Readers React: The political cult of the late Lyndon LaRouche just wouldn’t leave this reader alone

To the editor: If the Democratic Party ever had a Donald Trump, it was Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., who died Feb. 12.

I had heard of him before I went to my first Democratic Party convention, but I didn’t know his rhizomes had infiltrated into the party until I was given a button there with “No LaRouche” printed on it. I thought it strange because the words had a red circle and hash mark over it, thus communicating the double negative: “No no LaRouche.”

It lead me to ask around, and I was invited by someone to one of his Benjamin Franklin something-or-the-other club meetings without being told that it was actually a gathering of LaRouche’s cult followers. Lamentably, I not only signed the registry, but also filled in my address and phone number.

His followers scared the bejesus out of me that night with their bizarre and paranoid conspiratorial rhetoric. I left angry and feeling duped, but it didn’t end there. I got phone calls, letters and piles and piles of crazy books.

Not booklets, but tomes — crazy tomes.

Ronald Webster, Long Beach

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To the editor: The LaRouche obituary, which notes that the perennial presidential candidate built a following “based on conspiracy theories, predictions of economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism,” refers to him as a “fringe figure.”

Maybe he was just ahead of his time.

Monte Montgomery, Los Angeles

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