Willis Carto

Willis Allison Carto (born 1926) is a longtime figure on the political far right-wing in the United States.

Carto was born in Indiana. His career has been marked by controversy, and even among the far right wing he is a polarizing figure. The Anti-Defamation League as well as other critics believe that Willis Carto, more than anybody else, was responsible for keeping organized anti-Semitism alive as a movement in the United States during the last half of the 20th century. His critics have noted that Carto has founded some organizations, such as Liberty Lobby, with the intent of appearing to be respectable conservative, populist, or anti-Communist organizations, while founding other organizations that were racialist or National Socialist in orientation.

Willis Carto was known to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, who was one of a handful of esoteric writers during the post-WWII period who revered Adolf Hitler. Yockey's best known book, Imperium, was adopted by Carto as his own guiding ideology. Later, Carto would define his ideology as Jeffersonian and populist rather than National Socialist, particularly in Carto's 1982 book Profiles in Populism. That book presented sympathetic profiles of several United States political figures including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, as well as Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. Critics charged that the book whitewashed the anti-Semitism of Coughlin and Ford, and that Carto remained a devotee of Yockey throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1955, he founded the organization called Liberty Lobby, which remained in operation under the control of Willis Carto until 2001, when the organization was forced into bankruptcy as a result of a lawsuit. Liberty Lobby was perhaps best known for publishing the newspaper, The Spotlight, between 1975 and 2001, which is also now defunct. Willis Carto and other people who were involved with The Spotlight have since started a new newspaper, called the American Free Press, which is similar in tone.

Carto was also the founder of a publishing company called Noontide Press, which published a number of books on white racialist subjects, including Yockey's Imperium. Noontide Press later became closely associated with the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), and fell out of Carto's hands at the same time as the IHR did. The IHR was founded by Willis Carto in 1979, with the intent of promoting the proposition that the Nazi Holocaust never happened - a view known as Holocaust revisionism or Holocaust denial. After losing control of Noontide Press and the IHR in a hostile takeover by former associates, Carto started another publication, the Barnes Review, which is also dedicated to denying that the Holocaust happened. On March 26 2003, Switzerland issued an arrest warrant for Carto for embezzling millions from the IHR and its parent company.[1] (http://www.ihr.org/news/040709_carto_warrant.shtml)

Willis Carto has had a long history of attempting to take the remains of existing groups and publications, and turning them into vehicles for his ideology. In 1966, Willis Carto acquired control of the American Mercury, a magazine which was once a highly respected periodical associated with H.L. Mencken, but which was on its last leg by the time Carto acquired it, and quickly went defunct. After the failed third-party Presidential campaign of George Wallace in 1968, Carto acquired control of what was left of the Youth for Wallace organization, and transformed it into an openly white supremacist youth organization called the National Youth Alliance. Carto eventually lost control of the National Youth Alliance to a rival on the far right, William Pierce, who transformed it into the National Alliance, which is today the most notorious neo-Nazi organization operating in the United States. Willis Carto also acquired the Sun Radio Network in the early 1990s, and attempted to use talk radio as a vehicle for spreading his views. That network also became defunct under Carto's control.

In 1984, Willis Carto was among those involved in starting a new political party called the Populist Party. As with many other Carto creations, this group quickly fell out of the hands of Carto in a hostile takeover from disgruntled former associates. This Populist Party, which critics charged was an electoral vehicle for current and former Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity members, was not a continuation of the earlier Populist Party of the late 1800s, which was a left-wing party. The Populist Party started by Willis Carto was a party of the far right, and is best known for running David Duke as its Presidential nominee in 1988, and former Green Beret officer Bo Gritz in 1992. It disbanded by 1996.

In 2004, Carto joined in signing the New Orleans Protocol on behalf of American Free Press. The New Orleans Protocol seeks to "mainstream our cause" by reducing violence and internecine warfare, and was written by David Duke. There are few movements on the American far right that have not been influenced in one way or another by Willis Carto in the last 50 years.

References

• Carto, Willis A. (1982) Profiles in Populism. Flag Press.
• Mintz, Frank P. (1985). The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Coogan, Kevin. (1999). Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.