Chris Sayre and fellow protestor Bob Wesser with the controversial LaRouche Political Action Committee stood in front of Syosset Post Office on Wednesday asking, “Sir, are you ready to impeach Obama?”
Chris Sayer of the LaRouche Political Action Committee outside the Syosset Post Office on Wednesday
Some agreed with the pair, offered donations and signed up for the group’s mailing list. Others disagreed and nodded to their poster depicting President Barack Obama sporting an Adolf Hitler-style moustache. “You Republicans are destroying the country,” one passerby said to the men. Yet both Sayre and Wesser, of Hackensack, New Jersey consider themselves Democrats.
The polarizing reactions they receive on the street last week is just another day’s work for the group, which argues global warming is a hoax, calls for colonizing Mars and wants the world to return to a gold-backed monetary system. The group and its affiliates, named for 87-year-old felon and fringe political leader Lyndon LaRouche—famous for, among other things, his wild conspiracy theories—are not an easy organization to label. They’ve been called everything from a cult to “what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history,” according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Sayre said that Obama is implementing a Hitler-like health care plan and is conspiring to destroy NASA. “[This is] bone crushing austerity against the population, Obama is attacking the Constitution,” said Sayre.
“Get Obama out, stop the bailout,” said Wesser. “This country is ready for a fight and for a change,” added Wesser, while using one of the campaign buzzword used most by the man that he and his group are speaking out against.
LaRouche supporters have been setting up in front of Post Offices throughout Long Island and across the Tri-State area while trying to raise awareness for the crimes they accuse the President of committing. But this is by no means a new movement, it is just the latest focus for an organization that has been around since the 1960s.
LaRouche decided that the President was impeachable after he announced his plans for health care reform in July. A pamphlet from LaRouche states, “We are at the very threshold of the President and his henchmen ramming through this same Nazi plan, which would serve as a giant step toward a genocidal dictatorship.”
The LaRouche group’s association of Obama and Hitler are particularly ironic—aside from the contradictory concept of an African-American Nazi—considering a New York judge’s 1980 ruling that the Anti-Defamation League’s characterization of him as an anti-Semite are “fair comment.” LaRouche, who is reportedly very sensitive about being called an anti-Semite, had sued ADL, unsuccessfully claiming they libeled him.
ADL, which advocates against the prejudicial treatment of Jewish people, condemned LaRouche‘s latest Nazi-image-related campaign. “It is bad enough that Holocaust imagery has entered into the debate over health care reform, but it is worse when you realize that the major source of this imagery is a man who has a long track record of anti-Semitic fear mongering,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director, said last summer. “The Nazi imagery helps LaRouche accomplish his goal of changing the subject and drowning out any meaningful public discussion of this important issue.”
