Worldwide La Rouche Youth Movement - LaRouche Youth Movement - Pedagogy and Campaigns

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. It also attacks Wikipedia in similar terms.

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."