TRANSCRIPT:
Okay, so, what they do pursuant to the techniques of Going Clear —Lawrence Wright, Alex Gibney, Mike Rinder—is collapse the time track and they devote a tremendous amount of weight to the Guardian’s Office, okay, that was disbanded in 1981 at the orders of Hubbard, at the direction of Miscavige, in which Mike Rinder and I participated in, okay.
But they’re all communicating that as if this is the existing mechanism and methodology of Scientology. And Mike Rinder says, “OSA got created in the place of the GO.” And he says, “What did not change is the policy.” Now, when Mike Rinder was my boy Friday throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, he spent literally thousands of hours go-for’ing—for the first five years, ferreting out and cancelling every policy that had any bearing whatsoever on the Guardian’s Office, okay.
They segue away from the Guardian’s Office to the IRS event in 1993, where David Miscavige announces that the IRS has granted exemption to all Scientology entities, right. Mike Rinder, quote, this is what he says about the event: “You will see David Miscavige take the stage and laud actions that were taken to destroy the enemies of Scientology.”
It’s not that event. That’s not what that event is about. The only use of the word enemy was the disclosure to the Scientology parishioners, that we discovered through the Freedom of Information Act, that Scientology was considered an enemy of the IRS. And that it was in writing because it was on Richard Nixon’s enemy list. Which was specifically members—organizations on the Richard Nixon enemies list were designated for harassment by the IRS and the FBI under the COINTELPRO program, the counter intelligence program in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the IRS by unlawfully and unconstitutionally revoking tax exemption.
That was the only mention of “enemies.” There was no mention of Scientology’s enemies. There was mention that they considered us their enemy. And of course, the whole point of the entire thing was—well, I’ll get to that, because there’s another quote that is relevant.
So, Leah [Remini] jumps in, “They had a full-blown attack launched at the IRS but more importantly, the actual IRS employees,” right. Well, I’ve covered this in a previous talk that I did, okay. It was that Tony Ortega, I think, added that into the Going Clear thing. It’s a complete fallacy. Nobody was attacked individually, and Rinder then clarifies that by saying that individuals were sued. Well, I covered this already. There were a number of lawsuits—nobody individually had to defend themselves. In certain causes of action you must name the individual, period. The government covers it. The government indemnifies it, okay. So that’s a fallacy.
“There were 2,500 lawsuits,” they say. Mike Rinder says, “People were cheering.” First, they were cheering because one in four of the 10,000 people, one out of every four of the 10,000 people that were at the Sports Arena for that event, were plaintiffs in those law suits that were brought for unconstitutional activity and discriminating against them solely on the basis that they were Scientologists, okay. And the announcement that they had attained the relief for the lawsuits they brought. So, you can’t have it both ways.
Look, the event was two and a half hours of the whole history of the IRS’s discriminatory attack on Scientology, okay, and how it was overcome. And the message was, “The war is over, we’re at peace.” And I think he even said at the end of it, “I actually consider these people friends now,” okay. That’s how false this statement is by Rinder, okay. So, I mean, it’s literally the reverse. If people had ideas that they had to be aggressive to go fight the enemies of Scientology, that was dissuaded at that event. He’s literally given the exact opposite of the purpose and the content of that event.
