Berlet's first edits of any significance were to tone down or remove the hatchet job elements of his biography which was created some 6 months or so earlier. Which seems pretty reasonable.

Despite the madness which ensued, it's unfair to suggest that Berlet appeared out of the blue to link spam Wikipedia.

This is exactly what I mean. It was *not* his website. [[Political Research Associates]] is a company. It is not owned by Berlet. He is an employee, a professional researcher. It is a company used by journalists who are investigating PRA's area of expertise.

Patently false, and definitely repeating Berlet tripe & smears. All my information was properly sourced per WP citation policies at the time, and the specific example you, Mr. Hell Freezes Over, cite here was most definitely cited to the Washington Post. And Berlet made the claim in ArbCom that I said it, whereas with a click anyone can see for themselves on the Evidence page the cite was to the Washington Post. Interesting. BLP didn't exist in those days. And I believe my actions & case in some small measure helped force the issue -- particularly since Wikipedia was routinely used by Berlet, and Slim, and Will Beback to regulalry demonize and denounce thier imaginery political enemies.

Good grief. If you don't know that, then you have learned nothing from the absolute chaos of the past four years.

Slim, people here told me you were smart.

You're not. Earlier in the thread you seemed to wilfully ignore evidence presented of the LaRouche witchunts - after I posted it twice.

Now, you think it is perfectly reasonable for someone to edit articles on a BLP subject whom they've had open legal battles with in the Courts?!? You don't think that is a fucking Conflict Of Interest?!?!

Get out of here.

Much worse than that. Once he set himself up as the expert interpreter of LaRouchie "code talk" he lost all ability to engage in reasoned discussion. His adversary's very words mean anything he says they mean. He is now able to carry on both sides of the dialog and take it anywhere he wants. He no longer needs an encyclopedia, just a mirror.

Ok, let's see if I have this straight.

HK: LaRouche fanboy (just to keep it simple)

Cberlet: anti-LaRouche activist.

HK, at worst, wants LaRouche-related subjects to show glowing support of LaRouche and purge any negative content. In essence, a promotional wp puffpiece.

Cberlet, at worst, wants to show how bad of a man this LaRouche guy is and wants to make sure that anything that looks positive toward LaRouche is never, ever portrayed anywhere on wikipedia.

Cberlet is praised by "the Cabal" for keeping out all that "pro-LaRouche propaganda" but is allowed to have his published anti-LaRouche propaganda used as a source for wikipedia. His involvement sounds like COI to me.

I'm never been involved in this issue but it seems like keeping pro-LaRouche POV out of the article is of utmost importance for NPOV presentation while anti-LaRouche POV is all fine and dandy and conforms to an NPOV presentation. This seems inconsistent to me.

What if I, or anyone for that matter, was similar in notability as Berlet and published information critical of say, Barack Obama? How successful would I be if wanted to source my material of all the bad things Obama did (if no other source mentioned these things)? Probably not a WP:SNOW chance.

This is just another example of inconsistent treatment that I've seen on WP. This seems like a major theme to why this board exists. One side on wp is portrayed the bad guy while the other comes out smelling like roses in wikiland until the real facts show otherwise and it takes a long time for some to swallow their pride and admit a mistake was made.

We've been over this before.

What you're saying is that material published by a reliable publisher, and used all over the world by journalists, including very credible news programs such as the BBC's Panorama, may not be used as a source on Wikipedia because (a) a bunch of people such as yourself have been persuaded by the LaRouche movement that the authors are evil, and (b) the authors dared to defend themselves when trashed by the LaRouche movment, which made it a personal dispute.

Normally, this board laughs about stuff like this, where WP postures in ways not recognized by the real world.

As horribly time-consuming as it is, if you want to comment in an informed way, you really ought to go through Berlet's edits, including posts to talk and to the ArbCom; then go through Hersch's and Nobs's, including Hersch's socks and IP addresses, and compare the quality of their edits and the sources. No more would need to be said.

I'm not surprised that you would approve of a method that deprives people you disagree with a voice.

In a nutshell. Yes.

There really is nothing more to be said.

I'll leave it to Chip Berlet, allowed to control content on WP about LaRouche for the best part of 3 years. Try reading this with a straight face. It's difficult to tell who are more ridiculous, the LaRouchies or the Anti-LaRouchies.

Lyndon LaRouche: Fascist Demagogue, by Chip (No Conflict of Interest) Berlet

Includes Downloadable Flyer!

Slim: Let's cut to the quick (I just been informed who you are).

When Jimbo Wales told Editor & Publisher on December 5, 2005, two weeks prior to BLP being considered,
I think we can safely surmise the only possible "reliable sources" for this inane statement are Chip Berlet, and SlimVirgin. Then all suckups in the Admin community got into the act. And look at the damage to both Wikipedia & Jimbo's credibility it wrought.

Let's not confuse the cause of anti-communism with LaRouchism. This is an assinine path to pursue, even for you. It won't work. Let's not go there.

That's Ms. Hell Freezes Over.

The fact that it was "kept" is completely irrelevant to the discussion, obviously, but the fact that you mention it is somewhat telling...


Well I did, sort of, but it sounded earlier as though you were calling us "hypocrites" for not logging into Wikipedia and defending the guy's article. That's not something I would ever do, but as for the rest of the membership here, we're not some sort of cyber-vigilante organization (AFAIK). Even if Berlet was someone we actually liked, which might have been possible if he wasn't being protected by a substantial group of WP admins, that would have been a bit much to ask.


Well, shame on him, then. Then again, like Rhindle says, if you're going to use him as a source in a highly contentious group of articles, you really should have an article on him, at the very least. Now, if you weren't using him as a source, maybe I could see it.


I don't think so. As I recall, most of the "attack" edits to his article were attempts to suggest, if not actually prove, his conflicts of interest with regard to Larouche-related material, and to point out criticism of him by conservative groups. At no time did anyone here (to my knowlege) edit his article to claim or even vaguely suggest that Berlet is, or was, a "pedophile," a "wife-beater," a "faggot," a "child-molester," or that he fathered multiple children out of wedlock with an Albanian prostitute. Those are the kinds of things we tend to object to around here when it comes to BLP's. I'm not saying the "attack" edits in question were fair, or even factual, but there's just no equivalence for them - beyond the fact that Berlet himself objected to them.

As for him being an expert, let me give you a "hypothetical." Let's say that for the next 25 years, I make a career out of trying to convince the world that US President Barack Obama is an anti-semite, and to do so I not only use innuendo, selective interpretation, and references to "coded phraseology" in obscure Obama speeches that I worked out all by myself, but I also totally ignore published material written by Obama in which he writes or says things like "anti-semitism is one of the most despicable ideologies in human history." Or, when I don't simply ignore such statements, I dismiss them as "lies" and "rhetorical trickery."

So where am I, after 25 years? Am I considered an "expert on Barack Obama"? Of course not. I'm considered, quite rightly, a crank, a crackpot, an idiot, maybe even a traitor (if there's any justice). And yet there's no real difference between this and what Berlet has done with Larouche for the last 25 years, except for the fact that nobody likes Larouche, and Larouche doesn't like anybody else either. Larouche himself is widely considered a crackpot, as we all know. He is, basically, an "easy target," someone nobody cares much for, outside of his immediate circle of followers.

Regardless, the point here isn't that Berlet is dishonest or unethical, or even that he isn't really an "expert" on Lyndon Larouche in the sense that, say, Steven Hawking is an expert on advanced astrophysics, or even that Phil Sandifer is an expert on Doctor Who. I don't think anybody should have the right to demand that "experts" on them be impartial, though it would be nice if they were. The point is that Wikipedia ought to be able to discern whether or not any given expert is impartial, and if he isn't, don't let him control the articles in question. That didn't happen in this case.

To be fair, Cberlet didn't control the articles in question. Slim and Will Beback did. Berlet served at their pleasure.

You never addressed my question from yesterday, which is if you have a personal interest in making LaRouche look bad on Wikipedia? Here's why I ask:

- The LaRouche ArbCom case you were a party to found that you had committed personal attacks.
- You admit that you somehow know Herschel's name, living location, and place of work.
- You defend two rabidly (no, this word isn't an exaggeration, see the evidence others like Kato have presented in this thread) anti-LaRouche journalists' access to edit LaRouche articles while helping Jayjg and a few other admins ban all editors who appear even slightly pro-LaRouche
- You kept a secret page in your userspace that extensively documented suspected pro-LaRouche editors and sources related to the LaRouche articles.
- You often used to edit articles, frequently with Jayjg, about right-wing and anti-semitic topics, like New Anti-Semitism.
- Your editing almost, if not completely, always agreed with Jayjg's POV on those topics.
- Jayjg, as documented in a recent thread in his section in WR, is often quick and active at labeling BLP subjects as anti-semitic or anti-zionist, including, evidently, LaRouche
- You became irritated in a previous post in this thread, calling me a hypocrite, for asking why you never called-out Jayjg for POV-pushing or didn't advocate topic banning DKing and CBerlet

Now, it could be that LaRouche followers are trying to push POV on Wikipedia. But, it seems to me that what you, Jayjg, DKing, or CBerlet were doing was worse, which was pushing POV while pretending to be upholding the rules and using administrative privileges and wiki-political gaming to support your agenda. I'll give you a chance to answer before I go any further with my opinion on the issue.

Says you.

It's true that Berlet didn't have the block-button and the others did. However, due to his subject matter, he was given free reign.

I believe it has been mentioned that the fastest way to climb the WP social ladder is much like how to climb it in in the modern media: play on Jewish paranoia, and attack in all directions outward from the NeoCon/pro-Israeli/vaguely squishy liberal center. Just use the terms neo-fascist, racist, white supremicist, and new-antisemitism a lot. Most of the time they can be interchangable.

That's what Berlet did for a living before he came to WP anyway, and it's still what he's doing after he's gone. It's also more or less what Jayjg does for a living, apparently, and Slim has edited that way for years (without using the terms, there's still not a playing card worth of difference between SlimVirgin's wiki-politics and Berlet or Jayjg's).

As to how Will Beback got any of this pineapple up his rear, I have no idea. There must be a story, there, but I don't know it.

Don't forget homophobic!

In fact, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion right now, if it weren't for the homophobia of one of our (now former) members.

Ironically enough...

A good question, deserving of an answer. And don't forget mine:

Don't worry, she'll keep going there.

This is merely daytime entertainment, while she waits to get her admin power back
next month. Then you'll see a lot less of her on this forum.

Well, I for one will miss her sweet, sunny disposition.

Telling of what?



I'm not saying you needed to log in. I'm saying it's odd that so many other BLP issues get noticed, but the sustained (four years long roughly) attack on Berlet not only didn't get commented on in his favour -- it was added to here by Herschel, Nobs, and a couple of others, without anyone here saying, "Hang on, those are vicious attacks on someone already under vicious attack on Wikipedia *by the same people*, and we don't encourage that here." No, you *do* encourage it here, because one of the people doing it was promoted to staff.



Berlet wasn't being used as a source, so far as I know, when Herschel created the BLP on him in May 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...t&oldid=3597556 And you didn't use that argument when it came to Brandt -- that because he was a source for WP, we needed an article on him.



Herschel suggested in Berlet's BLP that he was corrupt. Nobs posted some awful stuff on the article's talk page that I won't repeat here, and as I recall tried to get some of it into the article too.



I suppose I wonder how much LaRouche you've read, Somey. You don't have to read much to find some very depressing material about Jews (as well as about gays and women), notwithstanding that he denies any antisemitism himself. And to dismiss him as a crackpot, as though he's a harmless one, is wrong-headed. The LaRouche movement used to be very good at cultivating young reporters in an effort to get its propaganda spread. An enormous number of prominent political conspiracy theories have been started or in some way spread by the LaRouche movement's ability to influence naive journalists. Over time, the origins of the rumours get lost, and they take on a life of their own. The LaRouchies then use those stories to spread the memes even further, trumpeting them as evidence of something they've been claiming for a long time, when in fact they made them up, and using their supposedly astonishing predictive power to bolster their credibility with the next generation of befuddled reporters.



I wonder how it would be possible to be a true expert on LaRouche, yet remain impartial.

Perhaps by not distributing propaganda leaflets comparing LaRouche to Hitler, which carry crude caricatures of LaRouche as Superman wearing a swastika on his chest? That might be a start.

http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/

Sorry, that was just a knee-jerk reaction on my part. It's just that I would have written it more like, "Berlet asked to have the article deleted, but he was unwilling or unable to back up his request with a massive lawsuit when a small group of mostly-anonymous revenge-obsessed cybergoons inevitably refused to delete it, and the actual publisher of the article decided (as per usual) to hide behind Section 230 of the CDA to deny all responsibility and accountability for the situation." Or something along those lines.


Well, it's hardly "odd," given some of the things he's said about us, and as for the rest of it, I think most people here have always seen him as a WP editor more than anything else. Certainly I'd never heard of him before I joined WR, and it's not like I'm oblivious to left-leaning political stuff in the US and elsewhere.


We might have, if Brandt hadn't declared almost immediately that he wanted his article deleted and stuck to it. Berlet, OTOH, became a rather active Wikipedian in his own right, and remained one for a good 2-3 years before finally coming to his senses.


I get called "corrupt" all the time, and I've decided it's not so bad really. It's probably just a USA-idiom sort of thing - it's actually considered a compliment here. I don't know about Canada...?

Anyway, I assume you're referring to this edit? The fact is, a whole bunch of reporters have been paid by Mellon-Scaife et al for doing all sorts of dirty tricks, most notably the Whitewater "scandal" and the effort to impeach Bill Clinton. It might be nice if the claim were cited, of course, but it's not all that hard to believe - and he did use the word "allegedly," at least. Surely no self-respecting vandal would be so equivocal as that?


That's just it, SV - I don't like Lyndon Larouche any more than you do, but I think you're the one who hasn't read enough, or else you'd be appalled at how often he agrees with you - on quite a few ideological issues. The fact is, Larouche either despises or distrusts just about everybody, including people who despise and distrust each other. For example, I keep pointing out how he totally agrees with you on Martin Luther's ultimate responsibility for the rise of the Nazis, which I (and IMO most people) would consider to be a grossly exaggerated and unfair claim, even in light of the fact that Luther was both German and a known anti-semite. But you never seem to "take the bait" on that one, for some reason...

Admittedly, Larouche also despises environmentalists, and I believe he lumps the Animal Rights people in with them. So you've got a perfectly legitimate reason there to oppose him, if not hate his guts - I'll give you that, at least.

Oh, and don't forget hippies. Larouche really hates hippies!

Of all the Whopping Idiocies in Wikiputia one of the Whoppingest Idiocies has got to be the Very Idea that an organization can have any sane policies about Conflict of Interest with members who will not disclose so much as their real names.

It's just one more area of Wikiputia where dishonest people get rewarded in proportion to their dishonesty and honest people get screwed in proportion to their honesty.

The same thing goes for all the members of this Review who operate under pseudonyms. They can spout generalities about Conflict of Interest all they want, but they cannot add anything but nonsense to any specific dispute until they are willing to make the pertinent disclosures, beginning at minimum with their real names.

Jon Awbrey

Or, more generally:

Hey, look, I'm agreeing with Jon Awbrey!

(Though you'll note that as worded, Wikipedia's COI policy isn't binding in any way - it merely advises people to avoid editing where they might have a COI. Understanding of this by admins is, ah, uneven.)

Pertinent Disclosure. I'm a card-carrying Pragmatist (or Peircean Pragmaticist if you wanna get picky). Among other things this means that I reckon the meaning of a policy according to its practical effects, which may be hard to guess from the cloud of dust that's often as not raised by its words.

Hi Ho, Sliver, Away !!!

Jon Awbrey

Wow:

SV, you asked me for an edit by CBerlet that is as bad as HK's. I think this edit summary is much worse. It's a clear violation of BLP. I checked CBerlet's talk page for the days following that edit summary and saw nary a warning or block from you or anyone else who I assume were closely watching that article to make sure no pro-LaRouche editors touched it.

To be fair, SV's name is missing from what I believe was the last pro-LaRouche editor witchhunt, but notice in that thread that Jayjg performed the checkuser, and JzG, Tom Harrison, and John Nevard were all active in pushing for action, in addition to Will Beback.



I guess you've confirmed that you have a personal stake in seeing that the content about LaRouche in Wikipedia is negative in nature. Do you see any problem with that?

Why, exactly, do you expect her to answer this one? She hasn't answered anything substantive so far, just led everyone on one rhetorical wild goose chase after another. Why would this be different?

Doug Birch, "Master of the Politics of Paranoia," Baltimore Sun Magazine, 5 June 1988, p. 27:

That's just the tip of the iceberg, from a mainstream journalist. If you spend time digging into more obscure sources, there's a lot about Berlet's collusion with the right-wing — such as that domestic spy agency, the Anti-Defamation League, which has publicly thanked Political Research Associates for passing along information for its files. As long as a right-winger or a CIA-connected person (such as Roy Godson) is anti-LaRouche, that person is potentially someone Berlet is happy to work with.

He's a wannabe spy, or maybe a real one. I can see why Slim has an affinity for him. Yes, that fits my definition of "corrupt."

Okay, but we haven't yet learned from SV that the diff we're referring to is the diff she's referring to, or if she's even referring to a particular diff at all. She's been associated with WP for a long time, so you have to wonder if she actually meant that Herschel accused Mr. Berlet of using a "sock puppet."

Here's a significant piece of the iceberg.


I must admit that although I have probably read as much LaRouche as anyone here, I'm drawing a blank on this one.

Although I can see that you wrote "at worst," I don't think that the actual record reflects anything like that. My battles over LaRouche went through several stages. My first major opponent was Adam Carr (T-C-L-K-R-D) , who was certainly the most lunatic POV-pusher of them all. He seemed to think that he had a divine dispensation to write whatever he damn well pleased, and when he didn't get what he wanted, his tantrums were spectacular. He stopped editing the LaRouche articles due to tantrum-fatigue.

That left another anti-LaRouche editor, whose name went through several changes and wound up as Formeruser-81 (T-C-L-K-R-D) . By my best recollection, Formeruser was a clean fighter; he didn't try to game the system, did not try to recruit admins to ban his opponents, etc. The other thing about the period that followed, which in retrospect seems remarkable now, is that Snowspinner AKA Phil Sandifer offered to mediate the conflict, and was an honest broker. The conflict was actually resolved to everyone's relative satisfaction, producing this compromise version, which I believe will stand up to scrutiny as not a "puff piece."

This version of the article remained stable until the advent of Slim, Berlet and Will.

The main things I'm getting from this thread are:

1. Herschel, or whoever it was, shouldn't have started the biography on Chip Berlet. That was a real mistake. That biography should be deleted at the subject's request, and for other valid reasons.
2. Chip Berlet shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the LaRouche articles. He's been in litigation with LaRouche for starters, has a massive conflict of interest, and openly talks about his quest to counter LaRouche whom he regularly compares to Hitler. It was inevitable that his presence would cause major problems.
3. The clique of admins and users who are openly anti-LaRouche, who rallied round to protect Berlet, showed blatant double standards; dragged a large area of Wikipedia through the mud - further discredited the place. They have shown they cannot be trusted any more than any of the other disruptive forces at the site.

You're conflating two different questions 1) Can Chris Berlet be used as a source 2) can he edit articles in which he is a source (and about whom he's been involved in litigation).

I think the answer to 1) is yes - at least in the case of his book and interviews he's done with major media and to 2) is no.

Also, I think you're exaggerating Larouche's importance. He did have some influence in the Reagan Administration and then there were those fluke primary victories by Larouche supporters, also in the 1980s but since the late 1980s when he was exposed in the major media and the early 1990s when he was incarcerated he's been a spent force. Yes, the Larouche movement can still recruit people (fewer than they used to) and wreck their lives like any cult can but their impact in the real world is negligible. The Scientologists and Moonies are a greater threat.

You've said this three or four times now, so I assume that you mean it. Ms. Hell may be correct in assuming that you haven't read much LaRouche. Permit me to give you a capsule summary of who and what LaRouche likes:

LaRouche likes the Renaissance, because it was the first movement to break with the millennia-old practice of affording the mass of humanity the same rights and dignity afforded to the livestock. He likes the American Revolution, because it was the first attempt to build a nation-state around those ideas of the Renaissance, instead of just institutionalizing the rule of some gang that managed to seize power. And although the commitment of the USA to those ideas was a bit shaky, there have been leaders who reaffirmed them and attempted to share them with the rest of the world: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, for example. LaRouche likes them, too. And the Non-Aligned Movement. These are examples of humanitarian action, an unselfish commitment to giving the vast majority of humans, who live without much hope, a chance.

Now in the late 1960s, there was a big change in American culture. I think it was manipulated, and you are free to dismiss that claim as a conspiracy theory. But regardless, the outcome was clear: Americans of all persuasions were soon frantically Doing Their Own Thing™ and any humanitarian impulse was pretty much lost. People in my age group tend to have their egos heavily invested in that Paradigm Shift™ and they get their backs up when LaRouche stridently tells them that it sucks.

One last thing: I take offense when Ms. Hell claims that the LaRouche movement is "right wing." It is a calculated, cynical insult to people such as myself. I got involved in presidential politics as a high school student, supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, and then LaRouche in subsequent elections. I believe this demonstrates a preference on my part for humanitarian candidates, and the coherence of my choices is underscored by the fact that Gene McCarthy, late in his life, became a close friend of LaRouche, while McGovern, last time I heard, was still alive and on cordial terms with the LaRouche movement.

Who do you believe manipulated it?

Levi-Strauss

Ja Ja

That's projection (in the psychological sense).

You are manipulating everyone you meet and therefore you assume that everything must be the result of some manipulation.

Malefactors of Great Stealth.

I haven't watched the LaRouche articles for a long time.

Yes, that edit summary was a BLP violation, though nowhere near as bad as creating WP articles in order to attack people, as Herschel did. But you might want to look at the LaRouche quote that Berlet was responding to. LaRouche is here talking about the need to take action against people with AIDS -- as I recall, he wanted to quarantine them:

"We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word. Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay", they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw! The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users. There are 20 million cocaine sniffers in the United States, at least. Of course it does affect their mind; it affects the way they vote! ...

"Where did this nonsense come from? Oh, we don't want to offend the gays! Gays are sensitive to their civil rights; this will lead to discrimination against gays!

"They’re already beating up gays with baseball bats around the country! Children are going to playgrounds, they go in with baseball bats, and they find one of these gays there, pederasts, trying to recruit children, and they take their baseball bats and they beat them up pretty bad. They’ll kill one sooner or later. In Chicago, they’re beating up gays that are hanging around certain schools, pederasts; children go out with baseball bats and beat them up—which is perfectly moral; they have the civil right to do that! It’s a matter of children’s civil rights!" -- Lyndon LaRouche, Executive Intelligence Review, January 10, 1986. http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/context_quotes.html#gays

Actually, I did come to this conclusion concerning Wikipedia and experts myself. An expert, especially a published expert, cannot adhere to Wikipedia policy in the current way that it is applied. An expert can't help but use primary sources, and to create original research even using published sources which are for laymen. It comes with the territory.

The only solution is to avoid editing on WP in any area in which you have expertise, since you're always going to be going against the rules. I would argue that someone like Chip Berlet should either limit their suggestions to talkpages, or not edit at all (the solution that I've finally come to, personally).

All this talk of cocaine, gays, and baseball bats reminds me that Glenn Burke's bio is poorly sourced and could use some fixing up.

Oh wait, he's dead, disrega#@*%)(=%NO CARRIER

Leaving aside the moral aspects of making such a statement, let's talk about inclusion of this kind of material in an encyclopedia: Would Britannica include that sort of thing? Not in the way that WP does, I should think.

It all goes back to the core policy of NPOV: is adding this information "neutral"? I really can't see how it could be.

You know, if you people would just enforce your policies as they are written in a fair and level manner, then 99% of this type of stuff wouldn't happen in the first place.

Any attempt to reason on the basis of Wikipediot excuses for definitions and norms is bound to lead to despair.

They simply have no grasp of what terms like Conflict of Interest, Original Research, or Primary Source mean in the Real World.

Give it up — it's sheer and utter baby babble.

Jon Awbrey

By neutral, all we mean is that we publish the views of all reliable published sources. The overwhelming majority of sources all over the western world, when writing about LaRouche, talk about allegations of cultism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, his shift from extreme left to extreme right, his attempts to become president, his bizarre attacks on Britain, including that the Beatles were some kind of front for British intelligence, and that the Queen is the head of an international drug cartel. Then there are the claims by researchers who've investigated him, or former members, of their names being blackened, or their homes or pets being attacked.

Britannica doesn't have detailed articles on anything the way we do on WP, so comparing them doesn't help us to work out what's appropriate. If you're going to have a detailed article, it's impossible to leave this stuff out, because there's so much of it. Also, why would we *want* to leave it out? He did say those things, and he presumably stands by all or most of them.

The question is would Britannica allow someone who is involved in the story to write their article? No. They might use him as a source but they wouldn't ask him to contribute. Berlet can be used as a source for Larouche articles but he shouldn't be editing them. You haven't addressed this point despite the fact that it's been brought up several times but, again, cherry picking which questions you answer is part of how you operate.

And I think you mean the Beatles, the rock band not the Beetles, the insect. It's a take off of "beat".

Silly Bugger … they obviously worked for Khrushchev …

Ja Ja

We have a backlog of unanswered questions on this thread. Let's get to these first, after which I will be happy to answer your question: