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Willis Carto

Willis Carto: Encyclopedia - Willis Carto

Willis Allison Carto (born July 17, 1926 in Indiana) is a longtime figure on the far right wing of American politics. Carto's career has been marked by controversy, and even among his contemporaries 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 latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. These critics have noted that Carto has ...

Willis Carto

Willis Carto: Encyclopedia - Willis Carto

Willis Carto

Willis Allison Carto (born July 17, 1926 in Indiana) is a longtime figure on the far right wing of American politics.

Carto's career has been marked by controversy, and even among his contemporaries 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 latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. These 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 nature.

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-World War II era 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 the controversial Catholic priest Fr. Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford. Critics charged that the book all but ignored Coughlin and Fords' virulent anti-Semitism, and that Carto remained a devotee of Yockey throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1955, Carto founded an 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" (also now defunct), between 1975 and 2001. Carto and "Spotlight" staff members and writers have since founded a new newspaper, called the "American Free Press".

Carto was also the founder of a publishing company called Noontide Press, which published a number of books on white racialism, 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, the nation of Switzerland issued an arrest warrant for Carto for embezzling millions from the IHR and its parent company.

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, Carto acquired control of "The American Mercury", a magazine which was once a highly respected periodical associated with H.L. Mencken, but which was failing by the time Carto acquired it. It 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 racialist youth organization called the National Youth Alliance. Carto eventually lost control of the National Youth Alliance to a rival, Dr. William Pierce, who transformed it into the National Alliance, which is today one of America's most notorious white racialist organizations. Carto also acquired the Sun Radio Network in the early 1990s, and attempted to use talk radio as a vehicle for espousing his views. That network also failed under his 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. Critics asserted that this Populist Party (not to be confused with the Populist Party founded in 1889, which was a left wing organization,) was little more than an electoral vehicle for current and former Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity members. Olympic athlete Bob Richards (1984), former Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke (1988), and former Green Beret Bo Gritz (1992) were the Populist Party's only three presidential candidates. It folded before it could nominate a candidate for the 1996 elections.

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.