USA should have done this to Scientology after they infiltrated the CIA or whatever it was.
At some point you have to be able to do so, despite religious protections. Otherwise “we are a religion” is a “get out of jail” card.
It was various offices but mainly the IRS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
Operation Snow White was a criminal conspiracy by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations into and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members in more than 30 countries.
I was watching a video by right to repair advocate Louis Rossman yesterday and he was basically saying that he’s fine to go after big companies and the government to try and get right to repair passed, but he doesn’t want to fuck with Scientology because they appear to be psychos that will harass the shit out of him and probably wreck his life if he gets in their way. Apparently they are anti-right to repair because they have some fake ass thetan reading machines they sell for $5000.
Anyway, he mentions some of the shit they did in his video, and while I’m not sure if it’s a fact or not, he does mention that they were going after the IRS for years to try and get out of paying taxes after laws changed and they lost their tax-exempt status. After a huge amount of harassment and other crime against the IRS over 37 years, they eventually got their taxes reduced from something like a billion+ dollars to $12.5 million… How did they not just end up in jail?
It is fact:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/irs.html
On 1 October 1993, the Church of Scientology obtained tax exemption from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This ended 26 years of what the Church itself has described as a “war” against the IRS, in which it used extraordinary and in many cases illegal tactics - bugging of government offices, theft of mountains of classified files, private detectives pursuing senior government officials, thousands of lawsuits, full-page attack adverts in US daily newspapers, and so on.
So perhaps it is not such a great surprise that the settlement itself came about in some very unusual circumstances, raising questions about the actions of both the Church of Scientology and the IRS. Neither party has been willing to provide answers, with the IRS refusing to disclose the terms of the exemption agreement in defiance of a court order and US taxation law. But with the leak in December 1997 of the secret agreement, the relationship between Scientology and the IRS is under greater scrutiny now than ever before.
imo if the religion itself violates the separation of church and state by meddling in affairs of the state, then in the name of separation of church and state they MUST react somehow, separation doesn’t just go one way. This especially counts the evangelicals who dabble in politics.
I can’t believe that a gunman shot a former Prime Minister in the middle of the street and when people read his manifesto the they went “Yeah, that’s fair” and started fixing things. It’s insane how shitty you must be for people to side with your murderer.
Assassinating Abe wasn’t right, but when I heard the killer’s side of the story I honestly felt a bit sorry for him. Glad to hear something is being done about the Moonies.
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Fun fact: The Washington Times newspaper, which in the DC market is the conservative competitor to the Washington Post, was founded by (and I think is still run by) the Moonies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times
And they apparently sell the majority of fish to Sushi restaurants in the US:
2 (at least, I haven’t really gone too deep down this rabbit hole) of the founders sons broke away and formed their own church, it got a decent amount of attention a few years back for doing some mass wedding thing with ar15s, as well as rifle blessing ceremonies. A few of the members of that church including the son who founded it were involved in 1/6, and the other one is the owner of Kahr firearms.
Again, they’re a breakaway sect, not the main Moonie church, so there’s surely some important ideological differences, but there are 2 guys who were raised by their founder, and the one was considered to be in line to take the whole thing over before having a falling out with his mom and deciding to make their own crazy cult instead, so you kind of have to wonder if these 2 nuts actually fell all that far from the tree.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/24/usa.religion
It’s weird…
Some democrats say they were duped. Regardless the whole thing is fucked up.
I wonder how that would affect the The Washington Times since it is owned by Moon.
“The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon and owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification Church movement.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The church, whose members are known colloquially as Moonies, could be subject to a court order to disband as early as next month, pending the completion of an inquiry into the group’s controversial fundraising activities, according to the Kyodo news agency, which cited an unnamed government source.
The government has been investigating the church – formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification – over its fundraising activities, while battling a scandal over the group’s ties to Japanese politicians, particularly members of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP).
In the months after Abe’s death, the media uncovered evidence that LDP politicians – and a much smaller number of opposition MPs – had ties to the group, from giving speeches at church-sponsored events to enlisting followers to work on election campaigns.
The suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, whose trial on murder and other charges is not expected to start until next year, has reportedly told police he targeted the politician, whom he shot at close range with a homemade weapon at an election rally, because of his family’s ties to the Moonies.
Testimony by former members, court rulings in civil lawsuits and church documents showed the group demanded huge financial donations through “spiritual sales” – in which followers are pressured into buying items, such as vases, at exorbitant prices.
Japan has around 180,000 registered religious organisations, but only two have received dissolution orders: the Aum Supreme Truth doomsday cult, whose members carried out a deadly sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, and the Myokakuji temple group, whose leaders were accused of defrauding followers.
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