Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
[4] On February 24, 2021, Helga Zepp-LaRouche denounced the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) and its treasurer, Barbara Boyd, for going "in a direction which I consider contrary to the central policies that my husband stood for.
She has taken legal action against LPAC to “immediately cease and desist, both now and in the future" from "using Mr. LaRouche’s name, likeness, and potentially other confusingly similar terms.
[8] 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.
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".
[15][16] In March 2010, LaRouche Youth leader Kesha Rogers won the Democratic congressional primary in Houston, Texas' 22nd District.
[17][18] 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.
[19] They spend time in what are called "Monge brigades," which emphasize readings of Vladimir Vernadsky, Alexander Hamilton, Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann.
[23] 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'.
LYM members confronted Institute executive director Yaron Brook at various universities across the US, heckling him and calling his policies "fascist".
[29][30] 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.
[35] 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.
"[36] 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.
"[39] 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".
[37] 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.
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.
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.
[38]Jeffrey Steinberg, a top security aide in the LaRouche movement,[42] responded by portraying Michael Winsted as an agent of the Washington Post who "briefly infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the LYM".
[44] 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.
[54] Following complaints from customers, Kroger, a national grocery store chain, received an injunction in 2009 barring LPAC activists from soliciting donations or distributing literature on their Ralphs and Food 4 Less properties in Southern California.
[55] Another grocery chain, Trader Joe's, also sought an injunction after customers allegedly complained that the LPAC members had called them "bitches" and "Hitler lovers".
[60] One Tea Party official complained that the "Obama as Hitler" posters "trivializes the travesties that occurred under the Fascist regime of Nazi Germany".
