[31] LaRouche wrote that he discussed Marxism in the CO camp, and while traveling home on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, also from Lynn, who converted him to Trotskyism.

[39][40][41][42] By 1973, the NCLC had over 600 members in 25 cities – including West Berlin and Stockholm – and produced what LaRouche's biographer, Dennis King, called the most literate of the far-left papers, New Solidarity.

Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns.

In 1984, he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there – the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität – and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement.

[60][61][62][63][64][65] LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them.

[66] One FBI memo, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC" (see image to left).

LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit".

LaRouche questioned spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife, because it was making him "politically impotent".

The Liberty Lobby soon pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference.

We're going to transform it through the export and development of high technology, we're going to have Manhattan Projects and NASA projects and every dirigiste, Federally-directed, scientific crazed program that we deem necessary.In December 1980, LaRouche and his followers started what came to be known as the "October Surprise" allegation,[116] namely that in October 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff conspired with the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis to delay the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, with the aim of helping Reagan win the 1980 United States presidential election against Jimmy Carter.

[117] The Washington Post wrote that LaRouche and his wife moved in August 1983 from New York to a 13-room Georgian mansion on a 250-acre section of the Woodburn Estate, near Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia.

He reportedly accused the Leesburg Garden Club of being a nest of Soviet sympathizers, and a local lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding after threatening phone calls and a death threat.

[122] In the same year, LaRouche raised enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at $330,000 each, in which he called Walter Mondale—the Democratic Party's presidential nominee—a Soviet agent of influence, triggering over 1,000 telephone complaints.

[124] In 1984, media reports stated that LaRouche and his aides had met Reagan administration officials, including Norman Bailey, senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr.

[129] According to King, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review was the first to report important details of the Iran–Contra affair, predicting that a major scandal was about to break months before mainstream media picked up on the story.

[132] LaRouche proposed the development of defensive beam technologies as a policy that was in the interest of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as the alternative to an arms race in offensive weapons and as a generator of spin-off economic benefits.

[134] Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported in his 2011 memoir that at a 2001 dinner in Russia with leading officials, he was told by General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the second highest-ranking officer in the Russian military, that LaRouche was the brains behind SDI.

The reports said an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service would lead to an indictment, and quoted Irwin Suall, the Anti-Defamation League's fact-finding director, who called LaRouche a "small-time Hitler".

[151] The trial judge called LaRouche's claim of a political vendetta "arrant nonsense", and said "the idea that this organization is a sufficient threat to anything that would warrant the government bringing a prosecution to silence them just defies human experience.

A motto of LaRouche's European Workers' Party is "Think like Beethoven"; movement offices typically include a piano and posters of German composers, and members are known for their choral singing at protest events and for using satirical lyrics tailored to their targets.

Renata Tebaldi and Piero Cappuccilli, who were running for the European Parliament on LaRouche's "Patriots for Italy" platform, attended Schiller Institute conferences as featured speakers.

He ran for president again in 1992 with James Bevel as his running mate, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations.

Entitled "Officials Call for LaRouche's Exoneration", its signatories included Arturo Frondizi, former president of Argentina; figures from the 1960s American civil rights movement such as Rosa Parks, Amelia Boynton Robinson (a leader of the Larouche-affiliated Schiller Institute), and James Bevel (a Larouche movement participant); former Minnesota Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy; Mervyn Dymally, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus; and artists such as classical vocalist William Warfield and violinist Norbert Brainin, former 1st Violin of the Amadeus Quartet.

A press release from his political action committee asserted: "Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouchePAC are the source of the campaign to expose the Obama ‘health care’ policy as modeled on that of Hitler in 1939.

Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, and anti-abortion advocates.

[218] An article in the Southern Poverty Law Center[219] website names him as "a fringe ideologue and conspiracy theorist whom Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates and an expert on the radical right calls "the man who brought us fascism wrapped in an American flag".

[5] The Washington Post obituary reports he was "often described as an extremist crank and fringe figure" and that he "built a worldwide following based on conspiracy theories, economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism".

[225] When the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused LaRouche of antisemitism in 1979, he filed a $26-million libel suit; the case failed when Justice Michael Dontzin of the New York Supreme Court ruled that it was fair comment and that the facts "reasonably give rise" to that description.

Marable argued that most of the community was not fooled and quoted the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for African American trade unionists, declaring that "LaRouche appeals to fear, hatred and ignorance.

He seeks to exploit and exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of Americans by offering an array of scapegoats and enemies: Jews, Zionists, international bankers, blacks, labor unions – much the way Hitler did in Germany.