Clearly scientology is worried that Mark Bunker is proving to be a viable candidate for the Clearwater City Council. They are now resorting to one of their tried and true tactics against those who worry them the most (see below in this blogpost for earlier examples of the same playbook). Following is a series of short videos of a recent candidates forum. Scientology sent along a gaggle of hecklers to disrupt Mark's statements -- pursuant to the policies of L. Ron Hubbard. Unfortunately, there is no video showing their faces -- perhaps next time when both Aaron Smith-Levin and I … [Read more...]
Where Clearwater Candidates Stand on Scientology
Tracey McManus published another of her uniformly excellent articles recently: Where every Clearwater City Council Candidate stands on Scientology I have excerpted most of the answers to her survey and offer my biased views on them. I believe there are just two reasons why scientology is actually being spoken about in this election. It has been a taboo subject for local politicians for decades. They have steered clear of this topic like it was the plague... Now for the first time in recent memory, it is something to be debated. The two factors are Tracey's bombshell article … [Read more...]
Flag is Empty
They claim it is a 4 star hotel. This is the peak season in Florida. Yet while every other hotel is charging the highest prices of the year, they are trying to attract people with special discounts -- $113 for a 4 star hotel in Florida in January? Absurd. And breakfast thrown in and chocolate covered strawberries. At this time of year you would be lucky to get into a 2 star hotel for that price. The place is empty and they are doing anything they can to get some rooms occupied. If Flag was "booming" the Ft Harrison would be full and they would not have room for locals to … [Read more...]
The L. Ron Hubbard Hall Money Making Machine
Scientology is still hard at it, raising money for the completely superfluous auditorium they say they are going to construct next to the Super Power building. And they are sending out new promotional pieces about it at an increasing rate. This is a very recent fundraising letter and there is also a whole magazine devoted to the subject: This is the cover of the mag... It is a strain for them to come up with reasons why anyone should be giving money to such a boondoggle. That this is going to be an event hall "large enough to hold every international … [Read more...]
Scientology in Clearwater
Scientology has been desperately trying to generate some goodwill in Clearwater. They are advertising on local radio for people to watch ScientologyTV (you can bet that isn't working)... They are sponsoring Tweets every day like this one. The problem is, those first two comments are only the tip of the iceberg. Here are the rest of them (haven't looked for an update since I wrote this a couple of days ago -- but I am sure things have NOT improved). Not a SINGLE supportive reply -- and I assume they have been deleting "entheta" responses fairly … [Read more...]
The Clearwater PR Offensive
Immediately following the revelations in the recent Tampa Bay Times article by Tracey McManus, scientology launched their version of a campaign to convince the citizens of Clearwater they are in fact good for the city. They distributed Freedom magazines to people's doors in the dead of night to try to persuade them the reason downtown Clearwater looks like the set for the latest installment of the Night of The Living Dead movies is not because they bought it up and leave most of the properties empty or massively underutilized, it is because the big bad meanies at the Tampa Bay … [Read more...]
Sirius XM Radio Tuesday Morning
Michael Smerconish wants to continue the conversation we began on Saturday on his CNN show on his SiriusXM radio program. Hoping we will have a little longer to get into these issues in more depth. Scheduled to begin Tuesday morning at 11:04am on SiriusXM channel 124. For those who could not catch it live, here is a link. Unfortunately, the only place I know you can find it is on the SiruisXM site. … [Read more...]
CNN on Clearwater & More from the Tampa Bay Times
Earlier today I chatted briefly with Michael Smerconish on CNN. Unfortunately, there is no embed code for the video so you have to click HERE to watch it. It was a VERY short piece, not really enough time to explain such complex issues, but it is good to see national media paying some attention to this issue. Hopefully more media outlets than just the Tampa Bay Times will want to dig in to this. Tracey McManus also published a new story concerning community reaction to middle-of-the-night distribution of Freedom magazines. As usual, the glossy hype of scientology's PR effort does nothing … [Read more...]
Scientology Attempting to Revise Clearwater History
After Tracey McManus' bombshell article dropped on 20 October, scientology immediately began their efforts to revise history. The next day, Freedom magazines started popping up all over the city. I wrote an article addressing some of the falsehoods Scientology BS Grows Deeper Then they began trying to make a dent in the social media world to cast the article as a bigoted assault on scientology and highlight the wonderful contributions they make to Clearwater. Freedom magazine has a twitter account @Freedommag and on October 21 they began sending out tweets. This is the tweet that is pinned … [Read more...]
Clearwater Politicians Weigh In
An interesting follow up piece by Tracey McManus quoting reaction from members of the Clearwater City Government to her bombshell expose from yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the Clearwater politicos don't have much to offer in terms of how this happened to their city, what they think it means or more importantly, what they are going to do about it. They have been overwhelmed by a far more sophisticated and well-funded opponent that doesn’t care whether they hurt anyone’s feelings as long as they get their way. Politicians in Clearwater in the last couple of decades have been more concerned … [Read more...]