Scientology's Dullest Tool
Some things I've known about Ron Brynaert for nine years.
This Substack’s avowed purpose is the transfer of my hard won online conflict skills to the next generation. There’s a story before the story, of course, but I arrived in a publicly visible fashion in the context of the Coffee Party, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and for better or worse I’m a product of the Anonymous class of 2011 - 2012.
The image board “chan culture” that birthed Anonymous used to self describe the public scrum in which they engaged as “the scene”. A storied participant I may be, but this was never my goal, and this has been a watchword for me since 2012.
The Scene Is Unclean.
Anonymous first became a politicized thing during Project Chanology in 2008, a series of actions in support of free speech and against the Church of Scientology. Although not a participant in that episode, I don’t care much for organized religion in general, and a systemic extortion operation disguised as a religion I like even less.
The weaponization of mentally ill individuals is one of CoS’s favorite tactics and a big part of what makes the online world so unclean. The poster child for this is a “journalist” I first encountered during Weinergate.
Ladies and gentleman, meet the performance artist formerly known as Ron Bryanert.
Knowledge Report:
Ron was once the editor of RawStory. He was reportedly always odd and intense, but he had a mental breakdown in 2010. The guy I encountered around this time in 2011 was a manic phone screamer still trying to do journalism. He’s had a mix of lucidity and mania since then, a brief run with a byline at Daily Caller, but mostly he broadcasts delusions of reference on Twitter. Most recently he latched on to the precipitous closure of FreedomWorks and claimed they ran a campaign against he and I. Something along those lines actually did happen, but it wasn’t FreedomWorks. This is the @ronbryn method - obsessively “investigating” and then vaguely truthy “publishing” via Twitter.
This whole subplot could make a really shitty B movie and we’re not going to spend any more time on Ron and his defects. But how I know that he’s a useful idiot for the Scientologists is a tale I’ve never previously shared in public.
Going Clear? Going Crazy?:
Ron, himself a New York resident, was handled during Weinergate by a New York teacher named Lane Lipton. They apparently even dated briefly.
Lipton had an associate who ran a Wordpress blog using the name Kid Kenoma. The blog often mentioned events in the hills south of Los Angeles and once or twice a group known as the Lunar Librarians.
I encountered other unwell individuals besides Ron, as well as a number of victims of this “weaponized weirdos” process. One of them had put a name to KK - Cynthia Simms Garcia. I don’t know precisely when that happened, but I learned of it circa 2014.
I happened to be engaged in a curious counter-terrorism effort in 2015 that put me in contact with some notable Hollywood residents. They were involved because they could identify the video production equipment ISIS was using just by looking at the footage. In the course of conversation Anonymous came up, since Junaid Hussain was among the counter-terrorism issues at the time, and that led to talk of Scientology, and then mention of the Lunar Librarians.
One of the people had experienced some serious health troubles, encountered the Lunar Librarians while on a very L.A. sort of path of self discovery, and had ended up pursued by the Scientology extortion squad.
Quite a twisty little path to resolving that mystery, eh? But the next act was the climax.
Disengagement:
I literally just sit around here, minding my own business, and the most astonishing stuff falls out of the sky, landing square in the middle of my desk. That being said … I have the receipts for everything, but there’s just no way I am ever going to explain how this conversation came to pass.
During the summer of 2015 I was hanging out in Indio and periodically wandering around the Los Angeles area. I was in the middle of a couple of those things that had landed on my desk with a thump and they included talking to someone who sits in the C suite along with David Miscavige. They told me they’d had a lot of trouble with “intelligence firms” over the years (without actually mentioning HBGary) and would I be available to consult?
Like turning down the FBI in 2012, or taking a pass on the offer free software licenses from Moscow based Social Links in 2018, this was just one of those times where I let it run on a bit to see how things progressed, but there was never any chance I was going to agree.
Being the mobile kind of guy I am, I avoided a planned IRL meet by suddenly moving several hundred miles north.
Conclusion:
Back when I first encountered Ron I was still in the Buddhist mode of trying to be kind to everyone. But I had met Mike Rogers, Megan Carpentier, and Roxanne Cooper, because of course I had, things falling out of the sky style, so social engineering happened.
I knew Ron had a sealed settlement with RawStory. Once I grew weary of his insolence it took me about two minutes to figure out Roxanne was his #1 friction point and less than three days to goad him into a course of action that led to this:
Not being one to leave a job half finished, this had to follow.
Life’s Little Mysteries:
Why was Ron balls deep in a Tumblr run by “Jenna Deville”, the woman who was with Barrett Brown during this famous episode? Remember what I said earlier about the scene being unclean? But just as Jenna did with Barrett’s laptop, we are going to close the lid on the story of Scientology’s useful idiot before this goes any further.
In Memoriam:
Jamie “asshurtmacfags” Cochran - 2018-01-09
Adrian “6” Lamo - 2018-03-14
Kevin “aegis” Gallagher - 2021-06-10
Three people, each dead by their own hand, and “Jenna” is the one commonality for all of them. As that great American philosopher once noted, you really can observe a lot by watching, can’t you?