So it's a little unclear to me. Again,
just how to characterize the family socioeconomic status. Because his
parents became pastor leaders at a Pentecostal church in Defoul
early on. His dad had been raised Protestant, like mainline Protestant, right,
which which put because obviously like Pentecostal church is a
Protestant denomination, but it's also kind of it's not mainline,
(15:55):
you wouldn't say, And this kind of put them in
the fact that he kind of moves to the Pinna
Costal faith puts them in line with a big post
war trend in the Philippines. American missionaries had brought Pentecostalism
to the country, but it was spread largely by these
kind of swashbuckling and these guys are Filipinos, swashbuckling like
pioneer church planters who are like Johnny Apple, seeds of
(16:19):
Pentecostal churches. And they're I mean, the term they use
is planting churches and these like settlements in the frontier
that are established in the jungle. Right yeah, Now, if
you're not aware of a lot of this, Pentecostalism is
a strain of Protestant Christianity that emphasizes charismatic practices like
speaking in tongues and what's called baptism in the Holy Spirit.
(16:43):
These are the kind of folks. They don't just believe
in miracles. They believe that God often bestows miraculous ability
and powers on members of churches during worship sessions.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
My argument is, like I've always argued that, like Philippine know, y'all,
y'all black is hell. I don't care what you say,
like you are black Asians. Yeah, somehow they're black and
Latino at the same time. Like, so to me, the
idea that it's like yeah, and then as a Pentecostal church,
I'm like, of course it is, because y'all black.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Is hell, they're also there's like a I'm not obviously
qualified to comment on that, but the fact that there's
a huge American influence on the way worship works there,
right yeah, yeah, you see here in this because i
mean we were there for quite a while.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, right, totally.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah. So his father must have been a man of
some ability and personal magnetism, because he does very well
in the Pentecostal faith as it is kind of sweeping
the country. And it seems that a skill for like
preaching and you know, like that kind of charismatic preaching
ran in the family because Apollo's older brother, Jose eventually
becomes the assistant general superintendent of the largest Pentecostal organization
(17:54):
in the Philippines. Now, one noteworthy fact about the Kiboloi
family is that they seem to have rejected there's a
lot of like in the area they're growing up in
kind of the rural area, and like the slums, there's
a lot of communist organizing when he's a little kid
that is sweeping through the surrounding communities, and they are
(18:14):
very much against it. This is a very conservative anti
communist family. We get very little here. This is something
I've kind of read in between the lines and also
just kind of based on stuff that happens later. But
due to a vaguely defined hardship that may have been
related to a conflict with like these local communist groups,
which are insurgent organizations. Apollo is moved away from home
(18:39):
as a boy to live with his older sister. I
don't know why. Just some of the stuff I've read
make me think it may have been tied to some
political conflicts in their hometown. I don't actually know, though.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
It's also like, what's interesting this may I don't know
if this is going to play in later, but I
feel like it probably will because of, like you said,
the communist thing. Like while Pentecostalism might be very theologically
on the fringes, like it fringes a strong word, but
like theologically liberal, they're actually very socially conservative. It's very like, yeah,
(19:12):
you know very much about like your performance of holiness.
You know what I'm saying. And that holiness is something
that you'd like. They don't drink, they don't smoke, they
don't you know what I'm saying. They're they're not free
with what you know folks will call like their liberties.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
It's very much like you know, with for us, like
you know, that's the older generation for.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
A lot of like black people.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So it's like you don't listen second music, you don't
watch rated our movies, you know what I'm saying, because
you're supposed to be holy, you feel me, and a
lot of that has to do what you being filled
with the holy ghost, you know what I'm saying. So
so to hear that like the play of like communism
may be in a thing, it makes sense to me
of those two things being together in that sense.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
It may not play in later, but I think it's.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Oh it does. No, no, no. As an adult, he is
going to have some dealings with his local commune that
are very much not pretty. So this is I'm not
bringing this stuff up for nothing, and I do kind
of because of some stuff he's going to say later.
I do suspect that like this is part of the
kind of why he's uprooted as a little boy, you know,
(20:15):
but I don't actually know that to a point of
certainty either way. He gets moved away when he's like
a kid to live with his oldest sister. His official
biography claims it was there that he learned the hard
lessons of responsibility through the rule of the stick. You
don't get a feeling, Yeah, you don't get a feeling.
She was a nice aunt, right, not on literally, but yeah,
(20:38):
yeah yeah. For eight years he attended school and worked
at his sister's bakery. He became, as he would later claim,
and again this is a liar, a diligent student. And
that quote. When he became a teenager, he forget all
about having friends or having fun because there just wasn't
time for that in his life. Again, maybe that's true.
(20:58):
I don't know. Between the lines a bit, we can
probably assume that he was not a happy boy, separated
from his family and used as free labor by his sister.
At age fourteen, he had his first vision from God,
a hallucination about the end of the world, with fire
raining from the sky igniting the gasoline depots near his
(21:18):
sister's home. Quote. People tried to escape into the sea,
but even the water was a flame, there was nowhere
to go. No, obviously, I don't believe this guy is
the prophet of or you know, would he's he's actually
going to claim the literal son of God. But I
also that's specific enough that I would believe that that's
an actual nightmare he had as opposed to he made up,
(21:39):
Like that's really the whole Igniting the gas depots near
his sister home is like such a specific thing to
bring up that that strikes me as like maybe something
something that was at some point came into his head
as opposed to something he made up later to justify
starting a cult, or night after night, the dream repeated itself.
Apollo would graduate and attend a Bible college, where he
(22:00):
finally came to realize that his nightmares weren't nightmares. They
were visions of the Second Coming. This, he would later write,
allowed him to make peace with the upheaval and difficulty
of his childhood. Quote he realized that his childhood was
all part of the father's orchestration. His sister was only
an instrument, a tool that the father had used to
mold him in the principles of discipline and responsibility that
(22:23):
made him into a vessel ready for the Father's incredible
calling in his life. Now clearly yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
God turned around for good. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
A lot of this is this part I think is
made up after the fact to justify the cult that
he starts. But I do find it interesting that he
describes his sister as just a tool meant to mold
him into shape. That's part of how you could see
like there must have been a real conflict here. That's
a very mean way to describe your sister.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Yeah, yeah, and also very Pentecostal, yes.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, yes yeah. And it also it kind of does
mirror the fact that his sister seems to have used
him as like basically a tool for free.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Labor, right for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
On his church's website, Apollo or one of his followers
makes it clear that he didn't want to go to
Bible school. His real dream was to be a pilot,
but ultimately the fact that tuition and room and board
were free are what swayed him. This was his first
chance at independence from his sister, and he took it.
As he continued to pray, he was visited by God
in dreams and he was told that he had been
(23:24):
anointed to spread the gospel. Quote the gift was so
extraordinary that Pastor Apollo had to check himself every now
and then to see if he was still sane, if
what he was saying still made sense, if he had
not after all, gone mad.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Now, okay, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Am I tripping?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Like y'all listen, listen, Yeah, tell me if I'm tripping.
It might be to ube, It might have been a
bad bull of Denuguan. Am I tripping? But I'm pretty
sure an angel was in his room last night. Now
I might be tripping.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
I think I might be here to bring about the apocalypse,
you know, anybody.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, I mean, like, look, stop me at any time.
But like, I'll pull the post down. I'll pull it
down if I need to delete it. But like I
think I am the pale horse.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of us think we're
the pale horse. There's nothing crazy about that, you know. Yeah, yeah,
if you think you're the pale horse, just keep riding, baby,
Just keep riding.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
You know, you won't have to do much about it.
You'll you'll do what you're doing, whether you try to
do or not.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
If you're a pale horse.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Maybe start on the East coast though, do me a
solid huh okay anyway, So I think Apollo is a
savvy man, and he's smart enough to pay attention and
see that by nineteen seventy two when he graduates Bible College,
American style charismatic churches are spreading everywhere, not just in
the Philippines, the most sophisticated of them. Because we've talked
about on our TV Joshua episodes, how this is a
(24:51):
lot of this is happening in parts of Africa too,
right around this period of time, a little later in Africa,
in like Central Africa, the most sophisticated of these churches
had embraced the radio and increasingly television as a way
to reach more people than could ever fill a physical church.
And he is someone who sees this happening. He's fairly insightful,
and he understands there's a lot of money and power
(25:12):
in making myself one of these men. And you know,
furthering on that point, he has a gift for preaching
that he finds that is, you know, seems to to
some extent be something that is in his family, but
that he's clearly got. He is special in this church. Yeah,
he's got the juice. His bio claims he could preach
as much as seven times a day because he had
(25:33):
to get all those words out of him. He had
a full schedule all year round, and such was his
passion and zeal that even if woken in the middle
of the night to preach, he would get up and go.
He became a famous evangelist because of this. He earned
the nickname preaching machine. I've actually heard this before. In
the US. I talk a lot about a documentary called
Marjoe that's about a guy, Marjo Gordner, who back in
(25:56):
like the fucking forties, is the youngest preacher in the
United States. Ary together travels, yes, yes, his parents, who
are very abusive, are like taking him around, and he
does a documentary as an adult, just kind of about
the actual gritty underside of this like traveling preacher industry.
And he is the kind of person who because he
(26:16):
does it a few times, it's like a party trick.
He can just lapse into a twenty minute sermon that
is this like big fire in Brimstone shit rhymes like
he's great at it. Like yeah, some people like and
this is you know, it's both there's a degree of
like natural talent, and he works at this right like
you do have to. There's it's this is not you know,
purely talent. There's a lot of skill here too. You
(26:39):
know that is crafty.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, I would.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
I would say that, like that's something that you know,
the the craft. Obviously, again I keep bringing up the blackness.
O don't know, I keep bringing it up, but like
I think the craft of preaching is something that you know.
In our culture, we do see as this is a
spiritual gift, like like God has given you this gift
(27:02):
and all you really need is just the training in
the actual text. And like once you know the text,
you got the gift. You called to be a preacher,
but you can't. But you can't help the call. Like
God has given you this gift, so like it would
be irresponsible for us to not let you use it.
And then oftentimes because this person is just so gifted
down be knowing what they talking about, and you can
(27:23):
get away with so much because you so gifted, you
know what I mean. So I'm always like whenever anybody,
especially around like when people fall for some sort of
like charismatic speaker and it ends up being a cult
like it's as silly as that is, as far as
like you're not having your antennas. Like some people are
just really good communicators. And it's like if you, if you,
(27:44):
if you like snap out for a second and just
suspend reality, fam you fall for it.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Too, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's like that, that's that's
where this guy is. He is the kind of person
who can just make a crowd lose themselves, right, Yeah,
really like listening to him. So yeah, he made waves
within his local church, and in nineteen seventy three, one
year out of Bible College, he was sent to an
(28:10):
expo in Soul, that's South Korea for Pentecostal youth activists,
which he attended as part of because, like again, the
Philippines a political situation at the time. He attends as
part of the American and Canadian delegations. He is the
only Filipino at the event. He is the only Asian
in his delegation of one hundred and eighty six people.
(28:31):
We can again infer that this is yeah, I mean
obviously there's of course people in Korea, American and Canadian delegations. Yeah, yeah,
we can infer that this was a lonely time for Apollo,
given how many times he stresses being the only non
white kid in his group, And it is here that
he claims to have first heard the voice of God
clearly give him instructions announcing his divine plans to use Apollo.
(28:57):
So Apollo naturally goes to the adult leaders and chef
ruins for his group and it's like, hey, God just
told me he's got some big old plans for me.
And their response, I don't know if it tells you
that like the rest of the charismatic movement is more grounded,
you know, at this point than it is today, or
just that they're racist and they're not willing to listen
to this, this torpedo kid, but a b.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Fam tell you experienced. Buddy's a byway, take your pick. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
After listening to him, the American missionaries gently but firmly
told him, you know, when you pray that it's you
talking to God. But when you hear God talking to you,
there's something wrong. You need to see a doctor.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Oh no, no, they just yeah, because that's that doesn't
that's yeah, yeah, no, no, y'all racist, because Pedecosa needed
you supposed to.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
You can't.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
You can't in charge until God speaks. So like that's
why charge be last and set outs. We got to
wait until we got to tarry to the Lord.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm saying, So, no, y'all just racist.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, I think you have to try it. I think
you have to pronounce it as like oh no, no, no,
no no. When you pray, that's you talking to God.
But when you hear God talking to you the exactly wrong. Yeah,
every pict it ben ends with the Lord told me. Yeah,
So like, no, fam No, I just think that's fair.
What else is fair, prop is the prices of the
(30:16):
products and services that support this podcast. You know, if
you can find a better deal, I will personally slash
the tires of the CEO of that company.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Hopefully, so hopefully, hopefully hopefully Goldilocks is the sponsor again,
another fili final joke right there, Azusa.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Sorry, it's a it's like a bakery.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Anymore, slash of bakery's tires.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I don't know, right, not.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Man, what you.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Know what I'm saying, Yeah, for legal purposes, he's joking.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah, maybe definitely. Anyway, we're back. Oh my gosh, everyone's
having a good time. I'm not, uh who, Well, fine,
all right. So Apollo at this point is like, well,
these guys don't believe what I'm saying, but you know,
(31:09):
I'm going to keep listening to these voices and keep preaching.
And things go well for him. The very next year,
he has adopted national president for the organization that like
the largest Pentecostal organization in the Philippines. And soon after
this he meets an American girl and he starts dating her.
Effect I only bring up because he brags about it
quite a bit in his biography of quote, he was
(31:31):
the apple of the eye of his denomination. He had
a beautiful American girlfriend that they wanted him to marry.
His career path to the top was clear. People loved him.
Wherever he went. He was treated like a prince. The
detail that they wanted him to his denomination wanted him
to marry this American.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
There's a lot there that I may be I'm definitely
not the right person to analyze, but that is interesting.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Yeah, Nah, that's that's good.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
There's a there's a phrase in Spanish that it may
not necessarily be the same concept. It's called advance the race, right,
so like, uh so, like what that What they're basically
saying is like, get you a white person, Joe saying, so,
get you an American white person, and it advances us.
(32:19):
So it's like, you're you're pushing our culture forward, you're
pushing the family forward, You're pushing on well forward. So
like so when you get you somebody like light skin
or an American white person, then this is like the
best thing for us, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
So it's possible.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I don't know if this is what he's going at,
but it's possible that like that's kind of a vibe
where it's like, oh yeah, no, yeah, no.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
No, no, no, they want me to marry her. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
You know what I'm saying, like, is what we're doing.
You know what I'm saying, I'm advancing. You know, it's
a flex. It's a flex to pull, to pull an.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
American yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
The next lines in his biography are that these American
missionaries who are jealous he kind of infers her jealous
that he's dating this American girl, are also become jealous
of his success, and they decide to sabotage him, and
he claims that this is what eventually set him on
the path to creating his own denomination and church. And
(33:13):
it's here that I finally do have some evidence to
the contrary to bring up, because we are when it
comes to the rest of this stuff, we are kind
of reliant upon his recollections of his early life. Here
we have some outside information. So his claim I started
having conflicts with the broader Pentecostal denomination in the Philippines
because these American missionaries didn't like me, didn't like that
(33:34):
I was seeing this girl from their country, didn't like
how good I was. That's not the whole story. Residents
from the mountainous rural region of kit Bog, where Apollo
claims to have had some of his greatest revelations, recalled
to a local newsmagazine, raptler dot Com, that back in
the nineteen seventies, Apollo was a young preacher and basically
acted as a sidekick to a government employee, Major Sanchez,
(33:58):
who had been sent by the resident to look into
the issues facing the indigenous communities in the area. Now,
this is particularly worth noting because the president at that
point was Ferdinand Marcos. So if your name is if
everyone calls you Major Sanchez, and you are sent by
Ferdinand Marcos to look into issues. Yeah yeah, facing indigenous
(34:24):
communities and a part of the Philippines in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
It's not agree.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
You're not doing anything good. It's not good.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
This is bad news man.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, right, today, the Philippines is it does not rank well.
I don't like to reduce countries to like where they
are and like the corruption index, right, but today they're
at about one sixteen out of one eighty, and things
are worse when Marcos is the dictator, right y. Marcos
is famous for awarding his cronies with you know, the
(34:54):
basically like you would get like a job like this.
The purpose of a job like this is to reward
someone who was lower to you by letting them go
rob a bunch of people blind, you know, with ribes,
with like giving contracts different companies to let them like
strip mind shit. Right, yeah, that's what Sanchez is doing
in this area, right in kind bog these are licenses
(35:15):
to embezzle and rob people blind. And the fact that
Apollo is like following Sanchez around is kind of his
tame preacher, where Sanchez is like, hey, these people are
religious as hell, I'm going to be strip mining their
lives away. You keep them entertained, right, yeah, that's yeah,
that's the insinuation. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. About our boy Apollo,
(35:35):
what he is doing at this point, as opposed to
he's just so good at preaching that these Americans are angry, right.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
As a sidekick of the Major, we can assume Apollo
made connections to other corrupt figures of the Marcos age
and put aside more than a little bit of other
people's money for himself, because that's just how it worked.
Whatever these specific details, it was bad enough what he
did with this major. We don't know exactly what he did,
but it was bad enough that the entire like the
(36:05):
Pentecostal Church in the Philippines, this fellowships him in nineteen
seventy nine, specifically because of his relationship to the Major,
which is an extreme measure, right.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't you don't give somebody a left
handed fellowship. But yeah, unless it's like real.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So his claim the Americans didn't want me there because
you know, they were jealous, the actual information, the actual
like reporting, suggests he was kicked out by his own people,
because he was hideously corrupt and involved in a figure
associated with this regime that, by the end of the
seventies was not very popular. He does that it's not
(36:48):
that bad for him, because he gets to make a
public apology and is accepted back the next year. So
we are whatever his involvement was, it was not hideous
enough that like someone's going to murder his ass in
the street or whatever. But it was bad, right. Apollo
is reassigned after he gets let back into the church
to head up a church in Agdow, where he developed
(37:08):
a habit of ranting angrily about his colleagues, who had
kicked him out of the church briefly. By nineteen eighty five,
this had caused enough problems that he was at risk
of being kicked out yet again. Now you have the facts,
this is clear the story of a corrupt asshole who
got a second chance he never deserved. This is not
how Apollo would later tell the story. Quote his heart
(37:30):
was so sincere, passionate and hungry for the Lord and
to follow what was written in his word, but he
could not see the same thing in his denomination. He
felt heartsore and disappointed. God really wants me robbing these
indigenous people.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
For Marcos heart was so sincere, passionate and hungry for
the Lord. It's like a bad Christian mingle. Bile, it's
a bad Christian mingle, bye said.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
But listen, listen, consider it a blessing when they lie
and persecute you. Blessed is he was persecuted for my
name's sake.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I was bringing the Gospel and I got persecuted for it.
So I'm in the fellowship of the suffering of our Savior.
It's doing the work of the Lord.
Speaker 4 (38:14):
And yeah, literally, it's like there's like this prompt and
all the diating apps that are like how would your
friends describe you? And then they write it themselves and
He's like, his heart was so sincere and passionate and.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Hungry for I'm going to create a dating profile on
my grinder in Portland for this guy, just using quotes
from his and see how it does. See how it does.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
Quote Robert, Let's find you some love.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I just feel some love.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Yeah, because your your heart was so passionate and hungry
from the Lord.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I'm going to be dress. Yeah, drop that nuke. I
dropped that nuke with a good heart.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. You know, it was a
loving nuke. So he writes that quote what he saw
in his denomination was politics and a failure to follow
what the father wanted. The cry in his heart was,
is this all? I want something more? And when you
think about all the bribes he was taking, I think
that that sentence is has a little bit of a
different field to it.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Come on, come on man.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
On September one, nineteen eighty five, Apollo was scheduled to
have what you might call a come to Jesus meeting,
a literal come to Jesus meeting with his superiors at
the church, where they were going to grill him on
the fact that he had been telling his congregation all
of the other pastors were quote unqualified and ignorant, basically like,
and you have to stop talking shit about the VisiC call.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah, like I had a mission this, sir. I need
you to sit down for a second.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yeah, we are unhappy with you. Yes, yeah, so yeah.
Instead of making that meeting, Apollo's like, well, fuck this shit,
I don't need I know where this is going to go.
I don't need to sit for this. I'm going to
start a cult.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
It's time road of vipers. Yeah, lost your ways?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
What else can I I do?
Speaker 3 (40:01):
I have to obey the Holy Spirit, the Spirit. Am
I gonna listen to man?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Or?
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Am I gonna listen to God? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That's right?
Speaker 4 (40:08):
And what else was he supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Cult? Obviously that's the only option.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I have to follow the spirit, and the Spirit is
leading me to do because the Lord said, And that's
what's that's the in some senses as bonkers as Pentecostal
church is they My mama used to say this. Everybody
that does say it the Lord. The Lord ain't thus
say My mama used to say that. So like, so
(40:33):
at least they going fam listen. The other Filipinos was like,
by day, you ain't here from God. That's not what
you're saying is not factual.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
That's funny.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah yeah, so they yeah, they're like, you know, he
has this meeting that he bounces on, and his version
of events, he claims that he decided to skip the
meeting because an anonymous man visited him and told him
they should meet up at a hotel later that night
so he could share a mission from God. Now listen, folks,
if this ever happens to you. Do not make that
(41:08):
meeting list. That is something terrible is going to happen
in that hotel, Sir, They're gonna make light of it.
I'm just going to say, you know the bad thing
that'll happen in that hotel, root du Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
You.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
Turn you into a noble bro like you like.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Do not.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Do not go to that Yeah. Now here's how he
describes the meeting that follows. When he got there, the
man surprisingly told him nothing except to sleep there in
the room, since the hour was late. It was twelve
oh one in the evening. But as he lay down,
he was catapulted suddenly into a vision. He saw the
ceiling open up to the night sky, showing the stars twinkling,
(41:51):
clear and bright. He did not know if he was
a sleeper awake, but he knew it was the open heaven.
One bright star was growing bigger and bigger, drawing down
slowly closer, until a hand with a white sleeve was
revealed to be holding a heavy, shiny bronze cauldron. The
hand held the cauldron before him as though just a
few feet away, and turned it and Pastor Apollo immediately
read the words written on one side strive to rhyme
(42:13):
for unity. When the hand turned the cauldron the other way,
he saw words written there, not in any language he knew,
and as he read it, a voice said, these words
are for you only tell no one, and Pastor Apollo
has kept those words secret to this day. Wow, I
don't know, yea.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
The whole Like he's there's so many things in there
that like require a level of nerdery.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Like there's a he's invoking. I think it's Barsk Corinthians.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
He's invoking image and that's all talked about being brought
into the third heavens. When he was like, Lord put
me to sleep. I don't know if I was awake
or asleep, I can't tell you, but I saw this
vision and I was given I was shown an image
that I still can't utter. So he's like, he's he's
(43:08):
like really invoking some like Apostle Paul type, like I
am starting a church imagery, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
That makes sense, That makes a lot of sense. Yeah,
that's what he's involing, specifically what he's bringing in because
I just I just found this very familiar to my
experience being invited into a hotel room by someone who
told me they were going to show me God, and
then the hallucinations that I had later, And I have
kept the words I heard that day secret, but for
a very different reason.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Anyways, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Words, the words. The words you got was from the
lsd in this and the dude saying.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
It was from a copy of that Terence mckinna book
about mushrooms.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
The voice, the voice said, never stop podcasting.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
That is right. I hear that voice every second of
my life, Sophie, every second of my life.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
That's just me, I.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Believe, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, the voice is like, so what are you guys
talking about next week?
Speaker 1 (44:02):
God?
Speaker 4 (44:03):
God?
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Just yeah, yeah, there there there are different kinds of
beliefs systems around the world that like believe that you
literally sing the world into being and there has to
always be somebody like singing in order to like keep reality,
you know, like like humming along. And I I am
that for podcasting, right. As long as I'm podcasting, you know,
(44:24):
the firmament will will stay above us, but it will
collapse and bring about a thousand years of fire.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
The instaart I stop. You are the Greek of podcast Yeah,
so keep listening.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Yes, and speaking of listening, it's time to listen to
these ads.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
You're right. So you're right, dude, that was speaking of Yeah,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
That was good.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
How was icy of me?
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Very We're back. So Apollo has abandoned his church and
act out and he's taken and a core group of
loyal followers about fifteen people, and established his new totally
independent church, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, Thy name above
every name, which is every word of that is capitalized.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
That's a lot of a no abbreviation of it.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
KOJC is usually what you get for the which is
a lot easier to say that is a that is
a heavy, heavy nas. He sets it up in a
slum nearby where his old church had been.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And as soon as he's got this church of his own,
he starts preaching to his first followers, and again there's
like a little over a dozen of them. He tells
them that, hey, this is not your daddy's pentecostal faith,
and I'm not just a preacher. I am now the
quote appointed son of God, Now what does that mean?
Prop Because he's not saying I am like this coming,
(45:51):
no man of God. Yeah, he said, it sounds to me,
and maybe something is lost in the translation here, although
he does he does preach a lot in the English.
Is he saying that like appointed? Like God was like,
you know what, You're not my born kid, but you
and I are so tight. I signed the papers, right,
(46:13):
I have adopted you officially, you were like the son
of God because I picked you.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Yeah, not like that Jesus guy. Just get by in
his blood.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
You feel me?
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, you just you were born in that's nepotism. No,
there is an idea. There are two ideas. Yeah, there's
two ideas in there. They're like the idea of salvation
is an adoption into being the sons of God. Right,
so there's like there's that concept, right, But then what
he's saying is again I'm pulling on like the idea
of the Pentecostal idea of being the anointed one, which
(46:45):
is like there's the capital anointed one that's Jesus, and
then there's anointed as in being set apart, being chosen
by God for this particular time. And what he's or
like like the old folks who say for such a
time as this, you know what I'm saying. So what
I feel like what he's invoking is like I am
God's chosen for this moment in this season. I am
(47:06):
the anointed one for now. So it's like lowercase anointed.
I'm thinking that's what he's saying. That makes sense, That
makes sense. Yeah, I could see that being it.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
But now I.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Should also note that appointed son of God. You'll hear
that a lot. That is not close to his only nickname,
his I supposeer for where this goes FBI indictments that
he notes that he also went by sir Pastor ACQ.
Not really sure where that one came from. I think
that's just maybe his nick like his initials and yeah,
that's got to be his initials. And one of his
(47:36):
favorite nicknames on his church website is the extremely unwieldy
man who was chosen when the Father's hand of appointment
came upon his life and he did not fail him.
Woo howdy howdy. That's a nickname.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
That's a nickname.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
This is the has clauses. You may editor.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Listen, oh man, they say so because like still like
you know you for like you go to church with
your grandma, Like when a pastor walks in, they say, man,
of God. You know what I'm saying, Like, you address
the pastor as the man of God, you know what
I'm saying, So like there is an element of like
sort of this hierarchy that kind of exists in that denomination.
(48:19):
And then there's the level you talk about, which is like,
oh words, So you you the Man of God Plus?
Speaker 3 (48:27):
Like, you know what I'm saying, You the plus streaming series.
You feel me?
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Like you get We're we all just got we all
just got the free trial version.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
We got the seven ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
You know what I'm saying, You got the Poteen ninety
nine version of the Anointing.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah, he's he's a double stuffed oreo of whole dumble stuff.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
He got a double portion any one of those new.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Coke flavored oreos. I don't know, you know, I'm not
a theologian, you know, I think I think religious scholars,
rabbis and the like could debate over that.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
So the next decade and change are a busy time
for Apollo. He continued to accumulate followers at a startling rate.
He is very good at building an organization. He has
a robust media operation that spreads videos of church sessions
where he would speak in tongues and perform miracles, and
as he brought in followers, obviously, so came money. He purchased,
(49:15):
like any good cult leader, a forested compound on the mountain.
That was his namesake. Right, he's got his mountain compound now.
In one TV interview, he claimed that this mountain compound
is proof that God had restored the Garden of Eden. WHOA, yeah,
I got the Garden of Eden. You can come.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
It's nice.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
It's nice. There's worse picks for a location. That's how
it is.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
You know, I'm saying, go up there in the mountains,
get that, Get that a hundred year old lady, give
you the tattoo.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Right, That's that's some Garden of Eden type stuff.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
I feel you sure. I don't know how apples do
over there, to be honest, but they got other fruit.
They got other fruit. So God apparently also really liked
the idea of shotgutting a shitload of money to Rodrigo
du Terte, who at this point becomes the mayor of
du Vos City in nineteen eighty eight after the People
Power Revolution. Du Terte was Apollo's most prominent political friend
(50:11):
of the post marcos Era right, and ju Terte would
later claim to owe some of his rights to power
to the fact that Apollo's church gives a shitload of
money to him at the start of his political campaign.
So again he gets jump started in a big way
by Apollo Kiboloi's cult. Now, given the corruption endemic to
du Terte's regime and the fact that Apollo's already been
(50:33):
caught up in some shady shit, you might assume maybe
is there some like sinister quid pro quo here?
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Is he backing this guy? So this guy is going
to like once he's mayor help him get away with
some crimes. Don't worry, Rodrigo Duterte would never do that
sort of thing, of course not, And in an interview
for The Inquirer, he assured the world that this was
never the case. Quote it was ju Terte himself who
said that the wealthy preacher doesn't have other friends, I
(51:01):
mean a friend he can really trust, stressing this as
the reason that KABOLOI has been giving him expensive gifts.
No no, no, no, this corruption and just needs a friend.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Look, trying to be there for my body when.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
You exist in our stratosphere, like in the in the
social sphere that we exist, and it's hard to have
people that trust you.
Speaker 3 (51:21):
You think everybody.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Needs some right, right, so you just it just gets lonely,
you know, and like I just wanted to do something
nice with the Humes.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Right, right, exactly exactly. You know what, we should all
be grateful that there are people like Rodrigo Jutte out
there who are willing to be friends with a poor,
you know, lonely cult leader with three to seven million
followers around the world. Right, you know, no one is
lonelier than a man like that.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
Yeah, you can be alone among millions, man, that's right,
alone as beautiful prop that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yes, anyway, the poet so the ko JC quickly spreads
to become one of the largest Pentecostal churches on earth,
somewhere between three and seven million followers. I've heard both numbers.
Most of these are in and around Manila, but you
know a lot. He has people in multiple countries around
the world. He has like sub churches dedicated to the
KOJC and multiple countries including the United States.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Now, unlike most pastors, Apollo tells his growing flock it's
not enough just to show up on Sunday to hear
me preach. You have to put your money where your
mouth is. With a steadily increasing yearly tithe that by
two thousand and four was more than twelve hundred dollars
a year in a country where the average salary is
less than ten thousand dollars a year, gott a tie.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
That is a game lesson tithe?
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah yeah, its yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
You know, I will not give unto God that which
costs me nothing.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Yeah yeah. And memorandums sent to followers about the annual tithe,
but with the signature office of the Son of God.
So you really, that's not just like your local tax
department or whatever. You know, that's not the fucking Department
of Water and Power are sending you a bill. You
really gotta get on that one.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
You gotta like listen, listen. You don't collection worth his wages,
you know what I'm saying. Will a man rob God?
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Will a man rob God?
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yeah? So money he's hitting all the high points, man, right,
he hit all.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
He really is. Now money is not the only thing
flowing Apollo's way. He began to get access to women
as well. Many of them very young and desperate to
forge some sort of connection to a man they believed
might bring salvation. It is unclear precisely how when when
Apollo started sleeping with his followers, but by no later
than two thousand and two, he and his most trusted
aids had built a system within the church entirely designed
(53:42):
to funnel young girls up towards him. His church referred
to these people as pastorals, which was not an extant
term in the faith, and referred to girls as young
as eleven and basically never older than twenty five. An
FBI indictment from twenty eighteen notes pastorals prepared defendant Kiboloy's meals,
(54:04):
cleaned his residences, gave him massages using lotion, and traveled
with him on trips throughout the world, to include the
United States. Pastorals engaged in sex with defendant KIBOLOI on
a schedule determined by defendants. That is happening again.
Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yes, it always gets to a dick.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
It's always, I like, because that's why people do this.
That's why people make cults one way or the other.
Usually every now and then you get like ol Ron
Hubbard's cult. You know, it was purely about being able
to absolutely control the lives of a bunch of people
and make the power dig for dig for treasure. You know,
he wasn't focused on the sex primarily, but most of
(54:43):
them are. You know, that's that's a big thing for
a lot of them. Yeah, pastorals engaged in sex with
defendant KIBOLOI on a scheduled determined by defendants and what
was referred to by pastorals as night duty for some
past nights duty, night duty. I know that that's a
bad one. I don't like that at all. And you
(55:04):
know the FBI notes for some pastorals, night duty began
before the pastoral reached the age of eighteen. Now, these
girls had all been not all but usually been raised
in the church, which is a lot worse because these
are girls who are raised to believe this is the
literal son of God and like the Man of God. Yeah,
he wants you close to him. He wants you to
He has chosen you, sister, to like you know, help
(55:26):
him and help him with his great work.
Speaker 3 (55:28):
And that includes me some of his annoying.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
They move along, and this is again not all that
why not completely dissimilar from how Epstein did it right.
Massages are kind of a key because it gets you, know,
it gets them in the room with you, and then
things can proceed from there. The difference here is that
these girls had spent their lives being told this man
was divine. Right now, the coaching to become a pastoral
does seem to have taken some time, and a big
(55:53):
part of the organizational structure of the church was set
up to train and funnel these girls upward so that
there's a steady supply of them. Sometimes it took years
to get them ready for night duty. But they were
informed that night duty was a privilege and that the
obedient would be rewarded, and they were KIBOLOI paid them
(56:14):
and stays at luxury hotels. These are often very poor
women and girls. Uh. He paid them in trips to
tourist hotspots with annual cash rewards. For the the people
who didn't want to accept this, he had a stick
to go with the carrot, and that stick was hell.
Refusing the pastor meant being set sentenced to eternal damnation.
Speaker 4 (56:33):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
And again, this is the son of God.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Man of God. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (56:38):
It's like, you want to you want to get close
to the anointing. You want to get close to whatever
gift gift does God's given him. Lord has chosen you.
This is your reasonable service to the man of God
who's given his life for our development.
Speaker 3 (56:51):
I mean this service.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
Yeah, yeah. Now, many of these girls, as I stated,
have grown up very poor in rural slums, not unlike
where Apollo it's spent much of his childhood. Some of
them had parents in the church, but others were targeted
by Apollo's agents who were sent out into the poorous
neighborhoods to look for teens and young adults who had
like either had left their families or who could be
(57:14):
convinced to abandon their families. So like, go find kids
on the margins and bring them in, promise them food,
and then we can either turn them into laborers if
they're not someone that Apollo wants to have sex with,
or turn them into pastorals. Now the bulk again, the
bulk of the people that are grabbed and are not
(57:34):
kind of are trafficked. Are men, right, because these are
He also needs workers, right, And these people are inducted
into the church, they're made to separate tize with their
family and they're told that they now have to pay dues,
and the fact that these are street kids who have
no money is unimportant because there's a way for them
to pay dues, as this article from the Philippine Daily
(57:55):
Inquirer in two thousand and five notes. To support their church,
the members are reportedly to sell church products door to
door during the annual month of Sacrifice, which lasts from
November to January, which you may note is longer than
a month.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
I was like that, do you mean November thirty?
Speaker 1 (58:13):
Yeah, yeah, it does seem longer than a month.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
Yeah, longer than a month.
Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, now that is Yeah. So Apollo also just doesn't
let his followers off with just that small amount of sacrifice.
He also required people to sell rice cakes, another branded crap,
year round to fund the construction of a network of
seventeen radio stations and a satellite television station that could
reach forty cities in the Philippines. Growth of this sort,
(58:39):
the kind that was experienced by the KOJC is an
exits is an exponential thing, and by two thousand and seven,
Apollo was ready to expand into the United States, particularly
towards the large Philippine expat community. That existed in Southern California.
It was only one problem. The kind of followers he
might get in the US are likelier to have an
(59:01):
understanding of their rights to understand, like there's law enforcement
they can go to to understand, there's media they can
go to to have like money that makes them less
vulnerable to you know, kidnapping like this. Right, So maybe
the locals aren't going to be the best picks for
past storals. But he's not going to spend all of
his time in the fucking palace that he's going to
(59:22):
get for himself in Southern California without sex slaves. Right,
He's not that kind of fellow. So there's only one
way to make these two things work out. And that way,
my friend, is a massive immigration scam. And that's what
we're going to talk about when we come back for
part two.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Problems.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Amazing, how you're feeling. I am not happy, and also
I'm not happy period saying but also because the like
Southern California, like Filipino community, and I know that, like
Sophie can attest, is like such a big part of
(01:00:01):
growing up out here, you know what I'm saying that, Like,
you know, even in the part of town I was in.
It was like they you default with Filipinos when they
get here, they default to either being black as hell
or like Mexican adjacent because they end up in our hoods.
So like, you know, I remember there was the like
in my neighborhood, it was all these cholos. There was
(01:00:23):
all these like Mexican gangs, and then there was these
like other cholos that kind of like they talk like
black dudes, you know what I'm saying, But they dressed
like like cholos, but then they look Asian, and I
was like, what what are y'all? But y'all go to
the same church as we go to because again they Pentecostal.
(01:00:44):
And then it's like, oh, so Manila Sunset, So that
restaurant that's not that's not Mexican food, you know what
I'm saying. Like, so I'm just saying all that to
say it's been such a community that we are so
intertwined with.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
To know more of.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
This past is like, well, I'll be, well, I'll be
you know, it sucks, but it's just like, dang, that's
what y'all been going, y'all.
Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Y'all was going there the whole time. Well, we was
going through the war on drugs. That's what was happening
with y'all.
Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
You know. Anyway, all right, everybody just out here selling Jesus' color.
Monthsie just hollow, hollow for Jesus. Anyway, I'm going to
sell something. I don't know what, but you know what,
Sophie's going to be angry. And that's the note to end.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
On yep, it'scuche.
Speaker 4 (01:01:41):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
(01:02:02):
at Behind the Bastards
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
You see Costco be like, hey man, we don't sell.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
That, we don't sell that baby oil.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, hey, look, don't be speaking on my name. Don't
be speaking keep my name out your fucking mouth.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I can't believe you tried to throw fucking uh Costco
into the back.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Costco is like, hold up, hold up, this shit you
got going is not with us. That is true. To
keep my name about your mouth.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
See if I if I was dead to rights and
only lying about Costco could get me off, I would
I would take the fall for Costco.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
I mean, yeah, what did Costco do to you?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Except for Costco's Costco has done so much for me exactly,
mostly provide me with olives.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
But you know, I feel like if there's somebody that
you don't go after in America, it's Costco.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I feel like it's it's it's the closest thing. We
have Costco in the post office. Like that's what we
have as like beloved institutions in this country.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, honestly, yes, Like you what what have they done
wrong except for provide to us everything that feeds our decadence?
Like this is all this is, It's the most American thing,
Like you know what I'm saying, like, Hey, you want
some mayonnaise, why don't you get a drum of it?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Personally, I don't. I don't enjoy going to Costco because
the aisles are really high, and as a person who's
very short, I'm like, this feels like a bad way
to go, like the fear of this argument. M hmm.
Plus it's just there's too many.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Fucking people anywhere where you could buy some dickies and
like you know, wild caught salmon in the same place.
I'm like this, this is American man.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I often just think about that man that got that
shirt made of the sticker for the barcode for the
rotisserie chicken. You know what I'm talking about? Yes, Okay,
I think about I think about him quite often. Like
I hope you're well, sir.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It's a hero, bro Robert, we've been recording.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
This entire time. Are we keeping this Costco conversation? In
I I.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
We're not allowed to cut the Costco conversation? Yeah, prop
we're talking about the Jeffrey Epstein of the Philippines. His
name is Apollo Cloid. Anyway, Cold Open's fucking done. Oh
we're back, boy, we really just kind of dropped media
res into this. Motherfucker didn't we didn't We Are the
(02:37):
kids learning words like that anymore? Do they have that
on the tiktoks? I assume if it's not on the tiktoks,
the kids aren't learning it anymore. I've become one of
those old men who's angry at the kids for not
having read the same things I read when I was
in high school, coming like the great Gadsby.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I feel like you were a you've been you've been
an old man since you're junior year of high school.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It is, it is, yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I have nothing to say.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
No.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
My brother was like that.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
He was just like I was, like when he turned sixteen,
we were like, you're forty. Yeah, you are a forty
year old, sixteen year old mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of us are
like that. And my knees have always been forty. Jason Petty,
host of Hood Politics, also guest on Behind the Bastards Today.
Prop Yeah, buddy, we go back a bit at this point.
You and I have been friends friends for a spell,
(03:37):
and this year, you know, I've called on you a
couple of times for some real tough episodes, the Bobby
Lee episodes, and the Thomas Jefferson episodes, not easy ones.
And I was like, I want to do something fun
for my friend Jason when he comes back on the show.
We're not going to do, you know, some fucking slaveholding
monster from American history. We're not going to do. You know,
(03:58):
We're gonna We're gonna steer clear of the United States entirely.
We're gonna do a fun one. I'm gonna find him
like a nice cot beater or something. Anyway, I fucked up,
and we're doing the Jeffrey Epstein of the Philippines. It
was not Jeffrey Epstein. If it was just a guy
named Jeffrey Epstein in the Philippines, that would be probably
responsible of me.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
You just got me a ballique Bayon box of trash
that you just brought over. That's shot out to all
my penoise y'all, I'm gonna throw just tell y'all right now,
my stepmom's Filipino.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
You know she's beside it. She's from Domaghetti.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My best friend who I toured forever, DJ Fectol Rest
in peace, Filipino. I'm from the part of town that's
like a good forty percent Filipino, So there's gonna be
a gang of Filipino jokes. I'm gonna drop in here.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
That's good, that's good.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
So many references that I'm gonna drop in this.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, and I yess yeah. Well, I guess there's nothing
to do but get into it. The guy we're talking
about today as a man, I'm gonna guess most Americans
have not heard of, although he committed a decent number
of his crimes in the United States. His name is
Apollo Kiboloi, which I checked on Google. Right before this.
I listened to two different pronunciation videos that both said
(05:14):
it differently. Hopefully that's right. But I did just my
background research here.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
We could call him, we could just call him the
like weird.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, anyway, it is.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
This is finally an Apollo episode I've been wanting to
do ever since a Greek man punched me out at
a Delhi, I've been wanting to do an episode on
men named Apollo. Unfortunately, this is not a Greek Apollo,
nor does the name have anything to do with Greek mythology.
That's a little bit weird at least it I don't
think it does.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Okay, that's not. The weird part is what happened right
before you said that you got punched.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Why you get.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
A lot of deli's So yeah, that's just what happens
at a deli. If you're someone who feels about cured
meats as strongly as I do.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, like there's some sort of there's some sort of
accidental insults you did.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Oh it was purposeful.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Oh never mind, Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
No, he that his saying is wrong. Yeah, yeah, we
had a scrap. So I'm not gonna say a whole
lot about Jeffrey Epstein in these episodes. I bring this
up because like that is what a lot of people
write when they've been doing articles. As a spoiler, A
bunch of shit blew up with Apollo very recently. His
life has collapsed this year, and so when because his
(06:35):
story is crazy, news media all around the world wants
to cover it because it's just the kind of thing
you got to cover. But because it's a Filipinos story
and most people are not familiar with this guy. He's
very famous within the Philippines, but most people are not
familiar with this guy, you know, in other countries. The
touchstone that the news has picked is he's the Jeffrey
Epstein of the Philippines, and I can say, you know, look,
(06:57):
that's a little bit you know, grow but also I
want your clicks too, you know, I'm not too proud
to go for those clicks. Right, Listen, listen, listen.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
When you can neatly package something that it may be
a little rough around edges, I'm maybe cutting out a
lot of factual things, but it's but it's a digestible pill.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
I'm with you, Yeah, absolutely with it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, that's that's the way. And it's also there's something
appropriate in terms of like we're never going to give
Jeffrey the punishment that he deserved because he punched out early,
but making his name like he really has in very
short order. He's not like a Hitler level, but in
terms of like name that is a recognizable shorthand for evil,
he's gotten shockingly close in a very short period of time.
(07:46):
You'd be like, yeah, that guy's a motherfucking Epstein. Everyone's like, oh,
I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, I
love it. He's a proper now now, you know, like, yeah,
I love it. And that's appropriate, That's that's what he deserves.
So wow, we Yeah, that's a reference. Was it's a
it's a TV show kind of a game. Anyway, google
(08:07):
it one day.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Wow. We it's a fun time.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I want to go to the Philippines, especially now that
our former Bastards Pod alumni Uhrigo to Terte is no
longer running things there. Always wanted to see it but
haven't been. It doesn't enough.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, my dad, my dad said he's gonna move with
with with my stepmom to the Philippines.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
And I was like, brother, no, you not. I'm just
looking at him, like, you're not leaving the city. Your dad,
your dad, my dad?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, my dad. I was like, Sir, I get it.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I feel you. He's like, man, I'm retired.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
He's like, bro, we got it, son, we got Helsa.
Guy like two cows. I was like, so you're gonna
move to the Have.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
You taken care of a cow? Because he's not as
fun as I was like, Dad, you from I grew
up with a lot of cows and they are a
mixed bag. You are a.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
City boy, Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I don't think you're ready for the amount of poop
you're gonna have to deal with. Great for heat, sir,
this is a jungle. Yeah, anyway, So Apollo carry on.
Kibbeloi was born on April twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, about
you know, four years out from the end of the
US withdrawal from the Philippines. Right, so you know, the
(09:21):
World War two happens, right, Japan is like, hey, we'd
like the Philippines, and the US is like, here's Douglas MacArthur.
He'll stop you. And then Douglas MacArthur's like, no, I
won't actually, And so Japan, Japan has the Philippines for
a little while, and then we come back, right, and yeah,
that's the that's the way it goes, you know, eventually
(09:43):
we leave anyway. Kind of. So his hometown Apollos was
de Vos City, which is where Rodrigo ju Terte got
his start as mayor, right like, that is where he
kind of you know started his political career too. And
these two men are very strongly tied together, right. Terte
is the guy who killed thou probably of drug users
and associated people during his time as this brutal authoritarian
(10:05):
president he did leave office, so not really dictator, but
very bad strong man type president. And Apollo in here
very close, so I'm not bringing him up just because
like he's the other guy from the Philippines we've covered
so far, right, Yeah, I know two guys from the Philippine. No,
he is directly tied in this story. So Apollo, the
(10:25):
youngest of nine children, was named again, not after the
Greek god or the much more impressive Apollo Creed, but
after Mount Oppo, a dormant volcano that, at almost ten
thousand feet above sea level, is the highest peak in
the Philippines. I should note here that I read on
Apollo's churches website that he had been named after a mountain,
(10:46):
and when I went to look up the first result
for Apollo Mountain, I found this book, which has nothing
to do with the story, but it made me laugh.
Mountain min Eventswood Valley, Aaron Havoc. That can't be a name.
So if you're trying to imagine what young child Apollo
(11:06):
CIBOLOI looks like, this is exactly I'm assuming this is.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
A picture of him. Yeah, yeah, totally nice soul.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yes, So yeah, anyway, I pointed this out. I put
this up also to point out that Google is just
really knocking it out of the park these I don't know,
great results always relevant to my search queries.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Like if there's anybody that say, hey, let's do something
good and then start not doing it good and see
if y'all stick around.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, it would be like if I started a podcast
about all of the worst people in history and then
at a certain point pivoted to just doing ads for
the Church of Scientology, just long extended ads for the Scientology.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Why is you doing this?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Even wanted to clean Tom Cruise's house. Well, there's a way, sorry, anyway.
Decade after his birth, the website for the cult that
Apollo would come to lead said this about the day
that he was born at home quote.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Hey, holdo, holdo, hold on, you slipped in the cult
he was about to lead that no point was there
a warning.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
That this was he had a cult? I did not.
I think I might have mentioned he had a cult.
He's got a cult.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
You said no, no, no. You said you were going
to try to find a nice little cult episode.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
For produde, and then you said you failed.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
You failed that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Well I failed at it being nice because those.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Wait time out.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
But it is a cult episode.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
I appreciate getting the cult.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah I did. There's a certain point at research it
which you can't turn back around and pick another topic.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
I feel like you we're doing it. You just give
a politicians answer, but us Okay.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Thank you, Sophie. I'm getting ready for my big presidential run.
Uh And I just want to let you guys know
I'm not going to be responsible with the nukes. That's
my promise. You're not going to have nowhere about it nevermore.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I've never been more convinced to not vote for somebody
than if Robert was running.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Like, I think this is going to go well with
a lot of people because look, you know Donald Trump,
who knows what he's going to do with the nukes, right,
Joe Biden, Oh, sleepy Joe. We just don't know much
about his mind state. Me. You know I'm going to
use them, and you know I'm not going to use them. Well,
that's a promise. You don't have to worry about it anymore.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean I feel you know, some people you
want cooking, some people you won't, cleaning.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Some people don't dropping the H bomb on Lake Superior. Okay, anyway,
he's the script. So from the club site for his cult,
this is what it said about the day that he
was born night. I should say that he was born
at home. The knight suddenly turned to day moments after
his birth, and a huge eagle had perched in the
trees outside their home and had stayed there until he
(13:50):
was born. So let's you know, God turned night into
day and eagle watched over him. All the good stuff
on some.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Found.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Okay, Yeah, so yeah, his family had was poor, or
at least that's kind of what the stories say.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
You get the feeling maybe they were closer to I mean,
the middle class was not really a big thing in
the Philippines at this time, but I don't think they
were as poor as he kind of likes to portray
them as. But his parents may have been prior to
having him. They had immigrated from the family's ancestral home
in Lubao after World War Two in order to find work,
which is what brings them to Da Vos City. By
(14:30):
the time Apollo came into the picture, they seem to
have been solidly working class. His biography claiming that though
the family was poor, they were happy. Now, I found
what appears to be a picture of his family from
a news report. It's into Galog, it's not translated, but
from what I can tell it looks like the kid
in the middle because it zooms in on him is
the our center. So and you can see just looking
(14:52):
at the hair, you can tell to own a cult
like that, that kid winds up a cult leader. I'm sorry.
Kid on the left probably not kid on the right,
maybe you know, but kid in the middle, that's a
cult leader. Yeah. For so you can just tell.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
You can look at all of his days in Quias
he was.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Although that baby in the back looks kind of like alive,
not alive. Maybe that's a doll. I can't really tell.
I don't know if I love the very incense skin
tones there. That baby does not look well.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Right, maybe the.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Flash was on. So it's a little unclear to me. Again,
just how to characterize the family socioeconomic status. Because his
parents became pastor leaders at a Pentecostal church in Defoul
early on. His dad had been raised Protestant, like mainline Protestant, right,
which which put because obviously like Pentecostal church is a
Protestant denomination, but it's also kind of it's not mainline,
(15:55):
you wouldn't say, And this kind of put them in
the fact that he kind of moves to the Pinna
Costal faith puts them in line with a big post
war trend in the Philippines. American missionaries had brought Pentecostalism
to the country, but it was spread largely by these
kind of swashbuckling and these guys are Filipinos, swashbuckling like
pioneer church planters who are like Johnny Apple, seeds of
(16:19):
Pentecostal churches. And they're I mean, the term they use
is planting churches and these like settlements in the frontier
that are established in the jungle. Right yeah, Now, if
you're not aware of a lot of this, Pentecostalism is
a strain of Protestant Christianity that emphasizes charismatic practices like
speaking in tongues and what's called baptism in the Holy Spirit.
(16:43):
These are the kind of folks. They don't just believe
in miracles. They believe that God often bestows miraculous ability
and powers on members of churches during worship sessions.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
My argument is, like I've always argued that, like Philippine know, y'all,
y'all black is hell. I don't care what you say,
like you are black Asians. Yeah, somehow they're black and
Latino at the same time. Like, so to me, the
idea that it's like yeah, and then as a Pentecostal church,
I'm like, of course it is, because y'all black.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Is hell, they're also there's like a I'm not obviously
qualified to comment on that, but the fact that there's
a huge American influence on the way worship works there,
right yeah, yeah, you see here in this because i
mean we were there for quite a while.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, right, totally.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah. So his father must have been a man of
some ability and personal magnetism, because he does very well
in the Pentecostal faith as it is kind of sweeping
the country. And it seems that a skill for like
preaching and you know, like that kind of charismatic preaching
ran in the family because Apollo's older brother, Jose eventually
becomes the assistant general superintendent of the largest Pentecostal organization
(17:54):
in the Philippines. Now, one noteworthy fact about the Kiboloi
family is that they seem to have rejected there's a
lot of like in the area they're growing up in
kind of the rural area, and like the slums, there's
a lot of communist organizing when he's a little kid
that is sweeping through the surrounding communities, and they are
(18:14):
very much against it. This is a very conservative anti
communist family. We get very little here. This is something
I've kind of read in between the lines and also
just kind of based on stuff that happens later. But
due to a vaguely defined hardship that may have been
related to a conflict with like these local communist groups,
which are insurgent organizations. Apollo is moved away from home
(18:39):
as a boy to live with his older sister. I
don't know why. Just some of the stuff I've read
make me think it may have been tied to some
political conflicts in their hometown. I don't actually know, though.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
It's also like, what's interesting this may I don't know
if this is going to play in later, but I
feel like it probably will because of, like you said,
the communist thing. Like while Pentecostalism might be very theologically
on the fringes, like it fringes a strong word, but
like theologically liberal, they're actually very socially conservative. It's very like, yeah,
(19:12):
you know very much about like your performance of holiness.
You know what I'm saying. And that holiness is something
that you'd like. They don't drink, they don't smoke, they
don't you know what I'm saying. They're they're not free
with what you know folks will call like their liberties.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
It's very much like you know, with for us, like
you know, that's the older generation for.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
A lot of like black people.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So it's like you don't listen second music, you don't
watch rated our movies, you know what I'm saying, because
you're supposed to be holy, you feel me, and a
lot of that has to do what you being filled
with the holy ghost, you know what I'm saying. So
so to hear that like the play of like communism
may be in a thing, it makes sense to me
of those two things being together in that sense.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
It may not play in later, but I think it's.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Oh it does. No, no, no. As an adult, he is
going to have some dealings with his local commune that
are very much not pretty. So this is I'm not
bringing this stuff up for nothing, and I do kind
of because of some stuff he's going to say later.
I do suspect that like this is part of the
kind of why he's uprooted as a little boy, you know,
(20:15):
but I don't actually know that to a point of
certainty either way. He gets moved away when he's like
a kid to live with his oldest sister. His official
biography claims it was there that he learned the hard
lessons of responsibility through the rule of the stick. You
don't get a feeling, Yeah, you don't get a feeling.
She was a nice aunt, right, not on literally, but yeah,
(20:38):
yeah yeah. For eight years he attended school and worked
at his sister's bakery. He became, as he would later claim,
and again this is a liar, a diligent student. And
that quote. When he became a teenager, he forget all
about having friends or having fun because there just wasn't
time for that in his life. Again, maybe that's true.
(20:58):
I don't know. Between the lines a bit, we can
probably assume that he was not a happy boy, separated
from his family and used as free labor by his sister.
At age fourteen, he had his first vision from God,
a hallucination about the end of the world, with fire
raining from the sky igniting the gasoline depots near his
(21:18):
sister's home. Quote. People tried to escape into the sea,
but even the water was a flame, there was nowhere
to go. No, obviously, I don't believe this guy is
the prophet of or you know, would he's he's actually
going to claim the literal son of God. But I
also that's specific enough that I would believe that that's
an actual nightmare he had as opposed to he made up,
(21:39):
Like that's really the whole Igniting the gas depots near
his sister home is like such a specific thing to
bring up that that strikes me as like maybe something
something that was at some point came into his head
as opposed to something he made up later to justify
starting a cult, or night after night, the dream repeated itself.
Apollo would graduate and attend a Bible college, where he
(22:00):
finally came to realize that his nightmares weren't nightmares. They
were visions of the Second Coming. This, he would later write,
allowed him to make peace with the upheaval and difficulty
of his childhood. Quote he realized that his childhood was
all part of the father's orchestration. His sister was only
an instrument, a tool that the father had used to
mold him in the principles of discipline and responsibility that
(22:23):
made him into a vessel ready for the Father's incredible
calling in his life. Now clearly yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
God turned around for good. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
A lot of this is this part I think is
made up after the fact to justify the cult that
he starts. But I do find it interesting that he
describes his sister as just a tool meant to mold
him into shape. That's part of how you could see
like there must have been a real conflict here. That's
a very mean way to describe your sister.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Yeah, yeah, and also very Pentecostal, yes.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, yes yeah. And it also it kind of does
mirror the fact that his sister seems to have used
him as like basically a tool for free.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Labor, right for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
On his church's website, Apollo or one of his followers
makes it clear that he didn't want to go to
Bible school. His real dream was to be a pilot,
but ultimately the fact that tuition and room and board
were free are what swayed him. This was his first
chance at independence from his sister, and he took it.
As he continued to pray, he was visited by God
in dreams and he was told that he had been
(23:24):
anointed to spread the gospel. Quote the gift was so
extraordinary that Pastor Apollo had to check himself every now
and then to see if he was still sane, if
what he was saying still made sense, if he had
not after all, gone mad.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Now, okay, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Am I tripping?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Like y'all listen, listen, Yeah, tell me if I'm tripping.
It might be to ube, It might have been a
bad bull of Denuguan. Am I tripping? But I'm pretty
sure an angel was in his room last night. Now
I might be tripping.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
I think I might be here to bring about the apocalypse,
you know, anybody.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, I mean, like, look, stop me at any time.
But like, I'll pull the post down. I'll pull it
down if I need to delete it. But like I
think I am the pale horse.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of us think we're
the pale horse. There's nothing crazy about that, you know. Yeah, yeah,
if you think you're the pale horse, just keep riding, baby,
Just keep riding.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
You know, you won't have to do much about it.
You'll you'll do what you're doing, whether you try to
do or not.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
If you're a pale horse.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Maybe start on the East coast though, do me a
solid huh okay anyway, So I think Apollo is a
savvy man, and he's smart enough to pay attention and
see that by nineteen seventy two when he graduates Bible College,
American style charismatic churches are spreading everywhere, not just in
the Philippines, the most sophisticated of them. Because we've talked
about on our TV Joshua episodes, how this is a
(24:51):
lot of this is happening in parts of Africa too,
right around this period of time, a little later in Africa,
in like Central Africa, the most sophisticated of these churches
had embraced the radio and increasingly television as a way
to reach more people than could ever fill a physical church.
And he is someone who sees this happening. He's fairly insightful,
and he understands there's a lot of money and power
(25:12):
in making myself one of these men. And you know,
furthering on that point, he has a gift for preaching
that he finds that is, you know, seems to to
some extent be something that is in his family, but
that he's clearly got. He is special in this church. Yeah,
he's got the juice. His bio claims he could preach
as much as seven times a day because he had
(25:33):
to get all those words out of him. He had
a full schedule all year round, and such was his
passion and zeal that even if woken in the middle
of the night to preach, he would get up and go.
He became a famous evangelist because of this. He earned
the nickname preaching machine. I've actually heard this before. In
the US. I talk a lot about a documentary called
Marjoe that's about a guy, Marjo Gordner, who back in
(25:56):
like the fucking forties, is the youngest preacher in the
United States. Ary together travels, yes, yes, his parents, who
are very abusive, are like taking him around, and he
does a documentary as an adult, just kind of about
the actual gritty underside of this like traveling preacher industry.
And he is the kind of person who because he
(26:16):
does it a few times, it's like a party trick.
He can just lapse into a twenty minute sermon that
is this like big fire in Brimstone shit rhymes like
he's great at it. Like yeah, some people like and
this is you know, it's both there's a degree of
like natural talent, and he works at this right like
you do have to. There's it's this is not you know,
purely talent. There's a lot of skill here too. You
(26:39):
know that is crafty.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, I would.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
I would say that, like that's something that you know,
the the craft. Obviously, again I keep bringing up the blackness.
O don't know, I keep bringing it up, but like
I think the craft of preaching is something that you know.
In our culture, we do see as this is a
spiritual gift, like like God has given you this gift
(27:02):
and all you really need is just the training in
the actual text. And like once you know the text,
you got the gift. You called to be a preacher,
but you can't. But you can't help the call. Like
God has given you this gift, so like it would
be irresponsible for us to not let you use it.
And then oftentimes because this person is just so gifted
down be knowing what they talking about, and you can
(27:23):
get away with so much because you so gifted, you
know what I mean. So I'm always like whenever anybody,
especially around like when people fall for some sort of
like charismatic speaker and it ends up being a cult
like it's as silly as that is, as far as
like you're not having your antennas. Like some people are
just really good communicators. And it's like if you, if you,
(27:44):
if you like snap out for a second and just
suspend reality, fam you fall for it.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Too, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's like that, that's that's
where this guy is. He is the kind of person
who can just make a crowd lose themselves, right, Yeah,
really like listening to him. So yeah, he made waves
within his local church, and in nineteen seventy three, one
year out of Bible College, he was sent to an
(28:10):
expo in Soul, that's South Korea for Pentecostal youth activists,
which he attended as part of because, like again, the
Philippines a political situation at the time. He attends as
part of the American and Canadian delegations. He is the
only Filipino at the event. He is the only Asian
in his delegation of one hundred and eighty six people.
(28:31):
We can again infer that this is yeah, I mean
obviously there's of course people in Korea, American and Canadian delegations. Yeah, yeah,
we can infer that this was a lonely time for Apollo,
given how many times he stresses being the only non
white kid in his group, And it is here that
he claims to have first heard the voice of God
clearly give him instructions announcing his divine plans to use Apollo.
(28:57):
So Apollo naturally goes to the adult leaders and chef
ruins for his group and it's like, hey, God just
told me he's got some big old plans for me.
And their response, I don't know if it tells you
that like the rest of the charismatic movement is more grounded,
you know, at this point than it is today, or
just that they're racist and they're not willing to listen
to this, this torpedo kid, but a b.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Fam tell you experienced. Buddy's a byway, take your pick. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
After listening to him, the American missionaries gently but firmly
told him, you know, when you pray that it's you
talking to God. But when you hear God talking to you,
there's something wrong. You need to see a doctor.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Oh no, no, they just yeah, because that's that doesn't
that's yeah, yeah, no, no, y'all racist, because Pedecosa needed
you supposed to.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
You can't.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
You can't in charge until God speaks. So like that's
why charge be last and set outs. We got to
wait until we got to tarry to the Lord.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm saying, So, no, y'all just racist.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, I think you have to try it. I think
you have to pronounce it as like oh no, no, no,
no no. When you pray, that's you talking to God.
But when you hear God talking to you the exactly wrong. Yeah,
every pict it ben ends with the Lord told me. Yeah,
So like, no, fam No, I just think that's fair.
What else is fair, prop is the prices of the
(30:16):
products and services that support this podcast. You know, if
you can find a better deal, I will personally slash
the tires of the CEO of that company.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Hopefully, so hopefully, hopefully hopefully Goldilocks is the sponsor again,
another fili final joke right there, Azusa.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Sorry, it's a it's like a bakery.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Anymore, slash of bakery's tires.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I don't know, right, not.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Man, what you.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Know what I'm saying, Yeah, for legal purposes, he's joking.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah, maybe definitely. Anyway, we're back. Oh my gosh, everyone's
having a good time. I'm not, uh who, Well, fine,
all right. So Apollo at this point is like, well,
these guys don't believe what I'm saying, but you know,
(31:09):
I'm going to keep listening to these voices and keep preaching.
And things go well for him. The very next year,
he has adopted national president for the organization that like
the largest Pentecostal organization in the Philippines. And soon after
this he meets an American girl and he starts dating her.
Effect I only bring up because he brags about it
quite a bit in his biography of quote, he was
(31:31):
the apple of the eye of his denomination. He had
a beautiful American girlfriend that they wanted him to marry.
His career path to the top was clear. People loved him.
Wherever he went. He was treated like a prince. The
detail that they wanted him to his denomination wanted him
to marry this American.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
There's a lot there that I may be I'm definitely
not the right person to analyze, but that is interesting.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Yeah, Nah, that's that's good.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
There's a there's a phrase in Spanish that it may
not necessarily be the same concept. It's called advance the race, right,
so like, uh so, like what that What they're basically
saying is like, get you a white person, Joe saying, so,
get you an American white person, and it advances us.
(32:19):
So it's like, you're you're pushing our culture forward, you're
pushing the family forward, You're pushing on well forward. So
like so when you get you somebody like light skin
or an American white person, then this is like the
best thing for us, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
So it's possible.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I don't know if this is what he's going at,
but it's possible that like that's kind of a vibe
where it's like, oh yeah, no, yeah, no.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
No, no, no, they want me to marry her. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
You know what I'm saying, like, is what we're doing.
You know what I'm saying, I'm advancing. You know, it's
a flex. It's a flex to pull, to pull an.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
American yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
The next lines in his biography are that these American
missionaries who are jealous he kind of infers her jealous
that he's dating this American girl, are also become jealous
of his success, and they decide to sabotage him, and
he claims that this is what eventually set him on
the path to creating his own denomination and church. And
(33:13):
it's here that I finally do have some evidence to
the contrary to bring up, because we are when it
comes to the rest of this stuff, we are kind
of reliant upon his recollections of his early life. Here
we have some outside information. So his claim I started
having conflicts with the broader Pentecostal denomination in the Philippines
because these American missionaries didn't like me, didn't like that
(33:34):
I was seeing this girl from their country, didn't like
how good I was. That's not the whole story. Residents
from the mountainous rural region of kit Bog, where Apollo
claims to have had some of his greatest revelations, recalled
to a local newsmagazine, raptler dot Com, that back in
the nineteen seventies, Apollo was a young preacher and basically
acted as a sidekick to a government employee, Major Sanchez,
(33:58):
who had been sent by the resident to look into
the issues facing the indigenous communities in the area. Now,
this is particularly worth noting because the president at that
point was Ferdinand Marcos. So if your name is if
everyone calls you Major Sanchez, and you are sent by
Ferdinand Marcos to look into issues. Yeah yeah, facing indigenous
(34:24):
communities and a part of the Philippines in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
It's not agree.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
You're not doing anything good. It's not good.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
This is bad news man.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, right, today, the Philippines is it does not rank well.
I don't like to reduce countries to like where they
are and like the corruption index, right, but today they're
at about one sixteen out of one eighty, and things
are worse when Marcos is the dictator, right y. Marcos
is famous for awarding his cronies with you know, the
(34:54):
basically like you would get like a job like this.
The purpose of a job like this is to reward
someone who was lower to you by letting them go
rob a bunch of people blind, you know, with ribes,
with like giving contracts different companies to let them like
strip mind shit. Right, yeah, that's what Sanchez is doing
in this area, right in kind bog these are licenses
(35:15):
to embezzle and rob people blind. And the fact that
Apollo is like following Sanchez around is kind of his
tame preacher, where Sanchez is like, hey, these people are
religious as hell, I'm going to be strip mining their
lives away. You keep them entertained, right, yeah, that's yeah,
that's the insinuation. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. About our boy Apollo,
(35:35):
what he is doing at this point, as opposed to
he's just so good at preaching that these Americans are angry, right.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
As a sidekick of the Major, we can assume Apollo
made connections to other corrupt figures of the Marcos age
and put aside more than a little bit of other
people's money for himself, because that's just how it worked.
Whatever these specific details, it was bad enough what he
did with this major. We don't know exactly what he did,
but it was bad enough that the entire like the
(36:05):
Pentecostal Church in the Philippines, this fellowships him in nineteen
seventy nine, specifically because of his relationship to the Major,
which is an extreme measure, right.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't you don't give somebody a left
handed fellowship. But yeah, unless it's like real.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So his claim the Americans didn't want me there because
you know, they were jealous, the actual information, the actual
like reporting, suggests he was kicked out by his own people,
because he was hideously corrupt and involved in a figure
associated with this regime that, by the end of the
seventies was not very popular. He does that it's not
(36:48):
that bad for him, because he gets to make a
public apology and is accepted back the next year. So
we are whatever his involvement was, it was not hideous
enough that like someone's going to murder his ass in
the street or whatever. But it was bad, right. Apollo
is reassigned after he gets let back into the church
to head up a church in Agdow, where he developed
(37:08):
a habit of ranting angrily about his colleagues, who had
kicked him out of the church briefly. By nineteen eighty five,
this had caused enough problems that he was at risk
of being kicked out yet again. Now you have the facts,
this is clear the story of a corrupt asshole who
got a second chance he never deserved. This is not
how Apollo would later tell the story. Quote his heart
(37:30):
was so sincere, passionate and hungry for the Lord and
to follow what was written in his word, but he
could not see the same thing in his denomination. He
felt heartsore and disappointed. God really wants me robbing these
indigenous people.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
For Marcos heart was so sincere, passionate and hungry for
the Lord. It's like a bad Christian mingle. Bile, it's
a bad Christian mingle, bye said.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
But listen, listen, consider it a blessing when they lie
and persecute you. Blessed is he was persecuted for my
name's sake.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I was bringing the Gospel and I got persecuted for it.
So I'm in the fellowship of the suffering of our Savior.
It's doing the work of the Lord.
Speaker 4 (38:14):
And yeah, literally, it's like there's like this prompt and
all the diating apps that are like how would your
friends describe you? And then they write it themselves and
He's like, his heart was so sincere and passionate and.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Hungry for I'm going to create a dating profile on
my grinder in Portland for this guy, just using quotes
from his and see how it does. See how it does.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
Quote Robert, Let's find you some love.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I just feel some love.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Yeah, because your your heart was so passionate and hungry
from the Lord.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I'm going to be dress. Yeah, drop that nuke. I
dropped that nuke with a good heart.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. You know, it was a
loving nuke. So he writes that quote what he saw
in his denomination was politics and a failure to follow
what the father wanted. The cry in his heart was,
is this all? I want something more? And when you
think about all the bribes he was taking, I think
that that sentence is has a little bit of a
different field to it.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Come on, come on man.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
On September one, nineteen eighty five, Apollo was scheduled to
have what you might call a come to Jesus meeting,
a literal come to Jesus meeting with his superiors at
the church, where they were going to grill him on
the fact that he had been telling his congregation all
of the other pastors were quote unqualified and ignorant, basically like,
and you have to stop talking shit about the VisiC call.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah, like I had a mission this, sir. I need
you to sit down for a second.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yeah, we are unhappy with you. Yes, yeah, so yeah.
Instead of making that meeting, Apollo's like, well, fuck this shit,
I don't need I know where this is going to go.
I don't need to sit for this. I'm going to
start a cult.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
It's time road of vipers. Yeah, lost your ways?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
What else can I I do?
Speaker 3 (40:01):
I have to obey the Holy Spirit, the Spirit. Am
I gonna listen to man?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Or?
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Am I gonna listen to God? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That's right?
Speaker 4 (40:08):
And what else was he supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Cult? Obviously that's the only option.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I have to follow the spirit, and the Spirit is
leading me to do because the Lord said, And that's
what's that's the in some senses as bonkers as Pentecostal
church is they My mama used to say this. Everybody
that does say it the Lord. The Lord ain't thus
say My mama used to say that. So like, so
(40:33):
at least they going fam listen. The other Filipinos was like,
by day, you ain't here from God. That's not what
you're saying is not factual.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
That's funny.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah yeah, so they yeah, they're like, you know, he
has this meeting that he bounces on, and his version
of events, he claims that he decided to skip the
meeting because an anonymous man visited him and told him
they should meet up at a hotel later that night
so he could share a mission from God. Now listen, folks,
if this ever happens to you. Do not make that
(41:08):
meeting list. That is something terrible is going to happen
in that hotel, Sir, They're gonna make light of it.
I'm just going to say, you know the bad thing
that'll happen in that hotel, root du Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
You.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
Turn you into a noble bro like you like.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Do not.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Do not go to that Yeah. Now here's how he
describes the meeting that follows. When he got there, the
man surprisingly told him nothing except to sleep there in
the room, since the hour was late. It was twelve
oh one in the evening. But as he lay down,
he was catapulted suddenly into a vision. He saw the
ceiling open up to the night sky, showing the stars twinkling,
(41:51):
clear and bright. He did not know if he was
a sleeper awake, but he knew it was the open heaven.
One bright star was growing bigger and bigger, drawing down
slowly closer, until a hand with a white sleeve was
revealed to be holding a heavy, shiny bronze cauldron. The
hand held the cauldron before him as though just a
few feet away, and turned it and Pastor Apollo immediately
read the words written on one side strive to rhyme
(42:13):
for unity. When the hand turned the cauldron the other way,
he saw words written there, not in any language he knew,
and as he read it, a voice said, these words
are for you only tell no one, and Pastor Apollo
has kept those words secret to this day. Wow, I
don't know, yea.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
The whole Like he's there's so many things in there
that like require a level of nerdery.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Like there's a he's invoking. I think it's Barsk Corinthians.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
He's invoking image and that's all talked about being brought
into the third heavens. When he was like, Lord put
me to sleep. I don't know if I was awake
or asleep, I can't tell you, but I saw this
vision and I was given I was shown an image
that I still can't utter. So he's like, he's he's
(43:08):
like really invoking some like Apostle Paul type, like I
am starting a church imagery, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
That makes sense, That makes a lot of sense. Yeah,
that's what he's involing, specifically what he's bringing in because
I just I just found this very familiar to my
experience being invited into a hotel room by someone who
told me they were going to show me God, and
then the hallucinations that I had later, And I have
kept the words I heard that day secret, but for
a very different reason.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Anyways, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Words, the words. The words you got was from the
lsd in this and the dude saying.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
It was from a copy of that Terence mckinna book
about mushrooms.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
The voice, the voice said, never stop podcasting.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
That is right. I hear that voice every second of
my life, Sophie, every second of my life.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
That's just me, I.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Believe, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, the voice is like, so what are you guys
talking about next week?
Speaker 1 (44:02):
God?
Speaker 4 (44:03):
God?
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Just yeah, yeah, there there there are different kinds of
beliefs systems around the world that like believe that you
literally sing the world into being and there has to
always be somebody like singing in order to like keep reality,
you know, like like humming along. And I I am
that for podcasting, right. As long as I'm podcasting, you know,
(44:24):
the firmament will will stay above us, but it will
collapse and bring about a thousand years of fire.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
The instaart I stop. You are the Greek of podcast Yeah,
so keep listening.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Yes, and speaking of listening, it's time to listen to
these ads.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
You're right. So you're right, dude, that was speaking of Yeah,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
That was good.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
How was icy of me?
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Very We're back. So Apollo has abandoned his church and
act out and he's taken and a core group of
loyal followers about fifteen people, and established his new totally
independent church, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, Thy name above
every name, which is every word of that is capitalized.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
That's a lot of a no abbreviation of it.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
KOJC is usually what you get for the which is
a lot easier to say that is a that is
a heavy, heavy nas. He sets it up in a
slum nearby where his old church had been.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And as soon as he's got this church of his own,
he starts preaching to his first followers, and again there's
like a little over a dozen of them. He tells
them that, hey, this is not your daddy's pentecostal faith,
and I'm not just a preacher. I am now the
quote appointed son of God, Now what does that mean?
Prop Because he's not saying I am like this coming,
(45:51):
no man of God. Yeah, he said, it sounds to me,
and maybe something is lost in the translation here, although
he does he does preach a lot in the English.
Is he saying that like appointed? Like God was like,
you know what, You're not my born kid, but you
and I are so tight. I signed the papers, right,
(46:13):
I have adopted you officially, you were like the son
of God because I picked you.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Yeah, not like that Jesus guy. Just get by in
his blood.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
You feel me?
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, you just you were born in that's nepotism. No,
there is an idea. There are two ideas. Yeah, there's
two ideas in there. They're like the idea of salvation
is an adoption into being the sons of God. Right,
so there's like there's that concept, right, But then what
he's saying is again I'm pulling on like the idea
of the Pentecostal idea of being the anointed one, which
(46:45):
is like there's the capital anointed one that's Jesus, and
then there's anointed as in being set apart, being chosen
by God for this particular time. And what he's or
like like the old folks who say for such a
time as this, you know what I'm saying. So what
I feel like what he's invoking is like I am
God's chosen for this moment in this season. I am
(47:06):
the anointed one for now. So it's like lowercase anointed.
I'm thinking that's what he's saying. That makes sense, That
makes sense. Yeah, I could see that being it.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
But now I.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Should also note that appointed son of God. You'll hear
that a lot. That is not close to his only nickname,
his I supposeer for where this goes FBI indictments that
he notes that he also went by sir Pastor ACQ.
Not really sure where that one came from. I think
that's just maybe his nick like his initials and yeah,
that's got to be his initials. And one of his
(47:36):
favorite nicknames on his church website is the extremely unwieldy
man who was chosen when the Father's hand of appointment
came upon his life and he did not fail him.
Woo howdy howdy. That's a nickname.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
That's a nickname.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
This is the has clauses. You may editor.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Listen, oh man, they say so because like still like
you know you for like you go to church with
your grandma, Like when a pastor walks in, they say, man,
of God. You know what I'm saying, Like, you address
the pastor as the man of God, you know what
I'm saying, So like there is an element of like
sort of this hierarchy that kind of exists in that denomination.
(48:19):
And then there's the level you talk about, which is like,
oh words, So you you the Man of God Plus?
Speaker 3 (48:27):
Like, you know what I'm saying, You the plus streaming series.
You feel me?
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Like you get We're we all just got we all
just got the free trial version.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
We got the seven ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
You know what I'm saying, You got the Poteen ninety
nine version of the Anointing.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah, he's he's a double stuffed oreo of whole dumble stuff.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
He got a double portion any one of those new.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Coke flavored oreos. I don't know, you know, I'm not
a theologian, you know, I think I think religious scholars,
rabbis and the like could debate over that.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
So the next decade and change are a busy time
for Apollo. He continued to accumulate followers at a startling rate.
He is very good at building an organization. He has
a robust media operation that spreads videos of church sessions
where he would speak in tongues and perform miracles, and
as he brought in followers, obviously, so came money. He purchased,
(49:15):
like any good cult leader, a forested compound on the mountain.
That was his namesake. Right, he's got his mountain compound now.
In one TV interview, he claimed that this mountain compound
is proof that God had restored the Garden of Eden. WHOA, yeah,
I got the Garden of Eden. You can come.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
It's nice.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
It's nice. There's worse picks for a location. That's how
it is.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
You know, I'm saying, go up there in the mountains,
get that, Get that a hundred year old lady, give
you the tattoo.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Right, That's that's some Garden of Eden type stuff.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
I feel you sure. I don't know how apples do
over there, to be honest, but they got other fruit.
They got other fruit. So God apparently also really liked
the idea of shotgutting a shitload of money to Rodrigo
du Terte, who at this point becomes the mayor of
du Vos City in nineteen eighty eight after the People
Power Revolution. Du Terte was Apollo's most prominent political friend
(50:11):
of the post marcos Era right, and ju Terte would
later claim to owe some of his rights to power
to the fact that Apollo's church gives a shitload of
money to him at the start of his political campaign.
So again he gets jump started in a big way
by Apollo Kiboloi's cult. Now, given the corruption endemic to
du Terte's regime and the fact that Apollo's already been
(50:33):
caught up in some shady shit, you might assume maybe
is there some like sinister quid pro quo here?
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Is he backing this guy? So this guy is going
to like once he's mayor help him get away with
some crimes. Don't worry, Rodrigo Duterte would never do that
sort of thing, of course not, And in an interview
for The Inquirer, he assured the world that this was
never the case. Quote it was ju Terte himself who
said that the wealthy preacher doesn't have other friends, I
(51:01):
mean a friend he can really trust, stressing this as
the reason that KABOLOI has been giving him expensive gifts.
No no, no, no, this corruption and just needs a friend.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Look, trying to be there for my body when.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
You exist in our stratosphere, like in the in the
social sphere that we exist, and it's hard to have
people that trust you.
Speaker 3 (51:21):
You think everybody.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Needs some right, right, so you just it just gets lonely,
you know, and like I just wanted to do something
nice with the Humes.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Right, right, exactly exactly. You know what, we should all
be grateful that there are people like Rodrigo Jutte out
there who are willing to be friends with a poor,
you know, lonely cult leader with three to seven million
followers around the world. Right, you know, no one is
lonelier than a man like that.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
Yeah, you can be alone among millions, man, that's right,
alone as beautiful prop that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yes, anyway, the poet so the ko JC quickly spreads
to become one of the largest Pentecostal churches on earth,
somewhere between three and seven million followers. I've heard both numbers.
Most of these are in and around Manila, but you
know a lot. He has people in multiple countries around
the world. He has like sub churches dedicated to the
KOJC and multiple countries including the United States.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Now, unlike most pastors, Apollo tells his growing flock it's
not enough just to show up on Sunday to hear
me preach. You have to put your money where your
mouth is. With a steadily increasing yearly tithe that by
two thousand and four was more than twelve hundred dollars
a year in a country where the average salary is
less than ten thousand dollars a year, gott a tie.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
That is a game lesson tithe?
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah yeah, its yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
You know, I will not give unto God that which
costs me nothing.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Yeah yeah. And memorandums sent to followers about the annual tithe,
but with the signature office of the Son of God.
So you really, that's not just like your local tax
department or whatever. You know, that's not the fucking Department
of Water and Power are sending you a bill. You
really gotta get on that one.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
You gotta like listen, listen. You don't collection worth his wages,
you know what I'm saying. Will a man rob God?
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Will a man rob God?
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yeah? So money he's hitting all the high points, man, right,
he hit all.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
He really is. Now money is not the only thing
flowing Apollo's way. He began to get access to women
as well. Many of them very young and desperate to
forge some sort of connection to a man they believed
might bring salvation. It is unclear precisely how when when
Apollo started sleeping with his followers, but by no later
than two thousand and two, he and his most trusted
aids had built a system within the church entirely designed
(53:42):
to funnel young girls up towards him. His church referred
to these people as pastorals, which was not an extant
term in the faith, and referred to girls as young
as eleven and basically never older than twenty five. An
FBI indictment from twenty eighteen notes pastorals prepared defendant Kiboloy's meals,
(54:04):
cleaned his residences, gave him massages using lotion, and traveled
with him on trips throughout the world, to include the
United States. Pastorals engaged in sex with defendant KIBOLOI on
a schedule determined by defendants. That is happening again.
Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yes, it always gets to a dick.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
It's always, I like, because that's why people do this.
That's why people make cults one way or the other.
Usually every now and then you get like ol Ron
Hubbard's cult. You know, it was purely about being able
to absolutely control the lives of a bunch of people
and make the power dig for dig for treasure. You know,
he wasn't focused on the sex primarily, but most of
(54:43):
them are. You know, that's that's a big thing for
a lot of them. Yeah, pastorals engaged in sex with
defendant KIBOLOI on a scheduled determined by defendants and what
was referred to by pastorals as night duty for some
past nights duty, night duty. I know that that's a
bad one. I don't like that at all. And you
(55:04):
know the FBI notes for some pastorals, night duty began
before the pastoral reached the age of eighteen. Now, these
girls had all been not all but usually been raised
in the church, which is a lot worse because these
are girls who are raised to believe this is the
literal son of God and like the Man of God. Yeah,
he wants you close to him. He wants you to
He has chosen you, sister, to like you know, help
(55:26):
him and help him with his great work.
Speaker 3 (55:28):
And that includes me some of his annoying.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
They move along, and this is again not all that
why not completely dissimilar from how Epstein did it right.
Massages are kind of a key because it gets you, know,
it gets them in the room with you, and then
things can proceed from there. The difference here is that
these girls had spent their lives being told this man
was divine. Right now, the coaching to become a pastoral
does seem to have taken some time, and a big
(55:53):
part of the organizational structure of the church was set
up to train and funnel these girls upward so that
there's a steady supply of them. Sometimes it took years
to get them ready for night duty. But they were
informed that night duty was a privilege and that the
obedient would be rewarded, and they were KIBOLOI paid them
(56:14):
and stays at luxury hotels. These are often very poor
women and girls. Uh. He paid them in trips to
tourist hotspots with annual cash rewards. For the the people
who didn't want to accept this, he had a stick
to go with the carrot, and that stick was hell.
Refusing the pastor meant being set sentenced to eternal damnation.
Speaker 4 (56:33):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
And again, this is the son of God.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Man of God. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (56:38):
It's like, you want to you want to get close
to the anointing. You want to get close to whatever
gift gift does God's given him. Lord has chosen you.
This is your reasonable service to the man of God
who's given his life for our development.
Speaker 3 (56:51):
I mean this service.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
Yeah, yeah. Now, many of these girls, as I stated,
have grown up very poor in rural slums, not unlike
where Apollo it's spent much of his childhood. Some of
them had parents in the church, but others were targeted
by Apollo's agents who were sent out into the poorous
neighborhoods to look for teens and young adults who had
like either had left their families or who could be
(57:14):
convinced to abandon their families. So like, go find kids
on the margins and bring them in, promise them food,
and then we can either turn them into laborers if
they're not someone that Apollo wants to have sex with,
or turn them into pastorals. Now the bulk again, the
bulk of the people that are grabbed and are not
(57:34):
kind of are trafficked. Are men, right, because these are
He also needs workers, right, And these people are inducted
into the church, they're made to separate tize with their
family and they're told that they now have to pay dues,
and the fact that these are street kids who have
no money is unimportant because there's a way for them
to pay dues, as this article from the Philippine Daily
(57:55):
Inquirer in two thousand and five notes. To support their church,
the members are reportedly to sell church products door to
door during the annual month of Sacrifice, which lasts from
November to January, which you may note is longer than
a month.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
I was like that, do you mean November thirty?
Speaker 1 (58:13):
Yeah, yeah, it does seem longer than a month.
Speaker 3 (58:16):
Yeah, longer than a month.
Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, now that is Yeah. So Apollo also just doesn't
let his followers off with just that small amount of sacrifice.
He also required people to sell rice cakes, another branded crap,
year round to fund the construction of a network of
seventeen radio stations and a satellite television station that could
reach forty cities in the Philippines. Growth of this sort,
(58:39):
the kind that was experienced by the KOJC is an
exits is an exponential thing, and by two thousand and seven,
Apollo was ready to expand into the United States, particularly
towards the large Philippine expat community. That existed in Southern California.
It was only one problem. The kind of followers he
might get in the US are likelier to have an
(59:01):
understanding of their rights to understand, like there's law enforcement
they can go to to understand, there's media they can
go to to have like money that makes them less
vulnerable to you know, kidnapping like this. Right, So maybe
the locals aren't going to be the best picks for
past storals. But he's not going to spend all of
his time in the fucking palace that he's going to
(59:22):
get for himself in Southern California without sex slaves. Right,
He's not that kind of fellow. So there's only one
way to make these two things work out. And that way,
my friend, is a massive immigration scam. And that's what
we're going to talk about when we come back for
part two.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Problems.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Amazing, how you're feeling. I am not happy, and also
I'm not happy period saying but also because the like
Southern California, like Filipino community, and I know that, like
Sophie can attest, is like such a big part of
(01:00:01):
growing up out here, you know what I'm saying that, Like,
you know, even in the part of town I was in.
It was like they you default with Filipinos when they
get here, they default to either being black as hell
or like Mexican adjacent because they end up in our hoods.
So like, you know, I remember there was the like
in my neighborhood, it was all these cholos. There was
(01:00:23):
all these like Mexican gangs, and then there was these
like other cholos that kind of like they talk like
black dudes, you know what I'm saying, But they dressed
like like cholos, but then they look Asian, and I
was like, what what are y'all? But y'all go to
the same church as we go to because again they Pentecostal.
(01:00:44):
And then it's like, oh, so Manila Sunset, So that
restaurant that's not that's not Mexican food, you know what
I'm saying. Like, so I'm just saying all that to
say it's been such a community that we are so
intertwined with.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
To know more of.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
This past is like, well, I'll be, well, I'll be
you know, it sucks, but it's just like, dang, that's
what y'all been going, y'all.
Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Y'all was going there the whole time. Well, we was
going through the war on drugs. That's what was happening
with y'all.
Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
You know. Anyway, all right, everybody just out here selling Jesus' color.
Monthsie just hollow, hollow for Jesus. Anyway, I'm going to
sell something. I don't know what, but you know what,
Sophie's going to be angry. And that's the note to end.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
On yep, it'scuche.
Speaker 4 (01:01:41):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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(01:02:02):
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.