Liberty Lobby

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Liberty Lobby was a right-wing political advocacy organization which existed in the United States between 1955 and 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto.

Liberty Lobby was the subject of much criticism from all quarters of the political spectrum. While Liberty Lobby was founded as a conservative political organization, Willis Carto was known to hold strongly anti-Semitic views, and to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, who was one of a handful of esoteric post-World War II writers who revered Adolf Hitler. Yockey, writing under the pseudonym of Ulick Varange, wrote a book entitled Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, which Willis Carto adopted as his own guiding ideology.

Many critics, including disgruntled former Carto associates as well as the Anti-Defamation League, have noted that Willis Carto, more than anybody else, was responsible for keeping organized anti-Semitism alive as a viable political movement during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when it was otherwise completely discredited.

Liberty Lobby attempted to promote a public image of being a conservative anti-Communist group, along the lines of the John Birch Society, but while the John Birch Society rejected white supremacy and anti-Semitism, Liberty Lobby promoted them. Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium was republished by Willis Carto's Noontide Press, which also published a number of other books and pamphlets promoting a racialist and white supremacist world view, and Liberty Lobby in turn sold and promoted these books. While Liberty Lobby was intended to occupy the niche of a conservative anti-Communist group, Willis Carto was meanwhile building other organizations which would take a much more explicit neo-Nazi orientation. Among these were the National Youth Alliance, a Willis Carto-founded organization that eventually became the National Alliance when Carto lost control of it and it fell into the hands of William Pierce. The National Alliance is considered to be the most notorious neo-Nazi group currently operating in the United States. Also founded by Carto was the Institute for Historical Review, a group known for publishing Holocaust denial books and articles. As with the National Youth Alliance and Noontide Press, the Institute for Historical Review also fell out of Carto's hands in a hostile internal struggle.

Liberty Lobby, however, remained under the control of Carto until the end. During the 1970s, as the old anti-Communism of the 1950s and 1960s fell out of favor, Carto redefined the public image of Liberty Lobby, increasingly taking on the public image of populist rather than conservative or right-wing. In 1975, Liberty Lobby began publishing a weekly newspaper called The Spotlight, which ran news and opinion articles with a very populist and anti-establishment slant on a variety of subjects, but gave little indication of being extreme-right or neo-Nazi. However, The Spotlight, critics charged, was intended as a subtle recruiting tool for the extreme right, using populist-sounding articles to attract people from all points on the political spectrum including liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and special-interest articles to attract people interested in such subjects as alternative medicine, while the newspaper subtly incorporated anti-Semitic and white racialist undertones in its articles, and carried advertisements in the classified section for openly neo-Nazi groups and books. The Spotlight for a while became the most widely-read periodical on the right in the United States, with circulation peaking around 200,000 in the early 1980s. While circulation experienced a steady drop after that, it continued to be published until Liberty Lobby's demise in 2001.

In 2001, Liberty Lobby and Willis Carto lost a lawsuit brought by a rival far-right group which had earlier gained control of the Institute for Historical Review, and the ensuing judgment bankrupted the organization. Willis Carto and others who had been involved in publishing The Spotlight have since started a new newspaper, the American Free Press, which is very similar in overall tone to The Spotlight. As an organization, Liberty Lobby is defunct.