History Barbara Boyd, spokesperson for the LYM and treasurer of LPAC, says that LYM was founded in 2000. According to Harley Schlanger, a LaRouche spokesperson, LYM's first major campaign was during the 2003 recall of California Governor
Gray Davis, when it distributed over a million leaflets across the country, opposing the recall and depicting
Arnold Schwarzenegger alongside
Adolf Hitler. They also distributed tens of thousands of other pamphlets in California. In a 2004 article in the
University of California, Berkeley independent student newspaper,
The Daily Californian, reporter David Cohn described the local chapter of the LYM as "30 college-aged youths" who spent several hours each day undergoing instruction provided by the LaRouche organization. One member, 23-year-old Jason Ross, told Cohn that he had dropped out of
Stanford University in his junior year to join the movement. "We are in a complete breakdown of the financial system and we know that. We can use our time in a more appropriate manner than going to school," he said. Cohn also talked to three other members who had all quit school to join the movement.
The Daily Californian reported the movement's numbers as "about 100 young people from Los Angeles to Oakland" who "travel to dozens of college campuses aggressively recruiting members and not hesitating to ask newcomers to quit school". As a result of the Internet, there are active chapters in nations like Japan where LaRouche has no official organization. The LYM has also expanded its activity into the African nations of South Africa,
Zimbabwe, and
Mozambique. At the April 2007, California State Democratic Convention, LYM activist Quincy O'Neal was elected vice-chairman of the California State Democratic Black Caucus, and Wynneal Innocentes was elected corresponding secretary of the Filipino Caucus. O'Neal is also president of the LYM's Democratic Party Club, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Legacy Club, which is affiliated with the
California Democratic Council. In March 2010, LaRouche Youth leader
Kesha Rogers won the Democratic congressional primary in Houston, Texas' 22nd District.
Pedagogy and campaigns LaRouche is highly critical of contemporary college curricula, and has designed his own pedagogy for members of his youth movement, which he describes as "the reliving of the crucial discoveries of universal physical-scientific principle by, successively, the ancient
Pythagoreans and
Plato and the modern science of
Johannes Kepler," combined with the performance of classical vocal music, particularly
Johann Sebastian Bach's
Jesu, meine Freude. They spend time in what are called "
Monge brigades," which emphasize readings of
Vladimir Vernadsky,
Alexander Hamilton,
Carl Gauss and
Bernhard Riemann. The LaRouche Youth have been assisted around the U.S. in performance workshops on classical music, as well as African-American
spirituals, by well known musicians
William Warfield and
Sylvia Olden Lee, and in drama performance by actor
Robert Beltran. The LYM has disrupted university lectures to distribute their material. On October 23, 2006, a group of LaRouche Youth Movement members twice disrupted a Connecticut U.S. Senate debate between
Alan Schlesinger,
Ned Lamont, and
Joseph Lieberman. According to
The Day, as Joe Lieberman spoke, the hecklers "sang a harmonized ode targeting Vice President
Dick Cheney, which, according to the group's website, is unofficially titled 'The Fat-Ass Nazi Song'." During the election campaign of 2006, the LYM came into conflict with organizations including the
Ayn Rand Institute, which the LYM accused of promoting genocide in speeches by its representatives at various campuses. LYM members confronted Institute executive director
Yaron Brook at various universities across the US, heckling him and calling his policies "fascist". In one case, at the
University of California, Irvine, 15 LYM members, some of whom violently resisted, were arrested. LYM members frequently combine political activity with choral music performance. They sang outside the Democratic Party Convention in Boston in 2004, and in 2007 they performed choral music with lyrics about impeaching Dick Cheney in classrooms at Harvard and Boston University. During 2007, LYM members have been seen in on the streets, campuses and conferences emphasizing two issues in particular: a call by LaRouche for the impeachment of
Dick Cheney, and the assertion that the theory of human-caused
global warming is a fraud motivated by
Malthusianism. On this latter issue, LYM have confronted
Al Gore on several occasions at his public events. In the
Philippines, LYM members debated a variety of spokespersons for the Global Warming theory. In
Argentina, LYM leader Betiana Gonzalez disrupted Gore's speech at a Biofuels conference. A similar incident took place earlier in the year in Montreal, Canada. In November 2007, the LYM launched a campaign against
social networking websites such as
MySpace and
Facebook, with the mass distribution of the pamphlet "The
Noosphere vs. The
Blogosphere: Is the Devil in Your Laptop?" The pamphlet says that
Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace, and
Microsoft, owner of Facebook (Microsoft owns only 2.5% of Facebook), are involved in
social engineering to destroy the
cognitive powers and potential for political leadership among young people.
TIME magazine's coverage of Kesha Rogers' campaign says that "The LYM espouses LaRouche opposition to free trade and 'globalism' (the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) and it also calls for a return to a humanist classical education, emphasizing the works of Plato and Leibniz."
Criticism and accusations Journalists, former members and law enforcement officials have made a wide variety of accusations of the LaRouche organizations, including a
Scotland Yard report that called them a political cult. Avi Klein of the
Washington Monthly describes this as an element of a campaign LaRouche created to blame the "first generation" of his own movement for fundraising failures, and to appeal to young members by channeling "the rage new acolytes felt toward their parents at a nearby, internal enemy". A LaRouche spokesman has said the young man killed himself because he was disturbed. In October 2004, a British inquest into Duggan's death heard allegations from his mother that LYM and the Schiller Institute may have used
brainwashing techniques on her son to persuade him to join the movement.
Michael Winsted An ex-member of the LaRouche youth movement has asserted that the LaRouche Youth Movement calls parents "brainwashed baby boomers." responded by portraying Michael Winsted as an agent of the
Washington Post who "briefly infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the LYM". ==LaRouche PAC==