Mark Rathbun on How Tony Ortega, Mike Rinder and Leah Remini Incite Hate
Mark Rathbun relates the ethics mindset of the anti-Scientology trio of Mike Rinder, Tony Ortega and Leah Remini: Anything goes in the name of their hate—even attempted murder.
TRANSCRIPT:
You know, they rail about ethics. They say, “Scientology has a totalitarian ethics system that is ‘us versus them,’ ‘good versus evil.’” And the funny thing is, is that, that literally is their system of ethics. It literally consists of, “If it harms Scientology, it’s good; if it helps Scientology, it’s evil. Period.” And, you know, this is—the way that Mike Rinder has put it, he’s literally put out on a podcast that Scientology is fair game and that you may and can do anything you want against Scientology and get away with it—literally promoting that idea.
Ortega puts it in many ways, every day on his blog, day after day. One incident stood out to me that really sort of encapsulates what I am talking about here. A woman took her car and rammed it through the front door of the Austin Church of Scientology, sped through the lobby and crashed it into the Church’s nursery for their toddlers. When the police arrived, she said she was disappointed when they told her that she didn’t hit anybody; she failed to kill anybody and that was her only regret, that she didn’t. Well, it subsequently came out that she was greatly inspired by Leah Remini—had been watching or reading her book or watching her show or listening to her ramblings, or her productions.
And of course, Leah Remini just never says anything about it, right. Instead, Tony Ortega comes in. And Tony Ortega flanks for her by trying to euphemize the whole thing. He literally characterized that attempted murder as “delinquency.”
He’s got about a couple of hundred people in his sheep farm and they generate thousands of comments a day, because that is what they do all day—they sit there and they comment back and forth. Just as an exercise I went through that day, out of 2,000 comments, not a single person objected to this characterization or called him out on it.
And they are all just frothing into these memes of hatred towards Scientology based on a woman attempting to kill somebody with her car.
