#and then has it come crashing down with the threat of an extremist fascist group that takes over

[scorpionatori]

[nebris]

The death of Lyndon LaRouche and lessons unlearned

By Joel Bellman | February 17, 2019 11:36 PM 

I had very mixed feelings when I heard the news that Lyndon LaRouche had died at the age of 96. If people knew him at all, it would be because the political cult leader and far-Right extremist had run for president eight times, a record exceeded only by the legendary Harold Stassen. But Stassen never drew down millions of taxpayer dollars in federal campaign matching funds and bought blocks of TV prime time to promote his own peculiar brand of political lunacy. But after five years in the federal slam for mail fraud and tax evasion (where his one-time cellmate was naughty televangelist Jim Bakker; now THERE'S a play that somebody should write), LaRouche had been off the news radar for so long that most people's reaction might range somewhere between, "I didn't even know he was still alive," and "Who?"

Not me, though. As unbelievable as it seems today, there was a time when many of us thought LaRouche represented a genuine threat to American democracy. I did, because I was there and saw it first-hand.

When I was a journalism grad-school student at USC in 1980, I became intrigued by the strange group of people manning tables of political literature around campus (as well as at local post offices, malls, and airports), featuring utterly whacked-out conspiracy theories accusing the British royal family of running an international drug ring while a cabal of bankers and financiers were engineering a global economic collapse. They were also calling for a crash program to develop fusion nuclear power, demanding that schools promote German classical music, making scurrilous attacks on various political figures (Henry Kissinger, Jerry Brown, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, Mayor Tom Bradley, and even my future boss, Councilmember Zev Yaroslavsky) and promoting the delusional ramblings of one Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.  In the autobiography his followers were peddling, "The Power of Reason," LaRouche bombastically declared himself "to have gained some degree of importance in respect to processes shaping current world history," and predicted that either he would become president in 1981, or "be in a position to significantly determine the selection and the policies of an appropriate alternative nominee."

The weirdest thing about it all was that instead of stapled mimeographs of crudely typed screeds, the materials were slickly and professionally published. Who was behind it all? Where did their money come from? How did smart and talented people end up cranking out such fundamentally incomprehensible drivel? To what end?

When i joined a local radio news department that fall, I made LaRouche my first investigative project. But after his 1980 Democratic primary campaign had fizzled as quickly as his previous two campaigns, the press turned away and forgot all about him. And I quickly discovered that apart from a tiny handful of articles years before in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and a scattering of alternative outlets, little had been published and nothing had been broadcast about what I discovered was a lavishly, and fraudulently, funded political cult that was aggressively promoting an anti-Semitic fascist program. And it was hiding in plain sight.

As I pored through newspaper microfilm and scoured the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature for any magazine articles, my research eventually led me to a handful of progressive journalists and labor union researchers who had been reporting on, and warning about, the LaRouche movement. The reason was because LaRouche--in identifying the ideological and organizational disarray in the American Left and the Democratic Party in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam Jimmy Carter era--had astutely set his sights on their violent disruption, co-optation, and takeover.

I spent months of research reading, scooping up copies of their publications (and infiltrating a truly wacky meeting of LaRouche's "Schiller Institute" with my classical musician brother, in which LaRouche's German wife Helga held forth on the sublime genius of Heinrich Schenker and Gottfried Leibniz, while cult members attempted a recital of German choral music). After a series of interviews with some of LaRouche's local targets, as well as experts on extremist movements, I finally felt prepared to interview an actual cult member. But nothing prepared me for the interview I finally scored with a top figure in LaRouche's Los Angeles headquarters, Khushro Gandhi.

He was a mini-LaRouche in every respect, spouting the same conspiratorial nonsense in LaRouche's familiar and distinctive cadences (members were constantly drilled with speeches and recordings of LaRouche propaganda). After softening him up with some consciously naïve and innocent questions, I started pressing: the numerous deceptive front groups, the boiler-room fundraising, the violent attacks on opponents, the anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, the paranoid fantasies, the pivot from Marxism to fascism, the vilification of local politicians. Gandhi instantly turned aggressive and accusatory, launching into programmed rebuttals and character attacks. Then he turned sly. "So tell me," he asked conspiratorially, "who gave you the Bradley stuff?" I looked at him in astonishment. "You did," I said. "All your literature, signs, and flyers attack him and Zev and ACLU as terrorist drug-peddlers because they sued the LAPD over its secret political spy unit." I was eventually able to establish that the LAPD and the local LaRouche organization regularly traded information about "leftist agitators."

My half-hour investigative radio documentary aired a few months later, and went on to win my first Golden Mike from the local Radio-TV News Association. It formed the basis for a long two-part investigative article I co-authored with Chip Berlet, one of the foremost experts on extremism and fascist movements, which is still widely cited in the literature.

Yet LaRouche continued to make inroads, mounting another presidential campaign in 1984 (with federal matching funds), and cultivating contacts in the Reagan administration. In 1986, the LaRouche organization finally burst into the open after two of its members won Democratic nominations to statewide office in Illinois, and in California qualified the first of two AIDS initiatives that infuriated the medical establishment and panicked the gay community, which was targeted for mandatory testing and quarantine. Suddenly I found myself in demand as reporters from all over the country began calling me, and I guested on several local public affairs TV shows debating proponents of the AIDS quarantine, including an aide to Republican congressman William Dannemeyer. LaRouche had essentially called for identifying and relocating gay men into concentration camps in the name of disease control--and the initiative's official proponent and author was the same Khushro Gandhi that I'd interviewed for my program five years before. Even "Saturday Night Live" got into the act, running a couple of LaRouche sketches featuring Al Franken, playing both Henry Kissinger and even LaRouche himself (right).

By 1988, it was all but over. LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud in 1988 and sent to federal prison along with some of his associates, but after his 1994 early release, the cult never regained the prominence it once had.

For many of us who worked the LaRouche story over the years, the rise of an extremist demagogue like Donald Trump has held a particularly fearful resonance. We tried to sound warnings back in 2016--here's what I previously wrote in this space, here's what Rachel Maddow broadcast, and here Dennis King, one of the earliest and most prominent LaRouche experts, weighed in--but too few were listening.

So we laugh at the comically deranged Lyndon LaRouche because "it can't happen here." But as we are brutally reminded, every single day, it already has.

http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2019/02/the_death_of_lyndon_larouche_a.php

[mothergwendoline-blog]

Trans Isolation

Disclaimer: This blog contains discussion of suicide and depression. If this makes you feel unsafe, please leave.

For a journal of a mad woman dedicated to suicide I certainly seem to be forward thinking. If nothing else the thought of my transition goals are one of the few things enabling me to wake and face every day. Make no mistake, the planet is dying, we live the last era of humanity and I fully intend to end my life before the apocalypse but I will be damned to go without seeking joy where I can. Barring the recent resurgence of extremist hatred and fascist uprising, no small matter, I am fortunate in many ways to be well positioned in life. Though I am poor, through fortune of being allowed to live with family whilst I recover from my last two suicide attempts, I at least am afforded some stability. I have a roof over my head, hygiene, relative physical health compared to many and food in my stomach. I think on my ultimate suicide daily, how and when I will accomplish it, but where is already decided. I will take myself to our government and end my life at their doorstep in environmental protest to the constant neglect and abuse of our planet at the hands of the powerful. When will be after I reach my original weight before my binging, after breast augmentation and a return to the sex industry, and finally after bottom surgery. I give myself about five years. I am not be the first climate change suicide but I intend to be a notable one. I expect I shall make national or hopefully international news for demonstrating in blood the very real harm those in power have done to our Earth. Soon we shall see an uprising of the masses and I have every hope the rich and powerful will beg us for mercy as we overthrow them.

For now, it is the joy and meaning of self-improvement that motivates my living. I have resumed weekly electrolysis treatment of my facial hair. It is a slow and constant progress but eventually I will have a soft, smooth kissable face. Of course I am mostly concerned with ridding myself of the immense dysphoria of having to shave away my beard but I am also glad to become more attractively feminine. Beauty is fickle and open to debate but I have my own concept of my personal beauty and I will obtain it through hard work.

I found a nice beauty therapist for electrolysis, I have had two of many treatments to come. Although she is a tad blunt on matters transgender. This would shy a lot of people away, too many trans folk are in my experience fragile and easily wounded by misplaced comments. My beauty therapist refers to us as “transes”, or “my girls” more affectionately. She told me a tale of how her second husband, after their divorce, left her to become a “transvestite”, her words, in a large city and is now a “street walker”. She holds no resentment to the ex-spouse or to trans people, which is fortunate. She did ask a great deal of questions of the trans experience, most revolving around socialization post-transition which I found an uncommon and interesting query.

The beauty therapist said “most transes I’ve known prefer to socialize with [cis] women rather than other transes” and asked why I choose to socialize with other trans people. Solidarity and good company I suppose. But it did raise an interesting question in my mind about the shame and self-imposed isolation of trans people. There are many trans folk, mostly older white women in my experience, who prefer to live lives without other transgender people. I can empathize to this. For a long period of time after my transition I refused to call myself trans; I was just a woman, plain and simple. There is still a great deal of truth to this but now I see myself as a woman and as a transgender person equally. I can only make guesses for others but for me there were, at the time, a great many things I detested about the trans community. For one, the promotion of finding happiness looking visibly trans was something I did not, and still do not rest easy with. Only now I hold no resentment towards others who hold this position, I simply see myself as sharing different sentiments. I used to want to go completely stealth, to move to a new city where no one knew me and live a life closeted about my gender history. However, things changed. I hold no grudge against people who want to live stealth, for some that is their truth and meaning and I respect it. For me, I look at the horrible state of inequality and abuse faced by my trans siblings and I can do nothing to remedy this without being open and out with them. I am trans, I want and need trans people in my life and though my goal is to pass and obtain bottom surgery, I will continue to remain open about who I am. So to the inquisitive beauty therapist I am not sure what to say in answer to her questions. Perhaps it is best said I believe that, if my being out can offer solidarity and comfort to other trans people and if it can help peaceably advance our equality, then I will be out. Barring of course an anonymous trans blog. I can be out in my public life whilst seeking my privacy online.

On that note, I have started going to a transgender support group held every few weeks at a local LGBTQ center. I waited outside vaping with a handful of other “transes” whilst waiting for our meeting space to be set up. All a very quiet bunch but then again, it is hard to have deep and involved trans talk out in public waiting on the street, the privacy is important. We were let in to a warm and inviting office lounge coopted into a meeting place. We shared food (all vegetarian, it’s always vegetarian), drank special teas and spent the next hour and a half regaling our lives, our woes and joys of life being transgender.

There were many shy, all but broken people in the room. This, sadly, is much in line with my other experiences of such support groups. The condition of life for trans people is unfortunate, many come from families who have abandoned them, others cannot come out for this very fear. I found myself to be one of the most extroverted people in the room which came as a surprise to me as I am usually the shyest in the room. Or perhaps I have simply grown in social confidence and should pat myself on the back for breaking out of my shell. I was also one of the longest “out” of those in the room, this being a young group and myself having been out since about twenty-one years old. I was not the oldest person there, but one of the oldest in trans years. It afforded me an interesting position, to listen to people talk of such things as beginning hormone replacement therapy, or their first venture into a public restroom, or even planning for their first surgery, whatever that may be. It made me take a moment to reflect and feel happy that, although I am young and have yet so many transition goals to achieve, I have already accomplished a great deal.

I started HRT about six or seven years ago, I have fully socially transitioned and am out to everyone in my life, and I have had FFS. I still remember acutely my first trans milestones. The first time I used a public women’s restroom was at a hospital after my first meeting with an endocrinologist, just when I started HRT. I decided then and there I would be brave and allow myself that infinitesimal right to go to the bathroom of my true gender. Exiting the cubicle, a mother and her child were in the room and she looked at me with shock and horror and moved her child away from me so that she the mother stood between us. I washed my hands and quickly left in self-disgust, even though it was her wrong and not mine. I pass better now but at the time, even though I was wearing a dress, makeup and handbag and had my hair done, I was visibly trans. Even in this day and age there are still those bigoted and ignorant people (sometimes hateful) who believe our very presence is a threat, to children no less. You could ask me to be sympathetic to her and consider what she was thinking. But you should also ask the same of her, to be sympathetic to me. And ultimately that is what it comes down to.

Transgender people have a right to use their correct restrooms and it is for others to abandon their hateful prejudices and look at us as common, equal human citizens. I am tired of the lackluster, unscientific, illogical and bigoted complaints of TERFs and transphobes. “It is a space for females” they would say “And you have a male body”. But sex and biology and gender roles are not, nor have the ever been so simple. But this blog is not an essay to justify the rights of trans people to use restrooms, plenty others exist. This is a personal journal to catalogue my experiences of transition and fitness. Hearing others at the trans support group talk of these milestones in transition with apprehension and fear made me look for the first time and realise I take these actions in stride. Using a public restroom, dressing how best suits my gender expression, entering gender specific spaces such as women’s art groups. Of course there is still adversary and transphobia I encounter regularly but I have become somewhat dulled and desensitized to it. On reflection it angers me and fuels the fight for rights and equality but it has also become a day-to-day occurrence.

After another month or so of rest and recuperation, once my mental health is less volatile as a result of therapy, I intend to find work in the city. I’m an artist, a writer, so finding work within my passion will be too difficult to obtain steady living as yet. A nice office job, secretary, clerical, data entry position will suit my needs and experience. And it will make the cost of transition achievable instead of digging away at my steadily diminishing savings.

Exercise at the gym has been treating me well although I have yet to lose weight. I recently had a severe depressive crash which resulted in my relapse in drinking self-harming again. I also broke my intermittent fasting for several days and returned to binge eating out of sadness. Thanks to exercise I have not gained weight, but I have not lost weight either. From today I will be trialing one month of intermittent fasting and will post my weigh-in at the end of the month.

I will likely have to return to a psychiatric hospital for a few days as my suicidal ideation is reaching its breaking point. Self-harm is a dire warning sign for me. Although my family are loving and empathetic, I need to be somewhere I can receive professional care.

Ultimately my goal is to obtain a referral through the public mental health system to attend a private psychiatric hospital which I would otherwise have no way of affording. And I believe I am an ideal candidate. I have had ongoing mental health struggles since the age of about ten or eleven. Since then I have been in and out of public psych wards and attempted suicide twice. I believe a private psychiatric hospital with intensive daily therapy is my best and only shot at obtaining a meaningful quality of life. But obtaining a referral is exceedingly difficult.

And that is where I shall end this entry. Between gym, electrolysis and the trans support group I am filling my life with meaningful pursuits of happiness, but I require something far more drastic to improve my mental health. Unfortunately we live in a world that chooses not to listen to suicidal ideation until it is too late. And then the mourning comes, an outcry of people exclaiming “What were the signs? What could we have done?”, but our drastically underfunded mental health services remain barren and individuals like myself bear the brunt of lack of care.

Mother Gwendoline