The Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM or LYM) and the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC or LPAC) are part of the political organization of controversial American political figure Lyndon LaRouche.On the Necessity of the LaRouche Youth Movement, schillerinstitute.org The LYM's "war room" is in Leesburg, Virginia, also the headquarters of LPAC. The LaRouche Youth Movement describes itself as an international political movement of young adults, led by Lyndon LaRouche, who promote the revival of classical humanist thought, organize politically to establish a new world economic system based on the power of human creativity to increase the power of the human individual in relation to the universe, and fight for a physical economy which can promote the general welfare of humanity, to develop and move towards better living conditions.Rodriguez, Martin, Iluminados y malditos , Noticias Urbanas, December 5, 2008
LaRouche Youth Movement
History Barbara Boyd, spokesperson for the LYM and treasurer of LPAC, says that LYM was founded in 2000. According to Harley Schlanger, a LaRouche spokesperson, LYM's first major campaign was during the 2003 recall of California Governor Gray Davis, when it distributed over a million leaflets across the country, opposing the recall and depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger alongside Adolf Hitler. They also distributed tens of thousands of other pamphlets in California.
In a 2004 article in the University of California, Berkeley independent student newspaper, The Daily Californian, reporter David Cohn described the local chapter of the LYM as "30 college-aged youths" who spent several hours each day undergoing instruction provided by the LaRouche organization. One member, 23-year-old Jason Ross, told Cohn that he had dropped out of Stanford University in his junior year to join the movement. "We are in a complete breakdown of the financial system and we know that. We can use our time in a more appropriate manner than going to school," he said. Cohn also talked to three other members who had all quit school to join the movement. The Daily Californian reported the movement's numbers as "about 100 young people from Los Angeles to Oakland" who "travel to dozens of college campuses aggressively recruiting members and not hesitating to ask newcomers to quit school". As a result of the Internet, there are active chapters in nations like Japan where LaRouche has no official organization. The LYM has also expanded its activity into the African nations of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.
Democratic Party involvement LYM members have been active in the Democratic Party at the state and local levels. In 2006, LaRouche Youth Movement activist and Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee member Cody Jones was honored as "Democrat of the Year" for the 43rd Assembly District of California, by the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.EIR Volume 33, Number 27 , July 7, 2006 p. 46: "Congress Held Accountable by Larouche PAC Drive" At the April 2007, California State Democratic Convention, LYM activist Quincy O'Neal was elected vice-chairman of the California State Democratic Black Caucus,California Democratic Convention: LaRouche Youth Bring Reality, Provide Leadership to Party EIR April 11, 2008The LaRouche Show: The LYM Report On Their Victory in California EIR May 11, 2007 and Wynneal Innocentes was elected corresponding secretary of the Filipino Caucus.California's Future Democratic Leaders Engage in Dialogue With State Chairman EIR September 14, 2007 O'Neal is also president of the LYM's Democratic Party Club, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Legacy Club, which is affiliated with the California Democratic Council.Franklin Roosevelt Legacy Democratic Club: Contact Us Archived on August 1, 2007 from the original In March 2010, LaRouche Youth leader Kesha Rogers won the Democratic congressional primary in Houston, Texas' 22nd District.
Pedagogy and campaigns
LaRouche is highly critical of contemporary college curricula, and has designed his own pedagogy for members of his youth movement, which he describes as "the reliving of the crucial discoveries of universal physical-scientific principle by, successively, the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato and the modern science of Johannes Kepler," combined with the performance of classical vocal music, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach's Jesu, meine Freude. They spend time in what are called "Monge brigades," which emphasize readings of Vladimir Vernadsky, Alexander Hamilton, Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. The LaRouche Youth have been assisted around the U.S. in performance workshops on classical music, as well as African-American spirituals, by well known musicians William Warfield and Sylvia Olden Lee, and in drama performance by actor Robert Beltran.
The LYM has disrupted university lectures to distribute their material. On October 23, 2006, a group of LaRouche Youth Movement members twice disrupted a Connecticut U.S. Senate debate between Alan Schlesinger, Ned Lamont, and Joseph Lieberman. According to The Day, as Joe Lieberman spoke, the hecklers "sang a harmonized ode targeting Vice President Dick Cheney, which, according to the group's website, is unofficially titled 'The Fat-Ass Nazi Song'."
During the election campaign of 2006, the LYM came into conflict with organizations including the Ayn Rand Institute, which the LYM accused of promoting genocide in speeches by its representatives at various campuses. LYM members confronted Institute executive director Yaron Brook at various universities across the US, heckling him and calling his policies "fascist". In one case, at the University of California, Irvine, 15 LYM members, some of whom violently resisted, were arrested.
LYM members frequently combine political activity with choral music performance. They sang outside the Democratic Party Convention in Boston in 2004, and in 2007 they performed choral music with lyrics about impeaching Dick Cheney in classrooms at Harvard and Boston University.
During 2007, LYM members have been seen in on the streets, campuses and conferences emphasizing two issues in particular: a call by LaRouche for the impeachment of Dick Cheney, and the assertion that the theory of human-caused global warming is a fraud motivated by Malthusianism. On this latter issue, LYM have confronted Al Gore on several occasions at his public events. In the Philippines, LYM members debated a variety of spokespersons for the Global Warming theory. In Argentina, LYM leader Betiana Gonzalez disrupted Gore's speech at a Biofuels conference. A similar incident took place earlier in the year in Montreal, Canada.EIR 30 March, Pavel Penev: "The Youth of Today Declare:‘We Will Not BeGorified!"
In November 2007, the LYM launched a campaign against social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook, with the mass distribution of the pamphlet "The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is the Devil in Your Laptop?" The pamphlet says that Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace, and Microsoft, owner of Facebook (Microsoft owns only 2.5% of Facebook), are involved in social engineering to destroy the cognitive powers and potential for political leadership among young people.
TIME magazine's coverage of Kesha Rogers' campaign says that "The LYM espouses LaRouche opposition to free trade and 'globalism' (the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) and it also calls for a return to a humanist classical education, emphasizing the works of Plato and Leibniz."
Criticism and accusations Journalists, former members and law enforcement officials have made a wide variety of accusations of the LaRouche organizations, including a Scotland Yard report that called them a political cult. In 2006, college officials in Boston told a reporter that the LYM was one of the two leading high-pressure groups on area campuses, and that it engaged in strong-arm tactics to induce students to leave college and help recruit new members. Boyd called the charges "gossip" and said the movement was working "for ideas and real policies" and was a "youth movement in the Democratic Party". Investigative journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King has described the founding of the WLYM by LaRouche as a way of maintaining his legacy after his death by "[going] back to his roots, the roots of his movement in the radical campus movement in the late 1960s." Avi Klein of the Washington Monthly describes this as an element of a campaign LaRouche created to blame the "first generation" of his own movement for fundraising failures, and to appeal to young members by channeling "the rage new acolytes felt toward their parents at a nearby, internal enemy".
Jeremiah Duggan
After spending six days at a Schiller Institute conference and LYM cadre school in Germany, 22-year-old Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from London who was studying in Paris, was believed to have run onto a busy road in what the British coroner called a "state of terror," and was killed. The German police investigation concluded that it was a suicide. A private forensic consultant said that he had found evidence of serious assault with a blunt instrument, but no public authorities have given credence to this claim. A LaRouche spokesman has said the young man killed himself because he was disturbed. In October 2004, a British inquest into Duggan's death heard allegations from his mother that LYM and the Schiller Institute may have used brainwashing techniques on her son to persuade him to join the movement.Samuels, Tim. "Jeremiah Duggan and Lyndon LaRouche," part 1, Newsnight, BBC, February 2004, at 3:49; part 2 and part 3.
Michael Winsted An ex-member of the LaRouche youth movement has asserted that the LaRouche Youth Movement calls parents "brainwashed baby boomers." Ex-member Michael Winsted says that although members are convinced that they are involved in important political work, the job of most members is only to collect money and recruit more members. He says that group leaders "were constantly asking us if we would die for these ideas" and that members that become critical or disillusioned by the movement often become the focus of brutal psychological attacks by the other members, including accusations of having "mother issues," of homosexuality, sexual deviance, and allegiance to anti-LaRouche conspiracies. They are often encouraged and even led by the group's managers. Winsted recounts:
I'm caught off-guard, like, what the hell just happened?...The yelling goes on for maybe five or 10 minutes while I'm furiously backpedaling...They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer...It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable.
Jeffrey Steinberg, a top security aide in the LaRouche movement, responded by portraying Michael Winsted as an agent of the Washington Post who "briefly infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the LYM".
LaRouche PAC
The Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee was previously registered with the Federal Election Commission as "FDR PAC" and by "Spannaus in '96". In 2000, LaRouche's FDR PAC made news when, forbidden from soliciting on U.S. Post Office property, it demanded that the Salvation Army be treated the same way. As of 2002, Nancy Spannaus was the executive director of the PAC.
LPAC and LYM members targeted Senator Joe Lieberman's reelection campaign in 2006. At one campaign appearance three members sang loudly "If you want a third world war, vote for Joe, Bill Buckley's whore".
In 2007, two associates of LPAC, Robert Lucero and Tony DeFranco, were escorted off Post Office property in Naperville, Illinois, by police. The two were carrying signs calling President George W. Bush "dumb" and calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.