National Youth Alliance

The National Youth Alliance (NYA) was a right-wing political organization founded on November 15, 1968 at the Army and Navy Club by Willis Carto, head of the right-wing Liberty Lobby.[1] The aim of the group was to recruit students to counter liberal and Marxist groups on college campuses like Students for a Democratic Society. The NYA emerged from an earlier group connected to Willis Carto known as the Youth for Wallace, which had supported segregationist Governor George Wallace bid for president as American Independent Party candidate in 1968.

Willis Carto was known to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, who was one of a handful of neo-Nazi esoteric writers during the post-World War II era who revered Adolf Hitler. Yockey's best known book, Imperium, was adopted by Carto as his own guiding ideology and used as the philosophical basis of the National Youth Alliance.

One of the most notable members of the National Youth Alliance was William Luther Pierce, previously a prominent figure in the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), the successor organisation to the American Nazi Party (ANP) which fell apart after the August 1967 assassination of its leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Pierce joined the National Youth Alliance in 1970 after leaving the NSWPP.

By 1971, a rift had already developed between Carto and Pierce. Accusations by Carto emerged alleging that Pierce had stolen the mailing list of his Liberty Lobby organization and used it to send letters attacking Carto's group. Tensions continued until the group split into factions, with Pierce and his supporters splitting off into the newly formed National Alliance. This group would come to be one of the largest and most prominent far-right groups in America.

External links

• FBI file on the National Youth Alliance