Rev. James Bevel

From The LaRouche Planet [accessed 12/31/2024]

"Before he ran for vice presidential candidate in 1992 on Lyndon LaRouche’s ticket, Bevel worked for the Moonies cult (Unification Church of reverend Sun Myung Moon). As a matter of fact, he never left the Moonies while still working for LaRouche. (See John Gorenfeld  at iapprovethismessiah.com)

The LaRouche-Bevel campaign marked a rapprochement between LaRouche and Reverend Moon. Indeed, the “LaRouche-Bevel campaign” paid, in February and March of 1992, for a series of 11 full-page ads in the Moonie Washington Times. Source: “Meet the Candidates”  at etext.org.

During 1992 Bevel was also involved in a LaRouche campaign to remove the statue of General Albert Pike, allegedly a founder of the KKK, from its place of honor in Washington, D.C.’s Judiciary Square.

LaRouche had connections with the KKK with KKK Grand-Dragon Roy Frankhouser, who worked for LaRouche as a security consultant since the mid-1970s. But, by then (in 1992), LaRouche was in jail and his KKK friend was convicted at the same time as LaRouche. Their friendship was over.

LaRouche and Bevel took the opportunity to blame… the Jews (eg, the ADL and the B’nai B’rith) for being behind the KKK!

Then in 1995, Bevel’s association with (antisemite) Louis Farrakhan led to his participation in the National Day of Atonement/Million Man March movement. This rapprochement between LaRouche and Farrakhan was started earlier by the end of ’80s.

Strangely, the LaRouche’s “Honey-Reverend-Moon” was suddenly over. EIR ran a series of unprecedented attacks against Reverend Moon in October-November 2002. Even more intriguyingly is this “press release” titled ““Is Your Clergyman or Congressman a Moonie Sex-Cultist?”  where it is said: “The dirty money is frequently followed by sexual favors from an army of young women—all brainwashed into Moon’s bizarre sexual rituals.” Strange accusations, since the Moonies defend chastity, campaign against “free sex” and regard extra-marital affairs as “satanic”! For instance Rev. Moon said :

“The Bible refers to the origin of free sex by using the image of a snake. Woman’s sexual organ is like the open mouth of a snake filled with poison. Man’s sexual organ is like the head of a snake. If you think of fallen love action in these terms you feel disgusted and so you should. It is poison to humanity.”

The Moonies don’t do “free sex” (unlike the “Children of God” cult for instance.) But, as it appears now, Rev. Bevel did…

Five years later, Bevel was arrested in Alabama after being charged with “unlawfully committing fornication.” The charges stem from an alleged incestuous relationship he had some time between October 14, 1992, and October 14, 1994 in Loudoun County, Virginia (where and while he was associated with LaRouche…) The accuser is one of his daughters, believed to have been between 13 and 15~years old at the time. Some of his other daughters have corroborated the accusation from their own experiences with their father, who has allegedly admitted to the acts on tape, claiming they were part of the daughters’ “religious training”. Currently charged in Virginia–which has no statute of limitations for incest–Bevel faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted and is free on bond until his trial. Source: Wikipedia

Did LaRouche know anything about Bevel’s sex life? Was this a tactic to distance himself from his old running mate and partner in crime?

James Bevel has played an important role to try convincing the African-Americans and other persons whose origins come from Black Africa that LaRouche is their “friend”. He played a similiar role as the “Jews for LaRouche” do.

More on LaRouche and the “Blacks”
Bevel is also suspected to have introduced “Moonie Mind Control” techniques (like sleep deprivation) which are used to recruit and manipulate the LaRouche Youth Movement."

https://laroucheplanet.wordpress.com/rev-james-bevel-1936-2008-2/

The Planet of LaRouche

ABOUT: So who are we?

"After the tragic deaths of Jeremiah Duggan in 2003 and Ken Kronberg in 2007, we hope this website will give those who are intrigued, puzzled, distressed or harmed by LaRouche and his destructive political cult, a better “picture” of what is often dismissed as weird, creepy or insane. What unite us are these two words: NEVER AGAIN!

This website about the “LaRouche phenomenon” is special because it is written by those who knew him best: the former members of his cult who have not deserted their moral integrity.

They have spent decades of their lives working with and for him. They knew him personally and helped build his organization.

It is therefore an insider view on that Bizarro Planet of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Junior… a kind of (ideological) colonoscopy… to expose his destructive group for what it is: a political, intellectual deception and a criminal fraud."

Website: https://laroucheplanet.wordpress.com/about-us/

LaRouche Planet

"By former members of his destructive cult."

Domain name: laroucheplanet.info

So who are we?

"After the tragic deaths of Jeremiah Duggan and Ken Kronberg, we hope this website will give those who are intrigued, puzzled, distressed or harmed by LaRouche and his destructive political cult, a better “picture” of what is often dismissed as weird, creepy or insane.

This website about the “LaRouche phenomenon” is special because it is written by those who knew him best: the former members of his cult Organization who have not deserted their moral integrity.

They have spent decades of their lives working with and for him. They knew him personally and helped build his destructive cult.

It is therefore an insider view on that Bizarro Planet of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Junior… a kind of (ideological) colonoscopy… to expose his destructive cult for what it is: a political, intellectual deception and a criminal fraud.

As for those who “know” but won’t speak out, here is our message."

CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/20/2023 (Lyndon LaRouche, L'Arche, France, Robin Boyle, NXIVM )

Lyndon LaRouche, L'Arche, France, Robin Boyle, NXIVM 

The New Republic: Lyndon LaRouche Was the Godfather of Political Paranoia. His Cult Is Still Alive and Unwell.

" ... LaRouche was invariably described in obits as a cultist and an eccentric—indeed, he was a wackadoo perennial presidential candidate who kept saying weird stuff about the Rockefellers. But from the vantage of the present, LaRouche doesn't seem so out of step with the country's politics. And the diminishment of his group over the past couple of decades—in the 1980s, LaRouchies raised hundreds of millions of dollars and even won a couple of primaries, all while maintaining a massive private intelligence operation and insinuating themselves in the Reagan administration by promoting the Gipper's Star Wars program—doesn't look like marginalization anymore so much as reabsorption."

" ... internally the group was increasingly run like a cult, with LaRouche using abusive "ego-stripping" sessions to firm up his followers' ideological commitments. Partnerships of convenience were struck with right-wing groups; racism and antisemitism flowered, for reasons both ideological and instrumental. "He is a racist, unconsciously to be true," wrote no less an authority than Robert Miles, a Ku Klux Klan leader, exulting in his newsletter after a couple of LaRouchies won Democratic primaries in Illinois in 1986. "His glorification of European culture, morals and histories is instinctive." At the same time, LaRouche used the inadequacies of liberal antiracism to recruit from the growing ranks of thwarted Black nationalists. This wasn't lost on Miles, either: "He mixes his forces, having blacks and Jews in his ranks. But then, so did every conquering army in history."

Analysis of the LaRouche movement, when it's taken seriously, tends to focus on the drift from left to right, from the Marxist-Leninism of his New Left days in the 1960s to reactionary conspiratorial populism from the 1970s. But as the writer Donald Parkinson has observed in the online magazine Cosmonaut—as always, it's the communists who see LaRouche most clearly, at least when they're not getting their heads cracked open—there were continuities that spanned LaRouche's different eras. There was the egomania, which manifested in a One True System mode of thinking, and an economism so stubborn and one-eyed it could only conceive of the Holocaust as a policy of labor exploitation."

AP: French religious orders demand change over L'Arche abuses

"The umbrella group of Catholic religious orders in France is demanding church authorities assume responsibility for horrific evidence of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse in L'Arche, once a preeminent lay community dedicated to people with developmental disabilities.

Sister Veronique Margron, president of the conference of religious orders in France, issued a devastating analysis Thursday of the implications of the findings of a two-year investigation into L'Arche, its founder, Jean Vanier, and his spiritual guru, the Rev. Thomas Philippe.

The 437-page report, published on Jan. 30, offers a detailed forensic study of how Vanier created a secretive "sect" within the heart of the Catholic Church designed entirely to feed his sexual appetites through "collective delirium" and mystical-sexual practices that he justified on spiritual grounds.

Using seduction, manipulation, secrecy and coercion, the charismatic Vanier initiated as many as 25 young women into the "mystico-sexual practices" of the sect within L'Arche, convincing them of his sanctity while abusing them sexually and spiritually, the report found.

In a statement on Thursday, Margron said the report prompted questions about the Catholic Church's "entire ecclesial, theological and pastoral culture, since it has been the breeding ground for abuse, manipulation, aggression, lies and even death."

She said the report also laid bare how secrecy, and "the great silence" by the Vatican had enabled the "gnostic delusions" of Vanier and Philippe, as well as their impunity and abuse."

St. John's Law: Boyle Featured in NXIVM Documentary

Just released is a documentary, Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM, featuring clips of Professor Robin Boyle who was interviewed for this film. NXIVM was a business that purportedly ran workshops for self-improvement but was actually a cult. Its founder, Keith Raniere, was arrested in 2018 and charged with human trafficking, racketeering, and other federal crimes. He and his associates were tried and convicted in the Eastern District of New York. In 2020, Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison. The documentary can be found on the Tubi channel. The film describes the creation of NXIVM and how its followers were coerced into turning over private information about themselves in the form of collateral, duped into spending tens of thousands of dollars on improvement workshops in which advancement was unobtainable, and subjected to corporal punishment and psychological manipulation. When the press exposed that women were being branded with Raniere's initials and being treated as sex slaves, federal investigation ensued.

Professor Boyle presents domestically and at international conferences on cults and the law.  Her articles have been published by peer-reviewed journals. In a 2016 law review article published by the Oregon Review of International Law, she proposed that human trafficking statutes be used to charge cult leaders with their crimes, which ended up as one of the successful charges in the NXIVM case. Her article's title is referenced in the documentary.

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Lyndon LaRouche Was the Godfather of Political Paranoia. His Cult Is Still Alive and Unwell.

Tommy Craggs
The New Republic
February 13, 2023

THE WALKING DEAD

Years after their leader’s death, Larouchies are still pushing their fascist politics.

It didn’t get a lot of attention, but back in November, a candidate representing one of the country’s most successful homegrown fascist movements got a little over 25,000 votes in her bid for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat. This was Diane Sare, who, in a campaign video taken outside Federal Hall on Wall Street, named as her main qualification her “32-year association with the greatest economist and statesman the United States has yet produced, the late Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.” The way she delivered the line, positioned as she was beneath the bronze crotch of George Washington, speaking with the dead-eyed adamancy of someone well practiced in the arts of political irritation, it was a little as if she were daring you to laugh.

And how could you not, just a little? A LaRouchie on the ballot! In the third decade of the twenty-first century! Yesterday’s cranks, still doing their thing in the age of Q, their thing being, in part, to shriek in the middle of town halls, hector people from their little stands in public parks, put Hitler mustaches on photos of President Barack Obama, declaim against the queen of England for having been the most prolific drug dealer this side and probably that side of Pablo Escobar, and continue carrying the torch for the once-ubiquitous paranoid gadfly candidate to end all gadfly candidates. LaRouchies still walk among us, embarrassing undead artifacts of another era’s grotesque folly, like Henry Kissinger or the Bay City Rollers. God love ’em, you almost want to say.

Sare brought home half a percent of the vote; she was routed by blank ballots. But winning elections was never really the point for the LaRouchies, even in their heyday, and elsewhere this fall, there were signs that LaRouchism was having a small moment.

Here was Sare, swinging at softballs from the post-left YouTube screamer Jimmy Dore. There were her staffers and compatriots, heckling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and lambasting Ilhan Omar, among others, over their votes to send military aid to Ukraine. Allowing themselves to be styled in the press as disillusioned anti-war leftists, they rope-a-doped AOC and Omar into denouncing them as Russian stooges. For a moment, the Squad members were left looking like evasive, hippie-punching warmongers by a group that made its bones in the 1970s attacking leftists with nunchucks (not kidding—literal nunchucks).

LaRouchies still walk among us, embarrassing undead artifacts of another era’s grotesque folly, like Henry Kissinger or the Bay City Rollers.

Four years ago, the Grand Poo-Bah went to that great airport table in the sky. LaRouche was invariably described in obits as a cultist and an eccentric—indeed, he was a wackadoo perennial presidential candidate who kept saying weird stuff about the Rockefellers. But from the vantage of the present, LaRouche doesn’t seem so out of step with the country’s politics. And the diminishment of his group over the past couple of decades—in the 1980s, LaRouchies raised hundreds of millions of dollars and even won a couple of primaries, all while maintaining a massive private intelligence operation and insinuating themselves in the Reagan administration by promoting the Gipper’s Star Wars program—doesn’t look like marginalization anymore so much as reabsorption.

Reading the past few years of American politics backward into the history of LaRouchism, the movement comes off more and more like a baroque and churlish expression of a tendency that’s general across our politics, right and left, fringe and normie alike. Laugh at Diane Sare if you wish, but how freakish is a LaRouchie, really, in 2023?

LaRouche was born into his conspiracism. His parents were orthodox Quakers in New England, but these were not the serenely tolerant Quakers of popular image. In his definitive Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, Dennis King reports that the couple “were ferocious sectarians who accused their co-religionists of closet Bolshevism and embezzlement of religious funds.” In a way, it was the organizing conceit of his life: the war on the enemy within.

A self-described “hardened Trotskyist,” he was a member from 1948 to 1963 of the Socialist Workers Party, a group that was red-baited and factionalized into oblivion, after which he stayed hardened but let the Trotskyism slide. In 1968, he led a group within Students for a Democratic Society that broke with the larger organization over the pivotal Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike in New York City. The strike pitted Black and Puerto Rican parents pushing for community control against white educators. LaRouche’s group took the teachers’ side—a sort of paleo–anti-wokeness that feels a little less paleo when you see the strike signs. “STOP TEACHING RACE HATRED TO CHILDREN,” one read.

Drummed out of SDS, the faction rechristened itself the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a name that seemed designed to roll off the tongue like a metal file drawer, perhaps deliberate in its blandness. Things got fashy in short order. In 1973–74, the NCLC launched Operation Mop Up, a campaign of ferocious assaults on rival leftists, particularly members of the Communist Party USA, while internally the group was increasingly run like a cult, with LaRouche using abusive “ego-stripping” sessions to firm up his followers’ ideological commitments. Partnerships of convenience were struck with right-wing groups; racism and antisemitism flowered, for reasons both ideological and instrumental. “He is a racist, unconsciously to be true,” wrote no less an authority than Robert Miles, a Ku Klux Klan leader, exulting in his newsletter after a couple of LaRouchies won Democratic primaries in Illinois in 1986. “His glorification of European culture, morals and histories is instinctive.” At the same time, LaRouche used the inadequacies of liberal antiracism to recruit from the growing ranks of thwarted Black nationalists. This wasn’t lost on Miles, either: “He mixes his forces, having blacks and Jews in his ranks. But then, so did every conquering army in history.”

Analysis of the LaRouche movement, when it’s taken seriously, tends to focus on the drift from left to right, from the Marxist-Leninism of his New Left days in the 1960s to reactionary conspiratorial populism from the 1970s. But as the writer Donald Parkinson has observed in the online magazine Cosmonaut—as always, it’s the communists who see LaRouche most clearly, at least when they’re not getting their heads cracked open—there were continuities that spanned LaRouche’s different eras. There was the egomania, which manifested in a One True System mode of thinking, and an economism so stubborn and one-eyed it could only conceive of the Holocaust as a policy of labor exploitation.

But above all, there was LaRouche’s belief in an essentialized, even biologized, unassimilable Other. This Other stalks the thickets of his prose in the form of “the Aristotelians,” “the Rothschilds,” “the witches,” “the oligarchs,” and it would come to sit comfortably alongside his producerist view of finance capital as a parasite thrusting itself on to the “real” economy—a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, to borrow Matt Taibbi’s famous metaphor for Goldman Sachs. (Think the hysteria about “woke capital” is anything new? Check out LaRouche’s argument about the credit system smoothing its expansion into the global south via “bourgeois-democratic revolution.”) Whatever leftist airs it might have once assumed, LaRouche’s was a fascist logic for what could only become a fascist politics.

Bear in mind that LaRouche was recruiting at a time of rapid deindustrialization and financialization across the United States; worker power was being crushed. Conspiracy provided the language for his narrative about the dastardly enervation of the proletariat, just as QAnon’s lurid phantasmagoria offered a grammar by which people could understand what they saw as threats to the family and gender order.

To dismiss LaRouchism or Q as pure irrationality is to ignore the political stories they were telling, the way they enlisted people in counterrevolutionary projects. King makes the persuasive case that all that business about the queen was antisemitic code—in LaRouche’s view, Jewish high finance had so thoroughly subsumed the British Empire that the two were basically synonymous. Whenever he called Queen Elizabeth a drug pusher, everyone would have a laugh, but he was really talking about getting rid of the Jews.

In 1988, LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud and tax evasion. His incarceration marked the beginning of his group’s decline. Into the new century, it did retain its ability to annoy, staging racist demonstrations after the election of the first Black president and rallying support for the white nationalist who succeeded him. Last year, a schism opened up between the Lyndon LaRouche PAC and the LaRouche Organization—run by his widow—in part because the former had been too favorable to Donald Trump.

“Narcissism of small differences” and all that, but you could maybe understand the LaRouche Organization’s wish to carve out a distinction. Trump and LaRouche may have shared a makers-and-takers conspiracism with roots going back to the country’s founding, but it was LaRouche who put Jefferson in a brownshirt, LaRouche who first articulated a Euro-style fascism in a cosmopolitan American idiom—fascism without the umlauts or the hoods.

Sare was not the only LaRouchie on the ballot last cycle, incidentally. In New Mexico, Solomon Peña ran for the state House as a Republican. He lost, and later it emerged that he’d given more than $5,000 to LaRouche PAC since 2021. In denial about his defeat, Peña was arrested in January after he allegedly paid four men to shoot at the homes of Democratic leaders around Albuquerque. Nobody was hurt, but the shootings had their intended effect: fear. The 10-year-old daughter of a state senator was awakened by what she thought was a spider on her face. It turned out to be drywall dust from the holes opened up by the bullets. No one seemed to be laughing.

Tommy Craggs @tcraggs22

Tommy Craggs writes for HBO’s Game Theory With Bomani Jones.



https://newrepublic.com/article/170290/lyndon-larouche-godfather-political-paranoia-cult-still-alive-unwell

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96

Richard Severo

New York Times
February. 13, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96.

His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change "a scientific fraud."

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in "Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism" (1989), maintained that Mr. LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.

Mr. LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the "Eastern Establishment" and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as "lower beasts."

Even so, Mr. LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept Mr. LaRouche's political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies.

He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.

His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.

Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois that year, was appalled. He denounced the LaRouche group as "neo-Nazis" and refused to run with Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart, organizing a third-party bid instead. He, as well as the LaRouche supporters, lost to James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent.

Some voters said they had voted for Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart because they had been endorsed by Mr. LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party.

Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.

"I'm as American as apple pie," Mr. LaRouche once said.

Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by a thousand votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20 to 40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, N.H., to Lyndon and Jesse (Weir) LaRouche. He grew up in the Quaker tradition. His father was a traveling salesman for the United States Shoe Machinery Corporation, and his mother once ran a Quaker meeting in Boston's Back Bay.

His was not a happy childhood. Boys would pick on him, he said, but he refused to fight them, which only brought more disapprobation.

It got no better after the family moved to Lynn, Mass. He regarded himself there as an outcast and had few friends in high school. He was not an "ugly duckling," he said, "but a nasty duckling."

When World War II began, Mr. LaRouche declared himself a conscientious objector, citing his pacifist Quaker upbringing. But toward the end of the war he enlisted in the Army, despite his mother's objections.

After the war, he enrolled in Northeastern University in Boston but "resigned," he said, because the university was not challenging his superior intellect. He said he had been able to become the century's leading economist without formal college study.

He married Janice Neuberger in the early 1950s and had a son, Daniel, by her in 1956. The marriage failed, and he never talked publicly about his son and his former wife in his later years.

Mr. LaRouche's political roots were Marxist. From 1948 to 1963, he was active in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite group.

His own group surfaced during the student unrest at Columbia University in the late 1960s as a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It evolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an organization largely made up of young upper-middle-class people who espoused Mr. LaRouche's Marxist views.

He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing United States Labor Party, now defunct.

By then, though, his politics had already begun moving to the right. And after spending much time in West Germany, he returned with right-wing, anti-Semitic views. Many of his followers made the shift with him.

George Johnson, the author of "Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics" (1983), wrote that Mr. LaRouche had developed a conspiracy theory that stretched back to the beginnings of civilization.

"In the world according to LaRouche," Mr. Johnson wrote, "history is a war between the Platonists (the good guys) and the evil Aristotelians. Anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 can follow the drift: Platonists believe in standards, an absolute truth that can be divined by philosopher kings like Mr. LaRouche. To the Aristotelians everything is relative."

In Mr. LaRouche's view, Mr. Johnson continued, "true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world."

He added: "The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world's riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs."

Mr. LaRouche's views became the foundation of a political movement. By the mid-1970s, his organization had 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America. A core membership in the United States numbered about 1,000. One follower won 27 percent of the vote in a local election in Seattle. Mr. LaRouche was pulling in enough money nationally to qualify for federal matching funds for his presidential campaigns.

He had also become an entrepreneur, starting three companies, one of which printed newspapers for high schools; together they brought in revenues of $5 million or more a year.

In his efforts to build a worldwide organization, Mr. LaRouche was helped by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a native of Germany who had been a journalist there. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. LaRouche was at the apex of his power in the mid-1980s, when he moved his headquarters to a large rented estate in Northern Virginia, in Round Hill, outside Leesburg. When neighbors wondered aloud why he had turned the estate into an armed camp, rigged with electronic security and patrolled by men with semiautomatic rifles, Mr. LaRouche went on the attack. He said that the Leesburg Garden Club was "a nest of Soviet fellow travelers."

In 1987, after an F.B.I. investigation, Mr. LaRouche was convicted in Virginia on charges of scheming to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and of deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from thousands of his supporters. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and sent to a federal penitentiary in Minnesota.

The conviction hurt his movement but did not end it. He was released from prison in 1994, after serving a third of his sentence. He immediately announced that he would run for president in 1996. He ran again in 2000 and 2004. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. LaRouche warned that the new president was in "grave and imminent danger" of being assassinated by the "British Empire," a familiar target of Mr. LaRouche's.

By 2015 he had long turned against Mr. Obama, calling for his impeachment and accusing him in one instance of orchestrating Turkey's downing of a Russian fighter jet involved in the war in Syria. "Obama organized an act of war, and has thus endangered the United States, as well as all of humanity," Mr. LaRouche wrote.

But he could be bipartisan in his attacks. He accused the Bush family of collaborating with Nazi Germany during World War II, and said that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a product of a neoconservative conspiracy, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to deceive the American people. That view was expressed in a series of pamphlets, titled "Children of Satan."

But Mr. LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to "politically paralyze" the president and bring about his impeachment.

That would be a mistake, he said. As his website declared, "Not since William McKinley has a president been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing, scientific advancement and world peace."

Dennis Hevesi, who died in 2017, and William McDonald contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 14, 2019 of the New York edition with the headline: Lyndon LaRouche, Who Ran for President Eight Times, Is Dead at 96.



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/obituaries/lyndon-larouche-dead.html

Lyndon LaRouche Is Running A Pro-China Party In Germany

Once a uniquely American political cult, now the LaRouche movement can't get enough of Beijing.

Foreign Policy
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
September 18, 2017

BERLIN — A week before Germany’s federal elections, Berlin is blanketed in a layer of campaign posters, from Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union’s bland slogan “For a Germany in which we live well and happily” to the far-right Alternative for Germany’s proclamation of preferring bikinis over burqas.

But one set of signs are particularly bizarre, even cryptic.

“The future of Germany is the New Silk Road!” reads one pinned to a streetlight near Berlin’s main train station.

“Cultural renaissance instead of barbarism,” reads another. And, “Germans can stop world war!”

These posters, in a matching blue and yellow color scheme, all urge Berliners to “vote BüSo.”

What the posters don’t say is that BüSo — short for Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, or Civil Rights Movement Solidarity — is a political party founded and operated by eccentric American millionaire Lyndon LaRouche and his Russian-German wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. For decades, the couple has lead a global political network with a devotion to conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and a belief in a looming doomsday economic collapse that will kill billions — but it is otherwise malleable in its beliefs.

LaRouche started on the far left of American politics before swinging to the far right in the 1970s. Today, as BüSo attests, the LaRouche movement’s enthusiasms are focused on promoting the interests of Russia and China in the West. And Beijing, at least, has been happy to reciprocate LaRouche’s support.

BüSo’s German-language website— which has a Russian-language version but no English — lists Zepp-LaRouche as its founder. The party operates 11 different offices around Germany, according to its website, and advocates a patchwork platform of grand but vague ideas — including an overhaul of global banking as “the only way to stop the collapse of the financial system,” Germany’s exit from the European Union, a new German currency, extraterrestrial human colonization, a “renaissance” of culture and science, and nuclear energy for all so that “hunger and misery can be overcome all over the world.” The website also makes the claim that “the roots of the strange coalition of financial institutions, foundations, media, and environmental organizations go back to the eugenics movement of the Nazis and their environment,” a longtime LaRouche obsession. Other quirks, such as the belief that the British royal family runs the global drug trade, have been publically dropped over the years.

But outdated obsessions have been replaced with LaRouche’s newfound fascination with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, also called the “New Silk Road” — which explains why campaign posters promoting the initiative as Germany’s saving grace now paper Berlin. It’s hard to tell what motivates that interest, whether it’s a remnant of LaRouche’s long-standing obsession with patterns of global trade, or a skillful attempt to appeal to the political mood in Beijing, where the project has become a shibboleth for support of an increasingly powerful Xi.

BüSo did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

In the United States, LaRouchites have long been treated as a legitimate, if unhinged, political movement. But in Germany, they are seen as a political cult — and a potentially dangerous one. In 2003, a 22-year-old British man died under mysterious circumstances after traveling to Wiesbaden, LaRouche’s main base in Germany, to attend a LaRouche event billed as a rally against the Iraq War. No charges were brought, but BüSo and its ideology were portrayed unflatteringly in the extensive media coverage that followed. Germany is particularly sensitiveabout any groups that could be portrayed as a cult — most Germans, for instance, favor banning Scientology.

On their own, the LaRouchites seem hardly more threatening to German democracy than any fringe political group, through they are a well-funded one. (LaRouche’s money stream is uncertain, but the associated PAC raised $6 million last U.S. election cycle, seemingly from donations from the over 5,000 members.) “Nobody knows them. Sometimes they have their people on the street, and if you talk to them, they are kind of crazy,” said Stefan Liebich, a member of the German parliament, in an interview with Foreign Policy. “They invest a lot of money for their posters, but no one will vote for them.”

The question is whether LaRouchites’ real audience isn’t in Germany but rather in China, where there’s growing evidence the movement has influential followers. “Journalists” associated with the LaRouche’s news outlet, the Executive Intelligence Review, are regularly invited to Chinese government press conferences in Washington and are quoted extensively in Chinese state media, where they often parrot government propaganda.

If China is choosing to waste its time and energy on a fringe group, that’s hardly a worry. But there’s the dangerous possibility that Chinese officials and academics actually think the LaRouche movement is a serious Western group. For a middle-aged Chinese official with little experience in or contact with the West, distinguishing between LaRouche’s Schiller Institute and, say, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute, or other mainstream think tanks is tough.

And the LaRouchites are telling the Chinese what they want to hear: that China is the future and that Xi is respected globally. When Chinese media wanted to praise Xi’s call with U.S. President Donald Trump, for instance, they went to “German expert” Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Even if the officials and journalists dealing with them recognize they’re cranks, praise from compliant Westerners is useful currency in Chinese politics. (China Daily’s Chen Weihua, for instance, is a U.S. resident; that didn’t stop him from writing a puff piece about the group this August.) And in a country struggling to understand how Western politics works, conspiracy theories can be dangerously tempting.

Nobody’s listening to the LaRouche movement in Berlin. But they might be in Beijing.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/18/lyndon-larouche-is-running-a-pro-china-party-in-germany/amp/

Cult Leader Lyndon LaRouche Hearts Hillary's Hottest Foe, Martin O'Malley

Olivia Nuzzi
November 12, 2015
The Daily Beast

At last Martin O’Malley has a major backer. Unfortunately for him, it’s the homophobic, anti-Semitic quasi-cult leader Lyndon LaRouche.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Martin O’Malley doesn’t have any supporters outside of his friends, family, and paid staffers. Since announcing his campaign for the Democratic nomination in May, he’s never polled higher than 5 percent (and that was just once, in June) and currently stands at 1.8 percent, or just slightly above where Jim Webb was (1.3) when he gave up on his campaign altogether.

In the last fundraising quarter, O’Malley raised $1.3 million—about $24 million less than was raised by Bernie Sanders.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a photo of O’Malley, Sanders, and Clinton standing together ahead of the Democratic forum in South Carolina. They labeled O’Malley “an unidentified man.”

But the Unidentified Man has the support of one influential and historically significant political figure: a 93-year-old homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, climate change-denying possible cult leader who believes the Rockefellers are trying to spread drug addiction, famine, and the bubonic plague throughout the world and once wrote that, “According to a variety of very authoritative sources, Henry A. Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot.”

Reached by phone from Virginia where, of ailing health, he leads a secluded existence with his yapping dog, Holly, Lyndon LaRouche said O’Malley is “the only one who I would consider qualified to be considered for the selection of the president.

“What I’ve seen so far, O’Malley’s the only one who I could feel comfortable about right now,” he said. “There’s a certain quality of honor with him which you don’t find often with many presidential candidates.”

O’Malley needs endorsements, sure, but he needs the endorsement of LaRouche like he needs Biden to jump in the race and start strumming an acoustic guitar, or a hole in his head.

Naturally, O’Malley’s campaign responded to LaRouche’s kind words with a minor panic attack.

“It goes without saying that we reject this reprehensible individual’s endorsement,” Haley Morris, O’Malley’s spokeswoman, said.

Morris never uttered LaRouche’s name, like he’s Voldemort.

“He stands in opposition to virtually everything that Governor O’Malley believes and his view of America could not be any more different from the governor’s. Governor O’Malley has never met him, and more importantly he is disgusted by this man’s racist, homophobic, Anti-Semitic, and backward views.”

LaRouche was born on Sept. 8, 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire, to a family of Quakers, and after nearly a century spent in New York City, Virginia, and countries as far flung as China, he maintains a grandiose New England patter.

LaRouche enlisted in the Army as a noncombatant and then, after dropping out of Northeastern University, he joined the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite movement that gained popularity throughout the 1960s and ’70s. During this time, he worked as a management consultant and economist, according to his website.

But LaRouche craved power and soon formed his own movement, the National Caucus of Labor Committees, and started recruiting followers. Defectors reported a cult-like environment that required devoting to the cause their every waking moment.

And the cause seemed to shift dramatically over the years as the one-time Marxist LaRouche lurched further and further to the right until, in 2009, he commissioned an image of Barack Obama as Hitler.

LaRouche laughed when I mentioned the Hitler thing.

“It would not be unfair to Hitler to compare Obama to Hitler,” he said. “The serious thing is the man is a bad killer! He, on his own opinion, has decided to put the death knell on people all over the planet. He’s a murderer! He’s a mass murderer! And he’s not competent in any respect in terms of politics.”

To call LaRouche crazy wouldn’t quite be going far enough. LaRouche is a paranoid narcissist and charlatan whose ability to unspool Twilight Zonenarratives about politics and the world’s power structures is rivaled by no other living conspiracy theorist. Not by Jesse Ventura or Alex Jones, not by Naomi Wolf or the bad Quaid brother. Not even by any of the number of people under the impression that mass shootings are false flag operations starring government-recruited crisis actors.

LaRouche is of a different breed (maybe lizard).

He believes, for instance, that Hitler was acting on behalf of the British government; that the Queen of England “personally runs the military and intelligence services” of the United Kingdom; that Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, tried to get American students addicted to LSD; that the Bush family financed Hitler’s takeover of Germany; that AIDS can be transmitted by bug bites; that global warming “is a scientific fraud”; that “the same oligarchy which had run the U.S. slave trade” is the one that “foisted” jazz music on African Americans; he claims he was personally used to help Reagan negotiate with the Soviets through “back channel talks”; and that the Rockefellers and the CIA have plotted against him and his followers.

When I brought up Clinton, he responded, “Hillary’s a funny case. She was not really a politician in any sense of a good term. She was a lawyer and she married Bill and Bill loved her very much that’s a fact and he hoped that his marriage with her would be a fruitful one, they were married early in the process and the end of the process the second term was a very bitter one for him because the British Queen herself and a bunch of Republicans set him up with a trap and he wasn’t quite quick enough on the answers to avoid that trap and after that of course we have a terrible period of Bushes and similar kinds of things and Obama so we’ve had a pretty much destroyed system of the presidency since Bill left office.”

But more than he believes any one theory, LaRouche believes in himself.

He has run for president nine times since 1976, in every election until 2008, when he finally decided he was “too old” to lead the country. One of those elections he ran from a jail cell after he was convicted of mail fraud, a felony, which he told me “was done by the Bush family” to retaliate against him for supporting Reagan, whose success he believes he is single-handedly responsible for because “I set forth the entire policy which launched his presidency,” though they only met one time.

But LaRouche still thinks he’s qualified—more than any other American since Franklin Roosevelt—to be president.

“My abilities are greater than most anyone in the presidency now, but I’m an old man,” he told me.

“I know that I am not going to become president of the United States. I won’t live long enough to become president of the United States,” he said.

“But I am qualified to judge, to make an official judgment, an authoritative judgment of what the presidency of the United States requires. That’s where I’m expert.”

And the judgment one of American history’s most baffling fringe political figures has made is that the most boring candidate of the primary should be president, which ironically could only harm O’Malley’s campaign. If LaRouche were viewing the situation from the outside, he might suspect something untoward were at play.

LaRouche did not wind up as O’Malley’s unwelcome ally through process of elimination.

Sure, he hates Hillary, “a chronic liar” who is “part of Wall Street” and acted as “a stooge of Obama.” He hates Sanders, too, “Well, because he’s no good!”

But he actually seems to like O’Malley. In March, LaRouche put out a press release touting O’Malley’s support for reinstating Glass-Steagall, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1933 and President Clinton overturned in 1999.

“O’Malley’s raised this question, and anyone who opposes that policy, has to be considered as a defective choice for a candidacy for president,” LaRouche said. “O’Malley’s the only one right now who has the qualifications for being a presidential candidate. The others will now have to declare themselves on this. You cannot ‘go along to get along’ forever with Wall Street.”

Whether or not a candidate would reinstate Glass-Steagall (and to a lesser degree, how they feel about “galactic studies”) is the decisive factor for LaRouche, who believes those opposed “should be thrown out of office.”

Roosevelt, who LaRouche measures all candidates against, “stepped into a period of real crisis where there was a kind of evil that we find in the Obama administration today,” he said. “Throw Obama out of office now! Throw anybody like him out of office now! And throw the Bush family out now!”

O’Malley may not want to be associated with LaRouche, but his disciples have been demonstrating in support of him nonetheless.

In July, Clinton gave an economic speech at The New School in New York City. Just a few feet away on the corner, team LaRouche had convened with a table of posters bearing Larouche’s face. On top of one of their cars was a sign, “LaRouche: O’Malley is Right! Glass-Steagall must be done!”

And outside the Democratic National Committee’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in September, LaRouche followers held “Martin O’Malley #WENEEDDEBATE” signs handed out by his campaign.

Mike Reeves, a lifelong LaRouche believer, told me he’s for O’Malley because LaRouche isn’t running himself.

“O’Malley’s talking about Glass-Steagall and breaking up the ‘too big to fail’ banks and he has a fighting position towards Wall Street, and Hillary’s taking a lot of their money,” Reeves said. “O’Malley actually has a policy on the banking system.”

LaRouche admitted he’s not yet gotten a chance to meet O’Malley “directly” but “indirectly, yes.”

“I’ve known him through close associates who I know personally who are in the business of working in support of presidents,” he said. “I’ve met people who I know personally who have been associated with him.”

O’Malley’s campaign said this was false. “Obviously they don’t know each other nor have folks in common,” Morris said.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/12/cult-leader-hearts-hillary-s-hottest-foe.html

LaRouche Movement: The far right cult alleged to be behind UK student Jeremiah Duggan's death

International Business Times UK
Tom Porter
June 2, 2015

The last time Erica Duggan spoke to her son Jeremiah was after midnight on 27 March 2003.

"He rang me in the early hours of the morning and he laid it straight out who the people were and that he was frightened, that he was in danger, and that he wanted to escape from them."

Later that day, Duggan was found dead by a motorway near Wiesbaden, Germany. Following a police investigation, German authorities ruled the 23-year-old had committed suicide "by automobile". In 2010, The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany rejected the Duggan family's request for a judicial review of the case.

For more than a decade, Erica has fought for the verdict to be overruled and for a proper investigation to be launched into the circumstances of her son's death. In May, partial vindication came when a UK coroner ruled Duggan did not kill himself.

Erica has all along had "no doubt" the shadowy LaRouche Movement, whose German affiliate the Schiller Institute organised the conference he attended before his death, had played a role in Jeremiah's death.

"He was at a meeting of the group the morning of his death attended by several senior members and was considered to be a spy and a traitor," she said.

Coroner Andrew Walker said Duggan's identity as a British Jew may have led the group described as a far-right cult by the Metropolitan Police to target him.

"The fact that he attended a conference run by this far right-wing organisation… together with Mr Duggan expressing that he was a Jew, British and questioning the material put before him, may have had a bearing on Mr Duggan's death in the sense that it may have put him at risk from members of the organisation and caused him to become distressed and seek to leave," Walker said.

Though he accepted Duggan had died after being hit by cars, he said "unexplained injuries" suggested there may have been an altercation at some stage before his death.

What is the LaRouche Movement?

Formed in the US by renegade economist and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche in the 1970s, the movement that bears his name has branches in countries including Germany, France, Brazil, Australia and the Philippines, and thousands of estimated followers.

The movement claims to promote a revival of classical art and culture, reform of the financial system and the development of global economic infrastructure projects.

However, critics allege LaRouche is in fact a dangerous far-right cult that brainwashes followers and is one of the world's chief disseminators of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Duggan became involved with the LaRouche group while a student in the Sorbonne, France, during the build-up to the war in Iraq.

"He told me he had met a man older than him who was teaching him about politics, and he gave the name Solidarité et Progrès, which I learnt is a French front group for LaRouche," said Erica.

"What they do is they have a very apocalyptic approach so they said: 'If we don't stop this war in Iraq, we will have a nuclear Holocaust and a Third World War and it is the most important thing to stop it. We have a way of stopping it. Come to this conference and see what you can do.'"

Jeremiah travelled to Wiesbaden, Germany, to the conference organised by the Schiller Institute, the German branch of the movement, which is run by Lyndon's LaRouche's wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

"Jeremiah said to me he was thinking of becoming more politically active. So he was only going to find out about it really, he didn't know about it," she said.

Coded anti-Semitism

Matthew Feldman is an expert on far-right ideology and professor in contemporary history at Teeside University.

He said the group's anti-Semitism is coded, allowing it to "hide in plain sight" under the radar of authorities.

"Few groups are willing to be public with their anti-Semitism, so what we find is a code, and the use of such terms as 'international financiers', 'Zionists' or even more vague terms, such as 'special interests,'" Feldman said.

He said LaRouche openly expressed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories earlier in his political career.

"You need to go back to LaRouche in the 1970s when he is much more overt about these things, much more overt about Holocaust revisionism, about various forms of anti-Semitism and his connections with the far right were at that point well-established," said Feldman.

Former members of the group have testified it used brainwashing "ego stripping" techniques and intimidated those who wanted to leave.

The group is also alleged to have waged intimidation campaigns against political opponents and journalists in the US.

Erica, who has been in contact with several former members of the group, described it as a "form of modern-day slavery in a way". She said: "They destroy your powers of critical thinking. Undermine your belief in your self, and make you believe that you are surrounded by people lying to you and that the world is the enemy."

She believes Duggan's open, questioning nature may have led him to challenge the group's teachings.

For Feldman, these are hallmarks of far-right cults. He said: "It is important that far-right politics are a subculture, they a totalising thing. You don't stop being a far-right activist when you go to sleep or go home. You embrace it."

He said the group uses classical culture, economics and pseudo-science to form "a whole conspiracy they have set up which explains their counter-vision of the world".

Calls for an independent investigation

For Erica, the long fight for justice continues, with German authorities in her view yet to launch a proper investigation into the organisation, or acknowledge the true nature of the LaRouche Movement and Schiller Institute.

She called for an independent investigation into her son's death. Erica said: "I want a proper political enquiry when they look into what really happened and for the first time conduct a proper investigation."

Feldman said although the German government had a strong record on tackling religious cults, and pointed to a recent law banning the Church of Scientology in the country, questions needed to be asked about why it did not take the danger posed by LaRouche more seriously.

"If Jeremiah's death wasn't suicide, then what the hell was it? It is still an open question," he said. "It is something fishy and something in need of serious investigation. It is time for the Germans to take this seriously as well."

The US Anti-Defamation League and the Australian Anti-Defamation Commission have both described the organisation as anti-Semitic, and he asked why authorities allowed it to disseminate its message of hate with impunity.

He said Germany had not shirked the duty of facing its Nazi past and "it should be small step from owning that to saying we are going to lead the fight against far right groups that preach hatred and violence everywhere".

He added: "I think many of us would like to see more of that from the German state and prosecutors."

In a statement, the Schiller Institute described allegations of involvement in Duggan's death as "utterly preposterous", and disputed the recent coroner's verdict.

"At no time has anyone connected with the Duggan family ever presented any evidence or facts that refute the findings of the German authorities concerning the suicide of her son," said spokesman Bruce Director.

"Instead, over the last 12 years she and her representatives and collaborators have propounded wild conspiracies theories promulgated by the political enemies of Mr LaRouche in and around the British Monarchy and the circles of the now discredited former prime minister Tony Blair."

The Hessen Public Prosecutor's Office has also been asked to comment.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jeremiah-duggan-larouche-movement-far-right-cult-alleged-be-behind-death-uk-jewish-student-1503875