AOC town hall disruption indicates that Lyndon LaRouche's nonsense didn't die with him

Just in case you missed it, Lyndon LaRouche died this past February at the age of 96, which probably explains why you haven’t seen the LaRouchies out much anymore, although their numbers probably never exceeded more than 2,000. Back in the 1980s, LaRouche and his various organizations were accused of extorting millions of dollars in “loans” from mainly paranoid elderly people for his various “campaigns,” defrauding them by as much as $25 million, as LaRouche seems to have had no intention of repaying the loans. During his trial on mail fraud and other charges, one former associate testified that he was basically told to steal money from anyone foolish enough to give it: “If you are talking to an unemployed worker who says he has got to feed a dozen children, forget it. Get the money. Most of these people are immoral anyway. This is the most moral thing they have ever done is to give you money." LaRouche was convicted, but paroled after serving five years in prison. His followers seem to be waging a campaign to get him "exonerated," perhaps via a pardon by Donald Trump, which their maniacal support for seems to be aimed at.

Although his various organizations would be forced into bankruptcy for failure to pay more than $20 million in contempt of court charges, LaRouche never seemed without mysterious benefactors who kept him off the streets despite the fact he didn’t appear to have a paying gig. LaRouche made some rather outlandish claims in his defense, such as being the target of assassination by every government organization he could name, and at one point claimed that his “elimination” was in fact orchestrated by the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time the Soviet head of state. LaRouche has made many other absurd claims over the years that tended to reveal him as an egomaniac with a touch of psychopathy. 

LaRouche kind of started out as an alternative political voice, at first embracing a kind of “Marxism,” but then “evolving” into an Ayn Rand-like social and economic philosophy in which people like himself and his followers were intellectual super-beings who were destined to rule the world. His followers liked to point to his Nostradamus-like “predictions,” most of which never came to be, and the few that did anyone could have guessed given the accident of time and coincidence. Although his organizations had ceased to exist from bankruptcy,  LaRouche still managed to put out the message he was still sufficiently alive to conjure-up sufficient financial backing to put people  out on street corners or in front of libraries and shopping malls to put out the message that the “government” was evil and corrupt, and if you wanted to save the planet, you only needed to listen to the superior wisdom of LaRouche on how to  reshape the world into, well, whatever happened to be his  latest conspiracy-driven whim. 

For example, during the second Bush administration, their propaganda broadsheets portrayed Ellen Degeneres’ best buddy George W. Bush as a “mental defective” heading a government of “gangsters,” and Dick Cheney was something like Hitler’s clone—an “odd” assertion since the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once accused LaRouche and his followers as anti-Semites and “neo-Nazis,” bemoaning their attempts to “infiltrate” the Democratic Party during the 1960s. The  LaRouchies fascination with Nazis would continue into the Obama administration; the last time I saw these people hawking their propaganda was in front of Kent Public Library, displaying a poster that portrayed Obama with a Hitler moustache. Of course, this rendered whatever they had to say in their broadsheet moot (apparently something about the right-wing conspiracy theory about “death panels”), because you either thought Obama was a “fascist” anyways if you were right-wing conspiracy nutjob, or were disgusted or bemused by the audacity of these people to camp outside an establishment whose clientele were three-quarter minority. 

At any rate, LaRouchies had (and have) a serious credibility problem. Before he passed on, LaRouche gave his blessing to Trump, and the website that lives on, LarouchePac, remains on life-support by advocating for Trump and the various nonsense claims that serves as manna for Trump fanatics. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the LaRouche tied himself to Trump like a wet rag; both LaRouche and Trump have been accused of various crimes, and both have decried the accusations as a sinister conspiracy against themselves personally. 

And while LaRouche might be gone from this world, that apparently that hasn’t entirely killed-off the activities of his cult following. Last week USA Today published a story about a “fringe group”— that “claimed responsibility for a strange stunt” at a Rep. Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez town hall meeting. Apparently a white woman wearing a T-shirt  printed with the words “Save the planet, eat the children” repeatedly interrupted AOC’s speech by shouting out “eat the babies” and proclaiming that even if the U.S. “bombs” Russia, “we will still have too many people, too much pollution, so we have to get rid of babies. Just stop having babies is not enough, we need to eat the babies.”

It turns out the woman was a member of the LaRouche cult, and it was the LaRouchies that claimed responsibility for the disruption. Why would a LaRouchie target AOC with such a ludicrous claim? Well, the LaRouchies support Trump, and we know what Trump and his racist familiars like Stephen Miller and Ken Cuccinelli think about Hispanics—and AOC happens to be Hispanic, and of course  Hispanics are alleged to have too many babies, or at least too  many in this country according to xenophobes, nativists, white nationalists and the like. Of course, bombing Russia makes no sense for population control since it has barely half the population of the U.S. since it pealed-off its satellite states—unless we used nuclear weapons which leave a cloud a radiation that would encompass the Earth, killing-off maybe a LaRouchie or two in the process.

The “eating babies” thing isn’t exactly original, either; 18th-century author and critic of human nature Jonathan Swift suggested it as a “solution” to Britain’s Ireland “problem” in his short story “A Modest Proposal.” But then again, you don’t expect anything sensible from the like of the LaRouchies; like many “superior” people in this country, they don’t seem to understand that the greatest abusers of the world’s resources are the well-off who happen to require a lot more “stuff” to support their lifestyles, and create a lot more wastefulness in the process. One of the tenants in the Exchange Building in Seattle has catered food brought in for lunch every day, and half of it (anywhere from 50 to 100 pounds) ends-up thrown away. Multiply that 260 work days a year—well, you get the idea.