Liberty Lobby

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Liberty Lobby was a political advocacy organization which existed in the United States between 1955 and 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto.

Liberty Lobby was the subject of much criticism from all quarters of the political spectrum. While Liberty Lobby was founded as a conservative political organization, Willis Carto was known to hold strongly antisemitic views, and to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, who was one of a handful of esoteric post-World War II writers who revered Adolf Hitler. Yockey, writing under the pseudonym of Ulick Varange, wrote a book entitled "", which Willis Carto adopted as his own guiding ideology.

Many critics, including disgruntled former Carto associates as well as the Anti-Defamation League, have noted that Willis Carto, more than anybody else, was responsible for keeping organized antisemitism alive as a viable political movement during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when it was otherwise completely discredited.

Starting in October 1966 Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson published a series of stories under "The Washington Merry-go-round" that recounted the findings of a former employee, Jeremy Horne (the author of this paragraph). Horne discovered a box of correspondence between Carto and numerous government officials establishing the Joint Council of Repatriation (JCR), a forerunner to Liberty Lobby (LL). The JCR;s fundamental purpose was to "repatriate" blacks "back to Africa". Ex-Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Tom Brady and various members of the White Citizens' Councils also had a hand in establishing both JCL and LL. Other correspondence referred to U.S. Congressional support for the emerging LL, such as from Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and James Utt of California. Numerous letters by Carto excoriated the Jews, blaming world miseries on them. "How could the West been so blind. It was the Jews and their lies that blinded the West as to what Germany was doing. Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe and America." Shortly after I left LL in August 1966 and turned material over to Drew Pearson, LL sued Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, the Bell-McClure Syndicate and me for misappropriation of douments. (LIBERTY LOBBY, INC., et al., Appellants, v. Drew PERSON et al., Appellees. No. 20690. United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit provides an accurate account of the case - bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/390/390.F2d.489.20690_1.html.) LL ultimately lost in the U.S. Supreme Court with a denial of "Certiori". In numerous LL file cabinets there was extensive pro Nazi and Klan literature. Sometime in the late 1960s (I think in 1967), "True" magazine ran a story by Joe Trento entitled "How Nazi Nut Power Has Invaded Capitol Hill".

Liberty Lobby attempted to promote a public image of being a conservative anti-Communist group, along the lines of the John Birch Society, but while the John Birch Society publicly rejected white supremacy and antisemitism, Liberty Lobby promoted them. Francis Parker Yockey's "Imperium" was republished by Willis Carto's Noontide Press, which also published a number of other books and pamphlets promoting a racialist and white supremacist world view, and Liberty Lobby in turn sold and promoted these books. While Liberty Lobby was intended to occupy the niche of a conservative anti-Communist group, Willis Carto was meanwhile building other organizations which would take a much more explicit neo-Nazi orientation. Among these were the National Youth Alliance, a Willis Carto-founded organization that eventually became the National Alliance when Carto lost control of it and it fell into the hands of William Pierce. The National Alliance is considered to be the most well-known neo-Nazi group currently operating in the United States. Also founded by Carto was the Institute for Historical Review, a group known for publishing Holocaust denial books and articles. As with the National Youth Alliance and Noontide Press, the Institute for Historical Review also fell out of Carto's hands in a hostile internal struggle.

Liberty Lobby, however, remained under the control of Carto until the end. During the 1970s, as the old anti-Communism of the 1950s and 1960s fell out of favor, Carto redefined the public image of Liberty Lobby, increasingly taking on the public image of populist rather than conservative or right-wing. In that time, Liberty Lobby also tried to create connections to the political left by redistributing a critical report on President Carter by Lyndon LaRouche's NCLC. ["When Left reaches Right." "Washington Post". August 16, 1977]

In 1975, Liberty Lobby began publishing a weekly newspaper called "The Spotlight", which ran news and opinion articles with a very populist and anti-establishment slant on a variety of subjects, but gave little indication of being extreme-right or neo-Nazi. However, "The Spotlight", critics charged, was intended as a subtle recruiting tool for the extreme right, using populist-sounding articles to attract people from all points on the political spectrum including liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and special-interest articles to attract people interested in such subjects as alternative medicine, while the newspaper subtly incorporated antisemitic and white racialist undertones in its articles, and carried advertisements in the classified section for openly neo-Nazi groups and books. The Spotlight's circulation peaked around 200,000 in the early 1980s, and although it experienced a steady drop after that, it continued to be published until Liberty Lobby demise in 2001.

Liberty Lobby was infiltrated by Robert Eringer and exposed by him in several articles. [Eringer, Robert. "The Force of Willis Carto." Mother Jones 6 (April 1981): 6.] [U.S. Supreme Court ANDERSON v. LIBERTY LOBBY, INC., 477 U.S. 242 (1986)]

In 2001, Liberty Lobby and Willis Carto lost a lawsuit brought by a rival far-right group which had earlier gained control of the Institute for Historical Review, and the ensuing judgment bankrupted the organization. Willis Carto and others who had been involved in publishing "The Spotlight" have since started a new newspaper, the "American Free Press", which is very similar in overall tone to The Spotlight. As an organization, Liberty Lobby is defunct.

ee also

Curtis Bean Dall
* [http://www.knology.net/~bilrum/cr127p1.htm Congressional Record: Why did the Spotlight and Liberty Lobby Attack Real Conservatives?]

References

Frank P. Mintz, "The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture". Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics. Noontide Press, 1962