Willis Carto

In Liberty Lobby closes its doors - Spotlight ceases publication, Searchlight, Sept. 2001, Lenny Zeskind describes Willis Carto as "America's most successful professional antisemite and racist."

He may not have been that extreme, but it gives us a clue as to the fences in his life, and which side of them he was on.

The American Free Press is a publication launched by Carto, who previously published Spotlight magazine through his now-defunct Liberty Lobby, an organization worked with racist anti-segregationists and neo-Nazi holocaust deniers. Carto continues to publish deceptive materials in which history is treated as a huge Jewish conspiracy. During the war with Iraq, for example, Carto's Barnes Report attempted to exploit anti-war sentiment by publishing fake whistleblower memos on media bias in the Iraq war, which attempted to cast the Iraq war as a conspiracy by "Jews who run the media and government."

"In the early 1950s a debt collector named Willis A. Carto, born in Indiana in 1926 and at the time living in California, became involved in a number of right-wing organizations. By 1955, Carto had built his own small organization, Liberty and Property, with its own periodical, Right. Kuttner was a regular contributor, along with Smith and pioneer Holocaust denier Austin App, later the author of The Six Million Swindle (Mintz, 1985). Carto was also involved with the John Birch Society, but he and others were asked to resign by Robert Welch, who found their extreme antisemitism distasteful and a threat to the Birch Society's respectability. Carto then began to build an organization called the Liberty Lobby, which like the IAAEE and the Northern League emerged in the mid- to late 1950s. In his own organization, Carto promoted four basic themes: Jewish world domination and international Jewish conspiracy, White racial and cultural superiority, to be maintained by segregation and eugenics, extreme anticommunism, and Spenglerian themes of Western decline and decay (see Lipstadt, 1993; Mintz, 1985; Simonds, 1971)...

"The nature of Carto's position is best illustrated by the titles reissued by Carto's publishing house, Noontide Press of Costa Mesa, California: Germany Reborn, by Herman Goering; The Myth of the Twentieth Century, by the prominent Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg; and The Inequality of the Human Races, by Comte Arthur de Gobineau, generally considered the ur text of Nordic supremacy. Noontide Press also published now-classic Holocaust denial books: Paul Rassinier's (1978) Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry and the anonymously authored 1969 book, The Myth of the Six Million. In addition to classic Nazi works, Holocaust denial books, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Noontide Press distributed books and pamphlets on race differences in IQ by IAAEE members Garrett, Osborne, and McGurk. Carto reissued Yockey's Imperium, with a glowing preface by Carto himself. Most significantly, Noontide Press was the exclusive U.S. distributor for Mankind Quarterly for a brief period. Carto later founded the Institute for Historical Review, which published the Journal of Historical Review, a journal of "revisionist history" (see Lipstadt, 1993). The institute and the journal have been the primary vehicles for promoting Holocaust denial in North America, although Carto himself lost control of the IHR in 1996 following an internal dispute."

Related Sourcewatch

 * Francis Parker Yockey