San Francisco rules the Scientology universe — for this week, at least

[The Golden Gate gang!]

Scientology held its annual L. Ron Hubbard birthday party last Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida. Tomorrow, video of that event will be shown at the church’s other locations around the world as members are invited to come down and witness the spectacle.

Scientology will then issue a press release and slide show, and we’ll have our usual fun looking through images of church leader David Miscavige giving his latest hours-long speech, and maybe see a celebrity or two in the crowd.

But we have already learned about at least one result from Saturday night’s party, and it’s a fun tidbit about how things are going as Scientology struggles through another year while Miscavige must give the impression that it’s booming.

We learned this bit of information from the same eager “files whisperer” at the Puerto Rico Ideal Org project whose pleas for donations we’ve been featuring recently.

Another of his messages was forwarded to us, and it actually contained some interesting details about the birthday party…

Was that a fantastic Birthday event, or what?

Man, the Class V org birthday game winner, San Francisco, by 23 points over Del Valle! And they didn’t know who won until they announced #2. How’s that for a nail biter?

What was even more wild to me were the total points for the two orgs. 6,060 for Del Valle, 6,083 for SF. Do you recall the winning total for previous years? 2,800 range is what I recall, occasionally into the 3,000+ range. AOLA, the winning SO org, made 2,394 points this year. Compare that to 6,083 for SF!

This year was DOUBLE previous years’ winners. Why? The OEC/FEBC grads took the orgs to new heights. In fact, reported to me by a Tampa staff member, the top 8 worldwide finishers were the OEC/FEBC grad-staffed Ideal Orgs. EVERY. ONE.

This tells me 1) the OEC/FEBC program WORKS, and 2) our Ideal Orgs ARE creating planetary clearing.

With every Ideal Org we're opening now, they have the new OEC/FEBC teams. They’re working to the 100 percent standard Org Board. They are highly trained to GAT II. They ARE Ideal in every sense of the word.

Puerto Rico is next. When you help open an Ideal Org, when that ribbon falls, the pride you feel and the win you experience is like nothing that can be described. It's a personal win, it’s a group win, it’s a 4th dynamic win. All rolled into one!

OK, there’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s take it in pieces.

First, one of the highlights of the annual Birthday Event is something called the Birthday Game. It’s based on the notion that at some point when Hubbard was asked what he wanted for his birthday, he said that he only really wanted to see the church expand.

So each year, Scientology’s various classes of orgs compete against each other to see who can earn the most points, based on things like new people signed up for courses, hours of auditing delivered, and so on, with different goals for different classes of organizations, and also weighted depending on past performance.

Years ago, Rod Keller demonstrated that things were generally rigged so that the newest Ideal Orgs would have a strong chance of winning in their category in their first year after having a grand opening.

In 2024, four new Ideal Orgs opened: In Austin, Mexico City’s “Del Valle,” Chicago, and Paris. Based on what Rod had found, you would expect that one of these four new Ideal Orgs would come out on top.

Mexico City’s Del Valle Ideal Org was apparently near the top, but it was edged out, according to this mailer, by the San Francisco Ideal Org.

It was a close contest, the mailer says, but SF managed to get the most, and with an astounding 6,083 points.

We think a couple of things are going on here. Sure, these “points” might be fudged in any number of ways, but the important thing is that church leader David Miscavige’s newest initiative — sending org staffs to the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida for special “OEC/FEBC” training (Organization Executive Course/Flag Executive Briefing Course) — is supposedly fueling a huge increase in productivity, and it enabled San Francisco to come out on top.

This is a closeup of the image at the top of the story, and the picture of the SF staff comes from a series of images that Scientology featured during its New Year’s Event in Los Angeles.

Miscavige showed those images while boasting about “the launch of the Golden Age of Administration [which] marked a watershed moment in Scientology history,” and he showed a number of different staffs that were getting the special training at Flag.

And now, three months later, the proof that Miscavige’s new tactic is working is that the SF staff which returned from Flag led its Ideal Org to win the Birthday Game, and with sky-high stats, over 6,000 points.

SIX THOUSAND POINTS, people. San Francisco is leading the way, and this planet will be cleared in no time!

Meanwhile, another of our correspondents forwarded a separate image of the SF team that went out this week, this time showing off their certificates after their special Flag training, which took months to complete.

OK, so what’s going on here?

It’s important to remember that David Miscavige, better than anyone else in Scientology, knows the church’s real “stats,” which have been crashing for decades.

Various experts we’ve consulted suggest that Scientology’s peak in membership was probably in the early 1990s, and it’s been going slowly downhill ever since.

It’s harder than ever for Scientology to recruit new people with so much bad press and so much material on the Internet, and years ago Miscavige had to come up with other ways of convincing his followers that the opposite was true, that Scientology was expanding.

In 2003, one of the strategies he came up with was his “Ideal Org” project, replacing regular “orgs” with bigger and more expensive facilities. He’s opened 67 of them now around the world, and Scientology constantly crows about it.

But Miscavige also promised church members that the new buildings would result in a rush of new people begging to join Scientology. That hasn’t happened. So over the years he’s come up with one excuse after another for why the Ideal Orgs aren’t producing that boom.

His latest excuse is that the staffs at these Ideal Orgs — some of which have sat mostly empty now for more than 20 years — haven’t been trained with the proper “admin technology.”

Once these staffs spend several months at Flag in Clearwater and are run through L. Ron Hubbard’s 50-year-old theories of business administration, when they return to their orgs it will finally light the fire that the Ideal Orgs were supposed to produce.

So now, at the birthday event, Dave offered supposed evidence that his newest plan is actually working, and that the OEC/FEBC-trained SF staff is blowing away the rest of the world.

Hip, hip, hooray!

Well, we will remain skeptical that even this vaunted SF crew can actually turn around Scientology’s dwindling fortunes in the US.

Featured front and center in those photographs of the SF staff, by the way, is a face you probably recognize. It’s Aaron Kyro, whose double-life as a 20-year Scientology staffer and YouTube skateboarding mogul is something we’ve featured numerous times over the years.

Kyro is a “Gold Meritorious” donor to Scientology, meaning that he’s given at least $1 million to the IAS, Scientology’s membership organization and David Miscavige’s litigation slush fund. (Here’s a photo when he had hit the previous mark, Silver Meritorious With Honors, for $750,000 in donations.)

Aaron Kyro won the Birthday Game! He’s got to be so fully stoked about it.

Somehow, though, we don’t think he’ll make a video about it for his skateboarding buddies.

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Jane Doe 1 gets a trial date in 2028

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kevin C. Brazile has still not had a chance to rule on whether Jane Doe 1’s forced-marriage lawsuit against Scientology will be sidelined into “religious arbitration” or not, but yesterday after meeting with attorneys from both sides, he set a trial date of January 10, 2028.

This was the lawsuit unsealed in 2023 that accuses Scientology, its leader David Miscavige, and Sea Org recruiter Gavin Potter of forcing Jane Doe 1, then a minor, to choose between going into the Sea Org’s prison program (the RPF) or marry Potter after she complained of his unwanted sexual advances. Potter, Miscavige, and the church deny the allegations.

Scientology produced a contract signed by Jane Doe in 2000 that it said obliged her not to sue but instead to submit to the church’s own brand of arbitration. But the first judge in the case, Robert Broadbent, posted a tentative ruling that said Scientology arbitration was inherently unfair. The morning that Broadbent was going to make that ruling final, Miscavige’s attorney accepted service for the church leader and immediately had the judge removed with a peremptory challenge.

Brazile then eventually was assigned to the case, but he has not had a chance to make his own ruling on the arbitration issue as the lawsuit has been delayed by Scientology’s insistence on deposing Jane Doe and her former attorney.

And speak about delays. Even if the arbitration issue is averted, Jane Doe will have to wait almost three more years before getting her day in court.

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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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