Behind the Bastards – Part Two: Bishop David E. Taylor: Jesus Christ's Best Friend

Podcast: Behind the Bastards (Cool Zone Media, iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Brett [Robert] Evans
Guest: Jake Hanrahan (Popular Front, Sad Oligarch)
Release Date: October 30, 2025

Episode Overview

In this gripping continuation, Brett Evans and guest Jake Hanrahan examine the bizarre, abusive, and predatory inner workings of David E. Taylor's "ministry": an ostentatious, exploitative religious cult recently raided by the FBI. The hosts dissect how Taylor preyed upon vulnerable people, fabricated divine connections for personal enrichment, enforced labor through deprivation and fear, and ultimately presided over a complex web of financial and sexual abuse, all under the guise of Christian spirituality. This episode is a dark but revelatory look at the mechanics of late-stage American cults—and their devastating impact on followers.

Main Themes

• Exploitation & Abuse Under a Religious Facade: How Taylor’s claims of intimacy with Jesus and "kingdom-building" were tools for extracting money, labor, and obedience from desperate people.
• Cult Tactics Modernized: The use of multilevel marketing aesthetics, AI-generated propaganda, and aggressive social media outreach to attract and maintain control over followers.
• Mechanics of Coercion: Strategies Taylor used to keep devotees compliant—ranging from sleep and food deprivation to threats of homelessness and divine retribution.
• Financial Fraud & Grift: Deep dives into church tax fraud, welfare (EBT) abuse, and money laundering.
• Sexual Abuse & Trafficking: The scope of Taylor’s sexual exploitation, including revenge porn and enforced contraceptive use for trafficked women.
• Intersections of Religious Power and Legal Impunity: How tax-exempt status and public perception shielded Taylor and enablers for years.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Taylor’s Ministry: A Cult Disguised as a Mega-Church

• Taylor's business model revolved around promising desperate, sick, or grieving people direct contact with Jesus… for a price.
  • “[Taylor] will fill out a stadium… or one of these like almost like an MLM… and he and his top… pastors… will teach you… three-day lecture series on how to make personal contact with Jesus… [to] cure and save your sick or dying or dead loved ones. Right? Like that is the entire grift here.” — Brett (04:01)
• The social media PR machine was fueled entirely by unpaid cult members, working and living communally:
  • “David’s marketing people… all unpaid cult members… managed his social media and they would draw people to the call-in line with posts… Thousands are being healed of cancer through the life and ministry of David E. Taylor. Call 1-877-843-4567…” — Brett (05:21)

2. Aesthetics, AI, and Absurdity

• The “Miracles for the Maimed” event:
  • Ghoulish ads with Taylor posing amid crutches/canes, promising healing to the severely wounded.
  • “Look at that. It’s a photo of David E. Taylor holding 30 different walking canes and crutches… like he cured the maimed. So David E. Taylor’s just gotta take care of all this trash now.” — Brett (06:58)
  • “He went in really heavy with that, man.” — Jake (07:24)
• Use of poorly-rendered, AI-generated promo videos filled with gold, beds, and palace imagery. The hosts note the weirdness and disconnect with biblical minimalism:
  • “It does all look like Donald Trump’s living room.” — Jake (10:56)
  • “If you go by the book… Jesus was a pretty fucking cool guy… He was not into like loads of gold… he was into… helping people. Yeah. So silly, man.” — Jake (11:08)

3. Living Conditions & Internal Dynamics

• Cult members were housed in squalid, shelter-like conditions, kept hungry, tired, and poor—deliberately:
  • “It looks like a homeless shelter… they’re not living well… The cult had the money to give them at least separate little rooms… but this is part of the point. Keeping them in a situation that is like a homeless shelter is part of the point… to use as leverage.” — Brett (14:09)
• Sleep and food deprivation as leverage:
  • “No going to sleep until the Mosaic video was done… restricting sleep, it’s like always the lowest rung of just nightmare shit.” — Jake (16:02)
  • “That’s why sleep deprivation is… top of the cult leader tactics out there. Or at least tied with cutting off your family and shit for number one.” — Brett (16:12)

4. Sexual Exploitation and 'Armor Bearers'

• Taylor’s “armor bearers” managed everything from servitude to trafficking women between locations, including enforcing post-intercourse contraceptive use:
  • “Taylor’s so called armor bearers… were Taylor’s personal servants… handled everything from… waiting on hand and foot… to the actual nuts and bolts sex trafficking work.” — Brett (16:49)
  • “Anytime you sleep with him, you take a morning after pill, just to be sure.” — Brett (18:36)
• Abuse driven by blackmail (“revenge porn”).
  • “Your ‘assignment’ is you need to take, like, naked photos of yourself… so that… I have revenge porn on you.” — Brett (20:15)
  • “That’s so dark. To frame it as the assignment.” — Jake (20:38)

5. High-Profile Victims & Manipulation Tactics

• The case of gospel singer Vicki Yohe:
  • “He starts calling her his spiritual daughter… She feels drawn to him and does consent to starting a sexual relationship… But describing women he wanted to fuck as his spiritual daughters was a tactic.” — Brett (27:19)
  • “He preys on women. He does not honor women. Women are just a vagina. And that seems true.” — Brett (27:36)
• “Spiritual daughter” language normalized abuse/manipulation within the cult’s twisted context.
  • “A lot of cults do that… recontextualize words… it’s just everything is on a different planet by that stage.” — Jake (28:18)

6. Financial Crimes & Welfare Fraud

• Massive tax fraud, tolerated for decades due to the church’s legal immunities:
  • “He lives in an apparent lavish lifestyle and appears to use the church account as his personal piggy bank. In his deposition, he says… he lives off gifts that are personally donated to him, which do not count as a salary.” — Brett quoting Trinity Foundation (37:06)
• Welfare (EBT) fraud instead of using church donations to feed followers:
  • “Members then allegedly pooled the cards to an appointed designee who would shop for everyone… Every person had to have an EBT card, a food stamp card… they said if you don’t get one, you’re not going to eat.” — Brett (40:38)
  • “You’re already so fucking rich. Why even risk getting into this trouble… do they think they’re untouchable?” — Jake (41:59)

7. Coercive Control: Food, Shelter, Sleep, and Threats

• Explicit threats via text to withhold food and shelter to enforce quotas:
  • “You’ll have to raise $164,000 today. Each hour you fall behind, consequences will start. We will mess with the food. You will fast from the regular food or abstain for a while… Those who do not push their calls and closing numbers… don’t eat dinner at all. …They are going to the homeless shelter.” — Brett quoting indictment (42:50, 45:40)
• Forced fasting, sleep deprivation, isolation, and medical neglect used systemically to maintain submission.

8. Cult Maintenance & Expansion: Social Media, Cold Messaging, and 'Miracles'

• The cult’s growth mechanism involved a well-orchestrated PR/social media team spamming thousands daily:
  • “They’re just going through the Facebook pages of David Taylor… seeing who is liking each of the posts, and then they’re just messaging people… send something like a thousand messages a day.” — Brett (59:11)

9. Physical Abuse and Internal Policing

• Eyewitness accounts of Taylor physically assaulting followers, acting as judge, jury, and executioner over every aspect of their lives:
  • “[Taylor] just started going off on one guy and just started slapping him… slapped them across the face, pushed them to the ground, sat over them.” — Quoting Chris Sorensen (60:42)

10. Legal Impunity and Slow Justice

• Despite years of fraud and reports to police, Taylor’s grift flourished until the recent FBI raids:
  • “This cult, he brings in $50 million in less than a decade just from donations to the… You can feed people.” — Brett (41:47)
  • “The primary church banking account had over $41 million in it.” — Brett (67:20)
  • “The FBI raid revealed 57 victims of forced labor living in the Florida mansion. …They have are being charged with quite a few different felonies right now.” — Brett (65:00)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Miracle Marketing:
  • “He’s got a white suit that’s chased with gold filigree and… Miracles for the Maimed with DAV David E. Taylor… We’re meant to take from this… he cured the maimed. So David E. Taylor’s just gotta take care of all this trash now.” — Brett (07:03)
• On Maimed as Marketing:
  • “Maimed is pretty heavy. …if you’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t walk very well’ to be maimed, you’ve been pretty fucking badly hurt.” — Jake (07:24)
• On Sleep Deprivation:
  • “That’s why sleep deprivation is like probably like top of the cult leader tactics out there.” — Brett (16:12)
• On 'Spiritual Daughter' Grooming:
  • “I just don’t get how calling someone, your spiritual daughter works as a flirtation method.” — Brett (27:51)
• On Tax and Welfare Fraud:
  • “You’re already so fucking rich. Why even risk getting into this trouble for this kind of thing, you know… Do they think they’re untouchable?” – Jake (41:59)
  • “I think they almost feel a sense of disgust at the idea that they might spend any of their money on other people.” — Brett (42:16)
• On Narcissistic Control:
  • “He thinks he’s God.” — Jake (43:53)
  • “Or the devil maybe.” — Brett (44:19)
• On Physical Abuse:
  • “He just started going off on one guy and just started slapping him. …He went after another, slapped them across the face, pushed them to the ground.” — (60:42)
• On Legal Impunity:
  • “If you do it with a church, it’s not a crime.” — Brett (38:04)
• On the Scale of the Grift:
  • “125 pounds of super colossal red king crab legs… Mercedes, Bentley, Rolls Royce, … at least four bulletproof automobiles… It's a little unclear which to me based on how the indictment's written. But yeah, do you ever think great stuff?” — Brett (67:20)

Highlighted Timestamps

• Miracle Crusade Pitch / Social Media Grift: (04:01–05:49)
• Miracles for the Maimed & PR Aesthetics: (06:16–07:53)
• AI Schlock & Jesus’ Gold Palace: (09:42–13:29)
• Living Conditions, Sleep/Food Deprivation Enforced: (14:09–16:33)
• Armor Bearers, Sex Trafficking, Revenge Porn: (16:49–20:54)
• Case of Gospel Singer Vicki Yohe: (25:09–28:49)
• Massive Tax Fraud, Welfare Fraud Explainers: (37:06–42:13)
• Explicit Food/Shelter Control as Punishment: (42:50–46:26)
• Testimony of Chris Sorensen, Cold Outreach Mechanics: (57:24–59:11)
• Physical Assault, Cult Policing: (60:21–62:45)
• FBI Raid and Legal Fallout: (64:25–68:22)

Tone & Style

The hosts blend investigative reporting with dark humor, incredulity, and a sense of moral outrage, exposing the banality and grandiosity of this brand of American religious grift. Jake’s British brusqueness and Brett’s deeply-researched asides lend the episode both credibility and a sense of bleak amusement at the unending creativity of exploiters.

Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive anatomy of David E. Taylor’s cult: from the mechanics of his exploitation to the slow grind of justice and the enduring, aggravating protections provided by U.S. law to such organizations. As Jake observes near the end:

"It's not even one of the big [cults], you know, like how many more of these are going on right now? That is what worries me, man." (66:08)

And Brett’s closing sentiment is even more pointed:

“If only I gave up my soul entirely. The amount of money I could be making. Holy shit.” (68:47)

A sobering, occasionally sardonic, and always illuminating look into the American “prosperity gospel” at its most toxic and predatory.

Listen to the episode for the full arc of grift, trauma, and (finally) accountability.