Going Clear, Part 1 Lawrence Wright, False Representations about himself and motives

Going Clear, Part 1 Lawrence Wright, False Representations about himself and motives

I got interested in working with Wright on the subject of Scientology because I did a little bit of reading of books that he wrote before, one of which was Looming Towers. And I know there’s controversy about the accuracy of it and everything else, but I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that, the way he wrote the book appealed to me in terms of sharing what I knew about Scientology because he took two viewpoints on two different sides, and he fully explicated both of them. He took Osama bin Laden and he took O’Neill, the Justice person who was onto terrorists, and explained their viewpoints from the crib to the catastrophe.

And that is something I never saw done with Scientology before and I assumed since he won the Pulitzer Prize for it that, you know, he would remain true to that sort of fairness, that objectivity, where you’re getting into two subjective views that conflict, to see a bigger picture.

The end result of it, clearly, wasn’t that at all, and in fact it was one viewpoint, it was one anti-Scientology narrative that excluded anything that might muddy that narrative, or might throw any bit of it into doubt. That was the end product of the book, Going Clear.

I identified going through it, and for me it was very frustrating because a lot of that other viewpoint, I provided. Some of which I’ve provided taped evidence of, but that’s only a small minutia, a fraction of the amount of explanations and facts and education on the subject that I provided to Wright that never made it into the book because it didn’t fit the anti-Scientology narrative.

And as I re-read the book, I did a review on it when it happened, contemporaneously, and I just really sort of lashed out at some real obvious fact check errors that really peeved me at the time because I had been hounded on them numerous times by his fact checkers and him, like several times on individual facts, that he still got wrong in the book.

And it really kind of threw me for a loop, because I understood, he was with a big publisher, he probably got a huge advance, he was able to take two years, have a whole crew of fact checkers and researchers and everything else, and to have that many glaring errors that just stuck out at me that were just ones that involved me and things that I said. I was just bookmarking that.

And I’ve done a further deeper review since now the movie’s come out and it’s had such impact, that I did a further review of the book and analyzed it and, against my experience with Wright. And identified several kind of techniques that were used to—that he used to give the anti-Scientology narrative as fact, while excluding anything, any differing viewpoint.

The first technique he uses was to paint himself as, and he does it in the introduction of the book and he did it in the introduction to the movie and he did it on the press circuit, was this introduction of his approach, which he states right in the book, was to find out why Scientology was so alluring, and how it was so appealing, and how it kept people within it, or people stuck with it, despite it being public relations suicide, I think he put it. There must be something to it.

You know, ultimately, when the movie was done, he was riding the press circuit, he said, really, otherwise. He wasn’t trying to find anything out, he was trying to advocate for tax exemption revocation, and he was trying to embarrass people from being involved in Scientology, trying to actively get them to defect.

You know, one of the things that made me want to participate too, was that I looked for a previous book that he did on the subject of religion. That was called Saints and Sinners. And I was impressed by it at the outset, because there was quite a bit of bias disclosure, right from the beginning of the book, and in fact, he says in the introduction, “Thus the tendency of journalists to look upon religion as a marketplace of the weird and the absurd. I confess, it is not easy to clear my head of this prejudice”. And he states that right at the outset.

And he’s looking into people who, you know, everything from a Baptist Minister to Jimmy Swaggart, to the head of the Atheist movement, to the head of the Church of Satan.

But he’s stating right from the beginning, and he goes into a big personal subjective essay about how he even felt his father, you know, was a traitor to him because he expressed doubt about his belief when he was on his death bed, and you know, it’s very kind of moving. And so, he’s always sort of trying to keep that balance when he’s dealing with these people. In fact, at the end of the book, he’s giving all sorts of praise to the head of Atheism and the head of the Satanists, saying that he really admires them because they continue to persist with their view despite, you know, all the brickbats that get thrown at them.

So, you know, it was that kind of objectivity and tolerance that I thought was going to spill over into his later project. And of course as we’ll go through you’ll see that it did not. That’s the first element. No bias disclosure in the Scientology book whatsoever, and in fact, just the opposite. Him acting as if he’s actually biased in the other direction. “Clearly there must be something good about this. I want to find out what it is”.