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This is Alanzo with AlanzosBlog.com. I was 16 years in Scientology 15 years in anti Scientology. And now I have been 9 years out of both.
This Month is Alanzo’s 40th Year Since Walking Into Scientology at 23
I used to say eight, but July 2024 is the 40th anniversary of me walking into a Champaign, Illinois mission with a Dianetics book in my hand. And I said to the lady there. “This is the most fascinating book I’ve ever read, but I’m not going to join a fucking cult!” And she laughed.
Had she not laughed. I would have walked out. But because she laughed, she showed me that she was capable of entertaining an idea that she didn’t presently believe. And that is a quality that is very, very important, I’ve found.
Somebody said that the mark of an educated mind is someone who can entertain or or discuss an idea or even learn about an idea without believing it. And so, this tolerance for ideas that are not your own is a very important quality in human beings as I have come to see.
And you know, you would expect to get pushback in a community of cult and ex cult members were uniform uniformity of thought and conformity of belief is just pressed down on you every single day. It’s a quality that is very rare in this community.
And I keep calling it this “community” because I don’t have a better way of describing this.
And so she her name was Connie Penner. She died of breast cancer in the 1990s. And I, you know, donated a lot of money to try to help save her and that money went to standard medical procedures. Just like this whole stereotype that you hear that Scientologists don’t go in for standard medical care. They do have a tolerance for alternative medicine. That is for sure. And for using auditing as an adjunct. But they do standard medical care, especially when their life is threatened.
And the people such as Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley, and all of those people that you’ve heard who’ve died of cancer, they used standard medical care to try to save their lives. And just like non Scientologists, they die in droves. Okay, because humans die in droves. So it’s another stereotype, y’all.
All right. So that’s my little rant about my 40 year anniversary. And now I’ve been nine years out of both anti Scientology and Scientology. So I have a perspective on today’s topic, which is very different from what you’re seeing on the internet.
And after nine years of being out of anti Scientology, nine years after using the ideology of anti cultism to understand my own experiences, okay, I can I can see things from a different perspective.
And that different perspective today is on what is called the Scientology Second Generation Sympathy Grift, “the second gen sympathy grift”.
There are tons of people who have sympathy for ex Scientologists. They have been told that they didn’t have a choice. They were brainwashed into deciding to become Scientologists. And they were brainwashed the whole time they were Scientologists.
Brainwashing Has No Basis in Reality As Affirmed by Dozens of Scientific Studies Since the 1940’s
Well, I’m sorry. There is no scientific evidence in the dozens of studies, scientific studies, that have studied brainwashing since the late 1940s. Not one of them have affirmed the power of brainwashing. In fact, all of the studies have debunked the idea that a cult leader can apply some kind of technique to you that will make you believe something you don’t want to believe.
So we have here, this sympathy grift that has been run on those people who believe in brainwashing, okay? And then there’s a new version of this now, with I think it originated with Serge Del Mar, where he distinguished between a second generation Scientologists who grew up in Scientology and a an adult who walked into an org on his own. A grown-ass adult here in 2024.
Okay so the sympathy grift here is that they didn’t have a chance. They grew up in a family of Scientologists. Okay, that’s that’s also false. And here’s why. And you gotta, you’re being bombarded with this. From Aaron Smith Levin and his Growing Up In Scientology channel where the sympathy grift is built into the name of the channel, to Marissa Sigmund, to Serge Del Mar, to Nora Ames. I mean, there’s just almost all the content creators are second generation, you know, Mike Rinder second generation, Chris Shelton. Second generation
You do realize it Marisa Sigmund has been lying about Chris Shelton. She’s trying say that he doesn’t get to get in on the second gen sympathy grift because he went in when he was 18 years old. Grown-ass adult – he made his own choices.
In fact Chris said he was 15 when he went in to do courses, because he grew up in a family of Scientologists. Now, ask him if his siblings got involved.
Doug Kramer As a 2nd Generation Scientologist
I had [many] long conversations with Doug Kramer about the second gen sympathy grift. I didn’t call it that then I didn’t. I didn’t know you know that term yet. But Doug, and I had many long talks about it, and it was towards the end of our relationship.
But I’ll tell you what, man, this made Doug madder than anything. We talked about it because if Doug would look at his own power of choice, he would see – and he refused to see this – he would see that yes, his parents got him involved in order to teach him how to be more ‘ethical’ when he was nine or 10 years old.
But then he continued, and then he moved out when he was 19. As a grown ass adult, moved to Camarillo, California, and continued in Scientology until he was 35. Paying for his own services, his own OT levels, getting involved as an actor on his own, and all the Scientology things that they had for him to have a to have a successful career as an actor.
Doug shows as a grown ass adult to continue in Scientology. So you may be saying, Alonzo, you’re, you’re being unfair. It’s all he ever knew. Okay. So one way to look at this is to understand that well, you gotta count the hits with the missus, okay.
So if you walk into the American Saint Hill Organization, and you see it staffed mostly with, you know, young second generation Scientologists, you would take look around say “They all joined, and they all became Sea Org members!”
But people who are in the know on this, such as Aaron Smith Levin and Chris Shelton and others, second gens – Nora Ames. Second gens themselves. They know that the number of Scientologists who are born into a Scientology family and who follow their parents into Scientology is vanishingly small. 80 to 90% of children born to Scientology parents never get themselves involved in Scientology.
And if they do, when they become adults, they get the fuck out. So that suggests something:
That suggests that they had a choice.
For instance, if my memory is correct, Doug told me that his sister never got herself involved in Scientology. She never got involved. She grew up in the same family, same household, same familial pressures to become a Scientologist, and she chose not to. Doug chose to.
And this thing, this choice thing is just like the, it’s evil – especially if you’re a second gen. And you’re running the sympathy grift on all of these compassionate, mostly Christian people who believe that you’ve been taken in by a false prophet. And you’ve been brainwashed, and they just believe all of these things. And that creates this package of sympathy and that sympathy, clouds their judgment.
They are not really looking at reality. And I’ll tell you what, all of these second gens, they don’t want them looking at reality because it actually means they might have to get a job. They might have to make money another way. If they told the truth, then they’d be fucked as far as their YouTube channel income came.
So this this I believe, in my conversations with Doug he would get angry very angry when I would talk about this, you know, count the hits with the missus type of thing. Just a benchmark in order to think critically about this.
And the reason he would get angry is because he was scared. There was a point where I could feel it on the phone, where he would ask these these things would usually originate with Doug
“Okay. He would ask me now what is this? He would ask me the same things over and over. He would ask me what what is this thing that you’re saying about choice? Like I had a choice?
And I would explain this, count the hits with the misses – you have to have a benchmark. What percentage of children of Scientologists follow their parents into Scientology? And that’s on the order of 10 to 20% 80 to 90% do not follow. They’d never become Scientologists.
And I’ll tell you what. A vanishingly small number who do follow their parents actually join in the sea org and stay there after they’ve become adults. I’m not saying that the people who did join [the Sea Org] are not under coercive pressure. They’re told that, you know, they’re going to be flipping hamburgers or whatever, at McDonald’s. “So you might as well stay here”. They are told that no doubt about it.
There is a fear of the outside world that is placed upon these people.
But guess what? They make it out. Their power of choice never went away. It was always there. Their courage level went up and down. Freedom requires courage.
And what I was running into with Doug in this topic of discussion is his fear. Because take a look at it from Doug’s perspective. He’s got a channel it’s like the fourth one that he’s tried to have. And he’s building an audience and he’s got this schtick. He’s talking about, you know, all the ideas of anti cultism but moving into conspiracy and the fucking fraud HD Tudor and narcissism and you know, oh my god.
But Doug, has built an audience with this. See, if he starts to think about his own timeline of experience and begins to realize that he had a choice all along to become a Scientologist, and he did choose on his own for his own reasons to keep going and to pay for his OT levels, and all of that. See what you’re paying for your own OT levels, you’re an adult and you are choosing things on your own. Okay.
But Doug was very afraid because if he began to see things from this perspective, number one, it would have been incredibly therapeutic for him. But it would have ruined his YouTube channel. And he he sensed that fear.
Getting Out of AntiCultism is Very Similar to Getting Out of Scientology
It’s a very similar fear to when I would talk to a Scientologists. When I would talk to a Scientologist who about you know, stuff that got me out of Scientology, where they’re, they’ve been lied to etc.
There is this fear, they sense that if “I start taking on these ideas, my life will be ruined. My life that I’ve built as a Scientologist, will be ruined.” So they they’re in a period of fear and anger and they lash out at you and all kinds of stuff.
That’s what Doug was in before he actually died. He was in that what Buddhists would call it a Bardo state of struggling back and forth with the you know, the truth of his own existence, versus the facade that he had built to grow his YouTube channel.
So there really is this thing called a second gen sympathy grift and it really is being run on people who are trying to raise money and get super chats and you know, Pay Pal donations and all of those things, based on building sympathy within their donors. About “I never had a choice. I was born into a family. I was a child. I was just a child!”
No, I’m sorry. When I was a child, my parents were very heavy Episcopalians, and they wanted me to be an Episcopalian. And I would go and I would I get confirmed and I kissed the Bishop’s ring and I made a choice like at 15 that I didn’t want to go anymore. And my dad was like, “You’re gonna go” and my mom was like, “let him let him decide on his own”. And so I did. And I was going to anyway, like, as soon as I moved out of the house, I wasn’t gonna go to St. Matthews church every Sunday like they did. No way.
So it is the same thing. You think that there’s this powerful brainwashing that Scientology puts on you. That makes you keep going, that’s wrong.
You get involved, it does something for you. It meets some kind of an emotional need. And you keep going because of that. And then it stops meeting that need and you leave. That is the simplicity of all of this.
For Doug it met his needs, until he entered into his mid 30s. Then he had seen enough and he quit. Then he destroyed his life with his anger, but there’s so much I’ll be doing that in future.
Future videos. I’ve also got some other future videos coming up with the week that Doug was missing. I was behind the scenes with Steven Mango and Marisa Sigmond during that week, and I watched some of the most bizarre and disgusting behavior I’ve ever seen. mixed in with some of the most compassionate and excellent behavior that I’ve ever seen as well. So it’s just one of those things where it’s not just one thing. It’s it’s both it’s all things. And I’m going to tell the truth about that that week that no one has told the truth about.
So thank you very much for listening. Remember to subscribe, like, follow, share all of those things, it helps me keep going. And I you know, I can use any help I can get these days.
So over and out.