For those who aren't aware, CAN was--at one time--one of the most outspoken exit counseling organisations reporting on coercive tactics; they were among the first to break news of not only abuses within Scientology but a fair number of "Bible-based" groups (including the International Churches of Christ and--relevant to this community--the "Third Wave"/NAR movement).

Scientology, of course, was not happy about this; CAN had an open membership, and so Scientology attempted to have no less than 150 of its own members join en masse (in an attempt to "steeplejack by numbers").

Fortunately, CAN had been warned and rejected the apps.

Unfortunately, Scientology decided to have all 150 people sue--not in a class action, but in individual lawsuits, with the purpose of bankrupting CAN.  In addition, they managed to contact an ICC member who was willing to claim CAN tried to refer him for involuntary deprogramming (of note, exit counseling groups don't generally support this anymore).

CAN ended up being bankrupted, and Scientology promptly bought up the name and assets (including an attempt to buy out the entire archives of correspondence with CAN--including an entire list of ex-Scientology walkaways).

I myself do see this similarity, and have been disturbed enough that I did contact the people with We Are AWARE to warn them of this possibility (fortunately, it seems the laws in Singapore are rather less friendly to SLAPPs of this sort).  Similar legal tactics have been documented (including in the case of ex-Assemblies walkaway Laura Schubert--whose case regarding an involuntary NAR-style "exorcism" and the resulting PTSD is now being appealed to the US Supreme Court and may end up setting national case law in support of the right to be free from religious coercion--as well as with other NAR groups).

The tactic of how AWARE was briefly steeplejacked is also remarkably similar to how the Republican Party was essentially taken over from within by dominionists--particularly via Ralph Reed's strategy of using "stealth candidates" who only revealed their mask once they had a critical mass and had secured power.  

Texas' GOP convention is a particularly disturbing example of just how effective this tactic is--the state convention platform (here, specifically in appendix F) differs very little from that of the state Constitution Party platform (here in full); the latter calls for going back to the gold standard, but other than that, there is little substantial difference, and in some ways the Texas GOP state convention platform manages to be a wee bit more blatant about its theocratic content.  (Texas is important, of note, because it was one of the very first state GOP conventions explicitly targeted for "takeover from within" via the same strategy of "cuckoos" used for takeover of churches.)

by dogemperor on Sat May 02, 2009 at 10:36:56 PM EST
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Long story short/tl;dr version: Apparently the steeplejackers attempted to move the conference to the same location as a major, yearly NAR convention ("Transformation 2009", which featured none other than Ed Silvoso as a speaker--my fellow researchers know why this is Bad News; Silvoso focuses on "Seven Mountains" strategy and specifically the steeplejack of businesses and NGOs as a form of "naming and claiming" the financial and social services sector for Joel's Army) that was to be held literally the very day after the emergency meeting--specifically so NAR "friendlies" could pack the meeting, most likely (there's archives of sermons where the pastor of Church Of Our Saviour was explicitly encouraging female members of his congregation to pack the meeting).  

Thankfully the Singaporean Police did the rough equivalent of what cops will do with Fred Phelps protests (namely, refuse to issue a permit for the forum move on grounds of "we can't assure your safety" ;3).

by dogemperor on Sun May 03, 2009 at 01:06:40 AM EST
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