Lyndon LaRouche

From RationalWiki

Lyndon LaRouche is a very special kind of American political animal, a perennial candidate for President and complete wingnut.

You know those sketchy-looking people that you see giving out pamphlets and newspapers near college campuses and subway stations? Carrying hand-lettered posters with pictures of Bush, Cheney, or the Queen? They're working for Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche is a perpetual office seeker with a messiah complex, who has run for President of the United States on many occasions, and operates his own batshit looney (but thankfully ineffective) political machine in a manner freakishly remniscent of a religious cult. Many of his political workers are young, middle-of-the-road to liberal students and young adults who think LaRouche, and only LaRouche, knows what needs to be done to Save The World.

Basically all you need to know about this guy is he has run for President 10 or 11 times, wants to build nuclear desalinization plants off the California coast and use tactical nukes to build a canal across Africa to solve the world's water crisis, thinks the economy will collapse unless we build a high speed mag-lev railroad through Alaska and Siberia, and thinks Henry Kissinger, the ADL, the Queen of England, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund are agents of international Satanism who control the drug trade. LaRouche has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism as well, though this is more prominent outside the United States, where he mostly blames the British for everything.

Though LaRouche has traditionally run as a Democrat since 1980, whether he is right or left is kind of hard to prove. The best that can be said is his beliefs are a unique amalgamation of wingnuttery and moonbattery, where far left and far right meet on the dark side of the moon. His earliest political background was decidedly on the hard left where he was an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party (kicked out when they noticed his messiah complex even back then) and then leading a Marxist study group of new-left students during the late 1960s, from whence he assembled most of his early following; but he later tried to establish close ties to the hard right during the early Reagan administration, especially over three of his pet issues, nuclear power, the War on Drugs, and opposition to the environmental movement. Though his organization has been active in other countries (particularly Australia), his home base and constituency has traditionally been largely American.

LaRouche was an early proponent of space-based weapons, and is credited by many with successfully lobbying Ronald Reagan into funding the so-called Star Wars program.^[1]^[2]^[3] And since George W. Bush was too busy trying to revive teh Strategic Defense Initiative instead of paying attention to what Osama bin Laden was up to like he should have been, it could be said by some that LaRouche bears some responsibility for 9/11.^[4]

He also once shared a prison cell with Jim Bakker.