Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.white-power
Subject: Paranoia as Patriotism: Liberty Lobby and _The Spotlight_

Archive/File: pub/orgs/american/adl/paranoia-as-patriotism/liberty-lobby
Last-Modified: 1995/08/22

              Liberty Lobby and _The Spotlight_

Liberty Lobby, the largest, best-financed and most influential
radical right organization in America, is a significant source
of propaganda for the militia movement. Founded in 1955 by
Willis Carto, currently listed as "treasurer," though
universally acknowledged to be the group's leader, Liberty
Lobby has established some connection to a great many leaders
and groups on the extreme right in the post-WWII era. Under
the guise of patriotism and conservative populism, the
organization has been a propaganda mill for Carto's actual
agenda: to rehabilitate Hitlerian National Socialism and
agitate on behalf of a neo-Nazi movement in the United States.

Willis Carto's personal anti-Semitism and racism have
manifested themselves in a number of overt ways.
Correspondence by Carto published in 1966 stated that
"Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe. And of America...
The blame, it seems, must be laid at the door of the
international Jews.... If Satan himself....had tried to create
a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of
the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the
Jews." In addition, Liberty Lobby has expressed support for
the apartheid governments of South Africa and Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe). Carto himself wrote in 1955 that "only a few
Americans are concerned about the inevitable niggerfication
[sic] of America."

Carto, now 68, carried on an intense relationship with Francis
Parker Yockey, an eccentric far-right activist who began his
career as a prosecution attorney at the Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials, but later developed pro-Nazi sympathies. Yockey, who
committed suicide in a San Francisco prison after being
arrested in 1960 on passport fraud charges, wrote a 600-page
manifesto titled _Imperium_, which outlined a totalitarian,
pro-Hitler political philosophy conceived in the image of "the
European Revolution of 1933." Carto has continued to
distribute copies of the book, and under oath during an
unsuccessful lawsuit against the ADL in the 1970s he
acknowledged that he still adhered to Yockey's ideology.

In pursuit of his covert neo-Nazi agenda, Carto has organized
a number of extremist front groups and spin-off associations
from the Liberty Lobby network. Two of the most important in
the past decade have been the Populist Party - founded in 1984
as Liberty Lobby's political arm, and most famous for
launching the national reputation of former Klan leader David
Duke during his 1988 Populist Party candidacy for President -
and the Institute for Historical Review. This latter group,
founded in 1979, is currently the leading outlet for Holocaust
denial propaganda in the world. In recent years, the Populist
Party and the Institute for Historical Review have broken with
Carto and Liberty Lobby over control of funds and disputes
regarding strategy. They both remain extremist organizations
to their core, and continue to maintain a significant presence
among the radical right today.

Liberty Lobby, meanwhile, has remained without question the
leading ideological influence on the hate movement today. The
main propaganda vehicles for the organization currently are
the weekly tabloid _The Spotlight_, which serves as a central
"bulletin board" for the extreme right and which claims to
reach an estimated readership of over 100,000, and the radio
broadcases "Radio Free America" and "Editor's Roundtable,"
which bring the voices of extremists and conspiracy theorists
to dozens of media markets across the country. The shows are
carried on the Liberty Lobby-controlled Sun Radio Network.

Illustrating _The Spotlight's_ role as a bulletin board for
extremists of the far right, ADL recently revealed that in
1993, Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh - using
the alias "T. Tuttle" - advertised for sale in _The Spotlight_
a military-style anti-tank launcher.

Liberty Lobby has often sought to portray itself as
respectably "conservative." However, it is nothing of the
kind. Major American conservative figures, such as William
Buckley and Judge Robert Bork, have condemned the group's
anti-Semitism.

In the past two years, _The Spotlight_ has devoted dozens of
features to conspiracy theories involving the Federal
government. Many of these stories have involved militia groups
directly, or have addressed the same issues which have
preoccupied militia members, such as national gun control and
international arms control efforts, or the alleged "black
helicopters" that supposedly signify the loss of national
sovereignty and the imminent takeover of the U.S. by the
United Nations. The paper ran a sensationalized 8-page special
suppliment, dated September 1994, featuring these themes.
(Anti-Defamation League, 22-23)

                       Work Cited

Anti-Defamation League. [Special Report] Paranoia as Patriotism:
Far-Right Influences on the Militia Movement. 1995.

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