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Talk:Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement/Sources on AIDS and gays

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Primary sources

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1970s

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  • The British aristocracy is essentially homosexual. Jeremy Bentham's argument for the legalization of pederasty is avant-garde for its time only in respect of the fact of publishing such an argument in that form. Nowadays, the Anglican priesthood reports with pride the percentile of its ranks which has, in the jargon of these times, "come out of the closet." Take your sexual pleasures wherever convenience and impulse direct your actions at that moment, but save approximately one-hundreth of the sexual effort from your classmates, homosexual lover, or favorite beasts: to perform your conjugal duties of perpetuating the litters from which the oligarchical species culls its next generation of breeding stock.
  • I disassociate myself from a policy of persecuting the victims of a certain, dangerous variety of neurotic, over-domineering mothering. I mean those persons who have found themselves most unhappily conditioned by such rearing into what are termed today "homosexual impulses." A child of a household with a weak father, or of a broken home with no father present, is left almost defenseless against a certain type of domineering, neurotic-irrationalist, overtly sensually incestuous, mothering or surrogate mothering. Contrary to frauds more recently circulated within the psychiatric profession, the etiology of "homosexuality" is conclusively established.
    • "HOW TO DEFEAT LIBERALISM AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY," by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Oct. 1979.

1980s

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According to a variety of very authoritative sources, Henry A. Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot.

I will not tolerate any denial of civil rights to a person who happens to be homosexual. Ordinarily, a homosexual is like an ordinary person suffering the affliction of nasty boils; one recognizes the distinction between the person and the affliction.

The problem with Kissinger is not simply that he has a homosexual personality. The problem with Kissinger is like that of that flaming, fascistic faggot Roy M. Cohn, who is justly hated by most of the ordinary homosexuals of the United States, and a number of those from other nations. Similarly, Henry A. Kissinger is no ordinary, common, garden-variety of homosexual. His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil.

One does not need to catch Henry in flagrante in the Carlyle Hotel, or with a Roumanian waiter in Acapulco. Whatever he does in particular hotel-rooms, or after meetings with Roy M. Cohn at certain New York City restaurants, or by arrangement of certain California acquaintances, need not be reported here. Kissinger may wash (one hopes) and dress, before leaving a hotel-room. He does not, and cannot change his personality. [...] Take the case of Roy M. Cohn's physical assault on Barbara Dreyfuss, or Nancy Kissinger's, the "Newark Strangler's," homocidal behaviour more recently. Normal public figures do not strangle every person who says something they do not like. More lies have been told internationally about me, for example, than any living public figure of the past ten years; I have never had an impulse to strike a journalist for such reason, nor, I am more or less certain, does President Ronald Reagan, or any other psychologically normal or reasonably normal person in public life. We say of such public attacks, "It goes with the territory." We have more important issues with which to concern ourselves. Not so in the case of narcissistic, anal sado-masochists such as a Kissinger or Cohn. [...] Kissinger is the kind of homosexual personality who ordinarily makes a potential professional assassin, a gangland thug for hire. Next time you see him on the television tube, especially when he is registering indignation, think the words, "Bugsy Kissinger," and watch how well those words fit the image on the TV screen. [...] There are, unfortunately, too many persons who suffer the same mental disease as Kissinger and Cohn. One pities them; no human being, however wretched, should have to continue suffering the condition in which a Kissinger and Cohn exist; the problem is that very foolish people, world-wide, have given power to such homocidal types.

To understand the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is, what Roy Cohn is, think back to the Emperor Nero and his court. Think of Studio 54, then of Nero's court, and then of Studio 54 again. Think of Roy Cohn's parties (faithfully reported in exaggerated, name-dropping detail, in the New York Daily News). Think of Nero, and then of Kissinger, and then of Nero, and then of Roy M. Cohn. That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is.

That kind of faggotry destroyed Rome. Will you permit it also to destroy the United States?

— "KISSINGER, THE POLITICS OF FAGGOTRY" By Lyndon H. Larouche, Jr. August 3, 1982

We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word. Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay", they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw! The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users. There are 20 million cocaine sniffers in the United States, at least. Of course it does affect their mind; it affects the way they vote!

What was the problem? The problem was the cultural paradigm shift. If someone comes up and says, "Yeah, but you can't interfere with the civil rights of an AIDS victim" — what the devil is this? You can't interfere with an AIDS victim killing hundreds of people, by spreading the disease to hundreds of people, which will kill them, during the period before he himself dies? So therefore, should we allow people with guns to go out and shoot people as they choose? Isn't that a matter of the civil rights of gun carriers? Or, if you've got an ax — if you can't aim too well, and just have an ax or a broad sword — shouldn't we allow people with broad swords and axes to go out and kill people indiscriminately as they choose, as a matter of their civil rights?

Where did this nonsense come from? Oh, we don't want to offend the gays! Gays are sensitive to their civil rights; this will lead to discrimination against gays!

They're already beating up gays with baseball bats around the country! Children are going to playgrounds, they go in with baseball bats, and they find one of these gays there, pederasts, trying to recruit children, and they take their baseball bats and they beat them up pretty bad. They'll kill one sooner or later. In Chicago, they're beating up gays that are hanging around certain schools, pederasts; children go out with baseball bats and beat them up-which is perfectly moral; they have the civil right to do that! It's a matter of children's civil rights!

— Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The End of the Age of Aquarius?" EIR (Executive Intelligence Review), January 10, 1986, p. 40.
  • ... as a category, gays and lesbians do not represent a valid voting constituency, and neither do prostitutes, drug pushers, child molesters, warlocks, witches, pornographers, or others who are morally equivalent.
    • "End Harold Washington's Consistently Disgusting Career", Illinois Tribunal, July 7, 1986, editorial page

...the refusal of governments to take credible action to stop the wildfire spread of the hideously fatal infection, is prompting the greatest rate of violence-tending qualities of fear among teenagers... The lynchers themselves are a small portion of the total population of the social strata from which they are drawn, but see themselves as ad hoc representatives of those strata and the fears and objectives of those strata. They are a special variety of political revolutionary, and express, spontaneously, the conspiratorial and other ethical characteristics of political revolutionaries ...

The impact of this pattern of developments on Britain's youth gangs of violence-prone football fans is predictable. One can read their general line of thinking in advance. Since the idea of touching the person of the carrier is abhorrent, stones and the nadiest approximation of a collection of baseball bats, come to mind. Certain individuals, of known haunts, first suggest themselves as easy targets...

The point is fast approaching, that increasing portions of these populations will focus upon the fact, that a dead AIDS carrier ceases to be a carrier. If governments were to proceed with repeated mass-screenings of the population, and isolation of carriers, the likelihood of a teenager lynch-mob phenomenon would be small. If not, then other ways of reducing the number of carriers will become increasingly popular.

In that case, the lynch-mobs might be seen by later generations’ historians, as the only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction.

— Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Teenage Gangs’ Lynchings of Gays is Foreseen Soon", New Solidarity, February 9, 1987, p. 8.
  • The clinical essence of the homosexual pathology, is destructive rage, a Nietzschean, dionysiac quality of rage. In the pre-1970s psychiatric literature, this was frankly and extensively documented. The pleasure of the homosexual deed is the pleasure of doing evil, in that clinical sense. It is not the desire for the act in itself, but the pleasure of the destructive character of the act as an affirmation of the diabolical, which is controlling. This is a form of the mens rea; it is an evilly grimacing Eros with horns and hooves, an Osiris, a Siva, a Dionysos. [...] In brief, it is the dionysiac quality of defect in the psychopathology of the homosexual, which is the source of his attractions to the pleasure of the act of betrayal. It is this flaw, more or less developed, which renders the homosexual intrinsically a security risk in corresponding degree, not merely because he is potentially blackmailable, but merely because he is a victim of a homosexual's psychopathology. To be a homosexual, is a terrible affliction; if we cared for the human rights of such persons, we should direct our efforts to curing them of that which makes them so unpleasantly distinctive.
  • Toleration of lesbianism, pederasty, and other forms of so-called "homosexuality," is characteristic of those pagan cults which St. John associates with "The Whore of Babylon" (Siva, Ishtar, Athtar, Astarte, Isis, Cybele, Mithra, et al.). This series of cults is collectively, the forms of satanism. Witchcraft, for example, is a form of satanic Ishtar-worship, or a derivative, often associated with either prostitution or militant lesbianism.
    • POLICY ON DEFENSE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, (The Law on Sodomy, For Example) by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., April 20, 1987, in NEW FEDERALIST, June 19, 1987.

Q. And did he ever get involved in the personal details of the lives of the members of the organization? A. Yes. Q. And could you describe how he did that and for what purpose? A. Well, the usual circumstance was one in which an individual member had expressed uncertainty about the complete accuracy of whatever Mr. LaRouche said. I mean, you had to believe and you had to believe a hundred ten percent in everything that Mr. LaRouche said. If someone expressed some doubt and they were important enough, Mr. LaRouche would want to know what was going on in their personal life and would make a very direct intervention into that person's personal life, very commonly bring them to his home and peppering them with some of the epithets that you have seen here in this memo which I shudder to read to the jury -- but in any event, the -- I mean, we know what we're talking about -- until that person either said, "I've had it. Good-bye,· and quit the organization or else recognized the error of his ways and saw the wisdom of, you know, Mr. LaRouche and once again got back on track. So he was very, very interested in the intimate personal details of his members' lives. Q. And did he ridicule people that didn't agree with him? 5-32 A. Yes. Q. And could you give us examples of how he did that? A. He would -- well, his favorite example was to raise questions about whether or ,not people's sexual lives were in accord with what he thought was the COrrect sexual life. He would accuse them of homosexuality. He would accuse them of bed hopping, things of this nature. He would accuse them of pederasty. That became actually increasingly not so much for the membership but for his other enemies. That became increasingly an association in his mind that was an appropriate epithet. Q. Now-- A. So he would use these kinds of terms to describe people in the organization and without who disagreed with him. Q. Not to be vulgar, but pederasty means? A. Child molestation.

— US v Frankhauser, testimony of Charles Tate, November 4, 1987

1990s

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I am happy to see that the California Medical Assn. has come out in favor of public health measures to slow the spread of HIV. In doing so, they are endorsing precisely what they denounced in 1986, when they came out against Proposition 64, which was put on the ballot by supporters of Lyndon LaRouche. I hope that CMA members have had the opportunity to reflect on how many Californians were needlessly infected with HIV during that eight-year period, because no effort was made to locate and educate asymptomatic carriers.

— DANIEL PLATT, Los Angeles "Reporting HIV Cases", LTE Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Mar 20, 1995. pg. 4

We're {all} victims of racism! In one form--it's not that we are races; we're {not} different races: there's only one human race. But we are victims of racist attacks.

So, if we defend our brothers and sisters who are African-Americans against the racism which is coming through Keeney and through his employers of the Democratic National Committee--if we {join} to say that's going to be cleaned up, then we are defending Hispanic-Americans and their rights, Asian-Americans and their rights, labor and its rights, senior citizens and their rights. If we {don't} defend African-Americans against this racism, we'll all go down together, of our divisibility. Eh?

That's the issue. So, what we're going to do, is we're going to organize to break the barriers. The way you deal with the problems of these fools--the foolish people in Orange County, in the leadership--is you impress them with power. The way to impress them with power, is to build these constituencies as a unified constituency.

Don't let them play one against the other. Like this question of so-called homosexuality. Look, take the case of AIDS, which I've been attacked for by all kinds of crazy people. I proposed that we mobilize $40 billion from the Federal government--that's back in the middle of the 1980s--to combat a danger, an epidemic disease of a new type, which implicitly threatens all mankind, which has--it's also in the United States, and it's in Africa: In Africa, because of environmental conditions and other tropical-disease conditions, the rate of spread of AIDS is now that most of the population of black Africa is threatened by virtual extinction--not total extinction, but near-extinction.

We have a little better conditions in the United States. Some people get drugs which they can't afford in Africa, because Al Gore won't let them, among other reasons. But that we're all victims of it. Who {cares} about whether the guy's a homosexual? It's irrelevant! It's a human being who is suffering from a disease, who needs help and protection--in the interests of the General Welfare. Who wants to make a category of "homosexuals"? I don't believe in it; it's not a legitimate category. It's just {people,} people who are suffering and dying.

Magic Johnson, the famous athlete, is fortunate enough, with his Starbuck enterprises, as he described the situation recently in Baltimore, that he can get and afford the regular treatment, the cocktail he requires, which so far has kept him functioning. How many African-Americans, for example, and others, can afford that cocktail, which might keep them alive? Well, Al Gore says Africans shouldn't get that; they have to pay full price. What do you mean, asking an {African,} whose income is like $100 a year, to pay for these drugs to keep them alive, to keep their families from being wiped out? But Al Gore says the prices have to stay up to protect the interests of Wall Street!

That's the problem. It's a way of thinking. You have to realize that what is done to one of us, is done to all of us. You can't say, "Well, the African-Americans are being victimized; that's not our problem." You can't say, "The AIDS victims are being victimized; that's not our problem: We don't have AIDS," or "We're not homosexuals," or something.

— LaRouche Webcast LA Town Meeting Questions & Answers] Dec. 11, 1999 [1]

2000s

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Freeman: I'll take a question from the audience here.

Victoria Overing: Someone out organizing had said that you think homosexuality is genetic. In relation to this, and also like mental disability, and mental disorders, and also in general, what is your opinion on genetics versus like effects of society? And where do you kind of drawn the line?

LaRouche: Well, that's a long question, but it certainly is not genetic. There's no indication of any genetic determination. There could be physiological cases, which would confuse, shall we say, the biological sense of sexuality. But that is not the phenomenon that we see in general, in dealing with homosexuality, in society today. It's entirely a—I wouldn't say it's cultural; that's too crude a term. Largely, homosexuality was induced by bad, evil, in a sense, psychologists.

There was a determination, which was made as part of the countercultural operation, to try to find ways to promote strange kinds of sexuality, which had been fringe in society, and promote them on a large scale. For example, the production of homosexuals by the divinity and theological schools in Berkeley, California, which is one of the great engineering places where they mass-produced homosexuals, from divinity students. It was a deliberate project, an experiment. And, that's why you had this concentration on the West Coast.

So, what they did is, they operated on factors. For example, Freud and others—Freud, who also had a homosexual relationship with one of his fellows, was one of the people who practiced in this area of therapy for homosexuals. You had others who also practiced that. And, from this work, which was centered in the London Tavistock Clinic, where Freud spent the last years of his life, there was a lot of study of homosexuals, who would come to psychiatrists and say, "I've got this problem. What do I do about it?" Homosexuality, "how do I get rid of it? How do I cure myself, psychologically, of homosexuality?" And, from this, in the London Tavistock Clinic and similar institutions, there was a program to say, "How could we synthesize, reverse the process, and how could we use the experience of study of homosexual case-histories, to reproduce them?" with people at a suggestible age of adolescence, or young adulthood.

Generally, homosexuality seems to occur largely in young people, in the period of the transition from—either molesting young children, for example, will do it, will cause problems; sexual molestation of children is a real problem, and it produces all kinds of side-effects. But, generally, it seems to come where there's an attachment, when the sexual activity emerges in early adolescence; but an attachment, or what is called a "cathexis" to homosexuality may be induced. And, if it's accepted by the person who's "cathexized," shall we say, they will tend to continue, throughout life.

So, from everything we know, homosexuality is not genetic. There may be marginal cases, in which the biological element is there. But it's not intrinsically genetic, and it's not a commonplace. It's actually functional.

But why and how it occurs, we don't know, entirely. There's much literature on the subject. I've studied some of the stuff, and it's plausible, but it doesn't really answer the question for me. So, I'm just left with the only answer I have—it's functional. And the way I deal with it, politically, is not on a personal level, in dealing with people who are or are not homosexuals, is, I deal with it: "Well, they're a person." And I just deal with them as people. And hope for the best. I don't try to cure, or whatnot. I'm a bit too busy with other things—but I know it's functional. And, therefore, I just take that into account, and say, "There are a lot of questions I can't answer; so I can't answer them, so I don't answer them."

— Dialogue With

Lyndon LaRouche Following Keynote SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE 'Hoover II' Has Happened! The Global Financial Crash of 2002 Labor Day Weekend August 31, 2002 [2], partially quoted in Lyndon LaRouche: Fascism Restyled for the New Millennium

by Helen Gilbert www.RedLetterPress.org [3]

Liebman was a bullied, fearful child, a victimized Jew who became a Communist and a homosexual, and a Zionist in the camp of the Jabotinskyites who formed the Israeli right. The Nazis killed his European relatives, and he went to work as a strategist and publicist for the managers of fascism. His autobiography laments that the right-wing movement he built became bigoted!

Liebman led a strange crew around Buckley's magazine National Review, creating the Young Americans for Freedom and the whole Conservative movement of the 1960s. Younger colleagues have related their shock and puzzlement over discovering that so many of the rightist leaders were homosexuals—or as one old timer recently put it, "self-hating, gay-bashing gays"—led by Liebman.

— This article appears in the April 22, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

"The Christian Coalition: The Nature of the Beast"

by Anton Chaitkin [4]

The Ford Foundation and its spinoffs in the "alternate philanthropy" movement paid for a new sexual politics. Homosexuality was promoted as a primary identity, to trump the self-concept of a political person passionate about mankind's betterment. [...] Stern Fund executive director David Hunter had worked at Ford Foundation pioneering their ghetto counterinsurgency projects. Hunter moved his protégé, flour-heir George Pillsbury, to organize the "Alternative Philanthropy" initiative. They created the Funding Exchange and many Lesbian/Gay-theme money channels for financier paradigm-bending projects; these comprise most of the funds eventually backing Berlet's organization PRA.

— This article appears in the June 16, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Chip Berlet and the Ford Zoo

by Anton Chaitkin [5]

LaRouche directed that the “Case of Baltimore” be understood and shown, according to the dynamic, non-reductionist principles he set out in his “Vernadsky and Dirichlet’s Principle” article (EIR, June 3, 2005); that is, living processes must be treated as Riemannian and dynamic, rather that Cartesian and mechanistic.

LaRouche has stressed this in key interventions over the past 35 years. In 1975, [LaRouche] convened a task force to study the potential for a “biological holocaust” to result, if economic breakdown were allowed to occur from the policy-implementation of globalization, so-called free trade, and deindustrialization. By the mid-1980s, aspects of just this danger became evident: HIV-AIDS outbreaks were identified, and spreading. During the same decade came the bovine spongiform encephalopathy/vCJD outbreak. Today’s potential impact of a virulent avian flu pandemic, is likewise part of the dynamics of economic breakdown.

This has been shown in many specific sitations. For example, for HIV-AIDS, in 1985, in the town of Belle Glade, near the Florida Everglades, the work of Dr. Mark Whiteside showed the interaction disease threat from poverty, HIV infection, tuberculosis, and lack of public health measures to control mosquitoes, and other vectors.

Today’s holocaust situation of Africa is the continent-wide example of the dynamics of poverty-induced collapse,lack of infrastructure, and disease. From the 1970s, LaRouche warned that conditions were being created for a deadly pandemic to arise — which stormed out of Africa as incurable HIV-AIDS.

Now, looking at conditions in Baltimore, LaRouche has issued a similar warning, noting, “That approach is not only relevant to special cases, such as tropical disease and comparable regions in Africa. It is a matter to be a case of threat whose spread is much to be feared under the conditions created by the influence of current HMO practice in the U.S.A. today. It is a deadly potential in any case in which a specific, simply defined disease, rather than a patient, is what is authorized, categorically, for treatment.”

In an interactive complex of active disease and related conditions which occupies a well-defined, but mobile populated area, LaRouche insists, one cannot simply take co-factors into account, using a Cartesian method of interacting “hard balls”; rather, one must use a dynamic, Riemannian analysis. (See box.)

Baltimore is not an aberration, but highly typical of formerly industrial cities in the United States. Its process of disease, developing in a non-linear way through interacting vectors of poverty, is the same kind of process as is now causing a genocide in Africa.

— "Deindustrialization Creates ‘Death Zones’". by EIR Economics Staff, January 6, 2006

The 1990s were the period of Al Gore’s treasonous Vice Presidency. Gore took advantage of this opportunity to push the same radical Malthusian policies he shared with Prince Philip. As Maurice Strong acknowledged, “On these issues [of environmentalism] they are very much soul mates. [Their relationship is] one of mutual regard and respect. I would say its as close as it could be with personalities of that kind.” Gore certainly demonstrated his desire to wipe out as much of humanity as possible; as when South African President Thabo Mbeki, to counter the decimating AIDS epidemic, announced that South Africa would produce generic versions of whatever AIDS and HIV medicines were available. Gore threatened Mbeki in person, that if Africans did not buy the impossibly expensive patented medications, South Africa would suffer the consequences. It was also Al Gore who authorized

the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which supplied that nation with 90% of its medicine, without any justification other than unsubstantiated claims that the plant was controlled by al-Qaeda. Protecting the environment was simply another means for Gore to pursue his schemes for massive population reduction, all in the tradition of Julian Huxley, Fairfield Osborn, and the white supremacist families of the British Empire.

— "The New Environmentalist Eugenics: Al Gore’s Green Genocide" by Rob Ainsworth, The Gore Dossier EIR March 30, 2007, p. 46

Secondary sources

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1970s

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  • The party predicts international disaster by 1980 because of economic policy and subsequent mass starvation and diseases in depressed regions which LaRouche says will lead to viruses, bacteria, and insects cannibalizing the earth's biosphere, "possibly rendering the human race itself virtually extinct within about 15 years."
    • "Labor candidates explain platform" By ANDY DABILIS" THE SUNDAY SUN. LOWELL, MASS., MAY 30, 1976 B5
  • Labor also gets the party's attention. The United Auto Workers is claiming that the NCLC harassed UAW members by calling their homes 30 or 40 times a day and accusing relatives of homosexuality.
    • Business Week. "The U.S. Labor Party's radical crusade". October 2, 1978.


  • The party persistently harasses journalists and publiaitons it regards as unfriendly. One Detroit freelance reporter who wrote of an investigation of the group found the next week that people living on his block had been sent a leaflet invting them to a "Gay Coming Out Party" at his house.
    • Howard Blum and Paul Montgomery, "U.S. Labor Party: Cult Surrounded by Controversy," New York Times, October 7, 1979,

1983

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The Democratic primary election Tuesday has an added dimension because of the presence, in 27 of the 40 legislative races, of candidates running under the slogan Beam Technology: Stop War, End Depression.

These candidates are led by Elliot Greenspan of Haworth, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, the former head of the United States Labor Party and leader of the National Democratic Policy Committee.

Mr. Greenspan, who is running for a Democratic State Senate nomination in the 38th Legislative District in Bergen County, said that the aim of the effort was to build a base within the party among thinking Democrats.

The Beam Technology that Democrats call for is a crash program to develop laser and particle beam technologies for a new weapons system designed to protect the country against attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

They also blame liberals in the party for policies they say encourage drugs and sex in the schools, and charge that the party is being held hostage by the 'Gay Alliance.'

— " POLITICS; 'GAG' ISSUE IS RAISED ON DUMPING PROJECT" By JOSEPH F.SULLIVAN, New York Times June 5, 1983

1985

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SUSAN DIRECTOR, 43, political consultant, [..]
Political experience: Candidate for U.S. Congress, 1974 and 1976; candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., 1978; candidate for Houston City Council District F, 1983; candidate for chairman, Harris County Democratic Party, 1984.
Education: BA, Oakland University, 1960.
Background: Native of Harrisburg, Pa.; member, National Democratic Policy Committee (not affiliated with the Democratic Party), Fusion Energy Foundation, Schiller Institute; since 1972, an associate of economist Lyndon LaRouche.
Family: Husband, Bruce; [..]
Q: The City Council has adopted a five-year program for capital improvements such as streets, parks, libraries, drainage projects and other improvements. Do you believe the city is spending enough to improve mobility and build necessary infrastructure improvements? If not, how would you pay for additional improvements?
DIRECTOR: Houston has an AIDS epidemic. At national doubling rates of six months, there will be no Americans left by 1993! AIDS originated in Africa in sub-human conditions created by enforced policies of the International Monetary Fund. We need crash construction of water and sewage treatment facilities, eradication of vermin and closure of culverts, enforcement of sanitary inspection. Costs must be covered by federal funding and increased local revenues from expanding manufacturing. The city also needs many more libraries and parks.
  • MAYOR; Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Oct 27, 1985. pg. 2

Keeping up with the growth is the main problem facing the school board, five of the seven candidates say. Two candidates who are members of Lyndon LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee say preventing the spread of AIDS is the top issue.

— "TOP ISSUE IN ELGIN SCHOOLS IS GROWTH."; Andrew Bagnato. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Oct 31, 1985. pg. 2

In Elgin Unit District 46, one of the few growing districts in the state, the three successful candidates ran on a platform supporting new schools and the higher taxes necessary to pay for them. [..]

Defeated in the Elgin election were two candidates running on the ultraconservative platform of Lyndon LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee, Scott Harper and Joseph Baruch.

This is the second time LaRouche candidates have run in suburban elections and the second time they have been defeated. They ran on a platform of preventing children with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) from attending school.

— "3 SCHOOL BOARDS FULL OF NEW FACES, HOPES"; Jean Latz Griffin and Michael Arndt. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Nov 7, 1985. pg. 8

Carriers of the AIDS virus would be subject to state quarantine under a proposed 1986 ballot initiative that was cleared for circulation Tuesday by Secretary of State March Fong Eu.

She said proponents Khushro Ghandhi, an official of Lyndon LaRouche's Democratic Policy Committee (no connection to the Democratic Party), and Bruce Lutz of Los Angeles must submit 393,385 valid petition signatures by April 18 to qualify the measure for the November, 1986, ballot.

Ghandhi has said the proposed law would authorize the state to identify carriers of the AIDS virus and bar them from jobs in food services, teaching or any work involving physical contact with the public. However, the attorney general's summary of the proposed initiative goes further, stating that AIDS carriers would be subject to "quarantine and isolation statutes and regulations."

Quarantine enforcement is at the discretion of the state health director and can range from keeping children away from school to restricting people to their homes.

State health officials contend that such a law is unnecessary because they already have all the authority they need to control acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which breaks down the body's resistance to disease. [...]

Ghandhi, West Coast coordinator for the conservative LaRouche party, has accused state health officials of permitting AIDS to be underreported. He also has charged them with inaction against AIDS because of pressure from "a powerful gay lobby" and the Reagan Administration.

— "Proposal for Ballot Would Subject AIDS Carriers to Quarantine" Los Angeles Times . Los Angeles, Calif.: Dec 25, 1985. pg. 32

1986 1st half

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In the glare of publicity, the LaRouche candidates have wavered between the idealistic and the surreal.

They list three planks in the Illinois campaign: the repeal of the Gramm- Rudman federal budget-balancing act; widespread testing for AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome; and an end to what they say is the illegal laundering of drug dealer's money by banks.

The subjects--the effect of budget cuts on the poor, the epidemic of AIDS, the problem of drugs in American society--are so much on the minds of the public that the "LaRouchies" would seem to be sitting on the pulse of middle America.

But it is when they describe some of their means for answering those problems that jaws start to drop.

Hart, at a Washington press conference on Friday, bristled at a demand for an explanation of her remarks that "tanks would rumble down State Street" in the war on drugs.

"Only a poet would understand that," she said. "I'm going to use the military with the help of the federal government to wipe out drugs. The use of tanks was symbolic of a declaration of war on drugs."

Hart later said that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was part of an international "drug mafia."

Asked if she believed Jewish persons were behind the drug traffic, she replied: "That's totally nonsense. I don't consider Henry Kissinger a Jew. I consider Henry Kissinger a homosexual."

At a Chicago press conference, LaRouche spokesman Sheila Jones said the party would use the powers of the Illinois secretary of state to revoke the licenses of banks suspected of laundering drug money, and use the "eminent domain" authority of the lieutenant governor to order AIDS testing for all state residents. State officials say those offices simply do not have those kinds of powers.

— "'LAROUCHIES' FORCE STATE TO TAKE NOTICE;" R Bruce Dold and Wes Smith Ray Gibson and Kurt Greenbaum contributed to this report. Chicago Tribune Chicago, Ill.: Mar 23, 1986. pg.
  • Meanwhile, a top LaRouche adviser was in Houston Tuesday talking about the same platform that dominated the Illinois race: mandatory testing nationwide for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and quarantine of those who have AIDS. Dr. John Grauerholz, a medical adviser to LaRouche, said leaders in the fight against AIDS have rejected - for political and economic reasons - suggestions that the virus is spread by biting insects, including mosquitoes.
    • "Democrats make plans to keep LaRouche followers in shadows;" NENE FOXHALL, Houston Chronicle Political Writer. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). Houston, Tex.: Mar 26, 1986. pg. 21
  • Despite the exotic material his followers hand out free at airports, such as posters saying, "Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry," not many people seem aware.
    • "LaRouche Panics the Democratic Party" Dinesh D'Souza. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Mar 30, 1986. pg. 3

In recent speeches and articles, Mr. LaRouche urges a return to traditional moral values, warns of a Soviet military buildup, assails drug trafficking and expresses a deep confidence in the progress of science and technology. His political group has placed a particular focus on the outbreak of AIDS, urging a program of mandatory mass testing and the quarantining of those who suffer from the acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

In the interview, Mr. LaRouche said such issues as AIDS, crime and economic distress were attracting increasing numbers of blue-collar workers, farmers and minorities to him. [..]

In 1982, Henry and Nancy Kissinger were in Newark International Airport when a LaRouche supporter approached the couple and began asking questions, including one that a judge later described as offensive. Mr. LaRouche acknowledged that his supporter asked Mr. Kissinger: Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel? Mr. LaRouche added that he considered it an appropriate question.

— "LAROUCHE SAVORS FAME THAT MAY RUIN HIM" The following article is based on reporting by Robin Toner and Joel Brinkley and was written by Miss Toner, Special to The New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 4, 1986. pg. A.1

Anyway, the real point, [Mel] Klenetsky said, is that this is all related, and that there is much, much more -- like the way the "international clique of financiers" and its allies in the International Monetary Fund and State Department always crack down with austerity programs on countries that try to free themselves of dope dependence.

They also, he says, have everything to do with the spread of the AIDS virus through central Africa. Quarantining all AIDS victims is one LaRouche idea that has received some press notice in recent days -- primarily because it can be summed up in a quick phrase -- but his devotees feel the context of it has not gotten adequate attention.

"Twenty to 30 million out of 100 million people in central Africa have AIDS," Klenetsky said. "It is spreading because of impoverished economic conditions, and that is a direct result of IMF policies that have destroyed people's means of resisting the disease."

That's important, he says, because LaRouche believes the evidence is growing that the AIDS virus can infect anyone -- not just drug- users or homosexuals. To get ready, Klenetsky said, there must be universal testing and mandatory quarantining of victims in places like "old tuberculosis sanitoriums."

For this year's political campaigns -- in which a few hundred LaRouche followers will run for various offices around the country - - AIDS and drugs will be major themes, somewhat eclipsing the old standbys: laser beams, "star wars," fusion energy and the Rockefeller family's assorted crimes.

— "LOOKING AT THE WORLD AS LYNDON LAROUCHE SEES IT; HIS ENEMIES LIST AN ECLECTIC MIX" Thomas Oliphant, Globe Staff. Boston Globe Boston, Mass.: Apr 6, 1986. pg. 24
  • Later, LaRouche married Helga Zepp, another group member whom he had first met in West Germany. Even so, the organization sunk to ever-darker paranoid depths. Roy Palmer says LaRouche began to purge members and put others in "sick bays" where leaders "psychoanalyzed" them "to find out what your mother did to you when you were three years old." There were "ego stripping" sessions where members were forced to reveal intimate details of their lives. LaRouche -- defectors say -- would accuse indecisive people of being homosexual or sexually impotent, and others were pressured to divorce spouses who were not members of the group.
    • Newsweek. April 7, 1986.
  • Lyndon LaRouche, holding one of the biggest news conferences of his no-longer-obscure political career, today characterized his enemies as drug pushers, homosexuals, insane and pro-Soviet.
    • "LaRouche Brands Enemies as Drug Pushers, Insane; Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles, Calif.: Apr 9, 1986. pg. 2
  • LaRouche, who characterized his enemies as drug pushers, homosexuals, insane and pro-Soviet, said he was unable to elaborate on the identity of the group opposing his political movement in Nebraska and Iowa.
    • "LaRouche: Nebraska, Iowa Giving Me Little Support;" David C. Beeder. Omaha World - Herald. Omaha, Neb.: Apr 10, 1986. pg. 1

The Leesburg Garden Club, according to Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., is a "nest of Soviet fellow travellers," and its members are "clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves."

At first Leesburg residents laughed. But if they laugh now, they look over their shoulders first. One merchant faces a $2-million libel and slander suit filed by a LaRouche organization, and a lawyer is in hiding and says her life has been threatened. LaRouche calls her a lesbian "tied to international terrorism." [...]

Few residents have been moved by his tales that the Queen is a drug pusher, that the International Monetary Fund is engineering the collapse of the United States, that their neighbors are Communists, terrorists or homosexuals, or that LaRouche is all that stands between the human race and Armageddon.

— Man who calls Queen a pusher worries town;" By MATTHEW WALD. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Apr 14, 1986. pg. A.1.FRO
  • LEBANON, Ore. (AP) - Supporters of extremist politician Lyndon LaRouche traveled from Seattle to plead with the Lebanon School District to change its policy that could allow a student with AIDS to attend school.
    • LAROUCHE BACKER URGES BAN ON AIDS VICTIMS; Seattle Times. Seattle, Wash.: Apr 16, 1986. pg. H.1

According to a news release from PANIC, the proposed statute would give the state Department of Health Services "the power and obligation to apply measures of quarantine as they deem necessary to halt the spread of the disease."

The actual wording of the initiative is somewhat stronger. It says that it would provide that victims and carriers of of the disease "are subject to quarantine and isolation statutes and regulations."

Hollis said that the term "quarantine" did not necessarily mean "strict isolation."

"We're not trying to re-invent the wheel here," he said. "AIDS is a dangerous communicable disease, just like plague and typhus, and should be on a list of such diseases.

"It is a public health issue."

— LaRouche is linked to petition, Initiative proposal would quarantine AIDS patients;" Don Davis. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: May 23, 1986. pg. A.3

Many of the persons who signed the petitions were not aware of the link between the initiative and the LaRouche group. However, a number of letters and telephone calls protesting harassment by the signature gatherers came in to the secretary of state's office, officials said.

According to one complaint, a youth yelled at a Catholic priest in Camarillo, accusing him of being a homosexual, when the priest would not sign the petition. In Huntington Beach, a woman coming from a Post Office was accosted for her signature and when she refused to sign, the petition pusher yelled, "You are going to get AIDS!" according to her letter to the secretary.

George E. Hollis of San Diego, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to Congress from the 45th District, dismissed reports of wrongdoing on the part of any LaRouche supporters. [...] According to a news release from PANIC, the proposed statute would give the state Department of Health Services "the power and obligation to apply measures of quarantine as they deem necessary to halt the spread of the disease."

The actual wording of the initiative is somewhat stronger. It says that it would provide that victims and carriers of of the disease "are subject to quarantine and isolation statutes and regulations."

Hollis said that the term "quarantine" did not necessarily mean "strict isolation."

"We're not trying to re-invent the wheel here," he said. "AIDS is a dangerous communicable disease, just like plague and typhus, and should be on a list of such diseases.

"It is a public health issue."

— "LaRouche is linked to petition, Initiative proposal would quarantine AIDS patients;" Don Davis. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: May 23, 1986. pg. A.3


Lyndon LaRouche's organization has endorsed William F. Rosa, the only opponent so far to Rep. Barney Frank's bid for a fourth term in Congress.

David Peterson, a spokesman for LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee, disclosed the endorsement in an interview yesterday. Rosa, a former postal worker who - like Frank - is a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the Fourth Congressional District, said he accepted LaRouche's backing.

Rosa said he has "a meeting of the minds" with some people in the NDPC, even though he does not agree with parts of the group's platform, including its support for the colonization of Mars. Frank said he was not surprised that LaRouche's group had endorsed Rosa. [...] Rosa said he is not a member of the LaRouche group, two of whose members shocked the Illinois political establishment in March by winning statewide Democratic primaries.

He said he agrees with "about half" of their stands, including that homosexuals are "an abomination," support for nuclear power and the Strategic Defense Initiative, and rejection of the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing bill.

— "LaRouche backs Barney Frank challenger William F. Rosa says he agrees with half group's stands" ELIZABETH S. SCHWARTZ Journal-Bulletin Reporter/Intern. Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: Jun 7, 1986. pg. A-05

Just how sweeping the provisions would be is open to interpretation. The attorney general is preparing a detailed legal analysis, but LaRouche spokesman Brian Lantz said Tuesday that the initiative was written to flatly bar suspected AIDS carriers from attending or teaching school or working in restaurants.

Opponents said the pressure will be great on local health directors to impose quarantines, and by some readings of the initiative such drastic steps could be required under a clause that says officials "shall" take all actions available. [,,,]

Secretary of State March Fong Eu in May warned the initiative's two sponsors, Khushro Ghandi and Bruce Lutz, to stop "harassing" petition signers and making false claims in gathering signatures. Eu said she had received numerous complaints about the LaRouche organization's tactics.

— "LaRouche Backers Qualify AIDS Measure for Fall Vote" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 25, 1986. pg. 1

LaRouche backers say the intent of the initiative is to stop the spread of an epidemic that they describe as "worse than the Black Death" that devastated 14th-Century Europe and Asia, "a disease more deadly to mankind than a full-scale thermonuclear war." Moreover, LaRouche followers say AIDS is "the leading political issue" of the times.

Secretary of State March Fong Eu in May warned the initiative's two sponsors, Khushro Ghandi and Bruce Lutz, to stop "harassing" petition signers and making false claims in gathering signatures. Eu said she had received numerous complaints about the LaRouche organization's tactics.

— "LaRouche Backers Qualify AIDS Measure for Fall Vote" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 25, 1986. pg. 1


The opponents' main objection to the initiative is that it would define AIDS as an infectious disease -- like measles or tuberculosis -- and could open up AIDS victims or carriers to possible quarantine.

"There's no comparison with AIDS and communicable diseases like measles and scarlet fever," said Jean O'Leary, director of the National Gay Rights Advocates organization. "(AIDS is) not transmitted by air ... But the onus is now on us to try to prove this man (LaRouche) is crazy."

Lantz said he would not quarrel with opponents' characterization that the initiative mandates a "quarantine" in that it restricts AIDS victims' freedom to some extent.

"Quarantine is something that should be seriously considered," Lantz said.

He added, "We want to err on the side of caution."

Lantz, whose group goes by the acronym PANIC (Prevent Aids Now Action Committee), accused liberal politicians of "spreading hysteria" about the disease.

"They attempt to treat AIDS as some sort of civil rights issue rather than a health issue," he said.

Lantz said the LaRouche organization and other supporters of the AIDS initiative has "the wherewithal to do whatever is necessary" to pass it in November.[...] The anti-LaRouche effort got an immediate endorsement from the Los Angeles City Council, which unanimously voted 13-0 to oppose the ballot measure and hold public meetings to inform the public of its implications.

Mayor Tom Bradley's representatives also released a letter sent yesterday to Deukmejian, asking the governor to participate in "a joint campaign" to help defeat the controversial initiative. Bradley, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, is opposing the Republican governor on the November ballot.

"Regardless of whether you or I are elected governor this fall, this initiative could require us to condemn anyone who has AIDS or has tested positively for the AIDS virus to quarantine and isolation ... To call this initiative bad public health policy is a vast understatement," said Bradley. "On this one issue, I believe we can work together."

— "AIDS initiative already causing lots of fireworks;" John Marelius. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: Jun 26, 1986. pg. A.3

1986 2nd half

[edit]

Lyndon LaRouche, designer of a state initiative that could lead to the quarantine of everyone carrying the AIDS virus, said on a radio talk show that the acquired immune deficiency syndrome is spread through the air and by mosquitoes.

LaRouche made his remarks, which are believed to be his first public comments about the measure that has qualified for the November ballot, during a telephone interview Friday with KGO radio talk show host Ronn Owens.

"A person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around shooting up a neighborhood," LaRouche said.

Attacks Immune System

AIDS attacks the body's immune system and leaves its victims vulnerable to a variety of infections. Experts believe that it is spread through blood and semen. Health officials estimate that approximately 250,000 Californians are infected with AIDS and do not know it.

The AIDS initiative would place AIDS on the state's official list of infectious, contagious and communicable diseases. It could lead to large-scale testing for the virus and quarantine of those infected with the virus but not suffering from the disease. The California Medical Assn. and other regional medical societies have come out against the initiative.

On the talk show, LaRouche blamed the Soviet Union for engineering what he termed the the AIDS "conspiracy."

"There is no question that it can be transmitted by mosquitoes," LaRouche said, citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida.

— "AIDS Spread by Air, Mosquitoes, LaRouche Says" Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jul 13, 1986. pg. 30


State Health Director Kenneth Kizer on Tuesday accused the Lyndon LaRouche followers who placed an AIDS initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot of wrongfully using his name, while the attorney general dealt the measure a blow by concluding that it could cost taxpayers millions of dollars more than first expected.

At a press conference here, Kizer said the LaRouche backers misled voters by including his name in statements they submitted for the official ballot pamphlet to be sent to all voters before the election.

He demanded that his name be deleted before the pamphlet is published, and Secretary of State March Fong Eu agreed Tuesday afternoon.

The measure, designated Proposition 64 on the ballot, would give AIDS the legal status of an infectious disease and would attempt to bar AIDS victims and carriers of the AIDS antibody from jobs in restaurants, schools and medical facilities. It would specifically authorize quarantines of acquired immune deficiency syndrome victims and give officials the authority to order blood tests and report the results to the state.

The LaRouche group's ballot statements, which have become controversial on several counts, included a paragraph that states: "Many health officials are demanding public health measures. Dr. Kizer, California's top health official, has called for more reporting and testing powers."

That is apparently a reference to Kizer's request last April for broader state powers to require that potential AIDS victims undergo testing. Kizer also proposed that the state loosen its promise to keep test results confidential. Both are steps the LaRouche-affiliated initiative sponsors, Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), have recommended.

However, Kizer said Tuesday that he has never supported the initiative and in the past has described its backers as "ill-informed and misguided on this issue."

"What is the most upsetting to me is they have used my name and implied my support for the initiative," he said Tuesday.

Unlike most of the state's medical leadership, which has strongly blasted the initiative as a threat to the fight against AIDS, Kizer said the state Department of Health Services is still studying Proposition 64 and will take a position within a few weeks.

The LaRouche group's ballot arguments were also attacked Tuesday by the California Medical Assn. The physician group's president, Gladden V. Elliott, joined the heads of the California Hospital Assn. and the California Nurses Assn. in signing a rebuttal to the LaRouche group's ballot statement, and a spokesman said the LaRouche argument contains several factual errors.

In contrast to the positions of the vast majority of AIDS experts, the LaRouche group's ballot argument states that "potential insect and respiratory transmission" of the AIDS virus and transmission of the disease by "casual contact" are "well established."

Virtually all public health experts agree that the AIDS virus is primarily transmitted by intimate sexual contact, by exposure to contaminated blood and from mothers to their newborn babies. The overwhelming consensus is also that the virus has not been shown to be transmitted by insects, through the air or by casual contact.

"That's as close to a blatant lie as you can possibly get," said Mark Madsen, a public health expert with the California Medical Assn., about the threat of casual contact.

The LaRouche organization's ballot arguments are signed by Khushro Ghandhi, the group's Los Angeles head, and by three people who claim medical expertise: Dr. John Grauerholz, a Virginia physician, who has written treatises on AIDS for LaRouche publications; Dr. Nancy T. Mullan, a Burbank physician, and Gus S. Sermos, who lives in Mississippi and is listed on the ballot statement as a former public health adviser in Florida for the federal Centers for Disease Control.

Neither Ghandhi nor any of those listed as medical experts could be reached for comment Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp released a report concluding that Proposition 64 may have no financial impact if the law does not require any new enforcement activities by state and local health authorities.

However, the report said that should courts conclude that widespread testing for AIDS antibodies is needed, the cost to taxpayers "could range to hundreds of millions of dollars per year."

Opponents of the measure had sought to persuade Van de Kamp's staff to conclude that the initiative would require quarantine and other drastic measures against AIDS victims. However, the report Tuesday concluded that Proposition 64 probably does not require health officials to act any differently toward AIDS victims than they do now.

— "AIDS Ballot Measure Attacked on 2 Fronts;" KEVIN RODERICK, ROBERT STEINBROOK. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Jul 23, 1986. pg. 3

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his followers hold a unique view of AIDS and the virus that causes the deadly infectious disease-including many beliefs that are dismissed as preposterous in the prevailing medical consensus.

For instance, they say AIDS is a tropical disease that is commonly transmitted by mosquitoes, bed bugs and other insects. It can also be spread through the air like tuberculosis, they say, and be transmitted in schools or restaurants by casual contact with infected people, or "the walking dead,' as LaRouche calls them.

"A person with AIDS is like a person running around with a machine gun shooting up a neighborhood," he maintained on a KGO radio talk show in San Francisco last month, where he also suggested isolating infected people. [..] LaRouche, the political extremist who has written that the British monarchy runs a conspiracy of world terrorism and drug-pushing, claims that most medical experts support his views in private but are suppressing the "facts" for political reasons. When his ideas are dismissed as bigotry and hogwash, as the chairman of the California Medical Assn. did on KGO, LaRouche has a simple retort: "The man is lying."

It may seem absurd to accuse most AIDS researchers and public health officials of lying en masse about AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. But that argument underlies the campaign for Proposition 64, the initiative that LaRouche money and followers placed on the California ballot this November. [..] Despite this prevailing view, the proponents of Proposition 64 downplay the importance of heterosexual spread of AIDS. "Heterosexual transmission of this disease can occur, but I don't think that it accounts for the majority of cases which fall out of the so-called classic risk groups," said Dr. John Grauerholz, a Virginia pathologist who is one of LaRouche's key medical advisers on AIDS. He told the California Medical Assn. that many researchers have "a policy of not seeking relevant environmental data" when investigating such cases of the disease.

Instead, LaRouche and his backers contend that the AIDS virus is often transmitted by environmental factors-thus, their support for the isolation and quarantine of all individuals infected with the virus and their exclusion from schools and from jobs as food handlers.

On the KGO talk show, LaRouche pointed to the "insect-bite belt," which he said includes Florida and the Caribbean. "In the insect-bite belt, we have a very large transmission of AIDS among poor people," he said. "The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has been suppressing this evidence."

[..]

To support their arguments for environmental transmission of the AIDS virus, supporters of Proposition 64 sometimes have misstated the results of scientific studies.

For example, Dr. Nancy Mullan, a Burbank psychiatrist and a signatory to the ballot argument in favor of the AIDS initiative, referred a reporter to a study by Dr. Warren Johnson of Cornell University Medical Center, presented at a medical meeting in Paris in June. She said Johnson's study showed evidence of transmission of the AIDS virus by insects and "casual factors" in Haiti, and proved that "AIDS spreads more easily in tropical climates." In fact, the study showed that... [..] Another claim that Proposition 64 supporters make in their ballot argument is that the AIDS virus "can survive for upwards of seven days outside the body." This claim refers to a laboratory experiment conducted by scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and reported in the Sept. 28, 1985, issue of the medical journal Lancet. [..] Proposition 64 is sponsored by the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee. Ghandhi, the president of PANIC, is also West Coast coordinator for the National Democratic Policy Committee, a national LaRouche organization that has no tie to the Democratic Party.

"I'd say right now the only place where you can get competent medical information publicly on AIDS is from us," Ghandhi said at a June 25 press conference where he announced that Proposition 64 had qualified for the November ballot. "We are the world's leading experts." [..] Ghandhi explained that LaRouche, who calls himself the leading economist of the century, had created a group known as the Biological Holocaust Task Force at his Virginia headquarters. The task force, Ghandhi said, pulls together data on the AIDS virus and has collected material on the spread of infectious diseases, particularly in Africa, since 1974.

LaRouche has offered to debate Dr. Gladden V. Elliott, president of the California Medical Assn., and has suggested that Sen. Alan Cranston and his opponent in the Nov. 4 election, Rep. Ed Zschau (R-Los Altos)-both of whom signed ballot arguments opposing Proposition 64-be present. The CMA has declined the debate, saying that it would give LaRouche undue attention. [..]

Another arm of the LaRouche empire, Caucus Distributors Inc., supplied most of the $215,000 spent to gather signatures for the AIDS initiative.

— "Medical Experts Assail Initiative on AIDS Officials Dismiss Claims Made by Supporters of LaRouche-Backed Prop. 64" ROBERT STEINBROOK, KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 3, 1986. pg. 3


  • Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, an advocate of anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals, said the initiative "almost gives a license to go out and discriminate. It would be a tremendous deprivation of people's rights." Like other critics, he noted that LaRouche's theories on AIDS suggest the disease is being spread as part of a Soviet conspiracy and that elected officials supported by homosexuals are attempting to cover up the epidemic.
    • "PANIC fuels AIDS initiative", UPI, 8/4/86.

The initiative declares that people who have AIDS, or who are "carriers" of the virus generally believed to cause AIDS, would have an "infectious, contagious and communicable" condition. The initiative would require that people in these categories be reported to public health authorities. Opponents, including state, political, and medical leaders and gay-rights activists, say there is little simple or reasonable about the initiative. AIDS victims and those exposed to the virus — many of whom, researchers believe, probably will never contract the disease — could be barred from jobs involving the handling of food and could be banned from working in, or even attending, schools. The initiative also could bar people from traveling without permission of health officials, opponents say. Possible use of the state's quarantine powers has led Bruce Decker, chief fund-raiser of the opposition effort and head of a state advisory committee on AIDS, to raise the specter of "concentration camps" for AIDS patients.

[...] PANIC criticizes health officials' response to AIDS as inadequate and politicized. Mr. Lantz says, "Being a public health official is a very political position (that) comes under all the pressures of being political, especially on the AIDS question."

Mr. Lantz says the small group of researchers who believe AIDS may be spread in other ways, such as insect bites, is growing. But health authorities, including the federal Centers for Disease Control, say the evidence doesn't support such theories.

Of course, science won't be the only issue in the campaign. Mr. Lantz describes Mr. LaRouche as an "avid" backer of the initiative, known as Proposition 64. Mr. Decker's opposition group has taken the name "No on 64 -- Stop LaRouche."

In his thrashings through the political fringes, Mr. LaRouche has accused the British Crown of leading the drug lobby, and the International Monetary Fund of creating the AIDS epidemic. [...] Of PANIC's funding, Mr. Lantz says only that the organization, which has received almost all of its money from a LaRouche-associated operation in New York, "will have the resources" to ensure its message gets to the voters. [...] Both sides say they expect the campaign over the initiative to get nasty, and some evidence shows it already has. March Fong Eu, California secretary of state, sent a telegram to PANIC in May threatening to sue because of "numerous" complaints from citizens subjected to "outrageous verbal abuse" by petition circulators.

Mr. Lantz says that the "handful" of complaints shows that the petition drive was "a very smooth operation." He calls the secretary of state's telegram a "dirty little trick."

The secretary of state recently filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court trying to force PANIC to remove certain statements from its ballot argument, such as claims that AIDS may be transmittible by insects and is "easy to get." It was the first such suit by the secretary of state and was prompted by the "blatantly false" statements being made, a spokesman said.

PANIC subsequently sued the secretary of state for removing from the group's ballot argument the mention of Dr. Kizer talking about the need for more reporting and testing powers on AIDS. Dr. Kizer had asked that his name be removed, but Mr. Lantz says his group has a right to quote public statements of a public official. As for the secretary of state's suit, Mr. Lantz defends the statements' accuracy and notes that the state routinely disclaims responsibility for the accuracy of ballot arguments anyway. The secretary of state's action is a violation of the First Amendment, Mr. Lantz says.

Friday, a judge granted the secretary of state's request to strike some of the ballot argument, but at the same time reinstated Dr. Kizer's name.

Mr. Lantz also complains that opponents are lying about the contents of the initiative. PANIC's vice president says that while he personally favors quarantine of AIDS victims and testing all residents for antibodies to the virus, the initiative doesn't mandate those things. Dr. Kizer, the state health services chief, says that what is or isn't mandated by the initiative probably will end up being determined in court.

— "LaRouche-Supported Initiative on AIDS Policy In California Spurs Debate on Handling Disease"By John Emshwiller. Wall Street Journal. New York, N.Y.: Aug 11, 1986. pg. 1


Dr. John Grauerholz, a Virginia physician with close ties to LaRouche, announced his side's appeal at a Los Angeles news conference where he implied Soviet collaboration with U.S. public health officials to spread AIDS and passed out papers that accused a prominent New York researcher of terrorist activities in France.

Introduced as medical director of LaRouche's Biological Holocaust Task Force, Grauerholz argued that the Sacramento judge overlooked studies that support the initiative sponsors' belief that the AIDS virus may be transmitted by insects and through the air.

He offered as evidence letters published in the British medical journal The Lancet that reported the results of two studies. The studies have not received acceptance in the medical world, but Grauerholz said that is because the usual practice of scientific "peer review" is tainted by physicians who make sure that "anything which disagrees with the prevailing orthodoxy is not allowed to be published."

Medical experts say that AIDS is transmitted through sexual relations with infected persons, the exchange of tainted blood or hypodermic needles, and from infected mothers to their newborns. LaRouche and his followers, who have advocated mass testing for the AIDS virus and quarantine of victims, have been denounced by the medical community in California.

Documents handed out to reporters at the news conference included attacks on Dr. Mervyn Silverman, the former San Francisco health director who testified against the LaRouche side in the Sacramento case, and Dr. Mathilde Krim, a prominent New York medical researcher. Silverman is president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, a major fund-raising group whose chairman is actress Elizabeth Taylor. Krim is the group's co-chair. [...]

Under questioning by reporters, Grauerholz said that the Soviets may have started the AIDS plague, and certainly are glad that it is spreading. He said that U.S. health officials have aided the Soviets by not stopping AIDS, and added: "I would certainly wonder about Dr. Silverman precisely because of his association with Dr. Krim." [...] Two UC Berkeley professors plan to release a study today that contends the measure would have a huge effect on the California economy. More than 100,000 would lose their jobs, and the adverse economic impact could total $2.3 billion the first year, according to a summary of the study by John Quigley of the School of Public Policy and Robert Anderson, an assistant professor of economics and math.

— "Decision on AIDS Measure Draws Appeals';KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 12, 1986. pg. 3

At best, medical leaders feel that Proposition 64 is a nonsensical diversion. At worst, they view the AIDS initiative as a pernicious measure that could drive AIDS victims underground and force millions, if not billions, of dollars to be wasted on mandatory screening of the entire population for infection with the AIDS virus and the isolation of everyone who tested positive.

These leaders already fear that LaRouche's unorthodox positions on AIDS, including his claim to have the world's best experts at his side, will further confuse the public about how to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

"What they are proposing is just sort of off the wall," said Dr. James Chin, chief of the infectious disease branch of the state Department of Health Services, who is one of a number of AIDS experts who claim their views have been misrepresented by LaRouche and his backers.

In their public statements, Proposition 64 sponsors say that Chin agreed in a private meeting early this year that mass screening and quarantine are the only methods that will control the spread of AIDS. Chin confirmed that he met with Khushro Ghandhi, the top LaRouche aide in California, in the Sacramento office of Republican State Senator John T. Doolittle of Roseville. But Chin said in an interview that he spent the whole time trying to convince Doolittle and Ghandhi that such approaches were wrong.

"The initiative is dangerous and deceptive," Chin added. "It is an initiative against AIDS when I don't think there is anybody in the world who is for AIDS. The stuff they are proposing is not going to have any effect on the way the disease is transmitted."

Indeed, Secretary of State March Fong Eu challenged in court what she called "blatantly false" sections of the ballot argument for Proposition 64 submitted by LaRouche backers, including claims that "AIDS is not hard to get," and that potential insect and respiratory transmission of the disease and transmission by casual contact are "well established." On August 8 the Sacramento County Superior Court ruled in Eu's favor, striking out those sections of the ballot argument.

The consensus medical view, as expressed by Dr. Merle Sande, chief of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, is that the AIDS virus is spread by sexual contact, the injection of contaminated blood or from an infected mother to her newborn child. High-risk groups in the United States include homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs. [...] Proposition 64 is sponsored by the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee. Ghandhi, the president of PANIC, is also West Coast coordinator for the National Democratic Policy Committee, a national LaRouche organization that has no tie to the Democratic Party.

"I'd say right now the only place where you can get competent medical information publicly on AIDS is from us," Ghandhi said at a June 25 press conference where he announced that Proposition 64 had qualified for the November ballot. "We are the world's leading experts."

Ghandhi explained that LaRouche, who calls himself the leading economist of the century, had created a group known as the Biological Holocaust Task Force at his Virginia headquarters. It pulls together data on the AIDS virus and has collected material on the spread of infectious diseases, particularly in Africa, since 1974.

Another arm of the LaRouche empire, Caucus Distributors Inc., supplied most of the $215,000 spent to gather signatures for the AIDS initiative.

— "AIDS a la LaRouche" ROBERT STEINBROOK, KEVIN RODERICK. San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: Aug 17, 1986. pg. 19

Meanwhile, after a half-day trial, Judge James Ford ruled in favor a suit by Secretary of State March Fong Eu, who sought removal of the disputed statements favoring Proposition 64 from arguments on ballot measures to be mailed to California's 12 million voters.

The phrases rejected by the judge are:

o "AIDS is not `hard to get'; it is easy to get."

o "There is no evidence that it cannot be transmitted by casual contact."

o "Potential insect and respiratory transmission has been established by numerous studies."

Accepting written testimony of Dr. Mervyn Silverman, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and other San Francisco Bay area AIDS specialists, Ford ruled that the preponderance of scientific evidence is that the disease is not easily transmitted.

Kenneth Robbin, attorney for Proposition 64's backers, argued that the statements in question came from physicians. Ford ruled they are casual opinions and not the result of formal scientific studies subjected to peer review.

The judge ruled that the AIDS initiative's backers have the right to quote state Director of Health Services Kenneth Kizer in their argument, even though Kizer opposes the AIDS measure.

Proponents of the initiative used a statement by Kizer that more testing for the AIDS virus is needed.

"How can Dr. Kizer complain, when they're saying exactly what he said?" Ford commented. "Anyone who has read anything about Kizer knows he's against this measure."

Ford's most severe criticism was for the statement that "there is no evidence that (AIDS) cannot be transmitted by casual contact."

"The court finds that this statement is false and intended to mislead," Ford said.

He ruled the contention that AIDS could be transmitted by insects or by respiration to be "statements of doctors not based on studies."

"We must avoid instilling fear," Ford said. "There is no evidence AIDS is transmitted by casual contact."

— "Charter cities out of tax initiative: Court also strikes statements from November AIDS measure;" The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: Aug 9, 1986. pg. A.3

Supporters of the AIDS initiative said yesterday they will send out their own voter pamphlets to publicize statements stricken from the official state ballot guide as "false and misleading."

Plans call for distributing up to 3 million pamphlets that will include claims that AIDS may be transmitted by insects and other statements most medical experts say are false.

"We are producing this material, and it will be distributed en masse throughout the state," said Dr. John Grauerholz, a Virginia pathologist and one-time medical examiner who serves as a consultant to Proposition 64 backers.

Grauerholz signed the ballot arguments for the measure, which is sponsored by supporters of Lyndon LaRouche.

Grauerholz said the booklets will contain versions of statements that were removed from the voter handbook by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Ford in an August 8 ruling. The judge said the statements were false and incited unnecessary fear among the public.

Grauerholz said the pamphlets will cite evidence that insects such as mosquitoes and bedbugs may be able to spread the AIDS virus, including a paper by a French researcher who tested insects in Africa for the presence of the virus. [..]

At his press conference yesterday, Grauerholz suggested the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta may be altering or suppressing evidence about insect transmission of AIDS.

He also said evidence that the AIDS virus is spread through insects is "every bit as good" as evidence that it can be spread between heterosexuals.

— "AIDS Initiative Backers To Publish Voter Guide" Erica Goode. San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, Calif.: Sep 16, 1986. pg. 6

Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine founded by LaRouche and published by one of his Virginia enterprises, referred to an aide of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo as "one of the nation's leading perverts for 15 years" when it reported his AIDS-related death in March.

In 1982, LaRouche issued a tome called "Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry" that described how former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger-whom LaRouche has declared a major nemesis-"is not a Jew but a faggot. . . . His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil." [...] Proposition 64 backers say they do not consider acquired immune deficiency syndrome a gay disease and have not aimed the measure at gays. But suspicions among gays were heightened last week when New Solidarity, a newspaper affiliated with LaRouche, printed a column attacking the plans for Monday's night rally.

The column ran under a picture showing gay protesters and the caption "Sodom and Gomorrah on the march-for the `civil right' to spread AIDS." The article also said state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, whose office is investigating the signature-gathering process for Proposition 64, was using a "Gaystapo" to harass the initiative's sponsors.

On Tuesday, the measure's chief sponsor, longtime LaRouche follower Khushro Ghandhi, made a point of disavowing one comment that gays had taken as an attack.

New Solidarity said in its Sept. 12 issue that the march by gays Monday night had been called a "public health threat" by officials of the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee. Ghandhi, who is president of the committee, said the campaign for Proposition 64 is independent, even though its press releases and statements are distributed under the banner of the newspaper's New Solidarity International Press Service. "I never said it was a public health threat," Ghandhi said.

However, he stuck by a New Solidarity International Press Service dispatch that described the march as a "terrorist incident" and which quoted Ghandhi as warning public officials, including Los Angeles City Councilmen Joel Wachs and Michael Woo, that they would be held responsible for any violence.

— "Prop. 64 Feud Between Gays, LaRouche Backers Grows" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Sep 17, 1986. pg. 25

A Lyndon LaRouche supporter says that if state voters approve the controversial AIDS initiative Nov. 4, elected leaders will get the message that the public wants more money and effort devoted to curing the deadly disease.

Dr. John E. Grauerholz said at a news conference in San Diego yesterday that politicians are not taking a serious approach to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, possibly because they believe it endangers only a small portion of the population. [..] Grauerholz is a Virginia consultant in forensic pathology and a LaRouche follower. "If this initiative passes, the political impact of this will be substantial," he said. "It is only when this thing is recognized as a general public health threat and, frankly, as a national security threat that you are going to get the federal commitment that is absolutely essential." [..] Grauerholz said passage of the initiative in California probably would prompt similar measures in other states. [..] Dr. Allen McCutchan, director of a treatment center for AIDS victims at the UCSD Medical Center, accused supporters of the initiative of using false arguments.

He disputed Grauerholz's claim that a French study indicated that AIDS can be spread by mosquitoes and other insects.

Grauerholz has repeatedly pointed to a study by the respected Pasteur Institute in Paris as proof that the disease, which attacks the body's immune system, can be transmitted by mosquitoes.

Published reports quote the study's author, Pasteur researcher Jean-Claude Chermann, as saying that he found the AIDS virus in mosquitoes and other insects in Africa, but that there is no evidence that the insects have spread the disease to humans.

"Epidemiology is very clear about that," Chermann was quoted as saying. "There is no way of transmission to humans by mosquitoes and other insects."

— "LaRouche backer touts AIDS initiative";Ruth McKinnie-McCoy. The Tribune. San Diego, Calif.: Sep 17, 1986. pg. A.18

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his political camp followers have taken up a new cause. They are out to make prejudice against AIDS victims respectable. If California voters approve a LaRouche-sponsored initiative that is to appear on the November ballot, doctors and public health authorities fear they will be forced to begin mass testing for AIDS and, worse yet, quarantine all Californians who have been exposed to AIDS.

In Mr. LaRouche's fantastical view of the world - a world where Walter F. Mondale is a Soviet agent and the Queen of England pushes drugs -AIDS has become the No. 1 menace. According to the LaRouche scenario, AIDS is a plot by the Soviet war machine to conquer America - or else a plot by the International Monetary Fund to wipe out the excess eaters from starving Africa.

Those claims, as well as Mr. LaRouche's insistence that a person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around, are nonsense, of course. But Mr. LaRouche is being treated with deadly seriousness in California.

— "LaRouche Turns To AIDS Politics;" [OP-ED] Berkeley., David L. Kirp: David L. Kirp is professor of public policy at the University of California at. New York Times. ' New York, N.Y.: Sep 11, 1986. pg. A.27

he most notable of the bunch this time is Proposition 64, the so- called AIDS initiative sponsored by supporters of Virginia-based political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.

Some LaRouche followers have suggested AIDS is a tropical disease transmitted by insects and one that can be spread through the air or even casual, non-sexual contact with those infected.

'Blatantly false'

"A person with AIDS is like a person running around with a machinegun shooting up a neighborhood," LaRouche told a San Francisco radio talk show earlier this year.

Secretary of State March Fong Eu has persuaded the courts to remove what she called "blatantly false" sections of the ballot argument for 64. (All households are mailed a pamphlet before the election listing the arguments for and against election measures).

The measure calls for anyone having AIDS or being infected with its virus but not necessarily having the disease (a much more common occurrence) to be subject to state quarantine and isolation rules.

Victims could also be denied certain jobs, barred from schools, restaurants and other public places and tattooed for easy identification.

— "Californians face tough choices" Jim Byers Toronto Star. Toronto Star. Toronto, Ont.: Sep 21, 1986. pg. B.3

One expects the untraditional from Lyndon H. LaRouche and his political followers, and their new campaign booklet urging passage of Proposition 64 is no exception.

The LaRouche booklet carries a price-$1 "suggested contribution"-a rarity for political literature. For that buck you get a personal message from LaRouche himself, attacking film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Patty Duke and asserting that "no sane person" should oppose the AIDS initiative, which has been denounced by virtually all AIDS experts and California leaders.

Much of the 24-page pamphlet is taken up with charts, maps and testimonials that seek to explain the unique view of AIDS that LaRouche and his supporters have made the basis for their initiative campaign.

They claim mounds of scientific backing, but Dr. Don Francis, an AIDS specialist for the Centers for Disease Control, flipped through the pamphlet this week and said, "It's a scam-the whole thing is absurd." [...] Finally, on the back cover, a woman in the leather garb favored by some punk rockers and a smattering of gay men is shown next to a billboard about missing children. The phrase "Had Enough?" is emblazoned on the photographs along with a pitch to join the National Democratic Policy Committee, a LaRouche political arm that has no connection to the Democratic Party.

The booklet, paid for by the committee, is the main campaign effort so far on behalf of Proposition 64, which seeks to force health officials to identify carriers of the AIDS virus and to remove the carriers from some jobs. As expected, the booklet has proven controversial.

"I think it's really a classic case of the big lie," said Torie Osborn, Southern California coordinator of the Stop LaRouche-No on 64 campaign, the group leading the opposition to the initiative. "The information is totally inaccurate."

Some gays complained that the picture on the back cover-which they say links gays to missing children-is a slur. However, Brian Lantz, a veteran LaRouche supporter and co-sponsor of the initiative, said Friday that it refers instead to reports that satanic, counterculture cults are tied to child kidnapings. [...] In the booklet, LaRouche repeats his claim that doctors and other health experts who oppose Proposition 64 are lying when they say AIDS is not transmitted by insects or by casual contact with people infected by the virus that causes AIDS.

"Every leading medical institution in the United States and Western Europe knows that the deadly disease called AIDS is spread by `casual contact,' " LaRouche begins. ". . . Obviously, no sane person should be opposed to Proposition 64."

The text of the booklet goes on to assert that AIDS has been spread through saliva and bites from mosquitoes and bedbugs. That explains the spread of AIDS in Africa and parts of Florida, the LaRouche publication claimed. "Since I am fortunate to be influential in scientific circles internationally, I have used that influence to organize support for AIDS research," LaRouche adds.

Scientists, however, say the LaRouche booklet is riddled with false data.

"Fortunately, the absurd quality of this is going to come out clearly," Francis of the CDC said. [...] In his essay in the booklet, LaRouche says Elizabeth Taylor opposes the initiative because a concert she scheduled in Italy was canceled because it was "discovered to be a rally for satanism. . . ." Patty Duke, president of the Screen Actors Guild, is dismissed as the leader of a "kookish faction" against Proposition 64. Later, LaRouche writes that the money spent on drugs at "Hollywood parties" could significantly help the fight against AIDS.

More than a million of the blue-covered booklets will be distributed to voters, the initiative's sponsors say. But how they plan to accomplish that California-sized task is unclear.

Lantz said Friday that LaRouche supporters in the state will circulate the booklets. But LaRouche's personal following in California is no more than a few hundred, say most groups who keep watch on the extremist three-time presidential candidate. Paid petition circulators were needed last summer to gather enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot.

Otherwise, Lantz said, the campaign has made no plans to spend money on media campaigns and mailings as opponents had feared. [...] "We still haven't ruled out media altogether," Lantz said. "But our resources are limited. We don't have millions of dollars to throw around."

Reports from other states say that lawsuits and criminal investigations of several LaRouche organizations' fund-raising tactics have cut into cash flow.

Four groups allied with LaRouche, including the National Democratic Policy Committee, are facing daily fines of $45,000 for refusing records to a federal grand jury in Boston investigating credit card fraud. The fines now total more than $21 million.

The groups, which provide the cash that pays for LaRouche's upkeep at a heavily guarded Virginia estate and his international political operations, have also been sued in a variety of financial disputes and have reportedly asked creditors for more time to pay bills. In addition, supporters last month paid a $200,000 court judgment against LaRouche to NBC. In California, Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp is also investigating charges of election fraud in the collection of signatures used to qualify Proposition 64 for the ballot.

— "It's `a Scam . . . Absurd,' Specialist Says LaRouche's View of AIDS-$1 Pamphlet Spells It Out; "KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 4, 1986. pg. 30
  • LaRouche detailed his view that AIDS could be politically useful in a 1985 book, "A Program for America," that announced he was running for President in 1988. The book was published by The LaRouche Democratic Campaign, his campaign committee. AIDS was presented as the leading plank of the LaRouche platform for 1988, and also as the political issue that will allow LaRouche to win the favor of more voters than he has wooed the three times he has run for President before. AIDS, the book predicts, will be the "last straw" for voters who believe the nation has gone into moral and educational decay. AIDS is the best issue to use to get Americans aroused politically because they fear for their families, the book says. "The AIDS epidemic and the growing signs of a government cover-up are beginning to move the majority of the citizens to a mood of political revolt," LaRouche wrote in a personal message included in the book. "Those citizens, set into motion by the AIDS crisis, are . . . a political army on the move." The "silent majority," as LaRouche called them, will also rally behind him because they are fed up with the Democrats' catering to gays. Homosexuality, the book said, is a "filthy and immoral practice" and people have come to resent gays for spreading the deadly disease. ... LaRouche, who is regarded by Jewish groups as anti-Semitic, also has a long history of attacks on gays. His umbrella organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees, swung into action when the strategy was prepared last fall. An in-house scientific group published reports alleging that AIDS can be spread in schools, restaurants, even barbershops. Internal documents provided The Times by Midwest Research Associates, a Chicago group that monitors extremist groups, showed that the LaRouche groups' internal computer linkup carried daily reports on the reception that LaRouche candidates around the country received when they advocated the quarantine of AIDS patients. ... Any semblance of independence was dropped when financial reports filed with the state showed that most of the money for Proposition 64 had come from LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg, Va. In recent weeks, several top LaRouche aides have flown to California to appear as experts on AIDS.
    • "LaRouche Wrote of Using AIDS to Win Presidency" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 17, 1986. pg. 3

LaRouche, who sent President Reagan a telegram vowing to resist if arrested, said the accusations are orchestrated by the Kremlin and others who oppose his view that AIDS is spread by, among other things, poor economic conditions.

The charges brought by the government reflect what some groups who watch LaRouche have long believed. They say he is more than a benign spouter of fanciful conspiracy tales-the Queen of England pushes drugs, AIDS is caused by the banks-and backer of odd, hopeless candidates who sell books and magazines at airports. [...] But many critics of LaRouche report that they have been harassed. Flyers appear calling women prostitutes, men are called homosexuals and government officials are called agents of the British-Zionist drug conspiracy. Reader's Digest, after a story about LaRouche, was called a Soviet tool in a long article in New Solidarity, a LaRouche newspaper published three times a week. [...] On the Proposition 64 campaign, much of the $200,000 spent to gather signatures was sent to California by a New York unit, Caucus Distributors Inc., and was largely paid in salary to local LaRouche candidates. [...] Court records show that a Virgina state police agent received 22 "abusive and demanding" phone calls from LaRouche associates in the week after he posed as a potential donor at National Airport near Washington. Callers said $5,000 and more was needed to keep LaRouche out of jail and stop AIDS, the agent said. [...] In documents from the early days of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, LaRouche talks about the wide-ranging role he plays in members' lives.

He warned members in 1973 that devotion to him would involve some stress.

"In respect of the mental processes, absolutely nothing is secret; there is merely blindness. . . . In Germany I am Der Abscheulicher (the abominable one); I shall soon be regarded similarly here," he said

The beginnings of his U.S. movement in place, LaRouche wrote in a confidential message to organizers in 1973, titled, "The Politics of Male Impotence," that he had set up a European base "on the premise that our growing importance in the world would close borders to me very soon."

He also predicted seizure of world power within the decade-through curing the sexual impotence of his followers.

"The principal source of impotence, both male and female, is the mother. . . . If you are sexually impotent-as most of our members inevitably are-then you are impotent as political organizers," he wrote.

Sexual performance and motherhood were common themes in LaRouche's early essays.

"All Germany is a heaving mass of sexual impotence," he writes. Latin machismo "is nothing but the fear of homosexuality, of male impotence in the extreme." Blacks have a special problem, he said: "Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the black ghetto mother?"

— "Authorities See Pattern of Threats, Plots Dark Side of LaRouche Empire Surfaces;" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 14, 1986. pg. 1

Increasing the anti-homosexual rhetoric from Lyndon LaRouche supporters, a newspaper tied to LaRouche said this weekend that communist gangs of the "lower sexual classes" controlled by the major parties are opposing Proposition 64, the AIDS measure on the California ballot.

The latest issue of New Solidarity, a newspaper that is the most widely read of several publications that espouse LaRouche's extremist political views, included the slur in a story about gay activists who picketed LaRouche's Los Angeles headquarters to protest the initiative. LaRouche supporters placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot.

As the election nears, items attacking gays have become more common in the paper, which is sold by LaRouche organizers in airports nationwide and handed out free in sections of Los Angeles.

Other issues of New Solidarity published last week attacked the state's Roman Catholic bishops-who strongly oppose Proposition 64-for aligning with "the degraded homosexual culture so pervasive in California" and made a vulgar joke about gays receiving Communion at a Catholic mass in West Hollywood, a city with a high percentage of gay residents.

An issue of the newspaper last week joked about AIDS, made flippant references to actors Frank Sinatra, Robert Redford, Tony Curtis and Patty Duke and attacked Elizabeth Taylor, who has become a frequent LaRouche target since she became a visible champion of AIDS research. [...] In the latest issue, New Solidarity said that three different "militant communist gangs" have been unleashed against the initiative by the Republican and Democratic parties. The groups it names are loose organizations of gay activists.

The paper used the phrase "lower sexual classes" to describe members of those groups and about 2,000 people, including clergy and public officials, who demonstrated outside LaRouche's Los Angeles headquarters in the Los Feliz area Sept. 15.

LaRouche and his supporters, who say they predicted the AIDS crisis a decade ago, have maintained that the initiative does not single out gays but calls for strong measures to protect everyone.

But the new attacks on gays lend credence to critics who contend that LaRouche and his followers are motivated by a long-standing hatred of homosexuals. LaRouche and his supporters also frequently attack people they consider enemies by labeling them as homosexuals in print, often in vulgar slang terms.

In his 1984 presidential campaign platform, LaRouche broke from prevailing medical opinion and said homosexuality is a disease whose spread can only be stopped by law. When he declared a year ago that he would be a candidate for the presidency in 1988, LaRouche wrote about the recruitment of "millions of Americans into the ranks of AIDS-riddled homosexuality."

The latest issue also claims, based on a letter published in the British medical journal The Lancet, that AIDS can be transmitted by one child biting another without breaking skin. However, the study that the letter is based on has not been validated by other scientists. American health officials said privately it is "inconceivable" the virus could be transmitted that way.

LaRouche and his supporters contend that most AIDS cases that are not classified as those of homosexually active men or infected blood exchange can be explained by insect bites and other forms of casual transmission. Health officials say virtually all the cases that LaRouche attributes to casual contact actually got the virus through sexual activity.

— "Paper Tied to LaRouche Attacks Gay Movement;" KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 6, 1986. pg. 21

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. i... has put forth theories in recent years blaming the International Monetary Fund for AIDS... [..] Exactly how many Canadians have embraced the LaRouche philosophy is difficult to pin down. Earlier this year, a LaRouche representative in Vancouver put Canadian membership at 500. But party leader Gilles Gervais, who might shed more light on the subject, declined repeated requests for an interview, and Benoit Chalifoux and Hal Quesnel, the young men buttonholing travellers at Ottawa airport, described the figure as "classified information." [..] Gilbert Provost, duty manager at Ottawa airport, says he receives complaints every time the PCC appears. It's not so much their philosophy that people complain about as their methods. They don't accept no for an answer. I've had a number of complaints from people I'd describe as vulnerable, for example older people." [..] APART FROM his problems with the law, much has been made recently of Mr. LaRouche's stand on AIDS, especially since his supporters stunned California's homosexual community by gathering half a million signatures to force a state referendum on the issue next month. If the proposition passes, testing and registration will be made compulsory for anyone exposed to the AIDS virus, involving thousands of people - 92 per cent of them gay men.

AIDS is also a concern to Mr. LaRouche's followers north of the border. In the Ottawa airport, Mr. Chalifoux exhibited a map outlining the locust plague that has struck Africa, saying that the food shortages it has caused will leave Africans more prone to AIDS. And Mr. Guay's comments included a reference to a U.S. lawyer he considered unsympathetic as that fruit who died of AIDS."

— "LaRouche in Canada: life on the fringe"; MARGOT GIBB-CLARK, GEOFFREY YORK. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Oct 21, 1986. pg. A.7



Political extremist Lyndon LaRouche believes that many homosexuals support Proposition 64, the AIDS initiative, and those who do not have been duped by a "a little mafia among the so-called gay community."

In a copyrighted interview in the November issue of San Francisco Focus magazine, LaRouche says the initiative is a pragmatic step to stem "the worst epidemic in the history of the human race."

"I think a lot of this homosexual riot against me is crazy, because I think there are a great number of people who may be homosexual, for example, who have the stuff (AIDS) and would agree perfectly with what I'm saying," LaRouche told an interviewer. "Look, they don't want to die. It's that simple."

Asked why the gay community has expressed outrage over the initiative, LaRouche blamed "a little mafia among the so-called gay community and the drug community."

"I think you will find that the average homosexual is much quieter than the people who are vocal. And I think that privately they're terrified of this disease. They don't see much hope," he said. "And I think they think about me, `. . . If this guy is gonna save our lives, more power to him.' " [...]

Commenting on his use of the term "politics of faggotry" to explain Henry Kissinger, LaRouche said: "Henry is a - well, Henry's got a big closet."

— "LaRouche Claims Gays Support His Prop. 64;" Marc Sandalow. San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, Calif.: Oct 25, 1986. pg. 16

Supporters of the initiative have come under fire from several quarters. Last week a U.S. District judge in San Francisco froze the bank accounts of the measure's sponsors after an 83-year-old widow filed suit claiming she was defrauded out her her savings.

Also last week, telephones at the Los Angeles office of LaRouche's Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC) were disconnected after the committee's checks to the phone company bounced.

Lantz predicts, however, that the vast reservoir of undecided voters will mean victory for the initiative.

"AIDS is the hand grenade thrown into the foxhole of American politics," Lantz said. "It's making people wake up."

Lantz wrote the measure last year, he said. Petitions to put it on the ballot started circulating in January with the backing of California organizers of LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee.

Both Lantz and co-author Khushro Ghandhi have long been active in various efforts by LaRouche, who gained notoriety by calling Henry Kissinger a KGB agent and accusing Queen Elizabeth of running drugs. Since last year, AIDS has emerged as the centerpiece of LaRouche's political platform.

The initiative is rooted in the contention of LaRouche supporters that AIDS may be spread easily by insects or by casual contact with people infected with the AIDS.

Without the stern measures of Proposition 64, Lantz warned, "AIDS will be spreading outside the risk groups. That will happen. This may be our last chance to limit it."

Thus far, proponents have waged their campaign in the controlled formats of news conferences, interviews and television and radio debates.

AIDS, they argue, is the product of a conspiracy of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, environmentalists, the KGB and the CIA, all of which want to see large segments of the world die off.

A LaRouche newspaper, New Solidarity, said California's Roman Catholic archbishops had aligned themselves with "the degraded homosexual culture so pervasive in California" by coming out against Proposition 64.

The publication also said that recent anti-LaRouche demonstrators in Los Angeles included "militant Communist gangs" made up in part of "lower sexual classes."

— "AIDS Initiative Opponents Say 'Race Is Up for Grabs';" Randy Shilts. San Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco, Calif.: Oct 22, 1986. pg. 14
  • But many critics of LaRouche report that they have been harassed. Fliers appear calling women prostitutes, men are called homosexuals and government officials are called agents of the British-Zionist drug conspiracy.
    • "FBI probing dark side of LaRouche organization;" KEVIN RODERICK. Houston Chronicle Houston, Tex.: Oct 19, 1986. pg. 1


Sponsored by a Lyndon LaRouche organization called PANIC (the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee), Proposition 64 embodies all of the deepest fears about AIDS in one cold legislative package. PANIC, based in Los Angeles, had no trouble getting 683,000 California voters to sign the petition that put Proposition 64 on the ballot....

Calling for "An emergency war plan to fight AIDS and other pandemics," the 138- page report raises the spectre of mosquitoes spreading AIDS willy-nilly like "flying syringes," an idea flatly rejected by essentially every reputable epidemiologist who has studied AIDS. It says the threat of AIDS "is potentially far deadlier than even a full-scale thermonuclear war." Incorporating political theories expounded by LaRouche for 15 years, it declares that AIDS and other lethal contagions were "deliberately created" by the International Monetary Fund, that Henry Kissinger and Zionism somehow played a role by curtailing U.S. biological warfare abilities and helped open the door to AIDS, and that U.S. policy on AIDS is dictated by the Soviet government via the World Health Organization. At the same time, the article reflects a careful reading of scientific literature on AIDS, and is larded with graphs, charts, and diagrams, many taken from generally accepted publications, to accurately show the known structure of the AIDS virus, its effects on AIDS victims, and to summarize tests used to detect it. The ballot measure that voters will see, however, "masks its real intention," said Scott Shafer, a San Francisco organizer of the No On 64 campaign. "It doesn't refer specifically to the fact that it will require mandatory testing of millions of people, and that it compels local health officials to take such actions as quarantining those who test positive." He added, "the numbers are pretty large. We find it particularly frightening, in that the test currently available is inaccu- rate at least 1% of the time."

— "California to Vote on AIDS Proposition", Charles Petit, Science, New Series, Vol. 234, No. 4774 (Oct. 17, 1986), pp. 277-278.

LaRouche claims to be in the vanguard of a worldwide revolt against government "lying" about AIDS. [..] LaRouche himself has not set foot in California during the campaign. But Wednesday he made an appearance of sorts-appearing by satellite from Washington on KABC-TV to defend the initiative against a prominent opponent, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, the former public health director of San Francisco.

The nearly 10 minutes was devoted to claims promoted in the main only by LaRouche-who has no formal training in science or medicine-that AIDS can be spread by insect bites or as a result of being close to infected persons.

"The insect bite mechanism . . . is thoroughly established," LaRouche said, going further than his own advisers who argued in a California court and to reporters last month that there is only "the potential" for insect spread. [..] Perhaps the strangest event of the campaign occurred this week in Riverside, where someone mailed bogus letters that purport to be an endorsement of Proposition 64 by 21 prominent-and now angry-professors at the University of California, Riverside.

The three-page letter, first received by The Times and the chairman of the UCR Academic Senate, attacks gays and a local state assemblyman, Steve Clute (D-Riverside), who is locked in a reelection fight. It bears a photocopy of the university seal and the letterhead "UCR Faculty for 64," a group that does not exist. Although it lists an incorrect zip code for the campus, the letter was described as looking authentic.

Philosophy professor Oliver A. Johnson said he was surprised to hear from a reporter that he is listed as chairman of the group. "I'm planning to vote against Proposition 64," said Johnson, whose signature was forged onto the letter.

"I certainly feel I was slandered," said Prof. Carl F. Cranor, chair of the university's Department of Philosophy.

There is no evidence to link the letter to either side of the Proposition 64 campaign. Meanwhile, the sponsors of the measure have begun mailing to voters a 24-page pamphlet produced at LaRouche headquarters in Virginia with their unique version of the evidence about AIDS.

— "Strange Twists Mark Prop. 64 Campaign" Kevin Roderick, Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) [serial online]. October 30, 1986:25

Sen. Pete Wilson, R-Calif, an early opponent of the proposition, warned the dinner crowd: "We cannot laugh this man off. He and his henchmen have qualified ... an evil measure (for the ballot)."

State Sen. Jim Ellis, R-San Diego, one of only two public officials in California to endorse the measure, recently complained: "The anti campaign is against Mr. LaRouche. I don't agree with him very often either, but I think it's unfortunate that a very important issue of this sort is being campaigned against an individual instead of against the issue."

Still others say a broader look at LaRouche's world view is essential to understanding why he is focusing his energies on AIDS, a thus-far incurable condition that destroys an individual's immune system and allows commonplace infections to become fatal.

LaRouche apparently hopes that fear of AIDS, and the policies outlined in Proposition 64, can provide him with the emotional issue he needs to capture the White House in 1988.

In announcing his fourth bid for the presidency last year, LaRouche predicted that "the AIDS crisis will transform U.S. politics" and become "the hottest political issue" in the world. He said there is a worldwide conspiracy of government institutions and medical professionals to cover up evidence that AIDS can be transmitted much more easily than thought -- such as through food, sneezing, kissing and mosquito bites.

To foment rebellion against this so-called conspiracy, LaRouche urged his followers: "Spread panic, not AIDS" -- an instruction that his California contingent apparently took to heart when they named the pro-64 campaign the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee," or PANIC.

In transforming AIDS from a medical issue to a political one, LaRouche takes aim at homosexuality, sexual permissiveness and drug abuse.

All are somewhat germane to the AIDS epidemic, in that medical authorities have determined that the primary carriers of the AIDS virus are homosexual and bisexual men, prostitutes and users of intravenous drugs, who transmit the virus by sharing needles.

Moreover, LaRouche doctrine is riddled with references to all three, particularly homosexuality and other sexual practices he deems "filthy and immoral."

Conspiracy theories are nothing new to LaRouche or his supporters, who believe that LaRouche has been marked for assassination by the KGB, Henry Kissinger and an international drug cabal that at times includes Queen Elizabeth II, the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the Rockefeller family.

He is said to have thought he was a topic of discussion at the Reykjavik summit between President Reagan and Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev

He claims that Adolf Hitler was put into power "on orders from London" and that that jazz was "foisted upon black Americans by the same oligarchy which had run the slave trade, with the help of the classically trained but immoral George Gershwin."

LaRouche believes that world leaders have adopted genocidal economic policies designed to depopulate the Third World -- a theory he espoused long before it was understood how widespread the AIDS virus is in Central Africa.

Over the years LaRouche has frequently claimed his political opponents are homosexuals. He made that accusation against Kissinger in an August 1982 press release titled "Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry," in which LaRouche wrote that "faggotry destroyed Rome."

When LaRouche follower Will Wertz ran for the U.S. Senate in California four years ago -- on a platform calling for industrial investment and massive public works projects -- he also attacked the Democratic Party's eventual nominee, then-Gov. Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr., as a closet homosexual.

As the Proposition 64 campaign has unfolded, its central theme has been that the AIDS virus can be spread by homosexuals and other carriers to "your family" through food, sneezing, kissing and mosquito bites -- theories that are unanimously rejected by AIDS experts, the American Red Cross and California Medical Association. [...]

PANIC has studiously avoided outward attacks on homosexuals, though inferences have been drawn from its campaign pamphlet, titled "A Vote for Proposition 64 Could Save the Life of Someone in Your Family." The back page of the pamphlet includes a photos of two transvestites, a billboard appealing for help finding a missing child and the message, "Had enough?"

— "AIDS initiative talk centers on LaRouche;" Gerry Braun. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: Nov 3, 1986. pg. A.3

The California initiative was put on the ballot by the organization of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, who has claimed the ``Soviet war machine uses AIDS as a biological weapon against the United States.

Unless Americans act quickly to adopt laws like his Proposition 64, LaRouche has warned, AIDS ``could conceivably wipe out every U.S. man, woman and child by 1991. His organization gathered 680,000 voter signatures for the initiative.

AIDS actually had killed about 10,500 Americans as of mid-September, according to the U.S. Public Health Service.

Opponents say the initiative wouldn't stem that death toll, but would force creation of ``concentration camps for the estimated 250,000 AIDS carriers in California.

The LaRouche proposition calls for physical isolation of people whose blood carries the HTLV virus known to cause Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. It would ban carriers from jobs in public schools and food handling.

State officials say the proposition also would probably force mandatory blood tests for everyone now in such jobs. [...] Those arguments and the unusual unity of political leaders on both the left and right don't faze the LaRouche organization.

``They have turned their back on classic public health policy in dealing with an epidemic, says Brian Lantz, co-head of the ``Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee.

And Khushro Ghandhi, another leader of the LaRouche committee, declares in the pro-initiative ballot argument that ``AIDS is the gravest public health threat our nation has ever faced. You and your family have the right to be protected from all contagious diseases, including AIDS - the deadliest of them all.

Lantz claimed earlier this year that ``Any politician who opposes this proposition will be defeated, but virtually all the candidates on next month's California ballot oppose it. Polls indicate the proposition is running behind among the approximately 40 percent of the voters familiar with it.

— "Initiative on AIDS in California will gauge public's fear of disease;" THOMAS D. ELIAS. Houston Chronicle Houston, Tex.: Nov 2, 1986. pg. 20

More bitterness surrounded Proposition 64, the AIDS initiative that would force authorities to test for the fatal virus, collect the names of its victims and remove them from schools and some jobs.

The initiative, mounted by political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, drew anger from the homosexual community and alarm from the scientific arena. Medical leaders nationwide stepped out in opposition to the initiative, stating in television and radio ads that the measure would devastate AIDS research and blood supplies.

Its backers distributed more than a million pamphlets printed at the LaRouche national headquarters in Virginia that promote his unique vision that AIDS is spread by casual contact, insects and U.S. economic policies. They have also produced television spots aired free by some stations to provide balance on the issue.

A dozen loosely affiliated groups have reported spending more than $2 million to defeat the measure, while LaRouche's political forces have spent $283,000-almost all donated by various LaRouche organizations. Proposition 64 trails in the polls, but many voters say they are undecided.

— California Elections Measures: AIDS, English-Only and Limits on Pay Put California in the Limelight;" CATHLEEN DECKER. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Nov 2, 1986. pg. 3
  • In the middle-class community of Ventura, LaRouche supporters have set up tables outside post offices and supermarkets with their petitions denouncing homosexuals. One local minister who refused to sign was called 'a queer' and his mother a 'lesbian'.
    • "California extremist whips up Aids crusade / US public health debate stirred up by controversial politician Lyndon LaRouche". The Times. London. November 1 1986.

Experts on the LaRouche organization say they doubt that LaRouche cares at all about stopping AIDS or helping its victims. "Considering his view of gays as subhumans, the logical belief for him would be the more AIDS the better," says Russ Bellant, a consultant on right-wing groups. Publications of the LaRouche organization are peppered with words like "faggot" and "queer," along with allusions to the possible need for violence against gays, whom the LaRouchians generally equate with child molesters. [..] Big Lie Number One: Gay Equals Jewish

This is an old theme with the LaRouchians. Their newspaper New Solidarity raved in the late 1970s against the "faggot politics" of "Zionist-supporting" gay activists, but the publication also targeted Jews who were not part of the gay community. A cartoon strip depicted New York investment banker Felix Rohatyn (regarded by the LaRouchians as a central figure in the world Jewish conspiracy) as participating in a homosexual banquet with other prominent New York Jews, including Mayor Edward I. Koch (labeled the "Emperor of Homohattan") and union leader Albert Shanker ("Albertius Judas").

In the following years, the LaRouchians repeatedly accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionists of homosexuality--of being part of an international "Homintern." LaRouche wrote a broadside on Henry Kissinger which he entitled "The Politics of Faggotry." According to LaRouche, Kissinger's alleged "heathen sexual inclinations" are merely an integral part of a larger evil," adding that "psychologically," Kissinger is of "a distinct species." Earlier, writing on psychoanalysis, LaRouche taught that the alleged pathology of the Jewish family, especially that of the "Jewish mother," produces sexual problems and repulsive psychological traits in young Jews. That idea has recently been refined. The March 7 issue of LaRouche's newspaper included an article, "Jewish Mothers in the Age of Aquarius," which expressed, through a sick joke, the idea that homosexuality is the natural outgrowth of being raised by a Jewish mother. Big Lie Number Two: Jews Promote Immorality

In a November 1985 speech, LaRouche called AIDS a "manmade evil" and linked it to "evil cults out of Babylon" (the LaRouchians see the origins of the "cult" of Judaism in Babylon, and, like the Ku Klux Klan, they frequently use Babylon as a code word for Jews). In "The End of the Age of Aquarius" (January 1986)--a long rambling tirade against the Babylonians, the "British" (another LaRouche code word), Henry Kissinger, "usurers," and "cabalists" (practitioners of a Jewish mystical tradition)--LaRouche stated, "Homosexuality was organized in the United States. It wasn’t something that sprang from the weeds...It was organized..."

These two pieces are not unique in the LaRouchian canon. Prop. 64's sponsor has charged in numerous articles over the past decade that the oligarchical enemy encourages sodomy, sodomic rites, a homosexual lifestyle, and a homosexual state of mind, all as a conspiratorial means of controlling the masses and undermining Western civilization. Big Lie Number Three: Jews Stand in the Way of the Fight Against AIDS

LaRouche, in an October 1985 article linking the U.S. government's monetary policy to AIDS, said, "Shylock demands his pound of flesh, and cares not in the least whether the collection kills the debtor." LaRouche continued, "Shylocks have their own reasons. To unleash the kinds of public health measures needed to stop AIDS' spread, would require a dumping of the present policies of the international monetary system..."

Of course, it follows from the latter belief, in LaRouche's conspiratorial logic, that anyone who opposes LaRouche's plan for fighting AIDS must be working for the Shylocks and is probably also Jewish. In an August 18 article, LaRouche lashed out at "Meyer Lansky's and Sidney Korshak's Hollywood" for opposing Prop. 64. And an August 25 joke column in LaRouche's newspaper said that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B’rith had launched a new stop LaRouche committee called "AiDsL."

Not surprisingly, there are close parallels between LaRouche's ideas about AIDS and Hitler's thoughts on syphilis, as set down in Mein Kampf (1925). Syphilis, like AIDS, is sexually transmitted, and in the 1920s there was no cure. Hitler focused on it because of his concern about maintaining the purity of the Aryan race and preventing contamination of the Aryan "blood." He blamed victims of syphilis, especially prostitutes, for spreading it, just as LaRouche today blames gays for spreading AIDS. Hitler believed that sexual promiscuity and prostitution were the result of "Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct"; he thus called syphilis the "Jewish disease." Contrast this with LaRouche, who fulminates about "Sodom and Gomorrah" and the "Babylonian disease."

Hitler's answer to the syphilis problem was to call for a quarantine of prostitutes and other syphilis victims: "[T]here must be no half-measures; the gravest and most ruthless decisions will have to be made. It is a half-measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones....[I]f necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated--a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow man and posterity."

LaRouche, in "The End of the Age of Aquarius," urges much the same idea: "[W]e’ve got to contain [AIDS], we can’t find a miracle cure that fast; we’re going to have to use methods of public health, which means we're going to have to put away every carrier until they can no longer carry; and if you don’t do that, you don’t care about your neighbor or your children.”

In reading the section of Mein Kampf dealing with syphilis and the section of LaRouche's "Aquarius" piece dealing with AIDS, one finds numerous parallels. Hitler says there "is no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity." LaRouche says that it's "nonsense" to be concerned with the "civil rights" of AIDS patients. Hitler criticizes the authorities for not "summoning up the energy to take decisive measures" and for their attitude of "total capitulation." LaRouche says the U.S. government is afraid to "estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers." Hitler says that for people who refuse to fight to save their own health, "the right to live in this world of struggle ends"; LaRouche says that the American people, unless they change their attitude to AIDS and their "moral direction," will "no longer [be] fit to survive morally, and will not survive."

Where do such ideas take us? Neither Mein Kampf nor the writings of LaRouche openly call for putting Jews or political dissenters into concentration camps. Both the 1920s Nazi policy on syphilis and the LaRouche policy on AIDS claim to focus on isolating disease carriers in order to save lives.

Hitler's rhetorical caution is understandable in retrospect. He was the jailed leader of a relatively small and powerless movement (not all that much bigger than LaRouche’s) when he dictated Mein Kampf in his prison cell. Fully revealing his hand would only have delayed his release from prison. Yet he stated clearly, in his discussion of how to fight syphilis, that this struggle was towards an esoteric higher goal: "The leadership [must] succeed in representing to the people the partial goal which now has to be achieved, or rather conquered, as the one which is solely and alone worthy of attention, on whose conquest everything depends. The great mass of people cannot see the whole road ahead of them without growing weary and despairing of the task." [italics added]

LaRouche is considerably more candid than this. He and his followers aggressively link the struggle for an AIDS quarantine with the need for a new ideological "paradigm” for America. Indeed, in an August 22, 1986 editorial, LaRouche's newspaper suggested that the AIDS crisis might become the springboard for a "nationalist" revolution.

How LaRouche’s AIDS policy meshes with such a fantasy is seen in LaRouchian propaganda calling for the rounding up of prostitutes, gays, drug users--anyone who might have been exposed to the so-called "AIDS virus”--and placing all "carriers" in "special isolation hospitals, under prison guard if necessary." (The quote is from a statement by the LaRouchian candidate for sheriff of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, last fall.) The implications are also seen in passages of the "Aquarius" article in which LaRouche discusses the possible need to "hang" or "burn" those he believes are responsible for AIDS.

Spokesmen for California’s gay community who say that Prop. 64 calls for concentration camps are, technically speaking, overstating their case. The measure on the ballot contains no such language. But the ideology and rhetoric of Lyndon LaRouche amply demonstrate that Prop. 64 is being used to desensitize the public to the idea of concentration camps. As to other schemes up LaRouche’s sleeve: His organization is on record as calling for a "Special Prosecutor's Office" to try American "Zionists" for treason. One can only wonder if the "traitors" would join the "faggots and cocaine sniffers" in the Allegheny County "special isolation" facilities. [..] For instance, a recent article in New Solidarity by long-time LaRouche aide Tony Papert charged that the gay rights movement is controlled by a "network of pederastic satanists" who kidnap children for use as "human sacrifices" in "rituals that often feature cannibalism."

— "America's Hitler? Behind the California AIDS Initiative" By DENNIS KING New York Native, November 3, 1986 [6]
  • Last spring, the man who has accused a host of public figures of being drug dealers, homosexuals or agents of influence of the Soviet Union, burst into the national spotlight when Hart and Fairchild won the Illinois primary.
    • United Press International. November 5, 1986.
  • Denounced as an anti-Semite and a fascist, LaRouche, 64, has accused a bevy of public figures - from the queen of England to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - of being drug dealers, Soviet agents or homosexuals.
    • "Indictment says LaRouche wanted to smear official to block probe;" Houston Chronicle Houston, Tex.: Dec 17, 1986. pg. 14

1987

[edit]

As early as the spring of 1973 LaRouche had begun to articulate a psychosexual theory of political organizing and began descending into a paranoid style of historical analysis that stressed not Marxist dialectical materialism and class analysis, but macabre conspiracy theories and a subjective egocentric analysis. LaRouche warned of a global plot by the CIA/KGB to kidnap and program his membership to assassinate him. His homophobia became a central theme of the organization's conspiracy theories. He said women's feelings of degradation in modern society could be traced to the physical placement of sexual organs near the anus which caused them to confuse sex with excretion.

A September, 1973 editorial in the NCLC ideological journal <Campaigner> charged that "Concretely, all across the USA., there are workers who are prepared to fight. They are held back, most immediately, by pressure from their wives...." Writing in an August, 1973 memo, LaRouche propounded the startling and sexist psychological theory that "the principle source of impotence, both male and female, is the mother." LaRouche claimed only he could cure the political and sexual impotence of his followers. NCLC members were forced into what was called psychological therapy and "deprogramming" but were what former members call "brainwashing" and "egostripping" sessions. The NCLC rapidly became totalitarian in style, with a peculiar obsession with sexuality and homophobia used as a weapon against internal dissent." To the extent that my physical powers do not prevent me," LaRouche told his followers in August, 1973, "I am now confident and capable of ending your political--and sexual-impotence; the two are interconnected aspects of the same problem."

— "Clouds Blur the Rainbow". By Chip Berlet Public Eye Research, 1987.

Don't call Sheila Jones a minor mayoral candidate, especially to her face.[...] Jones is impatient not only with reporters but with anyone who does not subscribe to her world view--or, more accurately, to that of her political mentor, right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche. [...] To stop the spread of AIDS, which she insists "will kill us all," she proposes quarantining patients because she says the American medical community does not really know how the disease is transmitted.

Jones said the disease will spread to people outside the major risk categories--homosexual men and intravenous drug users--unless the economy provides for full employment because "disease is caused by economic breakdown."

"The solution is simple," she said. "You bring the top scientists in; you debunk this lie about condoms. If your research is based on condoms and safe sex, you're never going to get to the essence of solving the problem, which is the economy." [...]

She describes her target constituency as people "who are worried about homosexuality, morality and traditional family values."

— "LAROUCHIE DEMANDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY;" Cheryl Devall. Chicago Tribune Chicago, Ill.: Feb 16, 1987. pg. 5

Two hundred parents turned out Thursday night at the Pilsen Community Academy, 1420 W. 17th St., to hear Board of Education officials say that the parents should have no fear when a child diagnosed as having the AIDS virus enrolls in the school Monday.

However, the meeting was disrupted by about a dozen people who identified themselves as followers of Lyndon LaRouche. The disrupters sat in the front row of the auditorium, shouted that the child should not be allowed to attend the school, and kept the scheduled speakers from speaking.

After eight Chicago police officers entered the auditorium, and after many demanded that the LaRouche supporters be quiet, the meeting was able to proceed.

But, when the meeting was opened to questions from the audience, the LaRouche disciples erupted again, and the meeting was adjourned.

— LAROUCHIES DISRUPT MEETING ABOUT AIDS PUPIL; [CHICAGOLAND Edition] Jerry Thornton. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 6, 1987. pg. 3

Six people were arrested Monday during a demonstration protesting a decision by the Chicago Board of Education to allow a child who has tested positive for the AIDS virus to attend a school in the Pilsen neighborhood.

The arrests, outside the the Pilsen Community Academy, 1420 W. 17th St., have added to an already "emotionally charged" atmosphere there, said principal William Levin.

Four of those arrested, including Ernest Washington Jr., an unsuccessful candidate for city clerk in the Democratic primary last month, are disciples of right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche supporters have been organizing anti-AIDS protests in the predominantly Hispanic community near the school.

According to Monroe District police, the demonstrators rode in a van to the school shortly before 9 a.m. Monday and began distributing literature and transmitting messages in Spanish through a loudspeaker. Police at the scene tried to pull the driver out of the van, and other protesters got out to stop them.

Washington, 36, of 11444 S. Forest Ave., and another man identified as a LaRouche supporter, David Vizcarro, 30, of 655 W. Irving Park Rd., were charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Thomas Szymecko, 41, of 5638 N. Wayne Ave., was charged with disorderly conduct and was given two traffic citations for disobeying police and obstructing traffic with a van he drove to the demonstration. Steven Carr, 29, of the same address, was charged with disorderly conduct. [Two other arrested were parents.] [..]

LaRouche organizers had marched at the school last week and had disrupted an informational meeting for parents. During the weekend, the LaRouche supporters had driven through neighborhood streets exhorting parents over a loudspeaker to keep their children out of the school until the matter is resolved to their satisfaction, Levin said. He added that attendance at Pilsen was about 90 percent of normal Monday.[..]

— "6 ARE ARRESTED AT PILSEN SCHOOL AIDS PROTEST;" Cheryl Devall and Philip Wattley. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 10, 1987. pg. 3

Gloria Arriaga stood in front of Pilsen Community Academy Tuesday and steered children away from the demonstrators handing out anti-AIDS literature.

"I wish they would just leave it and let these kids come to school," said Arriaga, the mother of a student at Pilsen. "Everybody needs an education. I don't want my kids to not have an education and get $3.35 an hour as a factory worker." [..] However, the Pilsen parents not only must cope with their own fears about the disease, but also with the noisy demonstrations by supporters of right- wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche

Those protests have marred attempts by Chicago Board of Education officials to follow an example set in January by the Wilmette school district, which held informational meetings for parents in an attempt to balance their concerns and fears against medical information. Wilmette's Central Elementary School was the first in the state to announce that a pupil who had AIDS would be permitted to attend class.

At Pilsen Community Academy, 1420 W. 17th St., principal William Levin said, "We are in a hand-to-hand combat situation with LaRouchies. There's no question that they are mounting a concerted effort to use this school as a focal point to prey on the fears of the parents."

School officials attempted to hold an informational meeting last Thursday to address the fears of parents after it was announced that a preschooler who has tested positive for AIDS would be allowed to enroll at Pilsen. However, the meeting was disrupted by LaRouche supporters and had to be ended.

During the weekend, vans with loudspeakers warned residents to not send their children to school, and on Monday, six people--four of them identified as LaRouche supporters--were arrested during a protest in front of the school. [..] The furor has made some parents anxious and angry that LaRouche supporters are meddling in their neighborhood.

"If the LaRouche people would get out of our community, the parents would accept it. All they did was complicate things. The child is still a human being," said a woman whose children attend a nearby school. [..] For now, Arriaga said, she will continue to walk her child home.

"I have a child here. I went to this school and my great-niece is enrolled. That's three generations," she said.

Of the LaRouche supporters, Arriaga said, "They don't have kids here. This is our neighborhood. Let us fight it out."

— PILSEN WRESTLES WITH AIDS FEARS, LAROUCHE TACTICS; [SPORTS FINAL, C Edition] Karen M Thomas. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Mar 11, 1987. pg. 1


  • Parents and school officials in the Pilsen community have earned applause for the way they have faced the challenge of a child with AIDS. ... Beyond that, the Pilsen parents have been subjected to shrill badgering by a bunch of LaRouche cultists who, for their own mysterious reasons, have decided to turn this into a cause. ... The LaRouche gang repeatedly has disrupted such meetings, held sidewalk rallies and passed out scare leaflets, all in an effort to frighten parents into resisting the child's enrollment. Why? No one outside the cult is likely to figure that out. It's what Lyndon LaRouche thinks, so it is what his followers think.
    • "PILSEN PARENTS VS. THE BOGEYMEN" [editorial] Chicago Tribune Chicago, Ill.: Mar 14, 1987. pg. 10
  • He describes homosexuals as "a well-connected network of pederastic satanists," and native Indians as "a miserable, relatively bestial culture."
    • "U.S. extremist called threat to Canadian democracy;" Olivia Ward Toronto Star. Toronto Star. Toronto, Ont.: Mar 31, 1987. pg. A.8

There are grounds for doubt. In late July 1976, a seemingly new disease appeared in persons attending the American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Legionnaires' disease was subsequently found to be caused by a newly discovered bacterium, and to have been around, unrecognized, for 20 years. In the six months between the outbreak at the Legion convention and isolation of Legionella pneumonophila, health authorities were deluged with theories of the disease's origin varying from the Jews (yet again) to eating infected pork.

Finally, the US Labour Party put out a two-page 'Fact Sheet' on the Philadelphia disease that was wholly bereft of facts. The Labour Party concluded that the malady was swine flu (which struck the United States that same year), and that this fact was being suppressed by Senator Edward Kennedy, and Senators Schweiker, Javits and Mondale, who had opposed the swine flu programme. The outbreak of 'swine flu' in Philadelphia would expose the Senators' position 'for the genocidal policy it in fact is'.

The US Labour Party is noteworthy not just as the standard-bearer of galloping paranoia, but because it subsequently metamorphosed into the National Democratic Policy Committee. This is part of the hydra-headed organization run by right-wing extremist Lyndon H LaRouche, Jr. whose views on AIDS are the modern manifestation of the plague mentality - one that has captured a massive popular following in the US.

The LaRouchean crusade against AIDS is outlined in a Special Report of the Executive Intelligence Review1 (EIR), a weekly magazine published by LaRouche and his associates. This report, entitled 'An emergency war plan to fight AIDS and other pandemics,' was prepared by the EIA Biological Holocaust Task Force under the the direction of Warren J. Hamerman. The central thesis is that AIDS is being downplayed (and may even have been created as a biological weapon) by the US Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Soviet Union, the CIA, the Pentagon, etc., in one or another combination (like lepers, Jews, and the king of Grenada). This conspiracy involves a variety of dramatis personae including Dr Armand Hammer, Donald Regan (at the time of writing still President Reagan's chief of staff), Henry Kissinger and many others.

The motive for the cover-up by the various agencies and people, in LaRouche's view, is that AIDS will decimate the African continent (another genocidal policy), eliminating a large number of 'useless eaters' and thereby make the continent a better investment for the IMF, World Bank, etc.

The cover-up in the US, according to EIR, is necessary because Donald Regan realises that dealing effectively with the disease would destroy the Administration's budget.

The LaRoucheans believe with passionate intensity that AIDS is spread by casual contact, despite the irrefutable evidence that it is not. Part of the Special Report presents the PANIC (Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee) measure that became Proposition 64 in the November 1986 California election.

Proposition 64 required that all cases of AIDS be reported, and that carriers of the AIDS virus (i.e. those with antibodies to it) could not be teachers, employees, or students in public or private schools and could not be employed as commercial food handlers. 'The State is obliged to test and quarantine as much as required to stop the spread of the disease.'

Realistic measures to reduce the spread of AIDS through 'safe sex' (see article) are held in utter contempt by LaRouche and his associates, as they must be if they believe that AIDS is spread by casual contact. John Seale, a Harley Street consultant on venereal disease, toured the US prior to the California election giving unqualified support to Proposition 64, with the predictable result that he became a darling of the LaRouche organization.

The Centers for Disease Control, The California Medical Association, The California Public Health Association, the American Red Cross, the deans of California's distinguished schools of public health, the Governor of California and both Democratic Senator Alan Cranston and his Republican opponent, Ed Zschau, were appalled by Proposition 64. It was defeated by a two to one margin.

It is my personal belief that the human spirit has been elevated since the Middle Ages. Indeed we are no longer burning witches and the good news is that Proposition 64 was resoundingly defeated. Even so, a full one-third of the electorate voted 'yes'. The measure was carefully advertised to the gullible as a simple requirement for reporting the disease. To this the celebrated person in the street might readily assent. Few bothered, I would guess, actually to read what was being proposed.

The bad news is that Proposition 64 lives on, as does the plague mentality that gave it birth. LaRouche assures us that it will surface in subsequent elections both in the US and abroad. The cover story of the Executive Intelligence Review for 21 November 1986 was 'Britain battles to survive against AIDS, drugs, terror.' The cure for the first of these, in EIR's view, is a British Proposition 64 for which majority support was allegedly given in polls conducted by the This Week television programme, and by the Sunday newspapers The Observer, and The People.

— Charles Gregg, a microbiologist, is scientific director of Los Alamos Diagnostics. He is the author of Plague! and The Virus of Love and other Tales of Medical Detection, both published by the University of New Mexico Press. new internationalist issue 169 - March 1987 [7]
  • Last week, federal agents in the U.S. seized the Leesburg, Va., headquarters of the ultra-right-wing LaRouche who dismisses the Holocaust as a delusion, denounces Jews, Catholics, homosexuals and Indians and espouses theories of world conspiracy.
    • "Minority-rights group calls for a crackdown on LaRouche;" By ANN LAUGHLIN of The Gazette. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Apr 29, 1987. pg. A.4

Gay City Councilor David Scondras accused fellow Councilor Albert "Dapper" O'Neil of supporting right-wing extremist and AIDS quarantine proponent Lyndon LaRouche at a June 10 City Council meeting.

O'Neil responded by taunting Scondras to "get up and be a man, if that is possible."

The conflict erupted as a result of a speech by self-proclaimed "AIDS expert" Dr. John Seale, who advocated universal mandatory testing in his 20 minute speech before the City Council. Seale, who believes that doctors, scientists and "homosexuals" have conspired to create the illusion of an AIDS "epidemic," was invited by City Council President Burce Boiling. Boiling said he invited Seale as a courtesy to O'Neil, but admitted that "he knew nothing about him."

Seale, a veneriologist at St. Thomas Hospital in England, was recommended to O'Neil by Richard Black, a perennial LaRouche candidate for office in Massachusetts, Black was indicted last year for credit card fraud involving fundraising for LaRouche's organization.

O'Neil, who did not return calls from GCN, has ties to LaRouche dating back to 1975 when he introduced tax legislation on behalf of the group. O'Neil agreed to renounce LaRouche and Seale in exchange for an apology from Scondras. Scondras grudgingly obliged.

— "Scondras Assails Dapper on LaRouche Support" Bull, Chris. Gay Community News. Boston: Jun 14-Jun 20, 1987. Vol. 14, Iss. 46; pg. 1
  • Political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, in his first public appearance in the United States in six months, said yesterday the AIDS crisis and an economic collapse would propel him to the presidency. He predicted there will be 10 million to 20 million AIDS cases in the United States in the 1990s.
    • "Around New England LaRouche: AIDS crisis will lead to his presidency" Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: Jun 28, 1987. pg. A-31
  • There are those out there who despise Dr. Robert Gallo. He discovered the cause of AIDS and is now at work on a vaccine, and yet he needs only to open his mail or make a trip, and there they are, the bizarre accusations, the flashes of hatred. Recently, critics in the Eastern Bloc accused him of creating the AIDS virus in his lab in Bethesda as a weapon of chemical warfare. A few months ago in Wiesbaden, he had to walk past a phalanx of West German acolytes of Lyndon LaRouche who were passing out leaflets denouncing him. He has had to stand before a huge audience at Cambridge University and listen as a British scientist in the audience, Alexander Karpas, accused him of stealing key AIDS data from a lab in Paris.
    • "Robert Gallo Goes To War; America's Leading AIDS researcher just can't stop fighting- whether it's against disease, his fellow scientists or his own ego;" David Remnick. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Aug 9, 1987. pg. w.10

A woman who works with AIDS victims was found not guilty Tuesday of battering a grass roots organizer linked with Lyndon LaRouche. [...] While testifying during the district court trial, Kevin E. Pearl of Baltimore claimed that Lark E. Lands crumpled literature and spat on him twice outside the post office on June 12. Prosecutors had charged Ms. Lands with battering Pearl during a struggle. Pearl is a grass roots organizer for the National Democratic Policy Committee. Lyndon LaRouche was the chairman emeritus before he withdrew to run for president of the United States. Ms. Lands, 36, lives in Frederick County and works with AIDS victims in Washington. She was outraged by posters she saw outside the post office which she recalled saying: "Kill the faggots. Kill Elizabeth Taylor." [...] Dana Scanlon, press spokesperson for the LaRouche Democratic Campaign, said that the National Democratic Policy Committee representatives who visit the Frederick post office want "to help fight AIDS politically, to return to traditional health measures."

— Olnick, Philip (SEPTEMBER 2. 1987). "Woman who works with AIDS victims found not guilty of battery". THE FREDERICK POST. (FREDERICK. MD).

LaRouche's followers denounce every critic-prosecutors, politicians, people at the airport who disagree with them-as cretins, communists, traitors or homosexuals. They believe the world is in danger of imminent collapse for any number of reasons, which vary-nuclear war, global starvation, and lately AIDS. They think LaRouche is the planet's only chance for survival-and people must be crazed not to accept him. [...] The federal indictment alleges that, soon after the FBI started investigating the group in 1984, members discussed ways to scuttle the probe, sent witnesses to Europe to keep them from investigators, hid and burned subpoenaed documents, investigated the friends and family of the prosecutor, even put out leaflets saying he was a homosexual and a dope pusher. Their failure to respond to the grand jury prompted contempt of court judgments of $21 million, and the forced bankruptcy of three LaRouche companies.

— "Inside the Weird World of Lyndon LaRouche;" John Mintz. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Sep 20, 1987. pg. c.01
  • The indictment describes relentless fund-raising quotas that individuals were required to meet and the consequences if they did not: "Those having failed were accused of disloyalty and told to stay at the chapter all night to catch up. They were ridiculed in front of other members. . . . They were taunted publicly that their sex life had obviously failed and would continue to do so if their fund-raising did not improve. They were berated as homosexuals, lesbians, drunks or prostitutes, all in front of their peers."
    • "LaRouche trial: Sure to be a spellbinder" SUSAN LEVINE Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: Oct 20, 1987. pg. A-16

Followers of extremist Lyndon LaRouche have placed a new AIDS initiative on the California ballot that is nearly identical to Proposition 64, the measure soundly rejected by voters a year ago.

Secretary of State March Fong Eu announced Monday that initiative petitions turned in by the LaRouche followers, Khushro Ghandhi and Brian Lantz, carried signatures of 508,695 voters, about 100,000 more than required.

The initiative, which will appear on the June, 1988, ballot, is essentially the same as Proposition 64, spokesmen for Eu and Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp said. It would require doctors and local health officials to report the names of AIDS patients and people who test positive for AIDS antibodies. Both AIDS patients and those with positive tests would be subject to quarantine laws, the official state summary of the measure says.

A year ago, health officials and gay groups joined in a campaign that spent nearly $3 million to defeat the LaRouche effort. Opponents said Proposition 64 was a thinly veiled attack on homosexuals by LaRouche, who has a long history of writings abusive to gays, and would only hurt efforts to find a cure for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. It was defeated by a 71% to 29% margin.

— "Followers of LaRouche Put AIDS Initiative on June Ballot"KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Dec 1, 1987. pg. 3

The pleasant-looking men and women who gathered outside Chicago's Pilsen Community Academy in March of 1987 looked like Jehovah's Witnesses in their go-to-meeting clothes, but the message they brought was not the Word. "The blood of your own children will be on your hands," they shouted, "if you allow this child with AIDS in your school." Those words, uttered by strangers eventually unmasked as camp followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, words that would scare anyone, were particularly chilling to the people living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. [...]

LaRouche had made AIDS a cornerstone of his political agenda, with the slogan "Spread panic, not AIDS." His National Democratic Policy Committee platform called for mass AIDS testing and quarantining of all those-by now, numbering in the millions-who had been exposed to the virus. In California the previous fall, LaRouche followers had gotten an AIDS quarantine proposition on the ballot. It took a $2 million campaign to defeat the proposition, and LaRouche had vowed to go to the voters again.

Schools were an obvious place for Lyndon LaRouche's forces to spread panic. As early as the fall of 1985 they had vainly tried to stir things up in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. More recently, in Granby, Conn., a small town just outside Hartford, Paul Cameron, a psychologist and ally of LaRouche's, crusaded-also unsuccessfully-against allowing a child with AIDS in school.

The LaRouchites know how to fight dirty-when they are trying to silence an opponent, they are trained to shout "He has AIDS! He has AIDS!"-but in sedate Wilmette they prudently couched their message in the quieter terms of pseudoscience. LaRouche supporters handed out leaflets to parents attending the informational meetings and stuck fliers on the windshields of the parents' cars. Several hundred families received a fat packet of articles from the New American, the party's house organ, warning what happens "When Perversion Prospers" and issuing an "AIDS Warning: The Surgeon General's Report May Be Hazardous to Your Health." The weekend after Wilmette's announcement, a sound truck broadcasting the LaRouche message of fear cruised the streets.

The Wilmette police quickly put a stop to the campaign: They escorted the sound truck to the edge of town, and they shooed off the leafleteers. Local ordinances banning sound trucks and requiring permits before leafleting backed them up. [...] Levin knew that there was no way to keep the Pilsen Academy situation wholly out of politics in a city where even the most trivial event of daily life can become a matter of clout. The principal's hope was to make sure that the politics stayed localized, and that meant persuading all the constituencies in the neighborhood, the parents and politicians and priests, that they could live with the decision. Levin knew that if he failed, if the community wound up being split over AIDS, there would be serious trouble.

The meeting came off without a serious hitch, as did Bill Levin's other attempts that week to touch base with everyone who had a stake in the AIDS issue. It was only some days later, when Lyndon LaRouche's followers made a determined effort to broaden the issue by evoking a panic that knew no geography, that the effort to emulate Wilmette began to unravel. [...] Following the procedure that had worked well in Wilmette, questions would be submitted in advance; since many of the parents spoke only Spanish, several teachers had been lined up to translate. But before the question-and-answer period could begin, the supporters of Lyndon LaRouche turned the meeting into a wide-open brawl.

This was not the LaRouchites' first adventure in Pilsen, nor were all the LaRouchites outsiders. "I was born in Pilsen," said Herman Garza, a staunch LaRouche supporter. "We work here, we organize." In 1979 the LaRouche organization held its first public meeting in Pilsen; a year later, when Lyndon LaRouche ran for president, he campaigned in the streets of Pilsen.

Driving home from his meeting with Joe Lee earlier in the week, Levin had spotted a van belonging to the National Democratic Policy Committee, LaRouche's party, which was fielding candidates in the upcoming Chicago elections. "Quarantine All AIDS Cases," read the banner hanging from the van, and Levin shuddered. During the first days of March, while the principal readied himself for the forthcoming community meeting, things were quiet in Pilsen. The hotline had almost no calls, and Levin caught himself thinking that "this could be a piece of cake." But the LaRouche activists were busy taking their message of fear door-to-door in Pilsen.

Several of Levin's old antagonists were among the parents that the LaRouchites conscripted to their cause. Their reaction was partly genuine fear about AIDS, partly Pilsen politics.

It wasn't clear until the March 5 meeting just how effective the LaRouche forces had been, and by then it was too late. "When I came home at 3 that morning," Levin recalls, "I crawled into bed and told my wife that I wanted to cry. . . . We had tried so hard to keep the LaRouchies out by using lists of all the parents, but they slipped past us by posing as spouses of single parents."

Nearly 500 people crowded into the school's auditorium that meeting night. Every seat was filled, and people stood in the aisles. For the first half hour, things went smoothly enough. But when Levin began to speak about the "misconceptions" that surrounded the youngster who would be enrolled at Pilsen, the LaRouche supporters, who had positioned themselves in the front rows of the auditorium, made their move. "Liar, liar," they started shouting, as Levin pleaded vainly for a chance to communicate the facts. "Where are the guarantees?" they yelled, and then demanded that the matter be put to a vote.

Levin tried switching to the questions and answers, but when the shouting persisted, he returned to the planned format. There was a brief calm when Dr. Lonnie Edwards, commissioner of the city's Health Department, beseeched the audience to "open up your ears and hear the truth we have to tell you. Use your minds, use your hearts." Then the tumult began all over again.

Levin turned to LaRouche sympathizer Garza, who had loudly been demanding the floor, and invited him to speak. Levin thought he had a deal-Garza would talk and the session would continue-but Garza rushed the stage, bent on taking over. At that moment, a furious Raquel Guerrero gave Garza a shove, and pandemonium broke out. It was mano a mano in the auditorium as LaRouche backers mixed it up with angry parents. "Is this Russia?" the LaRouche supporters cried when members of the Chicago police force, who had let the school administrators know that they would intervene only if things got violent, began carting off the antagonists. The meeting collapsed.

As Levin and Saigh spent the succeeding days planning a series of 24 simultaneous AIDS information sessions to be held on March 12 at Pilsen Academy and carefully limited to parents, the LaRouche supporters stepped up their noisemaking. They spent the weekend cruising the neighborhood, exhorting parents to keep their children home. On Monday, March 9, 190 children stayed away from the 1,000-student school, four times the usual number of absences. Many parents had brought their children to school but were scared off by talk of a bomb inside the school. [...] Outside the school, the LaRouche activists were picketing, blaring their message in Spanish. "This school is being used as an AIDS experiment because it is a minority school," they claimed. Raquel Guerrero stood down her antagonists. "Go home! Go home!" she demanded, waving her finger in the face of the leaders, while other parents encircled the LaRouche contingent with signs saying "LaRouche Must Go" and "LaRouchies Are AIDS." Levin, who had anticipated the LaRouche protest, called the police; when they tried to move the demonstrators along, the LaRouche contingent became "very combative," in the words of the police. Six people were arrested, including two parents of Pilsen children. [...] Levin looked like a leader, too. "We will listen to parents and respond to their concerns," Levin told the TV reporters. "We've got 90 percent of the parents now," Levin said on March 10, the second day of the LaRouche- organized boycott, when absences had been cut in half. "Our job is to convince the other 10 percent." By week's end, as even the most skeptical parents began bringing their children back to school in the aftermath of the AIDS informational meetings, both The Tribune and the Sun-Times offered editorial pats on the back to the "responsible" citizens of Pilsen. [...] These neighbohood leaders had been led to believe that the AIDS dispute could be readily contained, that there really were no serious medical concerns. The appearance of LaRouche backers gave them another reason to side with the schools, for it was important to them that LaRouche not gain added support in Pilsen. Several years earlier, in a fight over the placement of a drug treatment center in Pilsen, Gutierrez and Guerrero had been wooed by the LaRouchites, who had concealed their identities. "They wound us all up," remembers Gutierrez. Guerrero had even been sent to a convention of the National Democratic Policy Committee in Detroit. "A bunch of walking mummies," Guerrero called the conventioners, who cheered every word of their leader. "I didn't want to listen to this philosophy of hatred." Pilsen had to be preserved as their turf, not Lyndon LaRouche's. [...] Yet by this time, nearly three weeks after Levin had first learned that a child exposed to AIDS would be assigned in Pilsen, things were back to normal at the school. The LaRouche contingent had vanished. [...] By the end of the school year, it was hard to locate a parent in Pilsen who would admit to harboring serious misgivings about what the school had done, harder still to find anyone who would acknowledge any sympathy for the LaRouche contingent.

— "THE HIGH ROAD WHEN A CHILD WITH AIDS COMES TO SCHOOL, IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE A CRISIS; " Article by David L. Kirp. David L. Kirp is a professor of Public Policy and lecturer in law at the University of California in Berkeley He has spent the last 18 months researching "Suffer the Children," a book on AIDS in U S schools, for fall, 1988,. Chicago Tribune 'Chicago, Ill.: Dec 6, 1987. pg. 12 [Note, the article is just under 15,000 words.]

1988

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  • [Claude] Jones said he agrees with LaRouche's charge that "the British royal family has historically been involved in narcotics trafficking" and that some big banks in England are allowing AIDS to be spread in certain countries as a means of population control.
    • "CAMPAIGN '88/Dem leaders plot to thwart role of LaRouche cohort" NENE FOXHALL, Houston Chronicle Political Editor Houston Chronicle March 10, 1988:1.

Even two conservative politicians who supported Proposition 64 have said they are backing away from its successor. Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who signed the ballot argument for the 1986 measure, said he will not support Proposition 69 because he does not want to be linked with LaRouche.

"He is a political extremist with his own agenda," Dannemeyer said. "Let him paddle his own canoe. I don't want anything to do with him."

Denounces LaRouche

State Sen. John Doolittle (R-Rocklin), another Proposition 64 supporter, denounced LaRouche as "a very clever manipulator" who has a "hidden agenda." Doolittle, the author of a number of bills to promote widespread testing for AIDS, said he will oppose Proposition 69.

[...] In a separate legal action in California, three LaRouche aides will face court hearings in Los Angeles in coming weeks on charges they fraudulently collected signatures to qualify Proposition 64 for the ballot.

The proponents of Proposition 69 are saying little about their campaign plans and would not discuss how much money they expect to spend. During the 1986 campaign, they spent little on Proposition 64 once it had qualified for the ballot but circulated a booklet on AIDS prepared by LaRouche's headquarters in Virginia.

"We will definitely mount a very serious campaign," said Duree, the proponents' spokesman. "The campaign is going to focus on educating people about the threat that AIDS poses. We think there's a lot of support for measures like this."

In the kind of rhetoric LaRouche and his followers are noted for, Duree also accused the Proposition 64 opponents of mounting a dishonest campaign against the measure and a "witch hunt of Lyndon LaRouche."

"It was the big lie campaign reminiscent of the KGB or the Nazis which completely misrepresented the contents of the initiative itself," he said.

He also accused government and health officials of hiding the extent of the AIDS epidemic to avoid spending funds on the disease. "There's general agreement that there's been an AIDS cover-up in the interest of not spending the large amounts of money needed to combat this epidemic," Duree said.

— "LaRouche Back With a New AIDS Proposition, Old Pitch;" RICHARD C. PADDOCK. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: Apr 24, 1988. pg. 3
  • Before the hearing began, 12 members of a Lyndon Larouche organization gathered on City Hall Plaza to protest the needle-exchange program. The protesters held placards, dispensed Larouche literature and took turns on a bullhorn denouncing Flynn's proposal. A spokesman for the group, Anthony DeFranco, said the plan amounted to "a surrender," adding: "We've got to always be against drugs, and government has to represent that. This is like saying drugs are all right."
    • "TACKLE AIDS, HELP ADDICTS, SPEAKERS URGE CITY COUNCIL;" Peggy Hernandez, Globe Staff. Boston Globe . Boston, Mass.: Apr 13, 1988. pg. 77
  • Although a similar measure, Proposition 64, lost 71 percent to 29 percent in 1986, campaign press secretary Jim Duree said he is "cautiously optimistic" that Prop. 69 will pass. "Most people are sick and tired of AIDS being in a special category and want it to be treated as the deadly infectious disease it really is," he said. [..] A California Poll survey late last month indicated that of the 46 percent of those familar with the measure, 28 percent opposed Prop. 69 while only 9 percent endorsed it. When told what the initiative would do, 72 percent of the surveyed voters said they would vote against Prop. 69. "The poll is an obvious fraud," Duree said. He charged that pollsters deliberately worded questions to prejudice respondents against the initiative. Duree said the poll and the campaign against Prop. 69 are part of a "big lie ... witch hunt" being run by Los Angeles oilman-philanthropist Armand Hammer and movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
    • "LaRouche backers repeat anti-AIDS initiative". marc Lifsher:The Register. Orange County Register. Santa Ana, Calif.: May 7, 1988. pg. A.03
  • At the rally of gays and lesbians in Sacramento's Capitol Park, [Jesse] Jackson called Proposition 69, the AIDS initiative on the June 7 ballot, "an ineffective and punitive response born out of bigotry and panic." He said the AIDS-quarantine initiative sponsored by political extremist Lyndon LaRouche is an example of "the homophobia, the racism, the irrational and divisive fear, the victim-baiting that impede our efforts to combat this disease."
    • "Jackson challenges Bush's `stability' : Candidate reacts to `hustler' reference; hits amnesty bill;" John Marelius. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: May 8, 1988. pg. A.12


"It's going to be extremely explosive," said Jim Duree, spokesman of Prevent AIDS Now-Yes on 69. "They're going to present a very hopeful picture of how we can win the war with the AIDS virus, as opposed to this current cultural climate of hopelessness and pessimism." [...] In an interview last December, however, LaRouche said he promotes the quarantine of AIDS virus carriers in the hope that "a controlled panic" will ensue, and greater funding for AIDS research will result. [...] In fact, the low-profile campaign has fostered speculation that its backers never gave the measure a realistic chance of success, but have used it to promote the extremist LaRouche philosophy and to draw attention to his current bid for the White House.

Fueling speculation further is the fact that, though Duree referred to the broadcast and pamphlet as "the finale for the campaign," his committee will pick up the tab for neither.

Duree said that the "tens of thousands" of pamphlets titled "Victory over AIDS: Why You Must Vote for Proposition 69" are being published by the LaRouche-run National Democratic Policy Committee, and will also feature LaRouche. [...] Proposition 69 is based on the premise that AIDS can be transmitted through casual contact, such as sneezing and kissing, and through mosquito bites.

[...] Duree of the pro-69 campaign said, in response, that the medical profession and the governor are afraid of the potential costs of a LaRouche-style battle against AIDS, and thus have joined in a "Big Lie" cover-up of the facts.

"It is the penny-pinching economic austerity policy of the Eastern liberal establishment banking families who own the Reagan- Bush administration and who also own (Massachussets Gov. Michael) Dukakis," Duree said. "It's Armand Hammer's crowd in Hollywood which is running this Mafia. This is Liz Taylor's crowd. It's the astrology crowd, the American Federation for AIDS Research ... It's part of that political intelligence network."

Duree also termed "sociological lunacy" the claim that Proposition 69 would drive AIDS virus carriers away from health care programs, contending that 90 percent of carriers today are unaware of their condition.

Quarantining is "completely appropriate for people who are willfully spreading the disease" and Proposition 69 "will take the current situation, in which AIDS is already underground, and allow us to go after this disease," he said.

— LaRouche camp to make final push for Prop. 69, Measure would regulate carriers of the AIDS virus; [1,2 Edition] Gerry Braun. The San Diego Union. San Diego, Calif.: May 29, 1988. pg. A.3
  • Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been called a Nazi and a murderer by LaRouche publications. In a deposition, LaRouche once called Kissinger "a faggot," and one of LaRouche's female followers shouted at Kissinger at an airport, "Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" prompting Kissinger's wife, Nancy, to hit her.
    • "HANDLING OF RUMORS STIRS DEBATE IN THE MEDIA" Carl M Cannon. Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, Pa.: Aug 7, 1988. pg. C.1
  • [Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, R-Fullerton] was one of two California elected officials to support extremist Lyndon LaRouche's Proposition 64, which would have provided for mandatory AIDS testing and quarantine in some cases. Dannemeyer signed an argument in favor of the proposition in the California Voters Pamphlet, but it was defeated at the polls in 1986.
    • "Dannemeyer to represent Bush at AIDS event Members of California GOP question choice of controversial congressman" Robin Goldstein, Jean O. Pasco:The Register. Orange County Register. Santa Ana, Calif.: Sep 10, 1988. pg. A.01

DEMOCRAT MARQUIS Just because he follows the policies of Lyndon LaRouche, that shouldn't "make a monster out of me," Don Marquis said recently.

Marquis, regional manager for an engineering firm, said the radical leader should be applauded for taking on the establishment of world governments and tackling unpopular issues, such as drug abuse and the AIDS epidemic. [...] However, he said he supports Dannemeyer on one issue, albeit reluctantly. Marquis said he plans to vote for Dannemeyer's Prop. 102, which would require AIDS to be treated as a communicable disease and require notification of sexual partners. He said the measure doesn't go far enough.

"I don't like it but AIDS is doubling every nine months," he said. "There are 300,000 to 1 million carriers in the state of California alone. But there's no good data because there's been no testing."

— "39th: Dannemeyer faces LaRouche backer;" The Register. Orange County Register. Santa Ana, Calif.: Oct 30, 1988. pg. L.08
  • [Commonwealth of Canada Party] The controversial party has been accused of being an anti-Semitic, racist adherent of U.S. right-wing extremist and perennial U.S. presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche, a former Trotskyite, is on record as saying that Queen Elizabeth is the head of an international drug conspiracy and that homosexuals are "pederast satanists."
    • "Life at the fringe -- and beyond Our eight 'alternative' political parties may not get much publicity -- but there's somethingg here for just about everyone; " Lynda Hurst Toronto Star. Toronto Star. Toronto, Ont.: Oct 30, 1988. pg. B.1

1989

[edit]

According to LaRouche, the methods used by the KGB and British Intelligence to brainwash the membership of NCLC caused fear of impotence and homosexuality to immobilize each member and thus destroy their capability to organize effectively. LaRouche's pronouncements can easily be dismissed as a deranged conspiracy theory--but the words reveal his emotional and intellectual state at the time of the speech. [..] While perhaps offensive to some readers, only direct quotes can fully convey the incredible nature and content of LaRouche's demented discourse:

"How do you brainwash somebody? Well, first of all, you generally pull a psychological profile or develop one in a preliminary period. You find every vulnerability of that person from a psychoanalytic standpoint. Now the next thing you do is you build them up for fear in males and females of homsexuality, aim them for an anal identification with anal sex, their mouth is identified with fellacio. Their mouth is identified only with the penis--that kind of sex, and with woman. Womanhood is the fellacio of the male mouth in a man who has been brainwashed by the KGB; that is sucking penises. . . ."

"First they say your father was nothing, your father was a queer, your father was a woman. They play very strongly on homosexual fears. It doesn't work on women. . . .Most women are to a large degree homosexual in this society. The relationship between daughter and mother is homosexual, so the thing is not much of a threat."

"But to young men it is generally a grave threat. . fears about masturbation. . . .They say, `See that sheep. Wouldn't you like to do that to a sheep?'"

"It's not the pain that brainwashes, it's forcing the victim to run away from the pain by taking the bait of degrading himself. This persistant pattern of self-degradation, self-humiliation, is what essentially accomplishes the brainwashing." [..] Sexism and homophobia became central themes of the organization's theories. A September 1973 editorial in the NCLC ideological journal charged that "Concretely, all across the U.S.A., there are workers who are prepared to fight. They are held back, most immediately, by pressure from their wives. . . ." The problem with making the revolution, LaRouche apparently had concluded, was that women are castrating bitches. One former member left in disgust when she was told women's feelings of degradation in modern society could be traced to the physical placement of female sexual organs near the anus which caused women to confuse sex with excretion.

— "LYNDON LAROUCHE: Fascism Wrapped in an American Flag", by Chip Berlet and Joel Bellman, 3/10/89 A Political Research Associates Briefing Paper
  • AIDS also has been the weapon of choice for far-right leaders. Lyndon LaRouche, whose nutty blend of super-patriotism, anti- Semitism and conspiracy theories has no chance of winning popular support, has tried to expand his appeal by playing on fear caused by AIDS. In 1986, LaRouche supporters managed to get an initiative on the California ballot that called for testing and even the quarantining of the estimated quarter of a million Californians who might have the virus. The initiative was defeated, but other far-right groups decided LaRouche was on the right track. In 1988, they placed a similar AIDS measure, Proposition 102, on the California ballot. LaRouche's strategy became public when a letter from a major supporter of Proposition 102 to leaders of the extremist John Birch Society found its way into the press. The letter urged the John Birch Society to use the AIDS epidemic to "rejuvenate" the organization.
    • "Ignore claim of extremists about AIDS;" JOHN H. BUCHANAN. The Tribune. San Diego, Calif.: May 16, 1989. pg. B.7


  • Finally, at least one political organization, Lyndon LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee, advocates mandatory screening of the entire population and isolation of all infected individuals. The LaRouche forces backed an unsuccessful referendum on the issue in California in 1986. Their idea, presumably, is to achieve a "final solution" of the AIDS problem; I use the that term advisedly, in view of the massive coercion their plan would require.
    • AIDS: principles, practices & politics, By Inge B. Corless, Mary Pittman, Taylor & Francis, 1989, ISBN 0891167161, ISBN 9780891167167 p. 418

This emboldened his followers to escalate their smear campaign with a sixteen-page pamphlet on Dukakis's alleged mental problems, partiality for the "drug-sex counterculture," and support for "privileges for homosexuals."

  • King, Dennis (1989) Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-23880-0. Online at:[8], Ch. 15

Illinois pollster Michael McKeon has watched them at work at shopping centers. He observes that a LaRouche campaign worker may experience rejection from nine out of ten passersby, but the latter will often communicate the reason for their negative response. They will suggest new and more relevant issues even while flinging the leaflet back in the canvasser's face with a curse. The LaRouchians listen carefully to angry people and sometimes perceive things about the public's mood before the pollsters and professional politicians do.

The best example is the AIDS issue. By the fall of 1985, LaRouche recognized that it was about to become the scariest issue of the decade. He concocted the slogan "Spread Panic, not AIDS!" The entire human race, he claimed, would face extinction if stern measures weren't taken immediately against gay people and mosquitoes. Offering himself as the only leader willing to act with the necessary ruthlessness, he picked California as his first battleground. In the summer of 1986 his followers fanned out through most of the state's fifty-eight counties. Operating through a committee called PANIC, they collected over 700,000 signatures for a ballot initiative calling for quarantine of AIDS victims. The signatures withstood all legal challenges, and the measure was placed on the ballot as Proposition 64. It received nationwide publicity and became a major issue in California politics. Congressman William Dannemeyer (R.-Cal.) championed it and became its respectable front man. Ironically, Dannemeyer had chaired the Republican Study Committee two years earlier when it produced a report warning conservatives not to be taken in by LaRouche propaganda and pointing out that LaRouche's intent was to "disrupt our democratic system." Dannemeyer now said, as did some other California conservatives, that he was supporting Proposition 64 solely on its merits. Gay organizations, the health professions, labor unions, and the Democratic Party launched a counter-effort, warning the public that "political extremist Lyndon LaRouche" was behind the measure. (One of the anti-Proposition 64 groups was even called "Stop LaRouche.") Gay organizations charged that when LaRouche said quarantine he really meant concentration camps.

LaRouche's cadres were preprogrammed for the quarantine campaign. For years words like "faggot" and "queer" had peppered NCLC publications, along with allegations that child molesters, Satanists, and Communists control the gay rights movement, The articles also suggested that homosexuality is a characteristically Jewish condition and that rich Jews encourage it to undermine Western civilization. When the AIDS crisis erupted, LaRouche blamed the "shylocks" for being too cheap to pay for research crash programs.

His gay-equals-Jewish canard dates back to the 1970s, when New Solidarity raved against the "faggot politics" of "Zionist-supporting" gay activists. New Solidarity published a cartoon series in which prominent New York Jews were shown in Roman togas at a banquet sponsored by the "Emperor of Homohattan,” Mayor Ed Koch. In the early 1980s LaRouchian publications accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionist Gentiles of being part of an international "Homintern." LaRouche wrote "Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry," a crude and defamatory leaflet on his longtime Symbolic Jew. According to LaRouche, Kissinger's alleged "heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil," and Kissinger is "psychologically" part of a "distinct species." In the context of LaRouche's biological-racial theories about the Jewish "species," the equation of Jewishness and "faggotry" was unmistakable.

LaRouche also taught that the alleged pathology of the Jewish family, especially the mother's possessiveness, produces psychosexual aberrations in young Jews. A 1986 New Solidarity item, "Jewish Mothers in the Age of Aquarius," joked that homosexuality is the natural result.

That the Jewish oligarchy deliberately promotes homosexuality is suggested by LaRouche's references to "sodomic," "pederastic," and "lesbian" practices within oligarchy-controlled "cults such as Freemasonry and the Quakers. In a November 1985 speech, he said AIDS was a "man-made evil" linked to these "cults out of Babylon." He further developed this theme in "The End of the Age of Aquarius?," a rambling discourse on AIDS that included attacks on the "Babylonians," the "British," "usurers," and "cabalists." His conclusion; "Homosexuality was organized in the United States. It wasn't something that sprang from the weeds. . . .It was organized. . ."

In an article on government monetary policy, LaRouche claimed that the money for the necessary public health measures against AIDS could only come from funds currently being used to service the international debt. But the "shylocks" were blocking this: “Shylock demands his pound of flesh, and cares not in the least whether the collection kills the debtor." The implication was that anyone who opposed Proposition 64 was probably acting on behalf of powerful Jews. LaRouche lashed out at "Meyer Lansky's" Hollywood and a New Solidarity columnist joked that the Anti-Defamation League had launched a stop-LaRouche committee called "AiDsL."

LaRouche's AIDS propaganda bears a striking resemblance to Hitler's on syphilis as set forth in Mein Kampf. Syphilis, like AIDS, is sexually transmitted, and in the 1920s there was no cure. Hitler focused on it because of his obsession with racial purity and his fear that the Aryan bloodline was being contaminated. Just as he blamed the spread of syphilis on its victims, especially prostitutes, so LaRouche blames gays for spreading AIDS. Hitler believed that sexual promiscuity and prostitution were the result of "Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct" and thus called syphilis the "Jewish disease." LaRouche refers to AIDS as the "Babylonian disease."

Hitler's answer to syphilis was to call for a quarantine of prostitutes and other infected persons. "There must be no half measures; the gravest and most ruthless decisions will have to be made. It is a half measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones. . . .[I]f necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated—a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it but a blessing for his fellow man and posterity." LaRouche, in "The End of the Age of Aquarius?", urges much the same solution for AIDS: "We've got to contain it, we can't find a miracle cure that fast; we're going to have to use methods of public health, which means we're going to have to put away every carrier until they can no longer carry."

The parallels continue. Hitler said regarding syphilis victims that there is no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity." LaRouche says it's "nonsense" to be concerned about the "civil rights" of AIDS victims. Hitler criticized the authorities for not "summon[ing] up the energy to take decisive measures" and for their attitude of "total capitulation." LaRouche says the U.S. government is afraid to "estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers.” Hitler said that for people who refuse to fight to save their own health, "the right to live in this world of struggle ends." LaRouche says that unless the American people change their attitude toward AIDS and their "moral direction," they will "no longer [be] fit to survive morally, and will not survive."

Mein Kampf and "The End of the Age of Aquarius?" both express a concern for public health and describe quarantine as necessary in order to save lives. Yet Hitler clearly stated that his syphilis-fighting program masked a higher goal: The Nazi Party leadership, he said, must "succeed in representing to the people the partial goal which now has to be achieved, or rather conquered, as the one which is solely and alone worthy of attention, on whose conquest everything depends. The great mass of people cannot see the whole road ahead of them without growing weary and despairing of the task.” LaRouche is equally candid, linking the struggle for an AIDS quarantine with the need for a new ideological "paradigm" in America. New Solidarity even suggests that AIDS might become the springboard for a nationalist revolution.

What America could expect in the wake of such a revolution is revealed in NDPC propaganda urging a roundup of prostitutes, gays, drug users—anyone who might have been exposed to the AIDS virus—and their incarceration in "special isolation hospitals, under prison guard if necessary." LaRouche's "Aquarius" article also discusses the possible need to "hang" or "burn" those responsible for spreading AIDS. Given the virtual equation of Jews and gays, Proposition 64 becomes simply an extension of earlier LaRouchian calls for an anti-Zionist Special Prosecutor's Office and for the "immediate elimination" of Zionists from American public life.

When two-thirds of California's voters rejected Proposition 64 in November 1986, the media depicted this as a defeat for LaRouche. Yet it actually was a LaRouche victory of sorts. His measure received over two million votes in the teeth of an opposition that outspent the LaRouchians ten to one. In some rural counties it received the support of over 40 percent of the voters. Apart from these election statistics, LaRouche scored a major ideological breakthrough for neo- Nazism in America. He took a previously taboo idea—enforced isolation for the Scapegoat—and elevated it into a topic of legitimate discourse. He did this by reframing the discourse in pseudo-medical terms and targeting a minority less well organized than the Jews. Proposition 64’s opponents, frightened by its implications but lacking a full understanding of LaRouche's ideology or of fascism in general, were maneuvered into appearing on talk shows with the

LaRouchians, thus lending an aura of legitimacy to their extremist ideas. As the campaign intensified, some opponents of Proposition 64 developed a strategy to cut through the smoke screen and expose the hidden political agenda. Howard Wallace, the coordinator of the San Francisco Labor Council's work against Proposition 64, stated in the SFLC newsletter: "The real purpose of this initiative has little to do with either AIDS or public health. . . .[The LaRouchian] purpose is to build their small corps of storm troopers into a larger one…. In the grand tradition of Hitler's Nazis, they're taking the path of least resistance: attacking those who suffer in some measure from social stigma. . ." But too much of the literature opposing Proposition 64 continued to be confused, jumbling together the political and pseudo-medical issues and dismissing the LaRouchians as kooks or cultists.

In the following year the quarantine idea became "respectable" nationally. Congressman Dannemeyer appeared on TV talk shows to discuss it as just one more proposal in the marketplace of ideas. Several other prominent New Right politicians expressed interest in the concept. In mid-1987 President Reagan's domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, when questioned about it, coolly commented: "I don't see any evidence at this point that a quarantine in the traditional sense would be particularly effective" (italics added). Thus does LaRouchian propaganda spread like ripples in a pond.

LaRouche meanwhile developed a more extreme solution for AIDS. Praising Western Europe's skinheads for beating up gays, he said they spontaneously expressed the "conspiratorial and other ethical characteristics" of a nationalist revolution. He suggested that lynching might be the next step—in Catholic countries they'd pick off the gays one by one, while in Protestant countries lynching would become a mass movement. The lynchers, LaRouche said, would perhaps be remembered as the "only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction."

From this, he passed over to the concept of an anti-gay Holocaust, stopping just short of advocacy. "The only solution" to AIDS, he said, "is either public health measures including isolation as necessary, or ‘accelerated deaths' of carriers." He added: "The point of no return . . . is coming up very fast. If the violence comes, the politicians, the courts, and the governments will have no one to blame but themselves. They left a desperate, terrified population no other choice."

Meanwhile, public concern over AIDS reached a high pitch. An American Medical Association poll found that 50 percent of the American public believed all necessary measures should be taken to stop AIDS "even if it means some people might have their rights violated." LaRouche continued his inflammatory propaganda, claiming that AIDS was spread by casual contact and that the majority of heterosexual Americans would soon be infected if his draconian measures were not adopted. His followers were on the phones at their telephone boiler rooms in Leesburg, Virginia, night and day, calling thousands of Americans to warn them of impending disaster and to solicit funds to pay for more propaganda. In California, LaRouche's PANIC committee, undeterred by Proposition 64’s defeat, easily collected over 700,000 signatures to place a second initiative on the ballot, this time in the presidential primary election. LaRouche purchased a half hour on network television to present his views on AIDS three days before the primary. The initiative again failed to pass but received over 1,700,000 votes.

While this represented less votes than the first time (because of a lower voter turnout), the percentage of supporters had risen from 29 percent to 32 percent. (In November 1988 a third AIDS crackdown measure appeared on the ballot, this one sponsored by Congressman Dannemeyer and other conservatives without LaRouche's direct involvement. Although polls in September indicated that it had majority support, it failed to pass.)

LaRouche had demonstrated the vulnerability of the public, when frightened and angry, to the lure of thinly veiled fascist measures. He had desensitized millions to the idea of rounding up unpopular minorities. His California ballot initiatives had revealed that many Americans with healthy biological immune systems have no political immune systems at all.

  • King, Ch. 16

On February 7, 1982, two LaRouchians met the Devil, not in a graveyard at midnight, but in the well-lit terminal at Newark International Airport. They abandoned their literature table and rushed to exorcise him with a barrage of hostile questions. "Jesus Christ," muttered Dr. Henry Kissinger, their longtime hate figure. He and his wife, Nancy, kept walking toward the boarding area, en route to Boston, where he was scheduled to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery.

"Dr. Kissinger," shouted twenty-eight-year-old Ellen Kaplan, "is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" It was a standard LaRouchian accusation. Nancy Kissinger would have ignored it on other occasions, but she was distraught by the prospect of her husband's operation. According to her attorney, her hand reached out and came in contact, very lightly, with Kaplan's throat. Others assert that her actions were less restrained. Whatever the truth, Kaplan retreated, and the Kissingers continued on their way.

A trivial event, one might say. Yet its consequences included a warrant for Mrs. Kissinger's arrest, a heavily publicized assault trial, and a LaRouchian harassment campaign against Dr. Kissinger on four continents. This campaign, waged from mid-1982 through late 1984, is unique in the annals of radical protest against public figures. It involved a torrent of propaganda attacks in at least six languages, carefully planned disruptions of Kissinger's public appearances, the planting of defamatory rumors in the international press, scores of malicious pranks, and the expenditure of millions of dollars on network television ads denouncing him.

[...]

LaRouche meanwhile issued a personal attack in Kissinger. Circulated in leaflet form under the title "The Politics of Faggotry," it was a kind of manifesto of the harassment campaign, uniting LaRouche's loathing of Kissinger, Roy Cohn, gays, discotheque music, and the Roman Empire into a single extraordinary vision. To understand Kissinger's evil species-nature, LaRouche said, one must "think back to the Emperor Nero and his court. Think of Studio 54, then of Nero's court, and then of Studio 54 again. Think of Roy Cohn's parties . . . Think of Nero, and then of Kissinger, and then of Nero and then of Roy M. Cohn. That is the kind of faggot Henry Kissinger is." (Questioned about this quote in a 1984 deposition, LaRouche knew he was on shaky ground. He backed down and said Kissinger merely had the "personality of a faggot.")

  • King, Ch. 17

As Security became bolder, it ceased to worry about obtaining "confessions" from anyone. It simply made up the smears out of thin air. Russ Bellant, a Detroit freelancer, came home one evening in the late 1970s to find that his neighbors had received invitations to a "gay coming-out" party at his house. Marcie Permut, a twenty-two-year-old researcher for NBC-TV's Chicago affiliate, was working on a LaRouche story in 1984 when leaflets appeared on car windshields on the block where she and her parents lived. The leaflets claimed she was a prostitute and gave her parents' phone number.

  • King Ch. 23

But the LaRouchians themselves began to seek police help during clashes with United Auto Workers members in several states in 1975. The violence was mostly the NCLC's own fault. In a basic scenario repeated over and over, they showed up at plant gates with leaflets naming union officials or rank-and-file workers as drug pushers, homosexuals, or Communists. One leaflet said of a Buffalo UAW member: "He can't go home to his wife with the smell of sperm on his breath...so he sleeps in parks...." The NCLC leadership claimed this was a powerful new technique to appeal to the workers' unconscious minds, but the only result was dozens of assaults on the leafleters.

  • King, Ch. 24

Members who didn't meet their quotas were yelled at, denied any days off, or accused of homosexuality or drunkenness.

  • King Ch. 32

1990s

[edit]
  • In addition, this is the first state election in several years in which gays are not pinned down fighting repressive AIDS initiatives sponsored by extremist Lyndon Larouche or Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), freeing activists to contribute to and work for candidates.
    • "The Gay Vote Is Hotly Pursued in Governor's Race Elections: Hard work in building political muscle is paying off for homosexual groups. A close contest makes their backing especially sought after.;" VICTOR F. ZONANA. Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.: May 20, 1990. pg. 3
  • LYNDON LAROUCHE, Independent: LaRouche is serving a 15-year sentence for fraud in federal prison in Rochester, Minn. A perennial candidate, he has run for president four times. He has promoted a quarantine of AIDS victims and has maintained that the virus is transmitted much like any other virus and that most medical warnings about how it is spread are "an outright lie." He also has stated that the International Monetary Fund is "engaged in mass murder" by spreading AIDS through its economic policies and he's accused Queen Elizabeth II of England of being a drug dealer. In 1988, LaRouche detailed a plan to colonize Mars. A spokesperson for LaRouche said he expects the candidate to be certified in 21 states by November.
    • "30-HOUR WORKWEEK? NO IRS? UNCONVENTIONAL AGENDAS OF FRINGE CANDIDATES" THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. The Salt Lake Tribune. Salt Lake City, Utah: Aug 30, 1992. pg. A.17

Compare the position on orifices held by Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., in "My Program against AIDS": "I hold it to be true, that Creation has endowed our bodies with certain functions, including the body's orifices, each to be used in one way, and not contrary ways; ... AIDS demonstrates afresh . . . that if society promotes the violation of the principles of our bodies' design, that society shall suffer in some way or another for this obscenity" (p. 6) Whether blood transfusions violate "the principles of our bodies' design" is not addressed.

— Kauffman, Linda S. (1993). American Feminist Thought at Century's End: A Reader (Feminist Thought). Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated. ISBN 1-55786-347-4.
  • Lyndon LaRouche: A Special Case
  • Lyndon LaRouche is a far-right political extremist who is now serving a 15-yearsentence in federal prison for mail fraud and tax evasion. LaRouche runs a vast empire of organizations with ideological positions that exactly mimic his bizarre conspiracy theories. His followers are seen in airports and on street corners, often campaigning to free LaRouche from jail or attacking the organization's mortal enemy--Henry Kissinger. LaRouche's many organizations have always incorporated sexual themes into their analysis, and have been obsessed with AIDS since the pandemic began. LaRouche has conducted a long-running and fanatical campaign against homosexuality. Most recently, LaRouche spearheaded Proposition 64 in California, which would have established restrictive public health policies regarding AIDS. Proposition 64 was opposed by virtually all public health officials and elected officials (one exception was legislator William Dannemeyer). A public health specialist for the California Medical Association described Proposition 64 as "absolute hysteria and calculated deception." LaRouche organizers continue to peddle hysteria over AIDS and homosexuality. Their embrace of anti-Jewish and other scapegoating conspiracy theories and use of demagoguery add a firm base to the claim that the LaRouchians are a neo-fascist movement. Many New Right groups avoid any official alliance with the LaRouchians.

On the densely wooded street by Swarthmore-Rutledge Elementary School, mothers in Volvos and children in L.L. Bean jackets paused on a recent afternoon to watch 11 demonstrators sing "We Shall Overcome" and bob placards that urged: "Spread Panic, not AIDS" and "Turn off Your Boob Tubes and Listen to LaRouche."

Each sign had the words "Mallory for Congress" lettered across the bottom. Most spectators shook their heads and moved off into Swarthmore's lush Victorian springscape. A few indignant adults fell into argument with Therese S. Mallory and the other sign carriers, who were alleging a conspiracy to promote ignorance and decadence in education.

Mallory is the 48-year-old Drexel Hill woman who surprised Democratic Party regulars last month by winning a place on the May 10 primary ballot in the Seventh Congressional District. She is a disciple of cabal theorist and perpetual fringe presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. [...] Mallory describes herself in campaign literature as a sales representative and distributor of publications on politics, science and culture. Her campaign phone number is at the Upper Darby office of Larouche-affiliated Eastern States Distributors Inc.

Her campaign appearances at local schools protest condom distribution, sex- and AIDS-education programs, and Outcomes Based Education curriculum reforms.

At the Swarthmore school, she said such programs were being promoted by an AIDS "Death Lobby." In an interview after her presentation, she said the lobby is "dominated by people who have a secret agenda for population reduction."

— "LAROUCHE DISCIPLE BUCKS DEMOCRATS; THERESE MALLORY IS OPPOSING PARTY-ENDORSED SARA NICHOLS." Reid Kanaley. Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, Pa.: Apr 20, 1994. pg. B.1

When Missouri voters mull over their choices for U.S. Senate this year, Democratic candidate Nicholas Clement of St. Louis suggests they keep one thing in mind:

That he and other followers of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. "know what to do when the financial crash hits."

Such a fiscal collapse, contends Clement, could occur in the next 18 months. [..] Clement also contends that there is no world population problem, saying studies to the contrary are plots to empty Africa and reduce industrial growth outside Europe. He charges that scientists are lying when they say AIDS cannot be spread through casual contact or through the air. [..] Such views touched off gasps and some heckling from the audience Sunday at a forum at Parkway East Junior High School featuring Clement and three other Democrats seeking the party's Senate nomination in the Aug. 2 primary. Some Clement supporters among the 90 spectators, in turn, shouted their agreement when he cited certain points.

"We were the most interesting thing about that forum," Clement chuckled Monday. He was the only one of the nine Democratic hopefuls not invited to the forum, which was sponsored by the St. Louis County Democratic Party. He was allowed to participate after he grabbed the microphone and demanded to be included.

— "LAROUCHE CANDIDATE STIRS CROWD; "Jo Mannies Post-Dispatch Political Correspondent. St. Louis Post - Dispatch (pre-1997 Fulltext). St. Louis, Mo.: Apr 26, 1994. pg. 02.B
  • Neofascist hatemonger Lyndon LaRouche was among the first in the paranoid right to move the homophobic campaign into the political arena. LaRouchians spawned restrictive propositions ... that essentially called for firings and quarantine for persons with signs of AIDS. LaRouche even obliquely suggested murder as a tactic, writing that history would not judge harshly those persons who took baseball bats and beat to death homosexuals to stop the spread of AIDS.

[Nicholas] Clement, 40, is a Post-Dispatch carrier from St. Louis. He ran for the House in 1990 and for the Senate in 1992. Clement tops a slate of nine LaRouche candidates in Missouri who have filed for congressional and legislative seats. [...]Clement also contends that there is no world population problem, saying studies to the contrary are plots to empty Africa. He charges that scientists are lying when they say AIDS cannot be spread through casual contact or through the air.

— "3 KINDS OF DEMOCRATIC SENATE CANDIDATE: `CHRISTIAN,' `LAROUCHE' AND PERENNIAL;" Jo Mannies Post-Dispatch Political Correspondent. St. Louis Post - Dispatch . St. Louis, Mo.: Jul 18, 1994. pg. 01.B
  • During the election campaign, Duclos did not reveal his views on the LaRouche organization, known for its denial of the Holocaust and vitriolic opposition to homosexuals and Indians.
    • "On the fringe; Is Duclos obtuse, cunning or just plain ignorant?;" PEGGY CURRAN. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Dec 14, 1994. pg. A.3
  • LaRouche maintained that these extreme responses to AIDS were necessary public health recommendations. In reality, he manipulated the AIDS crisis to further his antigay political agenda.
    • All things to all people: the Catholic Church confronts the AIDS crisis, By Mark R. Kowalewsk , SUNY Press, 1994, ISBN 0791417778, ISBN 9780791417775, p. 22

Greenfield Park Mayor Marc Duclos yesterday steadfastly refused to denounce American right-wing ideologue Lyndon LaRouche or his anti-Semitic beliefs.

"It is not for me to judge people," Duclos told reporters after a two-hour meeting with executive members of the Canadian Jewish Congress. [...]

Duclos, 35, claimed he was unaware of LaRouche's well-documented statements against Jews, aboriginals and homosexuals, among others.

— Duclos won't denounce racist group; But Greenfield Park mayor says he severed all ties with LaRouche; [FINAL Edition] LYNN MOORE. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Feb 8, 1995. pg. A.3
  • Lyndon LaRouche's followers put the first AIDS measure on California's state ballot in November 1986. Voters rejected this initiative, which would have barred people with AIDS from teaching or from working in foodrelated jobs. Californians voted on the issue of AIDS again in June 1988. This time they cast their ballots against a proposal to declare AIDS a communicable disease and make people with AIDS subject to quarantine.
    • "Putting civil rights to a popular vote" Gamble, Barbara S. American Journal of Political Science. Austin: Jan 1997. Vol. 41, Iss. 1; pg. 245, 25 pgs

2000s

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  • He [Larouche] says people who lynch homosexuals are "the only force acting to save the human species from extinction" and that wealthy Jews encourage homosexuality as a way of undermining Western civilisation.
    • "Cult gears up for poll drive." Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) 6/10/2001.

"I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS -- by taking your bedrooms away from you . . . What I shall do is expose to you the cruel act of your sexual impotence . . . I will take away from you all hope that you can flee the terrors of politics to the safety of 'personal life.' I shall do this by showing to you that your frightened personal sexual life contains for you such terrors as the outside world could never offer you. I will thus destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical. I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee."

LaRouche moved into a rented mansion patrolled by heavily armed guards. According to a 1985 Washington Post series, there were sandbag-buttressed guard posts and metal spikes in the driveway. The gun-toting guards alarmed the locals. So did LaRouche's rhetoric. LaRouche said he needed the security because teams of assassins were gunning for him and just might start slaughtering people on the streets of Leesburg.

Civic leaders who criticized LaRouche were denounced by followers and in LaRouche literature as commies, homosexuals, drug pushers or international terrorists. According to one published report, LaRouche denounced the Leesburg Garden Club as a "nest" of Soviet sympathizers. ...

He was stunned, at first, to find out what happened when he asked questions or complained. "Maybe you are too [expletive] busy [masturbating] thinking about your mother to go out and organize," he recalls one of the leaders barking at him. "How much money did you raise today?"

"I'm caught off-guard, like, what the hell just happened?" Winstead recalls. "The yelling goes on for maybe five or 10 minutes while I'm furiously backpedaling."

Eventually, he became accustomed to the humiliating insults and tirades. "They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer," he says. "It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable."

LaRouche declined to discuss how members of his youth movement are treated, characterizing a series of questions about those practices as "simply garbage."

According to Winstead, attacking someone for having "mother issues," being homosexual or sexually perverse seemed to be a common strategy for controlling members in the office where he worked. Leaders directed the group to gang up on colleagues for minor infractions, a phenomenon Winstead calls "wolf-packing." It was effective, he says.

— "No Joke; Eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche may be a punchline on 'The Simpsons,' but his organization -- and the effect it has on young recruits -- is dead serious;" April Witt. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Oct 24, 2004. pg. W.12
  • Lyndon LaRouche is a homophobic American millionaire and indefatigable conspiracy theorist.
    • "The Queen's tormentors are off their heads;" Michael Gove. The Times. London (UK): Nov 19, 2002. pg. 20
  • Among the bizarre theories LaRouche and his followers peddled were that Britain's political leaders were "puppets of Jewish banking families," that Queen Elizabeth II headed a drug cartel and that Kissinger was a homosexual as well as a murderer.
    • "Argentina crying over 'hired guns'" Martin Edwin Andersen. Insight on the News. Washington: Jun 10, 2002. Vol. 18, Iss. 21; pg. 22, 3 pgs
  • The disease was giving conservative political forces ample ammunition for anti-gay legislative attempts. By that June, rabid right-wing politician Lyndon LaRouche had collected enough signatures for a statewide November California ballot initiative that would have banned people with HIV from attending school or working as commercial food handlers, teachers or school administrators, and would have allowed for mass testing and quarantining of anyone "suspected" of carrying HIV.
    • "Gay Parade an Event To Celebrate -- and Remember;" Dave Ford. San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, Calif.: Jun 25, 2000. pg. 5

QUARANTINE AIDS PATIENTS

1986

The proposal: To add AIDS to a state roster of highly contagious diseases. Thus, anyone infected with the AIDS virus would have been barred from working as a food handler or from working at or attending any school or college in the state. It also would have provided for the quarantine of AIDS patients in certain instances. Who brought it: Followers of fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

Who fought it: An unprecedented array of conservative and liberal political leaders, and medical, public health, labor and business groups.

Quote: A LaRouche newspaper denounced critics as "militant communist gangs" made up of "sexual lower classes."

Outcome: Rejected, 71-29 percent. A similar measure, Prop. 69, was put on the June 1988 ballot -- and it, too, was soundly defeated.

— "The Chronicle Recommends / Defend Family Values: Vote No on Prop. 22; " San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, Calif.: Feb 20, 2000. pg. 8
  • A vocal minority of right-wing religious fanatics in America, similar in style and viewspoint to the Nazi youth groups found in Germany just before Hitler took paower, have been permitted to set the terms of the politicla debate regarding the existince of gays in soceity and have used the AIDS health crisis to exploit anti-gay prejudices that already existed. Dangerous political extremists like Lyndon LaRouche, Jerry Falwell and New York's Archbishop John O'Connor have fostered the fiction that homosexuality is simply chosen behavior, an act, not an orientation. Such behavior is then termed sinful or illegal, creating a partisan moral issue where none should exist...
  • The LaRouchites accompanied their 186 and 1987 California AIDS quarantine voter initiative campaigns with streams of antigay propaganda.

Other

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