Willis Carto
Willis Allison Carto (b. 1926) is a fascist, racist, fringe wingnut (he calls himself a "populist," but that doesn't fool anyone). He is best known as the head of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby. He campaigned for George Wallace in 1968 and regularly pals around with various neo-Nazis and white supremacists, including David Duke, Ernst Zündel, and the late William Luther Pierce. In 1984, he founded the Populist Party (no relation to any of the various other parties of the same name throughout history) that basically served as cover for Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity types. The party, fortunately, went belly-up in 1996.
While Carto hates everyone who isn't white, his favorite form of bigotry is anti-Semitism. Carto co-founded the Institute for Historical Review in 1978 to act as an outlet for anti-Semitic propaganda and Holocaust denial. He also peddles quack cures and assorted medical woo.
However he has long tried spinning his racism as mere populism. An example was his group Liberty Lobby and their Spotlight newspaper, which covered a wide range of financial and political reporting with an anti-establishment slant with only occasional hints of overt racism. For another example, his 1982 book Profiles in Populism (later republished as Populism Vs. Plutocracy) profiled historical U.S. personalities Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, left-wing figures such as Bob LaFollette and Huey Long, conservative law-and-order Democrats like Frank Rizzo, and such Nazi sympathizers as Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. The profiles in the book are hardly accurate and full of Carto's spin, and reached laugh-riot levels when he took pains to note the pure white ancestry of fascist sympathizer Lawrence Dennis -- who was actually half African-American.[1]
Carto's favorite book was Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey, which partly explains his "populist" framing and fondness for political ecumenism, trying to build alliances among the racist far right, law-and-order machine politicians, Birchers, LaRouchies, and some elements of the far left. Speaking of Lyndon LaRouche, from about 1976 into the early 1980s, although both downplay the extent of it today, Carto and LaRouche were very closely aligned, with their respective followers providing material and ghostwritten articles for each others' publications.
As with many would-be gurus, he has invented his own in-group language. Ths most consistent indicator that you are dealing with someone steeped in the weird wild world of Willis is the use of the term "mattoid"[2] To assist the uninitiated, he provides a complete glossary in the appendix to Profiles in Populism. The redefinitions he gives many words are...interesting.
The current outlets for his views and activities are the American Free Press newspaper, and the Holocaust-denial magazine Barnes Review. He is a supporter of Ron Paul.[3]
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- ↑ In fairness, this was not widely known at the time.
- ↑ Mattoid is an archaic psychology term for a borderline psychotic rarely used today. In Carto-speak it means an amoral or morally degenerate but highly intelligent person who gravitates toward finance, banking, politics, or law, sort of a combination evil Jew stereotype and suppressive person.
- ↑ The New York Times: Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support