May 7, 2020 • 47 mins
Robert is joined again by Vic Berger to continue discussing Televangelist, Jim Bakker.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Well I podcast has returned. Robert Evans Behind the Bastards
Jim Baker Part two, Vic Burger guests, Hello, Hello, how
are how are how are just wonderful? That's good? That's good.
I am experimenting with using less words than normal, uh,
(00:27):
in the hopes that that will make me easier to understand.
So how's that going for you, buddy? Poorly? Yeah, poorly,
it doesn't doesn't work well. Um, But you know what
was working great in the nineteen eighties was Jim Baker's
grift fucking he's really hitting it out of the goddamn part. Yeah.
(00:49):
N seven would prove to be the high point for
Jim and Tammy Baker's empire of you know whatever you
want to call it. That year opened with PTL breaking
ground on the Crystal Palace Ministry Center, a hundred million
dollar construction project. So that's um. They have expanded quite
a bit at this point. Um. Now, and this is
I'm sorry, where where is this again? At the time?
(01:10):
What Heritage USA? It's in I think South Carolina, South Carolina? Okay, yeah,
uh so the Crystal Palace Ministry Center was supposed to be,
like the Palace itself, was a gargantuan glass structure nine
hundred and sixteen feet long and four hundred and twenty
feet wide. Uh. It was a full scale like representation
of like a Victorian era building from London. It would
(01:32):
have a three hundred seat auditorium and a five thousand
seat TV studio. Um. Jim Baker bragg to everyone who
listened that when complete, the Crystal Palace would be the
largest church on Earth. Uh So that's awesome. Yeah. By
PTL had more than employees and revenue of more than
a hundred and twenty five million dollars per year, the
(01:53):
Heritage USA theme park was hugely popular. More than six
million people visited it that year. Uh. In again, only
Disneyland and Disney World were more popular. So on the surface,
it's not crazy that they would embark on a hundred
million dollar construction project, right. That seems, you know, pretty
easily within their means um And yet on the very
day that ground was broken for the Crystal Palace, Tammy
(02:14):
Faye Baker suffered a calamitous mental breakdown. Now, when it
came to popularity outside of the evangelical Christian bubble, Tammy
Faye definitely outshone her husband her heavy makeup and regular
crying fits that sent it running down her face were
regular subjects for parody, like Bloom County made a lot
of Tammy Faye Baker jokes, but on that Phil Hartman
(02:35):
did uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he did a great
Sammy Faye like she that she's definitely like the one
who kind of cracked into the mainstream the most. Um.
But the hysterics were not like just something she did
for the camera or anything like. It was. She had
serious emotional regulation problems, in part as a result of
(02:56):
the stress of running a business that was constantly on
the edge of collapse because of the financial crimes they
were committing. Um, that's not great for your you. She's
not great, um. And so on that January day, she
had a mental breakdown and as Don Hardister, the former
detail had a security later called quote, they left me
(03:16):
in the house alone with Tammy and that's when she
started hallucinating. And I couldn't believe I'm there by myself
with this lady. And she'd taken her clothes off, and
Tammy didn't do that kind of stuff around me. We
all knew she had some prescription drug problems, so she's
is a bad breakdown. And two months later, Tammy's problem
grew serious enough that she required treatment for chemical dependency.
As had become the norm, the Bakers took to the
(03:37):
air waves and recorded a whole very special episode about
Tammy Phay's battle with drug abuse. And again this went
over well with their audience, Like the fact that Tammy
had been abusing narcotics, like didn't slow the donations down
at all or make them any less beloved by theirs.
You see their their faults and uh, you know, they
want to and they want to help. They want to
help her, help her problem exactly. What didn't go over
(04:01):
well with the audience was a blockbuster article in The
Charlotte Observer published just days later, revealing the sordid details
of the rape that Jim Baker had committed on Jessica Han.
So that comes out in eight seven too. And while
this is happening, the Observer continued to tear into Baker's
ministry for its flagrant misuse of funds. They published more
than six hundred stories in nineteen eighties seven alone. Um,
(04:22):
so they are, yeah, they are fucking tearing into this. Yeah.
The Charlotte Observer once this stopped and they put in
the fucking groundwork. Uh, and they revealed this massive chain
of fraudulent fundraising, fake lifetime memberships, incorrect tax exemptions based
on its status as a nonprofit religious organization. Um. It's
(04:45):
revealed that the FCC actually launched an investigation into PTL
back in nineteen seventy nine over three hundred thousand dollars
in funds raised from missionary work overseas that was just
spent on the theme park instead. Um. And it becomes
kind of clear that the theme park has been losing
money for a while, but because it's just so fucking expensive,
and all of these things that he keeps adding to
it are so ambitious. UM. So they're like raising money
(05:06):
for other things and then spending them on this theme
park because fucking Jim Baker loves his stupid theme park. Um,
it's pretty cool. So, Uh, Jim raised huge amounts of
money for overseas ministries, and his followers, you know, donated
that money in the hopes that he'd send out preachers
and provide humanitarian aid to impoverished areas. Instead, he rerooted
millions of dollars of this money and pumped up his
(05:28):
uh theme park. Yeah. So the park led millions a year,
and much of Jim's criminal behavior was dedicated to plugging
that hole in He was indicted on eight counts of
mail fraud, fifteen counts of wire fraud, and one count
of conspiracy to commit fraud. Between this and the big
reveal that Baker had spent another two hundred and sixty
five thousand dollars of church money bribing his rape victim,
(05:48):
there was no way for Jim and Tammy to stay
at the head of the PTL. So everything falls apart
very fucking quick. So we have found the line here though,
this is where it hits. So that's good that there's
a line. Um, this this proves to not be something
that you can like get on TV and be like, hey,
(06:10):
uh fucking this is what I did. And it's fine
because I'm giving myself up to God that that there
there is a line to how much you can do that. Yeah,
or at least there was. Our old friend Jerry Fallwell
sailed into the gap to take over the ministry and
try to write the ship. Uh. And if he thought
doing this would be an easy way to turn a dime,
he was very very wrong. It quickly became clear that,
(06:33):
due to Jim's criminal mismanagement, the ministry owed nearly a
hundred million dollars to various creditors and more than fifty
five million dollars in back taxes. Folwell resigned less than
a year later and accused Jim Baker of being quote
probably the greatest scab and the cancer on the face
of Christianity in two thousand years of church history. Like
(06:54):
there's some genocides in there, and he's like, there's a
there's a there's a good let a fall just before
all that where he uh, they're like seventy million dollars
in debt, and he raised a goal if they wanted
to get twenty two million in a month, he would
go down the water, go down the water slide um suit.
(07:14):
And they raised that money, and he went down the
slide in his suit. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a twenty
two million dollars. Imagine asking people to do that. It's
so it's so good. It's good and cool. So Jim
(07:35):
Baker was quick to tell the New York Times that
without a miracle of God, we will never minister again.
But it was clear to every rational observer that he
and Tammy had just stepped back from the flaming wreckage
of their ministry to wait out for the inherent forgiveness
of the well meeting rooms who supported them. Alast for Jim,
he would have to weather a massive criminal trial before
this could happen. Tammy Fay escaped indictment, and there's a
(07:56):
great debate to this day as to how much she
actually knew. It's probably fair to say she was more
or less an equal partner and was fully aware of
the enormous intercontinental scam that paid for her house boats
and fur coats. But she escaped without legal consequences, and
her husband was not so lucky. Uh. Their former employees
rolled on him pretty much instantly. Steve Nelson, a PTL
(08:16):
employee who was responsible for the lifetime membership program, testified
in court that memberships had been deliberately oversold. The act
of betraying his boss and God to a court of
law was more than the old man's constitution could take,
and he collapsed on the stand. As the court sketch
artist later recalled when he fainted, it was this silence,
and a voice from the audience came up and said, oh,
(08:36):
he's giving his life to God, and Baker's attorney called
him up and said, Jim, Jim, as if there's going
to be a miracle, he can bring him back to life. Uh,
sounds like a fun court case. Good time. Nelson was
not dead, though, and as the trial continued Jim Baker
(08:57):
had a complete mental breakdown himself. That their next day,
he began hallucinating. The reporters outside the courtroom were insects.
His his head of security recalled. Later that night he
was curled up underneath his attorney's couch. I think the
weight of that trial and the weight of everything he
had done, good and bad, just crushed him. Yeah right, yeah,
(09:22):
well I would hope so. So. Baker was committed to
a psychiatric ward in the federal prison and the trial
was put on hold for six days. When things finally
concluded on October nine, Jim was found guilty on all
twenty four accounts and sentenced to forty five years in prison.
He was also ordered to pay a half a million
dollar fine. He appealed, but the court withheld his conviction.
(09:45):
They did grant him a sentence reduction hearing, though, and
dropped those forty five years down to just eight and
he only actually served five before being paroled in nine.
So that's great. Yeah, five years, steal millions of dollars,
rape a woman five years right right back in a
minimum security prison. Yeah, and his cell mate was Lyndon LaRouche.
(10:11):
It's so good, Oh boy, So I'll ask for Tim.
Tammy Faye was not a waiter. She filed for divorce
while he was in the clink and married a guy
named Rome Messner, a contractor who had helped to build
Heritage USA. Tammy knew how to pick him. In nine,
Messner was convicted to twenty seven months in federal prison
for bankruptcy fraud. So and weirdly have Tammy Faye dies
(10:35):
and I think two seven she gets cancered. But she
her second act is actually kind of sweet, Like she
becomes for purely for purely ironic reasons. She becomes a
gay icon because of her like makeup and everything. Like
she's seen as yeah, like a lot of like drag
queens and people like that will like want will like
emulate her makeup style just because it's like so garish
(10:56):
and out there and kitchen. My first exposure to her
was when she was on that vag one reality show
the Surreal Life, remember that with Sherman Helmsley and the
guy from smash Mouth. It's amazing. Yeah, and she um, yeah,
she'd said horrible things that has had her husband about
(11:18):
gay people in PTL. And I don't think she ever
like came out and just said like I was wrong,
But she did state later in life that, like, when
everything collapsed for her, the only people who were there
for her was the gay community because they Yeah, so
that's interesting, Tammy. I don't know what to say about
Tammy Faye Baker. She's an interesting person. Yeah. So, once
(11:41):
he was out of minimum security prison, Jim Baker wound
up briefly in a halfway house. Before his fall from grace,
he'd owned a fifty five ft houseboat at five dollar
Rolls Royce and at dollar Mercedes Benz, along with numerous
palatial mansions all around the world. Afterwards, he went up
living in a rented farmhouse in North Carolina. There, Jim
began to execute an epic plan to rebuild his empire.
(12:03):
It started with the publication of his second autobiography, titled
I Was Wrong, which is at least a better title
than If I Did It. Yeah. Yeah. In it, he
seemed to repudiate the prosperity Gospel beliefs that had dominated
his first ministry. He wrote, I was appalled that I
could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful
that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet.
(12:27):
So that's interesting. Um, the book was step one. But
if Jim was going to achieve his goal, which was
to just do the same thing he'd done before a
second time, uh, he knew he was going to need
to sell himself to a new community, a community open
minded enough to forgive someone like him. He found this
community in Los Angeles, California, at a place called the
(12:48):
International Dream Center, and according to the Washington Post quote,
there he lived in a Crampton crumbling room with his
son Jamie twenty two, and received visiting reporters eager to
chronicle his recovery. All glowing articles about the New Jim
Baker mentioned his rough life in the ghetto, including the
cramped and Yeah, so Jim throws himself on the mercy
(13:09):
of the black Evangelical Christian community, like that's who he
goes to when his chips are down. And as surprising
as it might seem, they took him in Uh. Some
of this had to do with the fact that, as
I stated, PTL had been very popular with the black community,
and the Bakers had always been relatively good on racial issues. Um.
So many of the folks that he reached out to
in l A remembered him from their childhood. But as
(13:31):
the Post's reporting continues, that's not the only reason he
was accepted. Baker's story of temptation, collapse, prison and loss
resonated with many poor black folks in l A. You
know this is obviously Jim's actual experience of of crime
and prison had no similarity. But yeah, he was good
at spinning it. Um. They at one point, like when
(13:52):
he was doing this sort of revival to her, they
interviewed a number of the folks who were in line
to buy his book in l A. And I want
to quote from that now. One of them is his
former cellmate at Jessup, Nathaniel Mathis, thirty two, now working
at a telephone company, who showed up to wish his
friend well. I can relate so much to him how
he was stripped of everything. Mathis says, like Jim, I
lost everything a hundred and ten percent. But the lord
(14:12):
works in the lowest valleys. Lawrence Drew and his friends
are all black men in their twenties, just out of
prison on drug related or similar charges. In four hours,
they have to show up at a janitorial job for
manpower for Jesus, their halfway house alternative. All are hopeful
that their lives will soon change, and they look to
back or for inspiration. Oh sure, all of us can
relate to him, says Drew, who has just paid twenty
(14:32):
five dollars for Baker's book and is waiting patiently to
have it signed. He's the underdog, and that's what we are. Underdogs.
He's real. He's very real. And now by which he
means after the prison term, I think he can be
more powerful than he ever was. Who Yeah, that's that's
not what you guess, right right right? What what is
(14:53):
going on there? What is like that mindset to I
don't get it. Yeah, it's people was like yeah, just
for like just ignoring exactly what he did. Is I
mean just like obviously it's like like the Maga folks
today are just exactly it's the same minded like whatever,
you know, it's he's fighting for us. I guess I
(15:13):
don't I don't know. I don't understand it. Yeah, I
it's hard to understand. Some of it is just that
like as general rule, the Black Christian community is considered
to be is extremely forgiving, right. Like It's like a
number of prominent figures in the American history have like,
after doing something bad, like shown up at like a
(15:35):
black church and given a speech or something and like,
you know, done the Mia colpa there because it's kind
of a good place to do it. Um. And there's
a lot of complex reasons for that that I don't
feel competent to get into. But it's like it is
a trend, particularly for like white people who do something
really bad. Um, Like I'm gonna wipe this away by Yeah,
(15:56):
I don't know. It's it's a thing that happens, um. Yeah.
So that's good. Yeah. Now. One of the things, ironically,
that helped Jim Baker in crafting his act too was
the fact that he had never been a very good
preacher in the theological sense. All of his sermons and
ideas were just cribbed from more original thinkers, people like
Oral Roberts. It was hard for him to come up
(16:17):
with much on his own. Because Jim had dropped out
of Bible College and never quite finished reading the Bible. UM.
And it would seem to me that this would be
a bad thing to reveal after you've spent thirty years
as like an expert on Christianity. But Baker leaned into
this successfully and he flipped it into a positive because
now he could start claiming that he had learned the
(16:37):
Bible in prison um and that like that taught him
more about his faith than than Bible College. And this
is how he starts to claim, like this is how
he learns prosperity gospels wrong, as while he's in prison
he gets to really focus on the Bible for the
first time. It's an amazing griftuh. From the Washington Post quote,
(16:58):
he learned above all that the meekschell and at the Earth,
that his forty room mansion, an air conditioned dog house
in twelve cars were part of an ungodly, arrogant lifestyle,
a realization he came to a few months after he
was initially denied parole. I believe the Bible said, above all,
God wants you to prosper well. When I went to prison,
I began to study the Bible, and I realized that
Jesus Christ didn't have anything good to say about money.
He says in his sermon, he called money the deceitfulness
(17:20):
of riches. He said, woe unto the rich. And this
plays really well to crowd a poor black people in
l A. And it's just it's amazing that this is
coming from this fucking guy's mouth. But it it works.
It's it's something else. I don't I don't understand. I
(17:42):
don't know that I ever will if guys like Jim
Baker are grifting on easy mode or if he's like
the fucking if he's just that good, it's impossible for
me to really tell um. But it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So Jim reinvinced himself as a bold man, preaching the
word of God from the position of a sinner. He
(18:03):
talked about the little log cabin where he lived now,
which was really a seventeen thousand square foot home lent
to him by a wealthy follower, and he met a
new wife too, Lorie Beth Graham. She was a preacher
as well, with a harrowing history of abortion and drug
abuse to give her the kind of arc that really
sells to the evangelical crowd. But her real main qualification
(18:24):
in Jim's eyes was the fact that she was the
spitting image of his ex wife, Tammy, only she was
seventeen years younger. And it's worth noting that like his
first wife's Tammy, second wife's LORI, that's not for nothing.
Um right, there's something going on there, and you know
where else there's something going on. Vic. Where's that? The
(18:47):
products and services that support this podcast? Oh, let's hear
about that? Oh yeah, yes, wow, those were great products,
pretty good services. Better products and services, I have to say,
but that's a matter of interpretation, much like the Bible.
(19:10):
So with a stable base of supporters in California, Jim
began to tour the nation once more. He built up
his time in a cushy minimum security prison for massive
fraud into a journey through the eye of the needle.
The Washington Post reported on one sermon he gave in
Jericho City, he described the exact moment of his epiphany,
a story he calls his day in the Pit of Hell,
(19:30):
Speaking as if in a few state, he recalls vague
and spooky details, a door open, a madman singing la
la la, la la. At some point he looked down
into the possessed eyes, and the door locked behind him.
He was either in the insane asylum or in solitary confinement.
A man was dying in the next cell. A toilet
was overflowing. I had lost the will to live, he
tells the crowd. I had slipped into a corner of
(19:52):
hell as I was going insane. I've always cried out.
At the split second, I was leaving the world, it
cried Jim, I love you. At first he saw no one.
Then a vision appeared at the door, a man with
brown skin and brown eyes. I didn't know angels are black,
he says. I didn't know. That's his first thought. Not
(20:16):
then angel there, but they're black. Yeah, I didn't call
that one. Amazing. Amazing that this plays. Not long after
that speech, a wealthy followers swept in and donated twenty
five million dollars that Jim and his new wife, Laurie
(20:38):
could build a new compound to film their show from.
The Baker's instantly abandoned the flock they'd cultivated in Los Angeles,
but they were sure to use the story of those
people's generosity to reinforce the narrative of their own awesomeness.
During his tour of America, Jim sometimes would regularly refer
to his Los Angeles ministry as the inner City. That
was how he was supposed to, but he would generally
(20:58):
slip and just call it the ghetto, saying things like
I found healing in the ghetto. Those people love me
so much, God people. Glauri also had a number of
choice lines in that vein, telling one reporter this is
probably not PC, but out of all the races, white, Hispanic,
Afro American, the people of the black race have been
(21:19):
by far the kindness to Jim out of all the races. Oh.
A tip from me is, if you're starting a sentence
with out of all the races, stop the sentence, stop
the sentence. Whatever you whatever you're saying, don't. Oh Jesus Christ, unreal.
(21:47):
In two thousand three, the Bakers moved back to the South.
A wealthy supporter from Missouri, who claimed Jim had saved
his marriage, paid for them to get up and running
in the studio City Cafe in Branson. I love Branson,
by the way. It's it's the city where this happens.
And and yeah, Branson is like it's like it is
like for for this group of people like Las Vegas,
(22:08):
and like Las Vegas, like l A is filled with
all these like stars who are past their prime. And
so they get like, that's what Jim Baker is doing exactly,
He's doing his like show in Branson Um and so
like they do that for a few years and eventually
they're there. Backer uses his millions to construct a new
compound for them called Morning Side, which is basically the
(22:28):
same as their old compound, but somewhat more modest. It
is not as big and grand, but it includes like
a fake Main Street, USA, and like basically like it's
basically like a weird fake like that chunk of Disney
World that Jim Baker streets for himself. With this recording studio,
it's probably not nearly as cool. No churros um, No,
(22:54):
definitely not Chiros. So they move in there at two
thousand eight and they've been there ever since. And it's
worth noting that this millionaire Backer, Jerry Crawford, actually owns
the proper most of the property at Morning Side, presumably
because Jim Baker can't really own property anymore because he
still owes millions of dollars in back taxes. So there's
like some sketchy ship. Given his felon status. It's also
(23:17):
unlikely that Jim Baker could have convinced the I r
S to grant tax exempt status to another one of
his organizations. That is probably not going to happen a
second time around, Right, you know, fool me once, shame
on me for me twice. I'm not gonna make you
tax exempt again. Um. This is probably why he had
to discard all of the prosperity gospel nonsense from his
first rise to power. He can't ask people to blindly
(23:37):
send him money anymore, or at least not the same way. Now.
I'm not an expert in taxes, but i do know
that generally money you receive as a gift is treated
very differently from money that you receiving the sale of
a product. You don't normally need to pay taxes on
a gift, right, Like, that's kind of a basic rule.
Now stick with me, Vick, because this is where the
grift gets really complicated. This is this is the pivot
(23:58):
that he makes, and it's kind of it's objective, brilliant. Um. So,
the main theological shift that Jim Baker undergoes during his
prison metamorphosis is to drop the prosperity gospel bullshit and
pick up apocalyptic rapture bullshit. And it's the kind of
art that makes narrative sense so people don't question, you know,
Like I thought that it was all about money and
all about like bringing that in, but then I realized that, like,
it's all about God and he's coming back and the
(24:19):
world is ending, So wealth doesn't even matter anymore because
he can't So he can't promise people to make them
rich by donating money to him anymore. Um, So why
would you focus on wealth? So the question then is, though,
why does he start focusing on the apocalypse? What is
the grift in the apocalypse? Well, obsessing over the apocalypse
allows Jim Baker to hawk an endless line of survival equipment,
(24:41):
primarily Baker buckets, which are are dried food storage buckets
for preppers. Um. And so we'll talk more about those
in a minute. Now, selling a shipload of survival equipment
would normally mean you have to hand over a lot
of that money uh to the state and taxes, right,
Like that's how a business works. But this is not
a business. See, if you know Jim Baker, you know
(25:02):
that the last motherfucking thing he's ever going to do
is pay a goddamn diamond taxes. Um, So he works
out a way to not do that. And here's how
BuzzFeed describes the grift in Morningside Lingo. These traded supplies
or offerings are called love gifts. Technically, the Ministry isn't
selling these items. Instead, the organization's business model requires that
the ministry function on donations, and those donations are a
(25:23):
lot easier to get if people get something in return,
be it a mug or be it a bucket of
food for the apocalypse, So there's no purchasing happening gift
to the ministry. It's awesome. That is such a good grift, unreal,
and it's it's this is where you really, you really
(25:44):
see Jim elevate in my mind to like the ranks
of truly great grifters, because before I feel like he's
on easy mode, Like there's there's no artifice in in
just saying give me money, it'll make you rich. This
is a legitimately brilliant grifts and he's one that can
like app so easily just like find out what the
next path is, you know. And he's been doing this
(26:05):
since like yeah two thou, um So, he's he and
he you know, Barack Obama was a huge boon to
his business. He claimed almost immediately that Barack Obama was
probably the Antichrist um and the end was nigh um
and yeah, and you might think that his boy Trump
getting elected would have like actually done some damage to
his bottom line, um, because he really supported Donald Trump.
(26:27):
But he was able to flip almost immediately into freaking
out about a black president to freaking out about all
the different natural disasters that we're going to batter the
that we're battering the US, and then also saying that
you know, if you're against Trump, that's God wanted Trump
in there, then you're you're for the devil. Yeah, it's
so good, It's just awesome, um so and thou. Fifteen
(26:50):
NPR did a deep dive into his survival buckets, which
the prepper community tends to refer to as baker buckets,
and they are not well regarded amongst the kinds of
people who keep a lot of survival food in their houses.
They're not they're not considered good sawdust. Yeah, they you
you've done so many videos there, just like focus deep
(27:13):
pans on like these fucking buckets like normal survival food.
You'll like, you'll like, you'll pour out like a little
freeze dried packet of what is and you'll pour in
water and you'll stir it together. It's like, look, you
got mac and cheese or whatever, right, baker like fills
up like a check getting massive tubs of this like
dried cheese, cheesey broccoli soup. We'll just be slowly stirring
(27:37):
this like mash if what looks and has to smell
like vomit, and it's just stick. It fills ladle and
just eat right from the ladle. It's horrifying. What kind
of church is this? What is what is going on? Yeah?
The Jim Baker's ads will will play some audio from
one of them later. His ads for food buckets are
(27:59):
I I find them eggs stentially horrifying. Are that was
a clock ticking down? Yeah, it's unlike anything else I've
ever seen? Um, But I want to read first before
you drop into one of those videos. I want to
read first from a two thousand and fifteen uh NPR
deep dive on his survival buckets quote among the freeze
(28:21):
ried products available on his website is a fifty days
survival food sampler bucket containing a hundred and fifty four meals.
It will cost you a hundred and thirty five dollars,
but the idea is you'll be prepared when food shortage
is hit. Imagined the world is dying and you're having
a breakfast for kings. The food We've got our hands
on a version of this bucket, which contains a variety
(28:42):
of hardy dishes, including buttermilk pancakes, vegetable chicken soup, creamy
stroke it off, black bean burgers, fetecchini alfredo, and mashed potatoes.
In October, three hour long segments were devoted to Baker's
assertion that we are the generation that will experience rapture.
Followers must be prepared to survive and continue preaching the gospel,
he says, and why not, as Baker urges, buy food
today so that you can have parties when the world's
(29:03):
coming up heart. Save for the pudding, the dishes were
extremely salty and odd, lingering aftertastes, we couldn't agree on
which was worse the thick potato soup, but like eating
wet cement, the strong chemical overtones and the chocolate pudding
or the disturbing radioactive orange of the macaroni and cheese.
(29:23):
Christ And do you have a segment you want to
play about the baker buckets before, because that's yeah, there's
uh you're talking to me like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's I mean, there's like the cheesy broccoli rice. It's
just so like offensive the watch and it's to hear
the plops of you know, the broccoli dropping into the soup.
(29:47):
It's just like this bright yellow, like neon yellow. It
should orange should not. Yeah, it's almost love craft Ian
and it's yeah, yeah, it's unsettling. No, And I don't know. Yeah,
you can't see them, so it's it's hard to Oh
(30:07):
my god it okay, look at this. Look look at this.
But what I love to put my hands in, but
it's hot this this. Look at the rocoley in there.
Look at that rockety that's why would you want that
at the top of a pizza? If I wouldn't gross
(30:29):
you out, I would eat right out of this shovel. Wow,
let's let's dump this in with the rice. There it goes.
We're dumping twenty two gallons into the right into the right. Now,
I have forty four gallons. What if you happen to
survive for two years or three years, you're gonna need
(30:52):
some more food. But h and it just looks like
it looks almost like powdered protein. It's just like like
I've I've I eat a lot of dried food. I
go camping, I do, like he's just eating it's so good,
(31:14):
so good. I I've never like, no one else sells
I'm very familiar with how people sell survival food. No
one has this. The best is uh that he's like
he must have had like extra buckets. So now he
(31:36):
started selling buckets filled with bibles, which is insane, and
they recommend, you know, burying the bibles the bucket for
when they need it down the line. Completely insane, unbelievable.
I don't it's amazing. It's amazing. He's selling a twenty
(32:00):
buckets sampler there for donation or more po Branson Bizara,
unfucking real, dude, I'll never understand how this works, but
it does. I don't know. And some good lawyers on
his side, you know, I don't even know if anyone's tried,
like there's this is just the way the law works.
(32:22):
And it shouldn't. You shouldn't just be able to say
it's a donation, here's your product. But I guess it's fine.
We've all agreed not to stop this. Um, it's pretty
(32:47):
cool and good and I have to know. One of
the surreal things about watching modern Jim Baker's ads is
that he looks like David Cross in a costume. Like, yeah,
that's definitely part of it. He like you, I emerged
from prison. And then he kinda you know, he's wearing
a cap now and he's got this like beard. Yeah,
(33:07):
he's like, you've reinvented himself a little bit, you know
his look. Yeah, you have to when you do this. So, Vick,
I'm gonna start selling buckets of slop. I mean, no
taking donations. If you donate to me, I will make
(33:28):
sure forty four gallons of something liquid and hot arrives
at your door. I'll find a way. So let's send
the money over and in the meantime, check out these
ads for products that are not donation based and function
within the regular economy and have to pay taxes. Yeah.
(33:56):
Jim Baker wound up on Donald Trump's side of the
election and his politic cool stances over the last few
years won't really surprise anyone. In August, he said this,
Hillary Clinton is a very wicked and Unchristian woman. She
supports gay rights and abortion. I would say she is
a bride of Satan. If America, alexir it could lead
to armageddon and cool. So she would have been so
(34:18):
much better of a candidate if she was married to
the devil, like less problematic than Bill Um. Yeah, but alas,
initially it looked like Trump selection would be bad for
Jim's business. Like I said, Um, the whole president Hillary
means armageddon lyon, I think he was really gearing up
for Hillary Clinton as president because he would have sold
(34:39):
the ship out of food and Bible books whole out.
Like you know they're gonna ban the Bible. You gotta
bury your Bibles, you gotta bury your food, bury at all. Yeah.
The best is like his live feed of the of
when the results are coming in. You know, they're just
like preparing for Trump to lose and to and to
start their grift again. And like the same thing with
Alex Jones. Yeah, they had to think on their feet quickly. Yeah,
(35:03):
how do we get through this now? How do we
get through this? Now and it was disastrous for Alex
Jones in the end, Um, it wasn't disastrous for Jim Baker.
I and I I don't really know why other than that,
like Alex Jones is uh violent and and uh commits
(35:23):
a ton of crimes. And I think Jim Baker has
been pretty careful about committing crimes since all of the
crimes he committed sent him to prison. Um, I guess
that's I guess that's just it. UM. And I at
kind of the end of this here, I'm left trying
to wonder what Jim's followers seeing him like when you like,
(35:47):
you find and I think most people find these videos
from a show so profoundly unsettling that you were You've
spent dozens of hours of your life editing them into
the horror shows that they really are. To try to
like highlight that because I mean, a guess, can you
can you can you tell me about the first time
you ever came across one of these videos, Like what
it was like realizing this was all going on. There
(36:08):
had to be a time before you knew Jim Baker that. Yeah,
I mean, I thought I came across the Baker bucket
like when he was making the cheesy brack of the
rice and the massive tubs. Um uh. My friend Tim
Heidecker found it. He says, you gotta do something with
this because it seems like it's like it's like a
skit or something. It just doesn't seem real, you know,
(36:30):
And like, I don't I don't know what's up with
the people that that. I don't know how anybody can
just watch that and not like be offended, like wow,
like why is this happening? How why would you give
it this guy any money? But um, I think I
think it's a lot of because he still has a
lot of older people that you know, grew up with
him in the seventies and eighties, and and he's this
(36:52):
cultural icon in a way. Um, and you know, it's
there's a little bit of the cult mentality to there,
because like even you can actually like buy rooms in
his studio so you can people live there, live in
the studio. Yeah, so all old ladies pretty much. Uh yeah. Yeah.
But I've noticed recently, even before the coronavirus upbreak, like
(37:16):
the crowd has been pretty slim. It's like they've been
trying to fill the uh the rose with like statues
and stuff to make it, you know, fill the room
up a little bit. But yeah, I'd be curious to
know how they're doing. Yeah there, Um, it's interesting there.
So this is like you do have to say, it's
his His current digs are much more, much less ambitious
(37:39):
than his original ones, and like, I think his studio
has about a sixty seat audience if Yeah, they're they're
kind of all older women, and yeah, it does seem
like there have been less of them lately for his reasons. Um,
but he did, uh, he did slip with the uh
with pushing the silver solution, Yeah he did. He got
in trouble for that. He's he's like the Missouri a g. Yeah,
(38:04):
I think New York to like, yeah, we'll see what
kind of damage that does. It's interesting because I think
he kind of backed off on the silver stuff once
he got sued. Maybe a little wrong on that, but
I know, yeah, I know Alex did not. Alex Jones
has just been like I think he's just kind of
being like, fuck it, let's see what they do. Ye
come and get me, and like, yeah, Jim Baker's whole
(38:25):
life is testament to the fact that like they don't
do that much like you have to commit tens of
millions of dollars in fraud and violent rape, and like
the rape didn't have any im back on a sentencing,
as he wasn't charged for it. But I do think
it kind of played into the fact that like something
happened to him. Like I think if he just committed
to financial crimes, I doubt he would have spent more
like a year in prison. But um yeah, it's quite
(38:48):
a quite a thing. Anyways, I wanted to kind of
end by trying to get into the heads a little
bit of the people who watch this and love this
and find him inspiring, because I will never really understand them,
but we should try to you a little bit because
it's important. UM So, I found a BuzzFeed article um
that that interviews a woman who's a big fan of
(39:08):
Jim Baker's uh, an older lady named Dave's Green as
her her last name. UM quote. I watched the show
because I can connect with Jim and Laurie. They seem
to be such everyday people, she says, the stuff they
talk like, who they're like what. I grew up in
(39:29):
the South, I know the rural parts of this country.
I don't know anyone like Jim Baker, Like, what the
are you talking about? Um, Jesus. The stuff they talk
about the show, it's stuff that we everyday people struggle with.
And I guess that part is true because they do
talk to you about that. It's helped me to be
a better person, So that part I get. Um Day's
(39:50):
Green is worried about many things, the Leviathan spirit, natural disasters, pestilence,
bird flu, swine flu, Palestine, the Second Coming of Christ
isis blast me an immigration, which is the amazing list
of like, yeah, you should be worried about, you know,
diseases and natural Palestine. Wait, no, no, no, no immigration.
(40:13):
Over the course of our conversation, she expresses fear that
the world is crumbling before her, that people are falling
further and further away from God. I am awake, Daves
Green says. People say that I am crazy, but I
am not crazy. Jim Baker is not crazy. We know
that something is happening and we are trying to do something. Mostly,
Daves Green says she has been called crazy by the
(40:34):
church she used to attend. She asked the church to
preach on the Book of Revelation to reveal the truth
of the Bible that she believes people need to know
because it's happening now. She uses a verse from Hebrews
five twelve in our conversation which chastises young Christians for
their dependence on easily digested topics of faith instead of
trying to tackle more meaty ones. Revelation, in her opinion,
is than meat. I guess I got thrown into the
fanatical group, she says, because her church asked her to
(40:56):
leave Dave's. Green's faith is tightly bound together with her
Paul Plitics. She says he is a Donald Trump supporter.
She wants the swamp in Washington, d C. Cleared out,
and she wants America to return to the America she
lived in during her childhood. There's a lot of it
there and that's why Main Street USA is the theme
of his current like compound sort of church thing. Yeah,
(41:18):
they want to go back in time and they're very
open about that. Um. I'm continuing the article because I
think this is important. Her biggest personal causes immigration. She
wants her governor Greg Abbott to get rid of the
sanctuary cities in Texas. In fact, Abbott recently signed legislation
banning them. It used to be a little shelf in
the grocery store that had a few little Mexican things
on it, but now there's a whole section of the
(41:38):
store that's written in Spanish. She explains. They are supposed
to assimilate. It went from like five Mexican families to
like around us to like twenty. There are Muslim people
living in Graham, a nearby town. They took over the
convenience stores. She pauses, I don't want to have to
physically fight those people here on our own homeland for
our Christian American values, but I will. They're an invading force,
I feel. Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's it's yeah, that's
(42:06):
what that's. That's something though, I mean, because he doesn't
I think he does have like Muslim guests on his show,
you know, I think he could be wrong. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know enough about that, but that's at least
what this lady takes. Yeah. Interesting, Yeah, it's it's pretty wild.
And the language that Baker used around Donald Trump is
(42:30):
pretty wild. Um, Like in the run up to, like
during the election, he said at one point, I'm not
supposed to tell you this, but I have eyewitnesses. Donald
Trump is a very tender man, and he weeps. He
wants to please God more than anything else. He wants
to be president of the United States and make things
right in this country because he loves God Almighty. Then,
with his eyes shining, Baker declared, God has called I
believe Donald Trump. So yeah, and Baker says Trump called
(42:55):
him to thank him after his election. Uh and and
they were invited to the inauguration, which they attended. They
were invited to the inaugural prayer, breakfast, and inaugural ball.
Uh so yeah, that's you get this guy, were walking
around the Whitehouse. That's normal, typical stuff. That's good good,
it's good for good for America. Um. I mean in
(43:18):
terms of the rapists in the White House, he's one
of them. He is among them on the list. Um yep,
that's our episode. Yeah, how does everybody feel like, Oh
my god, I need a bath. Yeah, a bath in
(43:40):
one of those giant buckets full of cheesy brock. Oh
my Christ. So how um, how are we doing? Dude?
All right? Yeah? M hm, yep, yep, Robert, m hm.
(44:08):
You're frozen. I know, we're all frozen, frozen, frozen, in
awe of the grifting talent of Jim Baker. Fucking incredible. Well, Vic,
you wanna plug your plug doubles? Do you sell gigantic
forty four gallon buckets of slop? I don't at the
moment that it. Yeah, if you're gonna get my dusty
(44:32):
food together, you mix it with a little water and
you can you can feed your family the good as
a general rule, the good dried food like that. You
open the packs and you can tell it's food. Right,
it looks like freeze dried and like shrunken and you know, desiccated,
but it looks like what it is, and like some
of it you can just eat dry and it's not bad.
Like Mountain House, you can eat that ship dry and
(44:53):
it's pretty good. Um, Baker's food, Yeah, just looks like sawdust.
It's a slop. But it's like, yeah, pig should be
eating it. I don't know how he's put a trough
out there, and that's sucking incredible. Um right, oh yeah,
but you can, Uh, if you want to see my
re edits of Jim Baker videos, you can head to
(45:16):
my YouTube, Vic Burger. Uh, there's a number of them
on there. There's a lot of a lot of stuff.
They're a lot of a lot of fun stuff. You
can check me out on Twitter, Facebook, type in Vic
Burger and there I am. Yeah, there he is, and
I am also on the internet. He's I I write
okay on Twitter, We're at Bastard's Pot on Twitter and Instagram.
(45:39):
We have a t publok store where you can buy merch.
Robert also hosts a podcast called The Women's War. You
should check it out. I haven't verified any of this information,
so check up on it on your own, yeah, he said,
And thanks. Thanks for what you guys do. You guys
are doing important work documenting all this safely. Thank you
as well. Please, um, please continue doing I don't really
(46:01):
know how to describe what you do, but it's important. Um,
it's important documentation. I consider it a form of journalism, Vic,
And I'll tell you why. It's because the the the actual,
the baseline reality of these these videos doesn't do enough
to convey emotionally what happens to a human being who
(46:22):
watches them in the time in which they're concurrent. And
I think what you do provides that by by setting
the tone. That is important. Yeah, because I mean because
Jim is like he's doing you know, five six hours
a week. He's like, you know, these shows are long,
and uh so yeah, I try to whittle it down
to the most horrifying moments. Yeah, it's pretty cool and good. So, um,
(46:50):
we're all gonna go wash our hands, wash our hands, cry, pray, pray,
pray about crying, cry about prayer. Yeah, it's gonna be
it's gonna be good. Alright, alright, thanks than on being
on VIC h M.
Well I podcast has returned. Robert Evans Behind the Bastards
Jim Baker Part two, Vic Burger guests, Hello, Hello, how
are how are how are just wonderful? That's good? That's good.
I am experimenting with using less words than normal, uh,
(00:27):
in the hopes that that will make me easier to understand.
So how's that going for you, buddy? Poorly? Yeah, poorly,
it doesn't doesn't work well. Um, But you know what
was working great in the nineteen eighties was Jim Baker's
grift fucking he's really hitting it out of the goddamn part. Yeah.
(00:49):
N seven would prove to be the high point for
Jim and Tammy Baker's empire of you know whatever you
want to call it. That year opened with PTL breaking
ground on the Crystal Palace Ministry Center, a hundred million
dollar construction project. So that's um. They have expanded quite
a bit at this point. Um. Now, and this is
I'm sorry, where where is this again? At the time?
(01:10):
What Heritage USA? It's in I think South Carolina, South Carolina? Okay, yeah,
uh so the Crystal Palace Ministry Center was supposed to be,
like the Palace itself, was a gargantuan glass structure nine
hundred and sixteen feet long and four hundred and twenty
feet wide. Uh. It was a full scale like representation
of like a Victorian era building from London. It would
(01:32):
have a three hundred seat auditorium and a five thousand
seat TV studio. Um. Jim Baker bragg to everyone who
listened that when complete, the Crystal Palace would be the
largest church on Earth. Uh So that's awesome. Yeah. By
PTL had more than employees and revenue of more than
a hundred and twenty five million dollars per year, the
(01:53):
Heritage USA theme park was hugely popular. More than six
million people visited it that year. Uh. In again, only
Disneyland and Disney World were more popular. So on the surface,
it's not crazy that they would embark on a hundred
million dollar construction project, right. That seems, you know, pretty
easily within their means um And yet on the very
day that ground was broken for the Crystal Palace, Tammy
(02:14):
Faye Baker suffered a calamitous mental breakdown. Now, when it
came to popularity outside of the evangelical Christian bubble, Tammy
Faye definitely outshone her husband her heavy makeup and regular
crying fits that sent it running down her face were
regular subjects for parody, like Bloom County made a lot
of Tammy Faye Baker jokes, but on that Phil Hartman
(02:35):
did uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he did a great
Sammy Faye like she that she's definitely like the one
who kind of cracked into the mainstream the most. Um.
But the hysterics were not like just something she did
for the camera or anything like. It was. She had
serious emotional regulation problems, in part as a result of
(02:56):
the stress of running a business that was constantly on
the edge of collapse because of the financial crimes they
were committing. Um, that's not great for your you. She's
not great, um. And so on that January day, she
had a mental breakdown and as Don Hardister, the former
detail had a security later called quote, they left me
(03:16):
in the house alone with Tammy and that's when she
started hallucinating. And I couldn't believe I'm there by myself
with this lady. And she'd taken her clothes off, and
Tammy didn't do that kind of stuff around me. We
all knew she had some prescription drug problems, so she's
is a bad breakdown. And two months later, Tammy's problem
grew serious enough that she required treatment for chemical dependency.
As had become the norm, the Bakers took to the
(03:37):
air waves and recorded a whole very special episode about
Tammy Phay's battle with drug abuse. And again this went
over well with their audience, Like the fact that Tammy
had been abusing narcotics, like didn't slow the donations down
at all or make them any less beloved by theirs.
You see their their faults and uh, you know, they
want to and they want to help. They want to
help her, help her problem exactly. What didn't go over
(04:01):
well with the audience was a blockbuster article in The
Charlotte Observer published just days later, revealing the sordid details
of the rape that Jim Baker had committed on Jessica Han.
So that comes out in eight seven too. And while
this is happening, the Observer continued to tear into Baker's
ministry for its flagrant misuse of funds. They published more
than six hundred stories in nineteen eighties seven alone. Um,
(04:22):
so they are, yeah, they are fucking tearing into this. Yeah.
The Charlotte Observer once this stopped and they put in
the fucking groundwork. Uh, and they revealed this massive chain
of fraudulent fundraising, fake lifetime memberships, incorrect tax exemptions based
on its status as a nonprofit religious organization. Um. It's
(04:45):
revealed that the FCC actually launched an investigation into PTL
back in nineteen seventy nine over three hundred thousand dollars
in funds raised from missionary work overseas that was just
spent on the theme park instead. Um. And it becomes
kind of clear that the theme park has been losing
money for a while, but because it's just so fucking expensive,
and all of these things that he keeps adding to
it are so ambitious. UM. So they're like raising money
(05:06):
for other things and then spending them on this theme
park because fucking Jim Baker loves his stupid theme park. Um,
it's pretty cool. So, Uh, Jim raised huge amounts of
money for overseas ministries, and his followers, you know, donated
that money in the hopes that he'd send out preachers
and provide humanitarian aid to impoverished areas. Instead, he rerooted
millions of dollars of this money and pumped up his
(05:28):
uh theme park. Yeah. So the park led millions a year,
and much of Jim's criminal behavior was dedicated to plugging
that hole in He was indicted on eight counts of
mail fraud, fifteen counts of wire fraud, and one count
of conspiracy to commit fraud. Between this and the big
reveal that Baker had spent another two hundred and sixty
five thousand dollars of church money bribing his rape victim,
(05:48):
there was no way for Jim and Tammy to stay
at the head of the PTL. So everything falls apart
very fucking quick. So we have found the line here though,
this is where it hits. So that's good that there's
a line. Um, this this proves to not be something
that you can like get on TV and be like, hey,
(06:10):
uh fucking this is what I did. And it's fine
because I'm giving myself up to God that that there
there is a line to how much you can do that. Yeah,
or at least there was. Our old friend Jerry Fallwell
sailed into the gap to take over the ministry and
try to write the ship. Uh. And if he thought
doing this would be an easy way to turn a dime,
he was very very wrong. It quickly became clear that,
(06:33):
due to Jim's criminal mismanagement, the ministry owed nearly a
hundred million dollars to various creditors and more than fifty
five million dollars in back taxes. Folwell resigned less than
a year later and accused Jim Baker of being quote
probably the greatest scab and the cancer on the face
of Christianity in two thousand years of church history. Like
(06:54):
there's some genocides in there, and he's like, there's a
there's a there's a good let a fall just before
all that where he uh, they're like seventy million dollars
in debt, and he raised a goal if they wanted
to get twenty two million in a month, he would
go down the water, go down the water slide um suit.
(07:14):
And they raised that money, and he went down the
slide in his suit. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a twenty
two million dollars. Imagine asking people to do that. It's
so it's so good. It's good and cool. So Jim
(07:35):
Baker was quick to tell the New York Times that
without a miracle of God, we will never minister again.
But it was clear to every rational observer that he
and Tammy had just stepped back from the flaming wreckage
of their ministry to wait out for the inherent forgiveness
of the well meeting rooms who supported them. Alast for Jim,
he would have to weather a massive criminal trial before
this could happen. Tammy Fay escaped indictment, and there's a
(07:56):
great debate to this day as to how much she
actually knew. It's probably fair to say she was more
or less an equal partner and was fully aware of
the enormous intercontinental scam that paid for her house boats
and fur coats. But she escaped without legal consequences, and
her husband was not so lucky. Uh. Their former employees
rolled on him pretty much instantly. Steve Nelson, a PTL
(08:16):
employee who was responsible for the lifetime membership program, testified
in court that memberships had been deliberately oversold. The act
of betraying his boss and God to a court of
law was more than the old man's constitution could take,
and he collapsed on the stand. As the court sketch
artist later recalled when he fainted, it was this silence,
and a voice from the audience came up and said, oh,
(08:36):
he's giving his life to God, and Baker's attorney called
him up and said, Jim, Jim, as if there's going
to be a miracle, he can bring him back to life. Uh,
sounds like a fun court case. Good time. Nelson was
not dead, though, and as the trial continued Jim Baker
(08:57):
had a complete mental breakdown himself. That their next day,
he began hallucinating. The reporters outside the courtroom were insects.
His his head of security recalled. Later that night he
was curled up underneath his attorney's couch. I think the
weight of that trial and the weight of everything he
had done, good and bad, just crushed him. Yeah right, yeah,
(09:22):
well I would hope so. So. Baker was committed to
a psychiatric ward in the federal prison and the trial
was put on hold for six days. When things finally
concluded on October nine, Jim was found guilty on all
twenty four accounts and sentenced to forty five years in prison.
He was also ordered to pay a half a million
dollar fine. He appealed, but the court withheld his conviction.
(09:45):
They did grant him a sentence reduction hearing, though, and
dropped those forty five years down to just eight and
he only actually served five before being paroled in nine.
So that's great. Yeah, five years, steal millions of dollars,
rape a woman five years right right back in a
minimum security prison. Yeah, and his cell mate was Lyndon LaRouche.
(10:11):
It's so good, Oh boy, So I'll ask for Tim.
Tammy Faye was not a waiter. She filed for divorce
while he was in the clink and married a guy
named Rome Messner, a contractor who had helped to build
Heritage USA. Tammy knew how to pick him. In nine,
Messner was convicted to twenty seven months in federal prison
for bankruptcy fraud. So and weirdly have Tammy Faye dies
(10:35):
and I think two seven she gets cancered. But she
her second act is actually kind of sweet, Like she
becomes for purely for purely ironic reasons. She becomes a
gay icon because of her like makeup and everything. Like
she's seen as yeah, like a lot of like drag
queens and people like that will like want will like
emulate her makeup style just because it's like so garish
(10:56):
and out there and kitchen. My first exposure to her
was when she was on that vag one reality show
the Surreal Life, remember that with Sherman Helmsley and the
guy from smash Mouth. It's amazing. Yeah, and she um, yeah,
she'd said horrible things that has had her husband about
(11:18):
gay people in PTL. And I don't think she ever
like came out and just said like I was wrong,
But she did state later in life that, like, when
everything collapsed for her, the only people who were there
for her was the gay community because they Yeah, so
that's interesting, Tammy. I don't know what to say about
Tammy Faye Baker. She's an interesting person. Yeah. So, once
(11:41):
he was out of minimum security prison, Jim Baker wound
up briefly in a halfway house. Before his fall from grace,
he'd owned a fifty five ft houseboat at five dollar
Rolls Royce and at dollar Mercedes Benz, along with numerous
palatial mansions all around the world. Afterwards, he went up
living in a rented farmhouse in North Carolina. There, Jim
began to execute an epic plan to rebuild his empire.
(12:03):
It started with the publication of his second autobiography, titled
I Was Wrong, which is at least a better title
than If I Did It. Yeah. Yeah. In it, he
seemed to repudiate the prosperity Gospel beliefs that had dominated
his first ministry. He wrote, I was appalled that I
could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful
that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet.
(12:27):
So that's interesting. Um, the book was step one. But
if Jim was going to achieve his goal, which was
to just do the same thing he'd done before a
second time, uh, he knew he was going to need
to sell himself to a new community, a community open
minded enough to forgive someone like him. He found this
community in Los Angeles, California, at a place called the
(12:48):
International Dream Center, and according to the Washington Post quote,
there he lived in a Crampton crumbling room with his
son Jamie twenty two, and received visiting reporters eager to
chronicle his recovery. All glowing articles about the New Jim
Baker mentioned his rough life in the ghetto, including the
cramped and Yeah, so Jim throws himself on the mercy
(13:09):
of the black Evangelical Christian community, like that's who he
goes to when his chips are down. And as surprising
as it might seem, they took him in Uh. Some
of this had to do with the fact that, as
I stated, PTL had been very popular with the black community,
and the Bakers had always been relatively good on racial issues. Um.
So many of the folks that he reached out to
in l A remembered him from their childhood. But as
(13:31):
the Post's reporting continues, that's not the only reason he
was accepted. Baker's story of temptation, collapse, prison and loss
resonated with many poor black folks in l A. You
know this is obviously Jim's actual experience of of crime
and prison had no similarity. But yeah, he was good
at spinning it. Um. They at one point, like when
(13:52):
he was doing this sort of revival to her, they
interviewed a number of the folks who were in line
to buy his book in l A. And I want
to quote from that now. One of them is his
former cellmate at Jessup, Nathaniel Mathis, thirty two, now working
at a telephone company, who showed up to wish his
friend well. I can relate so much to him how
he was stripped of everything. Mathis says, like Jim, I
lost everything a hundred and ten percent. But the lord
(14:12):
works in the lowest valleys. Lawrence Drew and his friends
are all black men in their twenties, just out of
prison on drug related or similar charges. In four hours,
they have to show up at a janitorial job for
manpower for Jesus, their halfway house alternative. All are hopeful
that their lives will soon change, and they look to
back or for inspiration. Oh sure, all of us can
relate to him, says Drew, who has just paid twenty
(14:32):
five dollars for Baker's book and is waiting patiently to
have it signed. He's the underdog, and that's what we are. Underdogs.
He's real. He's very real. And now by which he
means after the prison term, I think he can be
more powerful than he ever was. Who Yeah, that's that's
not what you guess, right right right? What what is
(14:53):
going on there? What is like that mindset to I
don't get it. Yeah, it's people was like yeah, just
for like just ignoring exactly what he did. Is I
mean just like obviously it's like like the Maga folks
today are just exactly it's the same minded like whatever,
you know, it's he's fighting for us. I guess I
(15:13):
don't I don't know. I don't understand it. Yeah, I
it's hard to understand. Some of it is just that
like as general rule, the Black Christian community is considered
to be is extremely forgiving, right. Like It's like a
number of prominent figures in the American history have like,
after doing something bad, like shown up at like a
(15:35):
black church and given a speech or something and like,
you know, done the Mia colpa there because it's kind
of a good place to do it. Um. And there's
a lot of complex reasons for that that I don't
feel competent to get into. But it's like it is
a trend, particularly for like white people who do something
really bad. Um, Like I'm gonna wipe this away by Yeah,
(15:56):
I don't know. It's it's a thing that happens, um. Yeah.
So that's good. Yeah. Now. One of the things, ironically,
that helped Jim Baker in crafting his act too was
the fact that he had never been a very good
preacher in the theological sense. All of his sermons and
ideas were just cribbed from more original thinkers, people like
Oral Roberts. It was hard for him to come up
(16:17):
with much on his own. Because Jim had dropped out
of Bible College and never quite finished reading the Bible. UM.
And it would seem to me that this would be
a bad thing to reveal after you've spent thirty years
as like an expert on Christianity. But Baker leaned into
this successfully and he flipped it into a positive because
now he could start claiming that he had learned the
(16:37):
Bible in prison um and that like that taught him
more about his faith than than Bible College. And this
is how he starts to claim, like this is how
he learns prosperity gospels wrong, as while he's in prison
he gets to really focus on the Bible for the
first time. It's an amazing griftuh. From the Washington Post quote,
(16:58):
he learned above all that the meekschell and at the Earth,
that his forty room mansion, an air conditioned dog house
in twelve cars were part of an ungodly, arrogant lifestyle,
a realization he came to a few months after he
was initially denied parole. I believe the Bible said, above all,
God wants you to prosper well. When I went to prison,
I began to study the Bible, and I realized that
Jesus Christ didn't have anything good to say about money.
He says in his sermon, he called money the deceitfulness
(17:20):
of riches. He said, woe unto the rich. And this
plays really well to crowd a poor black people in
l A. And it's just it's amazing that this is
coming from this fucking guy's mouth. But it it works.
It's it's something else. I don't I don't understand. I
(17:42):
don't know that I ever will if guys like Jim
Baker are grifting on easy mode or if he's like
the fucking if he's just that good, it's impossible for
me to really tell um. But it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So Jim reinvinced himself as a bold man, preaching the
word of God from the position of a sinner. He
(18:03):
talked about the little log cabin where he lived now,
which was really a seventeen thousand square foot home lent
to him by a wealthy follower, and he met a
new wife too, Lorie Beth Graham. She was a preacher
as well, with a harrowing history of abortion and drug
abuse to give her the kind of arc that really
sells to the evangelical crowd. But her real main qualification
(18:24):
in Jim's eyes was the fact that she was the
spitting image of his ex wife, Tammy, only she was
seventeen years younger. And it's worth noting that like his
first wife's Tammy, second wife's LORI, that's not for nothing.
Um right, there's something going on there, and you know
where else there's something going on. Vic. Where's that? The
(18:47):
products and services that support this podcast? Oh, let's hear
about that? Oh yeah, yes, wow, those were great products,
pretty good services. Better products and services, I have to say,
but that's a matter of interpretation, much like the Bible.
(19:10):
So with a stable base of supporters in California, Jim
began to tour the nation once more. He built up
his time in a cushy minimum security prison for massive
fraud into a journey through the eye of the needle.
The Washington Post reported on one sermon he gave in
Jericho City, he described the exact moment of his epiphany,
a story he calls his day in the Pit of Hell,
(19:30):
Speaking as if in a few state, he recalls vague
and spooky details, a door open, a madman singing la
la la, la la. At some point he looked down
into the possessed eyes, and the door locked behind him.
He was either in the insane asylum or in solitary confinement.
A man was dying in the next cell. A toilet
was overflowing. I had lost the will to live, he
tells the crowd. I had slipped into a corner of
(19:52):
hell as I was going insane. I've always cried out.
At the split second, I was leaving the world, it
cried Jim, I love you. At first he saw no one.
Then a vision appeared at the door, a man with
brown skin and brown eyes. I didn't know angels are black,
he says. I didn't know. That's his first thought. Not
(20:16):
then angel there, but they're black. Yeah, I didn't call
that one. Amazing. Amazing that this plays. Not long after
that speech, a wealthy followers swept in and donated twenty
five million dollars that Jim and his new wife, Laurie
(20:38):
could build a new compound to film their show from.
The Baker's instantly abandoned the flock they'd cultivated in Los Angeles,
but they were sure to use the story of those
people's generosity to reinforce the narrative of their own awesomeness.
During his tour of America, Jim sometimes would regularly refer
to his Los Angeles ministry as the inner City. That
was how he was supposed to, but he would generally
(20:58):
slip and just call it the ghetto, saying things like
I found healing in the ghetto. Those people love me
so much, God people. Glauri also had a number of
choice lines in that vein, telling one reporter this is
probably not PC, but out of all the races, white, Hispanic,
Afro American, the people of the black race have been
(21:19):
by far the kindness to Jim out of all the races. Oh.
A tip from me is, if you're starting a sentence
with out of all the races, stop the sentence, stop
the sentence. Whatever you whatever you're saying, don't. Oh Jesus Christ, unreal.
(21:47):
In two thousand three, the Bakers moved back to the South.
A wealthy supporter from Missouri, who claimed Jim had saved
his marriage, paid for them to get up and running
in the studio City Cafe in Branson. I love Branson,
by the way. It's it's the city where this happens.
And and yeah, Branson is like it's like it is
like for for this group of people like Las Vegas,
(22:08):
and like Las Vegas, like l A is filled with
all these like stars who are past their prime. And
so they get like, that's what Jim Baker is doing exactly,
He's doing his like show in Branson Um and so
like they do that for a few years and eventually
they're there. Backer uses his millions to construct a new
compound for them called Morning Side, which is basically the
(22:28):
same as their old compound, but somewhat more modest. It
is not as big and grand, but it includes like
a fake Main Street, USA, and like basically like it's
basically like a weird fake like that chunk of Disney
World that Jim Baker streets for himself. With this recording studio,
it's probably not nearly as cool. No churros um, No,
(22:54):
definitely not Chiros. So they move in there at two
thousand eight and they've been there ever since. And it's
worth noting that this millionaire Backer, Jerry Crawford, actually owns
the proper most of the property at Morning Side, presumably
because Jim Baker can't really own property anymore because he
still owes millions of dollars in back taxes. So there's
like some sketchy ship. Given his felon status. It's also
(23:17):
unlikely that Jim Baker could have convinced the I r
S to grant tax exempt status to another one of
his organizations. That is probably not going to happen a
second time around, Right, you know, fool me once, shame
on me for me twice. I'm not gonna make you
tax exempt again. Um. This is probably why he had
to discard all of the prosperity gospel nonsense from his
first rise to power. He can't ask people to blindly
(23:37):
send him money anymore, or at least not the same way. Now.
I'm not an expert in taxes, but i do know
that generally money you receive as a gift is treated
very differently from money that you receiving the sale of
a product. You don't normally need to pay taxes on
a gift, right, Like, that's kind of a basic rule.
Now stick with me, Vick, because this is where the
grift gets really complicated. This is this is the pivot
(23:58):
that he makes, and it's kind of it's objective, brilliant. Um. So,
the main theological shift that Jim Baker undergoes during his
prison metamorphosis is to drop the prosperity gospel bullshit and
pick up apocalyptic rapture bullshit. And it's the kind of
art that makes narrative sense so people don't question, you know,
Like I thought that it was all about money and
all about like bringing that in, but then I realized that, like,
it's all about God and he's coming back and the
(24:19):
world is ending, So wealth doesn't even matter anymore because
he can't So he can't promise people to make them
rich by donating money to him anymore. Um, So why
would you focus on wealth? So the question then is, though,
why does he start focusing on the apocalypse? What is
the grift in the apocalypse? Well, obsessing over the apocalypse
allows Jim Baker to hawk an endless line of survival equipment,
(24:41):
primarily Baker buckets, which are are dried food storage buckets
for preppers. Um. And so we'll talk more about those
in a minute. Now, selling a shipload of survival equipment
would normally mean you have to hand over a lot
of that money uh to the state and taxes, right,
Like that's how a business works. But this is not
a business. See, if you know Jim Baker, you know
(25:02):
that the last motherfucking thing he's ever going to do
is pay a goddamn diamond taxes. Um, So he works
out a way to not do that. And here's how
BuzzFeed describes the grift in Morningside Lingo. These traded supplies
or offerings are called love gifts. Technically, the Ministry isn't
selling these items. Instead, the organization's business model requires that
the ministry function on donations, and those donations are a
(25:23):
lot easier to get if people get something in return,
be it a mug or be it a bucket of
food for the apocalypse, So there's no purchasing happening gift
to the ministry. It's awesome. That is such a good grift, unreal,
and it's it's this is where you really, you really
(25:44):
see Jim elevate in my mind to like the ranks
of truly great grifters, because before I feel like he's
on easy mode, Like there's there's no artifice in in
just saying give me money, it'll make you rich. This
is a legitimately brilliant grifts and he's one that can
like app so easily just like find out what the
next path is, you know. And he's been doing this
(26:05):
since like yeah two thou, um So, he's he and
he you know, Barack Obama was a huge boon to
his business. He claimed almost immediately that Barack Obama was
probably the Antichrist um and the end was nigh um
and yeah, and you might think that his boy Trump
getting elected would have like actually done some damage to
his bottom line, um, because he really supported Donald Trump.
(26:27):
But he was able to flip almost immediately into freaking
out about a black president to freaking out about all
the different natural disasters that we're going to batter the
that we're battering the US, and then also saying that
you know, if you're against Trump, that's God wanted Trump
in there, then you're you're for the devil. Yeah, it's
so good, It's just awesome, um so and thou. Fifteen
(26:50):
NPR did a deep dive into his survival buckets, which
the prepper community tends to refer to as baker buckets,
and they are not well regarded amongst the kinds of
people who keep a lot of survival food in their houses.
They're not they're not considered good sawdust. Yeah, they you
you've done so many videos there, just like focus deep
(27:13):
pans on like these fucking buckets like normal survival food.
You'll like, you'll like, you'll pour out like a little
freeze dried packet of what is and you'll pour in
water and you'll stir it together. It's like, look, you
got mac and cheese or whatever, right, baker like fills
up like a check getting massive tubs of this like
dried cheese, cheesey broccoli soup. We'll just be slowly stirring
(27:37):
this like mash if what looks and has to smell
like vomit, and it's just stick. It fills ladle and
just eat right from the ladle. It's horrifying. What kind
of church is this? What is what is going on? Yeah?
The Jim Baker's ads will will play some audio from
one of them later. His ads for food buckets are
(27:59):
I I find them eggs stentially horrifying. Are that was
a clock ticking down? Yeah, it's unlike anything else I've
ever seen? Um, But I want to read first before
you drop into one of those videos. I want to
read first from a two thousand and fifteen uh NPR
deep dive on his survival buckets quote among the freeze
(28:21):
ried products available on his website is a fifty days
survival food sampler bucket containing a hundred and fifty four meals.
It will cost you a hundred and thirty five dollars,
but the idea is you'll be prepared when food shortage
is hit. Imagined the world is dying and you're having
a breakfast for kings. The food We've got our hands
on a version of this bucket, which contains a variety
(28:42):
of hardy dishes, including buttermilk pancakes, vegetable chicken soup, creamy
stroke it off, black bean burgers, fetecchini alfredo, and mashed potatoes.
In October, three hour long segments were devoted to Baker's
assertion that we are the generation that will experience rapture.
Followers must be prepared to survive and continue preaching the gospel,
he says, and why not, as Baker urges, buy food
today so that you can have parties when the world's
(29:03):
coming up heart. Save for the pudding, the dishes were
extremely salty and odd, lingering aftertastes, we couldn't agree on
which was worse the thick potato soup, but like eating
wet cement, the strong chemical overtones and the chocolate pudding
or the disturbing radioactive orange of the macaroni and cheese.
(29:23):
Christ And do you have a segment you want to
play about the baker buckets before, because that's yeah, there's
uh you're talking to me like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's I mean, there's like the cheesy broccoli rice. It's
just so like offensive the watch and it's to hear
the plops of you know, the broccoli dropping into the soup.
(29:47):
It's just like this bright yellow, like neon yellow. It
should orange should not. Yeah, it's almost love craft Ian
and it's yeah, yeah, it's unsettling. No, And I don't know. Yeah,
you can't see them, so it's it's hard to Oh
(30:07):
my god it okay, look at this. Look look at this.
But what I love to put my hands in, but
it's hot this this. Look at the rocoley in there.
Look at that rockety that's why would you want that
at the top of a pizza? If I wouldn't gross
(30:29):
you out, I would eat right out of this shovel. Wow,
let's let's dump this in with the rice. There it goes.
We're dumping twenty two gallons into the right into the right. Now,
I have forty four gallons. What if you happen to
survive for two years or three years, you're gonna need
(30:52):
some more food. But h and it just looks like
it looks almost like powdered protein. It's just like like
I've I've I eat a lot of dried food. I
go camping, I do, like he's just eating it's so good,
(31:14):
so good. I I've never like, no one else sells
I'm very familiar with how people sell survival food. No
one has this. The best is uh that he's like
he must have had like extra buckets. So now he
(31:36):
started selling buckets filled with bibles, which is insane, and
they recommend, you know, burying the bibles the bucket for
when they need it down the line. Completely insane, unbelievable.
I don't it's amazing. It's amazing. He's selling a twenty
(32:00):
buckets sampler there for donation or more po Branson Bizara,
unfucking real, dude, I'll never understand how this works, but
it does. I don't know. And some good lawyers on
his side, you know, I don't even know if anyone's tried,
like there's this is just the way the law works.
(32:22):
And it shouldn't. You shouldn't just be able to say
it's a donation, here's your product. But I guess it's fine.
We've all agreed not to stop this. Um, it's pretty
(32:47):
cool and good and I have to know. One of
the surreal things about watching modern Jim Baker's ads is
that he looks like David Cross in a costume. Like, yeah,
that's definitely part of it. He like you, I emerged
from prison. And then he kinda you know, he's wearing
a cap now and he's got this like beard. Yeah,
(33:07):
he's like, you've reinvented himself a little bit, you know
his look. Yeah, you have to when you do this. So, Vick,
I'm gonna start selling buckets of slop. I mean, no
taking donations. If you donate to me, I will make
(33:28):
sure forty four gallons of something liquid and hot arrives
at your door. I'll find a way. So let's send
the money over and in the meantime, check out these
ads for products that are not donation based and function
within the regular economy and have to pay taxes. Yeah.
(33:56):
Jim Baker wound up on Donald Trump's side of the
election and his politic cool stances over the last few
years won't really surprise anyone. In August, he said this,
Hillary Clinton is a very wicked and Unchristian woman. She
supports gay rights and abortion. I would say she is
a bride of Satan. If America, alexir it could lead
to armageddon and cool. So she would have been so
(34:18):
much better of a candidate if she was married to
the devil, like less problematic than Bill Um. Yeah, but alas,
initially it looked like Trump selection would be bad for
Jim's business. Like I said, Um, the whole president Hillary
means armageddon lyon, I think he was really gearing up
for Hillary Clinton as president because he would have sold
(34:39):
the ship out of food and Bible books whole out.
Like you know they're gonna ban the Bible. You gotta
bury your Bibles, you gotta bury your food, bury at all. Yeah.
The best is like his live feed of the of
when the results are coming in. You know, they're just
like preparing for Trump to lose and to and to
start their grift again. And like the same thing with
Alex Jones. Yeah, they had to think on their feet quickly. Yeah,
(35:03):
how do we get through this now? How do we
get through this? Now and it was disastrous for Alex
Jones in the end, Um, it wasn't disastrous for Jim Baker.
I and I I don't really know why other than that,
like Alex Jones is uh violent and and uh commits
(35:23):
a ton of crimes. And I think Jim Baker has
been pretty careful about committing crimes since all of the
crimes he committed sent him to prison. Um, I guess
that's I guess that's just it. UM. And I at
kind of the end of this here, I'm left trying
to wonder what Jim's followers seeing him like when you like,
(35:47):
you find and I think most people find these videos
from a show so profoundly unsettling that you were You've
spent dozens of hours of your life editing them into
the horror shows that they really are. To try to
like highlight that because I mean, a guess, can you
can you can you tell me about the first time
you ever came across one of these videos, Like what
it was like realizing this was all going on. There
(36:08):
had to be a time before you knew Jim Baker that. Yeah,
I mean, I thought I came across the Baker bucket
like when he was making the cheesy brack of the
rice and the massive tubs. Um uh. My friend Tim
Heidecker found it. He says, you gotta do something with
this because it seems like it's like it's like a
skit or something. It just doesn't seem real, you know,
(36:30):
And like, I don't I don't know what's up with
the people that that. I don't know how anybody can
just watch that and not like be offended, like wow,
like why is this happening? How why would you give
it this guy any money? But um, I think I
think it's a lot of because he still has a
lot of older people that you know, grew up with
him in the seventies and eighties, and and he's this
(36:52):
cultural icon in a way. Um, and you know, it's
there's a little bit of the cult mentality to there,
because like even you can actually like buy rooms in
his studio so you can people live there, live in
the studio. Yeah, so all old ladies pretty much. Uh yeah. Yeah.
But I've noticed recently, even before the coronavirus upbreak, like
(37:16):
the crowd has been pretty slim. It's like they've been
trying to fill the uh the rose with like statues
and stuff to make it, you know, fill the room
up a little bit. But yeah, I'd be curious to
know how they're doing. Yeah there, Um, it's interesting there.
So this is like you do have to say, it's
his His current digs are much more, much less ambitious
(37:39):
than his original ones, and like, I think his studio
has about a sixty seat audience if Yeah, they're they're
kind of all older women, and yeah, it does seem
like there have been less of them lately for his reasons. Um,
but he did, uh, he did slip with the uh
with pushing the silver solution, Yeah he did. He got
in trouble for that. He's he's like the Missouri a g. Yeah,
(38:04):
I think New York to like, yeah, we'll see what
kind of damage that does. It's interesting because I think
he kind of backed off on the silver stuff once
he got sued. Maybe a little wrong on that, but
I know, yeah, I know Alex did not. Alex Jones
has just been like I think he's just kind of
being like, fuck it, let's see what they do. Ye
come and get me, and like, yeah, Jim Baker's whole
(38:25):
life is testament to the fact that like they don't
do that much like you have to commit tens of
millions of dollars in fraud and violent rape, and like
the rape didn't have any im back on a sentencing,
as he wasn't charged for it. But I do think
it kind of played into the fact that like something
happened to him. Like I think if he just committed
to financial crimes, I doubt he would have spent more
like a year in prison. But um yeah, it's quite
(38:48):
a quite a thing. Anyways, I wanted to kind of
end by trying to get into the heads a little
bit of the people who watch this and love this
and find him inspiring, because I will never really understand them,
but we should try to you a little bit because
it's important. UM So, I found a BuzzFeed article um
that that interviews a woman who's a big fan of
(39:08):
Jim Baker's uh, an older lady named Dave's Green as
her her last name. UM quote. I watched the show
because I can connect with Jim and Laurie. They seem
to be such everyday people, she says, the stuff they
talk like, who they're like what. I grew up in
(39:29):
the South, I know the rural parts of this country.
I don't know anyone like Jim Baker, Like, what the
are you talking about? Um, Jesus. The stuff they talk
about the show, it's stuff that we everyday people struggle with.
And I guess that part is true because they do
talk to you about that. It's helped me to be
a better person, So that part I get. Um Day's
(39:50):
Green is worried about many things, the Leviathan spirit, natural disasters, pestilence,
bird flu, swine flu, Palestine, the Second Coming of Christ
isis blast me an immigration, which is the amazing list
of like, yeah, you should be worried about, you know,
diseases and natural Palestine. Wait, no, no, no, no immigration.
(40:13):
Over the course of our conversation, she expresses fear that
the world is crumbling before her, that people are falling
further and further away from God. I am awake, Daves
Green says. People say that I am crazy, but I
am not crazy. Jim Baker is not crazy. We know
that something is happening and we are trying to do something. Mostly,
Daves Green says she has been called crazy by the
(40:34):
church she used to attend. She asked the church to
preach on the Book of Revelation to reveal the truth
of the Bible that she believes people need to know
because it's happening now. She uses a verse from Hebrews
five twelve in our conversation which chastises young Christians for
their dependence on easily digested topics of faith instead of
trying to tackle more meaty ones. Revelation, in her opinion,
is than meat. I guess I got thrown into the
fanatical group, she says, because her church asked her to
(40:56):
leave Dave's. Green's faith is tightly bound together with her
Paul Plitics. She says he is a Donald Trump supporter.
She wants the swamp in Washington, d C. Cleared out,
and she wants America to return to the America she
lived in during her childhood. There's a lot of it
there and that's why Main Street USA is the theme
of his current like compound sort of church thing. Yeah,
(41:18):
they want to go back in time and they're very
open about that. Um. I'm continuing the article because I
think this is important. Her biggest personal causes immigration. She
wants her governor Greg Abbott to get rid of the
sanctuary cities in Texas. In fact, Abbott recently signed legislation
banning them. It used to be a little shelf in
the grocery store that had a few little Mexican things
on it, but now there's a whole section of the
(41:38):
store that's written in Spanish. She explains. They are supposed
to assimilate. It went from like five Mexican families to
like around us to like twenty. There are Muslim people
living in Graham, a nearby town. They took over the
convenience stores. She pauses, I don't want to have to
physically fight those people here on our own homeland for
our Christian American values, but I will. They're an invading force,
I feel. Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's it's yeah, that's
(42:06):
what that's. That's something though, I mean, because he doesn't
I think he does have like Muslim guests on his show,
you know, I think he could be wrong. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know enough about that, but that's at least
what this lady takes. Yeah. Interesting, Yeah, it's it's pretty wild.
And the language that Baker used around Donald Trump is
(42:30):
pretty wild. Um, Like in the run up to, like
during the election, he said at one point, I'm not
supposed to tell you this, but I have eyewitnesses. Donald
Trump is a very tender man, and he weeps. He
wants to please God more than anything else. He wants
to be president of the United States and make things
right in this country because he loves God Almighty. Then,
with his eyes shining, Baker declared, God has called I
believe Donald Trump. So yeah, and Baker says Trump called
(42:55):
him to thank him after his election. Uh and and
they were invited to the inauguration, which they attended. They
were invited to the inaugural prayer, breakfast, and inaugural ball.
Uh so yeah, that's you get this guy, were walking
around the Whitehouse. That's normal, typical stuff. That's good good,
it's good for good for America. Um. I mean in
(43:18):
terms of the rapists in the White House, he's one
of them. He is among them on the list. Um yep,
that's our episode. Yeah, how does everybody feel like, Oh
my god, I need a bath. Yeah, a bath in
(43:40):
one of those giant buckets full of cheesy brock. Oh
my Christ. So how um, how are we doing? Dude?
All right? Yeah? M hm, yep, yep, Robert, m hm.
(44:08):
You're frozen. I know, we're all frozen, frozen, frozen, in
awe of the grifting talent of Jim Baker. Fucking incredible. Well, Vic,
you wanna plug your plug doubles? Do you sell gigantic
forty four gallon buckets of slop? I don't at the
moment that it. Yeah, if you're gonna get my dusty
(44:32):
food together, you mix it with a little water and
you can you can feed your family the good as
a general rule, the good dried food like that. You
open the packs and you can tell it's food. Right,
it looks like freeze dried and like shrunken and you know, desiccated,
but it looks like what it is, and like some
of it you can just eat dry and it's not bad.
Like Mountain House, you can eat that ship dry and
(44:53):
it's pretty good. Um, Baker's food, Yeah, just looks like sawdust.
It's a slop. But it's like, yeah, pig should be
eating it. I don't know how he's put a trough
out there, and that's sucking incredible. Um right, oh yeah,
but you can, Uh, if you want to see my
re edits of Jim Baker videos, you can head to
(45:16):
my YouTube, Vic Burger. Uh, there's a number of them
on there. There's a lot of a lot of stuff.
They're a lot of a lot of fun stuff. You
can check me out on Twitter, Facebook, type in Vic
Burger and there I am. Yeah, there he is, and
I am also on the internet. He's I I write
okay on Twitter, We're at Bastard's Pot on Twitter and Instagram.
(45:39):
We have a t publok store where you can buy merch.
Robert also hosts a podcast called The Women's War. You
should check it out. I haven't verified any of this information,
so check up on it on your own, yeah, he said,
And thanks. Thanks for what you guys do. You guys
are doing important work documenting all this safely. Thank you
as well. Please, um, please continue doing I don't really
(46:01):
know how to describe what you do, but it's important. Um,
it's important documentation. I consider it a form of journalism, Vic,
And I'll tell you why. It's because the the the actual,
the baseline reality of these these videos doesn't do enough
to convey emotionally what happens to a human being who
(46:22):
watches them in the time in which they're concurrent. And
I think what you do provides that by by setting
the tone. That is important. Yeah, because I mean because
Jim is like he's doing you know, five six hours
a week. He's like, you know, these shows are long,
and uh so yeah, I try to whittle it down
to the most horrifying moments. Yeah, it's pretty cool and good. So, um,
(46:50):
we're all gonna go wash our hands, wash our hands, cry, pray, pray,
pray about crying, cry about prayer. Yeah, it's gonna be
it's gonna be good. Alright, alright, thanks than on being
on VIC h M.
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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