David Miscavige says 4 new Scientology ‘Ideal Orgs’ are coming soon — but where?

We’re still thinking about what Scientology leader David Miscavige reportedly promised on New Year’s Eve (which we know about thanks to some reporting by Mike Rinder): That he plans to open four new “Ideal Orgs” just in the first quarter of 2023 (which ends on March 31, if you’re keeping score).

Of course we’re curious to see whether he can pull it off. Miscavige hasn’t presided over the grand opening of a new Ideal Org since the February 2020 event at Ventura, California (for which a reader of ours snagged some sweet drone footage).

A month later the Covid pandemic started, but more lately Mike figures that Dave has been putting off new grand openings because process servers are looking for him.

Now suddenly Miscavige says four are going to open in the next three months. Which might they be?

The two most obvious that come to mind are Austin and Chicago. They’ve both been renovated and are ready to go, as facilities. They can open next week, if Miscavige feels like it.

But where else? Even before the pandemic hit, Miscavige had tried to speed up Ideal Org fundraising by taking less of a piecemeal approach and instead encouraging a lot of projects to be going on at the same time. Here, for example, is a list of Ideal Org projects that were being targeted recently, and pitted against each other in a fundraising flier.

Now, we’ve heard from a source that says that they’ve been asked to attend a grand opening coming soon to…

…St. Louis.

Could it be among the first four in 2023? We don’t know, but we do know they’ve been planning to renovate the building you see pictured here, and which the Scientology organization there posted to their Facebook account just a couple of weeks ago. (Hm, interesting.)

If you know more about the St. Louis project and whether it’s really so close to being completed, please drop us a line.

Meanwhile, we also heard from another good source of ours this week, The Insider. This is someone still inside the organization who, late in 2021, began telling us about the chaos caused by Covid, new details on the ‘Chase Wave’ financial debacle, a detailed description of the Ideal Org scam, and predicted the new ‘Golden Age of Admin’ that was on the way. In November, they gave us another update, about the Ideal Org program going through some changes, particularly in South Africa.

And now, they suggested that at least one, if not two, of the Ideal Orgs about to open may be in that country…

The Port Elisabeth building is completely finished, yet remains empty until the trainees return from Flag. I believe the other org will be Durban or Cape Town, in South Africa as well.

Previously I wrote that Miscavige cut the “cost” of all orgs in South Africa by two-thirds so that he can open them and claim “unprecedented expansion” abroad. They’re also going to claim that they’ve made massive inroads in working with the SA government.

In reality, they’re only going to be able to open Austin and Chicago because they’re already complete. The cult has no way to get money from people in the US anymore. Not like they were previously with the Chase Wave.

I think future orgs will all be IAS funded and many will be manned by the Sea Org – like LA and Orlando.

They’re having a hell of a time getting staff. Worse than ever.

When we asked for additional thoughts about Miscavige’s New Year’s Eve message, he sent us this…

I would add that the way this event was held is indicative of the state of Scientology as a whole.

Miscavige claims that Scientology is both expanding at an exponential rate and is in desperate need of fixing, hence the “Golden Age of Admin.” That these two conditions are mutually exclusive is not lost on all the (Scientology) public. He has painted himself into a corner.

Having funded and renovated several orgs over the course of the pandemic, he can claim that nothing has slowed down. But what comes after that?

Even with the financial fraud, it takes a decade or so to extract enough money from the field. So what happens when the field has no money left to extract?

I would make the following predictions:

1) The IAS will be used to fund future orgs.
2) Much like they’re doing in South Africa, funding will be “crowd sourced” from all Scientology Public in the world with smaller donations from more people, rather than big donations from a few.
3) The “cost” of new orgs will magically be a third of what it would have been previously and Miscavige will claim this is because of his brilliance and ingenuity.

The Ideal Org strategy has been more about filling the coffers of SO reserves than anything else. And in that regard it has been a roaring success.

With what has previously been documented in Africa, we can surmise that the markup on the renovations is somewhere in the area of 300 percent – of which two-thirds goes straight to the SO.

Miscavige is now forced to open orgs at cost, or admit the Ideal Org program is a failure; which of course he won’t do. Ideal Orgs were a cash cow, but they’re now a money pit – a beast with an insatiable hunger for more.

Miscavige (much like Hubbard) is the architect of his own demise.

Having a front row seat to it all almost makes the time I’ve wasted in this cult worth it… almost.

Has Miscavige overextended himself with the Ideal Orgs and the extreme fundraising? So far, he’s resisted dire predictions in the past.

Now he says Scientology is getting back on track in 2023, while he dodges process servers trying to get him into court for child trafficking allegations.

Sounds dire. But with billions of dollars under his belt, he’s not licked yet. We can hardly wait to see how this year unfolds.

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A special treat for our subscribers

Yesterday our subscribers received the second episode of our new podcast series, “Group Therapy.”

Once again we assembled the same great crew of Underground Bunker regulars — Andrea “i-Betty” Garner, Lynette “Observer” Waggoner, Phil Jones, and “Panopea Abrupta” — and we discussed the Scientology news of the week with them.

Andrea had us roaring! We’re offering this new series as thanks for helping to support the work we do here at the Underground Bunker.

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Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:

Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain

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