Mark Rathbun

Going Clear, Part 5 Wright Dishonest Editing So we’re only at page 8 in the book. And we get the only, and I told you about L. Ron Hubbard, you know, and I had this discussion with him, you know, and I gave him the example of Spike Lee. Spike Lee got all sorts of heat over Do the Right Thing, because people said, well you’re just trying to stir up hate, racial hatreds, right? You know, and somebody was breaking it down, and particular scenes and he said, “hey, hey, hey, hey, back off for a second, can somebody, you know, judge me for my body of work?” And stop fixating on one thing, right? I had this discussion I’m having with you right now. I said, you got to apply that standard to Hubbard, right? So, I say that, because the only time he give it, he does a significant quotation from L. Ron Hubbard is from a lecture. Right? And he’s in The Convert part, still introducing Paul Haggis. Never says that Paul Haggis listened to this lecture. So I don’t know what context that had. He just in the middle of the chapter goes off into this thing on L. Ron Hubbard. But I read this thing, and he says, this is what Paul, this is what Larry Wright says: he would just open his mouth and a mob of new thoughts would burst forth, elbowing each other in the race to make themselves known to the world. He’s talking about L. Ron Hubbard and his lectures. They were often trivial and disjointed. But also full of obscure learned references. OK? And so he takes an example. And, I went, man, this is really bizarre. I looked at this quote. So I went to look at the, because it didn’t sound like Hubbard to me. So I went and looked it, I went and pulled out the transcript. And this just gives you an idea. But this is where he takes the quote. He takes the quote from here, where that mark is, right? And all of the pink highlighting, are the text that he omitted. So you can see, he quotes this, omits this, quotes that, omits this, quotes that, omits this, quotes that, omits this, quotes that, omits this, quotes that, omits this, omits this, omits this. OK? And if you look at it, it’s more than half, fully more than half of the text. OK? So that he can then call that, a mob of new thoughts racing out of his mouth. Of course. You could do that to anybody’s writing. Right? But what’s crazy about this is that at the end of that quote he says, Just as this fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, well of course it’s incoherent, because you took half of it out, number 1. But 2, I went on to read the lecture. He says, once the fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, Hubbard comes to the point. And then he gives the point. And I go back to the lecture, that ain’t the point at all. OK? So really, I get the impression the guy is just, is just creating, trying to create an impression. There’s no attempt to understand, even when he takes a section of the writing. He’s not even, he’s not even trying to understand. He’s trying to juxtapose, juxtaposition it to make it look like a fuzzy parable and just words racing out of his mouth.

Going Clear, Part 8 More Questionable Sources of Wright Alright, so now I’m up to page 165, and we bring in Ervin Scott, who’s this individual who tells this story, and it goes on for like 4 pages, this Ervin Scott. I never heard of him in my life, until, until, actually, until this project of Wright’s happened, I had never heard of him before. But I did run across the individual, before the book was published, shortly before the book was published. But Ervin Scott tells this whole story and he uses Ervin Scott for 3 ½, 4 pages to indict and convict David Miscavige at 12 years old, just like he indicted and convicted, I showed you he indicted and convicted L. Ron Hubbard at 12 years old. He’s doing the same thing with David Miscavige through this person Ervin Scott. OK? And it all revolves around this accusation that David Miscavige got physical with one of his preclears, person he was counseling, when he was 12 years old, in England in 1972. So. You know, I never gave any weight to that. I heard that rumor going around. And in fact, I think Karen de la Carriere was trying to get me to publish it on my blog. And, you know, based on what? Based on rumor, right? But Ervin Scott, I said, I don’t know Ervin Scott from anything. You know? OK. So in 2012, I’m in Los Angeles, and Karen de la Carriere arranges this dinner for me to go to at Gerhard Waterkamp’s house. And it’s supposed to be a big event. I said, I don’t want to do big events, you know, I just, you know, she said but just come and we’re going to be low key, it’s not a big deal. Ok? So I came. Right? And so everybody eats dinner, and then they have this big round table. It’s like 20 people there, former Scientologists, right? And Ervin Scott gives this talk, to tell his story that Larry Wright pub—ultimately publishes, 6 months later. And Ervin Scott, I mean, you just, one look at the guy and I’m like, I mean, this guy thinks he’s going to get his 15 minutes of fame. I guess he did. But, it was the most incredible story I ever heard. And it was, from early on in the story, he starts jabbering about what was going on at the, at Saint Hill, in 1972, and he said it was being run by messengers and there was messengers running messages back and forth. There was no such thing as Commodore’s Messenger Org in 1972. Anywhere else but on the Apollo, on the Ship, in the Mediterranean. OK? And then, in the Caribbean. It didn’t exist at Saint Hill. And I sort of just tuned out at that point, because the guy was so strained, trying to have this self-importance. OK. And I’m pretty sure I mentioned this to Larry Wright before this book got published. That this Ervin Scott, I’m pretty sure that I mentioned this to him. And if I did, if he asked me about it, I certainly did. And I would have, but, Ervin Scott has had zero, talk about credibility, you know, I mean it was so apparent the guy was manufacturing the story. Had all manner of internal inconsistencies, and then, he publishes the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, like, and this is what I’m talking about in terms of credibility. You know. There’s no question. This guy’s describing things at Saint Hill that didn’t even freaking exist. And then he tells this whole story about David Miscavige at 12 years old, and Larry Wright just sucks it in like a vacuum, and, you know, pours it in there. It’s an incredible story. And I find it interesting too, that he uses Karen de la Carriere in here, to now, all of a sudden, she’s heard it. That’s his corroboration. His corroboration is the woman who’s pushing the story, is going to corroborate it by saying she heard that rumor 40 years earlier. All of a sudden she remembers that she heard it 40 years earlier. And he just takes cheap shots through here, about talking about well, Scott said that David Miscavige took a certain asthma medication because he had asthma at the time, and therefore, this could have a steroidal effect on his psyche, but maybe it didn’t but it could have stunted his, I mean, he goes into a whole medical analysis and psychiatric analysis. Which he does throughout this book, based on a guy who has no credibility, okay? And based on rumor and innuendo. That’s another technique we should add to this list too, by the way. He takes rumor and innuendo and then he evaluates it, and then that turns it into fact. That evaluation then becomes a cornerstone which he then builds on.

Going Clear, Part 9 – Wollersheim case. 7 lies in one paragraph. OK, there is one particular paragraph that, you know, 178, 179, he is talking about. Lawrence Wright is talking about the Wollersheim case on page 178, 179. And there is one paragraph with five just outright lie, inventions of the most scandalous sort, and he managed, he managed to jam five of them into a sentence, into a paragraph that maybe has seven sentences. “An undercover campaign was launched to discredit or blackmail Wollersheim’s lawyer, Charles O’Riley”. False. Didn’t happen. I was there. I was in charge of everything that had to do with all that. Didn’t happen. Wright writes, “his house was bugged and his office was infiltrated by a Scientology operative”. A complete and utter invention of Lawrence Wright. It did not happen. I was there, I was in charge of all activity having to do, with anything having to do with that lawsuit and that lawyer. Next sentence, “there was an attempt to trap him, or his bodyguards in a compromising situation with women”. False. Invented. It never happened. It did not happen. I am sorry the count is more like seven lies. It’s, I thought it was five. The next sentence, I mean every sentence. The next sentence: “The Church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger”. False. Did not happen. Next sentence, quote, “’I was followed,’ the judge said later. My car tires were slashed, my collie drowned in his pool’”. That’s unfortunate that that stuff, if that even happened in the city of Los Angeles, which, which you know, wouldn’t be that uncommon, the Church had nothing to do with it. The Church would, this was, five years after the purge of the Guardian’s Office. I mean the prophylactic measures and control measures that were put in on external activity, were so tight, that you couldn’t cough, if you were involved in anything having to do with an external situation like a lawsuit, without HQ OK, OK. The last thing in the world that anybody, I mean, people knew, within an inch of their lives that they would be purged and expelled forever if they did something as stupid and corrupt as go mess with a judge. Didn’t happen. This stuff is literally, just invented. And the paragraph is, [cough], is capped off with a quote “a former Scientology executive, Vicki Aznaran, later testified that there was an effort to compromise the judge by setting up his son, who they heard was gay, with a minor boy”. It’s a complete invention of Vicki Aznaran. Now, if it is even an invention of Vicki Aznaran. It says, she testified. I doubt that she testified. If she did testify, she lied and she just made this stuff up. But I don’t even, I question whether you will find such testimony. But nothing like that ever, ever, ever happened. So we have seven sentences in one paragraph, all of which are invented. Several of which are unattributed. Most of which are unattributed. He is just inventing this stuff. Andre Tabayoyon says that Church funds were used to purchase assault rifles, shotguns, pistols. He also said that explosive devices were place around the perimeter of the fence at the Church’s headquarters, used in case of assault by law enforcement officials. I mean, this is right up there with Vicki Aznaran and Jesse Prince. I mean this is like, this is completely and utterly invented stuff. I mean, I was in charge of security for 20 some odd years, not in charge of it but intimately connected with it. From the construction of the perimeter fence to the security, you know, the electronic security system. It just does not exist, it didn’t happen. There weren’t caches of arms purchased by the Church. There was no explosive devices. I mean just, and of course not. And, again, like I said, but I could have. But I guess in this day and age people don’t care. They can get away with anything in the post-fact era. And then he says there was a sniper’s nest at the top of the hill. Like the Church had a sniper’s nest. We are getting further and further tabloid the deeper we go into this. And these are complete inventions. In that same paragraph, in the next paragraph, Larry Wright says: Each year a minimum of a hundred people attempted to escape from the base. Which, I mean, I don’t know where he gets; he just invented that. Complete fabrication, just invented it. (Laughs) And then he relies on Gary Morehead and you know Gary Morehead is one of these guys, he is kind of a goofy guy, very likeable guy, but this is this whole culture has turned into this pile-on culture, that you know, people just start embellishing things to become important. I can tell you from all these people that are out, because I participated in some media and how people thought this was just the apex of importance to be in the media, right. And so I kind of watched this as people’s stories over time, they just get more and more embellished. I mean, like he brings up Gary Morehead, and again, I am not trying to put the guy down, he is just saying things that are false. He says in here that they were using scanners to listen to people’s cellphone calls. I got news. A scanner will not net you the content of a telephone call. Ok. So either he, he is into this, Gary is into this embellishment for fame or Wright has invented this. But this physical fact, I am telling you what the physical fact is a scanner will not pick up on a cellphone call.

Going Clear, Part 6 Australian Inquiry, more Wright dishonesty Page 91 he talks about the Australian government’s Board of Inquiry, and I note that I went through with him in some detail, Ewen Cameron being involved in this. And I’ll talk about the significance of that, about the prosecutor Dax, and the fact that it was really a kangaroo court. Ironically, this really sort of—I don’t know, juvenile, not juvenile, what’s a better word? The guy’s, he’s a terrible writer, the guy who wrote this book called Fair Game, Steve Cannane out of Australia. You know, as much as the guy Cannane tried to just pile on—because he’s playing the “pile on” game now, because it’s easy to go after Scientology—and so he’s just regurgitating these things that have been said. But even Cannane, who was not, who wasn’t trying to come to this conclusion, the description that he gave of the Australian Inquiry and that whole episode, which he went into some depth because his book’s in Australia, describes a kangaroo court and a witch hunt to the tee. Of course, none of that’s described in here. He says they came out with a “passionate condemnation of Scientology”. But I went through a lot of those factors that Cannane actually reported on, even though Cannane—I never talked to him about any of that, and had I, he would’ve heard what I told Wright. But we’ll get there when he brings this up, because, again, he’s doing this jumbled time line. Wright says in the same paragraph where he introduces the Australian Inquiry, that “Hubbard believed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, along with the FBI and CIA, were feeding slanderous information about the Church to various governments”. Now all of a sudden, that’s been devalued to a “belief” which can be written off to his delusions and hallucinatory, you know, and paranoid mind frame that he’s accused him of 50 times already, and we’re only at page 91. And yet I went through this a lot with Wright, about how—he didn’t “believe” it, it’s documented. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, and the CIA were feeding slanderous information about the Church to various governments. But Wright just dismisses, so he doesn’t tell that story that I told him. Instead, he says “Hubbard believed…” as if this is just a paranoid delusion. You get what I’m saying? This is doubly kind of dishonest too, because, you know, and I don’t know if Wright in here does it, but the whole anti-Scientology narrative goes into this whole thing about well, they bought the IRS off, or intimidated the IRS, I mean it was so bizarre the IRS agreed to settle. I think they highlighted in the film where David Miscavige says the IRS is going to send out all this correction material to all these places that got their bad information, right? It’s not that they were intimidated or forced, or bought off to do it, it’s that this statement that he says was a belief of Hubbard’s, is documented true. U.S. agencies were sending slanderous materials, and did it for four decades. And it was so patently clear, by the documents Haitian presented to the higher levels of the IRS. That’s why they agreed to send corrective material out. That’s how much of a not “belief” or paranoid delusion it was. It was for real. And Wright knew that in spades.

Going Clear, Part 7 Wright: No credibility? No problem as long as you are anti-Scientology At page 141, he introduces, Wright introduces the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force. And, he goes off into the middle of this “narrative,” he goes off into a 15-page thesis about how the RPF is somehow a form of brainwashing. And, in other words, he is giving a whole narrative and then he just suddenly goes off, takes a pivot and goes off into advocating this theory of his, which is a really sort of intellectually dishonest theory. He says that people are physically forced into the RPF, and that, Wright says despite federal laws against human trafficking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the door on the RPF again. And of course, Wright made a big deal about an ongoing FBI investigation in the, around the time he was writing this book 2011, 2012, you know, I was intimately involved in that investigation and from the beginning, from the very beginning, when I first met the agents involved in the investigation, 2009. They were the first ones who were trying to use this human trafficking label for the RPF. I mean, I just informed them in detail, as I did Larry Wright, that the RPF is anything but human trafficking. It’s a rehabilitation, it is what it is, it is a rehabilitation project. And if you were to go interview or canvass anybody partaking of it and 99% of the people who have done it, they are going to describe it precisely as that. And so he begins with this, he introduces this term as if it is apropos to the RPF, which it absolutely isn’t. The reason I bring up the Feds is because he stated to me, Larry Wright stated to me that he was going to do something in his New Yorker article which was the predecessor that led to this book. He said to me that he was going to use that as some sort of nudge or leverage to kick the FBI into action. And so, for him to then, so by the time this book comes out, the FBI investigation, per my prediction, was gone, was long since gone. And it was clear to me that the Justice Department had accepted my argument that this, going into this, predicating on this idea that the RPF has anything to do with human trafficking, was a loser. Okay? It was clear to me from dealing with Dept. of Justice lawyers from Washington, DC and Los Angeles, that they accepted that. That this was constitutionally impermissible for them to go down this route. Two years after that he publishes the book, Larry Wright does and he characterizes the RPF as in violation of laws against human trafficking. So that is the predicate that he starts off with to make his brainwashing accusation or his brainwashing theory. And he uses, throughout that whole analysis, Jesse Prince as his example. And I spent a lot of, I don’t know how many times I told him you have got to evaluate Jesse Prince’s credibility, because Jesse Prince has a history of saying whatever needs to be said. He was a paid witness for a number of years, that’s a matter of court record in Clearwater, Florida and Tampa, Florida. There was, you know, he engaged in conduct while he was acting as “consultant and expert” and being paid for it, he engaged in conduct that, really lewd conduct, and aggressive conduct at the Church’s headquarters that essentially ended any credibility he ever had as a witness. And he actually disappeared because of that. He disappeared from the whole Scientology scene for a decade. And of course this goes into the whole issue that I have with Larry Wright. I mean, he literally was saying to me, I don’t know what you mean by evaluate his credibility. You mean, I am just supposed to ignore people because they did something. And I was like, and this is one of those sort of shocking moments for me. Like, I am dealing with a Pulitzer Price-winning author and he doesn’t understand what I mean by evaluating credibility. I said the thing that Franks and Prince both have in common, having been involved in Church defense work during their heydays. The two things those guys, they fit into a category that not a lot of other people fit into, and that was, the two things in common they had, was 1. They were paid witnesses. OK? They were getting paid by anti-Scientology forces to testify in cases. Not as experts, as fact witnesses. OK? So, in other words, they’re being paid to testify to facts. OK? You can’t do that. OK? That goes to, that goes to somebody’s credibility, number one. Number two, both of them, and I told him from my own personal experience, and a number of cases, OK? And which I researched meticulously, both of those two, were apt to say anything that the anti-Scientologists wanted them to say. In order to perfect their narratives. So I really, I warned him—I went over this, I don’t know how many times. I went over this with Larry Wright, a number of times, in person, on the phone, he called me back, his fact checker, and I kept raising this. I finally just threw up my hands and said, I just don’t even want to talk to you guys about this anymore. You just won’t get it. I said you’ve got to evaluate credibility, and he says, I don’t know what you mean. Wright says, I don’t know what you mean by evaluating credibility. You want me to just not do it because, because there’s something wrong with him?

Going Clear, Part 1 Lawrence Wright, False Representations about himself and motives I got interested in working with Wright on the subject of Scientology because I did a little bit of reading of books that he wrote before, one of which was Looming Towers. And I know there’s controversy about the accuracy of it and everything else, but I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that, the way he wrote the book appealed to me in terms of sharing what I knew about Scientology because he took two viewpoints on two different sides, and he fully explicated both of them. He took Osama bin Laden and he took O’Neill, the Justice person who was onto terrorists, and explained their viewpoints from the crib to the catastrophe. And that is something I never saw done with Scientology before and I assumed since he won the Pulitzer Prize for it that, you know, he would remain true to that sort of fairness, that objectivity, where you’re getting into two subjective views that conflict, to see a bigger picture. The end result of it, clearly, wasn’t that at all, and in fact it was one viewpoint, it was one anti-Scientology narrative that excluded anything that might muddy that narrative, or might throw any bit of it into doubt. That was the end product of the book, Going Clear. I identified going through it, and for me it was very frustrating because a lot of that other viewpoint, I provided. Some of which I’ve provided taped evidence of, but that’s only a small minutia, a fraction of the amount of explanations and facts and education on the subject that I provided to Wright that never made it into the book because it didn’t fit the anti-Scientology narrative. And as I re-read the book, I did a review on it when it happened, contemporaneously, and I just really sort of lashed out at some real obvious fact check errors that really peeved me at the time because I had been hounded on them numerous times by his fact checkers and him, like several times on individual facts, that he still got wrong in the book. And it really kind of threw me for a loop, because I understood, he was with a big publisher, he probably got a huge advance, he was able to take two years, have a whole crew of fact checkers and researchers and everything else, and to have that many glaring errors that just stuck out at me that were just ones that involved me and things that I said. I was just bookmarking that. And I’ve done a further deeper review since now the movie’s come out and it’s had such impact, that I did a further review of the book and analyzed it and, against my experience with Wright. And identified several kind of techniques that were used to—that he used to give the anti-Scientology narrative as fact, while excluding anything, any differing viewpoint. The first technique he uses was to paint himself as, and he does it in the introduction of the book and he did it in the introduction to the movie and he did it on the press circuit, was this introduction of his approach, which he states right in the book, was to find out why Scientology was so alluring, and how it was so appealing, and how it kept people within it, or people stuck with it, despite it being public relations suicide, I think he put it. There must be something to it. You know, ultimately, when the movie was done, he was riding the press circuit, he said, really, otherwise. He wasn’t trying to find anything out, he was trying to advocate for tax exemption revocation, and he was trying to embarrass people from being involved in Scientology, trying to actively get them to defect. You know, one of the things that made me want to participate too, was that I looked for a previous book that he did on the subject of religion. That was called Saints and Sinners. And I was impressed by it at the outset, because there was quite a bit of bias disclosure, right from the beginning of the book, and in fact, he says in the introduction, “Thus the tendency of journalists to look upon religion as a marketplace of the weird and the absurd. I confess, it is not easy to clear my head of this prejudice”. And he states that right at the outset. And he’s looking into people who, you know, everything from a Baptist Minister to Jimmy Swaggart, to the head of the Atheist movement, to the head of the Church of Satan. But he’s stating right from the beginning, and he goes into a big personal subjective essay about how he even felt his father, you know, was a traitor to him because he expressed doubt about his belief when he was on his death bed, and you know, it’s very kind of moving. And so, he’s always sort of trying to keep that balance when he’s dealing with these people. In fact, at the end of the book, he’s giving all sorts of praise to the head of Atheism and the head of the Satanists, saying that he really admires them because they continue to persist with their view despite, you know, all the brickbats that get thrown at them. So, you know, it was that kind of objectivity and tolerance that I thought was going to spill over into his later project. And of course as we’ll go through you’ll see that it did not. That’s the first element. No bias disclosure in the Scientology book whatsoever, and in fact, just the opposite. Him acting as if he’s actually biased in the other direction. “Clearly there must be something good about this. I want to find out what it is”.

Going Clear, Part 2 Wright Projecting Self on L. Ron Hubbard The second element you find throughout the book, is a projection, and I’m talking about the psychological definition of projection, projecting onto others your own motives and ideas. You know, I had lengthy discussions with Wright about this idea that I was getting from him, through his questioning, that L. Ron Hubbard at bottom really wanted to make it in Hollywood. And that was his real life dream and his life goal and that he sort of played out this fantasy through Scientology. And having been involved in Scientology, you know, inside the Church for 27 years, with the subject for 35 years, you know, I really tried to explain to him that there was not a scintilla of evidence to support that. In fact, quite the contrary. That Hubbard, even though he was the living Founder of this movement that people found so important to them that they stayed with it despite “public relations suicide” as he put it, Hubbard never surrounded himself with celebrities. I mean, I don’t think there’s any really A-list celebrities that ever even got to meet him. And that was a known fact within the Church. So, I kept wondering where this came from. And I started, you know, I learned more and more about his sources, and, you know, I know, I got familiar with the whole anti-Scientology field, the whole independent Scientology field, the whole, you know, every aspect of anybody has anything to do with Scientology, and I’d never heard this before and yet he was continuing to persist with it. And then when the book came out, I mean, the whole book was sort of predicated on that idea. And I came to realize that there was no source. The source was Larry Wright. Larry Wright was projecting himself onto Hubbard his own sort of psyche. Because it occurred to me that during the process of the New Yorker article, the book and the movie, that Wright was spending a great deal of his time trying to get a foot into Hollywood. He was doing a lot of screenwriting, he was doing a lot of hobnobbing, he was, you know, sort of using the Haggis connection to insinuate himself into the drama field and the cinematography field, so in the end, to me, it appeared that this was projection. Now projection, that’s just to give you an example. Because I’m just giving you categories of techniques that are found throughout. And then I’ll go through the book and you can, they fit within these different techniques, the things that, the inaccuracies and the inventions are going to fit within one or more of these types of techniques he used. The next one, the third thing he used was narrative manipulation. Which he purports and he kind of gives the impression that he’s giving a chronological narrative, but it’s had so many omissions and then so many alterations, that it really is a phony narrative and it’s not a chronology at all. And, he’ll take, what I mean by vast omissions is, one of the things that I imparted to him was, and invited him to just look at the sheer volume of, let alone just the content, but I said, you know, take a look at the lectures of Hubbard, okay? One to two to three a day. 60 to 90 minutes. Substantive. Okay? And constantly evolving and changing over a 15-year period, nonstop from 1950 to 1960, to the mid-1960s. Okay? And he’s referring in there, during much of it, to workshops and seminars that he’s involved in, experimenting with Dianetics and Scientology. So, he’s, I’m talking about L. Ron Hubbard is discussing the results, he’s not just, as much as you would get from Larry Wright that he’s just pontificating off the top of his head, they’re all predicated on drills and techniques and things that he’s experimenting with and working with between these lectures. So that, you know, 80% of his time, L. Ron Hubbard’s time, between 1950 and 1968, are accounted for. Right? None of that, none of that is in the book. None of what he was actually was doing, and, you know, was his life’s work, is in there. It’s every little bit of scandalous kind of, you know, problem area, or speed bump or hiccup, whatever you want to call it, sort of just piled on one after the other. So there’s this vast omission of what’s really going on and what the bulk of his time and effort is about. And then there’s his alteration, where he’ll take, he’ll take fact, he’ll be purporting to do a chronology and he’ll make conclusions throughout and judgments. So, there’s a constant manipulation in terms of the timeline. Another category of device that he uses is fact invention. And we’ll get into this in some detail as we go through the book. But the great, I think the greatest example, most glaring example, maybe, is the Paul Haggis situation on whom the book is supposed to be, you know, he, Paul Haggis in his narrative is supposed to serve as the, you know, the reason for the book and the foundation of the book. We’ll go through how that was in large part created. Another device that he uses, or practice that he follows, is, or adopts, it this sort of us versus them, and ironically it’s sort of an indicia of a cult, but there’s an us versus them mentality where, if you’re with the anti-Scientology narrative, there’s no question about your credibility and you get full credibility. And if you are agin em, so if you’re agin em, you’re cool. If you’re for, then there’s something wrong with you, and you’re either painted that way or you’re just omitted entirely.

Going Clear, Part 3 Wright practice of cultic Thought Stopping and Sophistry The next point, which is thought stopping. Which is something he touches on in this book and accuses Scientology of, which is the mind control research that was done by Dr. Robert Lifton during the red scare era, and, you know, that has all to do with ideological conditioning where you keep people ideologically in a box by getting them to reject any data from the outside, by labeling it. And so you label it and dismiss it. And Lifton uses the example with the Communist Chinese of any Western thought that comes in, they just dismiss it as bourgeoisie thinking. And it just doesn’t enter the person’s thinking stream. You know. Effectively, by the time you get into three, four chapters into this book, he is effectively applying that, or getting the reader to apply that, towards Scientology. Because he’s already labeled, you know, the founder and the core of the subject delusional, imaginary, and all these different things to the point where, just the tone and tenor of it throughout the rest of the book becomes, if it’s coming from Scientology, it’s immediately dismissed. He’ll even take things that are said, that he may have gotten from earlier, the earlier New Yorker interview from the Church spokesperson, or gotten from Church publications, or whatever, and just puts them in that light, that, well, this comes from Scientology. And, so that’s just sort of facilely dismissed. And then, finally, throughout the book, the guy uses a sophistry which depends upon these earlier devices, of, you know, us versus them, credibility determinations, and the thought stopping techniques, where, you know, he’s making, in a narrative, that’s being presented as sort of a chronological and objective narrative, it’s, it’s got these clever fallacious arguments, and conclusions, being reached, throughout, throughout the book. And then he relies on, the only subjectivity he allows are people that are clearly, never got the subject, and they swear they never got anything out of it, or somebody, and then, that would be Paul Haggis, who clearly, and I’ll show, you know, throughout here, really didn’t, there’s all indication, he really didn’t understand the subject. And Hana Whitfield, who of course was a, you know, she’s just a drama queen. She just, is giving everything in this very dramatic, kind of, you know, shocked, kind of characterization. And of course he doesn’t disclose her bias. That she in fact, for years after she left Scientology, valued Scientology, after she left the Church she still valued Scientology, so much so that she brought a suit to try to sort, to try to take over the ownership of the technology, and destroy the church in the bargain by suing it for a billion dollars. None of that is covered. We’re on page 10 and he says Haggis said he wanted to be a writer. That’s what he wanted to do, when he got into Scientology. But if you go to the film, this goes to projection, too. In the book, Larry Wright says Paul Haggis wants to be a writer. In the film, Alex Gibney, what does Paul Haggis tell Alex Gibney? He wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. So, Paul Haggis, I guess will say anything to ingratiate whoever he’s talking to. I mean if I’m a garbage man, he’d probably tell me he wanted to be a garbage man. Right? A writer, to Wright. A documentarian to Gibney.

Going Clear, Part 4 Wright Creating Phony Hubbard History – more straw man tactics But there was two things that Wright kept trying to deny to me. One that Fletcher Prouty was for real, and two that Hubbard had anything to do with naval intelligence. I just went through with him, I mean I was there. This was not something the Church dreamed up or anybody in the Church came up with. Fletcher Prouty blew us all away with his whole analysis. Number one. And number two, on this, he kept saying well the records don’t show that. And I said, Larry what did you do with the records. He said I made a request and I got all the records from the naval center in Missouri. And I said and that was it? I said, you didn’t do any follow up? I said, Larry, listen man, I have been involved, while I was in the Church, the prosecution of thousands of FOI requests and I know you never find anything even resembling the truth, unless you persist. And we had to persist for decades, through litigation, to get, to find the truth about the substance of documents. The government would fight hammer and tongs. And I even said, have you seen documents—I think I even showed him some, because I had some from some archive—I said look, there is more blackouts than there are document. You have got to follow through, you have got to cross reference, you have got to send requests from different people, then the new line is revealed in another document. I said this is a painstaking process, it takes a lot of time and effort. He never did it. He made one request and only one request. He got one response, and that is now the gospel. Right. And anything else that might throw it into question is invented or created and anybody who has done any type of research vis-à-vis the government, particularly the US Federal Government knows, would understand that is the nadir of research to just make a single simple request and then say that’s it, I’ll settle with it. How many people, do you think that I know, having been in Scientology for 27 years, and having been associated with Scientologists, anti-Scientologists, squirrel Scientologists, whatever, for another ten years, how many people do you think I know who got into Scientology because they had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled in the war, who had healed himself through Dianetics techniques? Do you know how many people I know? Zero. Okay. None of his sources. He tells these stories which conflict about how they got, and why they got into Scientology, and nobody, so why are we even having this discussion? And the reason I bring this up is, is I did have this discussion with Lawrence Wright. OK. I had the discussion about you have to judge somebody by their work not by their personality. But the whole thing is about this. The whole book is about, we are going to destroy him, his personality, because after all that’s the only reason why anybody ever follows the subject. And you know, they do that with the film. He starts the film, and Lawrence Wright, I mean Alex Gibney out of nowhere says, in order to understand Scientology, you have to understand the character and history of its founder. No you don’t. The guy wrote 55 million words. Ok, the work is there, you can examine the work, you don’t need to know, you get what I am saying. Anyway, this is sort of, this is, I bring this up here, because this whole Navy thing is a straw man and he just, again, makes this thing, some people, what people? I am unaware of any. But I get it, you need to say that so you can say why it is relevant for you to go on a 50 page rant, recounting a story that you didn’t even research but you are just repeating and making it sound like you are, doing a big expose.

INTRODUCTION I told you all the stuff about Scientology that’s already been said about Scientology, ad nauseam. And you want to hear the rest of the story; you want to hear the other side of the story. And I told you that that is a waste of my time – I’ve tried to tell that story and it’s always wound up in the editing room floor. Because we have a mimesis problem in this culture which is this obsessive copying, like sheep. And it applies to the media and it applies to documentarians that I have dealt with. Virtually anything that strays outside the agreed upon narrative doesn’t see the light of day. So, I consider it a colossal waste of time and that’s why I insisted and you agreed, that if I do that for you, you are going to do it under one condition and that is that, if I don’t like where your edit is going, or is headed, or being produced, I have access to everything that I told you – all cuts, and can use it as I see fit – I publish it if I want to. And since you agreed to that, I agreed to go ahead and tell you. Now, this mimesis problem – it’s a sort of a form of denialism where, in this culture particularly, of this click-bait culture, most news, most documentary work, is created to serve a particular public. They are trying to re-enforce ideas that people have, or trying to sell ideas and get people to adopt narratives. And what it is, is that people adopt narratives and then they are fed stuff that reinforces that narrative. And if it reinforces the narrative, it reinforces their views and they will go with it. If it doesn’t agree with their chosen narrative, they just ignore it. And so this is the rest of the story on Scientology that just gets ignored because it doesn’t fit the easy narrative. You know, I've have had this experience with a number of media, a number of documentarians, where I attempt to tell it and there’s just this sort of, unconscious kind of look, this hypnotic glaze kind of goes over their eyes and they kind of sit through it. No follow up questions, no nothing. It just kind of goes through like a blank and then they're right back to peppering about the scandalous stuff that they can, you know, that’s already been said a hundred times to try to reinforce the official narrative. That narrative incidentally – this whole sort of talent pool for the anti-Scientology media, comes from what I call the Anti-Scientology Cult, which in essence is a troll-farm. It’s a number of blogs and social media network sites where a lot of people just pile on and obsess over Scientology. What the sheep on the farm don’t understand, the participants, the vast majority of them, is that there is only three farmers in the farm system. It’s what I call the troika. There’s three people who supply virtually all the memes that these people exist to replicate and then pass on. And what the sheep don’t understand, is that the three are doing it solely and utterly for profit. In other words, it is all presented as if this is some selfless, noble, heroic idea about helping “former Scientologists” right. The one thing that you should know at the outset, is that the troika – you know they rail about this supposed strict hierarchically controlled religion. Well, the interesting thing is the watchword with all things A-S-C, or Anti-Scientology Cult, are hypocrisy. They literally accuse Scientology of that which they themselves do and intend. And they consider that they have a hierarchy – the problem is that each one of the three parts of the cluster, thinks that they're in charge. I’ll get into that in more detail as we go. But there is one thing that they all agree on, and that is that the Bible – the definitive “narrative” of the anti-Scientology cult – is Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, the book, as condensed and done in a movie by Alex Gibney, that they consider “the Bible”. That is the base narrative that they just continuously repeat and regurgitate and then try to add new names and new faces to try to perpetuate and continue to run. And so I think that it is probably best to begin by addressing the bible of the ASC.