For cults that live, it’s usually the third leader that’s the charm.
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Okay, you’ve got my attention. Is this a thing (re: third leader being the one to bring it home/make it big)? Can you give me some specific instances? Quite curious.
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Mormons: Yes.
Church Universal and Triumphant, probably not.
Scientology, I doubt it.
Yeah, it’s a rough rule of thumb, but it’s probably not too bad. The leader is the leader. The successor has to keep things going, knife other possible successors and change the narrative so that they were the only choice. If there isn’t a stable organization by or after the third leader, there isn’t going to be a tradition of continuity to keep things going, and each generation will be a reboot.
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Jesus H. Christ on a stick! Stop infecting us with earworms!! You don’t even have to play the damn thing to catch it. Boo!!!
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Can we go poke him with a sharp stick just to be sure?
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Dancing a little jig of grief?
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Larouche was briefly mentioned on this podcast (which came out today)
I was surprised to see a table for him set up on the campus in the San Francisco Bay Area where I went to grad school in the '90s. I don’t know if they were students there or not - for some reason I suspected they weren’t. That they would go to a different campus to set up a table is obviously absurd but seemed to fit with them.
I used to trolley them by asking them whether he was out of jail already. That really got them worked up into a lather every time. Very satisfying.
All I can remember is that he wanted to quarantine AIDS patients, and blamed the Jews for the holocaust. Really, anything beyond that felt like more information than was necessary.
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He’s managed to shuffle off the perch the same day as Australia’s Prince Leonard of the Hutt River Province. I’m not quite sure what to make of that…
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You mean, like, hammer a wooden stake into his evil heart? Well, it is the only way to be sure…
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Alex Jones before there was Alex Jones!
In the early 80s I was in a Soc 200 class and 2 of his “followers” came and spoke to us for about an hour. Totally bonkers.
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Was it a class in Sociology of Deviance?
His reach into conspiracy nut-job communities extended to the ends of the Earth.
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I remember that guy. He was one of the main nutjobs in the 00’s that tried and failed to connect school shootings with violent games
If true, then good fucking riddance.
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There’s still no serious confirmation of his death yet, just a lot of social media posts echoing each other.
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My ex girlfriend was (is?) spokesperson for his PAC. To this day, I have no idea what the hell they stand for. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0
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When I first moved to California, there were two LaRouche-backed state propositions on the ballot to place gay men in quarantine camps with the assumption we were “spreading” AIDS. Thankfully, Californians rejected these horrible notions.
This is just one awful example of the neo-fascism LaRouche loved and backed. This man fostered reactionary activism, racism, homophobia, etc., which took a lot of people and a lot of resources to effectively challenge.
Good riddance.
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It’s only on Twitter. So far, no newspaper, TV station or news site has confirmed this. So this may be a hoax.
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There’s a battle being waged on his Wikipedia page. Edits are being made and deleted because there’s no legitimate confirmation, aside from tweets by his organization that no one trusts due to past inaccuracies and fake news. Hoisted by his own petard!
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Probably the defining thing about LaRouche and his movement was that he’d glom onto just about anything controversial. Describe it as the end of human civilization, and present himself and his ideas as the only solution.
The AIDs epidemic, the Soviet Union, whoever was in the white house, violent video games, various minorities at various times, homosexuals, the death of Princess Diana.
If it was in the headlines it was proof of the conspiracy, and LaRouche would save humanity by putting us back on the gold standard, or something.
That’s almost impossible to figure. There are certain bonkers fringe ecconomic and policy ideas that seem to run their whole history. But he seemed just as interested in jumping around in terms of political affiliations as anything else. Started in Marxist/left wing movements, but later attempted to connect them selves to white supremacists and fascists, the civil Rights movement, the nation of Islam, the Reagan administration, the Soviets, then attacked the Soviets, Reagan, and even the post Sovient Russian reformers. They kept the socialist framing but his central ecconomic idea seems to be that we all misunderstood Marx and he was really a capitalist who wanted Lyndon LaRouche to run things? I think.
The only core things seem to be the conspiracy theories tying it all together. Which are word for word anti-Semitic classics with British, Globalist, Zionist, Bankers, the Bushes and a few others pallet swapped in for Jews. But with the same famous Jewish families purportedly controlling it all behind the scenes. Except when they got called out for anti-Semitism, then the secret root of it all was Nazis.
And the claims that everyone was trying to assassinate LaRouche because he was so brilliant/dangerous/important.
All other beliefs and associations seem to have shifted constantly based on what would bolster one of those two core beliefs.
The movement is much, much more similar to cults than anything else. Members give over all their money to the organization, work exclusively for the movement. They got compounds, seperate members from family and support systems.
It’s like even wackier Scientology.
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