If you’re on Twitter or Facebook, depending on where you live or what you’ve “liked,” lately you may have seen several promoted tweets and sponsored posts put out by the Church of Scientology disparaging the reputation of Scientology leader David Miscavige’s father, Ron Miscavige, himself a longtime Scientologist who left the Church in 2012. The senior Miscavige has recently published a rather damning tell-all memoir, Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me, about his sociopathic seed and the authoritarian sci-fi religion of which he is the “ecclesiastical leader.” The Co$ social media alerts wanted to make sure that you’re aware of some things in his past to discredit him as his book climbs up with NY Times bestseller list. Miscavige Sr.‘s story was featured on a riveting recent segment of ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine as well, something I think it’s pretty safe to say that his thin-skinned, used-to-getting-his-own-way, nasty-little-man son didn’t like very much.
 

 
But this barrage of promoted posts and tweets had rather the opposite effect on me than what the Church intended. It caused me instead to vaguely remember seeing a curious videotape back in the early 1990s where David Miscavige told an audience in Los Angeles that their messiah, Lafayette Ron Hubbard, had shuffled off this mortal coil, except that he put it in such a fucking ridiculous and utterly preposterously jargon-filled manner that his elite OT-level mumbo-jumbo became simply breath-taking to watch. The same guy who first showed me Heavy Metal Parking Lot had this tape. The Co$ tweet reminded me that I should share this video with our readers. (Thanks Scientology!) Of course it was on YouTube. Just skip around to various points in the video and play it down for a moment. But do watch how he beats around the bush of just saying “THE OLD MAN IS DEAD” in the first few minutes, it’s hilarious.
 

 
Now if you’ve never watched a film of Miscavige’s guru/mentor, it’s a truly fascinating—but ultimately absolutely soporific—thing to behold. L. Ron Hubbard was a master—there was simply none better—of saying absolutely NOTHING—it’s all just made-up things and half-baked concepts taken from early 20th century occult and self-help books festooned with a layer of obscure “terminology” and bald-faced bullshit—and yet playing it off as if his audience knows precisely what he’s talking about. They don’t. No one does. Existing films of Hubbard speaking directly to camera reveal a smirking, supercilious con artist who seemingly had a strategy of confusing—or perhaps trying to convince via their own self-perceived intellectual shortcomings—his audience into believing that they are hearing something of great philosophical value, but that they are still too unenlightened to understand all the terminology and “tech” talk. Mind control as an intellectual jujitsu move: Use the target’s doubts as a means to pull their strings. As the inventor and author of this meaningless jargon and the endless stream of pointless acronyms it takes to “understand” his threadbare philosophy, Hubbard assumed an authority even the most audacious con artists daren’t dream of.
 

 
Much of what Hubbard says in the first five minutes of the 1968 Granada TV documentary The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard (above) makes about this much sense. But hey, if you’ll just take a few of these Scientology “courses” all will be revealed, in due course, in some expensive courses with payment due in full or installment plans. In some of his “upper level” lectures of the late 1960s Hubbard rants and raves like he’s foaming at the fucking mouth. Naturally his audience would laugh nervously at all of his speedfreak “jokes,” because if they didn’t chuckle at the Master’s unfunny remarks it meant that they weren’t “in” on something. You see how this sort of anxious dipshit groupthink might work? They were all so invested in not looking like fools that they became the biggest fools of all. The anxiety of “not getting it” serves to reinforce the Emperor’s new clothes flavor of Scientology’s groupthink. It’s evil, yet brilliant, but for it to work, the victims would need to be chosen carefully—or better still—self-selected and then vetted with a personality test followed up with some confessions whilst they were hooked up to a lie detector test!
 

 
One can only imagine how desperately certain postwar Americans wanted to shed their Christianity and felt that something called “Scientology” might suit them better than the old time religion they were raised on. But there’s an inescapable element of “we’re the only ones who get it” that seems to me to be essential to the cult’s appeal.
 

 
Hubbard’s innovations as a con man artist are undeniable—what criminal in history has ever come close to achieving his big score? No mere Three Card Monte dealer he, Hubbard was a genius at separating fools from their money. And then making them serve him like his own private army—sorry—naval force. LRH figured out early that PT Barnum was right and a sucker is born every minute. And from time immemorial religions have never had a shortage of new victims lining up to be exploited either. Combining the two? Remarkable! But it—the whole Scientology gestalt—as successful a tax free con as it has obviously been, is really not a particularly sophisticated one. The particulars can be pretty crude and It only works on dummies ultimately. It’s a “belief system” (or self-help religion if you prefer) for stupid people, broken people, friendless people, losers, and feeble-minded rubes. The whole thing is so patently idiotic on the surface—or at least it should be seen as such—that anyone even remotely competent and self-possessed would just walk right past a folding table staffed by someone in a fake navy uniform offering them a FREE PERSONALITY TEST. Unless… unless they wondered if Scientology really did have some sort of “secret teaching”... But only an idiot would take the time to ponder that, wouldn’t they? BINGO! Step right up, step right up: We have found our next mark.
 

 
In the 1970s Scientology was even trying to recruit via disco dances. I have several crude lime green flyers advertising these nightclub-style events out in my garage. They weren’t slick at all, laid out with tape, glue and press type, not even typeset. Some were hand-lettered. These were meant to be tacked up on bulletin boards in coffee shops, bookstores, drug treatment centers and laundromats. It’s passed off like something akin to EST but with “a night of mingling and disco dancing with like-minded singles under the stars at the Scientology Celebrity Centre.” (If they told you it was a “soul-sucking authoritarian Amway™ operation with vast real estate holdings along Hollywood Blvd” would you have still rushed to put on your boogie shoes?)
 

 
I lived for a few years in the mid 90s near Hollywood Blvd. The Sea Org Scientologists—the “elite” ones in the goofy naval uniforms who’ve signed billion year contracts with the Co$—were a common sight, not just manning the personality evaluation sites set up in front of the various Scientology centers along the touristy strip, but also in some of the cheap (now long gone) greasy spoon breakfast joints that dotted the landscape near the Co$ owned buildings where they worked for pttance wages. I made it a sport—no really, it was a hobby of mine, a true pastime I promise you—to eavesdrop on their conversations as often as possible. I’d go straight to the booth or table nearest the Scientologists and shamelessly eavesdrop on their conversations. I did this deliberately, but it was next to impossible to avoid listening to their conversations in some of these places anyway. It was really something I discovered without meaning to. I was just eating breakfast. They were the ones having the loud, animated and incredibly bitchy discussions in a near empty diner. Two Sea Ogres at a time was optimal. Larger groups were less interesting. A conversation between just two of them could get revealing in ways that even a third person present would put a damper on..
 

 
There were two uniformed Sea Org members—both women—who I’d see constantly in one of my local “eggs and coffee for $1” morning haunts. They were short, squat spinsters with bad glasses and bad hair. They looked like a couple of defeated middle-aged Tina Belchers if she had joined some rich weirdo’s private navy. You could just tell from looking at them that they were low level dogsbody Scientologists. I probably pretended to read the Los Angeles Times while giggling to myself behind it over what these two talked about at least forty times over a two year period. And although I will say again that I was actively listening and eavesdropping on their conversation, theses two—who I only WISH I’d have been able to tape secretly Shut Up, Little Man!-style—would speak loudly about their fellow Scientologists in the meanest and most cutting ways. I came to the conclusion early on that they were both completely insane, probably roommates and potentially borderline homicidal. If they’d have sat there and plotted a murder together in one of those booths, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest. Many of the times I’d listen in on two Scientologists talking—not just them, but they were the worst—it seemed obvious that the Org must’ve bred not only extreme paranoia in its members (those billion year loyalty pledges must’ve chafed at times) but also that it was apparently only successful at attracting bitter shitty people who wanted to look down upon others. It was the common thread among them: They were all basically assholes, people who felt poorly about themselves, yet who felt—or wanted desperately to feel—a sense of superiority over the rest of mankind. Perversely they also seemed to desire some sort of fellowship with others who felt the same way and who, you would think, were not a whole lot of fun to be around. (The other subset of low level Scientologists I’d simply describe as “gullible” or if I wanted to be charitable, “seekers” although I think their numbers have dwindled over the past two decades. Sadly I’ve never been able to observe the more predatory Scientologists at the upper levels firsthand except in passing.)
 

 
If you’re wondering what are the common psychological and moral traits that the Scientology personality test uncovers, I took it once in Boston when I was maybe 16 or 17, in the early 1980s. At that time (and I doubt this has changed much) it was a rather long test that transparently aimed to get to you reveal if you were someone who considered yourself a “follower” rather than a “leader”; if you were someone who thought they got pushed around a lot in life, but you were okay with this; were you an easily exploitable dumbass and would your parents try to sue if you joined the Co$? I figured this out, not in retrospect, but as I was taking the test. It wasn’t subtle! When I finished, my test was scored by a Nigerian guy with big teeth—he was a real life Eddie Murphy character—who had been in the US for three weeks and in Scientology for two of them. I know this because I will never forget what he said to me as he grinned his toothy smile:

“I have been in US for three weeks and in Scientology for two of them AND I LOVE IT!”

The poor guy hardly spoke any English, but I heard him say the above statement several times in the hour or so that I spent in his proximity and it’s always stuck with me for some reason.
 

‘South Park’ on what Scientologists actually believe…