Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Rise And Fall (And Rise) of Arch-Grifter Jim Bakker

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Robert is joined again by Vic Berger to continue discussing Televangelist, Jim Bakker. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast is returned, Robert Evans, behind the bastards, Jim Baker, part two, Vic Berger, guest, hello, how are, how are, Vic, how are. Just wonderful. That's good. That's good. I am experimenting with using less words than normal. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing.

That's good. I am experimenting with using less words than normal in the hopes that that will make me easier to understand. How's that going for you, buddy? Poorly. Yeah, poorly. It doesn't work well. But you know what was working great in the 1980s was Jim Baker's grift. He's really hitting it out of the goddamn park in the 80s. Yeah, 1987 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, they have expanded quite a bit at this point. Now, this is, I'm sorry, where, where is this again at the time? What state? Heritage USA. It's in, I think, South Carolina. South Carolina. Okay. So the Crystal Palace Ministry Center was supposed to be like the palace itself was a gargantuan glass structure, 916 feet long and 420 feet wide.

It was a full scale like representation of like a Victorian era building from London. It would have a 300 seat auditorium and a 5000 seat TV studio. Jim Baker bragged to everyone who'd listened that when complete the Crystal Palace would be the largest church on earth. So that's awesome. Wow. Yeah. By 1986, PTL had more than 2500 employees and revenue of more than $125 million per year. The Heritage USA theme park was hugely popular.

More than 6 million people visited it that year. And 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. And yet on the very day that ground was broken for the Crystal Palace, Tammy 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.

Right. But on that, Jim- Remember Phil Hartman did- Yeah. Phil Hartman, yeah. On SNL. Yeah, yeah, he did a great Tammy Faye. Like she's definitely like the one who kind of cracked into the mainstream the most.

Right. 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 the stress of running a business that was constantly on the edge of collapse because of the financial crimes they were committing. That's not great for your- you. It's just not great. And so on that January day, she had a mental breakdown. And as Don Hardister, the former PTL head of security later called, quote, they left me 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 airwaves and recorded a whole very special episode about Tammy Faye'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 their viewers. Right.

You see their faults and they want to help. They want to help or help a problem. Exactly. What didn't go over 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 Hahn. So that comes out in 87 too. And while this is happening, the Observer continued to tear into Bakers' ministry for its flagrant misuse of funds. They published more than 600 stories in 1987 alone.

So they are... What, 600? Yeah, they are fucking tearing into this. Yeah, the Charlotte Observer once this stopped and they put in the fucking groundwork. And they revealed this massive chain of fraudulent fundraising, fake lifetime memberships, incorrect tax exemptions based on its status as a nonprofit religious organization. It's revealed that the FCC actually launched an investigation into PTL back in 1979, over $300,000 in funds raised for missionary work overseas that was just spent on the theme park instead.

And it becomes kind of clear that the theme park has been losing money for a while because it's just so fucking expensive and all of these things that he keeps adding to it are so ambitious. So they're like raising money for other things and then spending them on this theme park because fucking Jim Baker loves his stupid theme park. It's pretty cool. So Jim raised huge amounts of money for overseas ministries and his followers donated that money in the hopes that he'd send out preachers and provide humanitarian aid to impoverished areas. Millions of dollars of this money and pumped up his theme park.

So the park led millions a year and much of Jim's criminal behavior was dedicated to plugging that hole. In 1988, he was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud. Between this and the big reveal that Baker had spent another $265,000 of church money bribing his rape victim, 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. This proves to not be something that you can get on TV and be like, hey, fucking, this is what I did and it's fine because I'm giving myself up to God that there is a line to how much you can do that. Or at least there was. Your friend Jerry Falwell sailed into the gap to take over the ministry and try to write the ship. 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 due to Jim's criminal mismanagement, the ministry owed nearly $100 million to various creditors and more than $55 million in back taxes.

Falwell 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 2,000 years of church history. Oh my God. Like there's some genocides in there. There's a good clip of Falwell just before all that where he, there were like $70 million in debt and he raised a goal. They wanted to get $22 million in a month. He would go down the water slide in a suit.

And they raised that money and he went down the slide in his suit. Yeah. It's amazing. It's $22 million. Imagine asking people to do that. It's so, it's so good. It's good and cool. So Jim 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-meaning rubes who supported them. Alas for Jim, he would have to weather a massive criminal trial before this could happen. Tammy Faye escaped indictment and there's a 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 houseboats and fur coats. But she escaped without legal consequences and her husband was not so lucky. Their former employees rolled on him pretty much instantly.

Steve Nelson, a PTL 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, 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.

Sounds like a fun court case. Real good time. Nelson was not dead though. And as the trial continued, Jim Baker had a complete mental breakdown himself the very next day. He began hallucinating that the reporters outside the courtroom were insects. 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?

Yes, that's right. Yeah, well, I would hope so. What do you think is going to happen? 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 5th, 1989, Jim was found guilty on all 24 counts and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was also ordered to pay a half a million dollar fine. He appealed, but the court withheld his conviction. They did grant him a sentence reduction hearing though and dropped those 45 years down to just eight.

And he only actually served five before being paroled in 1994. So that's great. Yeah, five years. Steal millions of dollars, rape a woman, five years. Right, right. Back out again. In a minimum security prison, yeah. And his cellmate was Lyndon LaRouche.

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 Ro Messner, a contractor who'd helped to build Heritage USA. Tammy knew how to pick him. In 1996, Messner was convicted to 27 months in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud. So there we go.

And weirdly, if Tammy Faye dies in I think 2007, she gets cancer. But her second act is actually kind of sweet. Like she becomes for purely ironic reasons. She becomes a gay icon because of her makeup and everything. She's seen as a lot of drag queens and people like that will emulate her makeup style just because it's so garish and out there and kitschy. My first exposure to her was when she was on that VH1 reality show, The Surreal Life. Do you remember that with Sherman Helmsley and the guy from Smash Mouth? It's amazing, yeah.

She'd said horrible things as had her husband about gay people and PTL. And I don't think she ever came out and just said like, I was wrong. But she did state later in life that when everything collapsed for her, the only people who were there for her was the gay community. So that's interesting. Tammy, I don't know what to say about Tammy Faye Baker. She's an interesting person. So once 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 55 foot houseboat, a $55,000 Rolls Royce and a $45,000 Mercedes Benz along with numerous palatial mansions all around the world.

Afterwards, he wound up living in a rented farmhouse in North Carolina. There, Jim began to execute an epic plan to rebuild his empire. 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. 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. So that's interesting. 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, 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 International Dream Center. And according to the Washington Post, quote, there he lived in a cramped and crumbling room with a son, Jamie, 22, and received visiting reporters eager to chronicle his recovery. All the glowing articles about the new Jim Baker mentioned his rough life in the ghetto, including the cramped room. And yeah. So Jim throws himself on the mercy 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. 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. So many of the folks that he reached out to in LA remembered him from their childhood. But as the Post's reporting continues, that's not the only reason he was accepted. Another story of temptation, collapse, prison and loss resonated with many poor black folks in LA. You know, this is obviously Jim's actual experience of crime and prison had no similarity. But yeah, he was good at spinning it.

They at one point, like when he was doing this sort of revival tour, they interviewed a number of the folks who were in line to buy his book in LA. And I want to quote from that now. One of them is his former cellmate at Jessup, Nathaniel Mathis, 32, 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, 110%, but the Lord works in the lowest valleys. Lawrence Drew and his friends are all black men in their 20s, 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 backer for inspiration.

Oh sure, all of us can relate to him, says Drew, who has just paid $25 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. Ooh. Yeah, that's not what you'd guess, right? Right, right, what is going on there? What is that mindset to... I don't get it. Yeah, people will talk...

Yeah, just ignoring exactly what he did. I mean, obviously it's like the MAGA folks today are just... Exactly, yeah. It's the same mindset. He's fighting for us, I guess. I don't understand it. Yeah, it's hard to understand. Some of it is just that, as a general rule, the black Christian community is extremely forgiving, right? A number of prominent figures in the American history have, after doing something bad,

shown up at a black church and given a speech or something and done the mea culpa there, because it's kind of a good place to do it. And there's a lot of complex reasons for that that I don't feel competent to get into, but it is a trend, particularly for white people who do something really bad. I'm going to wipe this away by... I don't know, it's a thing that happens. Yeah, so that's good. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, one of the things, ironically, that helped Jim Baker in crafting his act too

was the fact that he'd 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 with much on his own because Jim had dropped out of Bible college and never quite finished reading the Bible. And it would seem to me that this would be a bad thing to reveal after you've spent 30 years as 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'd learned the Bible in prison. And that taught him more about his faith than Bible college.

And he starts to claim like, this is how he learns prosperity, gospel's wrong. As well as he's in prison, he gets to really focus on the Bible for the first time. It's an amazing grift. It's an amazing grift. From the Washington Post, quote, He learned above all that the meek shall inherit the earth, that his 40 room mansion and air conditioned doghouse and 12 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 of riches. He said, woe unto the rich. And this plays really well to a crowd of poor black people in LA. And it's just, it's amazing that this is coming from this fucking guy's mouth. But it, it works.

God. It's, it's something else. I don't, I don't understand. I 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. But it works. Yeah. Yeah.

So Jim reinvents himself as a humbled man preaching the word of God from the position of a sinner. He talked about the little log cabin where he lived now, which was really a 17,000 square foot home lent to him by a wealthy follower. And he met a new wife too, Lori 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 in Jim's eyes was the fact that she was the spitting image of his ex-wife Tammy. Only she was 17 years younger.

Exactly. And it's worth noting that like his first wife's Tammy, second wife's Lori, that's not for nothing. Right. There's something going on there. Yes. And you know where else there's something going on Vic? Where's that? The products and services that support this podcast.

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And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Wow, those were great. Products, pretty good services, better products than services, I have to say, but that's a matter of interpretation. Much like the Bible. 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 describes the exact moment of his epiphany, a story he calls his day in the pit of hell. Speaking as if in a fugue state, he recalls vague and spooky details, a door open, a madman singing 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 hell as I was going insane. A voice 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 that there's an angel there, but the color of his skin. Amazing that this plays. Not long after that speech, a wealthy follower swept in and donated $25 million so that Jim and his new wife Lori could build a new compound to film their show from. The bakers 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 would regularly refer to his Los Angeles ministry as the inner city, that was how he was supposed to, but he would generally slip and just call it the ghetto, saying things like, I found healing in the ghetto, those people love me so much. Lori 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 by far the kindest, Jim. Out of all the races? A tip from me is, if you're starting a sentence without all the races, stop the sentence. Whatever you're saying, don't.

Oh, Jesus Christ. In 2003, 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 the city where this happens. Branson is like, it is like for this group of people, like Las Vegas, and like Las Vegas, LA's filled with all these stars who are past their prime, and so they get, that's what Jim Baker's doing.

Yeah, exactly. He's doing his show in Branson. They do that for a few years, and eventually their backer uses his millions to construct a new compound for them called Morningside, which is basically the 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 creates for himself in this recording studio. Right, right. It's probably not as cool. Not nearly as cool.

There's probably no churros. No churros. No, definitely not churros. So they move in there at 2008, and they've been there ever since. And it's worth noting that this millionaire backer, Jerry Crawford, actually owns most of the property at Morningside, 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 shit.

Given his felon status, it's also unlikely that Jim Baker could have convinced the IRS 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, fool me twice. I'm not going to make you tax-exempt again. 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 send him money anymore, 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 receive in the sale of a product.

You normally need to pay taxes on a gift, right? That's kind of a basic rule. Now, stick with me, Vic, because this is where the grift gets really complicated. This is the pivot that he makes, and it's objectively brilliant. 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 arc that makes narrative sense so people don't question it. 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 world is ending, so wealth doesn't even matter anymore, because he can't promise people to make them rich by donating money to him anymore. 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, fairly baker buckets, which are our dried food storage buckets for preppers. And we'll talk more about those in a minute.

Now, selling a shitload of survival equipment would normally mean you have to hand over a lot of that money to the state in taxes, right? Like, that's how a business works. But this is not a business. See, if you know Jim Baker, you know that the last motherfucking thing he's ever going to do is pay a goddamn dime in taxes. 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 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. Wow. A gift to the ministry. It's awesome. That is such a good grift.

Unreal. And this is where you really see Jim elevate, in my mind, to the ranks of truly great grifters. Because before, I feel like he's on easy mode. Like, there's no artifice in just saying, give me money, it'll make you rich. This is a legitimately brilliant grift. And he's one that can adapt so easily. And just find out what the next path is, you know?

And he's been doing this since like, yeah, 2008. So he's, you know, Barack Obama was a huge boon to his business. He claimed almost immediately that Barack Obama was probably the antichrist. And the end was nigh. And yeah, and you might think that his boy Trump getting elected would have like actually done some damage to his bottom line. Because he really supported Donald Trump. 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 were going to batter the US.

Yeah, and then also saying that, you know, if you're against Trump, that's God wanted Trump in there, then you're for the devil. You're saying the devil appointed him, you know? Yeah. It's so good. It's just awesome. So in 2015, 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 considered good. Like sawdust. Yeah. You've done so many videos that are just like focused deep 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 basically, 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 20 gallon bucket. Like this massive tubs of this like dried cheese, cheesy broccoli soup. They'll just be slowly stirring this like mash of what looks and has to smell like vomit. And it's just, they'll stick. It'll fill his ladle and just eat right from the ladle. It's horrifying. Like what kind of church is this?

What is this? Like what is going on? Yeah. The Jim Baker's ads, we'll play some audio from one of them later. His ads for food buckets are, I find them existentially horrifying. Yeah, they are. It's always a clock ticking down. Yeah.

It's unlike anything else I've ever seen. But I want to read first, before we drop into one of those videos, I want to read first from a 2015 NPR deep dive on his survival buckets. Quote, Among the freeze dried products available on his website is a 50 day survival food sampler bucket containing 154 meals. It will cost you $135, but the idea is you'll be prepared when food shortages hit. Imagine the world is dying and you're having a breakfast for kings. The head food for guys.

We got our hands on a version of this bucket, which contains a variety of hearty dishes, including buttermilk pancakes, vegetable chicken soup, creamy stroganoff, black bean burgers, fettuccine 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 coming apart. Save for the pudding, the dishes were extremely salty and odd lingering aftertaste. We couldn't agree on which was worse, the thick potato soup that felt like eating wet cement,

the strong chemical overtones of the chocolate pudding, or the disturbing radioactive orange of the macaroni and cheese. Oh, Christ. Do you have a segment you want to play about the Baker buckets before we move on? Yeah, there is. You talking to me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's like the cheesy broccoli rice.

It's just so offensive to watch. It's horrible. To hear the plops of the broccoli dropping into the soup. It's just like this bright yellow, like neon yellow that should not, no food should be that color. Yeah, it's almost Lovecraftian and it's unsettlingness. And I don't know. Yeah, you can't see them. So it's hard to...

Oh, my God. Okay, look at this. Look at this. But what I love to put my hands in, but it's hot. This is cheesy broccoli rice. Look at the broccoli in there. Look at the broccoli. Why wouldn't you want that on the top of a pizza?

If I went grocery out, I would eat right out of this shovel. Wow. Let's dump this in with the rice. There it goes. We're dumping 22 gallons into the rice. There we go. Into the rice. Now I have 44 gallons.

What if you have to survive for two years or three years? You're going to need some more food. And it just looks almost like powdered protein. It's just like... I eat a lot of dried food. I go camping. I do some survival. He's just eating.

It's so good. I've never... No one else sells... I'm very familiar with how people sell survival food. No one does this. The best is that he must have had extra buckets. So now he started selling buckets filled with bibles, which is insane.

And they recommend burying the bibles. There's a 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 28 bucket sampler there for $2,500.

Donation or more. P.O. Bucks, Branson, Missouri. Unfucking real, dude. I'll never understand how this works, but it does. No, I don't know. Looks like some good lawyers on his side, you know? I don't even know if anyone's tried. This is just the way the law works, and it shouldn't.

Right, it should not. You shouldn't just be able to say, it's a donation, here's your product. Right. But I guess it's fine. Yeah. We've all agreed not to stop this. It's pretty cool and good.

One of the surreal things about watching modern Jim Baker's ads is that he looks like David Cross in a costume. Yeah, that's definitely part of it. He emerged from prison, and he's wearing a cap now, and he's got this beard. Yeah. He reinvented himself a little bit, his look. Yeah, you have to when you do this.

Yeah. So, Vic, I'm going to start selling buckets of slop. I mean, no, taking donations. If you donate $2,500 to me, I will make sure 44 gallons of something liquid and hot arrives at your door. I'll find a way. Right. So let's send the money over, and in the meantime,

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, Jim Baker wound up on Donald Trump's side of the 2016 election, and his political stances over the last few years won't really surprise anyone. In August, he said this, Hillary Clinton is a very wicked and un-Christian woman. She supports gay rights and abortion. I would say she is a bride of Satan.

If America elects her, it could lead to Armageddon. Cool. So she would have been so much better of a candidate if she was married to the devil. Like, less problematic than Bill. Right. Yeah, but alas. Initially, it looked like Trump's election would be bad for Jim's business,

like I said. The whole President Hillary means Armageddon line. I think he was really gearing up for Hillary Clinton as president because he would have sold the shit out of food and Bible buckets. He could have had this whole thing about, like, you know, they're going to ban the Bible. You got to bury your Bibles. You got to bury your food.

Bury it all. Right. Yeah, the best is, like, his live feed of when the results are coming in. You know, they're just, like, preparing for Trump to lose and to start their grift again. Yeah. Like, the same thing with Alex Jones. Yeah.

They had to think on their feet quick. Like, how do we get through this now? How do we get through this now? It was disastrous for Alex Jones in the end. Oh, yeah. It wasn't disastrous for Jim Baker. And I don't really know why. Other than that, like, Alex Jones is violent and commits 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. Right. I guess that's just it. And at kind of the end of this here, I'm left trying to wonder what Jim's followers see in him. Like, you find, and I think most people find these videos from a show so profoundly unsettling that 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'm going to guess. 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 had to be a time before you knew Jim Baker was doing this.

Yeah. I mean, I thought I came across the Baker bucket, like, when he was making the cheesy bracket of the rice and the massive tubs. My friend, Tim Heidecker, found it. He said, you got to 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? And, like, I don't know what's up with the people that I don't know

how anybody can just watch that and not, like, be offended. Like, why is this happening? Why would you give this guy any money? But 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 70s and 80s. And he's this cultural icon, in a way. And, you know, there's a little bit of the cult mentality, too, there. Because, like, even, you can actually, like, buy rooms in his studio.

Yeah, people live there. So you can be, like, they live in the studio, yeah. All old ladies, pretty much. Yeah, yeah. But I've noticed recently, even before the coronavirus outbreak, like, the crowd has been pretty slim. Yeah. They've been trying to fill the rows 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, they're, it's interesting. They're, so this is, like, you do have to say, his current digs are much more, much less ambitious than his original ones. And, like, I think his studio has about a 60-seat audience. Oh, yeah, if that, yeah.

Yeah, they're kind of all older women. And, yeah, it does seem like there have been less of them lately for obvious reasons. But he did slip with pushing the silver solution. Yeah, he did. He got in trouble for that. Yeah, he's being sued by, like, the Missouri AG, I think. Yeah, I think New York, too, like, yeah.

And New York, 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. I may be 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, fuck it, let's see what they do.

Yeah, what are you going to do? Yeah, come and get me. And, like, yeah, Jim Baker's whole life has 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 impact on the sentencing because 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 than, like, a year in prison. But, yeah, it's 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 a little bit because it's important. So I found a Buzzfeed article that interviews a woman who's a big fan of Jim Baker's, an older lady named Daze Green as her last name. Quote, I watch this show because I can connect with Jim and Lori. They seem to be such everyday people, she says. The stuff they talk... Right away, I was like, how the fuck?

Who do you know? Right, even there, like, what? I grew up in the south. I know the rural parts of this country. I don't know anyone like Jim Baker. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? 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 very, you know, candidly about that. It's helped me to be a better person. So that part I get. Daze Green is worried about many things. The Leviathan spirit, natural disasters, pestilence, bird flu, swine flu, Palestine, the second coming of Christ, ISIS, blasphemy and immigration.

Just the amazing list of like, yeah, you should be worried about, you know, diseases and natural diseases, Palestine. Wait, no, no, no, no. Immigration. 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, Daze 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, Daze Green says she has been called crazy by the 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 5.12 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 the meat. I guess I got thrown into the fanatical group, she says,

because her church asked her to leave. Daze Green's faith is tightly bound together with her politics. She says she is a Donald Trump supporter. She wants the swamp in Washington, D.C. cleared out, and she wants America to return to the Americas she lived in during her childhood. There's a lot of it there, and that's why Daze Green Street USA is the theme of his current,

like, compound sort of church thing. Yeah, they want to go back in time, and they're very open about that. I'm continuing the article because I think this is important. Her biggest personal cause is 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 store that's written in Spanish, she explains. It's supposed to assimilate. It went from like five Mexican families around us to like 20. 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. There you go. Yeah.

God. Yeah, and it's... That's... Yeah, that's what. That's something, though. It doesn't... I think he does have like Muslim guests on his show. You know, I think he...

I could be wrong. Yeah, I don't know enough about that, but that's at least what this lady takes. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And the language that Baker used around Donald Trump is pretty wild.

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 him to thank him after his election, and they were invited to the inauguration,

which they attended. They were invited to the inaugural prayer breakfast and inaugural ball. So, yeah. Yeah, you get this guy walking around the White House. That's normal, typical stuff. Yeah, this is good. Good for America.

Good for America. I mean, in terms of the rapists in the White House, he's one of them. Yeah, he is among them. He's on the list. Yep, that's our episode. Oh, Clifting.

Yeah, how's everybody feeling? Oh, my God, I need a bath. Yeah, a bath in one of those giant buckets full of cheesy broccoli. Exactly, yeah. Oh, my Christ. So, how... How are we doing?

Doing all right. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Robert, you're frozen. I know, we're all frozen. Frozen in awe of the grifting talents of Jim Baker.

Fucking incredible. Well, Vic, you want to plug your plugables? Do you sell gigantic 44-gallon buckets of slop? I don't at the moment, but I'm working on it. I'm going to get my dusty food together and mix it with a little water and 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 shrunken and desiccated, but it looks like what it is. And some of it you can actually just eat dry and it's not bad, like Mountain House, you can eat that shit dry and it's pretty good. Baker's food, yeah, it just looks like sawdust.

It is, yeah, it's a slop. It's like, yeah, pigs should be eating it. I don't know how he's... Put a trough out there and... That's fucking incredible. Fucking incredible. Oh, yeah, but you can... If you want to see my re-edits of Jim Baker videos,

you can head to my YouTube, Vic Berger. There's a number of them on there. There's a lot of stuff there. A lot of fun stuff. You can check me out on Twitter, Facebook, they've been Vic Berger and there I am. Yeah, there he is. And I am also on the internet.

He's... I write okay on Twitter. We're at Bastard's Pod on Twitter and Instagram. We have a tea public store where you can buy a 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, what he said. And thanks for what you guys do. You guys are doing important work documenting all this. Seriously. Thank you as well. Please continue doing... I don't really know how to describe what you do, but it's important. It's important documentation.

I consider it a form of journalism, Vic, and I'll tell you why. It's because the baseline reality of these videos doesn't do enough to convey emotionally what happens to a human being who watches them in the time in which they're concurrent. And I think what you do

provides that by setting the tone. That is important. Thank you. Yeah, because Jim is doing five, six hours a week. He shows along. I try to whittle it down to the most horrifying moments. Yeah, it's pretty cool and good.

So, we're all going to go... Wash our hands. Wash our hands. Cry. Pray. Pray about crying. Cry about prayer. Yeah, it's going to be good. All right.

All right, well, thanks for having me on. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science

and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.