Introduction
In 2003 for several months I was part of the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM).
This is something I feel a need to write, but it's difficult.
I didn't have to leave. I was expelled.

The dates on these posts are the dates that I wrote them. I will try to include any relevant dates of things when they happened within the posts.

Before I met the LaRouchies, I had been homeless for a little over a year, and had barely moved into my apartment. I had been living here for only a few months. The only friends I really had were other people who used to live at the shelter and I really wanted to get away from that.

I also was very opposed to the war in Iraq, and that's their main hook that draws new members into the LaRouche Campaign these last couple of years.

I came accross this book table at the Santa Monica College campus. Normally, I figure I can talk to someone who sounds crazy, what harm can there possibly be in that? I'm serious. Maybe not consciously, but I'd been homeless for over a year. I have bipolar disorder. Practically everyone I knew had something at least a little wrong with them. At the time, there was no way for me to judge whether it was ok to go to one of their meetings.

People who are recruited to cults are typically vulnerable or at transitional times in their lives.

Cults want people who are really intelligent, but also vulnerable or in a transitional period in their lives.

When you meet the LaRouchies at a campaign table, they ask for your number and a donation. I gave them my number, but I didn't have any money I could give them if I wanted to. Maybe I did, but I needed it. I was living on $200 a month at the time. "Come on, not even a dollar?" Already they reminded me of panhandlers who either had no idea how humiliating it was what they were doing, or just didn't mind, who had no idea that I was nearly as broke as they were, or didn't care.