American politics produces no small number of eccentrics. From the grotesque currently inhabiting the White House to Ross Perot to recently announced Democratic primary candidate Marianne Williamson (formerly Oprah’s “spiritual advisor”), the American political scene seems uniquely suited to creating and elevating very strange people. Among connoisseurs of crankery, however, one name has always stood above the rest: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr, who died yesterday, age ninety-six.

Originating on the far left, in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, LaRouche would eventually forge what is easily the strangest path from left to right in twentieth-century America. His cult, forged in street fights with the Communist Party in the late 1960s, now spends most of its time propagandizing on behalf of both Donald Trump and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In between, LaRouche was, at various points, a drug warrior, a Reaganite “Star Wars” backer, a dedicated foe of figures from Queen Elizabeth (“a genocidal drug runner”) to Walter Mondale, a federal prisoner, an advocate for Glass-Steagall, and, of course, a psychoanalyst. Only in America!