"Getting out of a 'cult' is not something that you recover from, it is something you are strengthened by." -- Alanzo
Tony Ortega is a former reporter for various independent weekly newspapers around the country, and was the Editor for the Village Voice for 6 years before it collapsed in the BackPage.com sex trafficking scandal. Ortega left the Village Voice before all the indictments came down and began writing about Scientology every day in 2011.
His first article on Scientology was written in 1995 and it expressed his atheistic, materialist view that all religious and spiritual pursuits are illegitimate, and Scientology is especially so.
It is notable, and should be kept in mind while reading him, that Tony Ortega has never written about any aspect of Scientology, or of a Scientologist, in a positive or even neutral way. AlanzosBlog believes his editorial position on Scientology is entirely negative to the detriment of the truth.
These are posts on AlanzosBlog which have to do with Tony Ortega.
During all 3 Seasons of Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath, Leah and Mike have sought to make anyone who criticizes their show out to be a Scientologist. Because who could possibly criticize the holy work that they are doing but a Scientologist?
Tony Ortega is one of the most valuable critics of Scientology ever. But is he so biased that, over time, you can start to live in a delusional world about Scientology? I think so.
I recorded my thoughts on the treatment I observed Aaron Smith-Levin getting from his Anti-Scientologist friends. From the ideologue Chris Shelton, to Tony Ortega’s demagoguery, to Leah Remini’s need to create a moral panic around Scientology – can Aaron’s intellectual honesty survive?
An ideologue is so certain of the ideology he has adopted, and the rightness of how he sees the world, that he can sneer at people, knowing how superior he is. It is a lazy way to go through life, intellectually, but if you surround yourself with people who also never question their assumptions, either, […]
If Leah Remini and Mike Rinder can help get one criminal conviction on the Church of Scientology through their “Scientology and The Aftermath” reality series, or help one lawsuit succeed against them for real injustices, no one will be happier than I. But when I see another Ex-Scientologist flip into nightmare mode on who they […]
There’s nothing like finally getting what you’ve wished for. The last few years have been an Anti-Scientology spooge dream: A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist writes a best-selling expose’ on Scientology, which turns into an Emmy-winning, Oscar nominated movie, followed by a Louis Theroux smarmy send-up, followed by 2 Seasons of an Emmy-winning TV reality show […]
I’ll hand this to Tony, whenever it is to his own advantage, he does make stabs at being intellectually honest. In this case, he published a response to his criticism of professor Hugh Urban and his stereotyping of all social scientists who study religion as “religious studies types”. Professor Hugh Urban is the Director of […]
There is a claim made by many anti-Scientologists, such as Tony Ortega, Mike Rinder, Chris Shelton and others, that the Church of Scientology paid social scientists and other academics in the field of religion to alter their research and to write articles favorable to Scientology. Since objective scientific research is important to critical thinking about […]
I’ve reached out to Tony Ortega via email for a comment about what kind of hatred of Christians was going through his mind, or if there was anything they did or said in the real world that set him off.
Ask yourself: Is Tony Ortega biased on the subject of Scientology, on L. Ron Hubbard, on David Miscavige, or even on minority religions themselves? As a staunch atheist, might he be biased in the area of religious and spiritual pursuits generally? Really. Ask yourself these questions. Then consider my argument below. Video Transcript: Hi. It’s […]
Tony Ortega writes a blog post with a clear bias against Scientology every day, sometimes more than one. And so it really is tiresome for me to be talking about Tony Ortega’s bias against Scientology every day, but the latest accusations of rape against Paul Haggis, a recent poster boy for anti-Scientology, show Tony Ortega’s […]
Why has this community of Ex-Scientologists let this kind of boorish oppression happen to the most vulnerable Exes at the most vulnerable times of their lives? There is more to the idea of who you were as a Scientologist than “I was conned”.
Mike Rinder Anti-Scientology vs. Mike Rinder Scientology: a great real life example of what happens when your friends and your group are more important than the truth. If you would like to see the same kind of information control that the Church of Scientology uses to squash criticism, just go over to Mike Rinder’s Anti-Scientology […]
Leah Remini began her emotional manipulation in Season 2 of “Scientology and the Aftermath” before the first episode aired with a promotional article in the Hollywood Reporter claiming that she wanted a federal investigation of Scientology, and then falsely accusing Scientologists of believing in pedophilia. Since then, every emotionally manipulative episode has contained specious suggestions […]
Tony Ortega loves it when a Scientologist commits suicide. He jumps all over every Scientology suicide he hears about. He even blames Scientology mothers for their daughter’s suicide. It’s where Tony Ortega’s cruelty against Scientologists who have nothing to do with the abuses in Scientology really shines. Ortega recently published an article on his blog […]
Aaron Smith Levin visited Tony Ortega’s blog this morning in an effort to enlighten us on what’s going on behind the scenes of Season Three of “Scientology and the Aftermath”. It looks like Ortega’s blog post this morning, “SHOCKING MOLESTATION CLAIMS LEAKING OUT BEFORE AFTERMATH EPISODE”” gives details of a young Ex-Scientologist’s life that – […]
In the unceasing parade of human folly and hypocrisy, perhaps there is no better example of a man who, for years, falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffick advertising, which led to horrific instances of […]
Dax Shepard should understand: Tony Ortega thinks Scientology poisoned his cat. And Scientology has erected websites devoted to exposing the least admirable parts of Ortega’s career as a journalist, just as he posts the least admirable parts of Scientology philosophy, and their history, every single day. So maybe you can understand why Tony Ortega seems […]
On Episode 2 of Scientology and the Aftermath, we are taken through the tragic story of Taylor Tweed’s suicide. We are shown the “handlings” that Taylor’s mom tried to perform to try to “get Taylor’s ethics in”, and which now can be seen to be clearly, tragically, catastrophically, the wrong thing to do for Taylor, […]
To hear Anti-Scientologists tell it, Elizabeth Moss was just a clueless & brainwashed Scientologist during her Emmy-winning performance portraying Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale”. But is thinking with stereotypes about people in minority religions ever going to explain how Elizabeth Moss is such a great actress? Having been a member of Scientology for 16 years, […]
Is Tony Ortega is trying to undermine yet another Ex-Scientologist? Ex-Scientologists that Tony Ortega has undermined: Carmen Llewelyn Marty and Monique Rathbun Mike Berman And now Aaron Smith-Levin And those are just the ones I’ve written about. (If there are any others, please let me know in the comments section.) They are all brave […]
Recently Mike Rinder called a poster to his blog a “dupe” and banned her for posting a link to a US Senate investigation on Backpage.com because it had information in it that exposed his fellow anti-Scientologist Tony Ortega as defending, endorsing, and condoning sex trafficking and pedophilia while he worked at the Village Voice. Both Mike […]
In my opinion, Tony Ortega’s continued use of his blog to attack Cathy Tweed very much crosses the line of ethical journalism. And Rachel Bernstein’s use of her standing as a licensed psychologist to publicly shame a mother who has lost her daughter to suicide is, quite possibly, a breach of her license.
Sunny Pereira, like a good Tribal member, instead of struggling to tell the truth about Scientology and all of her experiences in it, she’s working hard to give her anti-scientology tribe what it wants. The problem with this is that – in the end – Sunny Pereira Scientology never tells the truth. Some anonymous person […]
The main thing wrong with Scientology is that you might end up disconnecting from someone in your family? After all this time, is that all we’ve got?
This Ex-Scientologist is courageously putting herself out there and warning the public about the abuses she has personally witnessed in Scientology, and while she is in the middle of doing that, Tony Ortega tries to discredit her on his blog.
In my race to lose friends and influence fewer people, I have to write one more post about the breathless and distorted interpretations of Scientology experiences by Tony Ortega. Yesterday, Tony Ortega wrote a blog post entitled “Even the local Scientology mission is hiding a horror show of abuse: Kelly Jordan tells her tale”. The […]
“Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This […]
Yesterday, Tony Ortega continued his assertions that L Ron Hubbard & Scientology endorses pedophilia. He used Sunny Pereira and Nora Crest experience in Scientology to do it. But, it turns out, Nora Crest had something to say about Tony’s exploitation of her standing in the Ex community to continue his belligerent, and false, narrative. Here’s […]
I’ve re-joined the fray on Twitter over the last couple of weeks. Tony Ortega is on Twitter answering questions to people about Scientology in his extremely biased way. I mean really, even Tony Ortega has to admit that he has a bias, and he writes with a bias on Scientology everyday on his blog. No […]
If there is one thing to remember about Tony Ortega, it’s that even he doesn’t consider himself an unbiased, objective journalist on the subject of Scientology. This is what he says about himself: Because Tony Ortega does not label his blog properly, as all columnists would be labeled on the opinion pages of a newspaper, […]
If I were to pinpoint exactly when my disillusionment began with Scientology watching, I’d have to say the seed was planted with the Going Clear premiere.
Andreas Heldal-Lund, the founder of OCMB, used to be a free speech advocate, famously helping Tory Christman to post on his website when she was still a Scientologist – knowing she was going to post pro-Scientology ideas. When Tory asked him why he was helping her, he replied, “Because I believe in the freedom of […]
Tony Ortega recently repeated (twice) that an Ex-Scientologist who got themselves involved in Scientology did so during a “vulnerable” part of their lives. It’s a frequent and superficial claim made about a multitude of individuals who get themselves involved in all kinds of cults, not just Scientology. It’s becoming quite the stereotype. Here’s what Tony […]
As an hysterical anti-Scientology troll, Tony Ortega is loving the present environment. It’s an environment where, once any accusation has been made, it must be true. Even the position of “I don’t know – I wasn’t there” means you are violating the accuser and raping them again. So, in this environment, Tony’s business of creating […]
For the second time in many months, I personally, and politely, asked Marty Rathbun how that email ended up in the hands of Scientology attorneys, and in court against Dani Lemberger. I told him that if I only knew the answer to this, that I could assist him in getting his answer out to others, […]
This happened this morning: RandomSP • 2 hours ago O/T but speaking of the right to be forgotten… Or, more correctly, “the right to forget”… I am taking my leave of the Bunker and of all things Scientology. I am exercising my right to forget Scientology as regards reading about it, following the doings, etc. […]
Self-invalidation and self-disgust for having been a Scientologist is a common result of trying to graduate from Scientology. In some places on the post-scientology Internet, it becomes an unspoken penance to be endured before we can truly be considered by others to be “out” and no longer a stupid and deluded cult moron.
Despite his obvious and often unhinged bias against Scientology, Tony Ortega sometimes displays enough intellectual honesty to redeem himself as a journalist who wants to be taken seriously. I’ve been reading and re-reading his recent series of articles on the unlicensed mental care facility set up by Scientologists in the back woods of Tennessee. And […]
This begins a new weekly feature here on AlanzosBlog. Heresy, means “to choose”. Labeling certain ideas as heresy has been going on for a couple of thousand years now. What’s so great about heresy is that it forces scrutiny of assumptions that too often remain hidden and unexamined. The consideration of heresy and heretical questions was what […]
Tony Ortega’s charge, that the Church of Scientology has so much political power that it can shut down a FBI probe into human trafficking at its international headquarters, is quite a claim. It’s a claim that Ortega makes over and over, and it gets repeated by his followers over and over, as well. But I […]
Tony’s single hypothesis, which he’s riding like a little hobby horse in a futile attempt to herd Ex-Scientologists thinking (Ex-Scientologists who know more about Scientology than Tony Ortega and Ray Jeffrey ever will) has holes as big as the open range.
…”those who speculated that Rathbun had secretly settled will be feeling justifiably smug today”. – Tony Ortega Underground Bunker posters “8675309” and “Peacemaker” asked some important questions in the Underground Bunker a couple of days ago which I believe shed some well-deserved skepticism on Ortega’s smugness campaign against Mark and Monique Rathbun since April of […]
I have to say that Tony Ortega hit it out of the park this morning. Not only did he publish evidence of probable criminal activity and cover up by members of the Church of Scientology in the Danny Masterson case, but he also produced Dani Lemberger, who said…
Yesterday, to mark the occasion of the US premier of Louis Theroux’s “My Scientology Movie”, Tony Ortega printed a small snippet from the testimony of an obscure Scientology lawsuit going on in Tel Aviv Israel, translated from the Hebrew. Tony brags that “those who speculated that Rathbun had secretly settled will be feeling justifiably smug […]
When the President of the United States gets most of his news and information from Brietbart and Fox, and not from the information gathering services that the US has to inform the president and other leaders in our government, then you have skewed and pitched ideas filling the heads of people who need the best […]
The Underground Bunker rushed to re-capture their self-awarded crowns as the world’s greatest humanitarians today with a post about Ex-Scientologist Justin Rybacki, complete with a GoFundMe page to help him get on his feet after Scientology. Their gushing praise and acceptance of Justin was an inspiring sight: You can see that the lovebombing Justin Rybacki […]
Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely some whacked out stuff in Scientology. I’ve spent most of the last 18 years writing about it. But here we have one of Tony Ortega’s specialties: cherry-picking the craziest and most abusive parts of Scientology, and assigning those characteristics to all of Scientology and to all Scientologists – […]
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I can’t count. Or read. But in the pdf file on scribd which Tony Ortega represented as “the full court transcripts”, I count way over 100 pages missing from this document – following the original court page numbering. Here’s how Tony Ortega represented this document to his readers this morning If […]
Bizarrely, Tony Ortega continues to try to silence and discredit this woman. I tweeted the posts Fiona and others made to the Underground Bunker after they found out Ortega had called Fiona a “vicious hate-monger” in an attempt to discredit her to his readers. He deleted their comments to keep anyone from being able to […]
Alanzo was a Scientologist for 16yrs. He left in the late 90’s & got fairgamed: fired from his job, followed by PIs & endured attempts to destroy his business by Scientology. He’s emerged from that & believes getting out of a cult isn’t something that you recover from, it’s something you’re strengthened by.
Karen de la Carrier, the former “Queen of Scientology”, tries to suppress criticism of Tony Ortega by deeming it “OSA Program”. Should we all just get in line and do what we’re told now?
Fiona O’Leary is an Irish never-in activist for Autistic children. What brought her to the fight against Scientology are the quack and dangerous remedies for autism that they promote. This is what set her in the path of Tony Ortega. I’ll let her take it from here:
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Alanzo is an Ex-Scientologist who sees the same tribalism he escaped in Scientology rising up in Anti-Scientology.
Out of all the lessons he learned by escaping Scientology, he learned one lesson harder than any other: Never let your tribe do your thinking for you.
Alanzo writes from the battlefield of the war between Scientology & Anti-Scientology.
