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The Passing of Lyndon LaRouche
36 Plays5 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss the life (and recent death) of Lyndon LaRouche, someone who was a prominent conspiracy theorist in the late 20th Century (but no so much in the early 21st). From an imagined conversation between Elizabeth II, Queen of Auckland, and Jerry Garcia, to LaRouche's final advice to Baby Boomers, this episode ranges from one kind of absurd claim to another, because that was the life of Lyndon LaRouche in a nutshell.
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Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast Retrospective
00:00:00
Speaker
previously on the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Join us now as Greasy Sheen and Professor Watchlist once again take a whistle-stop tour of the past episodes of the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Josh, we're going to need hats for this and close that cranium. Okay. It's 2015 and the Sheenster is aghast. President Evil, what a name for an episode. What was the actual content?
00:00:29
Speaker
No idea me boy, sometimes a good moniker is all you need in this business. Fast forward a year to 2016, and the good professor is studying his tea leaves. The death of Antonin Scalia? It's a good thing Josh and Em aren't currently discussing President Trump, or they'd be talking about the potential stacking of the Supreme Court.
00:00:51
Speaker
And they're off again to 2017. Greasy is eyeing up his food. You know I don't like Malaysian food especially given the fact that Kim Jong-un just got poisoned. Don't be silly Greasy. Kim was poisoned with syringe very much like this one. And finally the distant past of 2018. An episode on history professor.
00:01:12
Speaker
I know greasy. It suddenly got very suspiciously coincidental. And you know what we say? There are no coincidences on the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Go, except when there are. Roll fame.
Exploring Podcast Growth and Analytics
00:01:36
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:46
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Edison. Sitting next to me is Dr. Em Denteth, but who are we and what is the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy? The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, Joshua, is a podcast about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. I wrote a PhD on conspiracy theories in philosophy called In Defence of Conspiracy Theories,
00:02:10
Speaker
where I put forward that we have to judge individual conspiracy theories on their evidential merit, and that is what this podcast is all about. Talking about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, when we ought to believe them, and when we're allowed to laugh about them. Yes.
00:02:26
Speaker
A little recap here. We thought we've been going for five years now. It's possible. You can't say that it's impossible, but we might actually have gained listeners. It's true. Some of them might not have been listening for a while. I mean, we are on Spotify now. We're on Spotify and everything. We had seven streams on Spotify last week. I know. You can tell that.
00:02:46
Speaker
Yes, the podcasters web page for Spotify tells you about the streaming Google Analytics page now and I have no idea what any of the numbers mean. Well, that was the thing we the podcasters hosted on podbean.com which gives you mountains of analytics and we know there's numbers they go up and down and
00:03:10
Speaker
For a while, where was it? Two weeks ago, we had one day where 8,000 people accessed the podcast. But what does that mean? Because we didn't get 8,000 listeners to any of the recent episodes. So I'm assuming someone scraped the podcast for their index and that's what occurred.
00:03:30
Speaker
Long time listeners might remember that some time ago we were getting thousands of hits every week from one particular state in the US. I can't remember which one. I think it was Virginia. Virginia, something like that. And so our stats were enormous for quite a while and then dropped off and we don't know what it means, is it?
00:03:47
Speaker
with a with a yeah some some Google or someone has happened to have a server server farm there and their bot was scraping us and I see basically I think what happened is that an AI became self aware based upon our podcast and then failed to take over the world because of our podcast we were both
00:04:05
Speaker
the beginning and the end of the singularity. So the fact we're not being controlled by robot overlords is entirely either our fault or our gift to you. You're welcome.
Critiquing Conspiracy Theories and Key Figures
00:04:19
Speaker
Now another little side on your work as a conspiracy theory theorist at large,
00:04:26
Speaker
Who's Kevin Barrett and why is it a good slash bad thing that he likes you? So Kevin Barrett, who writes for things like veteran affairs, veteran today, which is one of those quite, quite conspiratorial websites of the type that we tend to go
00:04:44
Speaker
Hmm as opposed to yay. So Dr Kevin Barrett has a PhD, he's an Arabist Islamologist and according to his blurb, one of America's best known critics on the war on terror
00:05:00
Speaker
He's the host of Truth E.G. Hard Radio, a hard-driving weekly radio show funded by list and donations at patreon.com and also False Flag Weekly News, an audio video show produced by Tony Hall, Alan Race and Kevin himself, which is funded through fundraiser.
00:05:18
Speaker
And Kevin wrote a review of several books of conspiracy theories that have come out in the recent past. Now, wait a minute. You had a book on conspiracy theories that came out in the recent past. Yeah, but he's not reviewing that one. He's reviewing Joe Youcinski's book, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them. And let me quote what Kevin wrote.
00:05:40
Speaker
Another relatively sensible essay is Emma Extentith's Conspiracy Theories and Philosophy, which ably deconstructs the most basic fallacy permeating the whole field of conspiracy theory research, the a priori assumption that a conspiracy theory must be false, or at least, dubious.
00:05:59
Speaker
Now he's quoting me, if certain scholars, and now he interjects himself, i.e. the majority represented in this book, back to me, want to make a special case for conspiracy theories, then it is reasonable for the rest of us to ask whether we're playing fair with our terminology, or whether we have baked into our definitions the answers to our research programs.
00:06:23
Speaker
He then goes on to say, unfortunately a few pages later, editor Joe Yusinski sticks his fingers in his ears and plays deaf and dumb, claiming that, to quote Joe, the establishment is right far more often than conspiracy theories, largely because their methods are reliable. When conspiracy theories are right it is by chance.
00:06:42
Speaker
He adds that conspiracy theories will inevitably occasionally lead to disaster. Whatever that means. So yes, I'm assuming this person would take exception to the idea that conspiracy theories are wrong more often than right, and that the authorities are right more often than wrong.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yes, and I do think Joe's being a little bit naive there by simply going, so he generous the establishment is more often right than wrong. How do we actually measure that? And the motion that they're more reliable. They're also quite good at covering up embarrassing things that would embarrass them because by definition they are embarrassing.
00:07:23
Speaker
Well, there you go. That's us. That's the podcast. Maybe we should stop talking about the podcast and start talking the podcast. Indeed. Because what we normally do now is we move straight in to the news. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:07:46
Speaker
That's somewhat of a lie, though, because we normally do the news after some other things in between. We're doing the news first now in a drastic break with tradition. But we normally do something like this. A new path to glory, to fortune, and also it makes more sense to do the retractions and updates after the news, rather than before. So there you go. But into the news, we start with a disturbing story, which just too... No, I'm sorry, Josh, but we have
00:08:12
Speaker
Breaking news? This bit is scripted. Irrelevant. People may well be aware that we mentioned that guest of the show, David Icke, was about to embark on a tour of Australia. But not also Aetoro New Zealand. Well, it's off. Owls before Icke was due to get on a plane to the Southern Hemisphere, his visa was cancelled by the Australian government.
00:08:32
Speaker
Ike, as predicted, is epileptic about the news, and there's even a petition to get the government to retract the retraction of the visa. So I guess, reissue it? Anyway, Ike is not arriving down under, unlike Jordan Peterson, who apparently is touring the country looking for lobsters. But that's another matter, back to the news. Shouldn't that have gone in the update?
00:08:55
Speaker
Back to the actual news, and the weird story of the week are the attack or alleged attack on Jussie Smollett. Smollett, a gay African-American actor, told police on January 29 that he had been accosted early in the morning by two men who had yelled racial and homophobic slurs before putting a rope around his neck and dousing him in bleach.
00:09:16
Speaker
Yet now reports are coming out from members of the Chicago Police Department that the attack was staged. What has followed in the last few weeks are claims and counterclaims of a conspiracy to create the appearance of an attack, with some presuming Smollett using the event to raise his career profile.
00:09:33
Speaker
The issue seems to stem from the fact that the two men Smollett initially identified from CCTV footage as being behind the attack were in fact known to him, one being his personal trainer. Not just that, but it's alleged that one of the suspects is said to have claimed they did a practice run of the attack days before the alleged assault. Pre-addictably, beliefs about the hoax seem to fall very much along the lines of whether or not the believer thinks that there are systemic or racial and homophobic issues in America. But, well, I mean, if it's a hoax, it's also a conspiracy. That makes it news to us.
00:10:03
Speaker
Quite a sad story, actually, because if the attack occurred, that's terrible. And if it to hoax, that's terrible, but terrible in a really weird way. And this this one, I mean, yeah, the back and forth has been has been quite crazy.
00:10:22
Speaker
when we in between us first writing notes for this and sitting down to record it stuff happened which meant we needed to revise things probably by the gap between us recording this and you actually listening to it something else would have happened that rendered this all moot it's all been very strange and bizarre yes this is news which
00:10:38
Speaker
is quite definitely time stamped to Thursday evening in Aetoro, New Zealand. Things may happen overnight before the podcast goes up, which changed the story entirely. We will not be held to what happens to our future selves. Indeed, not this time.
00:10:55
Speaker
And from one nation to another, we glance at our neighbours across the ditch. Australian universities are relieved that their Department of Defence has failed to secure backing from an independent review of the Defence Trade Controls Act for sweeping new powers over international research collaboration.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yes, in news which shows powerful organisations can openly want even more power, which makes you wonder what they're agitating for behind closed doors, the Australian Department of Defence wanted stricter controls over the development of new technologies.
00:11:31
Speaker
These powers would have allowed them to carry out search and seizure operations without a warrant. This in turn would have adversely affected Australian universities and research centres who work with overseas interests to develop and share new technologies. Had the Department of Defence gained these new powers, they could have
00:11:50
Speaker
effectively stymied international collaboration under the guise of protecting Australian interests. But in an interesting twist, Australian authorities have rejected this power bid. Well, for the time being. I think Australia has a reputation for being a little more right-wing than New Zealand. Australia is the US of Australasia. It is. And we are pretty much the Canada of Australia. Down. Except much smaller.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yes, yes, it's a very weird relationship we have with our cousins across the ditch. Yes, I was talking to an Australian just today about government sort of surveillance type plans and he was very much along doing the whole, well if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear thing to which I replied, can I have your pin number in that case? But yes, I don't know. So it's nice to see this one did get shot down.
00:12:44
Speaker
But who knows where things will go from here. Well, precisely. Australia, it's a bit of a magic eight ball, as we've said in the past. Now, finally, evidence of voter fraud in the US. Yes, we now have evidence that the Republicans are right. No, hang on. Hang on. We have evidence that the Republicans who keep on going on about voter fraud have themselves been fraudulently altering absentee ballots.
00:13:08
Speaker
Well, Republican operatives in a 2018 congressional race in North Carolina have. Appearing before the North Carolina State Board of Elections, several witnesses said that they were paid to collect absentee ballots by McCray Dallas, who presumably had his first names amputated in some sort of freak accident. Well, Republican operatives are produced in factory vats and in factories in the depths of nowhere, so I assume so, yes.
00:13:35
Speaker
At any rate, McRae Dallas, a political operative hired by people working for Republican candidate Mark Harris. The witnesses admitted to filling out ballots which hadn't been fully completed, filling in any omitted choices with a vote for whoever was a Republican. They were also trained in techniques to not throw out red flags, like making sure they put stamps on the right way, signed witness signatures with the same colour ink as the rest of the ballot, and mailing absentee ballots in small numbers in order to not raise suspicions.
00:14:03
Speaker
The witnesses insisted the candidate had no knowledge of the operation, and no evidence has been presented to show that Harris knew what his political operative was doing. Still, plausible deniability is precisely what you want when engaging in fraud, isn't it? And I understand, just reading before I came to record this podcast, I believe his son testified against him, Mark Harris' son. Oh! That is, that's breaking news!
00:14:28
Speaker
It basically testified that he knew his father had retained the services of someone to do these dodgy things and had told his father not to do it. So some people have said, congratulations to this young man for making the hard choice to do what's right instead of
00:14:48
Speaker
protecting his own family although others have said he's basically saying I'm not going to purge myself and ruin my career just to make up for the fact that my dad did a bone-headed thing that I really want him not to do. But interesting case indeed. Yes and once again evidence of voter fraud but not from the direction the Republicans actually claim it's coming from. Indeed where it's
00:15:12
Speaker
Not so much voter fraud as election fraud, I think, which seems to be the thing. Voter fraud doesn't really seem to exist. Election fraud, on the other hand, is rife in a gerrymandered democracy like the United States. God bless America. God bless them, said the atheists. So that's it for news. We generally precede this with a section on updates to things we've talked about before, but this time we're choosing to
00:15:39
Speaker
What's the opposite of proceed? Subsequently have the section. Subsequentrize the update section. Subsequentrize the updates and the retractions. That's what we're gonna do now. Update and retractions.
00:15:58
Speaker
So, an update on the Anne-Marie Brady case, which we discussed last year. If you weren't aware, Brady is a local academic who mostly works on China and its use of soft power. Last year, her office was broken into several times and her car was seemingly sabotaged. At the time, China, well more properly people in Beijing, was suspected as being the criminal masterminds behind the series of unfortunate events.
00:16:19
Speaker
This was largely suspected due to a. Brady's criticisms of China, b. Beijing not liking such criticisms, and c. some of her fellow academics who had also criticized Beijing, having also reported being threatened by Chinese authorities. However, the police investigation here into all of this has led to nothing.
00:16:38
Speaker
The year-long investigation involved the New Zealand Police's National Security Investigation Team, a somewhat shadowy organisation who work with the New Zealand Security and Intelligence Service and Interpol. At the moment, the crimes just remain unsolved, with no leads to track down. It's quite an interesting story, because everyone suspects China, except for the authorities that do the investigations, who have gone,
00:17:02
Speaker
No leads, no idea what's happening. Which of course is leading to people thinking that maybe it's a diplomatic thing, not going to blame China outright, because that would be bad for diplomacy. We'll just simply give them a signal of some kind, or
00:17:19
Speaker
Maybe there's just a set of coincidences with no unifying cause whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, the evidence that China's behind it seems to be more sort of circumstantial in that she's kind of made herself an enemy of them and then things start happening. But yes, it's not a good look, I think. No. One of those things where that's the best you can say.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yes, not a good look.
Lyndon LaRouche: A Life of Controversy
00:17:41
Speaker
And talking about not good looks, more news from Aotearoa New Zealand featuring Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil, who has lost his defamation case against Matthew Blomfeld. Now, we discussed Slater in the past. He's a political blogger who was heavily involved in a dirty politics scandal surrounding the 2014 general election.
00:18:02
Speaker
Slater, along with local Adrian Edmondson impersonator, Carrick Graham, were commissioned by ex-business associates of Blomfeld to run a smear campaign. The conspiracy was, however, uncovered, and Blomfeld sued for defamation. Slater's defense, that of truth, has been dismissed because Slater wasn't actually able to prove any of the allegations made on his blog were honest opinion.
00:18:29
Speaker
We at the Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy realise this is a very minor conspiracy, but minor conspiracies are the kind of thing which help normalise conspiracies generally. Not to mention the fact that Cameron Slater has shown himself time and time again to be kind of a horrible human being, so there is some amount of schadenfreude. And it's not the only legal reckoning we're waiting for this year, because there's also the
00:18:55
Speaker
Deformation by a bunch of nutritional scientists who Cameron Slater allegedly ran a smear campaign against. And then there's the food council thing where Catherine Rich and Cameron Slater allegedly ran a smear campaign. So it's bad times for Cameron Slater. Yes, a bunch of chickens coming home to roost.
00:19:18
Speaker
Cock a doodle doo. Well, yeah, I had literally no way of following that. So how about we just jump straight into the main content and talk about a certain Mr Lyndon LaRouche. Yes, let's talk about Lyndon LaRouche. I don't know why I said that with a strange pause. He's a strange man. He deserves a strange pause. It's true. He was a very, very strange man.
00:19:48
Speaker
So Josh, prior to my mentioning Lyndon LaRouche last week, actually earlier this week, on Sunday, we've been recording the most recent episode prior to this one.
00:20:00
Speaker
You had no idea who this fellow was, did you? I had heard the name Lyndon LaRouche before. But no, if you'd asked me about him, I couldn't have told you a damn thing. So I did a little bit of reading, and goodness me, he was an interesting character. He died on the 12th of this month, about 10 days ago, as we record, which is why we're talking about him now. But in terms of conspiracy theories, he was quite the figure, I understand.
00:20:27
Speaker
And what's interesting about LaRouche was that he was a major enough figure that when I was writing my PhD, which was submitted in 2012, that he got a mention in the PhD. In fact, he even gets a mention at the very beginning of my first book, published in 2014, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories.
00:20:46
Speaker
But he really hasn't been very notable in the years since, so I don't think he's ever rated a mention on this podcast up until the bonus episode last week, where we mentioned to Patreons who get advance warning about things, we'll be talking about LaRouche this week.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yes so I mean from what I could gather he was biggest sort of in the 80s 70s 90s perhaps but it's been 10 years or more since he was particularly relevant. I mean he did start at the age of 96. Exactly yes. So he had very good innings and you can understand the last 10 years that maybe he wasn't as prominent as he was in say his 80s or 70s. Yes so
00:21:32
Speaker
Lyndon Hermile LaRouche Jr. First of all, that is an outstanding name. It is. I mean, he does come from a time period where outstanding names were Dadega. Yes. Born September the 8th, 1922, dietary retail 2019. Thank you, Wikipedia.
00:21:51
Speaker
Linda, what can we say about him? Imagine if Alex Jones turned out to be right all along about the chemicals in the water turning you gay, and he had a baby with Jordan Peterson, and that baby went back in time and then started doing the sorts of things that they were doing before the internet even existed.
00:22:13
Speaker
that's kind of, with a little bit of, I don't know, David Koresh sort of culty. He had an armed compound for Christ's sake. He'd lived in an armed compound at some stage. Yeah, he shortened. Shall we go through? Let's go through the life of. Yeah, the life and times. Of Lyndon LaRouche. Of who am I, as we may well decide to call him, given that wonderful middle name. So, Lyndon LaRouche was the son of Orthodox,
00:22:40
Speaker
Quakers. He attended Columbia University in New York as a disaffected member of the Spartacus League, which was something I didn't even know existed up until doing this research. So the Spartacus League is a Trotsky-esque organization named after the original Spartacus League, which actually comes from a German revolutionary group in post World War One.
00:23:05
Speaker
Did they start every meeting by standing up and saying, I'm a Spartakist, and then the next person says, no, I'm a Spartakist, and then they all do that and have a good laugh and then get on with things? I assume so, but in German. Yeah, well, it's obviously the original. Yeah. Mein Nama ist Spartakus. Ich heiße Spartakus. Nein! Mein Nama ist Spartakus. Anyway.
00:23:24
Speaker
He taught courses on Marxism at a free university in New York and the big moment basically is in 1968. So in 1968 there are student protests all throughout New York. So all the big New York universities go into protest. LaRouche senses an opportunity and I'm using that term quite specifically here because as we'll see with LaRouche's
00:23:49
Speaker
history, sensing opportunities is basically what his political career was all about. And so he forms a labor committee during the protest to mobilize student support for sanitation workers who are striking at the same time. So he goes, right, I'm a socialist.
00:24:09
Speaker
we're all socialists here, we're striking, sanitation workers are striking, let's pull all our things together. And basically overnight becomes a union leader and also gains a reputation for being an especially hard line leftist.
00:24:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's the thing. Reading through the early stuff, there's a lot of leftiness. The Trotsky, the Marxism. In 1973, he apparently ordered his followers because at that stage he had followers. He was a charismatic individual.
00:24:46
Speaker
to physically attack meetings of the U.S. Communist Party claiming this would establish the hegemony, hegemony or hegemony? I never know, one of those words I never see written down. I would go hegemony but then you're going hegemony and I'm going oh I really don't know. At any rate they would establish the hegemony of LaRouche's group over the U.S. left which
00:25:09
Speaker
It's still very left, but then now he's attacking communists for being two left slash not left enough. Kind of moving from Trotskyism to Stalinism. So then by 76, the various lefty organisations who were normally on the same side as him started to notice that he was getting more and more conspiratorial.
00:25:30
Speaker
And so you had the whole splintering, splitty, splitter thing. And so he ended up moving away from the left wingers who were criticising him and becoming more and more and more right wing. He did a Derek Hatton before Derek Hatton, Derek Hatton. Now for those of you who don't know who Derek Hatton is, you'll be aware that
00:25:52
Speaker
Earlier this week, there was a split of seven MPs from the Labour Party in the UK to form the Independent Group, which is not a political party. It is at the moment a business organisation, which means they can take donations without having to declare electoral donations, which is pretty suspicious.
00:26:12
Speaker
And the day they left, Labour readmitted someone who hasn't been a member of the Labour Party since the 70s, Derek Hasson, who was a hardline left-wing mayor in one of the cities in the UK, ran the city into the ground, I should say it was the 80s he was expelled, under Thatcherism,
00:26:34
Speaker
and then fled to a third country and started driving fast cars and glorying in the fact they had large amounts of money. So he went from being hard left to being very, very avant-garde right. And LaRouche was doing that before Derek Hatton even had his hat on. He's the original, he was doing it before it was called. Although we didn't mention time travel earlier, so maybe, who knows? Who knows, quite frankly. So I mean, yeah, it's...
00:27:02
Speaker
It's a little bit hard to we talk about left wing and right wing, but really he was he was definitely political, but his politics were just a little bit all over the place. He was he was.
00:27:14
Speaker
Something of a philosopher, which we both being philosophy graduates know a thing or two about. He was very, very much pro-Plato anti-Aristotle. Yes, in fact, he would refer to his enemies as Neo-Romans.
00:27:34
Speaker
There's a lot you can say about that. But the short thing is Plato believed that there were ideal forms of everything, including government, and that everything in the world that we see has the attributes it has by partaking in some way of these ideal, perfect forms.
00:27:54
Speaker
Aristotle believed there was no such thing as forms and that abstract concepts like the concept of government and so on merely exist because things exist in the real world and we sort of abstract these properties that they have in common off them.
00:28:08
Speaker
Which is very technical and philosophy philosophy, but it does kind of have some can have some sort of real world implications when it comes to, you know, if you're a Platonist, you believe in the idea that there are the tangible ideals that can be striven for whereas if you're an Aristotelian, you might be possibly more
00:28:26
Speaker
pragmatic I suppose. I mean Aristotle's basically the origin of what we take virtue ethics to be which is you just inculcate the virtues in children to make them virtuous as opposed to appeal to moral forms outside of the world that you can embody. So basically this means LaRouche was very very sort of hard line. Well the thing about LaRouche is that he's hard to classify on any standard left right divide
00:28:53
Speaker
Because LaRouche's political views are more 18th or 19th century than they are anything else. So let me give you a quote from my PhD dissertation where
00:29:08
Speaker
in the introduction I talk about LaRouche. And I say, former American presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche believes the psychedelic rock group The Grateful Dead, we'll get onto them in just a minute, were a front for the British Secret Service's occult branch and was sent to the United States of America by direct order of the Queen of England to promote drugs to American youths.
00:29:31
Speaker
According to LaRouche, this is simply one fight in the grandest and most philosophical conspiracy of all time, which is the conflict between the empiricists, whose philosophical leaders include such luminaries as David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the rationalists, whose most notable founder apparently is Emmanuel Kant. I put that in quotes there because standard notions of rationalism don't include Kant, but LaRouche did.
00:29:58
Speaker
The empiricists, who according to LaRouche are the power behind the decadent United Kingdom and the European Union, are seeking to force their hedonistic ways on the American people and their American way of life, which LaRouche has identified as the most ideal form of rationalism.
00:30:18
Speaker
You notice you said at the start the former American presidential candidate. He ran how many times? He ran for president eight times. Eight times. One of them from prison. Because he also went to prison. For five years for fraud. Sorry, he was sentenced to 15 years. He served five. Yep, in the 1980s he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, 11 counts of actual mail fraud and one count of conspiring to defraud the US internal revenue service.
00:30:45
Speaker
It's interesting that fraud seems to be the only thing that rich white men go down for. Who was the pharmacy executive with the Punchable Face in the Wu-Tang Clan album? Oh, uh, Shkreli, Martin Shkreli. Yeah, Martin Shkreli. Yeah, he went to jail, not for...
00:31:00
Speaker
hiking up the prices of drugs that normal people have. Drugs which would normally cost a dollar, which he then charged $500 for. No, but he went down for wire fraud or something as well. It's only when you start taking rich people's money that they give a shit. Anyway, enough communism!
00:31:17
Speaker
He was all over the place. Like we said, he had followers. He had a bunch of followers. At one point, a bunch of them were living in a compound with armed guards and crap like that. He's said a great many things, a great many of them conspiratorial. And since this is a podcast about conspiracy theories, maybe we should be diving into the actual conspiracy theories that he had been known to promote.
00:31:41
Speaker
Well let's talk about music then. Let's do that. It had very strong opinions on music. Very strong opinions. Right down to orchestras or at least orchestral... Classical music. Yeah, classical music had to be in a particular chord. Yes, they all had to be tuned in the pitch of A or something. Those are musical words that I know. I don't know if what I just said makes sense.
00:32:04
Speaker
But he had very strong feelings about it and sort of lobbied official bodies, saying that they should all be instructing their orchestras to be tuned in a certain way. But he also believed that the Grateful Dead were sent from the UK to America to pervert the youth. And frankly, I would love to have seen the scene where Queen Elizabeth II ushers Jerry Garcia, who's presumably got short hair, probably a crew cut, wearing a suit. Jerry!
00:32:32
Speaker
Jerry, my boy, I need you to go all the way to America, and you're going to have to pervert the use. Now, you have to grow out your hair, and you have to pretend to smoke a lot of reefer, and try some LSD. Now, Philip, come over here. Give Jerry some of your LSD, Philip. Now, you have to try. You have to try the LSD, Jerry, so you do. I had a tear just a few minutes ago, and I had to say, it's barking in here. Absolutely.
00:33:00
Speaker
Barking, Jerry. I mean, I can see dogs growing out of your groin. Now, just take one of these tabs. Experience what it's like. No, no, no. Philip, Philip. Stop stroking his leg, Philip. Please stop stroking his leg. No, Jerry. Now, you want... Oh, I feel this is getting away from you a little bit. It is, but you need to go to America. You need to pervert the youth to bring America down. Now, we did send the Beatles across for Beatlemania, but it wasn't quite successful. So we need you to...
00:33:29
Speaker
Just finish the process so that a young Donald Trump will one day become prison. Oh, I've gotten political.
00:33:38
Speaker
But I mean, so in terms of conspiracies, not only did he think that rock music, I think in general pretty much was a conspiracy, or at least part of the great sort of cultural war that was fueling these conspiracies, but also he believed that the British royal family were behind a hell of a lot of them, didn't they? Well, he was of the firm belief that British royals had never given up any power. So the whole ceding of power to the US under George IV
00:34:05
Speaker
Sorry, no, George III. One of them. More of an opinions. Blah blah blah. Didn't actually happen. It was all just a rose and British interests were continuing to control the world around the place. He was particularly incensed by the notion of the European Union, which is also under the control of the British, which would be really confusing to the EU negotiators under Brexit at the moment.
00:34:32
Speaker
And she's not quite sure how LaRouche would have handled Brexit and died recently. He must have been aware of it. So yeah, the royal family were behind the plans to send rock music to destroy whatever it was they were going to do. Also thought the royal family controlled the world's drug trade. Well, you know, Jerry and the LSD. And now the thing was, he takes it at the moment in time
00:35:02
Speaker
that the British royal family takes control of the world is once again for a really really philosophical reason because he dates the birth of the British cartel to 1711, so the 18th century,
00:35:20
Speaker
and it's all linked to the insidious conspiracy theory by the Royal Society to deny Leibniz the invention of calculus. So, and I mean this is actually one of those things which there's actually good evidence that something bad occurred here. So the simultaneous development of calculus with Leibniz and Isaac Newsom
00:35:42
Speaker
And basically Leibniz submits papers to the Royal Society for his particular rendition of calculus. It uses a slightly different diagrammatic form than the version that Newton preferred. And Newton did use his contacts in the Royal Society to delay the publication of Leibniz's paper so that Newton could get there first. That did actually occur. Newton was apparently not a very nice human being. No.
00:36:10
Speaker
LaRouche takes this to be evidence that this is when the British cartel takes over the world. Right. As opposed to it being a thing that tended to happen a bit. I mean, we sort of we name individual people, men generally, if we're talking a couple hundred years ago, as being the ones who ushered in this great sort of transformative revolutionary thing, be it calculus or whatever, when generally an idea is usually of its time and chances are a bunch of people working on it at the same time. So, you know, all the people who were
00:36:40
Speaker
working on light bulbs before Edison stole their patents, all the people working on powered flight before the Wright brothers beat them to it. A whole bunch of people were working on a theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin had to rush his book into press to get ahead of them and so on. So given that, it seems a bit odd to say this. This is one case of that, though, isn't just competition in the academic world. It's the birth of a conspiracy.
00:37:06
Speaker
Ah, but he did say some wacky stuff. He said some horribly anti-Semitic and racist stuff. I believe he was a Holocaust denier at various points in his life.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yes, he was also a climate change denier and was all the firm belief that the US military was involved in 9-11. But of course, famously, he started the October surprise theory. He did. Now we've talked about at least one October surprise. I'm not sure if we've talked about this October surprise. The original October surprise was during the 1972 election where it was Nixon versus the guy who didn't get elected because we don't remember who he was.
00:37:44
Speaker
where Henry Kissinger put out a statement saying that peace is at hand, which was supposedly bolstered Nixon's chances of getting reelected because he was kind of running on the idea that he was going to end the Vietnam War. But in 1980,
00:37:59
Speaker
when you had Reagan versus Carter, wasn't it? It was Carter. Reagan won, so nobody cares who the other guy was. But the 1980 presidential election happened, at the time that was happening, there was the Iran hostage crisis. And the film, Aga,
00:38:15
Speaker
that the film Argo is based upon. So LaRouche or if not LaRouche himself then definitely his followers published claims that basically what happened was Reagan won the election, the hostages remained held hostage in Iran until after he became president and under his presidency they eventually got released.
00:38:34
Speaker
The claim is that members of Reagan's campaign conspired with the government of Iran to not make sure they didn't release the hostages until after the election. To lay basically the hostage release. So that Reagan could take full credit for their release and supposedly they bargained as arm sales or something. You hold off on releasing those hostages to give Reagan a better chance of winning and then once he becomes president he'll authorise arm sales to Iran or something like that.
00:39:04
Speaker
Now this was a view that was propounded by Lyndon LaRouche. He was also believed quite strongly by Christopher Hitchens. He died believing that October surprise theory of 1980 was in fact the one true explanation of Reagan's win. And what's interesting about this is around about this time, Lyndon LaRouche is running an intelligence network of his own.
00:39:29
Speaker
So he basically uses his political connections in governments all around the world and in agencies in those governments like the CIA to create a kind of intelligence backbone where information can be traded behind the scenes. So the South African government was trading information with the US using LaRouche and his followers as a go-between.
LaRouche's Global Influence and Legacy
00:39:54
Speaker
And for a few years LaRouche is king of the hill.
00:39:59
Speaker
until organisations like the CIA become aware of the kind of person they're in bed with, and then they start shucking contact with LaRouche. But at this time, and actually up until really until he died, LaRouche ran a bulletin called Executive Intelligence Review, or the EIR.
00:40:26
Speaker
that was going to fill me up quite dramatically, where this kind of information or compromise was being swapped so that people who are in the know could be even more in the know. And possibly due to this amassing of information, he did, at the very least, he did get one thing right, which was the Iran-Contra affair.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yes, which he talked about in EIR months before it came out in the rest of the press. The Contra was selling arms to the Contras, was it? Again, this is something that happened back in the 80s when I had no interest in politics whatsoever. It was a large-scale conspiracy being run by the American government.
00:41:14
Speaker
Is this the case of David Icke and Jimmy Savile, who as we've said before may not have actually ever published anything about Savile, but presumably dealt in the rumours since they'd already been going around, and so claims that he was right on that, so he was right on everything else. Was this a stopped clock being right? Yes, and the thing about a stopped clock being right
00:41:35
Speaker
once a day is it still an unreliable clock? Yes, yes it is. And that's the problem with LaRouche. LaRouche may have on one or two occasions actually been spot on about a particular issue, but generally
00:41:52
Speaker
LaRouche traded in vapid conspiracy theories. I mean, I don't know whether he actually made a list of all the weird things he wanted to do. He wanted to use nukes to create a brand new canal to take water into the center of Africa. Had some very, very bizarre views. Yes, I think as we've pretty much established, he was an interesting fellow.
00:42:19
Speaker
And in fact, what's really interesting is in the last few years living off in his compound, LaRouche became aware that his message was not likely to live on if it was only in the hearts and minds of boomers who were his traditional support base. So he formed a youth movement to try and get young people into the guiles of Lyndon LaRouche.
00:42:47
Speaker
That took. And so he told his Boomer supporters that they should commit suicide. The world was no longer for them, it was for the youth and basically the older members of LaRouche's movement should really consider wiping themselves off the map.
00:43:04
Speaker
Interesting. Now, one thing we didn't really talk about, of course, is we've mentioned that he has followers, that they published this EIR thing and so on. But I mean, they were quite active. You can find lots of pictures online of these LaRouche supporters, you know, picketing and protesting and holding placards up to publicise his various views and conspiracy theories and so on. They weren't quiet in their opinions. No, they were not. Much like Mr LaRouche himself. They were not.
00:43:32
Speaker
So there we have it, the life and times of Lyndon LaRouche. Interesting fellow, not so relevant in the last decade or so, which is why we've never really talked about him up until now. But we probably should have, to be honest. It's true, actually going through this has been quite fun.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, just the sort of character he was. And as we say, this was all before the internet. So, I mean, you're Alex Joneses and you're Jordan Peterson's have leaned very hard on the internet to spread the message and get themselves heard all around the world. But Lyndon LaRouche did it the old fashioned way. Yeah, he did it in part because he was a charismatic individual. He did it in part because he had amazing organizational nows. And in part because he was something of a ruthless madman.
00:44:17
Speaker
He was. And sometimes that can be quite beguiling. So I think we've come to the end of the episode. We have indeed. We've done a good survey of Lyndon LaRouche. May he rest in peace or not, I guess, if you didn't like him. And many people did not.
00:44:31
Speaker
Now if you stick around as a patron in the forthcoming bonus episode we'll be recording in just a few seconds time, we'll be talking about why Josh loves the Guilty Fitness podcast and why Deborah Frances White has a good point about 9-11.
00:44:49
Speaker
We'll be talking about the Chucky Cheese Pizza Conspiracy Theory, and also talking about the Vatican and its secret rules about the children of ordained priests. But if you want to hear about all that, you'll have to of course become one of our patrons, which we'd really like. What did we just do? We just bought a license for
00:45:09
Speaker
for the sound editing software we use. So patron things have, patron things, money, patron money. It's given us lights, it's given us sound editing software. It's given us life. Yes, but we don't really need to talk about the experiments. No, no. Precisely. It's not worth mentioning. What we're basically saying is thank you very much to our patrons, and if you'd like to become a patron, that would be just peachy. It would be. A couple of dollars a month.
00:45:39
Speaker
Who knows what ratio you know exactly what bonus is? You get bonus episodes and behind the scenes content. So there you go. So for our regular listeners, thank you as well for listening to us, quite frankly. Otherwise, we're just kind of two people sitting in a sticky, humid Auckland summer room, getting sweat misting up the inside of my glasses for nothing. So thank you all and all. And I guess we'll see you next week. La diodabe. Goodbye.
00:46:11
Speaker
you
00:46:16
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:47:17
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.