{"id":9257,"date":"2020-12-23T23:59:48","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T23:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/?p=9257"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:18:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:18:19","slug":"the-cult-on-pennsylvania-avenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/12\/23\/the-cult-on-pennsylvania-avenue\/","title":{"rendered":"The cult on Pennsylvania Avenue"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>\u2019ve been getting those emails. The ones asking for my support, and maybe the three-digit number on the reverse of my bank card, to save the Republic from the vote-riggers and prevent Joe Biden from stealing the US election. \u201cOn November 3,\u201d thunders a typical example, \u201cthe American people rose to the call of history, and voted to return Donald Trump to office . . . Now that victory must be defended from a \u2018color revolution\u2019, a fascist coup which is blatantly attempting to steal the election. The President is fighting the fraud and will not capitulate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These communications are not from the outgoing President\u2019s \u201cOfficial Election Defense Fund\u201d\u2014though those are weird enough, with their faintly threatening language, graphs borrowed from Falun Gong publications, and $5 donation button that extracts $55 from your account through some digital sleight of hand. But they are the work of an organisation with which it shares some common ground. The LaRouche Political Action Committee, founded by the late eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, is unenthusiastic about empiricism, beguiled by exotic and impossible conspiracy theories, and keen on conjuring virtue from its own falsehoods. It also enjoys the vocal support of Roger Stone, the political dirty trickster who recently received a pardon from the Oval Office. Which means that its messaging\u2014in a sense that will remain correct until 20 January\u2014is Presidential in tone.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s difference, though, in the detail. In the increasingly confusing assertions made in courtrooms and on landscape gardening forecourts by the President\u2019s personal lawyer, it\u2019s often hard to tell who is being accused of what. The affidavits produced by Rudy Giuliani a week after the election were like a collection of dreams about mysterious unmarked vans and once-glimpsed \u201cphoney\u201d ballot papers. When journalists ask Donald Trump if, as QAnon supporters believe, he is secretly saving the world from Satanic paedophiles (think\u00a0Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/i>\u00a0meets\u00a0Chitty Chitty Bang Bang<\/i>\u00a0meets\u00a0Team America: World Police<\/i>) then he doesn\u2019t agree, but coyly avoids the opportunity to deny it. Useful vagueness descends.<\/span><\/p>\n

The LaRouchians are much hotter on the specifics. And here, readers who thought, like John Major, that the United Kingdom is \u201cno longer a great power\u201d and \u201cwill never be so again\u201d can allow their chests to swell with pride. \u201cBefore Election Day was over,\u201d reports a recent LaRouche despatch, \u201ca British-centered imperial elite\u2014acting through Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence community and the media\u2014moved into the vote fraud phase of its four-year-long \u2018color revolution\u2019 against the President, and decreed the green, fascist Biden\/Harris team to be the imperial overlords of the United States of America.\u201d This covert British reconquest was finalised, they insist, on November 11 at Prince Charles\u2019s Green Horizon summit, where HRH, the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, his predecessor Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani\u2019s successor as Mayor of New York, spent a day \u201cputting the finishing touches on the \u2018Great Reset,\u2019 a global bankers dictatorship.\u201d (This inside scoop is the reason why LaRouchians are now protesting under a banner that depicts Her Majesty the Queen, raging beneath the caption, \u201cTrump Won! The Bitch Lost.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

The LaRouche organisation is the Galapagos Islands of American politics. Everything is exaggerated and peculiar, but it tells you a lot about what\u2019s happening on the mainland. It began as a fairly ordinary Marxist revolutionary group in Manhattan. (When researching its early history in the New York Public Library, I found Bernie Sanders on the mailing list.) In 1973 it underwent a convulsive transition into full cult mode, when its leader, a pipe-smoking ex-Quaker formerly employed as a management consultant to the shoe industry, decided that some of his followers had been brainwashed to kill him by the CIA.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From this point, they specialised in harassment and outlandish accusation. Larouchians planted stories in foreign newspapers alleging that Henry Kissinger had murdered a waiter in Acapulco. They charged Noam Chomsky with conspiring to blow up New York with an atomic device. They asserted that William Rees-Mogg was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Their nonsense and madness was disseminated in their surprisingly glossy publications, whose pages now read like the photogravure ancestors of today\u2019s conspiracy theory websites. Today, the organisation is enthusiastically pro-Putin, pro-China and pro-Trump. (One of their correspondents received White House accreditation in 2017, and members are sometimes invited to speak at conferences in Beijing.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Their appetite for stunts has not deserted them. Last October, a town hall meeting held by the New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interrupted by a wide-eyed young woman who claimed to be an environmental activist with a plan to solve the climate crisis. \u201cEat the babies,\u201d she declared, in an echo of Swift\u2019s\u00a0A Modest Proposal<\/i>. Ocasio-Cortez, presumably thinking that the speaker was suffering from some kind of mental illness, treated her kindly. But the moment went viral when online posters suggested, falsely, that the Congresswoman had concurred with this cannibalistic suggestion. \u201cSeems like a normal AOC supporter to me,\u201d cracked Donald Trump Jnr. \u201cAOC is a wack job,\u201d his dad tweeted back. The LaRouchians celebrated the success of their stunt. A day later, I found footage from one of their meetings at which the same young woman spoke, earnestly and haltingly, about the dangers of listening to Greta Thunberg. I hope, one year later, she has found her way out of the cult.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lyndon LaRouche died last year, four years short of his century. But his golden period, if that\u2019s the right term, ended in 1986, when his mansion in Leesburg, Virginia, was raided by the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in prison for scheming to defraud the tax authorities and deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from his supporters. The prosecutor in the case was the young Robert Mueller. Here, with this coincidence, is a lesson from history. One that tells us something about the tenacity of men who are used to bending reality and encouraging others to follow. LaRouche went to jail. But being locked in a cell didn\u2019t stop him making another bid for the Presidency. Or asking supporters to send him their money.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A peculiar organisation is peddling exotic conspiracy theories about Joe Biden\u2019s electoral win \u2014 but the Larouchians have long attempted to bend reality<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9525,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9257"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9264,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257\/revisions\/9264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}