Among the publications under Carto’s direct control was the American Mercury.[5] Though the journal had begun its descent into antisemitica under its previous owners, under Carto’s tutelage, which began in 1966, the pace of that descent quickened. By the time of the creation of the IHR in 1978 the American Mercury, which had been under the Carto aegis for thirteen years, was considered one of the leading antisemitic publications in the United States.{53} It functioned as a cheerleader for Holocaust deniers. An editorial in the American Mercury lauded the IHR because it would function as an antidote to “the Anti-Defamation League’s campaign to prod public discussion of the ‘Holocaust.’”{54}
But American Mercury was not the only publication in the Carto orbit to disseminate these views. The Liberty Lobby’s newsletter, Liberty Letter, echoed the same themes. It praised Imperium as a major work of philosophy and ranted about the “aggressive minority” that tightly controlled the so-called free press. This “alien-minded and America-last group,” was the “ruthless Zionist pressure machine.” The Liberty Letter claimed to have uncovered thousands of undercover “Zionist ‘fixers,’ lobbyists and Leftists” prowling the corridors of Congress and converging on the White House.{55}
In 1975 the lobby’s Liberty Letter, whose circulation was more than one-hundred thousand, was subsumed by the Spotlight, a tabloid newspaper that regularly featured articles on Bible analysis and the putative efforts of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission to dominate the nation. It offered its readers tips on avoiding taxes and fighting the IRS. The paper attacked Martin Luther King, Jr., as a Communist and praised members of the Ku Klux Klan. It has memorialized Gordon Kahl, the leader of the right-wing-extremist group Posse Comitatus, who killed three federal marshals and wounded a number of others before he was killed in 1983 in a shootout with federal agents.
These publications find conspiracies everywhere. In 1976, shortly before the presidential election, the paper charged that Jimmy Carter was directly linked with the international cocaine trade.{56} (The Federal Election Commission fined the Liberty Lobby for publishing this unsubstantiated story so close to the election.) In 1979 Spotlight’s lead article described how a global elite planned to topple world governments. The paper claimed that its reporter had attended an international conference in Austria at which such plans were discussed. In truth, no one from the Spotlight attended this legitimate conference, and the reporter who wrote the story admitted to falsifying it.{57}
But the main focus of Spotlight’s attention has been exposing what it calls the “Jew-Zionist” international bankers’ conspiracy designed to cause pain and suffering for dedicated, honest, and hardworking Americans. Though the tabloid finds conspiracies in many places, generally they are linked to Israel and its supporters’ successful efforts to control Congress and dictate American policy.{58} During the 1979 gas shortage the paper informed readers that as a result of a secret deal between President Carter and Prime Minister Begin “your gas [was going] to Israel.”{59} According to Spotlight, these Zionists do not work alone; cliques of bankers, Red Chinese, and American politicians, including Sen. Jesse Helms and the late Congressman Larry McDonald, were all part of the pro-Israel conspiracy against the United States.{60}
Since a major aspect of that conspiracy was the Holocaust hoax, Holocaust denial has also become a regular staple of Spotlight. The paper, which has identified Carto as the force behind the IHR, has devoted entire issues to Holocaust denial.{61} The paper has frequently reported on the IHR’s annual meetings and on their retrieval of history from the “memory hole.”{62} A fifteen-page supplement in the December 24, 1979, issue was completely dedicated to denial articles. Reiterating familiar denial themes, Spotlight has claimed that the bodies at Auschwitz were cremated as a hygienic measure to control typhoid, that the so-called gas chambers were actually life-saving delousing showers, that the Diary of Anne Frank was a propaganda hoax, that the six-million number was used to entice the United Nations to support the creation of the “illegal state of Israel,” and that professional Zionist “survivors” planned to extort five million dollars from America. It also touted the IHR’s contest. The front page of the “Holocaust Supplement” carried the following headlines:
WERE SIX MILLION JEWS EXTERMINATED?
FAMOUS “GAS CHAMBER VICTIMS” LIVING WELL
NEED $50,000? FIND A HOLOCAUST VICTIM
TORTURE USED TO MAKE GERMANS “CONFESS”
CHASING THE “WAR CRIMINALS” FOR PROFIT”.{63}
IN 1981 a two-page article bore the following headline:
GATHERING OF “LIBERATORS” MAY EXPOSE ALLIED WAR ATROCITIES; BELIEVERS IN THE “HOLOCAUST” HAVE INVITED THE “LIBERATORS” OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS TO GATHER FOR A CONVENTION. BUT TO SHOW UP WOULD BE TANTAMOUNT TO ADMITTING HAVING MURDERED INNOCENT GERMAN GUARDS.{64}
The nature of Spotlight’s readership can be gauged to some degree by the contents of its classified advertising section. There are ads for poetry, laetrile prescriptions, dating services for patriotic Christians, and devices for dramatically increasing a car’s gasoline mileage (these devices have supposedly been kept off the market in a conspiracy against the American consumer). In addition, its classified section regularly offers Nazi paraphernalia, gun silencer parts, bullet-proof vests, clandestine mail drops, and instructions for manufacturing false identification.{65}
The Noontide Press has also participated in spreading the message espoused by Yockey, Carto, the Liberty Lobby, and the IHR. Among the books listed in the 1992 Noontide Press catalog was Yockey’s Imperium. The catalog described Yockey as a brilliant young American who “saw through the Holocaust propaganda as early as 1948.” Also offered for sale were the standard works on Holocaust denial, many of which were published by Noontide, among them the Journal of Historical Review, Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and Harwood’s Six Million Lost and Found. The catalog also featured the antisemitic standards—Henry Ford’s The International Jew and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Included as well was a listing of books on “Race and Culture,” many of them described by the catalog as focusing on the inherent dangers of racial integration. The Testing of Negro Intelligence, by Travis Osborne and Frank C. J. McGurk, was described as a searching evaluation of black performance on intelligence tests from 1966 to 1980 whose findings “give little comfort to egalitarians.” Race and Reason: A Yankee View, by Carleton Putnam, was touted as the “intelligent reader’s guide to the pitfalls of Black-White integration from the White standpoint.” The sequel, Race and Reality, demonstrated how “egalitarians” have used botched science and faulty scholarship to obscure “biological facts about racial differences.”{66} Noontide not only offered these racist publications in its catalog, but it also tried to win subscribers for a tabloid newspaper, the White Student. According to Noontide the paper was designed to help students on campus “fight back.” It was an antidote to being brainwashed by Marxist teachers and debilitated “by the rigors of survival in our integrated schools.”{67}
5
In 1979 Carto turned control of the