Déjà vu
My dad would stop by the airport LaRouche booths and argue with the nutjobs. Not sure why he found it amusing. He knew they were nuts, but he did it anyway.
“It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation political aberration, a shooting-star buffoon. But when you tear him down to his studs, LaRouche was a white supremacist: a man high on his own supply who positioned himself as the sole savior of the planet; a man to whom no founding American ideal was sacred; a wealthy white man preying on both the insecurity and the credulity of others to enrich himself, while claiming to fight for the everyman; a bully who flipped on his loyalists whenever they ceased to be useful to him; a man who trafficked in myths of nonwhite savagery and conspiracies of absurdist proportions in which he was either the scapegoat or the savior. He was also a convicted felon running for office. He seemed so fringe to many that he could be laughed away or ignored altogether.
“Sound familiar?”
LaRouche was Trump before Trump.
LaRouche previewed Trump
“It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation political aberration, a shooting-star buffoon. But when you tear him down to his studs, LaRouche was a white supremacist: a man high on his own supply who positioned himself as the sole savior of the planet; a man to whom no founding American ideal was sacred; a wealthy white man preying on both the insecurity and the credulity of others to enrich himself, while claiming to fight for the everyman; a bully who flipped on his loyalists whenever they ceased to be useful to him; a man who trafficked in myths of nonwhite savagery and conspiracies of absurdist proportions in which he was either the scapegoat or the savior. He was also a convicted felon running for office. He seemed so fringe to many that he could be laughed away or ignored altogether.
“Sound familiar?”
LaRouche was Trump before Trump.
LaRouche previewed Trump
This reminds me of another cult figure, L. Ron Hubbard, who also was in some ways similar to Trump; for example, he was described, aptly I think, as displaying malignant narcissism. (There were lots of weird cults before QAnon: Moonies, Scientologists, etc.).
Decades ago a friend of mine was stopped on the street by a Scientologist who offered to “audit” him with an “E-meter.” My friend looked at the device and said that the circuitry was nonsense. The Scientologist replied that he could explain it to my friend, but he’d need to be a nuclear physicist to understand it. My friend was, in fact, a nuclear physicist and told the guy as much; the guy shut up, and my friend left it at that.
@Bob,
Yep. And the KKK. And the Branch Davidians. And the ammosexual NRA. And the John Birch Society. America has been a breeding ground for pernicious cults. The Trump cult is merely the most recent and arguably the largest and most consequential in my lifetime.
Credit where credit due: he did, like Joseph Smith prove that you can make up a religion out of air. I’ve read it was a bet, and he won
Worst scifi writer until that thrones game guy …