Liberty Lobby
From RationalWiki
Liberty Lobby was a right-wing U.S. group founded c. 1955 by Willis Carto, and defunct as of 2001 due to a lawsuit brought against them by the Holocaust denial group the "Institute for Historical Review" (also founded by Willis Carto). Liberty Lobby promoted "controversial issues" which other right wing groups, such as the John Birch Society, kept at arms' length.
Despite their name and their office near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. they did little, if any, actual lobbying. They did play a possible role in Lyndon LaRouche's abandonment of Marxism when Liberty Lobby began promoting LaRouche writings to their right-wing audience starting in 1976.
[edit] The Weekly World News of the Right
Their biggest influence came about because of their newspaper. From 1975 to 2001 they published the weekly newspaper The Spotlight which was a notable source of New World Order conspiracy theories and John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.[1] Promotion of alternative health remedies from Laetrile to shark cartilage to chelation therapy, reporting on Middle East affairs that mainstream media charged was anti-Semitic, reporting on fringe presidential candidates ignored by the controlled media like David Duke and Lyndon LaRouche, history pieces on World War II arguing that the Axis was really just a coalition against communism and articles defending Scientology against its critics.[2], and reporting on the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. They also took a special interest in investigative reporting on political and corporate scandals involving Zionists.
The talk radio show "Radio Free America" during the 1990s, hosted by Tom Valentine, was sponsored by The Spotlight.
[edit] American Free Press
The weekly American Free Press which is a significant source of 9/11 conspiracy theories and cited as a source by the 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change is a successor newspaper to The Spotlight founded in 2001 by former staffers.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Mark Lane, one of the early JFK assassination conspiracy theorists and author of the best-seller Rush to Judgment on the topic in the early 1960s, eventually became Liberty Lobby's in-house lawyer; Lane came from a leftist background and his eventual involvement with Liberty Lobby (as well as Liberty Lobby's promotion of Lyndon LaRouche) is an example of something that sets Liberty Lobby apart from most hard-right groups: they frequently made alliances with the far left.
- ↑ Liberty Lobby suddenly turned anti-Scientology very late in the game after Mark Weber, a Scientologist and Carto rival, took control of the Institute for Historical Review from Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto.
