Part Two: L. Ron Hubbard: The Greatest Con-Man In History

In Part Two of our Three Part Series on L. Ron Hubbard, Robert is joined again by Caitlin Durante (The Bechdel Cast) to discuss how L. Ron Hubbard lived the life of Indiana Jones, mixed with Steve Zizou, as well as mixed with the Prophet Mohammed. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show that tells you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, this is part two of our epic
three part series on l Ron Hubbard. If you haven't
listened to part one, I recommend doing that now for
those of you who are back for part two, you're
listening to this the day after part one has dropped,

(00:20):
but we are recording them all in one terrible marathon
fell sloop. So you're at us in the point. If
this were an actual marathon, this is about mile five,
where you're starting to feel good, You've hit a stride,
you're happy with the progress. But midway through this is
when we're going to hit our wall and it's just
gonna break us, both as human beings and as creative artists.

(00:41):
So that should be really exciting for all you people.
And then the third episode, we won't even be human beings,
will just be shattered remnants of souls hanging on to
me in Grahams in meat packing. Anyway, you ready, let's
do this. So people regularly message me on Twitter to
suggest new candidates for episodes of this podcast. Sometimes their

(01:03):
suggestions are spot on, and I do appreciate them. But
I get a lot of people who will love so
just shitty people like Ben Shapiro or Rand Paul or
Brett Kavanaugh, and I'm not going to do an episode
one of these people because while they're shitty, they're all
kind of lame um like, they're not interesting in a
bad way. We all know the ways in which they're bad.
Like Brett Kavanaugh. Everybody thinks he's bad, understands everything about

(01:24):
him is a shitty person. That's public knowledge. I like
to cover people who are shitty and exceptional, and that's
why I picked el Ron Hubbard this week because I
really do think We talked about this a little in
the first episode. I think he may be the greatest
con man who ever lived. So today is a story
about we. We ended the last episode with the establishment
of Dianetics as a science is kind of how he

(01:45):
build it. You can think of like anyone Jordan Peterson.
He's like that sort of guy where he you know,
normally a guy like that gets six months a year
of prominence or so right where everybody loves their new
pop philosophy book. And then we just sort of shovel
them into the coal fire of our culture and forget
about them and move on. Another year. Someone else will
come up and we'll we'll all be obsessed with that

(02:06):
for a little while. L Ron Hubbard avoided letting that
happen to him, and this episode is the story of
how of how he fought against falling into obscurity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you want to become a guru and then transmit
that guru nous into starting your own world religion, this
is the first class you've got to take on that.
Because el Ron Hubbard is the Master. Well there's that.

(02:30):
That's why that movie is called The Master. Yeah, I
just got it. The Master just got it. Okay. So
within two months of publishing Dionetics, more than five different
dionetics groups had started across the United States. Out run
Hubbard began offering classes in dionetics that were like dollars
apiece um and holding you know, conferences. He established different

(02:51):
centers in different states and whatnot foundations he called them,
and the money started pouring in. Hubbard's work developed a
rapid fan base who blanketed newspapers with angry letters when
they provided critical commentary. It was sort of like an
early example of what now happens every time anyone insults
anybody popular like the first edition of the Elon Musk's
Internet hate mob was l Ron Hubbard's fans of dionetics

(03:13):
sending angry letters to the New York Times. One of
the heads of Hubbard's troll brigade was a political science
professor from Massachusetts named Frederick Schumann, and one letter to
The New York Times, he wrote, history has become a
race between dionetics and catastrophe. Dionetics will win if enough
people are challenged in time to understand it. Now. The
reason that people thought this was so important was because

(03:35):
el Ron Hubbard had claimed that dionetics was not just
a path to personal betterment, it was a way to
cure people of mental illness, of psychopathy, and but also
it was a way too If everyone did dionetics, if
everybody became clear, Hubbard said, there'd be no more war.
And this was again, you're talking about nineteen fifty. The
specter of nuclear extermination has just arisen for the first time,
so people are freaked out that like, we're going to

(03:57):
murder the whole species, which we probably will at some point,
Hubbard is claiming, with dianetics, we can denuclearise the world.
We can all live in peace. You know, this is
what will save humanity from the darkness of the Cold
War in America. Ate it up. For the first time
in his life, run Hubbard became the focus of national attention,
which is clearly what he'd wanted his entire life. So

(04:17):
suddenly he was being interviewed by a lot of journalists
and newsmen, and of course they asked him about his
childhood and his background. And this is when he was
held all about I was a blood brother of the
Blackfoot tribe across the country, sound gold, I was a
pirate of the Caribbean. What's your life? If you were
to write like a Twitter post tomorrow that becomes the

(04:39):
Bible of the world six months later for some crazy
piece of Internet outcome. Suddenly suddenly everybody's talking to Caitlyn
Durrani and wants to know, like, would you grow up?
What's the lie you choose to tell? Oh? God, I mean,
I'm just such an honest person that I can't even
make up a line. I'm never going to have your
own religion with that attitude. I think the closest thing

(04:59):
I would would be that I'm from punk Satani, Pennsylvania,
the home of the Groundhog. Of course that's a lame line,
I know, but the truth is that I'm from a
town about twenty miles away. But it's just easier to say, yeah,
I'm from punk Sati. That's not even a lie. That's like,

(05:21):
that's like growing up in Mesa and claiming you live
in Phoenix, Like it's You're just making it easy for somebody.
I'm just so brutally honest that I can't even fathom lying.
Let me tell you how I do it. My lie
would yes, okay, So Abu Bakr al Bag Daddy, the
founder of isis probably dead, right, so I would just
lie and say I killed him because I was over
in Iraq around that time, so there's a kernel of truth.

(05:43):
It's easy enough to make up the rest of the lie,
and nobody who doesn't fact check that would be my lie.
If the Internet wasn't here, it would be easier. The
Internet exists, would be easy to prove it wrong. But
if there's like nineteen fifty I could probably lie and
make people believe that. It's so hard to fact check
in the pre Internet. Yeah, there's everyone's just like I
guess he was a blood I'm not gonna ask a
Blackfoot Indian about whether or not they have blood brothers.

(06:06):
Talk to somebody who's not white. No, sir, this is
the New York Times, although in fairness the New York Times,
they were actually very critical of Hubber and I. I
picked the name of the newspaper, and I slandered the
great lady. Let's get back to the story before I
commit slander again. So l Ron Hubbard started, in addition
to lying about his background, claiming that all of his
years of work as a trashy sci fi writer and

(06:27):
his globe trotting adventures were all research. You know, this
was him studying human psychology and the human mind in
order to develop his revolutionary new philosophy. All of his
you know, his travels, his adventures that were not real
were him studying history and ancient cultures to figure out
the kernels of truth. He told Parade magazine that he'd
had a child with his new wife, Sarah Hubbard, which

(06:48):
was true. He claimed that the child was the world's
first dianetics baby. He claimed to have protected her from
noise and even parental conversations in order to keep her
from developing any ingrams. As a result of this, he
said she'd started talking at three months and crawling it
four months. It's going to get terrible neglected his baby
by like not talking to it or well, if I

(07:08):
know anything about babies, it's that they thrive when isolated
and neglected. Yes, I think that everyone says that about babies. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah,
that's why most cradles are just dark rooms in the basement.
That's how you raise again. Uh. Just a few months
after the debut of Dianetics onto the world stage, I'll Run,
Hubbard introduced Sonya Bianca as the world's first clear He

(07:29):
claimed that she had quote full and perfect recall of
every moment of her life, and then brought her out
in front of an audience to prove it. Unfortunately, Sonia
was just a twenty one year old physics major who
did not have perfect recall of her entire life. So
the audience immediately started asking your stuff, like what did
you have for breakfast on October three nine, what's on
page one twenty two of Dianetics? And she couldn't answer

(07:49):
any of this. Yeah, at least get like an improv actor.
Oh yeah, I had an omelet someone to lie right. Yeah.
At one point Hubbard turned his back and someone asked
her what color Taiwa's and she couldn't even answer that.
This is like, it's a debacle this first attempt to
reveal it clear, but it teaches Hubbard a powerful lesson
which has never ever put yourself into position where people

(08:11):
can prove you're wrong. Like, if you're gonna hold events
and stuff, you've got a stage. Manage that ship so
that it goes exactly the way you want. He would
be more careful in the future. He did come up
with insane dionetics logic to justify why she hadn't been
able to perfectly recall everything. He said that when he
had called her up and asked her to come out now,
the word now had frozen her in present time and
temporarily interrupted her perfect memory. That makes sense to me.

(08:36):
The mental gymnat back on board. So the whole event
was a debacle, but it hardly put a dent in
the progress of dionetics. Less than a year, the new
science had made enough money to buy a four and
a half million dollar mansion in Los Angeles. So Hubbard
could manage his new operation in style. It was the
old California governor's mansion, which is weird because the capital
is not in Los Angele. I don't know why we

(08:57):
had a governor's mansion in l but he bought it.
All that money attracted attention from the government and from
the media. There were from this point on kind of
regular looks into him from the FBI and stuff, just
because like he's making a lot of money, he's not
paying taxes on a lot of it. He's being very
shady with it. Barbara Kay worked with him at this time.
She was a pr assistant for Mr. Hubbard. She later

(09:18):
noted in interviews that quote, he was having a lot
of political and organizational problems with people grabbing for power.
He didn't trust anyone, and he was highly paranoid. He
thought the CIA had hitman after him. We'd be walking
along the street and I would ask, why are you
walking so fast. He would look over his shoulder and say,
you don't know what it's like to be a target.
No one was after him. It was all delusion. Good
Barbara would go on to have an affair with Hubbard,

(09:39):
who had since lost that interest in his second wife, Sarah.
The two work closely together and often traveled together so
the Great Leader could administer the far flung chunks of
his burgeoning new empire. At one point, he leased an
apartment at the Chateau Marmont for them to share. In
order to reassure Barbara of their relationship, Ron walked her
through the apartment and said, this is your closet, This
is your dressing table, this is your or toothbrush. Two

(10:01):
days later, she found all of her possessions that she
left in the apartment on a bag at her desk.
Ron Hubbard's wife, Sarah, and their baby had moved to
Los Angeles, and Hubbard had put them up in the apartment.
He'd ridded it for himself and Barbara. Later in the day,
he apologized to her, called his wife a bitch, and
said I miss you. Then he asked her to have
dinner with him and his wife that night, with his
wife present. Yeah. Yeah, he wanted to have dinner with

(10:25):
him so she wouldn't think that he was having an
affair with Barbara, all right, I understand. In her interviews
with Russell Miller, Barbara admitted that she felt almost uncontrolled
be drawn towards el Ron Hubard because you would get
pissed him a lot for being a creep. But quote,
I was completely infatuated. I remember I said to my roommate,
we had a small apartment in Beverly Hills, if I
ever tell you I am marrying this guy, I want

(10:46):
you to tie me up and not let me out
the door because he's a lunatic. But I didn't trust
myself not to do it because I was so enchanted
by him. Being with him was like watching a fascinating
character playing a role on a stage. I was never
bored with him. He was a magical, delightful man, a
great wreck on tour, very bright and amusing, and a
very gentle, patient and sweet lover. Oh so he has
learned to fush. Yeah, she says he's learned to fun

(11:08):
and she clearly recognizes he's a nut, so she has
no reason to lie about this. I'm going to guess
he'd learned how to fuck him. So everyone, good news.
L Ron Hubbard learned to fuck. That's a T shirt.
That's a T shirt. Someone do some art for our
l Ron Hubbard learned to fund shirt so we can
get really sued by the Church of Scientology, like ludicrously

(11:31):
sued N Hubbard condoms. Maybe l Ron Hubbard. Dental Damn,
that's the one. He was a general lover. That's what
dental Damn says. Here's Barbara again. At the time, I
recognized early on that he was also deeply disturbed. Some
of the things he told me were really bizarre, but
I never knew what to believe. He said his mother

(11:52):
was a lesbian, and that he had found her in
bed with another woman, and that he had been born
as the result of an attempted abortion. He talked a
lot about his grandfather, who could really hold his liquor
and played a fiddle with the head of a Negro
carved on the end. But he never talked about his father,
and never once mentioned he had children. I did not
know he had a son until I read it in
the newspapers years later. There's a lot in that paragraph. Also,

(12:13):
wasn't the fiddle a guitar? Was a guitar? But he's
just lying about his instruments. They have forgotten what kind
of instrument with a weirdly racist carving his grandfather head.
I don't know. I'm gonna give him a pass on
that one that's so close to the truth that it
counts as honesty out of l. Ron Hubbard's mouth. Yes,
I don't even know what to say about the part

(12:35):
of what this makes me think is that maybe he
did think that his mom had tried to abort him.
I heard no evidence of this, but he seems to
be obsessed with the idea, so maybe he thought that.
I don't know. Well, Also, like he was, as we
heard in part one, like the beloved, like baby, like
everyone loved him in the family, So like what that,
it does seem and I think this will become clear

(12:56):
that he had a persecution complex. There's part of him
that wanted to be hunted, that wanted the offer mine
after him. So he may have just had a really
happy family life and wanted to invent like this dark
back story for himself because his real life was kind
of boring. At one point, Barbara went with him to
San Francisco and they attended a welcoming party at the
house of a local dioneticist who adored l. Ron Hubbard.

(13:17):
Barbara caught the Great Man in the kitchen making out
with the host's wife. When they got back to the hotel,
she refused to sleep with Hubbard, and he shouted, they're
all against me. Yo n By the Winter of Dionetics
had grown way way too fast for its bridges. Hubbard

(13:38):
had established too many schools and too many places, and
they couldn't cover their own bills. He'd also hired way
too many people. Dr Winter, the guy who'd helped make
Dionetics look legitimate, left the organization after several people developed
psychoses during auditing. One attendee turns out, you can damage
people by doing this. Yeah, have an untrained people try
to do psychotherapy. It's a mixed bag. Lesson learned lesson.

(14:03):
They didn't less this lesson flew way over everybody's head
and still has um. One attendee of a Dionetic center
in Elizabeth, New Jersey, noted quote people had breakdowns quite often.
It was always hushed up before anyone found out about it.
Happened to a guy in my course, a chemical engineer.
They wanted to get him out of the school, and
I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building.

(14:25):
He never slept her eight and was in a terrible state.
No one could do anything with him, and in the
end they took him off to an asylum. Yeah. Yeah,
So Dr Winter leaves, and a number of the people
who had first think Campbell starts distancing himself from all
of us. At this point, a number of people who

(14:45):
had been backers of Dionetics sort of step away after
because Hubbard just immediately goes to like crazy gurup, like
right away, because he'd been waiting for this his whole life.
Which guy's Campbell again, Campbell's the editor of the science
fiction editor who was like a fan of his. Yeah.
When Dr went or left, Hubbard announced that the doctor
had been engaged in a scheme to take over the
foundation um rather than just him being like, no, this

(15:07):
isn't wearing it out, so he can't take accountability for anything.
Oh good lord, No, no, no, l Ron Hubbard take
acountability for something that is not the story we're reading.
Yeah cool, it sounds like this is going to end
really well. So problems with Dionetics were compounded by Hubbard's
problems at home. In nine, his wife Sarah attempted suicide.

(15:29):
Elron audited her afterwards and claimed to have recovered an
ingraham that told him his wife's suicide attempt had been
caused by a phone call from Barbara about work related business.
Hubbard interrogated Barbara about this, and she actually wrote a
record of the conversation in her diary. And it's pretty
fun me, Barbara. You make a habit of instilling in
Graham's too, don't you. That's fine, that's good behavior for

(15:51):
the founder of dianetics, Hubbard. Isn't it exciting for you
being a pond of such a grand chessboard? You are
playing for the world. Can you think of anything more exciting? Barbara?
I don't give a good goddamn about the world. I
want a single, gratifying human relationship. Yeah, Hubbard, you couldn't
have one. You're an ambitious woman. You crave power. You're
a Marie Antoinette at Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia. You must have

(16:13):
a Caesar or an Alexander. You get the idea. She
told him he needed her more than she needed him,
and he responded in nineteen thirty nine, I was very
much in love with the girl. She felt that way too.
When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I
waited on the stairway with a gun just for a moment.
Then I said, they are flies. I realized who and
what I was and left. I told her I would
leave her free to marry a sharpie with a cigar

(16:33):
in his mouth from Muncie, Indiana. Would you like to
be left free? So Hubbard, I don't understand that either.
This is just how Ron Hubbard response to someone trying
to break up with him. I guess I don't know.
I could not find out what a sharpie with a
cigar in his mouth means as an insult. I mean,
I understand why Muncy, Indiana as an insult. And if

(16:57):
there's any fans from Muncy, Indiana, let me know I've offended. No,
we do have a lot of Pittsburgh fans, and I'm
gonna give another shout out to Pittsburgh. It has no
bearing on this story, but not too far from punk
Sitani where I'm from. Ah, you're nah. So this seems
to have prompted al Ron Hubbard to fire Barbara and

(17:17):
break off the affair temporarily, although he would try to
re engage it a couple of times. His marriage, though,
was already doomed. At that point. His wife Sarah, had
begun to date a dianetic sist named Miles Hollister, who
she had met when Hubbard had forced his mistress to
go on a double date with him and his wife,
and she brought Miles along, and his wife wound up
with Miles. It's a messy tale, um and Miles was

(17:38):
apparently like a handsome, nice, intelligent guy, so Hubbard was
obviously furious at all of this. It was around this
point in when l Ron Hubbard decided to start drugging
his followers, based on nothing really. He came to the
conclusion that a mix of Ben's adrine, which is a
type of speed, insane, doses of vitamins, and glutamc acid
would help make auditing more effective. He called this chemical

(18:00):
mixture g u K. According to his agent, you were
supposed to take it every two hours for at least
twenty four hours, so it was like really crazy doses
of speed and vitamins and taking enough would allow you
to release the ingrams within you without the need for
an auditor. So that was Hubbard's claim. It didn't work out.
Dianetics quickly abandoned this practice, but Elron Hubbard never gave
up on the idea of dosing people with absurd amounts

(18:21):
of vitamins to gain unspecified you need it. In the
late seventies, after Scientology was established the church, he developed
a variety of Scientology focused rehab centers Narconon for drugs,
criminal for crimes, just to name two. One treatment method
used in these programs was the purification rundown or still is, which, yeah,

(18:44):
it's basically you sit in a sauna for days and
take huge amounts of vitamins. Multiple people have died in
these facilities for a variety of reasons. One Oklahoma facility
lost four patients in the space of three years. So
don't do that. Overdose on give people fatal doses and
vitamins for no good reason. But you know what, you
should take fatal doses of. That's not the right way

(19:06):
to introduce ads. You know you should take the right
amount of is the ads that we have. I'm gonna
eat a derrito. You guys can, by the way, the
simply organic white cheddar Dorrito's really good, really tasty. Here's
some ads that paid us and we're back. We're back,

(19:30):
and I just ate a couple of white cheddar organic derritos. Delicious.
I'm not really focused on the organic thing normally. I
can't imagine how organic would be different from normal derritos
because it's all very processed. But it's good. I think
it might just be the white cheddar is a flavor
I like a lot, and these white cheddar Doritos are
fucking fantastic. Yeah, Well are the cool ranch? Are those

(19:53):
white cheddar? Is that something different? It's cool ranch? What
do you mean? What do you mean is that something different? Well,
there's gonna be cheese involved in the Look, we have
three bags of Doritos on the table right now. They've
given us zero dollars. We have three more bags than
dollars we've gotten from the Dorrito's people. I should stop

(20:13):
plugging them at this point. I'm now pushing three bags
of Dorrito's towards Caitlin. They're all right here in front
of me, uncomfortably, So you look uncomfortable. I'll explore these later,
explores the right word for it. And you know who
would have appreciated the adventurous taste of doritos, Ron Hubbard?

(20:34):
It would be famed explorer l Ron Hubbard. This is
not going to help our sponsorship, but we're off the
rails now. Fuck it. I'll unfunck it if I'll do
a whole podcast on how l Ron Hubbard would not
have enjoyed the flavorful taste of doritos if if the

(20:55):
Dorrito's people get in touch with us, is that good? Okay,
let's get back to this story. So when we last
left el Ron Hubbard, he'd broken things off with his
wife and his his mistress, and yeah, it's nineteen fifty one.
He tried to drug his followers, but it hadn't worked
very well and um later in nineteen fifty one, the
New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners started what would become
a decades long pattern of state and national agencies investigating

(21:17):
el Ron Hubbard's activities. They accused his facility and Elizabeth
of teaching medicine without a license, and they brought a
suit against him. In response, Hubbard closed up shop because
he knew he was going to lose any sort of
legal battle because he was teaching medicine without a license,
And they left New Jersey. Everything he owned was shoved
into the back of a black limousine and they drove
to Los Angeles. Oddly enough, Greg Hemingway, youngest son of

(21:41):
Ernest Hemingway, was one of the dianeticists who packed el
Ron Hubbard stuff. Greg It's weird because Ernest Hemingway sounds
like an author name, like it just has that, probably
because of his way, but it still has greg Like
as a father, you're really sabotaging your kid from flowing
in your footsteps. Gregory. I mean, you need more than

(22:03):
one syllabley, even Gregory. I'd never read a book from Gregory.
That's such an untrustworthy name. No, I mean I wouldn't. Michael,
there's a book name. Oh, come on, that's just too generic.
Sorry for all you Michael's out there. You want a
generic first name and an exciting last name like Michael Crichton.
Michael Crichton. There you go, exactly the most trustworthy writer, Yes,

(22:27):
in history. He didn't turn out to be crazy or anything.
You know what, I'll forgive everything he did after Jurassic
Park because of Jurassic Park. You and I are on
the same page. But yeah, that was a not as
bad at ascent as this cheesy sci fi author, but
pretty rough. In case you don't know, Michael Crichton spent
his later years writing a whole book about how global

(22:49):
warming was a lie, and also writing one of the
critics who badly reviewed his books into one of his
novels as a pedophile and describing the critics small penis
Michael Crichton classy fella. Oh boy. Okay, So the marriage
of el Ron Hubbard and Sarah Northrop fell apart as
he was fleeing New Jersey. He knew that there was

(23:11):
going to be a divorce, and since he was now
quite wealthy, there was a lot of money at stake
in order to secure more favorable divorce terms. What do
you think Elron Hubbard did in order to ensure that
he would have the upper hand in the coming divorce battle. Well,
he's not known for lying, so I don't imagine he
did anything dishonest. So I would guess that, you know,

(23:31):
he just parted with half of his money and assets
um amicably. No. Oh shoot, fun fact, he kidnapped his
daughter Alexis and took her to Cuba. Yes, I remember
this clear. Well, he didn't immediately take her to Cuba. First,
he kidnapped her and paid a random nurse to take

(23:52):
care of her for a month, and then kidnapped his wife.
Once the baby was already taking care of He and
two of us fall where kidnapped his wife physically forced
her into the vehicle. According to bare Face Messiah, they
grabbed her by each arm, one of them clamped a
hand over her mouth, and they bustled her out of
the house across the sidewalking into the back of the car,
which drove off as speed. Sarah fought like a cat

(24:14):
in the back of the car, screaming and shouting at Hubbard,
who in turn was shouting at her. At one point,
when the car stopped at traffic lights, she tried to
releap out, and thereafter Hubbard gripped her around the neck
in a stranglehold while the argument continued. Yeah, okay, feminist
icon run over kidnapped his wife. This is why I
say it's shocking that I can't find any evidence of
him being like a child molester, because it's like she

(24:36):
really seems like he would have been molesting some kids.
Like But okay, like I said, still a piece of ships,
Still a monster. So once his wife was subdued in
the back of the car, they drove to San Bernardino
to try and find a midnight doctor who would declare
Sarah legally insane. Unfortunately, and kind of shockingly, he couldn't

(24:57):
find one, which I think you probably would be able
to into doctor willing to do that in l A. Now, yeah,
if you had l Ron Hubbard money, right, apparently you
couldn't back then, all right, that's encouraged, so Kudo's nineteen
fifties San Bernardino psychiatrists. You get a clear pass from
behind the bastards. Eventually, he promised to tell his wife

(25:17):
where she could find their daughter if she signed a
piece of paper claiming he hadn't abducted her. Just then, Wow,
this guy, I'm starting to like him. It's just so consistent,
like it's just so shockingly consistently terrible. I'll tell you

(25:39):
where our kidnapped daughter is if you agree not to
tell anyone that I just kidnapped you and strangled you
and trying to declare you insane. I mean, I gotta
say strangling probably wouldn't got him in a much trouble, probably,
and it didn't. He let her go after she signed

(26:00):
a paper, But when she went to go find their baby,
Hubbard had already had the child moved. In fact, he'd
hired a couple who were against strangers to drive the
baby across the country. The baby is just an afterthought
and no point is he focused on this kid. It
couldn't matter less to him. Sarah Hubbard filed a kidnapping
complaint with the l a p D. But they assumed

(26:20):
this was just a domestic dispute and decided not to
get in the middle of things. So the l a
p D hitting it out of the park. Yeah, you
guys don't get a pass. Psychiatrists of San Bernardino. Cool
with you. Fuck the l a p D. L a
p D today. If you want to sponsor the show,
we can talk about it. In the meantime, while Sarah

(26:43):
was trying to file a kidnapping complaint, Elron Hubbard found
a psychiatrist who was willing to diagnose him, saying which
he had done just sort of a precautionary measure. According
to one of the men who helped him do all this,
a dianeticist with the last name of Demill quote, he
and I first went to a psychiatrist who didn't like
the smell of it. He obviously thought he was being manipulated,
so we just paid him ten dollars and left. Then
we went to a prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era

(27:06):
who did some projective testing on Hubbard and produced an upbeat,
harmless report, saying he was a creative individual upset by
family problems and dissension, and it was depressing his work
and so forth. It was very bland, but Hubbard was
delighted with it. The main value of it to him
was that it didn't say he was crazy, so he
could claim he had been given a clean bill of
health by the psychiatric profession. Okay. Next he called the

(27:32):
FBI to claim that Myles Hollister, the man his wife
was having an affair with, was a communist as well
as armed and dangerous. He made several calls and reports
to the FBI, trying to get them to murder his
wife's new lover by claiming he was an armed and
dangerous communist. Next, l Ron Hubbard, de Mille and his
baby flew to Havana, Cuba. Hubbard put the baby in
the care of two Jamaican women as soon as they arrived,

(27:52):
who were also strangers. Not with anybody who cares about it. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Ln Hubard is not gonna spend any time with his
bay be. No no no. He spent the time in
Cuba writing the draft of a sequel to his book
on dianetics and drinking huge quantities of rum so he
couldn't be taking care of a baby. Then he had
to drink for several weeks straight and write a terrible book.

(28:15):
Sarah did eventually file a writ with the l A
Superior Court, and the news picked up the exciting story
that the founder of America's newest cult, psychological fad whatever
had abducted his own child. As a result, Outron Hubbard
had to write a letter to his estranged wife. So
I'm gonna read you that letter now. This is to Sarah.
This is to Sarah. Dear Sarah. I have been in

(28:36):
a Cuban military hospital and I am being transferred to
the United States next week. Is a classified scientist, immune
from interference of all kinds. Though I will be hospitalized
probably a long time. Alexis is getting excellent care. I
see her every day. She is all I have to
live for. My wits never gave way under all you
did and let them do. But my body didn't stand up.
My right side is paralyzed and getting more. So I
hope my heart lasts. I may live a long time,

(28:58):
and again I may not, but Diane Netics will last
ten thousand years for the Army and Navy have it now.
My will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune
unless she goes to you, as she would then get nothing.
Hope to see you once more. Goodbye, I love you
Ron more. Truth. Yeah, Alexis is his daughter who he's

(29:19):
not taking care of him instead drinking rum. Yes, and
will later deny is his child and tells her when
she comes to him an adult, that she was the
illegitimate child of his wife. And I was going to
ask about because he has kids from his first marriage
with Paula, having five or six kids. Yeah, one of
them Nibs I think was his nickname, was with the

(29:40):
cult for a while and then left. Changed his last
name to D Wolf's nephew, Jamie. D. Wolf does a
lot of I think he's like a motivational speaker and stuff.
So a number of his kids have become big anti
scientology sort of voices. He didn't spend any time with them,
so how could they have One of his kids committed suicide? Um, yeah,
at least one. So Sarah filed for divorce, and the

(30:01):
court documents she filed revealed horrific details from inside their relationship.
According to her, at one point, Ron told her they
couldn't get a divorce because it would be bad for
his reputation. She says that he told her basically, you'll
kill yourself if you really love me, because we can't
get divorced because it's the fifties. She also says that
he regularly strangled her. She believed that he was insane

(30:22):
and needed to be locked up in a mental asylum.
Obviously she has a bias, but it's really hard to
disagree with that statement. Oh yeah, what a different world
it would be if somebody had given a Ron Hubbard
the help he's so desperately needed. Now. Hubbard flew back
from Cuba around this time. He wound up living with
a millionaire dionetics enthusiast named Purcell, who had gotten rich
through something else and just love dionetics. Purcell wound up

(30:44):
essentially taking over the business operations of Dionetics for a
while and fixing everything on fucking all of the damage
Hubbard had done to the structure of it to make
it profitable and for a while, Wichita, Kansas becomes the
center of dionetics research. Yeah, yeah, Wichita, So they're doing
research not really. They just yeah, I mean now writes

(31:06):
a bunch of books about dionetics to try to sell
them to people and to teach classes. But no, I
don't think they're doing much real research. When Sarah found
out that Hubbard was in Wichita, she filed a petition
asking to have his assets in Los Angeles placed into receivership.
Hubbard responded by sending a letter to the Department of Justice.
He described himself as basically a scientist. There's there's exact words,

(31:29):
basically a scientist, and accused the Communists and their secret agent,
his wife, of orchestrating a campaign to try and destroy him.
He would later claim that his wife was a Nazi
agent as well. He kind of switched between the two
pretty much. It will and this is like McCarthy, era's
good time to be accusing people of communism. It is
proof of how nutty he sounded. He is constantly going

(31:50):
to the FBI and claiming that all the people who
are against him are Communists and armed and stuff, and
the FBI immediately writes him off as a nut which
the FBI was not good at determining who was legitimate
a threat to the country, not in this period they
went after a lot of innocent people, but even the
nineteen fifties, FBI was like, this guy is fucking crazy,
Like Joseph McCarthy's basically running the show right now, but

(32:12):
this guy is a fucking lunatic. Like yeah, which, like,
if the fucking FBI under j Edgar Hoover thinks you're
too crazy to be credible about your anti communist conspiracy theories,
you gotta be real crazy. You gotta be really goddamn crazy. Okay.

(32:33):
The good news is that Sarah Northrope eventually got both
her divorce and her daughter back, and as far as
I know, hopefully Alex has had a good childhood. I
really don't know much more about her at this point,
but she went to live with her infant whenever she's
getting filled with bad ingrams like holy shit. In exchange

(32:53):
for getting her baby back, though she agreed not to
say anything bad about her ex husband l Ron Hubbard,
he also made her write a statement, or rather he
wrote a statement and then published it with her name
attached to it, and she didn't complain. That seems likely
based on the actual wording of the statement. I'm going
to read you the end bit of it. There is
no other reason for the statement than my own wish

(33:13):
to make atonement for the damage I may have done
in the future. I wish to lead a quiet and
orderly existence with my little girl, far away from the
interbulating influences which have ruined my marriage, Sarah North through pubbic.
Interbulating is a word that l Ron Hubbard invented, which
is why people think he just wrote this. And she
wanted her baby back, and it was the fifties and
she was like, this is the closest version of justice

(33:35):
I can get. Yeah, Interbulating. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
By the end of dianetics looked to be on its
way out. A conference of dianeticists only drew a hundred
and twelve attendees, which is about about a year about
what you could expect to get out of a fad

(33:56):
pop psychology things like this. Hubbard desperately pushed book after book,
including child Dionetics, but all of them failed to catch on.
The book he wrote while drunk in Cuba did not
see the same success as the original, which is really
a tragic We call dietics to dionetics to extremely dionetics hardarch. Yeah,

(34:17):
you could call it like a reverse Hemmingway, because he
went to Cuba and got drunk to write but was
less successful. And I assume that's where Hemingway did all
his good stuff. I don't know much about swear around him.
That's probably a shipload. Yeah, I assume may it would
have been a better book of it had more cats. Yeah.
It became increasingly clear to many people that l. Ron

(34:38):
Hubbard was not quite the genius they had thought. Perry
chapter Lane, a researcher at the Wichita Dionetics Foundation, said,
quote the problem for many people involved in dionetics was
that they accepted every word Hubbard said as literal truth,
rather than a framework around which you could do things.
I remember at a lecture one night, he told people
that if they did this or that, they would no
longer need to wear glasses, and that they would be
able to throw them away forever. He pointed to a

(34:59):
big bowl at the bottom of the steps leading up
to the rostrum. At the end of the lecture, people
were throwing their glasses into this bowl. Don Purcell, the
millionaire who saved Hubbard's ass and save dianetics, was one
of the guys who tossed their glasses into the bowl quote.
Hubbard thought it was a great joke. He told me
about it afterwards, making a snider remark about Purcell and
describing how he took off his glasses, threw them into
the bowl, and groped his way out of the lecture hall.

(35:21):
Hubbard was laughing that people would do something like that
just because of what he said. Of course, it didn't
work like everyone else. Purcell had a new pair of
glasses in a couple of days. Yeah, I thought the
story was going to end that like someone crashed on
their way home because they couldn't see. That would have
made sense, No, I mean everyone on the road was
drunk in they were limp when they hit. Anyway, Hubbard

(35:42):
met and married his third and final wife, Mary Sue
Whipped during this Wichita period. She was like eighteen, and
he was like it was kind of a bit of
a creepy, But they stayed together the rest of his life. Um,
and he may even have been faithful to her. Maybe not,
probably a couple of affairs in there, but he might have.
They were They were together the rest of his life,
well sort of. She wound up taking the Fall Firm

(36:04):
and going to prison, but that's a story for another day.
Um Wichita is also where he first revealed the e
meter at of ice, he claimed could measure emotions and
quote give an auditor insight into the mind of his
pre clear. Hubbard announced this at a meeting in a
Wichita hotel, right before he made the exciting announcement to
a group of eighty that he had developed a new
science even better than dionetics, a science that filled the

(36:28):
few holes dionetics had had and elevated it to a
new level that was almost more than a science. He
called this scientology. Yeah. Now I looked on scientology dot
org try and figure out what they had to say
about this, and I actually found another reference to his
totally real book Excalibur, because that's where they claimed the
name comes from. L. Ron Hubbard began his studies of

(36:48):
the mind and Spirit in ninety three, resulting in a
manuscript entitled Excalibur in nineteen thirty eight. In this unpublished
work that the word scientology first appeared to describe what
Mr Hubbard termed the study of knowing how to know.
He'd decided against publishing the book for the fact Excalibur
didn't contain any therapy of any kind, but was simply
a discussion of the composition of life. Consequently, he said,
I decided to go further. So now it's worth interesting.

(37:12):
The author of Bare Face Messiah found an earlier use
of the word scientology and like a German scientific study
published like in the thirties, but it had nothing to
do with any of This is worth noting someone else
figured out the term first. Not really a big deal.
Hubbard probably wasn't plagiarizing this obscure German scientist, but I
thought that was interesting. So in the scientology dot org

(37:34):
write up of things, scientology was immediately conceived of as
a religion. The reality is that it was immediately conceived
of as a science, and its real purpose was to
protect Hubbard legally because he and Purcell had gotten into
a fight at this point over the rights to dionetics.
Don Porcell and he had a falling out, and so
there was a giant legal battle waging over who was
going to own the rights to dionetics. So Hubbard created

(37:56):
scientology initially so we could keep making more books and
selling more products. I'm or thing that Purcell had no
rights to yeah, and it was not a religion at first.
Hubbard claimed that while Dianetics had been about the body,
scientology was essentially focused more on the soul because he
had quote come across incontrovertible, scientifically validated evidence of the
existence of the human soul. So we're gonna get into

(38:18):
what Hubbard claimed in scientology and how it changed from
a way for him to dodge legal liability into a religion. Um,
but first consume we're back. We're talking about scientology, the
new science of the soul that l Ron Hubbard has

(38:41):
just launched in order to avoid a court case, or
in order to protect himself from a court case, start
a religion. Oh the great well, Jesus actually started Christianity
because he hit a guy with his camaro. Anyway, anyway,
it was, it was. It was a mess, but it
all worked out in the end, thank goodness. So Hubbard
claimed to have discovered that human beings were driven by

(39:04):
immortal and omnipotent beings called thetens. Now Thetan's try on
millions of bodies over the course of eons, and so
they're essentially these immortal spirits that like guide our meat
sacks Dianetics had been about refiling bad memories in your
brain to cure health problems, but Scientology was a way
of waking your theting up to the memories of its
long hidden existence in order to gain superpowers. Essentially, you're

(39:27):
activating your theting so that you can, you know, and
clearing off all of the bullshit that's tricked into thinking
it's just a mortal being, um, something like that. It's
close enough. Yeah. According to bare Face Messiah, Theting's were
obviously not restricted to this universe, and auditing sessions revealed
innumerable accounts of space travel and adventures on other planets,

(39:47):
very similar to those found in the pages of Astounding
science fiction, to which the founder of Scientology had so
recently been contributing. One report described how a pre clear
had arrived on a plane at seventy four thousand years
ago and battled black magic operators who were using a
lect ronics for evil purposes. So this is the point
in which past lives become a real big part about
Ron Hubbard's philosophy. And they have electronics seventy years ago. Well, yeah,

(40:09):
you space aliens, because space and aliens and stuff. Aliens
have been traveling space all the time. Yeah. In July,
Ron Hubbard published The History of Man. He called it
quote a cold blooded and factual account of your last
sixty trillion years. In it, he promised that with scientology,
the blind willigan see the lame walk, the ill recover,

(40:31):
the insane becomes sane, and the sane will become saner.
Oh yeah, And if there's one man you should trust
on how to become saner, it's the guy you kidnapped
his own baby. You know. That says to me, sane,
really stable guy, balanced man. You know, I've always really
respected kidnapping as a discipline. Oh yeah, there's Yeah, it's

(40:53):
a wonderful industry. It's a calling, it's an art form,
really a good solid kidnapping basically science. It's a guy
stealing babies out of a window. What are you doing,
I'm basically a scientist. That's the T shirt right there,
Hubbards stealing a baby. We're gonna get some good T

(41:14):
shirt based lawsuits out of this, and then I'll have
to create a religion in order to maintain my rights
to this show. And then I'm going to fight you
for those rights, and then we're something Bad's gonna happen.
You want a baby in Cuba, go right ahead, because
that's where it's going. Oh boy, abduction jokes. It's a

(41:35):
good fun when you know the kid got out. Yes, yeah,
a lot of kids didn't get out of scientology anyway.
Back to the story, So the History of Man basically
repackaged Hubbard's dineticist ideas about in grams, but catch them
in weird evolutionary terms. So now scientologists didn't just have
to worry about the traumas you know, they'd experienced as babies.
They had to worry about the traumas that deep back

(41:56):
in time their ancestors had experienced. Hubbard claimed that many
grahams were caused by clams because our clam ancestors were
locked in an eternal conflict between the hinge that opened
and the hinge that closed. He claimed that the gesture
of opening and closing your thumb and forefinger wasn't consciously
upsetting to people as a result of this, Are you
getting okay? Do you have you have questions about that?

(42:19):
That's not all clear. Our clam and our clam clamcestors.
It's like a clamato clamanca fish. No clams specifically specifically clams.
Are we descended from absolutely okay, or at least our
thet and spent time in clams. Oh okay, um, yeah, no,

(42:39):
I'll get it. Okay, it's all internally consistent. Yeah, this
all works out. And then the motion of of me
clasping my you know, thumb against my fingers is upsetting,
is what he's saying. Yeah, it upsets people. If you
just do this, just walk around the street today and
just do this at strangers. Basically sock puppet basically sock
puppet motions. If you live near l Ron Hubbard Boulevard,

(43:01):
just walk down at doing this. You're really piss some
people off. I live near the whole church of Scientology.
I live near the Scientology like movie studios. Oh fantastic. Yeah,
I'm like in this area that where all that stuff
is very well. If the scientologist tries to abduct you,
you know how to upset them. Just do the clam thing. Now, Hubbard,

(43:24):
did Warren quote your discussion of these incidents with the
uninitiated and scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the
clam to someone, you may restimulate it in him to
the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim,
after hearing about a clam death, could not use his
jaws for three days. So how's everyone's jaw feel? You
know what's starting all tired because I'm making so many

(43:47):
good jokes about Ron. My jaw is tired. But I've
read through sixteen pages this nonsense. You know what doesn't
tire your jaw out? And you know what, I'm not
going to do a Dorito's at now. You could have
had a Dorito's ad Dorito's people, but instead I'm going
to shill for another product of the next product available,

(44:08):
Lisol sanitizing wipes. That's what's good for you is Lysol
wipe yourself, clean, your thetings away, your thetings away. See
Lysol got a freebe Doritos. Anyway, back back to the tail.
So there's an awful lot of lunacy in scientology. I'm
not going to go into tremendous detail about all of

(44:29):
the different crazy things he said, because that could be
a whole fucking tin part episode. But it is important
that you know it didn't all come together at once,
you know, I think most people's understanding of Scientology's actual
beliefs comes from that South Park episode, which did a
pretty good job of summing it up. But he hadn't
even invented all of this stuff yet, everything about Zeno
and that this was all added over time. It was
definitely cobbled together. He did not just come out with

(44:51):
suddenly this vision of how things had happened. Well, genius
doesn't happen overnight, you know, no, And neither do bullshit
science fiction short stories in general. The story of scientology
is the story of l Ron Hubbard just making up
things for seventy years and writing them down, and now
people have to pay attention to him because it's a religion.
It's pretty great. He continuously expanded his claims of what
scientology could achieve in the book Scientology eight to eight

(45:14):
thousand and eight. I don't know what that's a reference to.
He ragged with this book. The ability to make one's
body older, young at will, the ability to heal the
ill without physical contact, the ability to cure the insane
and incapacitated, a set forth for the physician, the layman,
the mathematician, and the physicist. So anyone can use this
science to heal the sick. Weird that we still have

(45:35):
sick people shocking. Scientology proved to be a much better
money making scheme than dianetics had been. Hubbard moved to
England and bought a gigantic manor house. He built facilities
there and was soon making more than forty dollars a
week just at the English facility teaching auditors there. He
was making millions and millions of dollars long in the world.
This marked the end of l Ron Hubbard's money problems.

(45:57):
Money is just if your question is how did they
afford that? For any other part of the next two
parts of the story, it's just he's riches shit like
forever now, and this is one of those things. He
does not have any more money problems like. And this
is because people are just buying into this religion and
shelling out buying the books, paying for training all over,
most of whom probably aren't super committed, because like I've

(46:17):
talked to a number people in l a who did
scientology for a years, so they probably spent a couple
of grand on it, but then they just left. But
there's a lot more people like that than there are
a committed scientologists. It's a good money making thing, God,
which is what it's always been, but I'll give it
to him for this. It was a very idiosyncratic organization
at its start, and that initially caused some problems because
he was bad at managing. But he really seems to

(46:38):
have learned how to manage a really profitable, gigantic worldwide enterprise,
which is not easy. So again, one of the reasons
why it's hard to hate him as much as you
should is he's really competent. Like it's not like a
guy who was just born rich and does shitty things,
like an unnamed person we're all thinking of right now,
just born rich and never has to work for his
money and is mominent. Because the l Ron Hubbard was

(47:01):
born poor and built a multibillion dollar religious cult, It's impressive.
It's an impressive con, probably the most impressive con. On
April tenth, ll Run Hubbard wrote to one of his
higher ranking followers and suggested turning their science self help
empire into a religion. I await your reaction on the
religion angle. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public

(47:24):
opinion than we have had, or have less customers with
what we've got to sell. A religious charter would be
necessary in Pennsylvania or New Jersey to make it stick.
But I sure could make it stick. Not inaccurate, it's stuck. Well,
ask someone from Pennsylvania from punk SATONI specific from Pati
for sure. People are Yeah, they're really impressionable there. So
as the guy who defeated isis I agree with you? Uh?

(47:48):
In December of ninety three, ll Run Hubbard incorporated three
new churches, the Church of American Science, the Church of Scientology,
in the Church of Spiritual Engineering, all in Camden, New
Jersey's Jersey Boy. Uh. February of nineteen fifty four, he
incorporated the Church of Scientology in California. Over the course
of nineteen fifty four, he encouraged Dionetics Foundation franchise holders,
because that's how it spreads so rapidly. People were starting

(48:10):
franchises to turn their businesses into independent churches. Yeah interesting, right, yeah,
really it came together real well. Executives of the Hubbard
Association of Scientologists were now ministers. Some even called themselves Reverence.
Just let people call themselves Reverence, whatever you want. Whatever.
I've always wanted to be a reverend. Scientology wouldn't qualify

(48:31):
as a religion for the purposes of tax exemption. Until
nineteen This was a battle, the battle to get accepted. Like,
it took a long time. I'm not going to get
into everything they had to do it it was. It
was a fucking uphill. But starting in nineteen fifty four,
that's when he starts consistently saying this is a religion.
This is the point which Hubbard quit claiming to be
a researcher and a scientist and started presenting himself to
the world as spotified holy man, basically a science Now

(48:55):
he's definitely a holy man, definitely a holy man. He
of course drew government attention, particularly from the FBI. This
made him grow more and more paranoid. He encouraged believers
to attack anyone practicing scientology outside of the Church. Apost
states were called squirrels and should be sued out of existence.
Um the term squirrel is still used by the Church
of Scientology. You can find YouTube videos called squirrel Busters.

(49:17):
Type that in and it's like guys with like go
pro camras, just like yelling scientology nonsense. It's supposed apples
state scientologists. Yeah, I saw some of that in Going Clear.
It's weird. It's really uncomfortable. It's like to people yelling
about a video game that you don't know anything about,
Like it's so technical and specific. Are you on tech?
What are you talking about? Man Um Hubbard advice scientologists

(49:40):
who are arrested heckling nonbelievers or apost dates to immediately
sue for a hundred thousand dollars and claim religious persecution.
He said the only proper response to any kind of
challenge to the church was unrestricted warfare. Attack, attack, attack,
never stop attacking, can always be attacking. It works a
B A. I mean it. It's the same social media

(50:02):
strategy the president uses. Like you never apologize for doing
something bad. You always just attack new people. And if
you get attacked for something you find like it works it.
Don't spend any time addressing problems, just attack. Really successful idea.
So Hubbard figures this out in the early fifties and
applies it to his religion. So it is, yeah, the coolest.

(50:26):
Throughout the late nineteen fifties, auditing sessions and courses devolved
from semi scientific discussions of dianetics and two lurid stories
of past lives as aliens and famous historic figures. One
of Hubbard's followers were called There was a good deal
of rivalry as to who could dig up the most
notable or extraordinary past life. Jesus of Nazareth was very popular.
At least three London scientologist claimed to have uncovered incidents

(50:47):
in which they were crucified and rose from the dead
to save the world. Queen Elizabeth the First, Walter Raleigh
and the Venerable bed were also popular. Funnily enough, I
never met anyone who claimed to know anything about Attila
the Hun Genghis Khan or punscious pie it, which is,
if you're ever pretending to have fake lives, pretend to
be someone cool, yeah, No one wants to be a

(51:07):
goody two shoes in the past. Yeah. I was fucking Gangskan.
That's a cool past live. Yeah. Now. The CIA had
taken an interest in Hubbard in nineteen fifty seven, and
the FBI had been onto him for a while, almost
because of the hundreds of letters he'd sent them claiming
people were communists. In nineteen sixty l Run Hubbard officially
spooked the government when he urged his followers to do

(51:28):
everything in their power to stop the election of Richard Nixon,
not on the wrong side of history there. Now, Nixon
didn't win, probably for other reasons because JFK was just
such a charming son of a bitch, But the whole
escapade convince Hubbard that he could use his colt to
gain political power. In August of nineteen sixty two, l
Run Hubbard wrote a letter to President Kennedy claiming that
scientology was the only way to train human beings for

(51:50):
the rigors of space flight. Since Hubbard and his followers
were all aware of their past lives as space travelers,
they really were the best people to manage astronaut training. Yeah, definitely, absolutely,
totally again logically consistent the S and NASA stands for scientologists.
He said in his letter to JFK. Quote, man will
not successfully get into space without us. We do not

(52:11):
wish the United States to lose either the space race
or the next war. The deciding factor in that race
or that war may very well be lying in your
hands at this moment and may depend on what is
done with this letter. Courteously, Ron Hubbard, suppose the alert
we did get into space without them, have we? Though
I've seen those staged moon landing photos see I think
the moon landing is stage. But I think it's because

(52:33):
we really landed on venus. Oh that's an interesting theory,
and that's where cell phones come from, the government doesn't
want you to yea. Yeah. Anyway, back to l. Ron Hubbard.
In January of nineteen sixty three, the FDA carried out
a raid on the Church of Scientology. They didn't get much.
It seems like one of those things where they basically
cooked up a bullshit reason because e meters were labeled

(52:54):
improperly and we're like making health claims they shouldn't make.
But they used as an excuse to send them a
dozen of armed men and stuff to like raid a facility.
It was like it was it was an overreach of force.
It seemed like they were expecting to find a cache
of weapons or something crazy because this Colt seemed so
crazy and they didn't. Church of Scientology was probably more
in the right than the FDA was, although they were

(53:15):
publishing misleading stuff. The raid seems to have been kind
of bullshit. Well, they read, you know, works from what
was it, Remington Winchester Colt and exactly he's got three guns.
The whole thing increased out on Hubbard since of paranoia
and persecution. In nineteen five, Hubbard introduced ethics technology to
his new faith, which included conditions that could be applied

(53:36):
to people when they had had ethical lapses. One member,
who worked in Hubbard's English manner as a butler, recalled
I was assigned a condition of emergency because I served
him salmon for dinner that was not quite fresh. I
was shocked. You had to go through a whole formula,
right it up and submitted with an application to be upgraded.
Scientology developed a new cadre of ethics officers, who are
basically secret police, tasked with punishing the insufficiently dedicated or disloyal.

(53:59):
Different penalties, including a condition of liability, could be imposed.
Members in a condition of liability had to wear dirty
gray rags on their arms. They also couldn't like bathe
and stuff. It was gross. Church members who screwed up
too badly were declared suppressive persons. These people, Hubbard declared,
were fair game to be destroyed by any means necessary.
Now Australia had been a hotbed of Scientologist activity. Australia. Australia, Okay,

(54:23):
Hubbard brag that was going to be the first clear continent.
But in October of nine and Australian Board of Inquiry
published report on Scientology and they wholeheartedly condemned the cult.
So Australia basically kicked them out. They said it seemed
so silly that people would think it was harmless, but
that it's really fucking dangerous. Scientology is evil. It's techniques evil,
it's practice a serious threat to the community medically, morally

(54:45):
and socially, and it's adhere it's sadly diluted and often
mentally ill um So Australia knows what is talking about. Yeah,
and they banned them. They basically banned, or at least
the state of Victoria basically banned Scientology. And I hate
to say it, but we owe a lot of that
to Rupert Murdoch newspapers he owned, and he seems to
have been personally involved and really pushing coverage of how

(55:06):
crazy Scientology was, which is responsible for starting the investigation
which got it banned. He gave them their first nickname,
which is also the only nickname I aware of for them.
Bunk Homology didn't take off their Murdock's not great at
naming things, um, But credit to a monster he was
in the right this one time. In the fucking sixties,

(55:27):
England began to crack down more on Hubbard and scientology
as well. With the US, Australia and UK all clearly
against him, l Ron Hubbard began to look for a
new place to base his growing faith. His first instinct
was Rhodesia. You ever heard of Rhodesia. I don't think so.
I think it's Zimbabwe now. Rhodesia is the name when
a bunch of white people were ruling over the black majority,

(55:49):
pretty brutal. He was very much an apartheid state. There
was a civil war, the people in charge got overthrown.
Before that happened, he went to Rhodesia and basically promised
to put a bunch of money into the local economy,
and he wrote a new constitution for them that was
meant to trick black people into thinking of their votes
mattered without actually letting them vote. Weirdly enough, Rhodesia actually
kicked him out. They didn't want anything to do with him. Yeah, no, no,

(56:11):
it's weird. You expect it to go even worse. But
even the country of racists, run by racists for racists,
and it's still like a major in far right white
supremacist talking points today to talk about Rhodesia along they
didn't want anything to do without run Hubbard, So I
guess props to Rhodesia. Like once he got back from Africa,
l Ron Hubbard began to cook up a scheme to

(56:32):
escape all his myriad legal troubles. One of his friends
recalled him saying, you know, John, we have got to
do something about all this trouble we're having with governments.
There's a lot of high level research that still has
to be done, and I want to be able to
get on with it without constant interference. Do you realize
that the Earth surface is completely free from the control
of any government. That's where we could be free on
the high seas see back to the boat. Back to

(56:54):
the boats. The high seas are exactly where al Ron
Hubbard decided to go next, quietly, carefully and his minions
embarked upon what he called the C Project. And we're
going to hear about that C Project on the next
episode of Behind the Bastards. Are you feeling I feel great?
I feel I oh man, I'm invigorate. And my Satan's

(57:14):
are They're really charged up and my ingrams or their
their disappear gramm. They're they're instagramming, but they on their
way out. What did you have for breakfast? Because of
my many past lives, I definitely recall having some hot cakes,
pot cakes, hot cakes. Well, I don't know what I'm

(57:36):
trying to do. Speaking of Instagram, you can follow me
there and on Twitter. That was good, Thank you so much.
At Caitlin Dronte spelled c A I T l I.
And you can listen to my podcast right here on
how Stuff Works. It is called the Bechtel Cast, and
we talked about the portrayal of women in movies and

(57:57):
uh yeah, follow us there at Bectel Cast b E
c A d e O. Speaking of the portrayal of
women in movies. My Twitter is I right, okay. You
can find this podcast online at behind the Bastard's dot com.
You can find us on Twitter at at Bastard's pot
on Instagram to so check us out. If you're an
angry scientologist, you can yell at me there. I'm sure
I got something wrong about your religion because it's silly.

(58:23):
That's the only religion I'll say that about, except for
Zoro Astrinism. No, I'm actually I like zoro Astrinism. It's
cool as hell. It's really neat, really cool imagery. Sorry,
I don't know why I've faked and insulted Zoroastrians. There.
I've gone mad reading all of this. This is what
happens two hours into the Leron Hubbard podcasts. We insult
Zoroastrians for no reason, a religion that never did anything

(58:45):
to hurt anybody. Oh no, you're implicated now date and
you're all implicated for listening and be implicated in our
part three Boats