Lyndon LaRouche

LaRouche, 2006.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

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Persons of interest

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“”Oh no. Aliens... Bio-duplication... Nude conspiracies. Oh, my God! Lyndon LaRouche was right!

—Homer Simpson

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019) was a very special kind of cult leader American political animal, a perennial candidate for President and the ultimate wingnut/moonbat, encompassing both the extreme left and extreme right.

You know those sketchy-looking people that you see giving out pamphlets and newspapers near college campuses and subway stations? Carrying hand-lettered posters with pictures of Bush, Cheney, or Obama with a Hitler mustache? Chances are, they're working for Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche was a perpetual office seeker who ran for President eight times. For a while, he lived under heavy guard in a rural Virginia compound, where he operated his own batshit loony—but thankfully ineffective—political machine in a manner freakishly similar to a religious cult. Many of his political workers are young adults who think LaRouche, and only LaRouche, knows what needs to be done to Save the World™.

The LaRouche organization attempts to recruit followers from across the political spectrum. Though his organization has been active in other countries (particularly Australia and Germany), his home base and constituency has traditionally been largely American. Perhaps most surprising has been their success in recruiting old civil rights leaders into their movement. These include former SCLC leader Rev. James Bevel (1936-2008), and Amelia Boynton Robinson (1911-2015), a leader in the Selma-Montgomery marches. He also had a great deal of success wooing nuclear scientists into alliances with his group over nuclear power advocacy, including some big names who should have known better, although most of them jumped ship quickly once they realized LaRouche was nuts.

Views

“”I resolved that no revolutionary movement was going to be brought into being in the USA unless I brought it into being.

—LaRouche

LaRouche's wild theories seem especially strange to the Great Unwashed because they don't realize his thinking and his sympathies are stuck in the past − way, way in the past. LaRouche wanted to use 17th and 18th century political ideas to solve 21st century problems, and he was likely to use a peace agreement between England and Vietnam from the year 1643 as an example of what needs to be done to solve a current political crisis (even one that exists only in his own mind) today.

Though LaRouche traditionally ran as a Democrat since 1980, whether he is right or left is kind of hard to prove. The best that can be said is his beliefs were a unique amalgamation of wingnuttery and moonbattery, where far-left and far-right meet on the far side of the moon. His earliest political background was decidedly on the hard-left, where he was a Trotskyist and an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party (kicked out when they noticed his messiah complex even then), and then led a Marxist study group of New Left students during the late 1960s, from whence he assembled most of his early following. Some say he did this on the grounds that, according to Marxist theory, a proletarian revolution would not be possible until industrial development and a strong middle class were first a reality. This may explain his infatuation with nuclear power and big development projects.

SimCrank

“”Apart from those accomplishments which are as much an organic product of the U.S. Labor Party as my own efforts, my principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date. That distinction can be most easily defended, since it is not quantitative, but qualitative.

—LaRouche

He wanted to build nuclear-powered desalinization plants off the California coast, use tactical nukes to build a canal across Africa to solve the world's water crisis, thought the economy will collapse unless we build a high speed maglev railroad through Alaska and Siberia, and thought Henry Kissinger, the ADL, the Queen of England, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund are agents of the Royal family the KGB international Satanism who control the drug trade. LaRouche had been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism as well, though this is more prominent outside the United States, where he mostly blames the British for everything.

His apparent endgame was the militarization of all corners of society, the expulsion of British influence from western culture, and the creation of a new super-race he calls "Golden Souls" (a term he borrowed from Plato — LaRouche was heavy into Ancient Greece and accused his enemies of being Neo-Romans). The common thread in his views from the 1960s onward was a doomsday scenario in which finance capital is about to bring about a worldwide economic collapse or a "new dark age" unless LaRouche's leadership and economic proposals are adopted. (Heh heh.) He predicted imminent global collapse for 40 years, effectively beating Ron Paul at his own game. We're still waiting.

The REAL British Invasion!

“”Who is pushing the world toward war? is the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H.G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell.

—LaRouche

I'm your mama, I'm your daddy, I'm that nigga in the alley, I'm your doctor when in need, want some coke? Have some weed ♪

The underlying theme used as the basis for nearly all of LaRouche's actions stems from the conspiracy theory he embraced for most of his political career: the idea that the Royal monarchy still rules the world-spanning British Empire, and that we are all still slaves to England. The difference is that instead of overtly ruling the member nations of its empire, the British monarchy secretly controls the world's governments from behind the scenes. He also thought rock & roll, especially The Beatles, is a British intelligence plot to lead us into a dark age, and only classical music played in C=256 Hz Verdi tuning can bring about a new political and cultural renaissance, and that Harry Potter and Pokémon are cults reprogramming children's brains to commit acts of violence.

In LaRouche's eyes, the key event that led to the birth of this vast British cartel took place in the year 1711. This was the time of the insidious conspiracy by Isaac Newton and the Royal Society to undermine the workings of Gottfried Leibniz and his development of calculus. Everything in modern politics stems from this event, even to the point where an issue of his cult's self-published fanzine, Everyone In The World Is Insane But Me Executive Intelligence Review, rarely passes without a mention of Leibniz.

According to LaRouche, all of the worst United States Presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries have been pawns of London – and not the other way around, as the insidious British-controlled media tell you. LaRouche respects Franklin Roosevelt highly, but don't mention Harry Truman in his presence – because, you see, Truman was actually a tool and pawn of London! Likewise, Dubya and Dick Cheney were following London's agenda to wage a fake "War on Terror" especially to take away your freedoms and keep you under the yoke of England. When Larouche examined the candidates in the 2008 election, he concluded that Barack Obama was a tool of London, so he threw his considerable political clout (ahem) behind Hillary Clinton.

But of course the ruling cabal won, and the reins of power from London were merely transferred from Bush to Obama. Therefore, in LaRouche's eyes, Obama is Hitler. This explains why LaRouche supporters have taken part in the Tea Party protests against the Obama administration, holding signs proclaiming Obama to be the new Hitler… even though LaRouche and his supporters have run their political campaigns under the Democratic Party? (The Democrats, however, soundly reject LaRouche and kick his followers out on a regular basis.)

Political (mood) swings and flip flops

It's just a jump to the left...

“”Cry for the duck? You silly chickens! This is a hawk. See now how he moves.

—"Morning is a Wonderful Day", L. Marcus

The son of orthodox Quakers who themselves had a yen for tin hattery, LaRouche (then-known as "Lyn Marcus") came to Columbia University as a disaffected former member of the Spartacist League. He began teaching courses on Marxism at a "free university" set up in New York for student radicals. When the 1968 Columbia University student strike broke out, led by the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), he formed a "Labor Committee" to mobilize student support for a sanitation workers' strike that was taking place at the same time. After the Columbia strike the Labor Committee became a full-blown faction within SDS called the SDS Labor Committee, and later the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). SDS at that time had several factions, one of which was controlled by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL), another of which was also Maoist but opposed to PL (this faction later spawned the Weather Underground), the older social democratic wing of SDS who weren't happy with all the Maoist sects, an anarchist faction, a faction of white students who wanted to work with the Black Panther Party, etc. LaRouche assembled most of his early following from his students at the free university, and when SDS fractured at their 1969 convention, LaRouche went his own way with his National Caucus of Labor Committees gaining a reputation as an especially hard-line leftist sect. The chaotic demise of the Cultural Revolution in China around 1970 proved to be a windfall for the Labor Committees, with disaffected former PLers already conditioned to hard line cult politics and familiar with LaRouche from SDS days seeing him as a suitable stand-in for Mao, who had left them disillusioned. The Labor Committees became known mainly for calling for "strike support" in a form that striking workers really didn't want, and showing up at antiwar functions to pontificate and denounce the movement for ideological impurity.

Transformation into a personality cult

“”To the extent that my physical powers do not prevent me, I am now confident and capable of ending your political — and sexual — impotence; the two are interconnected aspects of the same problem.

—L. Marcus

The transformation appears to have happened around 1973-74. In 1973 he ordered his followers to physically attack meetings of the U.S. Communist Party, claiming this would establish the "hegemony" of LaRouche's group over the U.S. left. Shortly thereafter, he began incorporating a weird psycho-sexual analysis into his politics and subjecting followers to "deprogramming" sessions, claiming that only he could fix their erectile dysfunction, cuckold marriages, or homosexual leanings. LaRouche also claimed he was being targeted for assassination. Ex-followers call this period the "great freakout of 1974."

...and then a step to the right

“”We shall end the rule of irrationalist episodic majorities, of British liberal notions of 'democracy.'

—LaRouche

In 1976 he made his first run for president on the U.S. Labor Party ticket, best remembered for posters claiming a vote for Jimmy Carter would cause global thermonuclear war. His abandonment of Marxism came a little later around 1978. This may have happened because in 1976, the extremist right-wing group Liberty Lobby took notice of some of LaRouche's campaign material and its conspiratorial overtones (LaRouche, like Liberty Lobby, was an early critic of the Trilateral Commission), and began promoting LaRouche publications to their audience, while criticizing it for not identifying what Liberty Lobby thought the "real source" of the "conspiracy" was. Soon, sensing a new potential source of converts, LaRouche publications were filled with conspiracy theories originating in the extreme right, with anti-Semitic overtones. In 1978, his group was still Marxist in some sense, as they published a translation of a Rosa Luxemburg book, but by 1979 he abandoned any remaining traces of Marxism.

In 1980 he made the first of several runs for president in the Democratic primaries. LaRouche attempted to build a grand coalition that would "piggy-back" (his words) him to the White House and make ties with the far-left and far-right. For example, he condemned counter-culture as a conspiracy to enact the drug trade and staunchly criticized the environmentalist movement, to the point of blaming them for the 1979 Iranian Revolution. At the same time, LaRouche also attempted to build ties with civil rights and labor union leaders (the Teamsters especially), claimed he alone could bring Arab-Israeli peace, as well as hammering Carter on enacting trucking deregulation. This seems to have failed to materialize, as LaRouche won a massive 0.09% of votes and Ronald Reagan took LaRouche's seat. Still, try, try again they say, so LaRouche ran six more times, either barely improving or winning fewer votes. He later tried to establish ties with the New Right in the early years of Reagan, especially regarding his pet issues: nuclear power, homofascism, the War on Drugs, and opposition to the environmental movement.

LaRouche was an early proponent of laser and space-based weapons ("which we absolutely need" to destroy the Oligopoly, says LL's wife), and is credited by many with successfully lobbying Ronald Reagan into funding the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" program. So yeah, it's his fault.

A group of his followers calling themselves PANIC, the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee, actually put a measure on the ballot in California in 1986 that could have led to a quarantine of people with HIV, on account of LaRouche's belief that HIV can be spread by insect bites and casual contact. Among their awareness-boosting slogans was “Spread Panic, Not AIDS.”

LaRouche's intelligence network

“”We play the enemy forces as a hundred-pound fisherman successfully plays a powerful sailfish or oversized tarpon.

—Blofeld LaRouche

Starting around the time of his 1976 run for the presidency, the LaRouche organization built a private intelligence gathering network which rivaled that of many governments and major media. According to one critic, the LaRouche organization used this intelligence network in an opportunistic way to try to establish ties and information exchanges with anyone and everyone, and would often pass information between agencies and groups hostile to each other, either as a deliberate go-between or in an opportunistic way. They established such communication channels with both the CIA and KGB, with both African-American civil rights activists in the U.S. and the South African apartheid government, and with several Latin American military dictatorships and the left-wing Christic Institute which opposed U.S. policy in Central America. Some of these people eventually figured out LaRouche was a loose cannon only interested in promoting himself, but only after a bunch of stuff was leaked that shouldn't have been.

Give credit where credit is due, though: LaRouche's EIR magazine broke the Iran-Contra affair several months before anyone in the media picked up on it.

Success... and hard time

“”...a nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.

—LaRouche on the Leesburg Garden Club

Originally based in New York City, the entire LaRouche operation pulled up stakes in 1985 and relocated to Virginia in the Leesburg area near the West Virginia state line. The locals were not amused. In 1986, his followers Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild won the Democratic primaries in Illinois for Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor respectively; that, combined with his move from the relative anonymity of New York City to the fishbowl environment of Leesburg (population 8000) where they quickly came under close scrutiny from local law enforcement and media, and his group's sponsorship of a controversial AIDS ballot initiative in California, called enough public attention to his movement that his fundraising practices came under scrutiny. It was during this time that the LaRouche organization had its biggest successes in running candidates in Democratic primaries. Although their only major victories were the two primary wins in Illinois, his supporters also won a number of minor seats, mostly local Democratic precinct captains and party chairmanships, the most significant of which was in Houston, Texas. The hundreds of "LaRouche Democrats" running in primaries, as the media dubbed them, sent the Democratic Party into a panic and there was a brief media hysteria circa 1986 over the possibility that LaRouche's movement was gaining traction with voters. This ended with the criminal convictions of LaRouche and several top aides.

His Leesburg office was raided by the FBI in October 1986, and he was convicted in 1988 on mail fraud and tax evasion charges. He served five years of a 15 year sentence, at one point sharing a prison cell with Jim Bakker. He and his apologists claim this was solely a politically-motivated prosecution and that LaRouche was a "political prisoner," but in fact was the same sleazy malady every televangelist knows and does well: scaring old people with lurid stories of the Imminent End of the World and bilking them out of their retirement money.

After prison

“”The worst human swine is of the self-righteous variety.

—LaRouche

During the early 1990s he attempted to establish ties with the "Wise use" movement, which is a catch-all term for a wide variety of groups, some of them grassroots organizations on a shoestring budget in timber, ranching, and mining communities who saw their jobs and culture under attack from hard greens; others, corporate-funded astroturf groups engaging in environmental denialism and greenwashing. The LaRouche organization wasn't the only fringe group trying to establish hegemony over this movement, another was the Unification Church. LaRouchies would typically show up at their meetings peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about a British cabal conspiring to de-industralize the planet through environmentalism and their rock-sex-drug counterculture to bring about, again, a "new dark age." They had little success, and when they found themselves rebuffed by rough-and-ready loggers and miners who recognized bullshit when they saw it, LaRouche fired a volley at "wise use" around 1995, writing off the movement as a front for "British" libertarian interests taking their cues from Milton Friedman (one of LaRouche's main bugaboos).

On other matters, LaRouche's conviction had effectively cut off his ties with the Reaganite right, and his group's breaking of the Iran-Contra affair pointed to a different direction and an eventual swing back to the left. Two LaRouche associates wrote George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography which became one of their most popular books, detailing George H.W. Bush's various misdeeds (albeit with typical LaRouchian distortions and conspiracy theories woven in). LaRouche opposed the 1991 Gulf War and his followers joined anti-war protests.

See-sawing back to the left

“”Was [Monica] Lewinsky a Likud plant into the Clinton White House? It is highly unlikely that we will ever get a satisfactory answer to that question.

—

At some point in the late 1980s he began to distance himself from the U.S. extreme right, which was then moving into some bizarre new areas themselves such as the militia movement and black helicopter conspiracy theories; even LaRouche realized these movements were dangerous and crazy, and he denounced these (predictably) as "British" propaganda (he likes blaming the British for a lot of things). He began offering staunch support of Bill Clinton, which had gradually begun almost immediately after the 1993 inaguration. LaRouche strongly denounced the Clinton impeachment attempt, and attacked right-wing Republicans like Newt Gingrich and called for impeachment of the Republican (then-governor of Pennsylvania) Tom Ridge in 1996.

Who even knows anymore

“”President Obama is now impeachable, because he has, in effect, proposed legislation which is an exact copy of the legislation for which the Hitler regime was condemned in the post-World War II trials.

—LaRouche on the Affordable Care Act

We did Nazi that coming.

His brand of "leftism" in his final years, however, was still full of the same conspiratorial talk from his far-right period. He endorsed John Kerry in 2004, the first time he ever endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate other than himself, and shared many of the criticisms of Dick Cheney and the Bush administration with the left. But he also considered George Soros public enemy #1 (apparently replacing his old nemesis Henry Kissinger) and took a conspiracy-laden view of Barack Obama's administration — possibly putting him in the PUMA category, although we're sure the PUMAs don't particularly want anything to do with him either.

LaRouche attacked Obama's health care proposals from the left — LaRouche wants single-payer and only single-payer — and his followers have been showing up at health care debates with signs showing Obama with a Hitler moustache.

Logan's Run

“”Remember the American Revolution was a youth movement.

—LaRouche

Still very much a cult, he in recent years tried organizing younger "Millennial Generation" people into his movement through the LaRouche Youth Movement, and took to denouncing "Baby Boomers" and suggesting they commit suicide, which may have influenced one of his longtime followers to do just that.

Longtime LaRouche watchers and ex-followers have noted his organization has essentially split: the older followers based in Leesburg are now on their own, while LaRouche and his LaRouche Youth Movement relocated to nearby Purcellville. The speculation here is LaRouche knew he was not going to live much longer, and had given up on his older followers whom he recruited in the 1960s-70s, and thought that he could ensure the longevity of his ideas by cutting the older baby boomers loose and putting his stock entirely in building the LaRouche Youth Movement. His older followers, who have been loyal to him all this time, are needless to say confused and betrayed, and the state of the LaRouche movement is not good at this point.

Front groups and recruiting

• Schiller Institute — established in Wiesbaden, Germany by Lyndon's wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a German national; this group is also active in the U.S. It is involved in musical crankery regarding the so-called "Verdi pitch", seeking to mandate the tuning of A above middle C to 432 Hz. Other cranks claim this magical frequency to be "mathematically consistent with the universe."
  • Bizarrely, Larouche's Schiller franchise has also branched out to Denmark, where The Friends of the Schiller Institute (Schiller Instituttets Venner) are perennial crank candidates at various Danish elections. In a stopped clock moment, they recommended reinstating the Glass–Steagall Legislation, but how relevant this policy is in a Danish municipal election campaign is anyone's guess... The party also ran on planks demanding Maglev trains across the Kattegat and colonization of Mars as antidotes to the Great Recession in their bid to gain a foothold in municipal politics in Denmark.
• Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (BüSo) (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity) — the LaRouche political party in Germany
• Parti Ouvrier Européen (European Labor Party) — French counterpart to the US Labor Party (74-89)
• Solidarité & Progrès (Solidarity & Progress) — the French LaRouche party allegedly founded in 1996
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) — name of the LaRouche-led faction of and split-off from SDS; renamed the US Labor Party in 1976.
• Citizens Electoral Council — formerly an outfit of run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic white supremacist nutbags, it suffered an internal takeover to become the LaRouche political party in Australia. Distributes colourful and insightful pamphlets during election campaigns in states in which they are not standing for election, or even have a party registered.
• New Federalist newspaper (prior to 1988 known as New Solidarity)
• Executive Intelligence Review (or EIR), his comically misnamed journal.
• 21st Century Science and Technology magazine — the main outlet for LaRouche's views on nuclear power and his esoteric proposals for space-based weaponry and high speed rail.
• Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement - Clue brick: if you don't like people calling your movement fascist, don't call your young followers "LaRouche Youth."
• Fusion Energy Foundation, and Fusion magazine. FEF is defunct; the magazine was later replaced by 21st Century Science and Technology.
• "Committee for the Republic of Canada" in Quebec.
• LaRouche-controlled book publishers, past and present, include Campaigner Publications and New Benjamin Franklin Publishing House

Electoral history

He ran for president in every election from 1976 through 2004, and for U.S. Congress in Virginia in 1990. His best results were in the 1980 New Hampshire Democratic primary (2%), and in the 1996 and 2000 Democratic primaries (4.55% and 2.2% nationwide respectively, mainly because the only candidate of note in the 1996 primaries was Bill Clinton, and in 2000, Al Gore and Bill Bradley). In 1996 and 2000 the Democratic Party refused to seat his delegates won in the Virginia and North Dakota primaries in 1996 and the Arkansas primary in 2000. The LaRouche organization has a long history of falsely exaggerating LaRouche's electoral results and claiming he outright "won" some states. His best showing in a general presidential election was 0.09% in 1984 as an independent candidate, billed in his half-hour TV ads as an "Independent Democrat." Unfortunately he did not run for president at age 86 in '08.

It's been stated that Abraham Simpson once voted for LaRouche.

21st Century Science and Technology

21st Century Science and Technology is a quarterly magazine published by the Lyndon LaRouche organization. The magazine mainly serves as an outlet for LaRouche's crank views on science, which tend toward denialism of global warming, space-based weaponry, and a lot of quirky and odd science woo.^{[citation needed]}

It replaced an earlier magazine called Fusion, which was the publication of the Fusion Energy Foundation, a LaRouche front group which had some success in wooing mainstream nuclear scientists into alliances with him.

On the positive side, LaRouche was a big fan of building high-speed rail transport and big infrastructure projects. Don't be fooled, this is the stopped clock effect at work folks.

LaRouche appears to have been fascinated with the work of 19^th century German scientist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who is frequently referenced in this magazine. He also seems to be fascinated with the pseudomathematical concepts of "squaring the circle" and "doubling the cube".

Originally a print magazine, since 2006 it has been web-only.

As of 2017, it has been almost 4 years since the last issue and 2 years since the "New" section has been updated.

See also

• Galileo gambit: During the trial, he compared his writings to the works of Dante, St. Augustine and Plato, among others.
• Rothschild family: The focal point of his various Jewish bankstah conspiracy theories.
• Ron Paul: Another ideologue with views across the spectrum who draws the support of young white Americans.
• David Icke: A proponent of the "Queen Liz is secretly Scarface" theory.

Videos

• 1976 half hour TV ad, in which Judge Doom LaRouche moves his head around a lot, prophesies Carter will launch nuclear war no later than 1977, and claims "aliens" (or Aliens?) in California are going to move from precinct to precinct in vote fraud to throw the election to Carter.
• LaRouche on Weekend Update, 1988. "I'll get you for that."
• Tell us what you really think of Walter Mondale

External links

• LaRouche PAC - A vortex of blithering insanity
  • LaRouche PAC science - A glittery asshole of vapid pseudo-science
  • J'accuse!
• LaRouche articles at culteducation.com
• A Menace or Just a Crank?, New York Times
• Partners in Bigotry: The LaRouche Cult and the Nation of Islam, Nizkor Project