If you're a
big shot [or think you are], there are many ways to deal with criticism: You
can address it with counterarguments, you can use it to improve yourself, you
can ignore it ... or you can spend inordinate amounts of time and/or money trying
to nuke the reputation of your critics in the hopes that it will make people
stop listening to them.
This is
about the people who go for that last option. But sometimes they end up
throwing so much shit in the wind that it flies right back in their faces. Like
when ...
Church of Scientology Forged a
Bomb Threat to Smear a Journalist
If you ever start
feeling sorry for those poor Scientologists because everyone picks on them,
just remember the time they had a journalist indicted on fake terrorism charges
because she wrote a book that painted them in a bad light. If you think we're
being unfair, well, let's run through the details.
Starting in 1969,
journalist Paulette Cooper published a number of damning exposes on the church
and its founder, sci-fi writer turned messiah L. Ron Hubbard, including a book
called The
Scandal of Scientology, which detailed the psychological methods used to keep the
church's followers (and, more importantly, their money) in line. The church
tried to sue Cooper to shut her up several times, but none of the lawsuits took
off, mainly because they couldn't prove that she had just pulled her book out
of her ass like they claimed.
So, they moved to the
next step: "Operation
Freakout,"
an organized campaign to have Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution
or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks"
(that's a
direct quote
from a real church document). Besides writing her phone number on bathroom
walls and sending anonymous smear letters to her family members and neighbors,
the Scientologists actually infiltrated Cooper's life by having
agents pose as friends -- one supposed friend reported that Cooper was close to
suicide after all the harassment, adding, "Wouldn't that be great for
Scientology?"
But the lowest moment
came when church members mailed themselves bomb threats and told the police
that Cooper had sent them. Cooper agreed to have her fingerprints taken by the
cops, not too worried by the laughably transparent attempt to have her arrested
... only to find out that her prints were actually on the threatening letters,
and that the stationery had come from her house (courtesy of the infiltrators).
This resulted in some very real federal charges for conspiracy to commit
terrorism, which turned Cooper's life into a living hell until the charges were
finally dismissed two years later.
Documents seized in
an FBI raid of a Scientology office in 1977 revealed all of this and more: The
Scientologists had also planned to frame Cooper for threatening President Ford
and Henry Kissinger. Oh, and according to a former member, at one point they
even planned
to murder her.
At which point presumably somebody stood up and said, "Whoa, we'd better
not do that or else we'll look like assholes."
General Motors Laid Out Hooker Traps
for Ralph Nader
After spending most
of the 1930s killing the electric streetcar and conspiring to install a fascist dictatorship in America, by the 1960s General Motors had moved
on to more constructive things -- like building criminally unsafe cars with
total impunity. When some guy called Ralph Nader came along and ruined the
party for GM, the company decided to dig up dirt on Nader to discredit him ...
and when they couldn't find any shameful secrets in his past, they figured
they'd help him create some. With hookers.
The higher-ups at
General Motors found themselves facing a wave of scrutiny after Nader's most
famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was published. The book is a
scandalous look into the safety record of the automobile industry, and it
exposed GM's 1960 Chevrolet Corvair as the murder machine that it was. Rather
than take Nader's advice to heart and create cars that didn't unnecessarily
kill people, GM came up with a solution that to them made a lot more sense: If
they proved that Nader was a pervert or a homosexual, obviously everyone
would forget about the whole "My car could kill me at any moment"
thing and continue buying unsafe vehicles.
And so, GM hired private detectives to follow Nader around and catch him
in some kind of unscrupulous act, only to discover that he was perfectly clean
(17 detectives died of boredom during the stakeouts). Still, GM was determined
to get something on the guy, even if they had to fabricate it. Nader was able
to confirm, years after GM's crusade, that the company had greenlit a plan to hire comely prostitutes to throw themselves at him in the hopes that his raw animal lust
would kick in and cause him to give himself over to them. Thankfully, his
extreme dullness prevailed and the plan failed.
GM's plans were
revealed when the taped conversations of one of the detectives with GM higher-ups became public.
Eventually, the company's president was forced to apologize to Nader for the
invasion of privacy. We kinda hope Nader becomes president one day just so he
can harass them with an army of hookers. See if they like it.