by Sean Bonner
Will Smith and Scientologists and Anonymous, Oh my!
September 22, 2008 at 12:26 am in People, SoCal, Social issues
As you may or may not have heard Will Smith is funding a school called the New Village Leadership Academy which has ties to Scientology. How deep those ties are is the subject of much debate, but the school is definitely using some very controversial Scientology developed teaching methods like Study Tech. Given this bit of information you can imagine that Anonymous has taken note. The interesting bit is that the school was anticipating them.
Basically what happened is the school posted a false grand opening date on their website, expecting protesters to show up, which they did. In what has become typical fashion representatives from Scientology were on hand to film the protesters and try to get personal information about them. What isn’t typical at all is that some of the people at the school who were ill informed about Scientology and Study Tech took interest in the protesters and invited them in for further discussions. And that’s where things get really interesting.
I was curious how this all went down. Did anonymous wear their masks throughout all of the conversations? How did the school representatives react upon hearing their arguments? I asked, and Anonymous answered. After the jump is a first hand account of the protest and discussion by Anonymous member Blvd Nights who was on hand for all of the festivities and conversations.
“During the first encounter, when we met the school staff, 3 out of the 5 of us, including myself, wore masks until we went onto the campus and had the meeting with the faculity. The discussion was very refreshing. The faculity, minus the Scientologists (of which their were 4), showed sincere signs of being informed and hearing our concerns. It was a little bit of a shame when most of the staff seemed to not know anything about Scientology beyond what their Scientologist peers had told them, one of the teachers hadn’t even heard of an e-meter. Throughout the meeting, whenever one of us mentioned having a better line of communication with the school than Scientology, the Scientologists would snicker or react in a upsetting way physically. At the end of the meeting only one of them came up to us and said thank you for coming.
As for Will, I believe he has only read some of the material on Scientology’s philosophy and therefore really isn’t a Scientologist. When we talked to him, we had mentioned the e-meter and what’s called a Purif Rundown, very elementary Scientology techniques and tools, and Will seemed confused by just the mention of them. When he said a while back, he was a student of all world religions, I know feel that statement has some credibility. Our only concern for the school was using Study Tech. The staff, facility, and Will himself have assured us that Study Tech is being “experimented” with at the school. They are trying to accomplish separating the Scientology/religious parts of Study Tech, and use the parts they feel are suitable for teaching.
During the first picket we also had a PI driving around the whole three hours we were there, filming us. I feel that since the two pickets at the school, Scientology has significantly picked up their fair gaming policy. This past Saturday, during our monthly worldwide protest, I had three different sets of Scientologist visit my residence, one of my parent’s residence AND my grandmother’s house. They came to my family’s house to tell them I was part of a “terrorist organization”. When they came to my place the two people (one man and one toad looking woman) began to film right on my street and lied about being independent filmmakers. I look inside their car, and saw they had a piece of paper with my name, address, my car’s license plate number and a description of what it looked like. During the protest later that day, one of their handlers began to describe my house and threatened to come to my house as well. That same protest they brought about between 15-20 of their people with most of them carrying signs. They had three different signs:
-Signs that read “Anonymous creates hate and destroys freedom”
-Signs that had Nazi symbos on them (the guys holding these signs claimed to be from 4chan, but it was clear later on they were not.)
-2 Signs had personal information and pictures of 2 Anons with their mask on and off.One Scientologist, Tim Armer of Sylmar, was making physical threats against some Anons, including myself, and was passing out flyers with some of our faces on them and personal information of each individual.”
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