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Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism
Investigates the political and personal make-up of a politician whose allegiances have shifted over the years from the far left to the extreme right and explores LaRouche's cult following and his vision for the nation's future
415 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
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Dennis King
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June 29, 2023
Larouche is such an interesting figure. He started out as a Trotskyist before splintering off and forming his own self-proclaimed “Marxist” political organization. For this organization he recruited student radicals and put them through pretty intense brainwashing which included: humiliation sessions where members were lambasted and castigated for the most minor ideological discrepancy or infraction in front of the rest of the party; telling members that he had repeatedly survived assassination attempts and that the government/other radical Marxist groups were out to get them; and fostering a belief that Larouche’s group were the only true marxists that stood head and shoulders above all others. This group then cut their teeth by violently attacking CPUSA members and their offices to the point where people began believing LaRouche was a fed (he wasn’t at the time but he would eventually openly brag about becoming an FBI informant).
By the 1970s LaRouche’s NCLC organization had begun making “tactical” alliances with the KKK and other white supremacists against the “main enemy” AKA “Nelson Rockefeller’s fascism with a democratic face”, liberals, and “social fascists” (left wing organizations). Through various brainwashing and psychological manipulation tactics LaRouche had whittled his followers down to the most ardent true believers. His adherents had become cultists who believed anything that opposed them, or that LaRouche told them to oppose, was part of a grand CIA conspiracy specifically to target the NCLC. The supposed theory for allying with the farthest elements of the right, like klansmen and neonazis, was that the NCLC could dip into this pool of rightists to gain more funding and recruits. After the inevitable and impending glorious revolution, the right elements would then easily be crushed. However, “pro-Rocky” (Rockefeller) conservatives, which were defined as conservatives not far enough to the right for LaRouche’s liking such as William Buckley, could not be trusted or relied upon. These men had already been bought out by big business. Only the farthest elements of the right were sufficiently independent enough from the tentacles of big business and the CIA to be trusted.
To get his followers to buy into this (especially his sizable number of Jewish followers) Lyndon began promoting his own “unique” theory of history, sprinkled in with some pseudo-psychoanalysis. First, he claimed that he and the NCLC didn’t oppose all Jews, just the ‘fake’ “nominal Jews/Jews who are not Jews” that support evil things like zionism. By LaRouche’s convoluted standards the only “real” Jews happened to be the Jews that were members of the NCLC. Therefore, any Jew was fair game to be attacked by his anti-semitism, but this was ok because they were not, in fact, real Jews. Next, LaRouche claimed that Hitler had been put into power by the Rothschilds (the quintessential “Jews who are not Jews”) to do their bidding, which happened to be committing a Holocaust against German Jews so that somewhere down the line the Zionist state of Israel could be created. The good German people resisted and, through a staunch nationalism, convinced Hitler to invade Great Britain (the home of the Rothschilds), but Hitler was eventually won back over by the Rothschilds and thus invaded the USSR. Through LaRouchian alchemy the Jews were the real Nazis and the real perpetrators of the Holocaust. This led up to the modern day, where the undefeated Rothschilds and their minions were now attempting to partake in a Holocaust infinitely worse than the original Holocaust they perpetrated. Anybody who did not fight the Rothschilds was a Nazi and probably an agent of the Rothschilds themselves; however, since rightwingers like the actual Nazis were anti-Semitic (but remember against “not real Jews”) they were, in fact, the real antifascist fighting against the new Nazi Holocaust! According to LaRouche there was no political spectrum, just people who were funded by the global elites versus people who were not. Therefore there were good and bad communists, good and bad conservatives, and even good Nazis (the Wehrmacht) and bad Nazis (the agents of the Rothschilds).
Throughout the 1970s LaRouche incessantly preached to his followers that an imminent insurrection and coup would soon put them in power. In fact, many NCLC members contacted high-ranking military officials to try and convince them to undertake one. After the coup, according to his written works such as “The Power of Reason” and “The Case of Walter Lippmann”, LaRouche’s idea of Americans being reborn under his reign was something very similar to fascism. His ultimate plan was to “rid our planet” of the “Zionist oligarchy” and put the societal conditions in place to build an ultimate race of “golden souls” that were to be the next step in human evolution. This new America would totally reject “British liberal notions of ‘democracy’ “ and have “nothing to do with elections, parliaments, or such”. Within LaRouche’s dictatorship all anti-LaRouche forces would obviously be suppressed and America would be “cleansed… by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby”. In typical fascist class collaboration, that capital and labor were to be “understood to be identical” and therefore unionization and strikes would be banned. Next, the nation would prepare for total war mobilization to export this war against the Zionist oligarchy on a planetary scale. Large scale projects modeled after the Apollo project, the Manhattan Project, and the Nazi’s V-2 rocket development (done by slave labor) were to be the main industrial focus of the economy. The only way such robust and groundbreaking projects could be undertaken was if the educational system was remade to “mobilize the creative powers of the mind” by teaching things like NCLC “humanism” and educating Americans on our ‘actual’ Teutonic heritage through listening to German classical music, reading German poetry, and mastering classical German philosophy (the NCLC believed that German, not England, had the greatest role in the ‘real’ foundation of America). Only through all these means could we bring about the “progressive liquidation” of the Oligarchs.
By the mid-1970s the LaRouche movement had begun building its own political machine and running in the Democratic ballot, and by the early 1980s they were running thousands of candidates across all states. By running on promises to prevent farm foreclosures, reopen factories and mills, violently crack down on drug dealers, legally prosecute banks, and quarantine AIDS victims the LaRouchites were vying for the votes of a so-called “silent majority” of senior citizens, small farmers feeling the economic squeeze of neoliberalism, and petty-bourgeois businessmen AKA a class base commonly sought after by fascists. The LaRouche movement was also very close to the Republican Party and the Reagan government. They often pushed conspiracy theories from their fringes into the mainstream in order to help Republican candidates; an example of this being the rumor that Michael Dukakis was mentally ill and unstable. This rumor was eventually picked up by the mainstream press like the Wall Street Journal (who wrote an article about “rumors of Dukakis’s depression”) and even got a mention from president Reagan in a press conference where he referred to Dukakis as an “invalid”. This specific smear was actually tested over a decade earlier in 1976 when LaRouche, after being paid around $100,000 by Republican businessmen , went on television on the eve of the presidential election to declare that Jimmy Carter was mentally unbalanced. Other targets of LaRouchite propaganda included Jerry Brown, Ted Kennedy, and George Bush. Often, LaRouchite candidates would enter into electoral races just to smear their Democratic opponent, intentionally giving any Republicans running a window with which to pick up the smear and propagate the blatant lies as if they were widely accepted truths.
The author, who was writing as the LaRouche movement was edging towards its eventual downfall, includes a lot of random LaRouche info that doesn’t really build on a coherent framework of what the movement was; if LaRouche shit in the woods, which was then reported on in the media, only for LaRouche to call the reporter a KGb agent homosexual pedophile, odds are this book writes about it. This becomes a problem when the book gives equal time to important things, such as the political basis of LaRouchism or the depth of its conspiratorial belief system, to relatively obscure and unimportant stuff such as LaRouche’s feud with Roy Cohen or what former CIA agents LaRouche hired for security. Finally, the author is a major lib whose analysis of how LaRouche’s paranoia is akin to “Stalinism” and “totalitarianism” is, for obvious reasons, not very enlightening or intelligent.
Here are some of my favorite random LaRouche facts thrown in here:
-In an effort to cultivate support from both left and right wingers, LaRouche mercilessly hounded and slandered Henry Kissinger as a pedophilic homosexual who was a member of a gay communist cabal called ‘the Hominterm’. Which, let’s be honest, is fucking hilarious. You just know whoever came up with the name ‘Hominterm’ was like “yeah I know Kissinger is a genuine psychopathic war criminal but we can’t just let this name go to waste now can we?”
-The LaRouche movement were probably the biggest supporters of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars program’ in the world. They were the heads of the top nuclear fission promoting thinktanks in the nation, and they had direct contact with many members of the Reagan administration who were overseeing the Star Wars program.
-LaRouche had his own extensive intelligence operation which they used to contract out and supply information to many shady figures and operations such as the CIA (who had lost funding/manpower in the Carter years), Manuel Noriega, Guatemalan right-wing death squads, the Shah of Iran’s secret police (SAVAK), and Ferdinand Marcos. Because LaRouche’s cult members were essentially a limitless supply of free, hard-working laborers they had no problem being used to man phone banks all day, 7 days a week, for over 10 years to gather information. This information could then be filed away and traded for other information from people such as police officers, reporters, KKK members, and other international intelligence agencies.
By the 1970s LaRouche’s NCLC organization had begun making “tactical” alliances with the KKK and other white supremacists against the “main enemy” AKA “Nelson Rockefeller’s fascism with a democratic face”, liberals, and “social fascists” (left wing organizations). Through various brainwashing and psychological manipulation tactics LaRouche had whittled his followers down to the most ardent true believers. His adherents had become cultists who believed anything that opposed them, or that LaRouche told them to oppose, was part of a grand CIA conspiracy specifically to target the NCLC. The supposed theory for allying with the farthest elements of the right, like klansmen and neonazis, was that the NCLC could dip into this pool of rightists to gain more funding and recruits. After the inevitable and impending glorious revolution, the right elements would then easily be crushed. However, “pro-Rocky” (Rockefeller) conservatives, which were defined as conservatives not far enough to the right for LaRouche’s liking such as William Buckley, could not be trusted or relied upon. These men had already been bought out by big business. Only the farthest elements of the right were sufficiently independent enough from the tentacles of big business and the CIA to be trusted.
To get his followers to buy into this (especially his sizable number of Jewish followers) Lyndon began promoting his own “unique” theory of history, sprinkled in with some pseudo-psychoanalysis. First, he claimed that he and the NCLC didn’t oppose all Jews, just the ‘fake’ “nominal Jews/Jews who are not Jews” that support evil things like zionism. By LaRouche’s convoluted standards the only “real” Jews happened to be the Jews that were members of the NCLC. Therefore, any Jew was fair game to be attacked by his anti-semitism, but this was ok because they were not, in fact, real Jews. Next, LaRouche claimed that Hitler had been put into power by the Rothschilds (the quintessential “Jews who are not Jews”) to do their bidding, which happened to be committing a Holocaust against German Jews so that somewhere down the line the Zionist state of Israel could be created. The good German people resisted and, through a staunch nationalism, convinced Hitler to invade Great Britain (the home of the Rothschilds), but Hitler was eventually won back over by the Rothschilds and thus invaded the USSR. Through LaRouchian alchemy the Jews were the real Nazis and the real perpetrators of the Holocaust. This led up to the modern day, where the undefeated Rothschilds and their minions were now attempting to partake in a Holocaust infinitely worse than the original Holocaust they perpetrated. Anybody who did not fight the Rothschilds was a Nazi and probably an agent of the Rothschilds themselves; however, since rightwingers like the actual Nazis were anti-Semitic (but remember against “not real Jews”) they were, in fact, the real antifascist fighting against the new Nazi Holocaust! According to LaRouche there was no political spectrum, just people who were funded by the global elites versus people who were not. Therefore there were good and bad communists, good and bad conservatives, and even good Nazis (the Wehrmacht) and bad Nazis (the agents of the Rothschilds).
Throughout the 1970s LaRouche incessantly preached to his followers that an imminent insurrection and coup would soon put them in power. In fact, many NCLC members contacted high-ranking military officials to try and convince them to undertake one. After the coup, according to his written works such as “The Power of Reason” and “The Case of Walter Lippmann”, LaRouche’s idea of Americans being reborn under his reign was something very similar to fascism. His ultimate plan was to “rid our planet” of the “Zionist oligarchy” and put the societal conditions in place to build an ultimate race of “golden souls” that were to be the next step in human evolution. This new America would totally reject “British liberal notions of ‘democracy’ “ and have “nothing to do with elections, parliaments, or such”. Within LaRouche’s dictatorship all anti-LaRouche forces would obviously be suppressed and America would be “cleansed… by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby”. In typical fascist class collaboration, that capital and labor were to be “understood to be identical” and therefore unionization and strikes would be banned. Next, the nation would prepare for total war mobilization to export this war against the Zionist oligarchy on a planetary scale. Large scale projects modeled after the Apollo project, the Manhattan Project, and the Nazi’s V-2 rocket development (done by slave labor) were to be the main industrial focus of the economy. The only way such robust and groundbreaking projects could be undertaken was if the educational system was remade to “mobilize the creative powers of the mind” by teaching things like NCLC “humanism” and educating Americans on our ‘actual’ Teutonic heritage through listening to German classical music, reading German poetry, and mastering classical German philosophy (the NCLC believed that German, not England, had the greatest role in the ‘real’ foundation of America). Only through all these means could we bring about the “progressive liquidation” of the Oligarchs.
By the mid-1970s the LaRouche movement had begun building its own political machine and running in the Democratic ballot, and by the early 1980s they were running thousands of candidates across all states. By running on promises to prevent farm foreclosures, reopen factories and mills, violently crack down on drug dealers, legally prosecute banks, and quarantine AIDS victims the LaRouchites were vying for the votes of a so-called “silent majority” of senior citizens, small farmers feeling the economic squeeze of neoliberalism, and petty-bourgeois businessmen AKA a class base commonly sought after by fascists. The LaRouche movement was also very close to the Republican Party and the Reagan government. They often pushed conspiracy theories from their fringes into the mainstream in order to help Republican candidates; an example of this being the rumor that Michael Dukakis was mentally ill and unstable. This rumor was eventually picked up by the mainstream press like the Wall Street Journal (who wrote an article about “rumors of Dukakis’s depression”) and even got a mention from president Reagan in a press conference where he referred to Dukakis as an “invalid”. This specific smear was actually tested over a decade earlier in 1976 when LaRouche, after being paid around $100,000 by Republican businessmen , went on television on the eve of the presidential election to declare that Jimmy Carter was mentally unbalanced. Other targets of LaRouchite propaganda included Jerry Brown, Ted Kennedy, and George Bush. Often, LaRouchite candidates would enter into electoral races just to smear their Democratic opponent, intentionally giving any Republicans running a window with which to pick up the smear and propagate the blatant lies as if they were widely accepted truths.
The author, who was writing as the LaRouche movement was edging towards its eventual downfall, includes a lot of random LaRouche info that doesn’t really build on a coherent framework of what the movement was; if LaRouche shit in the woods, which was then reported on in the media, only for LaRouche to call the reporter a KGb agent homosexual pedophile, odds are this book writes about it. This becomes a problem when the book gives equal time to important things, such as the political basis of LaRouchism or the depth of its conspiratorial belief system, to relatively obscure and unimportant stuff such as LaRouche’s feud with Roy Cohen or what former CIA agents LaRouche hired for security. Finally, the author is a major lib whose analysis of how LaRouche’s paranoia is akin to “Stalinism” and “totalitarianism” is, for obvious reasons, not very enlightening or intelligent.
Here are some of my favorite random LaRouche facts thrown in here:
-In an effort to cultivate support from both left and right wingers, LaRouche mercilessly hounded and slandered Henry Kissinger as a pedophilic homosexual who was a member of a gay communist cabal called ‘the Hominterm’. Which, let’s be honest, is fucking hilarious. You just know whoever came up with the name ‘Hominterm’ was like “yeah I know Kissinger is a genuine psychopathic war criminal but we can’t just let this name go to waste now can we?”
-The LaRouche movement were probably the biggest supporters of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars program’ in the world. They were the heads of the top nuclear fission promoting thinktanks in the nation, and they had direct contact with many members of the Reagan administration who were overseeing the Star Wars program.
-LaRouche had his own extensive intelligence operation which they used to contract out and supply information to many shady figures and operations such as the CIA (who had lost funding/manpower in the Carter years), Manuel Noriega, Guatemalan right-wing death squads, the Shah of Iran’s secret police (SAVAK), and Ferdinand Marcos. Because LaRouche’s cult members were essentially a limitless supply of free, hard-working laborers they had no problem being used to man phone banks all day, 7 days a week, for over 10 years to gather information. This information could then be filed away and traded for other information from people such as police officers, reporters, KKK members, and other international intelligence agencies.
August 20, 2018
The big positive of this book is its condensation of the mid-70s through the mid-80s history of the LaRouche organization into a nice concise little chronology. It partially fulfills a need for clear history and documentation on the group which hadn’t previously existed very much. To a lesser extent it also provides a very convincing analysis of the LaRouche group as a truly fascist vanguard, in the sense of an alliance between bourgeoisie and lumpenbourgeoisie to handle capitalist crisis in the market and society in a dirigiste fashion (though King does not explicitly use such class-based terms.)
King’s comparisons between LaRouche and the classical fascism of Mussolini & the Nazis could certainly have used more pages however, at the very least given the title alone. In a certain sense the book suffers from a methodological Arendtism, following the “horseshoe theory” and making frequent detours to characterize LaRouche as “Stalinist” or take his postures at face value and draw attention to his insincere overtures toward the Brezhnev-era USSR while ignoring his Trotskyism. Overall it’s these failures in scope that account for both his lack of differentiation and two detours in the middle of the book, both bookended by some good research which shouldn’t be discounted.
First, King spends an undue amount of time in the chapters focusing on LaRouche’s electoral inroads accounting for his successes in terms of speaking to innate anxieties within the middle class outside of the urban coastal regions. This is reductive and shifts the blame on the LaRouche phenomenon in part on its victims while overall leaving the bourgeois political system and blatant vote rigging untouched.
Second, King devotes a chapter each to two actors who each “played” LaRouche: KKK grand-dragon Roy Frankhouser and JDO founder Mordechai Levy. These serve as somewhat surface-level tangents with questions arising from them (such as a fuller account of communications through the “Mister Ed line) remaining unanswered in part due to a paucity of documentation. One even gets the impression of the author’s sympathy for Levy, especially given the appearance of JDO-member and Bob Dylan trash-picker A.J. Weberman as both a firsthand source and in the acknowledgments, which might belie a sort rose-tinted look into Levy’s intents and his hypothetical success in being a “chaos agent” for the group.
That all being said the final two parts go into some good detail on LaRouche’s relationship to most nooks and crannies of this already-fascist America, from labor racketeers and contract-CIA drug-runners to the emergent techno-finance industry. A lingering disappointment however is the lack of questions as to what value was gained by the FBI and intelligence community at large via their relationships with the LaRouche group, not just vice versa. This can be a particularly blatant admission at times too, especially given how neatly their early behavior corresponds with quintessential COINTELPRO activity. King’s FOIA documents on the Mop-Up Operation seem to reveal only the most shallow awareness of their activities on the part of the Bureau, something this reader finds hard to believe. Read it if you’re interested in a particularly useful cross section of post-60s politics which the LaRouche group managed to straddle.
King’s comparisons between LaRouche and the classical fascism of Mussolini & the Nazis could certainly have used more pages however, at the very least given the title alone. In a certain sense the book suffers from a methodological Arendtism, following the “horseshoe theory” and making frequent detours to characterize LaRouche as “Stalinist” or take his postures at face value and draw attention to his insincere overtures toward the Brezhnev-era USSR while ignoring his Trotskyism. Overall it’s these failures in scope that account for both his lack of differentiation and two detours in the middle of the book, both bookended by some good research which shouldn’t be discounted.
First, King spends an undue amount of time in the chapters focusing on LaRouche’s electoral inroads accounting for his successes in terms of speaking to innate anxieties within the middle class outside of the urban coastal regions. This is reductive and shifts the blame on the LaRouche phenomenon in part on its victims while overall leaving the bourgeois political system and blatant vote rigging untouched.
Second, King devotes a chapter each to two actors who each “played” LaRouche: KKK grand-dragon Roy Frankhouser and JDO founder Mordechai Levy. These serve as somewhat surface-level tangents with questions arising from them (such as a fuller account of communications through the “Mister Ed line) remaining unanswered in part due to a paucity of documentation. One even gets the impression of the author’s sympathy for Levy, especially given the appearance of JDO-member and Bob Dylan trash-picker A.J. Weberman as both a firsthand source and in the acknowledgments, which might belie a sort rose-tinted look into Levy’s intents and his hypothetical success in being a “chaos agent” for the group.
That all being said the final two parts go into some good detail on LaRouche’s relationship to most nooks and crannies of this already-fascist America, from labor racketeers and contract-CIA drug-runners to the emergent techno-finance industry. A lingering disappointment however is the lack of questions as to what value was gained by the FBI and intelligence community at large via their relationships with the LaRouche group, not just vice versa. This can be a particularly blatant admission at times too, especially given how neatly their early behavior corresponds with quintessential COINTELPRO activity. King’s FOIA documents on the Mop-Up Operation seem to reveal only the most shallow awareness of their activities on the part of the Bureau, something this reader finds hard to believe. Read it if you’re interested in a particularly useful cross section of post-60s politics which the LaRouche group managed to straddle.
October 1, 2025
This book is a wild ride. Going in, I knew virtually nothing about Lyndon LaRouche. Afterward, it's surprising that more people don't. Of all the American right-wing extremists of the 20th century, LaRouche gained the most influence and access to the halls of government. Having abandoned youthful Trotskyist visions of revolution, he took inspiration from Hitler and Stalin and thus set about gaining power from within the system. His organization would ultimately consist of myriad PACs, committees, coalitions, think tanks, institutes, and corporations. They rubbed shoulders with Reagan administration officials, nuclear scientists, intelligence operatives, the mafia, labor unions, and everyday voters, as well as the "violent, semi-psychotic world of gunrunners, drug smugglers, and CIA rogues." LaRouche was a cult leader, a fascist, a perennial presidential candidate, and the leader of a sophisticated political machine and private spy network. How have I not heard this before?
Author Dennis King's bland liberal commentary is the only negative. He is a big advocate of the cordon sanitaire approach to politics – unable to fathom that anyone should be far right (or far left), they should therefore be excluded from the democratic process. Like many liberals today, when frothing at the mouth over Donald Trump, he reassures himself that people only hold anti-mainstream beliefs out of ignorance or insanity. LaRouche never gained office for himself, but he did help shift the Overton window. What we're seeing now with MAGA, Identitarianism, and other such movements heralds the return of history and the resurgence of the true right. This would not have happened without the efforts of ideologues like Lyndon LaRouche.
Author Dennis King's bland liberal commentary is the only negative. He is a big advocate of the cordon sanitaire approach to politics – unable to fathom that anyone should be far right (or far left), they should therefore be excluded from the democratic process. Like many liberals today, when frothing at the mouth over Donald Trump, he reassures himself that people only hold anti-mainstream beliefs out of ignorance or insanity. LaRouche never gained office for himself, but he did help shift the Overton window. What we're seeing now with MAGA, Identitarianism, and other such movements heralds the return of history and the resurgence of the true right. This would not have happened without the efforts of ideologues like Lyndon LaRouche.
November 18, 2019
Published in 1989. I had read it previously and revisited it now. Has relevance today. LaRouche died in 2019. Most recently, he was a big Trump supporter. Most writers on LaRouche focus on him being crazy and a cult, and miss the bigger point, which is fascism. Including key elements like alternate reality, promoting the conspiracy theory of the Other that is destroying society, gestapo style street level thugs and private intelligence service, promoting the round-up of unpopular scapegoated minorities. And promoting all that as the way society as a whole should be governed. His conspiracy theories seem absurd to most intellectuals, but as the dog whistle of fascism, they don't have to make sense, and they serve a purpose. That is a key element of fascism, the celebration of nonsense over sense. He got a lot of support and funding from the rising US fascist movement in the 1980's. Some still refer to him as a "right-wing populist", I think this book explains more why he was an actual fascist. And that is important because fascism is now unfolding in the US and the world, with Trump/Pence in the US and with the rulers of many other nations.
September 5, 2018
This book, originally published in 1989, has new relevance today, as the LaRouchians made in-roads in post-Soviet Russia and have been able to renew their influence through the internet. Many of the disinformation and sabotage tactics described in this book, from making connections to intelligence agencies while simultaneously claiming that all their opponents are part of intelligence agency conspiracies, from frequent libel suits against their critics, and even the term "political technology" have returned. Anyone who is trying to understand the ability of right-wing populists to woo people on the left should read this book - and after putting it down, pay attention. A number of LaRoucheans continue to get platforms in left alternative media, despite the LaRouche movement having been thoroughly discredited on the left over 30 years ago.
July 16, 2024
ALTHOUGH MORE THAN 30 YEARS OLD, STILL THE MAJOR BOOK ON LAROUCHE
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019) was an American political activist, and eight-time presidential candidate (1976-2004); he was imprisoned from 1988-1994 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations (he even briefly shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker (detailed in Bakker's book 'I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond'). He headed one of the strangest (or at least, most unique) organizations on the political scene (decried as a "cult" by many), and also operated a fairly well-respected private intelligence service.
Author Dennis King wrote in the Introduction to this 1989 book, "We shall pierce the screen that has concealed the real story of ... Lyndon LaRouche and his potentially explosive ideology and movement... This book will... investigate the motives of the remarkable range of allies that LaRouche gathered along the way..."
He notes that LaRouche has "repeatedly suggested" that "he served as a government informant" within the Socialist Workers' Party. (Pg. 8) He asserts that "LaRouche has demonstrated the vulnerability of the public, when frightened and angry, to the lure of thinly veiled fascist measures. He had desensitized millions to the idea of rounding up unpopular minorities. His California ballot initiatives had revealed that many Americans with healthy biological immune systems have no political immune systems at all." (Pg. 144)
He admits that "It is thus hardly a surprise that American journalists have difficulty understanding what LaRouche is about. They assume he will use ideas and words in as straightforward a way as they themselves do. When he doesn't, they become confused... They conceal their confusion and intellectual laziness with jokes about LaRouche the kook who thinks the Queen of England pushes drugs... LaRouche knows that his writings mystify most readers, but he provides little hints for them." (Pg. 269) King argues that through this "code language," LaRouche is able to promote a neo-Nazi ideology in all but name yet remain sufficiently respectable to gain meetings with high-level Reagan administration aides..." (Pg. 273)
He notes that when law enforcement agencies began to investigate LaRouche, he counterattacked with costly resource-consuming lawsuits, "charging a conspiracy to undermine his constitutional rights... This type of suit makes local police departments think twice about tangling with people who can make more trouble than their arrest seems worth." (Pg. 367)
LaRouche was a complex and confusing figure, but King's book is an important one for providing background information about him.
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019) was an American political activist, and eight-time presidential candidate (1976-2004); he was imprisoned from 1988-1994 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations (he even briefly shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker (detailed in Bakker's book 'I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond'). He headed one of the strangest (or at least, most unique) organizations on the political scene (decried as a "cult" by many), and also operated a fairly well-respected private intelligence service.
Author Dennis King wrote in the Introduction to this 1989 book, "We shall pierce the screen that has concealed the real story of ... Lyndon LaRouche and his potentially explosive ideology and movement... This book will... investigate the motives of the remarkable range of allies that LaRouche gathered along the way..."
He notes that LaRouche has "repeatedly suggested" that "he served as a government informant" within the Socialist Workers' Party. (Pg. 8) He asserts that "LaRouche has demonstrated the vulnerability of the public, when frightened and angry, to the lure of thinly veiled fascist measures. He had desensitized millions to the idea of rounding up unpopular minorities. His California ballot initiatives had revealed that many Americans with healthy biological immune systems have no political immune systems at all." (Pg. 144)
He admits that "It is thus hardly a surprise that American journalists have difficulty understanding what LaRouche is about. They assume he will use ideas and words in as straightforward a way as they themselves do. When he doesn't, they become confused... They conceal their confusion and intellectual laziness with jokes about LaRouche the kook who thinks the Queen of England pushes drugs... LaRouche knows that his writings mystify most readers, but he provides little hints for them." (Pg. 269) King argues that through this "code language," LaRouche is able to promote a neo-Nazi ideology in all but name yet remain sufficiently respectable to gain meetings with high-level Reagan administration aides..." (Pg. 273)
He notes that when law enforcement agencies began to investigate LaRouche, he counterattacked with costly resource-consuming lawsuits, "charging a conspiracy to undermine his constitutional rights... This type of suit makes local police departments think twice about tangling with people who can make more trouble than their arrest seems worth." (Pg. 367)
LaRouche was a complex and confusing figure, but King's book is an important one for providing background information about him.
January 2, 2023
Someone mentioned this book on my Twitter feed last month . As others have mentioned, this book resonates with current domestic & international events. 2nd-3rd generation LaRouchians under different labels (ends of the political spectrum) implement updated strategies /techniques /tactics utilizing communication technology enabled media’s role as facilitator in polarizing viewpoints ;billionaire owned MSM v billionaire owned “Social “ Media hypocrisy . Other similarities, some of his “code words” are used by “independent media” today. “Anti-Zionist” & “Oligarchy “ whether intentional or not, it illustrates how labels are weaponized ; currently anti-Zionist is construed by Zionists as being anti-Semitic . Oligarchs are in Russia but not in the USA.
I never heard of LaRouche until the 1980’s, so learning about the 60s-70s LaRouche had me reminiscing . His campaign ads are still on YouTube but the infamous 1984 NBC First Camera episode is missing . So essentially the same script & plot, different characters & roles
I never heard of LaRouche until the 1980’s, so learning about the 60s-70s LaRouche had me reminiscing . His campaign ads are still on YouTube but the infamous 1984 NBC First Camera episode is missing . So essentially the same script & plot, different characters & roles
February 26, 2019
A wild ride through the (partial) history of LaRouche's cult formation and political misadventures. Antisemite, sociopath and shameless liar, LaRouche has returned to the bugfood from whence he came, but his legacy should be studied more than it probably will. Truly an example to bemoan and detest in the Amerikan historical swamp.
July 18, 2020
Packed with information, but reductive and unimaginative. I come away thinking LaRouche and his cult were way weirder than your run-of-the-mill fascists.
December 23, 2019
An overview of one of the weirdest political cults ever... covers the organizations structure at its peak of relevance back in the 1980s, when it could actually be taken as a serious national security threat. Covers the organizations private intelligence arm, financial scams, brainwashing, pro-militarism, connections to organized crime and dictators, etc.
The authors Judeophilia permeates this though and there doesn't seem to be a Jew not worth defending be it Kissinger, Roy Cohn, the Bronfmans, the Jewish Defence League, Israeli spies like Jonathan Pollard, etc, etc.
Not everything published in the Executive Intelligence Review, and other LaRouche related publications, over the years is necessarily false... even though most of it is.
The authors Judeophilia permeates this though and there doesn't seem to be a Jew not worth defending be it Kissinger, Roy Cohn, the Bronfmans, the Jewish Defence League, Israeli spies like Jonathan Pollard, etc, etc.
Not everything published in the Executive Intelligence Review, and other LaRouche related publications, over the years is necessarily false... even though most of it is.
February 10, 2011
I didn't actually finish this. I was a bit disappointed in the writing. I picked it up while a LaRouchian was running for U.S. represenative in my district. Plus, it was on a shelf in the library I walk by frequently, so it called to me. I eventually stopped reading it as I sensed the author was a bit off his nut. He has good reason to be concerned by LaRouche and his movement, but I think he crossed the line to fanatical. His website seems to indicate so, at least. It's a very detailed history with tons of footnotes, so I don't doubt his facts. I was just looking for more of an overview of the movement from a less partisan source.
March 29, 2015
Some fascinating info, especially the material King added for the revised edition. But his efforts to paint LaRouche and his "movement" as anti-Semites and Nazis betray a lack of imagination and insight, and an inability to understand that LaRouche's cult really has little to do with politics, fascist or otherwise.
July 2, 2023
I'm not a fellow traveler of Dennis King's political biases but I appreciate his pinko analysis of Lyndon LaRouche and his sophisticated political organizations. King's book paints a picture of a perennial politician, theoretician and physical economist as a cult-leader whose Machiavellian mesmerization is presented as the polar opposite to King's brand of communism. Interesting read.
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