Vol. 5, #3 – May – June 1992

The Liberty Lobby and L.A.’s Network of Hate

      The Washington, D.C.-based Liberty Lobby was founded and is led by Willis Carto, considered by the ADL to be one of the most notiroius anti-semites in the U.S. today.  Liberty Lobby is at the center of an extensive web of racist oriented groups in the L.A. area.  The outlines of this “network of hate” began to emerge at a conference in south central L.A. in February (see last issue of T.T.T.).  At that meeting, Joe and Dierdre Fields of the racist Populist Party and Tom Marcellus of the “holocaust is a hoax” Institute for Historical Review were the main guests of Robert Brock, a Black man who has made a career of working with white supremacists.  Brock even claimed that Carto himself, who rarely appears in public, would be the featured speaker; but Carto failed to show up.

      PART began to uncover this story last year by exposing the racist campaign of “Bo” Gritz as the Populist Party candidate for President.  In the interim, while infighting has comntinued between Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby and “national” Populist Party led by Don Wassall, both the Liberty Lobby and the Populists have been more open about their racism.  The Spotlight, Liberty Lobby’s newspaper, has quoted Thomas Jefferson favorably on the impossibility of Blacks and whites living together; it has promoted the pro-Dixie book “Race and Reason,” which gave its name to neo-nazi Tom Metzger’s TV show for the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and has defended Byron de la Beckwith, the Klan leader facing a third trial for killing NAACP leader Medgar Evers.  We have been investigating the extent of this interlocking network of organizations and front groups.  Key figures include:

* Robert Brock, a Black pseudo-nationalist who once styled himself the leader of the erroneously named “Self-Determination Committee,” and now heads the “Cosmopolitan Brotherhood Association.”  Another of his front groups is the south-central L.A. chapter of the American Pistol and Rifle Association, an ultra-right wing anti-gun control associated with the Christian Patriot movement, which considers the NRA “soft” on gun control.

      Despite his claims to be a Black “nationalist”, Brock has been denounced as an Uncle Tom sell-out by authentic Black liberation groups like the Malcolm X Grssroots Movement.  This progressive Black group led a demonstration outside Brock’s south-central event, denouncing his invitation of white supremacists and apologists for genocide into their community.  Brock’s true political affiliation is as a member of the national board of directors of the Populist Action Committee, another front set up by Carto’s Liberty Lobby.  (Other members of the board include Robert Weems, the Mississippi Klan orator who was the first chairman of the racist Populist Party, “Bo” Gritz, and Fletcher Prouty, the former military intelligence officer who is fictionalized as “Col. X” in the film “JFK.”)  The Populist Action Committee has commended the campaigns of such open racists as former Chicago nazi leader Art Jones.

*  Joe Fields, who is the long-time nazi activist from the Harbor area who runs the racist Populist Party locally.  He is also a member of its national executive committee.  Fields first achieved notoriety a decade ago when he published stories questioning the truth of Hitler’s genocide in the Harbor College newspaper.  He continued his career with such exploits as going into an Oktoberfest celebration at a German restaurant in Torrance with a group of fellow nazis wearing swastika pins.  Fields became a national political footnote last year when a tape-recording of an interview with him and David Duke, in which Fields is open about his nazi orientation and admiration for Hitler while Duke counsels him to be more discreet, helped convince voters to reject Duke’s candidacy for governor of Louisiana.  Fields has worked closely with Brock, appearing at his south central program and using Brock to front for Populist Party gatherings in Pasadena.  Fields is currently running for the California State Assembly from a district in the Long Beach-San Pedro area on the American Independent Party ticket.  He has also won the commendation, printed in a recent issue of the Spotlioght, of Willis Carto’s Populist Action Committee, which reports that Fields is now also on the steering committee of the American Independent Party.

* Dierdre Fields, Joe’s “Afrikaaner” (white South African) wife, is a racist activist in her own right.  Dee, who met Joe when both were involved in Carto’s Institute for Historical Review, now represents a group called “Friends of White South Africa.”  Dee, who was one of the featured guests at Brock’s program, speaking about an immigrant’s view of the Bill of Rights, was a guest on the Liberty Lobby’s “Radio Free America” show hosted by Tom Valentine, along with a representative of the former white supremacist “Rhodesia” (now Zimbabwe) in February and March.  Her remarks were reprinted in a two-page spread in Carto’s newspaper “The Spotlight,” on April 13, 1992.  Denouncing even attempts by the ruling Nationalist Party to reform apartheid, Dee Fields blames Harry Oppenheimer and the “money power” (neo-nazi code words for “Jews”) for selling out South African whites.

* Daniel Johnson, formerly based in Glendale, toured the country extensively in the late ’80’s with Brock, promoting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which Johnson had authored under a phony name. Labelled the “Pace Amendment,” this would have abolished the 14th amendment (applying the Bill of Rights to the states) and restricted U.S. citizenship to people of Northern European descent (so-called “Aryans.”)  Johnson ran his League of Pace Amendment Advocates as a kind of racist pyramid scheme, promising “advocates” a cut of the membership fees of new members they brought in.  League headquarters in Glendale were firebombed a couple of years ago, shortly after Johnson went up to the northwest to run for the Congressional seat vacated by Dick Cheney (who became Bush’s secretary of defense after John Tower was rejected by the Senate).  Johnson’s “campaign manager”, a nazi bonehead, was arrested on weapons posession charges for having a sawed-off shotgun, and Johnson failed to garner any significant support in the supposed Aryan homeland in the northwest.  Now he is back in L.A., running an office in the Los Feliz area that is promoting repatriation of “Blacks” to Africa through ads in Carto’s Spotlight.

*  Willis Carto, the “grey eminence” of the racist, anti-semitic right wing, has his fingers in many pies.  Founder of the Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby and the southern-California based Institute for Historical Review, Carto was a follower of Hitler admirer Frances Yockey and once established his own society for repatriating African Americans to Africa, according to investigative reporters Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson.  The IHR promotes what is called “revisionism,” which essentially defends Hitler as a savior of Western civilization betrayed by Anglo-Jewish conspirators led by the Rothschilds.  Revisionists portray Hitler’s genocide as a “big lie” invented by the Jews to burden whites with guilt and exploit them; perversely, this “lie” is then used as proof that the deceitful Jews deserve eradication.  After the IHR headquarters in Torrance were fire-bombed, it relocated to Costa Mesa, and sponsors annual gatherings at which Holocaust revisionists propagandize each other and plan their strategies, such as the current effort by revisionist Bradley Smith to place ads in college newspapers “questioning” the holocaust.

*  Mark Weber, editor of the IHR’s “theoretical journal,” was also a featured guest at Brock’s event, and although Carto himself was a no-show, Weber did turn up, to tell reporters that “Blacks and whites could never live together.”  He told a TV cameraman that “a close reading of the Emancipation Proclamation will show that even Abraham Lincoln wanted to send the Blacks back to Africa.”  It was interesting that Weber, more often associated with anti-semitism, was more open about the racial basis of his beliefs.  Weber came to the IHR from the National Alliance of William Pierce, publishers of the racist National Vanguard.  Pierce is the author of the “Turner Diaries,” a fictionalized account of a near-future white supremacist guerrilla war, resulting in the extermination of Blacks, Jews and white “race-traitors” and “race-mixers.”  The book served as the basis and inspiration for the white racist underground known as the Order, which drew into its ranks several of Joe Fields nazi and klan associates from L.A. for a mid-’80’s reign of racist terror.

*  Stan Witek, the criminal who ran the local nazi party, is currently serving time for a triple-cross-burning carried out in the San Fernando Valley in 1983.  Other participants in the cross-burning included Tom and John Metzger of San Diego’s WAR (White Aryan Resistance), Richard Butler of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations, and Frank Silva, local head of the KKK.  Silva and at least three other cross-burners were later convicted of their involvement in the Order, which killed a Jewish talk show host in Denver, held up Brink’s trucks and banks, and planned for race war, assassinations and the destruction of dams.  Fields was an associate of Metzger, Witek, and several other local nazis involved in the cross-burning, which some believe cemented the southern California anchor for the Order.

      This is not the only association between L.A.’s neo-nazi nexus and the Order.  “Bo” Gritz, the Populist Party candidate for president, was closely associated with Pete Peters, the Colorado “minister” whose racist congregation was another major recruiting ground for the Order, along with Butler’s Aryan Nations compound in Idaho.  It was for ridiculing “Col.” Jack Mohr, a racist guest of Pete Peters’ (and until recently, also a backer of Gritz) that Colorado radio host Alan Berg was targetted for murder by the Order.

      Other figures that have popped up as part of the Carto-Brock-Fields nexus of racist Populists and revisionists in the L.A. area include Tom Marcellus, editor of the IHR newspaper, who also turned up at Brock’s event; Russ Morrow alias Tom Reveille, who ran a pirate radio station in the Venice area with financial backing from Carto. (“Reveille” reportedly met with Fields and with open members of the nazi party locally); Ted Nicholoff, chair of the L.A. County central committee of the American Independent Party; Edson Johnson, a frequent advertiser in the Spotlight from Altadena; Ruth Coffey, of “Stop Immigration Now!” in Long Beach who has appeared at Populist events along with Brock.

      This is a network, not a hard and fast organization.  The components are prey to in-fighting and factionalism.  Carto, for example, is often at odds with the leadership of the Populist Party, and is currently scrapping with national Populist chair Don Wassall, as he did earlier with American Independent leader Shearer from California, who took his party into and then back out of the Populists.  But they often seem to coalesce again, just as the American Independent Party is working closely again with Fields of the Populists and offering its ballot line to Gritz as part of his so-called “America First” coalition.  Fields for his part has been more supportive of Pat Buchanan and David Duke than of Gritz’s candidacy.  But as Duke has faded and Buchanan has opted for mainstream legitimacy in the Republican Party, many of the racist factions will probably close their ranks in the Populist Party campaign in the fall (unless they see a chance to infiltrate Ross Perot’s candidacy).

      Meanwhile, they are trying to expand their ranks or dupe other political groups into providing protective coloration to disguise their nazi beliefs.  For example, Brock and the Populists invited the Students for America, a group associated with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, to join in one of their events; to another, they invited representatives of the Libertarian Party.  Although the chair of the Libertarian party in L.A. later denounced the Populists when his presence at the gathering was publicized, at least one Libertarian candidate, for Congress in CA’s 4th District, has applied to Carto’s Populist Action Committee for its endorsement, characterizing his campaign and the party’s platform as Populist.  Carto’s group declined because the Libertarians support free trade. Similarly, Gritz peddles his views as much through the “new age” movement and on the airwaves of Pacifica radio as he does through Christian Patriot/Christian Identity circles.  His Center for Action sponsored a conference in Nevada in 1990, to which he attracted Fr. Bill Davis of the Christic Institute and David Stockwell, while at the same time providing a platform for the anti-semitic views of Eustace Mullins, a long-time favorite of Carto and the Libery Lobby crowd.  Recently, Gritz was a featured speaker at a survivalist conference in Nevada.

      The network associated with the Liberty Lobby are of course not the only racists in the L.A. area or nationally.  Around the country, various factions of the KKK remain active.  At least one of these, the Oklahoma based White Kinights, have tried to recruit in the L.A.P.D.  A local group called American White Supremacists, whose slogan is “Racial Purity is America’s Security,” may also be involved in such efforts.  Calling cards with that slogan were used to harass several Black officers in an area of their station accessible only to other cops.  Tom and John  Metzger, based in San Diego, continue to be active around southern california, with supporters in both L.A. and Orange County. 

They are currently promoting an anti-immigrant mobilization to the Mexican border for June 1992, and have attracted supporters.  The mobilization, nicknamed American Spring, has been advertised in Spotlight, as have about a half dozen other white supremacist groups around the L.A. area.  Metzger also still maintains contact with nazi boneheads.  Geremi Rineman, a nazi-skin who appeared together with Metzger on local L.A. TV last year after he was paralyzed in a shooting after being involved in a racially-motivated exchange, has hooked up with the North Carolina based Church of the Creator, but makes his hate-line available to Metzger as a WAR contact number.  Rineman, who now styles himself Von Rineman, issued a scathing racist denunciation of “mud people” after the L.A. rebellion that followed the acquittal of four officers charged with brutality for beating Rodney King.  And of course, the real danger posed by these racist groups, despite their claims to be anti-establishment is that, like Hitler before them, they may be seized upon by the racist and exploitative establishment elite to impose a repressive regime that can maintain the degrading status quo.       Southern Californians must become more alert to the organizing efforts of the Liberty Lobby inspired network of racists.  If you have information to share about their activities, please contact PART