New Republic Goes Ape against LaRouche and Diane Sare

Feb. 14, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—As surely as the sap rises, when Americans threaten to break from narrow “left vs. right” controlled pathways, and respond to the quality of statesmanship of a Lincoln, an FDR, a JFK or, presently, Lyndon LaRouche’s movement, a wild brainfart bursts upon the scene. Five days before the Feb. 19 gathering of citizens from across the political spectrum in Washington, D.C., to put an end to an insane march toward a thermonuclear showdown, the New Republic on Feb. 13 posted a bizarre tirade against Lyndon LaRouche and U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare, without daring to directly mention that Sare is a speaker at the upcoming Feb. 19 rally itself. The article was partially reproduced in “History News Network,” published by the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Entitled “Lyndon LaRouche Was the Godfather of Political Paranoia. His Cult Is Still Alive and Unwell,” the headline also carries the threatening kicker: “The Walking Dead.” The article opens its attack upon Sare, saying that she “named as her main qualification her ‘32-year association with the greatest economist and statesman the United States has yet produced, the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.’ The way she delivered the line, positioned as she was beneath the bronze crotch of George Washington....” The rest was much the same.

The listed author, Tommy Craggs, whose sole identification is that he “writes for HBO’s Game Theory With Bomani Jones,” retreads the long discredited fantasies of Dennis King, citing King as his authority on matters such as, when LaRouche talks about the British Empire doing evil, he really is just using code for “the Jews.” Craggs bounces over to Klan leader Robert Miles to account for how “thwarted Black nationalists” joined with LaRouche. “He mixes his forces, having blacks and Jews in his ranks.”

Craggs writes that LaRouche has a “producerist view of finance capital as a parasite thrusting itself on to the ‘real’ economy—a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, to borrow Matt Taibbi’s famous metaphor for Goldman Sachs.” But this touch of reality is cited as, of course, evidence that LaRouche is a fascist!

Craggs is a sports writer, and his longest term of employment was as the executive editor of Gawker Media, which specialized in celebrity gossip. He ended up resigning in 2015, after posting a shameful article “outing” a married corporate executive, which Gawker withdrew. Otherwise, Craggs’ previous venture into “political writing” was an article for Slate, in which he explained that old politics is posturing about useless issues such as the “national debt,” while the real “issues of race and class and gender and sexual violence,” a version of “identity politics,” are what count.