LYNDON LAROUCHE, CULT FIGURE WHO RAN FOR PRESIDENT 8 TIMES, DIES AT 96:
Some voters said they had voted for Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart because they had been endorsed by Mr. LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party.
Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.
“I’m as American as apple pie,” Mr. LaRouche once said.
Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by a thousand votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20 to 40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.
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Mr. LaRouche’s political roots were Marxist. From 1948 to 1963, he was active in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite group.
His own group surfaced during the student unrest at Columbia University in the late 1960s as a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It evolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an organization largely made up of young upper-middle-class people who espoused Mr. LaRouche’s Marxist views.
He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing United States Labor Party, now defunct.
In the 1980s, LaRouche was a prolific maker of cable infomercials, where likely most Americans first heard of him, including Homer J. Simpson, who works in Sector 7-G of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant:
Finally, for those who get Lyndon LaRouche and fellow Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez confused, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has done a great public service by creating a handy comparison guide. The truth is out there!