Eyewitness report: Scientology leader David Miscavige at the LRH Birthday Event

One of the biggest dates on the Scientology calendar is March 13, the anniversary of founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birth in 1911. For many years on or around March 13, Scientology’s current leader David Miscavige would preside over an LRH Birthday Event at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida, which holds a crowd of a little more than 2,000.

Since the pandemic hit, however, Miscavige has been holding smaller events in the auditorium of the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater. And last month, he held what Scientology considered its first official return to the LRH Birthday event since the 2020 lockdowns.

As usual, Dave’s hours-long speech was filmed and then a week or two later was shown in the rest of the Scientology “orgs” around world. So whether you fly to Clearwater to see Dave in person or view the tape at your local org a week later, as a Scientologist you are expected to take in this important annual message about the founder.

Now that the event has been held and the video has been shown, one of our “under the radar” readers has sent us a report about what was in Miscavige’s speech. (Dave is known as “C.O.B.” to Scientologists, for “Chairman of the Board.”) We’re grateful to get this level of detail…

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The next Ideal Orgs to open are Austin, Chicago, “Del Valle” in Mexico City, and Paris, supposedly in that order, and with Paris being a little bit further out than the other three. They didn’t give any exact dates but C.O.B. did say “in the coming weeks and months,” so I have to assume they are relatively soon. The only other org he said was going to open in 2023 was Cape Town, but that didn’t have a date or anything. That one was mentioned as “later in the year” (they’re still doing interior renovations on it).

Those were the only five orgs I recall him talking about opening in 2023. He mentioned a bunch of other buildings that were purchased, but I didn’t keep track of them, he also mentioned the renovations for Puerto Rico had been funded and were underway, but no word about their opening.

The event started with some remarks by C.O.B. about how happy he was to be back. There were some jokes about those damn governments shutting everything down and laying the blame for all the pandemic shutdowns squarely on the SP governments of the world. (Of course, most of Scientology’s own shutdowns were self imposed; they shut down before there were official government orders in many places and they stayed shut down/restricted long after most places had opened up. But being aware of that would require some critical thinking about what was going on, something Scientologists lack for the most part.)

Brief tangent: The Chase Wave had blown up right before the pandemic. Stats were already crashing worldwide before Covid was a thing. My personal opinion is they shut things down as much as they did because the stats already sucked. Covid gave them a great red herring. They could point to it and say of course orgs crashed and are struggling now, but it isn’t the full story.

OK, skipping most of the fluff and getting to the important stuff: Birthday game winners and the stats they shared.

The way they announced winners was a little weird. For missions and Class V orgs they announced the winner for 2020, 2021, 2022 and then cumulative 2020-2022. For Sea Org orgs and CLOs [Continental Liaison Organizations] they announced the cumulative winners for 2020-2022 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

For missions the winner for 2020 was some new Ideal Mission around Hungary/Slovakia, maybe Kosice? For 2021 it was one of the LATAM missions, I think Panama? The winner for 2022 was Belleair and the overall 2020-2022 winner was an Ideal Mission in Bergamo Italy. They didn’t share many stats about the missions; from what I recall each had about 20 staff (or that’s about the number they alluded to) except for Belleair which is quite a bit bigger.

For orgs they shared a few more details.

The 2020 winner was Twin Cities, in Minnesota. Yes the tiny org of TC won. They didn’t share any delivery stats but they did say TC had 70 people sign up for staff. I definitely paid attention to the wording they used. They didn’t say TC had 70 people on staff, they said they had 70 sign-ups, a significant difference (over what time period? are they counting/double counting people who were just re-signing their contract? how many actually arrived?). I also noticed that they didn’t have any shots showing a large number of people, all the shots were using forced angles/perspectives. I’m still convinced TC is a tiny org, but I do wonder what made them win in 2020, something is going on there.

2021 was Kansas City. They shared virtually no stats about KC other than the amount of food handed out during food drives (which I’m sure was just a staff member or VM showing up to a food drive set up by some other church/group). I also noticed that in almost all of the shots they were careful not to show staff member faces, and probably don’t want to show Sea Org members holding posts at a Class V org. Twin Cities showed plenty of shots of staff members faces in comparison.

2022 was Budapest. It has a 67- or 69-man tech team and delivered close to 60,000 WDAHs [Well Done Auditing Hours] over the 2020-2022 time period. That’s a little over 360 per week. That’s a good number but to be honest not that great for that number of tech staff. Maybe they didn’t deliver much during the worst of the pandemic/shutdowns. If they have that many tech staff they are probably close to 200 staff total. These numbers track for what I have heard about Budapest.

The 2020-2022 grand champion was Milano. Their building is over 100,000 square feet and they have 238 staff (not they signed up 238 staff, a flat statement that they have 238 staff). They delivered a little over 80,000 WDAHs during the 2020-2022 time period. Better but still not the 600 per week a Saint Hill-size org is supposed to be delivering (I think it’s supposed to be 600 per week). They also showed some shots of Milano that showed large numbers of staff and public. This tracks with what I know of Milano. I’d say they are the number two org in the world, behind Tampa.

The winning Sea Org orgs were #3 Anzo, #2 Africa, #1 Saint Hill. I think the only numbers they mentioned was Africa having delivered something crazy like 800,000 WDAHs over the last three years.

The CLOs went #3 Anzo, #2 Europe and #1 Africa.

There was more (it was a three and a half hour event) but I think I covered most of the significant points.

— A reader

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

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