112 Facts About Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche was a prominent conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate.

Lyndon LaRouche began in far-left politics but in the 1970s moved to the far right.

Lyndon LaRouche's movement is sometimes described as or likened to a cult.

Lyndon LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment, but served only five.

Lyndon LaRouche was a perennial candidate for President of the United States.

Lyndon LaRouche ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate of third parties established by members of his movement, peaking at around 78,000 votes in the 1984 presidential election.

In 2000, he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in some states, but the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred Lyndon LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.

Lyndon LaRouche's paternal grandfather's family emigrated to the United States from Rimouski, Quebec, whereas his maternal grandfather was born in Scotland.

Lyndon LaRouche's father worked for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester before the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.

Lyndon LaRouche's parents became Quakers after his father converted from Catholicism.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote that, between the ages of 12 and 14, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant.

Lyndon LaRouche graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940.

Lyndon LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942.

Lyndon LaRouche later wrote that his teachers "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate".

Lyndon LaRouche ultimately worked as an ordnance clerk at the end of the war.

Lyndon LaRouche described his decision to serve as one of the most important of his life.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces and characterized that prospect as "revolting to most of us".

Lyndon LaRouche wrote that he discussed Marxism in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism.

Lyndon LaRouche returned to Lynn in 1948 and the next year joined the Socialist Workers Party to recruit at the GE River Works there, adopting the name "Lyn Marcus" for his political work.

Lyndon LaRouche arrived in New York City in 1953, where he worked as a management consultant.

Lyndon LaRouche gave them esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Georges Sorel to discover Rudd's anarchistic origins, or studying Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.

In 1967 Lyndon LaRouche began teaching classes on Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and attracted a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, recommending that they read Das Kapital, as well as Hegel, Kant, and Leibniz.

Robert J Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971.

Lyndon LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover.

Lyndon LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security.

US sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the Lyndon LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials.

An aide to Deputy Secretary of State William Clark said when Lyndon LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed qualified.

Lyndon LaRouche's printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting Lyndon LaRouche's faction at Columbia University.

Lyndon LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them.

Lyndon LaRouche established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force", which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund austerity policies for impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.

Lyndon LaRouche founded the US Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC.

Lyndon LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit".

Lyndon LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, place their savings and possessions at its disposal, and take out loans on its behalf.

Lyndon LaRouche began writing in 1973 about the use of certain psychological techniques on recruits.

Lyndon LaRouche said that during the session he discovered that a plot to assassinate him had been implanted in George's mind.

Lyndon LaRouche recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer.

In December 1973 Lyndon LaRouche asked the couple to return to the US His followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot.

White ended up telling Lyndon LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up Lyndon LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.

Lyndon LaRouche established contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan in 1974.

George Michael, in Willis Carto and the American Far Right, says that Lyndon LaRouche shared with the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto an antipathy towards the Rockefeller family.

The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with Lyndon LaRouche by saying the US Labor Party had been able to "confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left".

Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for Lyndon LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said that while the Lyndon LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was copious evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union.

The Liberty Lobby soon pronounced itself disillusioned with Lyndon LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference.

The Lyndon LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies.

Around the same time, according to Blum, Lyndon LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of the United Kingdom, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad.

In 1975, under the name Lyn Marcus, Lyndon LaRouche published Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, described by its only reviewer as "the most peculiar and idiosyncratic" introduction to economics he had ever seen.

In 1976, Lyndon LaRouche campaigned for the first time in a presidential election as a US Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes.

Lyndon LaRouche's platform predicted financial disaster by 1980 accompanied by famine and the virtual extinction of the human race within 15 years, and proposed a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector, and an "International Development Bank" to facilitate higher food production.

Lyndon LaRouche's campaign included a paid half-hour television address, which allowed him to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns.

Lyndon LaRouche went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of her career, standing for election in Germany in 1980 for his Europaische Arbeiterpartei, and founding the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984.

Lyndon LaRouche supported the replacement of the central bank system, including the US Federal Reserve System, with a national bank; a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering; building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; and a crash program to build particle-beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Lyndon LaRouche opposed the Soviet Union and supported a military buildup to prepare for imminent war; supported the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients; and opposed environmentalism, deregulation, outcome-based education, and abortion.

Lyndon LaRouche reportedly accused the Leesburg Garden Club of being a nest of Soviet sympathizers, and a local lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after threatening phone calls and a death threat.

Helga Zepp-Lyndon LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984.

The Lyndon LaRouche campaign said the reporting was full of errors.

Three years later, Lyndon LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC, saying he had been in conflict with Oliver North over Lyndon LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Dennis King wrote that Lyndon LaRouche had been speculating about space-based weaponry as early as 1975.

Lyndon LaRouche set up the Fusion Energy Foundation, which held conferences and tried to cultivate scientists, with some success.

Lyndon LaRouche proposed the development of defensive beam technologies as a policy that was in the interest of both the US and the Soviet Union, as the alternative to an arms race in offensive weapons and as a generator of spin-off economic benefits.

Between February 1982 and February 1983, with the NSC's approval, Lyndon LaRouche met with Soviet embassy representative Evgeny Shershnev to discuss the proposal.

Physicist Edward Teller, a proponent of SDI and X-ray lasers, told reporters in 1984 that he had been courted by Lyndon LaRouche but had kept his distance.

Lyndon LaRouche began calling his plan the "Lyndon LaRouche-Teller proposal," though they had never met.

Lyndon LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported in his 2011 memoir that at a 2001 dinner in Russia with leading officials, he was told by General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the second highest-ranking officer in the Russian military, that Lyndon LaRouche was the brains behind SDI.

Rumsfeld said he believed Lyndon LaRouche had had no influence on the program, and surmised that Baluyevsky must have obtained the information off the Internet.

In interviews, former members of the movement gave details about their fundraising practices, and alleged that Lyndon LaRouche had spoken about assassinating President Jimmy Carter.

Lynch said Lyndon LaRouche members began to impersonate her and her researchers in telephone calls, and called her "Fat Lynch" in their publications.

Lyndon LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the ADL, arguing that the programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him.

The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and Lyndon LaRouche lost the case.

When Lyndon LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "Lyndon LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.

Lyndon LaRouche interpreted the AIDS pandemic as fulfillment of his 1973 prediction that an epidemic would strike humanity in the 1980s.

Lyndon LaRouche advocated testing anyone working in schools, restaurants, or healthcare, and quarantining those who tested positive.

In 1986 Lyndon LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases.

Lyndon LaRouche disputed the charges, alleging that they were politically motivated.

When Lyndon LaRouche's "heavily fortified" estate was surrounded, he at first warned law-enforcement officials not to arrest him, saying that any attempt to do so would be an attempt to kill him.

In 1987, a number of Lyndon LaRouche entities, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were taken over through an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding.

On December 16,1988, Lyndon LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; eleven counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and a single count of conspiring to defraud the US Internal Revenue Service.

Lyndon LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, but was released on parole after serving five years on January 26,1994.

Lyndon LaRouche had an interest in classical music up to the period of Brahms.

Lyndon LaRouche gave an interview to National Public Radio on the initiative from prison.

The initiative was opposed by the editor of Opera Fanatic, Stefan Zucker, who objected to the establishment of a "pitch police," and argued that Lyndon LaRouche was using the issue to gain credibility.

Lyndon LaRouche began his jail sentence in 1989, serving it at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota.

Lyndon LaRouche ran for president again in 1992 with James Bevel as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations.

Lyndon LaRouche received 26,334 votes, standing again as the "Economic Recovery" party.

Lyndon LaRouche was released on parole in January 1994, and returned to Loudoun County.

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote a letter in 1995 to then-Attorney General Janet Reno in which he said that the case against Lyndon LaRouche involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge".

The Lyndon LaRouche movement organized two panels to review the cases: the Curtis Clark Commission, and the Mann-Chestnut hearings.

Lyndon LaRouche addressed seminars at the RAS Institute of Economics, the RAS Institute of Oriental Studies.

Lyndon LaRouche spoke at hearings in the State Duma of the Russian Federation on measures to ensure the development of the Russian economy at the point of destabilization of the world financial system.

In 1996, Lyndon LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit.

Lyndon LaRouche opposed attempts to impeach President Bill Clinton, charging it was a plot by the British Intelligence to destabilize the US government.

Efforts to clear Lyndon LaRouche's name continued, including in Australia, where the Parliament acknowledged receipt of 1,606 petition signatures in 1998.

Lyndon LaRouche founded the Worldwide Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement in 2000, saying in 2004 that it had hundreds of members in the US and a lesser number overseas.

Mahmoud Alinejad wrote that, in a subsequent telephone interview with the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Lyndon LaRouche said the attacks had been organized by rogue elements inside the US, aiming to use the incident to promote a war against Islam, and that Israel was a dictatorial regime prepared to commit Nazi-style crimes against the Palestinians.

In 2003 Lyndon LaRouche was living in a "heavily guarded" rented house in Round Hill, Loudoun County, Virginia.

Lyndon LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns; Democratic Party officials did not allow him to participate in candidate forum debates.

Iqbal Qazwini wrote in the Arabic-language daily Asharq Al-Awsat in 2003 that Lyndon LaRouche was one of the first to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 and German reunification.

Lyndon LaRouche said LaRouche had urged the West to pursue a policy of economic cooperation similar to the Marshall Plan for the advancement of the economy of the socialist countries.

In 2007, Lyndon LaRouche began a national lobbying campaign to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, saying that it would be possible to save the US banking system by reorganizing it under bankruptcy protection.

Lyndon LaRouche believed that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed.

Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, Lyndon LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs.

In 2011, Stephen E Adkins's Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History called LaRouche "the leading neo-fascist politician in the United States".

Lyndon LaRouche is described as having "fascistic tendencies", taking positions on the far right, and creating disinformation.

Lyndon LaRouche was commonly regarded as a conspiracy theorist: for example, in his Fox News obituary.

An NPR obituary is titled Conspiracy Theorist And Frequent Presidential Candidate Lyndon LaRouche Dies At 96.

In 1977, Lyndon LaRouche married his second wife, Helga Zepp-Lyndon LaRouche, a German 27 years younger than him.

For example, his book title The Economics of the Noosphere: Why Lyndon LaRouche Is the World's Most Successful Economic Forecaster of the Past Four Decades.

Lyndon LaRouche identified an emotionally charged issue, conducted in-depth research into it, and then proposed a simplistic solution, which usually involved restructuring of the economy or national security apparatus.

The Lyndon LaRouche movement has been described as a cult or cult-like by critics and anti-cult organizations.

Lyndon LaRouche's death was announced on the website of one of his organizations.

Lyndon LaRouche died on February 12,2019, at age 96.