Rattigan - “Why do they keep talking about the government persecution?”
The short answer is that they know their katamari ball of misdeeds is gonna come back to bite them on the ass sooner or later, potentially resulting in loss of tax-exemption and insolvency.
A long answer is that playing the victim card been an integral component in their End-Times narrative for half a century, Fred Franz never left any kind of protege, and Ted Jaracz used 9-11 as a pretext to purge Bethel of the majority of moderates and liberals, leaving almost no creatives left with the narrative chops to give their End-Times narrative the necessary rewrite.
For the old version to work at this point, there’d have to be a complete radical political shift, constitutional suspension, and large-scale martial law initiated (all on ridiculously short notice) for it to actually work…
…it was a lot more plausible way back in the day, as much of the UN charter had been drafted by Europeans with socialist (i.e. communist) leanings, McCarthyism was rampant, and the cultural shifts of the era were scaring the shit out of ultraconservative religionists.
Probably why they’re reportedly trying to overhaul the Org’s eschatology to (presumably) look not so 20th Century Cold War -centric (not to mention that if the WTS was sunk, it’d fly in the face of the old version, which had “Babylon the Great” very specifically attacked and destroyed first rather than “God’s Exclusive Earthly Organization”).