Lyndon LaRouche, perennial presidential candidate and conspiracy aficionado, is dead at 96

Lyndon LaRouche Jr., a candidate for president every election from 1976 to 2004 — including one run from inside jail, in 1992 — died Tuesday, his political action committee confirmed Wednesday. He was 96. LaRouche was a “philosopher, scientist, poet, statesman," the PAC said in a statement, and "those who knew and loved Lyndon LaRouche know that humanity has suffered a great loss, and today we dedicate ourselves anew to bring to reality the big ideas for which history will honor him."

LaRouche's politics were hard to define — he began as a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the late 1940s and 1950s, ran for president first as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and then an independent or independent Democrat, and he called himself heir to the proto-Republican Whigs in 1986 — but he was best known for his enduring conspiratorial theories.

LaRouche, for exampled, maintained that the queen of England was involved in drug trafficking and the International Monetary Fund was "engaged in mass murder" by spreading AIDS, a disease he promoted other conspiracy theories about. He said the Holocaust was "mythical," The Associated Press notes, and called Zionism "cult nonsense." He claimed that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walt Mondale were Soviet "agents of influence" and more, as in this 1984 campaign ad.

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In 1988, LaRouche was convicted of tax fraud and mail fraud, serving about nine years of his 15-year sentence. His followers, who solicited money and passed out leaflets at airports and other public places while he was in prison, were so devoted that loved ones reportedly hired "deprogrammers" to abduct them.