WHICH EXPLAINS A LOT (profanity alert):

LaRouche, who died Tuesday at age 96, was a despicable old fraud, and the warmest feeling I've ever been able to conjure for his devotees is pity. Fiercely authoritarian in both his political ideals and his personal life, LaRouche fed his followers a stream of lies, psychological abuse, and paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies featured a big cast of villains, from the queen of England to Aristotle to "Dope, Inc." to gay people, not to mention whichever follower or ex-follower was the designated scapegoat of the moment. One such scapegoat, Ken Kronberg, committed suicide after the denunciations turned his way.

LaRouche didn't limit his abuse to the people who chose to cast their lot with him. He aimed it outwards too--most infamously during "Operation Mop-Up," when his followers in several cities used fists, bats, chains, and nunchuks to attack members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. When those assaults began in 1973, LaRouche considered himself a part of the radical left; Operation Mop-Up, he hoped, would establish his "hegemony" over the competition. But a few years later he was aligning himself with Klansmen and the far-right Liberty Lobby. He had a habit of flipping positions like that. [...]

In 1989 LaRouche went to prison for fraud, and he spent five years behind bars before he was paroled. After that, he and his followers were less likely to get meetings with Washington officials (though Roger Stone was flirting with him recently--and another ex-governor, Jesse Ventura, became a LaRouche fan). But his former followers sometimes did well for themselves. Matthew Sweet's recent book Operation CHAOS notes that a fellow named Clifford Gaddy managed to hop from the LaRouche world to the Brookings Institution, where he co-wrote a book on Putin with future Trump advisor Fiona Hill. (I should probably note that Sweet thinks it possible that Gaddy had been spying on the LaRouchies for the feds all along.) And there are journalists on both the left (Robert Dreyfuss) and the right (David "Spengler" Goldman) who spent time in LaRouche's orbit before heading off in their own directions.

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