When a woman interrupted an AOC town hall yesterday to advocate
eating babies to stop climate change, many people thought it was too good to be
true. An obviously mentally-disturbed woman who was advocating a crazy policy
that seemed to embrace the twin pillars of leftist ideology, abortion and
climate change, was like a caricature of what many people think leftism is. One
of my rules of thumb is that if it seems too stupid to be true, it probably is
(although this guideline gets tested more and more these days, it seems), and
that turned out to be the case with the baby-eater.
As Gabriella
Hoffman pointed out earlier today, the woman was part of a hoax. A group
called the Larouche PAC claimed responsibility for the in-person trolling on
Twitter.
If you haven’t heard of Larouche PAC, don’t worry. It’s a
name that I haven’t heard in decades. I remember “Lyndon Larouche” as a
perennial fringe candidate from elections in the 1970s and 1980s, but being a
kid then, I never knew much about him.
As it turns out, Lyndon Larouche
was a Quaker and a conscientious objector during WWII. Beginning in 1944, he
served with the US Army in noncombatant roles in India and Burma. At this point
in his life, he was already dabbling with Marxism and joined the Socialist
Workers Party when he returned after the war. In 1967, he organized his followers
into the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and created a private
intelligence network in which his supporters sent in information from around
the world. During the 1970s, Larouche had contacts with both leftist groups
such as the CPUSA and right-wing groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the
Liberty Lobby.
By the late 1970s, Larouche
was transforming from a Marxist to a fascist. He ran the gamut of the political
spectrum with contacts in both the CIA and the KGB. He supported fusion energy and
the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), while also
embracing a variety of conspiracy theories. Larouche was famous for pamphlets
that railed against the British, who he believed controlled international
trade, as well as Jews and Israel, which he said was “a hundred times worse
than Hitler.” A Holocaust, denier, in the 1980s, he also advocated
concentration camps for AIDS patients. In a pamphlet series that became a book
called “Children of Satan,” he alleged that followers of Leo Strauss in the
Bush Administration, led by Dick Cheney, misled Congress and the American
people in order to invade Iraq and that the September 11 attacks were an “inside
job.” His group was considered to be a cult by many observers.
Larouche was convicted, along with several supporters, on charges
of credit card fraud, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice in the 1980s. He ran
a losing campaign for Congress while in jail. Larouche was never elected to
public office even though he ran for president a total of eight times, most recently
in 2016. However, in 1986, two of his supporters won Democratic nominations for
Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois. He faded from the
headlines but remained active in politics well into the 21st
century. He died
in February of this year.
I say all that to say that Lyndon Larouche was a complex man
who had a wide range of political positions, many of them contradictory. He was
also well-known as a nut. Considering the breadth of his policy platform and
the fact that politics makes strange bedfellows, it should not be surprising to
learn that the modern Larouche PAC supports Donald Trump.
The Greenwich
(Ct.) Time reported last year that two members of the group were demonstrating
with signs that read “DEFEND TRUMP” and criticized former special counsel Robert
Mueller. The couple said that they like Trump’s economic policies. The website for the Larouche PAC is also
unabashedly pro-Trump. The top of the home page contains several articles
referencing the “coup” against Donald Trump as well as a number of articles attacking
the British (including a press release that purports to have evidence that the British
were behind the 2016 election meddling) and Joe Biden. A video on the site shows Larouche
supporters with a display in Manhattan working to “protect the Donald Trump
Administration from the coup.”
A 2017 article,
posted while Larouche was still alive, on the site exults, “Not since William
McKinley has a President been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the
economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British
Imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing,
scientific advancement and world peace. Not since Franklin Roosevelt has our
nation applied these principles for national recovery and development, which
are so urgently required today. The American people must now take it upon
themselves to understand this American System tradition, and the means by which
it can be applied most successfully today.”
The common denominator in all this seems to be the group’s
opposition to climate change policy. A Larouche webcast is titled, “CO-2 Reduction
is a Mass Murder Policy” and the question at the AOC town hall was focused on climate
change. Donald Trump also has a history of opposition to climate change
policies and withdrew from the Paris Accords.
That the Larouche PAC and Donald Trump converge on the issue
of climate change is not necessarily an indictment of the president. Nor does
it mean that all climate change skeptics are nutjobs. But the underlying truth
is that the Larouche PAC does support Donald Trump, even though there is no evidence
that the president was aware of the group’s support, or even of its existence,
before yesterday.
The trolling of the AOC town hall was a masterful piece of performance
art, but the group behind it is a shadowy fringe group that is neither fully
left nor fully right. They do seem to be fully enshrouded in tinfoil, however. Hopefully,
the publicity from the “baby-eater” stunt will fade and the group will return
to the obscurity that bigoted conspiracy theorists deserve.
Originally published on The
Resurgent
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