Dividing the headlines for the obits for lyndon larouche into various categories. I do like the attempts — ‘Queen Elizabeth is a drug pusher’ conspiracy theorist dies at 96 — as though we need to figure out what, who, what you may have known him as, vaguely.
For the most part it’s “Political Cult Leader” (thank you right wing world net daily), or “8 Time Presidential Candidate”… “Conspiracy Theorist” and Presidential Candidate… “Who led cult“.
Tagging to specifics — harmfulness — “Politicians who sought HIV Quarantine“. And the local angle — “Rochester’s own“.
A few years later I encountered Fairchild pushing the LaRouche stuff (and if I recall correctly, feeding a student’s seeing-eye dog some of his lunch which is a no no). When he said his name, I said “hey you are that guy who ran for Lt Governor†he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
A few years later we encountered LaRouche followers in Germany, surprised me quite a bit.
ANDÂ I think all his life he was laughing up his sleeve at his cult. I don’t think Lyndon Adolf H. Stassen Marcus-LaRouche believed half the things he said.
At least by 20 yrs. ago people had finally stopped confusing libertarians w LaRouche. That longstanding confusion was as vexing to him as to us.
Back then I showed their lit to a friend. He thought it was hilarious & joined them for the lulz. Little by little, they won him over, but after a few mos. he was outed as a Rockefeller spy. He described his being purged as a very scary scene of them surrounding him & saying, “Hah!”
I was talking with a LaRouchite at a table in a public square during the 1980s and he axed me where I was from.
I told him my hometown and he looked at me wide-eyed and he axed me if I knew that the founder of NAMBLA was from my bumfuck town and then pulled out pamphlets on it and, years later, I found out that the info was accurate!
I ‘m one of the few who know of it in the town where I grew up.
Hey da. Â Back in the day, I was intrigued by the anti-war, anti-Bush/Cheney posters with which they decorated the table they routinely set up on Broadway, so I stopped one day to see what they were all about.
That five minute conversation got me months of some of the kookiest mailers and emails I ever could have imagined. “Just think of how much better the world would be if orchestras didn’t tune to 440,” and the like.
Those guys are f*cking crazy.
“Okay.” A tireless proponent of returning America to the policies of Alexander Hamilton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, passed on February 12 at the age of 97. There are no details. Still trying to get reactionary Catholics?
And moving aside the glib “slur political enemy” angle — Here’s the Competitive Enterprise Institute who notes Larouche had a big goal for huge government, as does AOC — why, Larouche lives on! — (Noted, the Larouche organization has declared her and her “green agenda” Malthusian anti-human etc.)
And semi-the same the claim “showed where U.S. politics was headed” — never mind I recall paranoia as being pretty extant during the Cold War, a dig at Trump — Or to the point, the hbo video puts him in the context of “Long running joke”.
and reference point to the likes of Alex Jones “Before there was Internet Paranoia” — (notably in the current era of deplatforming has been hawking the old fashion virtues of radio to his listeners) —
For my part, the “hits” that arrive at this little blog of mine… he disclaimed The Beatles.
This hour, some random talkings, and it skips around to things of note and some things not of note, the interviewed struggling not to overstate what he knows… skip about to 45 minutes and we get some of the “high lights”, and — “chimpanzee in the White House”, worth noting the black man skipped out on the cult in short order.
As described by Scott McLemee in trying to explain how “cults die” or disintegrate — over to “Why We Left”.
So, where does LaRouche’s mathematical output fit in? Has anyone in the field assessed it?
Har de har har.
As any good demagogue… The crises and anxieties of our age gave Lyndon LaRouche a lot of material to work with …
The big change-over over the last few years, under the new leadership of Helga Zepp as Lyndon faded and stopped being plopped up back in 2016… It’s no longer an American cult serving Russia; now it’s a German one serving China… (McCarthyite of me, dunno.)
Deceptive to the end, LaRouche passes from the scene having migrated from Marxism to quasi-fascism, and from fake Democratic to fake German allegiances. It’s never been clear to what extent Lyndon LaRouche was a con man, or just a megalomaniac who drank too deeply of his own Kool-Aid. But he left a lot of damage in his wake. And in the end, the drug dealer Elizabeth II got the last laugh by outliving him.
Molly Kronberg: Glad to see you included references to Ken Kronberg’s suicide and LaRouche’s attacks on his own (baby boomer) members. As Ken Kronberg’s widow, I appreciate any article on LaRouche that recognizes the tremendous damage he did to his own “membership,” and Ken would too. Not long before he died, Ken told me that LaRouche “was too mean to die”–but the past few days show that, however mean LaRouche was, he was no match for Death.
Swedish prime minster Olof Palme, who seemed likely to have been killed by incubated poisonous rhetoric. Jeremiah Duggan could not escape a controlled environment.
Matthew Sweet may have written the last book on the movement in anticipation for his death — as it should be for a footnote of a footnote, coming at him from a side-story.
Kremlinologically, reading factnet… Rachel Brown — the woman who ran against Barney Frank — appears to have been slotted down the scales; — it’s Kesha Rogers and Diane Sare that come out of the cult’s “LYM” recruiting struggles, I guess — Jeffrey Steinberg disappears — and why wouldn’t someone like Harley Schlanger– carved out his space in conspiracy land — just drop the cult connection and move on to Webster Tarpley’s jib?
