In the early 1970s, I remember standing alongside other socialists to defend the Communist Party (who we all detested) when it came under physical assault by the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a libertarian cult formed around Lyndon LaRouche. NCLC members would attack CP members outside their offices or at meetings. We defended them from assault with locked arms, often getting injured ourselves, because we opposed violence in politics regardless of the CP’s stinking politics.

The NCLC came into big money at that time, became even more crazy-pants cultish, & continued to morph toward fascism, including overtures to such groups as the KKK. But since they played no part in US antiwar, civil rights, or women’s rights politics of that era, we lost interest in following them. LaRouche became in so many ways a counterpart to David Icke who believes extraterrestrial reptiles that morphed into Jewish bankers rule planet Earth. Both are cults that share obscurantism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, & political derangement. Both are active supporters of the Assad regime.

Now, many of those socialists who stood against NCLC violence in the 1970s find themselves in the same political current as the LaRouche movement when it comes to supporting the Assad dictatorship, Putin’s bombing of civilians in Syria & his arming of the Burmese junta against the Rohingya people. What has changed them in that time? It is likely that estrangement from actual political work combined with Islamophobia have wreaked havoc on their political judgement & commitments. They’ve abandoned the principles of their youth for the paranoia & misanthropy of libertarianism. May they rot in hell for what they now justify.