HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGIONStep One: Sell Hope to the Hopeless
I’ll never forget the first time someone told me I had blood on my hands. I
remember it as if it were yesterday.
It was 2005, a sunny, crisp morning in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a
university student then and walking to class, minding my own business, when
I saw a group of kids holding up pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with
captions that read, “America Deserved It.”
Now, I don’t consider myself the most patriotic person by any stretch of
the imagination, but it seems to me that anyone holding such a sign in broad
daylight immediately becomes a highly punchable person.
I stopped and engaged the kids, asking what they were doing. They had a
little table set up with a smattering of pamphlets on top. One had Dick
Cheney with devil’s horns drawn on him and the words “Mass Murderer”
written beneath. Another had George W. Bush with a Hitler mustache.
The students were part of the LaRouche Youth Movement, a group started
by the far-left ideologue Lyndon LaRouche in New Hampshire. His acolytes
would spend countless hours standing around college campuses in the
Northeast, handing out flyers and pamphlets to susceptible college kids. And
when I came upon them, it took me all of ten seconds to figure out what they
actually were: a religion.
That’s right. They were an ideological religion: an antigovernment,
anticapitalist, anti–old people, antiestablishment religion. They argued that
the international world order, from top to bottom, was corrupt. They argued
that the Iraq War had been instigated for no other reason than that Bush’s
friends wanted more money. They argued that terrorism and mass shootings
didn’t exist, that such events were simply highly coordinated governmental
efforts to control the population. Don’t worry right-wing friends, years later,
they would draw the same Hitler mustaches and make the same claims about
Obama—if that makes you feel any better. (It shouldn’t.)
What the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) does is pure genius. It finds
disaffected and agitated college students (usually young men), kids who are
both scared and angry (scared at the sudden responsibility they’ve been forced
to take on and angry at how uncompromising and disappointing it is to be an
adult) and then preach one simple message to them: “It’s not your fault.”