Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Scientology EXPOSED: Mark Bunker's 30-Year War vs. Fake Religion CULT | 203

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Mark Bunker is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a Scientology history expert. He is a massive critic of the Church of Scientology, having previously worked for the Lisa McPherson Trust –– and is the founder of Xenu TV, a website featuring videos and commentary critical of Scientology. - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6  Scientology Videos from Episode: - Tom Cruise “KSW” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0  - Tom Cruise Scientology Award Speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8ciJZvjyk&t=107s  JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - How Mark exposed the Tom Cruise Scientology Videos 10:46 - Scientology Founder, L Ron Hubbard background 21:47 - L Ron HUbbard’s multiple wives; Dianetics, Escaping US government 33:37 - Scientology belief in the afterlife; Xenu & Volcano of Souls 42:31 - Scientology hiding beliefs from public; Tom Cruise; Scientology brainwashing 55:42 - Internet shaming of Scientology; Clearwater HQ 1:12:37 - Ponzi Scheme success; Sea Org kicked out of England; Hubbard’s India Trip 1:26:31 - Mike Rinder; Hubbard on run from FBI; E Meter; Leah Remini Casting director escape 1:42:27 - David Miscavige takes over scientology; Miscavige’s wife Shelly goes missing 1:56:03 - Clearwater Politics & Scientology; LA Scientology building; Fake history 2:12:27 - Lisa McPherson Tragic story; Scientology attacks Mark Bunker 2:29:07 - Mark’s involvement in Scientology take down; L Ron Hubbard turns on Scientology 2:39:07 - Mark moves to Clearwater; Police paid off by Scientology; Mark stories getting people out of cult 2:54:34 - Smart people brainwashed by cult; Mike Rinder pulled out of hole 3:05:28 - Lisa McPherson Trust & Scientology fair play tactics 3:13:28 - Political plan to eradicate Scientology in Clearwater 3:19:51 - Scientology’s history with the IRS 2:23:45 - Mark soldiering on CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 203 - Mark Bunker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There was a really tragic death at the Ford Harrison Hotel back in 1995. Lisa McPherson was a woman who was a devout Scientologist for many, many years. She was having a mental breakdown, and she got involved in a little fender-bender accident right outside the Ford Harrison Hotel. And when the paramedics arrived on the scene, she had taken off all of her clothes and was walking down the street naked. And this female paramedic comes up and says why are you doing this and she said i need somebody to pay attention to me i need help What's up, guys?

If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. Mark, thank you so much for coming, man. I really appreciate you coming up here on a Saturday, too. Well, it's an exciting trip. And you are the son of a bitch who leaked the Tom Cruise videos that we all now get to enjoy from Inside Scientology. Well, yeah. There were a team of people who actually got that video.

It was a DVD direct from Scientology. And it was only supposed to be shown in the orgs. In the what? In a Scientology org. That's what they call the churches. It's an organization or org. And public would come in and they'd be sat down and they'd be watching this Tom Cruise DVD. Oh my God, this is the biggest moment in Scientology history. And then we leaked it online, and it was pretty remarkable to see that video go all around the world. And for like a solid week, every single TV show, that was back in 2008, Every place you looked, it was popping up. And by Friday night,

I finally had a chance to relax, put my feet up and sit back on the sofa and turn on 2020, where they were doing a piece on it. And I just looked over at my computer and said, that video came from that computer right there. That's amazing. Yeah. And do we have those, Alessi? Where Murray goes? Just for people to get a little refresher on what we're working with here, we'll put this on the screen. So which one is this? This is his. Like the speech?

No. No. This is the introduction to this event. All right. Let's play this real quick. We got the volume. There still remains one more word on the man. Call it Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise Scientologist.

They're so corny. I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist does he or she has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions being Scientologist you look at someone and you know absolutely

that you can help them so for me it really is KSW it's something that I don't mince words with that, you know, with anything. But that policy to me has really gone, boy. There's a time I went through and said, you know what? When I read it, you know, I just went, pfft. That's it. Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it's not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it.

Because you know you're the only one that can really help. That's what drives me. It's that I know that we have an opportunity to really help for the first time. All right, let's cut that one here. We'll put the link to this in the description because it's like nine minutes or something, and you can watch it. It's pretty hilarious. Oh, it's brilliant. And this, you know, it's crazy to us, but Scientologists are going, wow, that's great.

He's right. KSW, which stands for Keeping Scientology Working, an important policy letter that L. Ron Hubbard wrote. Before you do any course, you have to read the KSW to keep Scientology working. Got it. So. Good to know. Yeah. And then Alessia, we have the other one just for people to see like how cringe the actual

audience is. This was this was the other leak you had where he's accepting a big award. Right. That I think Miscavige. We're going to get to these people, by the way. So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it.

Impress even the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys. If you're listening out there and you don't know some of the names that were just said, like we're going to get through all these people in the history. Mark knows all this stuff. But he, I think, invented this medal specifically to give it to Tom Cruise. Is that right? Yeah. They had to create something extra special for Tom. Got it.

So the Freedom Medal of Valor. And they kept giving it year after year after this. But this was the first one, I believe. Got it. All right, let's play this real quick. And this is back in, like, maybe 07, something like that. 2007, 2008. Got it.

So these are all Scientologists in the crowd. Yeah. This is in Clearwater? No, this is, I think, in LA. Yeah. I love the Miss Impossible music in the background. It's so cringe. And he probably did not get permission from Paramount for that.

Oh, no. It's Tom Cruise. You're not going to say no. Sure. Look at the metal. Oh, it's his proudest moment is Miscavige short too? oh he's tiny

yeah he's well over four feet tall yeah Tom Cruise is like five four and Miscavige is like looks like he's five it's Miscavige

Miscavige I keep saying that well that's why I'm here, you know. I've got to sit you straight. Can we cut forward to the speech, Alasdair? Cut forward, yeah. A little more. Oh my God, they're just screaming.

I'm really, really honored to be here with you. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for your confidence in me. I've personally been very privileged to see what you do to help, to protect, to serve all of us. All right, that's enough. We'll put the link in the description. You guys get the picture.

So basically, this is like a psycho convention. This was a very fascinating period of Cruz's career, though, because when this came out, he was in the process of firing his top-of-the-line publicist, Pat Kingsley, and he hired his sister, she's a Scientologist as well, to handle his career. And immediately, trouble began because, you know, Pat Kingsley was saying, let's not talk about Scientology. But once she was gone, bam! Cruz was out there jumping

on Oprah's couch. And going on the Today Show. Matt Lauer, that interview. Matt, Matt, Matt, you're glib. You're glib, Matt. You're so glib. And at that point, he had an office on the Paramount lot. And he got kicked off the lot. His contract ended.

The 90-year-old guy who ran Paramount at the time, Sumner Redstone, was incredibly embarrassed by Cruise and said, okay, you're out of here. And Cruise's career was really shaky at that moment. But he bounced back. He got another Mission Impossible film and was welcomed back to Paramount and everything was fine. But there was, when the South Park episode came out oh yes trapped in the closet so good made fun of tom cruise and a huge wonderful episode that it's one of the best ever um cruise was upset he went ballistic and uh complained to sumner Redstone because South Park was also a Paramount show. And there was an announcement the day after it aired that that episode would never be seen again. It would not go into reruns.

It would not be included in a DVD collection. It's dead. Really? I didn't know that. I've seen it. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Tom Cruise got it canned for a brief moment

until he continued acting wacky. And at that point, Sumner said, you're out of here. And I was amazed when the DVD collection came out. I was walking through a store and I saw it on the shelf. And not only was it on the DVD collection came out, I was walking through a store and I saw it on the shelf. And not only was it on the DVD, but there was a sticker on the front of the package saying, includes the award-winning Trapped in the Closet episode. So there you go. That's awesome. I remember, like South Park is almost like a future documentary sometimes of a spoof because man, do they have their finger

on the pulse of what's going on what's what's crazy about that episode is that was the first time i think i probably saw it when i was maybe 16 years old something like that it's the first time i'd ever heard of scientology yeah i was like this can't be real they must have made this up right and then i googled it i was like oh God, like people actually believe this. You're not alone. I mean, that was a huge turning point for Scientology. That episode introduced the wackiness of Scientology to a whole generation of people. And really, it's a critical moment in Scientology's history. Yeah. Now, I think today what would be good for a lot of people out there who aren't familiar with all the nooks and crannies of the history and where it stands right now, I think we can kind of work our way through of trying to get rid of the influence of Scientology within that town. So that's certainly something interesting to talk about.

But my buddy Danny Jones has a big podcast down there in Madeira Beach, and so he grew up in Clearwater. He's very familiar with Scientology. So he's done some amazing podcasts over the years on Scientology, including with Mike Rinder, Aaron, who's big on YouTube and some other guys. And so he had been telling me for a long time, I got to do one on this. But I didn't realize that there was literally someone who was down there like on the city council who was speaking up about this. I think that's a very brave thing to do. And we're going to get in into why today, but before we go there, can we just start with L Ron Hubbard and how this whole thing came together?

He's such a fascinating figure. I don't know how there hasn't been like a major movie made about him at this point. I feel like someone would win an Oscar playing that. There's an incredibly minor movie that was made about him by some of my former friends called The Prophet, which was a thinly veiled biography of Hubbard and the creation of Scientology. It has not really been seen by many people. It premiered in Clearwater, Florida, and ran for like three

weeks straight in this one theater. How long ago? Oh, this was like 2001, I believe. Oh, a while ago. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My friend, Bob Minton, who is a retired international banker, had spent about $10 million of his own money trying to help people who had been abused by Scientology. And that was one of the things he did was finance this film that a couple of our friends wrote and produced and directed. And they did a horrible job with it. So that one wasn't seen but there's another film that uh is a a great movie called the master if you haven't seen that wait phil seymour hoffman yeah and that's based yeah that's based on hubbard and scientology and

there's so much of it that that is ident. They didn't call it that, of course, and he's not called Hubbard, but there are several practices in it, you know, when they're showing off, you know, doing a locational where, you know, you're trying to, if you're not fixed in this time and space, they'll say, look at that tree. Thank you. Look at that wall. Thank you. So there's things like that in the film that very closely mirror that. I saw that like right when it came out.

That was like over a decade ago, I think. Yeah, but that's the awful and wonderful versions of the story. Gotcha. So was – I'm trying to remember though. Was Philip Seymour Hoffman supposed to be Hubbard? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

He was good to play Hubbard. He was perfect for it. Because like I see this guy talk and I just see like Christian Bale, maybe Leo with some more weight. Well, both of them more weight or who's the Daniel Day-Lewis playing that they could play the shit out of that guy because he's so fascinating. So he was basically a shitty science fiction writer. Well, I mean, he was a very prolific science fiction writer. He wrote for pulp magazines back in the 30s and 40s. And these were cheap digest magazines that had stories of adventure, Western, sci-fi, detectives. He wrote them all, but he's primarily known for his science fiction work. But he would crank out these stories at a penny a word and was one of the most prolific writers around. Not one of the best,

but he was selling these stories constantly. And there are some times where he would have almost every story in a particular issue was his, but he would write them under different names. So there'd be pseudonyms for stories that are set in the Wild West, or he actually did French Legionnaire stories and all sorts of anything he could crank out, he would get paid for. But he did not get rich from that. A penny a word, it's hard to make a living. He wrote a lot, though. He wrote a lot, but still. But that explains why Hubbard is so verbose as well.

If you read any Scientology stuff, it is so overwritten because that's the style he's used to you know yeah yeah yeah throw out a lot of words there and maybe some of them make sense um but you just bury whatever you have in in this language um do we know much about like his childhood and how like he even got to this like oh my god he was the youngest boy scout ever he was well that's what he says okay uh he uh was the you know a friend of uh some indian tribe they they um i made him an honorary engine or something i don't know uh but there's this fanciful history that he came up uh with um you know he was he's's just a kid with a wonderful flight of fancy and, you know, was able to BS with the best of them. A terribly flawed individual.

But he, you know, he was a prolific writer, but not making money. He served served uh in world war ii he actually got command of a ship for a couple of months before he was yanked off they gave that guy command of a ship they did i guess there were no psychiatric evaluations back then no and you know and clearly he he was nuts, and they noticed that he was nuts, and they said, you know, you've been shelling this supposed Japanese submarine for two days now. You're wasting all of our ammunition on this. It's costing us a fortune. And it turned out to just be some magnetic ore in the water. It was no ship at all, but he was convinced he's saving the U.S. from this Jap attack. So he was canned from that. And when he got out of service in World War II, he found a place to stay in South Pasadena.

There was this fella, colorful fella, who had a mansion and he was renting out rooms to bohemian characters. He was looking for artists, writers, anybody who was like offbeat, that they could come and rent a room in his mansion. And Hubbard thought, well, this will be a wonderful thing to do. I'm not going to go back to my wife in the Midwest. I'm going to stay here in this mansion for a while. And this guy who owned this mansion was Jack Parsons, and he was a JPL original rocket scientist. He was a fellow who had, you know,

a lot of stuff going for him. One thing he had going for him was that he was a Satanist. Oh, he worshipped the devil. Yeah. He was a follower of Anton LaVey, I think. But he was actually doing these satanic rituals that Hubbard joined in on. And they were doing these black magic sex rituals with Jack Parsons' girlfriend. They would both be having sex with her as they were in, you know, front and back or that I don't know. I wasn't there. I just know that they're, you know, they're doing their little chance and they're trying to create the moon child. If you got a video of that, we'll take it. Well, thankfully I don't. But they're trying to create the spawn of Satan, essentially. And Jack Parsons wrote to Anton LaVey, I think that's the right person I'm thinking of, and said, hey, we're working on creating a moon child.

And this guy went, oh, God, these idiots. So Hubbard actually spent a few years there and then made off with Jack Parsons' girlfriend and his money. He told Parsons, hey, listen, I'm going to go to the East Coast and we'll buy some ships and we'll sail them back here and we'll sell them for a profit. It'll be wonderful. I'm taking your girlfriend with me. And so he got the money, got there, and, you know, they never brought the ships back. At least –

Or the girl. Yeah. At least not at first. So, you know, this is the type of wonderful, reputable fellow that Hubbard is. And that's one of the most fascinating aspects of his life and the most unorthodox, the most unbelievable aspects of it. So I usually don't even talk about it because people think, oh, come on, you're going overboard now. But Scientology had to admit that this happened. And their cover story when this was uncovered, I think in the 60s.

A while ago. Yeah. They said, well, yeah, well, Hubbard was sent in by the CIA to break up this black magic cult. Oh, yeah, that's what happened. Right. Yeah. Heroic Hubbard. Says Bustamante about that one.

Yeah. Anyway, it's a really fascinating but bizarre period of his life. But almost every aspect of his life is bizarre. Was that – was the girl he brought back Mary Sue? No. It was different? Mary Sue was the third wife. This was the second wife.

Okay. Polly, I think, was his first wife. And then this gal, and I can't think of her name right now. This gal was the second, and then Mary Sue was the third. And there's this great interview done in 1964, I think, called The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard. And I put this online decades ago, and I heard from the guy who actually made this episode of a documentary series for British TV. And he contacted me and explained how he just went up to Hubbard's ship, which was docked in a port.

He just went up there in the middle of the night and said, Hi, I'm interested in doing an interview. And he had his equipment there. And Hubbard, for some reason, said, Yes, that would be a wonderful thing to do. Let's do that right now. That's a pretty good Hubbard, for some reason, said, yes, that would be a wonderful thing to do. Let's do that right now. It's a pretty good Hubbard. Oh, yeah. So they sat down, and this guy's grilling Hubbard. One of my favorite moments is when he talks about Hubbard's marriages. And he asked Hubbard, what about your second wife?

And he goes, I never had a second wife. Really? Don't lie. Well, I mean, if you, yeah. If you had only two wives, your second wife would have been Mary Sue, the person you were talking about. But clearly, he's going, oh, I never had a second wife. Okay, he just didn't want to mention this gal who, well, it was a massive story in itself.

Look this up. Go and look up L. Ron Hubbard's life. It's amazing. He tried to have her committed to an insane asylum. He was also a wife beater and stuff too, right? Yeah, that was his first wife. And this is about as flawed a human being as you could ever encounter. And he's got the secret to how you can be a perfect human being. It never worked on him. But all of these courses are to help you become not just Homo sapiens. He wants you to become

Homo novus, new man, able to control matter, energy, space, and time through Hubbard Scientology techniques. And this guy, his life was in a complete mess, and he found himself hiding out in the desert for the last 10 years of his life or so. And his wife, Mary Sue, went to prison for all these covert activities that they were doing against the U.S. government and against Clearwater. We can go into that. We will. I'm bouncing all over the place. This is fine.

You're just giving the overview. This is fine. We'll come back. So this is a guy who let his wife take the fall for him and he hid out in the desert because he didn't want to go to prison himself. He also like went – he sailed around the world to run from the U.S. government basically. Yeah. Yeah. That was, you know, starting in the early sixties, he got in trouble here in the U.S. The FDA raided their headquarters and seized all of their e-meters and said, you're practicing medicine without a license. And so he got in trouble with that. And they forced him to put a disclaimer on every e-meter

that's still on there. If you look at the back of the e-meter, it says, this is a religious artifact. And, uh, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's insane, but they still, you know, they still will say, yeah, we can, we can cure ailments. Um, they just try to pretend to the authorities that, oh, no, we don't do that. But you talk to any, any Scientologist, and they'll tell you, oh, yeah, cured my mom's arthritis. It cured this, it cured that. Science. Yeah. Yeah. Because Hubbard said in Dianetics that you can cure the common cold, you can improve your eyesight, you can do, you know, everything can be cured with – When did he write Dianetics? That was a book that – we'll explain it. But it later became the basis for what he then transformed into Scientology itself. Yeah.

That was 1950 when it came out as a book. It was first an article in one of those pulp magazines, one of the science fiction magazines. And then the book came out and boom. It was a huge success. It was like the hula hoop there for a brief period. And this was because it was psychotherapy for the common man. At that point in the late 40s, there was massive interest after World War II in psychiatry. But it was something that most people didn't have access to or couldn't afford.

If you look at the movies at that point, Hitchcock made a film called Spellbound, which was all about a psychiatrist. And there's a whole lot of movies that deal with this at the time. So it was something that the public was fascinated by. So Dianetics, Hubbard says, you can sit down with a friend and this book, and you can audit each other. Auditing is their form of therapy. So you can essentially get your therapy session for the price of a paperback. And that was a huge bestseller. And then he started doing lectures. And for a couple of years, he was raking in some dough for the first time in his life. And it was sweet, except he always got in trouble with

his investors. Who were his investors? He would have these people that read Dianetics and said, wow, this is great. You know what we need to do? Set up a foundation for you here. And then Hubbard would run off with the money and go to another city. So he went to Phoenix at one point and set up shop there.

And he lost the copyright to Dianetics in like 1952, I think. It went over to one of the guys who put the money into it. So Hubbard then had to sit down and create something else. And that's when he created Scientology, which was, I think, 1953 when that was established officially. And there's a wire, a telegram that he sent to one of his people saying, how's everything coming on the religion angle? On the angle. Yeah. If we can get this approved, i know i can make it stick i mean you know it's right there in writing this religion angle uh you know um

but he got it and he made it stick it's it seems like the guy i mean obviously he was narcissistic out of his mind obviously he and I'm not a psychiatrist. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, make instant deposits or same day withdrawals. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager ontario only

please gamble responsibly if you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario i'm just giving some basic ones here obviously he he was bipolar did have a brain up there and what it seems to me is that sort of like you said a few minutes ago he he was maybe actually somewhat consciously aware of all his own internal struggles that he felt like almost like we may feel now when we go on to web md and hope they're going to tell us something that's going to cure something that's wrong with us at the time just to get that confidence boost like oh yeah i'll just drink more orange juice and this flu is gonna fucking go away it feels like he did

that but wrote a book about it and just i mean from my perspective and i haven't read dianetics but from the things i've heard about on podcasts and reading articles about it and documentaries like it's all made up it's not none of it's really based in scientific fact you know he cobbled together a lot of things from uh even back in the 1920s there was some um some article about um dianetics i think it was or some you know scientology or dianetics the I think it was, or, you know, Scientology or Dianetics. The name was there prior. It was not exactly what Hubbard developed it into. But clearly, it's a lot of stuff he's just pulling out of his ass. Yes.

And not everything is, you know, bad. There are certainly some things that if you get into Scientology, you may be able to learn how to communicate better. For instance, the way Scientologists want you to communicate. Not necessarily the best way to communicate, but

there are things you can pick up that in the lower levels are, you know, they're not harmful, and you may learn something from them. But the problem is Hubbard had to keep writing new material because he would promise that this is going to cure this problem. And people would take that course that he created and go, well, I'm not sure that it really did. And he said, ah, but that's in the next course. So he'd sit down and write another course. For $1,000. Yeah. So, you know, anytime he needed to, he could sit down and say, well,

I just came up with this new revelation and here you're going to have to buy this. And it worked. I mean, it made him a ton of money. Do you think he actually believed it? Like he started making money and actually when he sat in bed at night didn't say, I'm scamming all these sons of bitches. He actually thought it was real. It's hard to say. It seems like he has to know that it was a scam. And his son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr. said that he and dad would sit around with a case of beer at night and laugh at how they're, you know, put one over on all these suckers. But then you get

to the end of his life and he's hiding in the desert and he's sitting there with an e-meter holding the cans and doing auditing on himself. So you think, well, you must believe it if you're sitting there trying to still create new courses to take and actually thinking that you're talking to your body thetan.

So, you know, he may have just gone nuts by that point and decided, well, yeah, I guess, you know, I think I'm really right. I think we are covered with body thetans i think you know this was a piece of bullshit when i created it but now i think there's something to it yeah i mean you tell yourself something over and over again sometimes you know psychologically it's proven it becomes true to you and when you

got followers who are telling you yes this works and you go well you know maybe i am onto something um but you know i i still think he's a con man through and through for sure yeah but what was there like what is this scientology stance on the afterlife slash creation because i mean we can get into it today but the word religion is very interesting because we tend to think about it one dimensionally in society but it can be a whole lot of different things i'd love to get your thoughts on that but the basis of this was supposed to you know through the irs say hey we're a religious organization let's let's get tax exemption so yes you're going up in this case, like trying to put yourself in the same classes, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam,

stuff like that. How did L. Ron Hubbard work in the religious creation aspect to what he did? Well, it's a good question because Dianetics is the science of mental health. That's supposed to be – you should be able to scientifically prove that, and of course you can't. But with Scientology, he created this cosmology behind it and kept adding through it over time. But essentially, we are godlike beings ourselves. We just forgot that we are. We are Thetans. A Thetan is kind of like a spirit, except if you're a Star Trek fan, the closest equivalent would be Q. If you watch Star Trek Next Generation, there's Q, this guy who can pop in and out and control matter, energy, space, and time, essentially. Which is what Hubbard says we can all do. We just forgot how to do it. We used to be these spirits without bodies,

and we would spend all of our time playing games. And we were so omniscient, so we could do anything we wanted, and it got dull. So we created meat bodies to make it a little more challenging. Where did you say he came up with this? Where did you say he came up with it? You know, he looked around at his butt, and he reached in there, and there you go. Seems like the truth.

Yes. So, you know, he eventually got around to doing these upper levels called the operating Thetan levels. It took a while for him to get that part of the bridge. But once you get there, then it really starts turning wacky. And all of these things were top secret until the internet came along and some of this material started leaking like OT3. Operating Thetan 3 is where you find out that 75 million years ago, Earth was known as Tigiak and was ruled over by the evil overlord Xenu, who, to solve the overpopulation problem in this sector of the galaxy, as Hubbard pronounced it, shoved us all into volcanoes and blew us up with hydrogen bombs far more powerful than those we have today. And that is the cause of all of our problems. We don't remember being blown up in that volcano, but we

all were, which is why in round 64, I think it was, L. Ron Hubbard said, we're going to put an exploding volcano on the cover of Dianetics. And people will be standing in a checkout line and they'll see that, they'll remember something about being blown up in a volcano and they'll impulsively buy that book and dig into it. So this is something that Scientology tried to keep secret and were able to for decades before the internet came along. And this was, the internet was like Scientology's Waterloo. So all this information gets out there and Scientology tries everything they can do to stop it in its tracks. They were raiding people's homes who leaked some of this material. What do you mean they're raiding?

They're private citizens. Well, you would think. But, you know, they can go get a court order, as they did, and say that our copyrighted material is being put online. And, you know, a court will give them the warrant to go in and search this person's house. And luckily, I lived just a few blocks away from one of the guys whose home was raided,

Dennis Ehrlich. And Dennis called up the local Fox affiliate, and they had a camera crew there, and they videotaped the entire incident where these two Scientology lawyers and executives were there to take this guy's computer and all of his files, and they were rifling through this, and it's all captured on video so they can go they go in in this case with the help of the government because they get an actual order yeah and then they're able to actually carry out the raid in front of the government officials they show up with an officer who says well you know they got a warrant so we're just gonna get your shit yeah and dennis is just frantic and making phone calls and uh so um he had the entire raw tape of this thing. And I put it online back around. Yeah, that's it. This is it right here on the screen?

Yeah, back in like 98 or 99, I think I put this online. Should we put volume on this, Alessi? Do you hear what they're saying? Let's do it. Let's get there. Is it on? All they trashed was my fucking civil rights. That's all they trashed.

And that's what you're part of. And whether you like it or not, that's the truth, man. I would have expected a little more from you. And these guys hate being on camera right now. Is that the Scientologist? Yeah. The captain? These two people? Yeah.

One has gone back to us. I can't remember everyone's name. Warren McShane is one of the guys. That's one right there? Yeah. Yeah, he looks like a spook. Look at the warrant. Right?

I don't know what that is. Right? This guy is a Scientologist. I can tell by the thousand-mile stare. Ooh, what a burn. You said he was an employee of your firm, and he wasn't connected with you. Wait, who's the firm he's talking about? What does he mean the firm?

Oh, a legal firm, I believe. Got it. One shot is what Eddie said. Make sure the one shot is the trash. Obviously, it's positions. All right, let's pause it there. Let's see, we're going to put this video also down in the description we'll have a section in the description called like all scientology videos

related to this and they'll all be down there that is that's fascinating yeah so they just go in and take stuff yep and they're you know they they did this i think at at three homes at the same time. And that's when my friend Bob Benton, a retired international banker, got involved with this. They were working for a group called FactNet, and Scientology sued Dennis and the FactNet people for leaking this material. And Bob paid for the court case, and I think he gave Scientology a settlement to make sure that these guys didn't go to jail or anything. And they came to an agreement that they wouldn't disperse any of this material again. But it was out there in the wild.

So it really didn't matter. All of that is public information now, much to Scientology's chagrin because once South Park was talking about the material, it was way too late. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I think a real irony here with this religion is that if we go back to like the big three again, so like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, you got the Bible, you got the Torah, you got the Quran. Now, each of these churches has their secrets

on the inside and whatever, but the basis of the story of their religion is public domain. They talk about it to everyone. You get all the Jehovah's Witnesses coming to your door, knocking, saying, hey, find Jesus, right? That's a common thing across religion. What it seems to me is that Scientology,

all the basis of the religious aspect of it, they wanted none of that in the public domain. They didn't want anyone to even know what they believed. Yeah. Well, when you have a 2,000-year-old story of Jesus, that's in the public domain. Yes. Hubbard's writing could be copyrighted. And that's a way they were able to say, hey, you know, I'm saying this is the cold historical

fact of life, but it's copyrighted cold historical facts. And this is the insane way that the court system works. You know, groups like Scientology are, are able to use the,

the law to, uh, shield themselves, um, as they continue to ruin people's lives and just commit the, the most awful, awful, uh, disgraceful actions against uh members and people who just try to speak out well when when l ron hubbard actually came up with the religion itself scientology and put it to work did he have i mean obviously their their headquarters we know now is clearwater and everything but did he have specific areas and people that he wanted to target with this? And how long – like how quickly did it grow before he had to go on the lam around the world, which we'll get to as well? Well, he wanted to target anyone who had money. But around 55 or 56, I think, he put out a hit list of celebrities, and he listed a few dozen people like Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, these people who were big names at the time and you have never heard of, I'm sure.

And Hubbard said, anyone, any Scientologist who brings one of these people into the fold, oh my god, you're going to be treated royally. And none of them ever were suckered into the group. It wasn't until John Travolta that they had any success. And that was in the 70s. That was the start of really

the celebrity onslaught. You know, they kept getting more and more of these celebrities in. Not, you know, most of them weren't major celebrities. There are very few of them. You had Travolta, Tom Cruise. But Tom Cruise really believes that Scientology is responsible for his success.

You can see it in the video that he did. A lot of these guys do. Yeah. Because L. Ron Hubbard said that that's the case. And you are built to believe that anything that works in Scientology is L. Ron Hubbard's genius. And if it doesn't work, you did something wrong. So you put yourself in the mindset of saying, okay, well, I got to get my shit together. And once I do, oh, this is going to be perfect. But Cruise really thinks that he's a successful, huge movie star because of Scientology,

where in reality, Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise because he's Tom Cruise, not because of any Dianetics or any Scientology aspect at all. If all it took was for you to be a Scientologist, every actor or artist who joined Scientology should be at the level of Tom Cruise, and they're not. So you got John Travolta, but you have Joey Travolta,

his brother, who nowhere. You know, Frank Stallone, I think, was a Scientologist for a while. You know, if Scientology really was the key to being a brilliant artist well all of these people would be successful but you know and we'll get into the the full background the audits and stuff like that soon but you know how like there's a lot of people who are successful who have a clear routine right not not everyone but but some people they're so

so rigorous about this is my routine this is my routine this is what i do i wake up at this time i do this i do that and it helps it almost puts their body into a pattern that allows them to then go on to cruise control while they work to then have success and what they do is it possible that some of the non-religious aspects rather the self-help aspects of Scientology that aren't necessarily rooted in science but is it possible that some of that involves mental rewiring that actually makes people – I don't want to use the woo-woo terms, but like manifest some things through their work to then happen that then they think like, oh my God, this is the only reason it happened because of that, because this works for me. Well, I think you're right. It's not so much the religious aspects that are part of this. It's the methods that are used. It's the methods that are used. It's the thoughts that are instilled in you that you are all powerful.

You just have to unleash that. It gives you a confidence that perhaps you really aren't worthy of. But, you know, you can be bolder. You can go into an audition without so much fear because you know how to do this. So, yeah, there are aspects of that

that... Let me give you an example from a different side of this, not showbiz. But Scientology has a lot of front groups that they use to get the message out there. Because if you just say, hey, we're Scientology and we believe you were blown up in a volcano, come in and find out about that. Instead, they have to do things like put together a marketing branch for the Hubbard Management Tech. And they'll do seminars to bring in professionals and show them how to make money in their business. And this is targeting especially people like dentists and chiropractors, these people who make a lot of money from their practice, but when they're going through their education, they don't learn how to run an office the way medical doctors apparently do.

That's part of their education. So they found this niche market, and they hit up these dentists and chiropractors and say, we'll show you how to make money. One of the things they instill in you is hard sell, because everything in Scientology is hard sales. But they'll explain, you know, you need to get this patient, get them to prepay for all the work they're going to need done. Probably nothing right now needs to be done, but, you know, down the line, they're going to need this. So have them prepay for that right now. So you're strong-arming your customers.

And that works for a while until people get, you know, catch on to you and they start warning other people. In the meantime, Scientology has found a way to get their members working in the dentist's office. So Scientology knows exactly how much money the dental practice is making, so they know how much they can bleed out of the dentist. So it's like an intelligence mission. They go to their people. They're like, Donna, you look like you'd be a good hygienist. Hop on in there, kid.

Like that's pretty much what they're doing. Well, yeah. People run the office essentially, you know. And I interviewed a couple of married dentists in Chicago back in 2000 that explained this whole process. They came in because the husband went to one of these seminars and thought that was wonderful. They got involved in that. And then, of course, Scientology says, well, you know, there are other aspects of your life. How's your relationship going? How's this? We can help you. Come on down to the church and we'll talk to you there. And in this case, the wife, when it turned into, let's go to the Church of Scientology, she was going, no way,

this is a cult. No, sir, I don't want any part of it. But he convinced, the husband convinced her, let's give it a shot. She eventually got sucked in from that position. She became the true believer, and he started having doubts. And she would talk to the Scientologists, people in charge of their auditing. And she would complain about her husband starting to have some doubts about Scientology. And the Scientologist would tell her, dump them. You've had millions of husbands before. You're going to have millions of husbands again. Dump them. Oh, my God. This is what Scientology believes. If somebody's going to have doubts,

get rid of them because we want you to keep paying us money. We need to bleed you dry. If he's out, okay. Just cut him off. But don't you have a negative thought about L. Ron Hubbard, for God's sakes? Well, they also

have like a... It feels like the mafia when you talk about them because you'll hear about, for example, like Leah Romney. Am I saying that right? Leah Remini. Leah Remini. God damn it. I'm having a tough day. But Leah Remini, she's talked about it a bunch before how she would get summoned to clearwater they'd say you must come here you must do an audit or whatever and then she'd have

to pay for it and everything and then they i think they would ask her to to donate more to scientology they're basically like bilking her checks for the church and she feels forced to do it what why do you think more people when they they get summoned from L.A. or from Sioux City, wherever they are, don't just say, no, I can't do that right now? Well, you know, it depends how dedicated they are. I'm sure not everybody hops on the plane and comes down to Clearwater. But if you want to be a good Scientologist moving up the bridge, yeah, you're going to do everything you can to stay in the good graces, pay the fortune for each escalating tier of courses you're going to take. All the while, there is eternity waiting for you. Nothing may make sense as you're going along.

There's always that next course that's going to make sense. And by the time you're an OT-8, oh, my God, those people are the most amazing people on the planet. They know everything. These OT-8s. And you want to be that too, don't you? And people who are lower on the rung in Scientology do look at OT-8s as these remarkable beings, powerful beings, and I could be just like that. But these powerful beings are messes as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe now would be a good time to actually define the process because we keep on talking about this and everything. But when you first

agree to go to a Scientology center to talk about maybe joining the religion, what happens? Well, normally you will be recruited. There are several ways that you could bump into Scientology. You can be walking down the street and have somebody ask you to take a personality test. For many years, that was one way they would do this. And they call that body routing. You stand outside. If you look on YouTube now, there's a testing center on Hollywood Boulevard where a lot of TikTok people have been taking their cameras and kind of interfering and pestering the guys who are doing the body routing. Shout out TikTokers. They're now on YouTube as well. And Aaron, my friend Aaron, went out there a couple of weeks ago to join them. And he got there and got assaulted.

And they arrested him. Oh, well. And this other guy. We're going to play one real quick. I'll let you just pull it up. He's trying to lie to you. It's not lying. It is.

All the time. That's you? Yeah. It's a personality test right he takes that information to try to then recruit you into scientology the whole goal is he's going to ask you to buy the book he's asked you to take a seminar for 200 and 85 for the book they get they see they ask you that that personality test it's not scientific it's owned by scientology they created it to ask 200 questions about yourself and then they use that information against you to recruit you they listen to them that's right let them know right it's no good it's a personality test they would have had you

in there for two hours and then you know what you'd be separated from your family sooner or later you don't have anything to do with that you don't have anything to do you thought you had them on sebastian you worked on that hard that's right that's right so it's pretty remarkable you got people out there every day now trying to uh warn people away from going in to take the personality test and uh is this, I think it's like 200 questions. I took it years ago. And there's wacky things on it, like have you ever, and no, that's not that one. Because I'm thinking now about the sex check. I was about to say, have you ever enslaved a planet? That's part of the security check. That's not-

Oh, they ask you that? Yeah. Have you ever had a negative thought about L. Ron Hubbard? If you have, well, boy, you're in big trouble. You need help. That's when they haul you in and make you do the SEC check that you have to pay for. And so it can be, you know, I think Leah spent like $40,000 to be sex checked on her way out. $40,000? Yeah.

Are they hooking you up to a fucking golden pool? No. Like – No. You just got your little soup cans attached to an e-meter and they're grilling you about whatever horrible thing you did to harm Scientology. For $40,000. Yeah. You get the honor of paying for that.

Wow. I love how they do that. Yeah. They change the psychology. You're so lucky to do this. You get to give us your money. You have to go. Once you get to the upper levels, I think OT7 is where this starts, where every six months

you have to go in and pay for a sex check. And in this case, where I'm talking about Leah now being sex checked at the end, it was because she asked questions about David Miscavige's wife not being at Tom Cruise's. Yeah, Shelley Miscavige was not at Tom Cruise's wedding. And for that, she was hauled in and grilled for months and forced to spend money to pay for that delightful treatment. Grilled for months. Yeah. Like is she allowed to leave the compound? Well, yeah.

You know, they're staying at the Fort Harrison Hotel. And, you know, your world becomes centered around the Scientology properties there when you come to Clearwater. And this is where – Clearwater is where all the upper levels are given you can't do OT3 and up anywhere else if you want to do

the upper levels you have to come and pay in Clearwater directly lower levels you can do at smaller orgs around the world but at a certain price point they they say, you have to come to us. And once you come to Clearwater, they force you to pay to stay in their hotel, and then they want you to prepay for all of your meals at their property. And, uh, you, you, unlike signing in at any hotel, uh, here you're, you're led from one registrar to register to another registrar. Uh, these are the salespeople and they, you know, say, no, you have to pay for this. And now you have to pay for that. Um, Hey guys, if you have

a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. Yeah, so you – And people don't get – they don't have the red flags go up during this? They feel that they're getting something from it. All right.

So they go in though. They take the personality test. How soon after that can they or do they become an actual Scientologist and what happens? Like are you like knighted or some shit? So for the raw meat who – I'm sorry. The raw meat who get sucked in off the street. That's what they call them. I like that. Fresh meat, raw meat who – I'm sorry. The raw meat who get sucked in off the street. That's what they call them. I like that.

Fresh meat, raw meat. Yeah. So once you go in and take the personality test, they're going to say, oh, look. Look at these troubling – so you're having problems with this area of your life. Well, we can help you with that. And they'll sign you up for generally the communication course, which I think is like 40 bucks. And they teach you how to communicate the way a Scientologist does. There's a certain pattern.

There's this arc triangle where you say something, then the other person has to respond to it to acknowledge that they've heard that, and you can move forward. This is an earth-shattering revelation of L. Ron Hubbard on how to communicate. At the end of it, at the end of every course, you are forced to sit down and write up your win, what you got from the course. And this is one of the insidious control issues that Hubbard, the genius, the evil genius Hubbard came up with. Once they get you off the street there, you're put onto this mind control factory conveyor belt. And so at the end of the course, you sit down and you're forced to think about what did I get from? Well, I guess I learned how to communicate better by this.

So they have all of those things in a file. So if you ever have doubts, they pull out the folder and they go, well, look at all the wins you've had. You don't want to give up now. You're making so much wonderful progress. All of these insidious little things that become part of channeling you farther and farther into it. And, you know, they'll want you to buy a set of books. You may be able to find the orientation video online. There's a really lousy quality version of it that somebody videotaped off of a movie screen in one of the Scientology centers. It's an amazing film, and I saw it in their celebrity center in L.A. back in 2000. Which one? This one? Yes, that would be it.

All right, let me turn on. What is that? It is pretty amazing. Right now you're in the cosmos. You're seeing meteors kind of hurtling towards you with this ethereal music. This is, I think, 20 minutes long, and it

says nothing essentially except we're tax-exempt and we're a real religion. Love that. But along the way, you see this great host who is going to walk you through the org and tell you, well, let's go over and talk to Susie in the library. And she'll say, well, you need to buy this book and this book and this book and this book and this book.

God, it's so corny. Everything they, all the videos they do, do they have video editors who are Scientologists, I assume? They're not letting outsiders do this. Yeah, no, they have in-house. And the in-house work has gotten so much better. You can see in this video how crappy they used to be. Oh my God, I still think it's crappy. I'll do this back.

But now there's a polished glean to them. So Larry, the host here, you're going to see on camera, his name is Larry. I can't think of his last name right. Larry Anderson, I think. And he blew. He's no longer a Scientologist. So they had to stop showing this particular video. That's a problem that Scientology has. When somebody in one of these videos blows, well then

they have to reshoot the damn thing. This is St. Hill Manor, headquarters in the United Kingdom, and once Ron's home. This is the founding church in Washington, D.C. This is the International Ecclesiastic Management

Center. This is the upper level and combined organizations in Los Angeles. It feels like a South Park episode. This is Celebrity Center International in Hollywood. This is the Psychology College

in England. And this is the free quiz. Where you get a free quiz to spend every Indianasian where you get a free cruise to spend seven thousand dollars on every continent in over 100 countries of Earth. And millions of Scientologists to be your friends and help you help yourself and others. Scientology was designed for you. Larry. And all that you hold dear. Religion is as old as man.

Man has believed far longer that he was a spirit than a piece of mud. Now this is going to go on and on and on. Okay, let's go there. But, you know, you can get a sense here of, you know, Larry is, oh, this is wonderful, and let's find out more about this and that and the other thing.

And if you jump to the end, the last couple of minutes of it, is when it turns brilliant. And I was... Is that sarcasm? Do I detect sarcasm? Oh, no, no. I love this.

This is like one of my favorite things. I saw this in the screening room, really nice little screening room at the Celebrity Center in LA. And I had a Scientologist friend who invited me there. And I said, sure, I'll come and see the place. This was as I was just starting to learn about it. And we got to a certain point here where the lights come down on Larry and the music gets ominous. And suddenly the wonderful tone that he had before turns bleak and dark.

So if we can watch this i was laughing hysterically at this turn and she's slapping me on my thigh going stop it stop it this is like the last two minutes you said uh yeah you might want to roll back just a little bit more this is worth watching right there is that uh a little uh yeah, a little farther in. You're going to, no, no, I'm sorry, the other way, toward the end. Right, all right. Toward the end. Okay, go to the last two minutes. You want to see, yeah, just start around there.

Okay. When he's in front of that door. Done. Such a thing occurs every few hundred or thousand years. Some genius rises, and man takes a new step toward a better life. A better culture. There is a difference with Dianetics and Scientology.

They're the smart people who are joining Scientology. In all the countless years of time. In this brief moment, we have our temporary chance for handling and continuing life. Clouds loom over this culture and planet.

In this short interval, in this one place, we have our freedom before us. We can arise above the decay, the final flash that will inevitably extinguish this planet. It is not our mission to save it. It is our mission to free you. You are an immortal being. Your life will not halt because this planet halts. You can go on. Now, we could play this very low key.

We could sort of giggle and say, we can help you a little to lead a slightly happier life. Yes, we could say that. Stating that if you cooperate, we could make you more cheerful. But that would be like offering someone a diamond and saying it was glass. What? Right this instant, you are at the

threshold of your next trillion years. Trillion. You will live it in shivering, agonized darkness, or you will live it triumphantly in the light. The choice is yours, not ours. If you this minute say,

I will, for better or for worse, go on in Scientology, you will open the door to your own future. If you say otherwise, you slam tomorrow shut in your own face. I'm sorry, but that's the way it really is. Sucks to suck. We are not making any claims for Dianetics and Scientology. It is you who, when you've experienced what can be, are the one that will make the claims. What is true is true for you.

In man's past barbaric apologies and religions, they told you that you were better. That you had to believe them. You had to have faith there was a possible recovery for you, that there were various gods and that heaven waits. And you were told by some that you were a one-life animal and by others that hell yawned if you dared to sin. You had to believe them or you got burned at the stake or shot or flunked. You don't have to believe us, or even trust us.

If you work with Scientology, you will find out for yourself. What's true is what is true for you. You have a friend. He worked for half a century in a violent and often unkind world to open the gate for you. Elrond. We are here to help you put yourself

in the trap that leads up. If you fall off, we'll try to help put you back on. But it is up to you. It is how you use it that counts comes for you are the one that counts if you leave this room after seeing this film and walk out and never mention scientology again we won't kill you you're perfectly free to do so it It would be stupid, but you can do it. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out.

That is your choice. If you don't walk out that way, if you continue with Scientology, we will be very happy with you, and you will be very happy with you. You will have proven that you are a friend of yours. We here in this org are really just doormen to the great highway found and built by Ron into a better future. All right, cut that. Yeah, that's fine. That's my favorite part.

Oh, sure, you can walk out and never say Scientology again. That would be stupid. You might as well just blow your brains out. Jump off a bridge. Yeah. Wow. Not mincing words. Yes.

Now, how do you go in and watch that and go, oh, yeah, I'd like to be part of that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I can't. Maybe it's just because my baptism of fire to this was a South Park episode, like that's what I can't – you know, maybe it's just because my baptism of fire to this was a South Park episode. So that roots me in that. But I don't know – I don't know how you take it seriously. I understand they may actually tell you some things like, oh, that's going to help me.

It's going to sell me money, confidence, and love, right? It's going to sell me improvements in those places. I think you and I talked about that on the phone last week before you came here. But, you know, all the other shit they put around it is like a – it's as if a Ponzi scheme were a religion. Well, yeah. That's what it is. It's crazy. Yep.

And they don't show this video anymore. I'm going to fix this while you're talking. Keep going. Okay. They've gotten better with their propaganda. At this point, there's a whole bunch of Scientology material that was generated that's just so over the top nuts. There's an audio tape called Can We Ever Be Friends, I think is the name of it. And it was played as a piece of evidence in a court case. And I put that online. I figured I can get away with playing this whole thing because it was played in a court. But it's a tape that you're supposed to give to your parents or other loved ones when you're a Scientologist and they're saying that Scientology is evil or sucks.

They'll say, listen to this tape, mom. Listen to this tape, mom. Listen to this tape, dad. And it is this over-the-top nonsense where you go, oh, my God, I'd worry even more about my kids if you played this for me. So do a search for that sometime and listen to it. It's a can we ever be friends. Can we ever be friends. All right. You don't have to listen to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll try to find that afterwards.

Yeah. Can we ever be friends? All right. You don't have to listen to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll try to find that afterwards. But when Elrond – I want to go back to part of the origin here because not approve of, whether that be share information about Scientology that's not supposed to be shared or just speak out against it. And obviously Mike Rinder used to be – when he was in Scientology, he was literally in charge of doing this and pressuring people. But L. Ron Hubbard, you had mentioned his wife ended up taking the fall and going to prison. Before he went on the, whatever it is, cruise ship journey around the world to run from the U.S. government, what exactly happened there and what actions did he take? It was literally in like a covert manner to pressure the government? Yeah. And I seem to have gone off on a tangent on a question that you asked me earlier about him being in trouble with governments around the world.

After the FDA raid here, he said, I'm going to go over to England and I'm going to set up shop there in a castle or a mansion rather, St. Hill. And he ran it from there for several years until he was kicked out of England. Nice. And at that point, he said, I'm buying a ship, and we're going to run this from international waters where these pesky governments will leave me alone. So he started the Sea Org,

and the most dedicated followers would join him on board the ship. How big a ship? How big a ship? Well, it was a pretty big ship. It was, I think, a cattle ship at one point. Fitting. Yeah. And these people who had no experience at all of sailing or doing any of this work,

he convinced them, listen, you were a sailor billions of times before. Just remember what it was like when you were manning a ship at that point. And he would give them some basic directions on

how to do things. So you got this motley crew of young people, normally in their 20s, traveling around the world with him as he continues to create more and more upper-level courses to take. He did that for 10 years. And he finally decided, I'd like to come back to dry land. And there were missions sent out to find a place for him to land. And there were two cities that were options, Clearwater and I forget the name of the other place,

another southern city, I believe. And Clearwater won because it had just the properties that they needed at a reasonable price. And it didn't hurt that the word clear is in the name of Clearwater. Clear is one of the first states you reach on the bridge to total freedom. When you're clear, you've gotten rid of all your negative thoughts from your unconscious mind or your reactive mind, as they call it. And then you're able to move forward to do the OT levels. So Hubbard snuck into town in Clearwater, and he very quickly started covert actions against Clearwater and also at the same time against the U.S. government. Project Normandy was the operation in Clearwater where he said, get people in the mayor's office, get people in the newspaper, get people in this, that, and the other thing. And we're going to take over every aspect of this. We want to make sure we know who is against us

and take actions against. After about a month of them being in town under this phony name of the Southern Land, exactly what, United Churches, Southern Land Corporation, something like that. After about a month, Mayor Gabe Casares had been asking questions and they discovered that it was really Scientology. And Gabe was like, wait a minute, we've got people here that they have billy clubs. They're carrying on them. There's security guards at the top of the Fort Harrison Hotel. There's this very ominous presence there.

What the hell is going on? How big was Scientology by this time? Like approximately, do we know how many members? You know, well, I mean, they'll say 10 million, but really, you know, it was not a huge thing. You know, they were making enough money, though, to buy their ships and continue their operation. Now they've, I think they're down to like 20,000 to 30,000 people worldwide. So they come into town. Project Normandy happens. They run covert operations against Gabe Casares, the mayor.

When you say covert operations, like just literally trying to send people in there to curry favor or also hiring like private investigators to get – Dirty tricks. Dirty tricks. Dirty tricks. The FBI raided Scientology's headquarters in L.A. and Washington, D.C., I think around 78. They snuck into town in 75. And then the FBI raids happened. And Scientology at that point was putting everything down in writing. Every nasty step of all these operations they were doing against Gabe, they said, I'm up on a hit and run accident.

He was up in Washington, D.C. for some legislative thing. And there was a Clearwater resident with him in the car. And they were driving down a street in Washington, D.C. And suddenly there was somebody who walked in front of the car and got hit. And it turned out that they had set this whole thing up. This person, this woman convinced Gabe to go down the street. And this guy walked out in front of the car. All in writing, step by step, how we're going to do this. They're trying to ruin his political career.

Because he was going to run for I think Senate or Congress and he did but he lost because of all of this nonsense that was going on that was just one of the things they had all sorts of things they would have girls

calling up Gabe's phone number at home and talk to his wife and say, is Gabe there? Oh, I love that Gabe. You know, just things to kind of ruin his life. At the same time, they had operations against Paulette Cooper, the first woman to write one of the early books about Scientology, critical of Scientology. They set her up on bomb threats. right, one of the early books about Scientology, critical of Scientology. Oh. They set her up on bomb threats.

They forged these bomb threats against Henry Kissinger. Wait, they didn't like Kissinger? He was coming out against them? Oh, well, supposedly she didn't like Kissinger. Oh, right, right. She was – That took a minute to go upstairs. Sorry.

Yeah. So they, you know, and they were framing her. And this almost ruined her life. I mean, it took, it cost all of her money. She was a journalist who had a really solid career going. And suddenly she was in the newspapers as this insane woman trying to blow up Henry Kissinger. And she didn't know what the hell was going on in the world. Yeah, she had no idea what was happening here, but her life was in ruins. She actually said, listen, you know, give me, what is the truth serum that, you know,

shoot me up with this stuff and put me on the lie detector. And, you know, I did not do any of this. Well, when the FBI raid was uncovered and they found all of this documentation about what they did to her, she was finally cleared. In the meantime, before that happened, she had a roommate who came to live with her. He was the only person that she could turn to, and she'd be crying on his shoulder about how horrible this was. He would go up on the roof and send messages back to Scientology saying, isn't this great? She's either going to be committed to an asylum or she's going to kill herself. It's working.

It's working. He was a Scientologist. He was a Scientologist who sent in there. Oh, my God. Oh, and Gabe hired an attorney to sue Scientology after it was uncovered what they did to him. And there was this attorney at his golf club who said, hey, you ought to hire me. And Gabe did. And this guy botched the case.

Turned out that he was a Scientologist brought in from another state specifically to befriend Gabe and Gabe's wife and get hired so he could screw this up. So your oath, whatever oath you take to follow the law, is superseded by your oath to L. Ron Hubbard. God, it's so weird. I mean, it is the type of thing where the greatest good is protecting Scientology. You get in this mindset that whatever you do, there's a good reason for it because we got to protect the only possible salvation for the planet. If Scientology goes, this planet is doomed. And Scientologists get in thinking they're saving the planet. Really do.

So that gets beat into them. Yeah. You know, the world, those of us out here who are lowly wogs. The what world? W-O-G. It's a slur.

In England, it's used against black people. It was a colonial thing in India. And L. Ron Hubbard, his father was a career military guy. So L. Ron Hubbard visited India as a kid and China. And he wrote down in a little notebook his thoughts about all these places. For instance, in China, he said, the only problem with China is all the... And in India,

the British who were ruling the country, they would have the locals come and ask for some help with things. And between themselves, they would be saying, oh, what do the wogs want today? Worthy Oriental gentlemen is one abbreviation that's sometimes used for that. But the wog world is something that Scientologists are told about you know the wog world is filled with insanity and war the only hope we have for changing things on this planet and saving it is to get everybody in Scientology so that's the big push is

there a common moment like among what we'll talk I'm sure about a lot of these people over the years who have disaffected from Scientology. We've already mentioned some. But in doing an autopsy of that with all these different people who had their own different experiences leading them eventually out of the church, do they all talk about some sort of crowning moment where they cross the Rubicon and suddenly believe? And is it similar for all these people? Usually it's because some pressure is put on you that makes you go, wait a minute, this isn't fair. It could be that you're sent to the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force. You could get sent to the RPF for something as little as making a joke about Scientology or saying something about L. Ron Hubbard that they didn't like.

The RPF is where you work half the day in hard labor. And then the other half of the day, you're studying L. Ron Hubbard's writings. So, and you're taken away from your family members, you know, if you're a husband or wife, you, you know, you'll be separated. Um, you're, um, you, you can't talk to anyone unless talked to first. And people can be on the RPF for months or years. And that was the case for like Mike Rinder. And you come to a breaking point at some point where you just say, this is insane. I got to get out of here. Or it can be that your relationship is ruined. If you start to have doubts and your partner writes up a knowledge report and sends it in to the Scientology officials and saying, my husband just said this, that gets them in trouble and puts them on the

RPF. People's marriages are split up if they're both members of the Sea Org and David Miscavige is upset with somebody. He'll ship, you know, one of the couple, you know, over to Australia or some other far distant land and they'll be separated for years. Are there people, though, in those situations who have said, fuck you and left though yeah and nothing happens eventually yeah eventually yeah you know once it once this hardship is is to a point where they just can't take it anymore they'll try to escape as many people have um like um well leah Remini is assistant now. She was a casting director for Scientology videos and worked up at their desert compound in Hemet, California. She would be hiring actors who were non-Scientologists, and they would come and do these little orientation type of videos because they have their film studio there in the desert compound they would let non-scientologists do that yeah well i mean it used to be pretty much all scientologists but the problem there is when they when they fled scientology then you know they have

to go and reshoot it uh so if you get some um wog actors who are just coming in and doing a script about evil psychs or whatever. Um, you know, they're just happy to get a job, uh, and be paid, uh, a little bit of money for, you know, these are not high caliber actors for the most part. Yeah. Um. Yeah. Something tells me they're not winning Oscars. Yeah. So, so anyway, this woman, uh, who was the casting director had to, had to flee. And there was a shoot one day. Um, and she crawled into the trunk

of one of the actor's cars and waited until he drove home to LA, a two hour ride. She's, uh, she's huddled in that trunk all the way back to la he finally pulls up to his house and she's pounding on the trunk and the guy opens it up and goes what the hell you're the what what do you do huh uh and you know at that point you just say i'm a scientologist And then people go, oh, okay, that makes sense. That happens so often. Oh my God, man. You get to that point where you just can't take it anymore. And those folks who flee, they can actually be chased across country. One of the guys I interviewed was the head of security at that desert compound. And he talked about how he

developed these blow drills. When you leave Scientology without permission, they say you've blown. And then they now have this set situation where they know every Sea Org member, they know their families and friends, they have the contact information for everybody, they know where these people live. So if somebody flees, they go, well, here's places he may be going, and they'll send Scientologists across the country to kind of sweep the place and find them and drag them back. Like forcibly? Forcibly? the prison of the mind that you've got going on there. If they can convince you that you have to come back and route out properly, you can't just blow because they're worried you might go to the

press. You might say horrible things about them. So they grill you with the E-meter and they're finding out, have you ever had a negative thought about Hubbard? Have you ever had a negative thought about David Miscavige? What have you done to harm Scientology? Can you explain the e-meter to people? The e-meter is this little lie detector type of device. You hold on to two metal cans. They're originally soup cans.

They run a little electric current through you. And on the meter itself, there's a little needle that moves. And so as you're talking, the needle will move back and forth. And the professional auditors who study this machine, they can tell when you're lying. They can tell when there's something wrong. And I read that they won't update this technology because it was crafted by the hand of hubbard well it gets updated in in many ways but they won't change like they won't say that this type like we had years ago we had the landline phone right yeah well now we have iphones it's still a phone

but it's a huge upgrade like they don't't do that. They stay with the landline. They just change the tech. There are – well, there's yes and no. The e-meters essentially still work the same way. It's an electric galvometer. It's just measuring your skin moisture, whatever. But they think, oh, it's a key to your eternal mind, and we know what you're thinking. Right.

But, you know, Scientologists believe that it will, you know, point out when they're not being truthful. That can get them in a lot of trouble. And so that's why people put the blinders on when you're in Scientology. You don't want something negative to pop up on the meter that's going to cause you nothing but trouble and nothing but money coming out of your pockets if you're a public member. So you force yourself to not have a negative thought. You put those blinders on yourself and refuse to read anything negative about Scientology. Watch any program that might be an expose.

You wouldn't think of watching it. They rewire your brain. Yeah. So at any rate. When I picture these people you talk about, though, like when they go across state lines to go tell someone it's in their best interest to come back yeah i don't know if this is a good way to picture it but i just can't help with doing it i picture all the actors inside the world of the truman show where they're like truman no no you need to go back there yeah you know and they all know like this whole joke is on

him but you know like that thing like that thing on their face that's so fake like it's almost like robot turn into it that's how i picture these people yeah yeah well uh you know you're you're taking on the um valence of l ron hubbard you're you're you're behaving exactly the way he wants a scientologist to behave. You find yourself falling into that because you're surrounded by people who buy into it all and all are behaving that way. And so you fit in. It's going to cause you nothing but trouble if you don't fit in. And you want to be able to control matter, energy, space, and time at the end of this. So you put up with a lot of misery because you know it's going to be incredible when you are able to control matter, energy, space, and time.

So it's bizarre, but there you go. Do they ever recruit people who are active practitioners of another religion? Oh, sure. And do they convert them? Well, they'll tell you that it's completely compatible with any other religion. What? That is the party line. Sure, you can be a Christian and a Scientologist.

You can be Jewish and a Scientologist. It's completely compatible. Of course, it's not. And believe me, I'm not coming here from a faith perspective. I just think this is just morally bankrupt, as everything is in Scientology. If you are saying, well, it's completely compatible with Christianity, and then you find out L. Ron Hubbard said there was no Christ, there's an audio tape on that. You can pull that up online. L. Ron Hubbard, there was no Christ. He says that some 2,000 years ago, some maniacs stumbled upon part of L. Ron Hubbard's tech, R6, and misinterpreted it. The man on the cross is every man. So how you say that that's compatible with Christianity, I don't know.

All right, here we go. We have the video. Let me turn this on. I got to get, I say this every time I gotta have you logged in to mine Alessi so that you can have the here we go every man has been shown to have been crucified so don't think

that it's an accident that this crucifixion they found out that this applied somebody somewhere on this planet back about 600 B.C.

found some pieces of R6 and I don't know how they found it either by watching mad men or something but since that time they have used it and it became what is known as Christianity the man on the cross there was no Christ but the man on the cross is shown as every man. So, of course, each person seeing a crucified man has an immediate feeling of sympathy for this man. That's why you get many PCs who says they are Christ. Now, there are two reasons for that.

One is the Roman Empire was prone to crucify people. So a person can have been crucified. But in R6, he is shown as crucified. Wow. Now, is that compatible with Christianity? No. Yeah, I don't think so. But they don't hesitate to say, oh, yeah, sure.

But what they really mean is your wallet is compatible with Scientology. So, sure, sure, it's compatible. Come on, pay for another course. The average Scientologist, how much – I don't know if you're going to know the answer to this, but I think about like taxes, right? You pay in a tax bracket or whatever. So depending on how much income you make, that's the amount of money you then owe the government, but it's based on a percentage. So on a percentage basis, you think like Scientologists are given 20% of their income every year to Scientology? Well, it's not like that.

It's not like the Mormon church where you're tithing 10%, I think. They'll bleed you dry for every cent they can. And you may not have money. Like my friend who invited me to the Celebrity Center, she had no money. So we were looking at the grade chart. They have all of the courses you can take listed there from, you know, the communication course up to OT8. And I said, okay, where are you on the bridge the bridge total freedom is what this is called and she pointed right way down at the bottom so that's it you've been in it for

like 20 years and and you're down there god she didn't have the money and she didn't want to join work 17 hours a day in order to get some free courses. But, I mean, you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. It used to be, and this was a couple of decades ago when I first started looking into this, that in order to reach OT3, where you find out about Zeno blowing up in a volcano, that would cost $360,000. $360,000. Yeah. To get up to that level, yeah.

And it's well more than that now, I'm sure. We got a long way to go, Leslie. Yeah. Actor Jason Begay, I sat down and did an interview with him back in 2008. That's still, more people watch that video on my channel than anything else. Actor Jason Begay, I sat down and did an interview with him back in 2008. Still, more people watch that video on my channel than anything else. Every day there's people who comment on that video and how much they appreciate him having talked about this. He joined and they got a million dollars out of him in one year.

How did they do this? Well, by explaining to him how much progress he's going to make. And, you know, if you've got... This much? Yeah. If you've got the money, they have to be happy to sell you all the bridge to begin with. You have any family members? You should buy it for your wife too.

You should buy it for whoever you – there are Scientologists who borrow the money for people who don't have money so they can buy the bridge. Then those people have to pay back the Scientologist who lent them the money so the people who have money are even paying for other people's bridges. Oh damn. It's a remarkable Ponzi scheme that they have. Oh yeah. Yeah. And they also had – what's interesting to me is how the continuity happened when L. Ron Hubbard passed away because you had this guy.

We've talked about him today, David Miscavige. I got it right now. He essentially took over in 1986, I guess like three days after Hubbard died. He announced it inside Scientology that he's dead, and now I'm in charge. And he's held an iron fist since then for almost 40 years. How did that happen? How did he become the guy, and how did he even get involved in Scientology in the first place? Well, as a kid, he joined. His father was a Scientologist, probably his mom too. I don't remember offhand. But Miscavige got in early and he had some problems that felt that Scientology cured.

And he became a Commodore's messenger. When Hubbard was at sea, he would have usually cute little 14-year-old girls as his messengers. And there was no hanky-panky as far as... We sure about that? Well, you know, we haven't heard of anything, really. He just liked having them waiting on him night and day. Yeah, I'm sure. And they would be Hubbard's voice on the ship. He would be mad at somebody,

and he'd call in a messenger and say, you find Joe, and you tell that son of a... and just curse up a storm. And she would have to go and find that person and in the same tone as Hubbard say, you son of a and so all these people on board the ship would be terrified of these 14

year old girls coming toward them. Because they knew if this girl was saying this, Hubbard means business. Oh, my God. It's like the Wizard of Oz. So he became a messenger and found himself at a young age being one of the few people who knew Hubbard's desert hiding spot after his wife went to prison.

There are only a couple of people that were allowed to go up to his secret location. And Miscavige was one of those. And the people who were living with Hubbard out there at that compound were supposed to take over. Pat and Annie Bro her, I believe. Hubbard kind of had in mind that they would take over, but Miscavige, ruthless person that he is, decided, no, I'm going to have a power coup, and I'm going to get rid of them. I'm going to get rid of everybody that I possibly can, since he spoke to the old man, Hubbard. People knew that he spoke to the old man. He just bullshit his way through this whole thing and got rid of anyone who was

competition and took charge at a very young age. And there's a reason David Miscavige's father wrote a book about him and called it ruthless. I mean, this guy is a piece of work. But it's amazing. Usually when a cult leader dies, the cult disperses. This one is held together. What is it about his personality you think that makes him so magnetic to the followers? Minus obviously the ruthless. Miscavige? Yeah. I don't know that he's magnetic. I think that it's probably just the fact that they really still believe in Hubbard and the tech. David Miscavige is supposedly protecting and safeguarding L. Ron Hubbard's tech. He's Tim Cook to Steve Jobs.

Yeah. And, you know, anyone who's been critical of Miscavige, he's gotten rid of and put in the hole, like Mike Render spent two years locked in a double wide trailer with bars on the window and all these executives. Yeah. All these executives that would get, you know, fall in disfavor with Miscavige, they'd be put in a hole. But that's false imprisonment. Well, yes, but you're imprisoned in your mind. And at one point, the FBI was going to go in there and raid the place. This is after Mike was out.

And they had filled them in on all the things that are going on at the desert compound. But then, you know, they were told, listen, if you go in and knock down the doors and barge in there and say, we're here to rescue you, the people who had been sleeping on the floor for two years, eating rice and beans, emaciated, would say, but it's my religion. I want to be here. You's the that's the difficult part of trying to do something to help these people but if if Mike render in that situation said I want to leave you would think it would be like in Guyana when Jim Jones had all of his followers drinking the Kool-Aid. There were people who, who's the, God, I can't think of his name now, Senator or Congressman, Leo J. Ryan, went down there because his constituents were worried about family members who had moved to this jungle in Guyana. And he and some of his staff went down there and said to the followers, listen,

got a plane here. Anyone who wants to leave can come with me now. And they murdered him. There were people who slipped little notes to him to say, this is horrible. You've got to get me out of here. And that's when he said, all right, anyone who wants to come can come. He was shot dead. And meanwhile, the other folks were told, drink the Kool-Aid. A lot of people did.

Um, a lot of people said, I'd rather not. Um, and a lot of those people who refused to drink the Kool-Aid, they were shot. Uh, you get to this point where, I mean, that's a serious cult. We, we're not really facing that with, with Miscavige and Scientology. I don't think anyone's going to go to those links. You don't think they've killed people? I don't think so. No, I think—

Do you want to not think so? Well, it's kind of a tough thing to accept. You hear this all the time. There you know, there are people who said, well, yeah, they tried to run me off the road. Like Jerry Armstrong said that. And I believe that. I mean, I've had, I've had cars try to run me off the road, not Scientology people, but, um, you see people out there doing crazy things with cars. Um, and you know, L. Ron Hubbard joked about, um, what is it? Uh, there was a, something about, uh, about guns. Um, and I should know this is the, it's a number that would relate to a gun. Uh, anyway, there's some, there's some process that he talked about. R245, that's it. R245, just use

that against someone and you can silence them forever. Oh, man. It's fascinating to me, though, that a guy who quite literally wrote everything down, that, you know, like you said, the FBI was able to raid this stuff later. He wrote things bombastically for a living before he did this. It's interesting that his succession plan wasn't written down. Well, I mean it's possible it was. Correct. But the only one who knew where it was was Miscavige. And he got rid of it.

Yeah. That is very, very fascinating to me because there was a whole thing too and i i'm trying to remember this story this was a big thing like a year ago and then i guess she got found but like miscavige's wife shelly who i guess is also a scientologist yeah she went missing for a long time what was what the deal there? Like she wasn't at Tom Cruise's wedding and then no one heard from her for years and now they found her? Right. Yeah. Leah Remini asked questions at Tom Cruise's wedding because Miss Gavage was there and Shelley wasn't. And she was saying, well, where's Shelley? That got her in trouble. And

that was the reason they brought her in to a sex check sex checker, uh, for a couple of months at the end of her career in Scientology, because she dared to ask Miscavige a question. Uh, and, and I'm sure it's just a situation like they, their marriage was, was crap. And just like Miscavige would have no problem sending off a husband, a husband to the other side of the planet and let the poor wife who still believes in Scientology slave away in the Sea Org. I'm sure it's just the same way. The easiest thing to do is just send her to a different org, get her out of my sight. And my feeling is that she probably still believes in L. Ron Hubbard and still believes in the tech and is happy to be slaving away at another org and just content. Well, that didn't work out.

But they did find her, though, recently, right? Well, she was supposed to be up in Big Bear. And I did see a headline that she was spotted at another location. I didn't read the article, so I'm not sure where she's supposed to be now. That's so mysterious. I am less concerned about that. I'm more amused that it's become something that the entire world knows about. I mean, people can make that joke, especially, you know, John Oliver routinely asks,

where's Shelly? Where's Shelly, Miss Gavin? And I don't know if you saw this bit from last year when Mickey Mouse was about to go into the public domain. They got some guy dressed up like Mickey Mouse and his new catchphrase, he said, where's Shelly? And so for several episodes of last week tonight, they came out and did this. Where's Shelly Miscavige? Oh, my God. And what did – there was also something similar, I think, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, right? Like they wanted to break – they thought Nicole was leading him astray from Scientology like they wanted to break they thought nicole was leading him

astray well scientology and they wanted to break up that marriage um you know i you know i hear rumors but uh you know essentially her father is a psychiatrist um oh boy and so that was always a troubling aspect of their relationship to begin with. And I guess she was starting to have some doubts. She wasn't as hardcore as Tom, but she was still a Scientologist. For whatever reason, and I'm not privy to any of it, Cruz had a prenup with her, I think, that if they split before 10 years, she would get far less. And right as that was coming to that deadline, he said, we're done. Smart businessman. Yeah, in the press, it said, you know what you've done, Nicole.

But nothing was ever revealed as to what was going on. And frankly, I don't care. Good for you. There's bigger fish to fry. Yeah. We have a whole religious issue here I guess. Yeah. I mean it's insane that – I mean people can put L. Ron Hubbard above their marriages, but –

I guess they do. They do. Well, this has so far been a great full kind of crash course on Scientology and where it's gotten today. There's so much in the history. There's obviously some things, grab a bite to eat, and then come back and talk about what you've hinted at throughout today, which is your involvement over the years, how you came into this and what you're doing about it now down literally in Clearwater.

I mean, this is what we talked about on the phone a ton. It blows my mind. So we'll be right back and we'll go through all that. All right. All right, we are back, back everybody i was just sitting down with you at lunch already going through some of these things and i was like we got to get in the studio right now and not keep talking about this because it's good stuff but i want to start at the beginning with you and the first time you even became aware of Scientology, when was it?

How did it come up? And was it something that then really became a part of your life later that you just kind of put to the side for a minute? Or were you right away gung-ho like, whoa, this is problematic? Yeah, no, I can tell you exactly where it started. It was 1980. I was back in Wisconsin where I lived. And Mike Wallace came to Clearwater for 60 Minutes and did a piece called The Clearwater Conspiracy. And that was the first time I heard anything about Clearwater. This was shortly after

they snuck into town in 1975. And it was all about the takeover and how upset the people of Clearwater were that Scientology had done this. And it was a fascinating story. At the end of it, Mike Wallace had a handful of Scientologists that Scientology provided him for the show to tell Scientology's side of this thing. And it was so bizarre because Mike would say something, well, here's the negative thing that we've discovered. And what do you think about that? I don't know that that's true. Well, if you saw this report, well, we wouldn't look at that report. No, we just wouldn't. We wouldn't look at it. We wouldn't read it. Don't ask, don't tell. Yeah. They just wouldn't. They didn't believe anything could possibly be negative about Scientology. And of course, after that show ended, there was no internet. There were very few books

published on it. So it's just kind of something that was stored away in my memory. And then in a few years later, I moved to California. And at one point, probably around 98 or so, I had moved into a home in the Hollywood Hills I was renting. Beautiful views. What were you doing at the time? Like, what was your career? I was working for a market research company for the movie studios, and I was doing a lot of acting and voiceover work, stuff like that as well. Oh, that explains all the good impressions. You did voiceover work. You got a good voice.

Well, it's kind of going now, but yeah, I started out as a radio guy back in Wisconsin right out of college and then moved to L.A LA to do stuff in TV and film. So it's always been something I've been interested in. Anyway, I'm living in this place in the hills now. And the woman who lived there before me was a Scientologist. And she didn't give them a forwarding address, which often happens when you decide you're getting out of Scientology, you don't want them to know where you are so I kept getting all of her junk mail all the copies of the celebrity magazine and All these different publications they put out and I'd be reading the articles. I'd be reading the ads for the e-meter

and it was all just bizarre. But, you know, there was my first writings of L. Ron Hubbard that were sent right to my home. And so that got me interested again. And I started, you know, going around to their properties. And, well, I read one or two books. My favorite was Barefaced Messiah by Russell Miller, I believe. Probably my favorite book because it's a biography of Hubbard that's incredibly readable and it gives you the history of Scientology too, and a really nice, concise, fun, pleasant read. So I recommend that to anyone if they want to find out more about it. Uh, so I read that and then I, I said, well, I'm going to go down and, uh, visit some of these buildings.

So I'd go into, uh, Big Blue, their, their big headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, which is, um, uh, used to be the Cedars of Lebanon hospital that they bought and they painted it this gaudy blue color. Oh, no wonder. That does look – I was going to say. Yeah. So I'd wander in there and goes, what goes on in here? And then they'd show me around.

They'd give me a tour and they would show me the orientation film again. There's the building right there. Yeah, that's it. Big blue. Big blue. Big blue. And, you know, I just feigned ignorance and I went to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition on Hollywood Boulevard. By the way, if you're in Hollywood, stop there.

It's a treat. It was like a Disneyland of lies. Really nicely laid out, and it kind of gives you, it walks you through L. Ron Hubbard's life, so you find out about his Cub Scout adventures and then the Indian tribe thing, and it moves into his um uh career in motion pictures uh you know they claim he wrote casablanca what he didn't that's not claim you wrote casablanca that's one of those things that just gets around the org it's not not something that they put in the life exhibition uh all they had there uh the only thing that we know that L. Ron Hubbard had produced was one of these weekly serials these these uh uh like 16 or 40 episode uh short adventures that

would play Saturday afternoons for the kids before a feature film and this one was I think something like mysteries of treasure Treasure Island. There's somebody out there who knows the name of this and they're going to say Bunker. You got to get this right. But I haven't thought about these things in years. Anyway, they have like a fake movie theater marquee and box office to show the name of that film on the marquee. The only time probably it was ever on a marquee. And then next to that was these life-size animatronic figures from Battlefield Earth.

Johnny Goodboy Tyler and Turl, the evil alien that John Travolta eventually played. So they have these figures just like if you went to the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. They come to life and they do a little scene from the book. And oh my God, that's exciting. I'm losing brain cells hearing about this. Oh, it's wonderful. And then they usher you to a room.

And this is what it was like when I was there. They usher you to a room where you sit down in a theater to watch a movie. And this is the story of Dianetics. And to introduce it, the lights come down in there. And a volcano arises in front of the screen. The lights go very dramatic. And the volcano explodes without really exploding. Just with the sound and lights.

It's like, oh, my God. And that introduces the black and white film about Hubbard. And they hired a guy to play Hubbard. But it would be sacrilegious to show his face. So he doesn't say a word and it's all shot from behind his back. And it's so hysterical. It is brilliant. If you ever saw Miracle on 34th Street, which I'm sure everyone has, you know, there's a scene at the end where they bring in all the letters to Santa Claus and pour them out in the courtroom and say, oh, this is Santa Claus. Well, there's a scene like that in this where some of the employees come rushing in.

Ron, Ron, Dianetics is a hit. Look at this. And they're pouring out all the letters. And you just see Hubbard going, you gotta go! I hope it's still playing there. I hope they haven't changed anything about it. I would be kicked out of there. If you knew me well, you only met me today, I'd be kicked out of there within

five minutes. I know, unless he's nodding his head like, yes. You know, you gotta play along and just enjoy it. Bullshit! Bullshit! Yeah, and you got to play with the e-meter and all those things. Oh, you get to play with an actual e-meter? Yeah, you get to hold on to the e-meter and they do a little pinch test.

What's a pinch test? The pinch test, well, you're holding the meter and they pinch you and you watch the needle move. And then they say, okay, now remember the pinch. And you remember it and the needle moves a bit. Ah, see? That's the recording of the thought. That incident is recorded in your brain. And these negative incidences are what cause all your problems.

Your reactive mind is always recording even when you're unconscious or asleep. And there are things that happen to you that you can't make sense of. But Dianetics can help you recover all of these bad instances. And that's essentially what you're doing through Dianetics and through the early courses of Scientology. You're locating these troubling moments in your life. And you're walking through that situation again and again and again. So if you think about the pinch a few more times, it stops moving. The needle doesn't move. So they go, see, you erased that bad incident from your life.

Do they have like a kiosk at the end of this thing where they're trying to recruit people too? Or is it literally just a museum? I mean, you know, it's all about recruitment. You know, you're invited to, of course, come in and sign up. But it's primarily to say, oh, my God, L. Ron Hubbard, he was a remarkable man. And you've got to understand this is the friend of mankind. He's the guy who has all the answers. So come on over and take a course. And let's see. Oh, so when you're going through with Dianetics and you're holding on to the

e-meter and you're talking about things that have troubled you in your life, you say, well, I remember when I was a kid, my dad hit me, and it was not nice. And they say, okay, well, tell me about that again. And you tell it again, and they say, all right, no. Go back and remember, you know, did you hear any sounds in the background? Was there a car going? Oh, and my father was smoking a cigar. So that explains why anytime you smell a cigar, you feel a little bit panicked because you're unconsciously remembering that your dad savagely beat you. And all you have to do is find out what that first incident is, erase it from your mind, and then eventually your reactive mind will be clear of all those incidences. And when you reach that state of clear, now you're ready to move on to the OT levels. this the concept they have of rewiring certain impedi if that's a word plural that goes into

your brain yeah that that's i'll give them that's a psychological concept but they make everything sound like it's it may not be like tomorrow but it's gonna go away you're gonna be good that's not real you can't unless you you know well uh you wouldn't mean it can't be real it's not they're telling you they're doing it they're they're saving mankind you should you should have shown them you should have gone in there and like shown them your your voiceover reel and offered to do a live voiceover reel and just blown the lid off the place you should have done that like everybody here this is all bullshit you are being lied to to. It is not real. Get them out! Yeah, be like those TikTok people on the streets.

Yes. Run! Run for your life! Don't take the course! At any rate, I'm digressing, as I often do. No, this is great. This is great. You were talking about going through the museum for the first time, and you're like, holy shit.

Yeah. this is great you were talking about going through the museum for the first time and you're like holy shit yeah and uh and then the last thing the last step of it um you come into a room where there's a wall uh you know how the music got really pretentious in the orientation video you know yes yes big overblown thing yeah uh so they they they crank up the music and this, you world, all proclaiming L. Ron Hubbard as being this wonderful, brilliant man who's saving mankind. And I've seen how they do this. I mean, they did this in Clearwater when I was living there in 2000. The mayor read off a proclamation saying that this particular school, Clearwater Academy, was one of the finest schools in the country, according to the Concerned Businessmen of America. And the Concerned Businessmen asked,

they actually wrote a declaration for the mayor to read. Uh, and then they said, we'd like to have, um, three copies of this, one for the school, uh, one for our records, and then one for us to, to display back at the concerned businessman headquarters. So they get this done. And then the next week I went in to say, okay, what you just did is do Scientology's bidding because the Concerned Businessmen of America is a Scientology front group. And when they say, we've looked at all the schools in the country, and this is one of the finest around. It's Scientology saying, give a proclamation to the Scientology school. And I explained to the mayor, now they have you on display.

So when parents come to the school, they can say, look, the city loves us. The mayor thinks we're amazing. You should bring their kids here. So that's what they do from lowest level all the way up to President Clinton had sent something to them. And they brag about all these things. Damn it, Bill. Yeah. God damn it.

Yeah. I mean he's one of the closing – they do this type of thing in the orientation video where they're showing plaudits from around the world. And I think the last one is President Clinton. Oh, that's tough. Yeah. But, I mean, it's just another tiny little part of the scam. You know, how they can make themselves appear legitimate because they know. They know what the public feels about them.

They know how disreputable the organization's character is. Now, when you say they. The organization's slappy miscavige, essentially. Because I'm thinking he's like the. Yeah, most scientologists think well uh we hear that scientology is great so uh that's what we hear so scientology is great and they love us because it seems like even like mike rinder was effectively like number two he was like the underboss basically and it seems like until he finally had his clarity non-scientology related

like let's get the fuck out of here. You know, he was into it. Sure. Right? Sure. So I'm trying to psychologically – it's hard because I've never been a part of that. But I'm trying to psychologically put myself in a person like that shoes and wonder if I actually would recognize how many people think we're a joke versus if i'm miscovich and i'm just miss cabbage and i'm i'm just crazy and obsessed on power i may know it and not care you know what

i mean like this you think the senior level people they all know it miss cabbage knows yes yes i would agree with that there was a a really tragic death at the Ford Harrison Hotel back in 1995. Lisa McPherson was a woman who was a devout Scientologist for many, many years. She had just attested to the state of clear. And like a month or two later, she was having a mental breakdown. And she got involved in a little fender bender accident right outside the Fort Harrison Hotel. And when the paramedics arrived on the scene, she had taken off all of her clothes and was walking down the street naked. And this female paramedic comes up and says, why are you doing this?

And she said, I need somebody to pay attention to me. I need help. And they took her a couple blocks away to the Morton Plant Hospital. And she was checked in there. And within an hour, 10 Scientologists showed up at the hospital and convinced her to check herself out against the doctor's wishes. And these 10 people took Lisa back to the Fort Harrison Hotel. And she was locked up in a cabana there for 17 days. The last 17 days of her life. And her mental condition worsened every single day. By her last day, she had lost 40 pounds. And she was so weak. They panicked. Rather than

calling in a doctor or calling an ambulance, they put her in a van and they drove her to a hospital, but not Morton Plant two blocks away, not another five different hospitals that were closer. They drove all the way over to a hospital where there was a Scientologist doctor on call. And by the time they got there, she was dead. And this doctor, Dr. Minkoff, who had been prescribing medication without seeing her, he was freaked out. Why'd you bring her here? And, of course, Scientology did this major cover-up where they, when the police found out about this,

the person who was in charge of this at that point was the real second in command, Marty Rathbun. Mike was like the third in command for Office of Special Affairs. But Marty whisked all the people who were watching over her out of the country. And they started doing what they could to clean up the situation. There were people who were watching over Lisa every single day. Doing what? Like security guard, basically? Well, L. Ron Hubbard has his own theories because psychiatry, of course, is evil.

Oh, God. course, is evil. So he has his own method that he developed called the introspection rundown or baby watch. So what L. Ron Hubbard said is if you're having a psychotic break, which they would never use that term, but if you're in this condition, people should not be talking to her. So even if she's like talking to you, asking questions, you know, begging for help, you don't respond. She has to have absolute silence. Anything you might say in a situation like that when she's screwed up, that could cause more implants, more engrams. So you can't say a word. And there were people who were put on the baby watch who didn't even speak English. So they didn't have to worry about saying a word to her.

I met one of those people. Sorry, just a couple of months ago, I met one of the guys who said, I had just come to the country like a month earlier and I didn't know any English at all. And they had me watching over her. But the people who did speak English were writing down logs of her condition every single day. And you could see her condition getting worse and worse and worse. She's losing 40 pounds and 70, I mean, my God. But she's also, you know, becoming increasingly demented.

She's barking like a dog. She thinks she's L. Ron Hubbard herself. She's smearing her feces on the wall. They're forcing medication down her throat with a turkey baster. What were they giving her again?

Exactly what medicine she was on, I don't remember. You'd have to search that. There's a couple other doctors who were involved. There's a female doctor who was prescribing a lot of this medication, and she was not licensed in Florida at all to be doing any medical work. And what was her condition again from the very beginning of this story when they first took her there? Was she already a little manic?

Yeah, she had been having some psychotic break at that point, and that's why she was saying, I need help. Um, and unfortunately the, the Scientologists, including her boss, Benetta Slaughter, and, uh, some other people like Mary DeMoss, who, uh, was featured in a lot of my videos. She came out on the street to handle me quite often, and she was my favorite of the Scientologists because she was always... To handle you. Yeah, she was always brilliantly bizarre.

You ever let her take advantage of you? No. No? No. I did ask her out. I said, let's have dinner. Let's go to the movie. We're both actors.

I thought it would be wonderful. It's like, I'm going to fuck the Scientology right out of you. Anyway. We're both actors. I thought it would be wonderful. I'm going to fuck the Scientology right out of you. Anyway, so the circle of her friends, her peers, said, you can't be here. They're going to put you in a psych ward. Nothing could be worse than having an evil psych doing horrible things to you, you know, electroshock. And who knows what they're going to do, but they're evil. So she came back with them to the hotel, and that was the end of it for her.

That's insane. Anyway, I forgot exactly why I got onto this. You were bringing this up because you got – we were going through your course to getting into really going up against Scientology. So you got involved after this happened. Yeah. What went down there? Yeah. At that point in – beginning of 2000, Bob Minton, who was the retired international banker who had spent about $10 million helping people abused and defrauded by Scientology. He decided to open up the Lisa McPherson Trust in Clearwater.

She'd been dead for several years now? She had been dead for five years. Right. But much of this wasn't publicly known for a few years until there was a trial. So there's a criminal trial brought that a lot of this evidence came out. And then there was a civil trial that Bob Minton was bankrolling for the family.

And we started the trust. There were four of us to begin with who were working down there, moved down there. I was in charge of, of the multimedia. So I was videotaping, I was creating videos and putting up our website, things like that. Um, and you know, this was, this was the most fascinating time of my life. To be invited there, to be part of this bizarre situation where

these Scientologists were going just nutso in front of my camera. After a couple years of them looking goofy on my camera, they realized, you know, we should stop doing this. Yeah. So after that, it became kind of dull.

They didn't want to say anything anymore. But anyway, that's around when I got started. In 1999, back in L.A., I started doing videos. The first one that I shot was when two scientologists came to my home to picket me i call that the revenge picket it's a short picket yeah yeah um and well really short because um i i went out there with my camera and i started interviewing these guys were they on your property well they were out at the edge of the driveway. So could you shoot them? Well, I wasn't going to shoot them. I shot them with a camera. I was trying to get him to say,

no, I couldn't. I shot them with the camera and that was plenty powerful. That morning, they had leafleted my entire neighborhood because I got a call from a neighbor saying, are you Mark Bunker yeah she said i'm supposed to beware you and uh she had a dog beware of dog beware your neighbor mark bunker is not who you think he is that needs to be your campaign slogan beware the bunker okay oh come on it's a little too late i've got everything printed up already let's let's do it come on uh so so i knew you know they they had warned everybody that uh i was a dangerous individual but um at the bottom of it they actually put in fine print that they were at the church of scientology and when people see that they go oh well right you know so we got a big laugh out of that and there was a policeman who was living in the house above me. And I told him, listen, it's possible.

I don't think it's likely. But they're picketing people at their homes now. So they may come and picket me here. And as I'm talking to him, I look out the window. And these two guys had shown up with big signs. And this was a cop? This was a cop. And he wasn't loading the shotgun like, be my no one's shooting at them okay and none of my

stories will Scientologists be shot at uh anyway so so I'm talking to these guys trying to you know have a pleasant conversation with them and uh within three minutes I I bring up Zinu. And one of the guys was not on that level. So he started walking away. So it was like bizarre that there were security guards in Clearwater who would be following me with their camera. And I could say 75 million years ago, Earth was known as TGAC. And they would put their fingers in their ears and run away. What kind of security is that?

Not brainwash security. I mean, it's amazing. So it was a fascinating time. And after a couple of years of that, well, there you go. This is the very first video I shot. Which, by the way, everyone, the link to Mark's channel is going to be down in our description. You can go subscribe to it.

It's Mark Bunker. It's got all the stuff you're talking about today. You've just been building this for a while. It's really good stuff. All right. Go ahead and play this, Alessi. I think I know more than you. Well, if you would consider Scientology a religion. Oh, my God. I think I know more than you bigot

well if you would consider Scientology a religion might believe that but unfortunately it's a cult that dude don't even look real alright

I gotta give you my premium. Do skip. It's over there on the right. Yep. There you go. You know deep down inside you're trying to harm something that is good and helps other people. Well, deep down inside I'm trying to help you is what I'm trying to do. Because you probably don't know all of what your church does and all of what your church believes.

I know a lot about what my church does, and it's mostly helping people, you know. Well, where are you on the bridge? Oh, Mark, I'm not going to listen to you. Well, where are you online? Where I'm on the bridge. Well, I'm just, you know, you're here. I'd always like to talk to Scientologists. I'm trying to get your side of the story.

Have you ever done anything in Scientology yourself? I went in. I talk to Scientologists. I'm trying to get your side of the story. Have you ever done anything in Scientology? I went in. I took the personality test. And I played with the e-meter. Played with the e-meter? Played with the e-meter. Well, the e-meter is kind of a toy. So you played with the e-meter.

In other words, you know nothing about what you're attacking. You know nothing about what you're attacking. I think I know more than you in many respects. I know about OT3 where Hubbard wrote that 75... Homeless John Lennon's laugh is really bothering me.

Oh my god. And Tikiak was ruled over by the evil overlord Xenu. He's walking away. He stuffed us all into volcanoes and blew us up. That guy's just, he is perturbed. Is this real? Seems that all of those little invisible dead space cooties that were caused by the exploding volcano.

For people just listening right now who aren't on youtube or spotify watching this go to youtube or spotify to watch this and well actually i'm going to put the link to this down in the description so you can see this video on its own too you can actually just do that reach that level of course it will cost you about 360 we got the point. Yeah, there you go. But wow. Yeah, and the other guy who stayed there, Dan Mernan, he stayed for like 20 minutes and we were talking before he finally gave in. And Dan is still in and still believes.

Blonde guy with the goatee? Yeah, yeah. Not the guy who walked away. So Dan, I saw like 10 years later, Anonymous is out in LA and Dan Mernon pops up there and he's saying the exact same things to them that he said to me you know a decade earlier uh and he still believes that he's still in do you know anything about his backstory his backstory yeah i don't that'd be fascinating yeah i don't know how fascinating i mean well no i'm saying like to do a autopsy of how someone gets that brainwashed yeah you know like where did they come from to be in a position to become that? You know, that's your basic Scientology position. I mean, once you get sucked in, you're supposed to be heading toward that.

You know, that's the goal of L. Ron Hubbard and Miscavige. You know, they want you to believe anything that they say and nothing that the public says. And you have those blinders on so you won't hear anything else that's said. At any rate, I mean, it's sad. What year did you say that video was? That was 99. Okay.

So now you're like heavily involved in everything. Because at this point, obviously, you're now even going to city council. I think a really important point that I was completely uneducated on that you walked me through on the phone about Scientology that can help people understand why they're able to hold such an iron fist over at least part of Clearwater is how they're essentially building their portfolio for the church so you talked about miscavige is essentially buying all this real estate all over clearwater and in other places but let's focus on clearwater and filling it with nothing he'll own buildings that are essentially abandoned ghost towns that are near the scientology center so that it's almost like they create a Scientology ghost town for their entire part of town, which, by the way, also costs the city of Clearwater untold amounts of money for, you know, if real businesses were able to go in there and actually add to the economy. There are very popular downtown areas right around us. Nundedin is 10 miles away at the most, down the Fort Harrison Boulevard,

right on the water the same way Clearwater is. They have a happening main street there. It's a much smaller city than Clearwater, but people, you know, dine there, shop there. It's an incredibly popular spot, especially for people in Clearwater who have nowhere else to go. And there's another place, Safety Harbor, which is right nearby as well. Very wonderful place to go and have a meal. And, you know, the place is always popular. We're dead. And we have been ever since Scientology snuck into town in 1975. They have turned it into a nuclear radioactive dead zone. And they like it that way. They have a campus there that Miscavige wants to keep people away from. They don't want – Miscavige doesn't want prying eyes, seeing anything that we shouldn't see.

Oh, he's so small. I can barely see him. Well, there you go. You can take some binoculars with you and look down at him. Um, but, uh, the thing is, um, there, there are, there are people that, that I'll encounter. Like when I was running my first campaign for city council four years ago, knocking on doors, introducing myself, everyone had stories. Everyone had questions. Everyone was concerned. Um, all the, pretty much every candidate says,

when you knock on the door, the first thing people ask is, what are you going to do about Scientology? Oh, wow. And I have the ability to say, well, I've been helping people abused and defrauded for 25 years now. Wow.

And you may have seen me on Leah Remini's show, Scientology and the Aftermath. And so immediately people say, give me that clipboard. I want to sign a petition for you. And you got my vote. So that helped me in the first campaign. That got me elected because it was pretty much this crazy guy talking about Scientology with no political career before this. Outsider.

Yeah. Yeah. And you also said like people, you were telling me on the phone, people on the council historically are very afraid to talk about it publicly. Obviously, they may talk about it privately and not like it, but there's a fear there. Well, historically, that wasn't always the case. I mentioned Gabe Casares, who was the mayor when they snuck into town. Gabe continued to actively speak out against Scientology for the rest of his life. And I got to know him when I moved there

in 2000, and we became friends. So I spent a lot of time with him. And also Lieutenant Ray Emmons, who was the police lieutenant who was in charge of investigating Scientology for 20 years. I got to know him pretty well. Now, at that point, there was such an uproar. No one was afraid of taking on Scientology. Everyone on the council understood that this was a problem. And in 1982, after the FBI raids and all sorts of other stuff was uncovered about what they did in Clearwater, the city council held hearings in our council chambers for a week where they brought in an attorney who was representing a lot of people who had been former Scientologists or ripped off by them. And he brought in people like Paulette Cooper, the woman who wrote the book about Scientology and was attacked, L. Ron Hubbard's son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr. He came to testify.

When did he leave his father's care? They were working together in the 50s, and I think somewhere in the 70s, they had a falling out. Hubbard Sr., who was in hiding at that point, Jr. tried to have him declared dead because there was no sign of him. So he went to court and tried to get this done. They couldn't bring Hubbard forward because they would clap cuffs on him and take him away. So they would do things like, I think he wrote a signature on something and they put, I don't know. They tried to pretend, hey, look, it's a signature. He's alive. He's alive, yeah. So by then, there was a family rift.

And Junior had written a book with another co-author, Ripping into Dad. He knew it was all scampi. Yeah, yeah. But then, you know, they attacked him viciously. And Junior said, okay, I'm going to settle. And I'll take back everything. Just leave me alone, give me the money, and I'll shut my mouth. So for a week, there were these hearings, and Scientology had the option to come and give their own testimony, and they refused. At the end of the week, their attorney, who's not a Scientologist, he was just the top criminal attorney in the city.

They always paid the guy who is the big hot shot. They'll hire them. And he came and talked for like 10 minutes saying, this is nothing. This is nonsense. We are not even going to respond to any of this. Um, I, I got a videotapes of that entire week's worth of testimony. And I put that online back in 99 and you can still see it on that channel. So if you're interested at all in seeing what it was like in 1982 when no one was afraid on the council to take them on. Versus now. That's what it was like.

And unfortunately, over the decades, that faded away. Is that because more and more Scientologists settled in Clearwater and because of the financial influence Miscavige has? No. No? No. What it is is this is a problem that Clearwater itself couldn't solve. So they went to the state officials. They went to federal officials. They said, we need help.

And people on the higher levels, they said, are they going to come after me? Are they going to attack me? It's a religion. So no one helped. Clearwater at one point passed a law saying that if you're a, not a religion, but if you're a, I can't even think of a simple phrase, like a nonprofit. If you're a nonprofit operating here in the city. Like 501c3 type? Yeah. Yeah. You need to open up your books for us to check out. And clearly they wanted to be able to see Scientology's books. Scientology took them to court and they won.

How'd they win? They said, listen, we have religious standing here. You can't just force us to open our books to you. And the court made the city pay them a million dollars. After that, the city said, we can't afford this. And no one's helping. Let's just shut up about it. And that's what did it.

Yeah. So by the time we came to town with the LMT in 2000, the city was upset with us for bringing trouble to the city. They had Scientology off the front page of the paper. And us coming there brought Scientology back to the city they had scientology off the front page of the paper and us coming there brought scientology back to the paper and people in city hall thought well we're the problem if uh if we weren't uh uh causing all this trouble then scientology who are the ones who are going nuts in the streets of, you know, protesting us. This would all quiet down and no one would even know Scientology was here, which was nonsense. Yeah, that's crazy. Because, you know, from 75 on, nobody wanted to go downtown because of Scientology.

And when I came to town, you know, one thing that Scientology did was protest the police department. They were marching around the police department at one point. Why? Because Sid Klein, the police chief, was investigating Scientology. So they were walking around with signs saying, Sid Klein, what's your crime? Sid Klein, what's your crime? So I came to town and I knew what the police had been going through. And one of the first things we did was go to a Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast. And Sid Klein and his police chiefs were all around him. And I thought, well, I'm going to go say hi.

And I went over to him and I put out my hand and said, it's a pleasure meeting you. I want you to know I'm a big fan of the Clearwater police. And he wouldn't shake my hand. He just glared at me and said, if you get my way, I'll arrest you. And I went, oh, this is not what I expected when I moved here to Clearwater. Did he think you were a Scientologist? No.

He thought I was a pest. I was causing problems that he was going to. Yeah. But that was the general feeling. You know, Bob and Stacey Brooks are the president of the LMT. Went and sat with the then city manager, a fellow who used to be a city manager in Miami. Can I think of his name right now? No, I can't.

It's all right. You're remembering a lot of good stuff today yeah you're doing good um so uh this guy uh says to bob and stacy we got scientology off the front page of the paper and you're putting them back on there. And he threatened them that he would shut us down. And I think that was a rude awakening for Bob and Stacy that this was happening. But meanwhile, the public were behind us. And while we were there, we did help a few people get out of Scientology. We educated a lot of other people. Wait, how'd you do that? How'd you get them out? There were people, well, like my friend Tori Christman. She was actually, it was the internet

that got her out. Tori was a member for 30 years. And I met her in LA where she and her husband lived at some of the protests. So she would come out to handle the critics when we were out there. And I have videotape of her coming up to me the very first time. Yeah, that story there, this is when she's out already. But when I first met her on L. Ron Hubbard Way... I can do what I like, can't I? Yeah, I'm just asking you. Why can't you? You know, communication is the universal solvent, but it's not solving here.

You'd say that you did something in Scientology, right? I was up to 87 for seven years. Apparently it doesn't matter, does it? It didn't work for me. And I don't know how other people did it. Apparently not. And it wasn't that I was a failed scientist. Oh, I love the alien blow up right there.

That's good. I don't know what to say. So this guy was a current Scientologist. So the roles were reversed. When I met her, she was the one saying, well, what are you doing here? We're, you know, we're. We're so nice. Come on.

It's a beautiful religion. First time she came up to me, she put on a really bad English accent and lied about her name. I said, I'm Mark Bunker. Who are you? And she said, I'm Margaret. What are you doing here? And, you know, we had a, we had a pleasant little conversation. Um, and then I would see her at a few other protests and we always got along well. She and

her husband, uh, JR, uh, was the name he was using. Um, I would talk with them and they were nice people and I'm nice. So we got along fine. There were a couple other critics that were a little harsher and they didn't like them. But I'm adorable. You got to admit. You are a very nice guy. You disarm people very quickly. I'm surprised these people – I understand it's like – well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But normal people I would think would be able to at least calm down and have a conversation with you eventually. Yeah. You'd think so. Yeah. Oh, you're like a Tory could. Um,

so, so the LMT had opened and this is like a couple of years after I met Tory. Tory meanwhile, um, was still fighting with me online when battlefield earth came up oh that was a fun period i took my camera to the uh to the movie theater for for the premiere and i grabbed kids coming out of the theater to get their reaction i you know it was all stinker you know the type of stuff you're the tmz of scientology yeah um effectively, right? So there was a website for Battlefield Earth on the Warner Brothers page. And there was a forum. So Torrey, under a different pseudonym, and another Scientologist were on there constantly writing things like, Oh, I just saw it for the fourth time today.

I'm taking my kids tomorrow. And I would respond in my own inimitable way and point out some of the things that were less talked about there. Like, for instance, I put up a review of the first draft of the script before the film was released that showed how horrible it was. I reviewed that and printed it. And suddenly there's this remarkable rave for the movie from this other dude. And I went online and hunted down this guy who did the review. And it turned out that he had a bio on another site saying, and this year he is being paid to do publicity for Battlefield Earth by the Church of Scientology. So I would go onto the message board and put the link there and say,

see, you know, that's what it takes to get a rave review. You have to hire somebody to do that. And she'd get so mad at me. And I didn't know it was Tori until later. But she had enough. And she announced online that she was leaving Scientology. And it was recommended by Andreas Heldo Lund, who had a website called zinu.net, which is still out there. Andreas died just recently. But Andreas said, you know,

you should go talk to the people at the Lisa McPherson Trust. So Tori called us and Stacey came in to say, there's this woman on the line who says she knows you. And she gave the pseudonym of the, the person who was, um, was attacking me on the, on the message board. And I went, her, she's, she's horrible.

But then she put me on the phone with her and I recognized Tori's voice immediately. You, I love you. And yeah, she was trying to strike an effective blow. You know, it's one of those things that, she didn't really hate me, but you know, she had to stop the negative in theta, is what Scientology calls it. So then she came down to Clearwater

and we gave her a sanctuary there and helped her decompress. What's that like? Because you – It's not easy. How many years had she been in it? 30 years. And she lost her husband over it. Oh, my God.

He disconnected from her. 30 years. Yeah. Destroyed her life. Suddenly she's like, oh, my God, woke up. And then you have her in a room drinking coffee like what is that conversation like well i mean took you long enough i was not perhaps the best exit counselor um let me say about being in a room with her. When she came to Clearwater, she had a ticket from Bob Minton to fly from LAX to Clearwater.

And when she got to the airport in LA, a Scientology bigwig was there to meet her and say, Tori, you can't go. You can't go with these people. And Tori called Bob and Stacy and Bob said, I'm going to get you a first class ticket so you can go in the lounge where she can't go. And he did that for her. And then she had to switch planes in Chicago. And her husband was flown out there to meet her at the transfer to say, you know, you can't go to, you can't go talk to the people at the LMT. You can't. Uh, and she said, I'm sorry,

I'm going. Wait, is that a new husband? No, this is Harold, the, the, the husband who would eventually disconnect from her. Oh, I, I misunderstood that. They're still together. I'm sorry. They're, they're, you know, they were together at this point until she decided she'd had enough. I thought it was he during that 30 years. He disconnected. But it was after she had come down here and said, okay, I'm totally out. Wow. Anyway, he met her in Chicago and then he flew down here and found out where she was staying. And she was staying at a hotel room that we got for her at this nice place. And I was there when Harold came to the door. And Tori was in her nightgown.

And the door opened and Harold saw me and Tori there and was not at all thrilled with the very sight of it. There was no hanky-panky. It was just something that he wasn't expecting. I don't believe him. I think that's Mark's secret. He's like the Hugh Hefner of anti-Scientology. He's like, come on down to the mansion. You're going to leave

reformed. You know, it'd be nice if women were throwing themselves at me unfortunately okay there's still time ladies let's let's let's get let's get some uh hidden cams down there by his place see what's going on okay uh and so i'm not exactly sure where i was going with this but we're talking about people who left the church yeah and like what it's like it's it's a crazy crazy journey because you know these there's people who are in this yeah and like what it's like it's it's a crazy crazy journey because you know these there's people who are in this thing for way longer than i've been alive and

i try to imagine and you can't what that's like to adhere to something and then suddenly one day be like you know what it's all lie yeah i gotta go okay here's why i said I wasn't a very good exit counselor, because that wasn't really my position. But we took Tori up to Bob's home in New telling me, uh, um, about all the wins she had. It wasn't all bad. I had so many wins. And I said, well, yeah, but I think the people at Jonestown would have told you they had wins before drinking the, and she went, burst into tears and it wasn't anything I went, you know, I thought I was being logical. That's a great line. When you're in a group like this, yeah, you're getting something from it until you realize, no, I'm not. Wow. But she – that did not go over well. And I went in where she was crying and Bob and Stacy said, what did you say to her?

And I said that and they went, no, you didn't. Okay. I'll bet that was important, though. Well, I don't know. Because she's upset about it, obviously, at first. But then when you get a minute to think about it, like, whoa. Yeah. Probably there's a gradient scale.

We should wait a while before spring or something like that. When she's in a delicate condition to begin with. So it's just me a dope thinking well i'm being illogical um but what what happens to a woman like her once she does meet with you guys and now you know it gets back to scientology like oh we lost her she left does she get pis put all over her to buy scientology or well yeah i mean they um at that time they they were absolutely um checking up on people um i don't think i don't remember her being terribly afraid of it but she was convinced that people were screwing with her car and things like that um but you know it's a journey. It takes a while to, uh, to peel away those layers.

Um, and, uh, you know, she, she became one of the biggest spokespeople and helpers of getting other people out of Scientology following that. And she's got a beloved following. One of the things I did right away is bought her a webcam so she could be doing her own videos from her home. And so there's a lot of people who know her and love her. That's great. And you need people like that. It's so impressive when you see the depth that some of these people who have left are willing to go to on camera, because in some ways

you could be like you might be a little self-conscious of it you were in it for so long but once you once you hear them talk whether you watch going clear or you watch documentary you were in with with leah you know it's not like a lot of them are dumb people like a lot of them are actually pretty smart people no and now they now they've come to. Yeah. And that's the thing. Because that's the first reaction I had when I found out about Xenu. I thought, well, you've got to be really stupid to believe this stuff. But you don't hear anything about that stuff for the longest time. It takes you a lot of money and a lot of time before you reach the level where they say, okay, I think we can trust her enough to give her this OT material. Um, and believe me,

you have to jump through hoops to prove that you're worthy of that. Um, cause they know that, uh, I mean, I've talked to at least one person who said they gave meacherial. I read it and I went, oh, my God. What have I been doing here? And they left quietly. Was that Paul Haggis? But for most people, no. This was a woman that I had encountered. There was a group that Dennis Ehrlich was actually a part of. There was a woman, Priscilla Coates, who was a woman who was helping members of former cults of various stripes. And every Sunday at her house, she would have like a meeting with

people who are Scientologists, Moonies, things like that. And they invited me over one time. And this woman was a Scientologist who told me that that was her experience. She, she just walked away after seeing that, but that's not always the case. Um, you're, you know, you're expected to be ready to believe anything Hubbard told you at that point. Um, you know, it, it, it, it's a fascinating story. It's a difficult story, but I thought that people had to be stupid. But you realize that Dennis Clark, who was this big brute who was punching people. And you can see some of that in one of my videos.

There's a video called Scientology and the Clearwater Police, which was a 20-minute video I did back in 2000 to show what it was like when the police officers were working off duty for Scientology. Scientology realized, hey, you know, we've got the money. We can pay an officer to sit down here on the street and we can feed them the steady stream of negative stuff about us. What did you say there? You told me this on the phone. Did you say their coffers are estimated at like $3 billion or something like that? Yeah, I think they're at $3 billion now, yeah. Wow. Okay, so what are we looking at here on the screen? Officers who were being paid by Scientology were willing to do Scientology's biddings or not to pay attention to anything that we said. Okay, let's play this right here.

Make sure walking off to the right. Yeah, that's the city manager who threatened us. That night, Scientology hired the first pair of off-duty police officers. But the rules change daily. I just want a clear, firm response from the police department on what the rules are here. In bending over backwards to appease Scientology, Roberto and the police department created new laws on the spot that even its own officers couldn't understand. So I can't go across the line now. No. Even worse than the confusion over how to manage the white lines is the byproduct of the creation of this rather unique bus unloading zone.

You see, now a large percentage of the Clearwater Police Force work directly for Scientology. And they're supposed to report to Mike Rinder, the head of the Office of Special Affairs. office of special affairs again this is the new name for the scientology department that once broke into the fbi and the irs stole documents bugged offices and that to this very day continues to destroy the lives of those who scientology perceives to be i got there's two things i would really like you to go through from this because this is perfect because it just came up. Number one, this video was made years ago, long before Mike Rinder actually left. Yeah, he was still in. Right.

So he was still in, obviously. I have video of him trying to have us arrested. Oh, my God. And now you're like friends with him. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because he's out. Sure. Okay. So first question is, what happened when he got out and how quickly were you in contact with him and what was that like?

He got out because they pulled him out of the hole to handle a PR flap when the BBC did a – was doing a story on Scientology. There's a terrific journalist there. And again, forgive me, I'm blanking on his name right now, John Sweeney. So John Sweeney is like the Mike Wallace of the BBC, nationally known guy who's really terrific. And he was doing a piece on Scientology where there was a new PR person for Scientology, Tommy – oh, God. Tommy something or other. Okay, Tommy Scientologist. Yeah, so Tommy, you know, I should know this. He's Ann Archer's son, but it's not Tommy Archer.

But at any rate, this guy was taking over the job that Mike Rinder did before Mike Rinder was thrown in the hole. And there was such a flap from the show that Miscavige pulled Rinder, the emaciated, pale, thin Rinder out of the hole and said, you get over to England and you handle this right now. And so John Sweeney in the BBC show is asking Mike Rinder, does David Miscavige beat people? And Mike's going, no, of course not. And Mike Rinder is one of the people that Miscavige was beating. And yet, you know know he's walking in there with a black eye like cuts all over his face and shit nah of course not uh you know and really

at this point he looked like death warmed over um so so uh this continued to be a bad situation where Miscavige was furious about how Tommy did and how Mike did. And this was not being stopped. This was still going to air. And things got so bad for Mike when he was over there. He just said, I'm done. I'm not going back. I'm out of Scientology. It meant that he'd be losing his wife and kids and every friend who was a Scientologist. But he had come to the breaking point and said, that's it. I can't do this anymore. And when did he contact you? I didn't really meet him for probably a couple of years after that. What was that like?

Well, it was interesting. We had lunch and at a nice restaurant in Dunedin, because there were none in Clearwater. And I remember he was a good guy. We had a nice chat, and I asked him at one point,

so what did you folks think of me and i you know i was hoping there'd be some oh mark your videos were such a pain for us and but it was like oh mark you know you were the friendly videographer who would wave at us we didn't really think about you. What? I'm supposed to be tearing this place apart, destroying Scientology. You're not even thinking about me? So, and then after that, I think we met that time because I wanted him to sit down and do an interview with me. And that went well. So he said, yeah. So I then took my equipment over there and did a long-form interview with him shortly after he had left. It was interesting.

And, you know, we've remained friends. There have been times like I took him with me and Aaron Smith-Levin to talk to the FBI about the racketeering with these buildings. And you said the FBI won't do shit about this. FBI said, you got to have evidence. You got to have somebody who's in right now, who comes out with evidence or says, if you go to this room, open up that desk drawer, you'll find the evidence you need. He owns the buildings. They're all empty. How's that not evidence of something? Well, it doesn't prove that there's some coordinated effort to do this. But if there

was someone who could say, yeah, here's the planning thing that Miscavige put together about this. But the FBI says we have to go to a court to get a warrant to go in and do a raid. That's the first time the FBI said we need a warrant for something. Jesus Christ. I didn't know about that. I'm kidding. Oh, yeah. Some things, it feels like they go to these FISA courts. We've seen it.

I've had guys on here on the podcast where it's like, yeah, yeah, just toss that through. And they toss it through. Yeah. So if they really wanted to do it, they could. They probably could, yeah. At any rate, that and we had a new – we hired a new city manager and a new city attorney a couple years ago. And I had Mike Render come in and talk to them to explain what it's like dealing with Miscavige. This is not like anybody else that you've had to deal with.

This is a particular problem. And I want to show you one other part of that police video in just a moment if we can go back to it yeah we can't show that battlefield earth thing unless it's a trailer we definitely cannot do that uh it's it seems from the trailer actually i think but um uh what was i i talking about we were talking we were talking about mike r I actually, in the meantime, if you don't mind, while he's pulling that up, the second thing from that video you had mentioned that I wanted to ask about was the IRS thing.

What happened there? That was like a giant war. I think this is really important to describe just how far the Scientology religion is willing to go. Sure. Before we get into that, can you move just a little bit farther on here? You're going to see a scene where we're in the street,

and there's a guy who comes after me with a hammer. With a hammer? Yeah. Oh, this section right here. All right. Go to seven. So I'm with a couple of German filmmakers who are trying to interview a Scientologist artist, painter.

All right. And we go to his house, and they're knocking on his door. We believe these videotapes show a clear pattern of bias against the Lisa McPherson Trust on the part of the Clearwater Police Department. This first piece of footage was shot on February 1st of the year 2000. Two German filmmakers had asked me to come along as they shot a documentary about a famous German Scientologist artist who now lives in Clearwater. The day before, the German filmmakers had gone to the police department and asked if it was legal for them to knock on the door and ask for an interview.

Wayne Shalour, the police spokesperson, assured them it was. As we headed back to our cars, a man ran out of the house with a hammer. Uh-oh. What if I smash that fucker for you? Oh, smash it? You better go. I called the cops. Get the fuck out of here. Is this?

Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, on the public? Yeah, well, guess what? I'm on the public property, too. You want to start some shit with me? Ooh. Ooh. Feisty son of a bitch.

The man's name was Richard Barnard, and he claimed to be an electrician doing some work inside the house. Barnard struck the camera twice with a hammer and once with a screwdriver. But even more unsettling than the attack from Barnard was the reaction of the Clearwater Police Department. The first to arrive on the scene was Officer Terrence Kelly. According to recently released documents, Kelly is one of the police officers who works for Scientology on his days off.

Yes, these are German documentary filmmakers who are here shooting a film about Scientology. They've had several documentaries that have been produced already. They're trying to get an interview with the person in this house here. These two gentlemen, and I came along just to videotape to make sure that nothing happened excuse me yeah I work for the Lisa McPherson trust these fellows came into town and just asked me to come along as backup okay now he wants all your ideas that turned around quick

yeah he did he. He hit the camera. Let me see everybody's ID. There you go. Now, in a moment, I'm going to turn off the video camera after Officer Kelly expresses some concern about it continuing to run. In fact, Officer Kelly was more concerned about my video camera than he was about the hammer attack. After I turned off the camera, Officer Kelly told me it's a felony to record people's voices without their permission.

Oh, boy. In fact, he threatened to arrest me for the footage you just saw. This is pre-George Floyd era, I guess. I told Kelly once again that a man attacked us with a hammer and that I had the whole incident on videotape and I could roll it back and show it to him. Oh, smash it. You better go. I called the cops. His response to me was a question. Did you inform that gentleman with the hammer that you were recording audio? If not, that's a felony. Yeah, well, guess what? I'm on the public property too. You want to start some shit with me? The next officer on the scene was Officer Holsenbach, who also refused to look at the videotape. Holsenbach is one of the regulars working the white lines on Watterson Street.

Scientology pays the officers $21 an hour for a total of $178 per day. They were bought off for $178 a day? Cheap date. If he had, he would have discovered that on this day Richard Bernard gave the police a phony name, a phony birthdate, and a phony social security number. It was only later discovered that Richard Bernard had skipped bail on a cocaine trafficking charge. He is now serving a one-year prison sentence in Key West. Love that. Okay. So, you know, I sincerely believed that these officers weren't bad people or bad officers. But when you're sitting there taking money from them and they're telling you how evil we are, it does tend to influence you.

Oh, yeah. And so that's what we were trying to show with this video. Now, it's 24 years later. This video has been up all this time. It has not been pleasant for the police department. They have been upset about that in the past. They still get guff about it. And everyone thinks that, you know, they're being paid off by Scientology, which is not true.

But I think it's interesting to say that even with this history of the fact that the Clearwater Police FOP endorsed me in this race. Wow. Four years ago, that would not have happened. Or 180. Yeah. The first time I ran, I was this crazy guy going to talk about Scientology. No one wanted to be attached to this at all, except Leah Remini was nice enough to endorse me, and that went a long way. People from around the community that had doubts about me have said, you know, we've been watching you and you got my vote. How do you want to solve this? If you're put on there, obviously you don't have like eminent power to do whatever you want. It's part of the council. But if you could sway your fellow councilmen and all the interested parties in decision-making to come on your side, what would be your solution to the Scientology issue? That's the problem. Finding a solution because it's not easy.

Ultimately, the only thing that's going to really make a difference is if their tax exempt status is revoked. And I think we do need to be, uh, reaching out to folks in Congress to see if we can get some hearings held. Now things have been so nuts over the past many years in Washington, DC that nothing gets done. So that seems like a long shot, But that's something we really need to work on. That there's got to be somebody there we can reach out to to start some hearings. Because what they're doing should not be tax exempt. What about using also with respect to their real estate holdings, all the empty shell places they basically have? What about using some sort of eminent domain?

Eminent domain is something that I've been talking about all along there are a lot of things that that i talked to our city attorney about uh there there are things that you think would be easy solutions but they're not because it's not illegal to buy buildings it's not illegal to leave them empty um eminent domain is something we can use and something we probably will use. But when you do that, you have to use that property for a government use. You can't say, okay, we're taking this property and we want you to put up an Apple store on this location developer. Go ahead and do that. If it's something that is a government use, like we say, we need a parking structure.

We could do that. Because we spent $84 million to put in a really beautiful park down there now and an amphitheater. There's a crushing need for parking. So there are a couple spots that Scientology has that would be ideal for us to take. One I'd like us to use is the Clearwater Marine Aquarium lot. This is back in around 2017, I think it was. The aquarium was going to move downtown. Part of it was going to move downtown on the bluff there, right next to, right behind the Fort Harrison Hotel where Lisa McPherson stayed in the cabana.

David Miscavige wanted that property. The aquarium owned it. Miscavige ruined, sabotaged the plans for the aquarium to open there. And then once they killed that, they then tried to ruin the reputation of the man who was in charge of the aquarium, David Yates. They had a huge campaign to smear him. David Yates and the aquarium decided they're going to sell that lot that Miscavige wants to the city instead of to Miscavige. Miscavige was furious because he was offering like $15 million. The city bought it for $4.5 million. So after that, that's when

Miscavige said, all right. He went radio silent, stopped talking to the city. And in the paper, he said there was a vote with the council about accepting David Miscavige's plans for what he wanted to do for the downtown. He said, you give me that lot and I will put new facades on every store in the area and I will pay for this myself. We've got a guy in Tampa who as a business recruiter, he'll fill up all of these buildings with businesses. All I want is that property." And the council at that point said, no, we don't want you to have it. And he was furious.

He stopped talking to the city. In the paper, he said, I'll wait for the next council. The next council, he got me. Tough shit, Dave. Yeah. So in the meantime, secretly, he was organizing this thing to buy up all the property at two, four, six times the market value. So if we want to use eminent domain to buy one of those properties back, it's going to be at that inflated price. So it costs the city a lot. We can't, you know, they, they spent close to $200 million now to buy property downtown and in the Marina district right nearby.

For us to, to be paying that money to buy everything back, we can't, and there's no use for us that we can't put it to use if we use eminent domain for all of it. So that's a tactical thing that we can use here and there. There's all sorts of other solutions that people are suggesting. Frankly, you know, it's a tough, tough situation. Um, I, I'm going to continue reaching out to state and federal authorities trying to get help. But again, it's just like it was, uh, 20 years ago. People say it's a religion. I think the other problem is, as you said, there's something like only 20,000 to 30,000 people in the religion today, and it's focused more heavily in one town in America. And so looking at it from a DC perspective, they're like, oh, these fucking people are crazy, but it's lower on their totem pole. It's just – to me, that's a lot of people who are unknowingly falling victim to something terrible i'd like

to think that if we could go back and redo the jim jones thing and stop that not to say they've gone that far to like you know have everyone swallow a pill and kill each other but you know things like this can devolve into that you know so when you see something sick like this happening live i feel like there should be some impetus to fix that. But again, it's just priorities. But I'm happy to see someone like you in your local community is taking the bull by the horns and trying to do something. So my position right now is, you know, the city's been talking about a land swap with Scientology for years now. And my feeling is Miscavige has to go first.

And I've gotten that one concession from the city that whatever deal we make is not going to include the aquarium lot. The CMA lot will be held until Miscavige comes through. Got it. And you've never met him, you said, right? You've never been in? No. He seems to be reluctant to meet me because every time there's a meeting with city officials, they say, I'll come. I'll be happy to come and negotiate.

For some reason, I'm not invited. Well, you're going to tower over him. That's probably affecting his ego a little bit. I will stay seated. Eye level. Love it. Yeah. Even seated, I'd tower over him. Yeah, probably.

So before we get out of here, this has been amazing, by the way. You want to talk about people getting an education on what this really is from the grassroots, like you have given it today. So thank you so much for doing this but before we get out of here i don't want to be remiss and forget to go back to the irs thing that's come up like several times and what that was can you just explain like how deep scientology went to i kind of go to war with the oh yeah they did they they declared war in fact they declared the war was over when they got the IRS to buckle. And if you go online, you'll see on my channel a very lengthy video from Marty Rathbun where he talks about some of the ways Scientology – well, wait a minute. No, I'm thinking about a video about the Lisa McPherson case. He talks about some of the ways Scientology – well, wait a minute. I'm thinking about a video about the Lisa McPherson case.

He was revealing a lot of things about how they botched – how they were able to kill the Lisa McPherson case, which is really interesting to hear. On the IRS thing, he was there. I don't think I put any video of that part of the interview up. But they went all out to have this campaign where they were doing – Miscavige actually did like a 30-minute infomercial about the evils of the IRS. And what was the impetus of it? Like why was he going to war with the IRS? Because they thought they were going to lose their tax-exempt status? They did not have their tax-exempt status. They were fighting for it.

Oh, okay. There were long periods where they did not have it. Um, and the IRS was going to charge them for back taxes that would have bankrupted the place. So Miscavige had to pull out all the stops. They were following individual IRS agents around. They, they put together programs where if you were a whistleblower, you should report to them and expose IRS crimes. And they put out full-page ads in newspapers attacking the IRS and the commissioner. Finally, at the end, there were like a thousand lawsuits from individual Scientologists filed in one week. And the IRS commissioner met with them and said, all right, if we give it to you, will you call off all these lawsuits? And Miscavige said, sure, absolutely.

And that's what happened. The guy said, all right, uncle, you can have it. Stop with the harassment. Wow. And, you know, that's pretty remarkable. A religion like this of not many people could do that to the IRS. Not many people, but a lot of money. And that's what it takes.

Yeah. And when was that again? Roughly? That was, I think, 95. Wow. I believe. what it takes yeah and when was that again uh that was i think 95 wow i believe it's crazy that these aren't bigger stories well i mean that was it was a big story but it's ignored in history you know what i mean it may be but yeah it gets it spurt at the moment you know leia goes on joe rogan six years gets its spurt at the moment. You know, Leia goes on, Joe Rogan six years ago got a spurt at the moment, right? Sure. She does a documentary, gets a spurt at the moment.

But then it kind of shuffles away. Like, oh, yeah, that thing, Scientology. Sure. It's going to take something major for actions to be taken. All we can do is keep pushing for it. And that's what I'm continuing to do Well, keep on keeping on You're doing some amazing work

Your channel has incredible content From really the last 25 years on there So again, we'll put that link in the description And this episode is going to be coming out Right around the time of your election On March 19th So I wish you all the best in that down in Clearwater. And I hope to see that you end up getting co-support on your council to

work on some of these measures and hopefully get some attention on it nationally so there can be a little top-down help. That'd be very, very cool. Yeah, it would be nice. I wish we had four council members and a mayor who were willing to take them on like in the good old days. So far, it's me against the giant. All right, guys, come on. Let's get on board, everybody. Let's do it. Mark, thanks, sir. Thank you. Appreciate you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show

at Julian Dory podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.