How many of you have seen tables either on campus, or the streets, full of college drop outs who sell EIR, claim to be FDR Democrats, and claim that everyone who disagrees with them is responsible for getting George Bush in office? 

I ran into those people in Santa Monica in 2004.  Those people had conspiracy theories about the British arranging every assassination in the US, about everyone but LaRouche being evil, and about doomsday being around the corner.  They were much more aggreessive than the cell phone salespeople in most malls.  A few used car salespeople can learn from them.  I made the stupid mistake of giving them an accurate phone number and that was incredibly stupid.  I got harassed every week and at some point every day by those assholes.  They tried to keep me on the phone as long as possible and got pissed if I refused to give them money.  They asked for $200-$500 and who actually gives that amount?  And they wanted that much every time they called me.  They used conspiracy theories, doomsday predictions, guilt trips, and anger to persuade me to give them money.  None of that worked on me, but they were persistent.  They spent a year harassing me before giving up.  If I didn’t give money, they would tell me I got George Bush in office or that I am a shill. 

Then I did some research on who LaRouche is.  I learned that I was lucky compared to the college students they try to recruit.  College students get a call every day and two per day if they are being difficult.  They try to drain their recruit’s savings for fundraising and to keep them from being able to afford bus fare to leave once recruited.  They are persuaded to drop out and go to a Larouche seminar or cadre school.  If they go to a seminar or cadre school, they can never leave.  They are sleep deprived, forced to work six days per week ten hours per day, and given information overloads on the upcoming doomsday.  LaRouche is a cult leader who profited heavily since the sixties by claiming to be a progressive political activist.  He ran for president every election year since 1976 and his campaign was the same every time:  that his chances of getting elected were better than our chance of surviving if he doesn’t get elected.  His cult was originally a small group within the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) called the National Caucus for Labor Committees.  All of them were dropouts who quit their jobs and abandoned their families to give him everything they had.  LaRouche spent most of his life studying how to make people gullible, how to exploit people’s fears of right wing nut jobs, and how to manipulate people into doing just about anything. 

His favorite targets were always people with progressive political attitudes and a serious fear of what the future might bring - such as another Hitler, inflation wiping out their savings, unemployment, an invasion by the religious right, etc.  That describes most of the college students who get recruited - and persuaded to drop out, give their life savings th LaRouche, and spend their lives trying to recruit more people.

LaRouche’s cult has people in Europe as well as all over the US.  In 2002, in Weisbaden, Germany, a student named Jeremiah Duggan was killed trying to leave the German division of the LaRouche movement.  He was run over while trying to run across a busy highway.  Witnesses said he was in a state of terror and appeared to be running for his life. 

LaRouche was in jail from 1988 to 1992 when he tried to get the government to double his donations to a political campaign and also harassed too many elderly people at airports.  He and his supporters claim it was for his political views.  His jail sentence became a good recruiting tool because to many college students and young people, it sounded like it justified his conspiracy theories.  Recruitment into the LaRouche cult skyrocketed in 2003 due to the war in Iraq and Patriot Act.

A lot of people have never heard of LaRouche.  This too is an important recruitment tool.  LaRouche supporters depend on their prey to have never heard of him.  That way they can say he is oppressed by the evil mainstream media.

Read "www.justiceforjeremiah.com" to find the testimony of ex-members and information on the LaRouche movement and I am sorry if this post ran too long.

That’s an accurate post.  I dealt with LaRouchians from 2003-2004 at Temple University in Philadelphia.  My experiences and impressions were similar—they were college dropouts who set up tables with EIRs and other lit, told me the media was oppressing all info about LaRouche, showed me a Socratic “proof” of the noesphere and the concept of “dis-covering” knowledge that we all innately can tap into or something, tried to convince me that a Maglev must be built through the Sahara, and called me sometimes twice a day.

Sometimes I’d wander by their tables on a pleasant afternoon just to debate for a while…until the phone calls got out-of-hand, and I felt I had to cut off all contact.  I remember telling a friend of mine in the Philosophy department a little bit about their background and beliefs, and the next time we walked by their tables, he stopped and yelled, “Don’t you know it’s a CULT?  You’re all in a CULT!” and on and on.  Their response: “No, you’re in a cult! LaRouche told us you’d say that!  Look at you—the school owns you!”

(Yelling is probably not a very good way to get members of a cult to break their ties; it is, however, funny!)

Debbie

Loonies. We see them sometimes on street corners in NYC with inflammatory signage.

Steer clear.

Thanks for the warning.  I wonder why none of his ex-followers have return the favor and kill him?

What would that solve, except to make him a martyr for his cause?

His followers would then develop ideas about the government conspiring to kill him to oppress his ideas (same way they did when he was in prison about 15 years ago).  The death of a charismatic leader can lead either to the death of his movement, or to the galvanizing of his followers.  I think in this case, it would be the latter, which would probably make it worse before it got better, if indeed it ever got better.

When L. Ron Hubbard died, Scientology didn’t die with him (unfortunately)—in fact, they say he didn’t die, but instead transcended the physical, or something along those lines.  Martin Luther King Jr.‘s death didn’t weaken his followers.  Nor did that other guy’s—you know the one.

Debbie

Well put, Deb.

Fusion Power

I remeber them as the US Labor Party. They were pushing hydrogen fusion energy as the answer to all human problems.

I guess the old saying is true: All politicians are bad, just some more than others.

They used to show up at Reed College in Portland, OR back in the early nineties. I got a free copy of La Rouche’s autobiography from them. Seriously bizarre stuff. He traced most of society’s ills to the ancient Roman cult of Mithras. I’d study Mithraism and other mystery cults later on, and still can’t figure out how La Rouche drew that conclusion. He frequently alluded to what he called “The rock-drug-sex cult” (can’t you even get the word order right, man? It’s sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll! Sheesh!)and characterized Margaret Mead as a “witch.”
What amused me about his upbringing was that he, like President Richard Nixon, was raised Quaker. Being a good bleeding-heart liberal, I was raised to think of Quakers as “the good guys,” but in least in those two instances, they produced a couple of real hawks…

Oh, and he still shows up as a presidential candidate with alarming regularity, at least on California ballots…

Deb’s right. Lyndon Larouche is the Libertarian-KKK hybrid version of L. Ron Hubbard and Rev. Moon.

Occam

Not that it matters much, but Lyndon Larouche isn’t a Libertarian.  I don’t know about his KKK ties, or lack of them.

He has been working the Democrats for his presidential bids ever since he gave up trying to start a new political party, apparently due to the difficulties of gaining ballot access.  I don’t recall the name of that party, but I think it had “Labor” as part of it.  -Eric

I wasn’t saying that Larouche was a Libertarian, just that he embodied the worst ideas of the Libertarians, many of the tenets of the KKK, and tried to build the charismatic leadership of Hubbard and Moon. 

And, no, I’m not attacking the Libertarians. I like some of their ideas and dislike others of their ideas.

Occam

OK.  Glad to hear it.

It wasn’t all that clear to me when I first read it, and thought others might read the wrong thing into it, too.

I suppose I should have done the same with the Libertarian - KKK non-connection, but it didn’t occur to me that anyone might think there was one.  But it can happen.  The Southern Poverty Law Center made one, of a sort.

Eventually, the SPLC removed a local (St. Louis) Libertarian group from their list of “Hate Groups”, but they did include it a while.  Can’t say that improved the SPLC’s reputation with my mother or ex-wife, both of whom know me well enough to see how absurd that SPLC claim was.

But I did get an interesting artifact from it: hardcopy of the page, autographed by Morris Dees Himself when he was in town (well, SIU-Edwardsville).  I doubt he knew what it was he was autographing; my explanation was hurried and so was he.  He had hundreds of autographs to sign that night.  (Plus, he actually signed it.)

To see their latest set of lists, visit http://www.splcenter.org .  You might want to read the fine print of how a group gets on the list, especially if one listed is one you belong to or know well.  It could be you or someone one you love is a racist, and you don’t even know it!

The process used to add an entry is not exactly rigorous.  At least, it wasn’t, last I checked the site.  And I don’t recall seeing anything about how an organization gets removed from the list.  -Eric

Dang… I suddenly have this overwhelming fear that I could get manipulated by him…

If I ever join LaRouche’s group… shoot me. Please.

Well, try to undo the brainwashing first…

‘Least Nader gets more votes than him.

I’ve never heard of them and judging by what I’m reading here, I hope I never do.