Beware the Leesburg Garden Club!

This is the first presidential election since 1972 in which the fascist crank Lyndon LaRouche is not running for the White House. Writing in The Washington Monthly, Avi Klein reviews LaRouche's political career and the declining fortunes of the cult he created.

Comments

[Jamie Kelly]

One of those weird little fuckhead cult loonies once cornered me in Seattle and started screaming in my face. Seriously, his spit was specking my glasses.
I nearly punched his bitch-ass out before my girlfriend pulled me away.
I walked away screaming "Ayn Rand! Ayn Rand!" (don't know why -- seemed like a suitably contrarian thing to yell) while he laughed hysterically.
Goddamn, those people are weird.

[Nigel Watt]

Good riddance. That whole thing is a pile of WTF.

[de stijl]

The Gore of Babylon

That is a false analogy!

[Brandybuck]

It's been twenty years and I still don't understand those guys. 9/11 Truthers seem thoughtful and coherent next to them.

[JBinMO]

Well of cours he stopped running. His goal was to get a facist in the white house and....

[jmklein]

Props to my brother Avi, he first taught me about Libertarianism but has since settled into the life of a Democrat. Great writer, and in the spirit of atrocious conflict of interest, read more of his stuff!

[lunchstealer]

That is a false analogy!

No it isn't. It's apt! AAAAPT!

[T]

I voted for a LaRouchie to be Lt. Gov. in Virginia some years back. I figured she would be powerless but vastly more comical than another efenant or donk. If I'm gonna get screwed to pay for the gummint, I at least want some entertainment out of it.

[BakedPenguin]

I remember a LaRouche pamphlet that was handed to my grandmother in her nursing home for the 1980 election. It showed a cartoon of Jimmy Carter with a firehose, spraying old people to keep them out of voting booths, while he denied that he wanted to keep old people from voting. Didn't get it then, don't get it now, except now I know there's nothing to get.

[Aresen]

But without Lyndon LaRouche around, who will warn us about Queen Elizabeth II's vast drug cartel?

[Franklin Harris]

I'm sure agents of the Queen of England are behind this.

[ted]

I actually joined these guys when I moved to Los Angeles as a joke. I went there with a large yellow notepad and wrote down the funniest one liners I heard and put them up on the somethingawful forums. Everyone on the forums loved it. I called it "The Lyndon LaRouche Experiment". I'll try to find the link to show you guys later.

[Bhh]

I always sort of liked the guy. No more crazy than the neocons and more highbrow and entertaining.

[Jesse Walker]

I always sort of liked the guy.

Ordinarily I bow to no one in my appreciation of fringe weirdos. But the LaRouche cult has fucked up a lot of people's lives, which kind of curtails its charm. I'll stick with the Birchers and Rastafarians, thanks.

[sage]

I RTFA on the way home today, and what Jesse said.

[Bhh]

I had a professor who was very smart and talented and really committed to LaRouche. There was always lots of literature. I think I've got some 15 year old Executive Intelligence Reviews around somewhere.

LL did seem to have this belief that if he could just get enough people to read his turgid theorizing then the world would change.

[mozzie]

"But the LaRouche cult has fucked up a lot of people's lives,"

I don't doubt you but I'm interested in hearing some examples of this. Anyone who almost got famous but then quickly became a has-been before his five minutes were getting started?

[Robert]

I actually joined these guys when I moved to Los Angeles as a joke.

After I told my friend Michael Pinto about them and gave him some of their lit in the early 1970s -- they were big at Columbia U. where I was an undergrad -- he joined them for amusement purposes too. Then he got serious about it. Eventually they purged this "Rockefeller spy" in what he described as a very scary scene.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

But without Lyndon LaRouche around, who will warn us about Queen Elizabeth II's vast drug cartel?

Yeah! And who's gonna tell us now, when the Queen of England has sex with a horse? Huh? Who's gonna let us know about that, if LR? He was my inside source, man.

The f***ing lunatic anyway.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

I don't doubt you but I'm interested in hearing some examples of this.

Uh, a relative of mine would make a good case in point. He was kind of off a little before meeting up with the cult. But then he got sucked in, and he's never been the same.

He still hasn't broken loose, in spite of everything.

Trust me, L.R. has taken a lot of semi-fucked up lives, and converted them to totally fucked up beyond any hope of repair lives. I've seen lots of on-the-hoof examples.

[Wazoo]

An entire phalanx of LaRouchites is attempting to infest the Australian political process at the moment under the guise of party called the "Citizen's Electoral Council" [http://www.cecaust.com.au/]. They have a remarkable number of candidates standing in electorates across the country.

[BakedPenguin]

I'll stick with the Birchers and Rastafarians, thanks.

You must have some interesting parties.

[David E. Gallaher]

At long last, the Librarian Party can come out from under the shadow of the LaRouchians!
It's finally the end of the beginning!
(If anything, librarians are patient.)
Personally, I have already glommed onto the cult of the Paulifarians.

[Robert]

Trust me, L.R. has taken a lot of semi-fucked up lives, and converted them to totally fucked up beyond any hope of repair lives. I've seen lots of on-the-hoof examples.

My aforementioned friend you might count as one. After the LaRouche experience he went downhill, being institutionalized several times in the years that followed -- schizoaffective. He died a few years ago, around 50 YO.

[Aresen]

And who's gonna tell us now, when the Queen of England has sex with a horse?

Not true. It's Prince Phillip that has sex with horses (stallions, specifically).

The Queen, however, likes to watch.

😛

[VM]

Question:

in the nightmare scene in the Manchurian Candidate, there was a ladies' garden group meeting - did the Chinese, perhaps, name it the Leesburg Garden Club?

[Syd]

LaRouche's headquarters were in Leesburg and he once denounced the Leesburg Garden Club as a nest of Soviet sympathizers. Don't know why; maybe their roses were red.

[dhex]

But without Lyndon LaRouche around, who will warn us about Queen Elizabeth II's vast drug cartel?

jordan maxwell, alex jones and david icke?

[ChrisO]

I had noticed that the LaRouche pamphleteers were no longer infesting the Foggy Bottom Metro stop in D.C. as of about a year ago or so.

I remember my wife and I being handed one of their pamphlets a couple of years ago. That was some freaked-out shit. It's remarkable that someone with such an obvious mental illness could keep an organization/cult like that going for 30 years. L. Ron Hubbard did it too, but he had the more effective idea of couching his exploitive nonsense in the guise of religion.

That shit about the Leesburg Garden Club is the funniest thing I've read in ages.

[Art-P.O.G.]

The joke being of course that LaRouche's organization was itself about as perfidious as anything they wrote about.