Fresh off his controversial pardon, former sheriff Joe Arpaio is palling around with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.
A September 15 article published in American Free Press cites an expansive interview Arpaio recently gave to the news outfit “in an effort to bypass the fake news.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League–an organization dedicated to rooting out anti-Semitism which also works “to secure justice and equality”–American Free Press is “an anti-Semitic conspiracy-oriented newspaper.”
And that description puts it a bit lightly.
In the past, American Free Press has published numerous Holocaust-denial pieces–occasionally deleting them in the face of unflattering media attention–and their bookstore sells titles like, The Holocaust Never Happened & The CIA Killed JFK, a pseudo-scholarly tract which claims to “destroy the hoax of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi Germany.”
Present–and scrubbed–headlines on the website read: “AUDIO INTERVIEW: Jewish Fingerprints All Over 9-11”; “AUDIO INTERVIEW: Holocaust Hoax Exposed”; “Meet the Man Who Invented the ‘Holocaust’“; “Why Can We Question Anything but the ‘Holocaust’?”; “Third Consecutive Zionist Jew to Head U.S.’s Economic Warfare Division”.
And the New York Times once described American Free Press co-founder Willis Carto as a man who “used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust.”
In Arpaio’s interview with Mark Anderson, the disgraced former lawman rails against Barack Obama, describe the alleged laxity of federal immigration policies and agencies and complains about his treatment after being charged with contempt of court for ignoring that same court’s order that he stop racially profiling people of Latin descent. According to Arpaio, his entire slate of legal troubles stems from his aggressive investigation into Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Arpaio also took the time to chide Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain, and floated the possibility of challenging Flake in a Republican primary sometime in the future. “Originally, after I lost the sheriff’s race, I said, ‘I’m out of this.’ I actually don’t know what office I’d run for. Now, if President Trump asked me to run, that’d be a ‘wild card’ to consider,” Arpaio said.
Media Matters notes that Arpaio has given interviews to American Free Press on multiple occasions before his legal issues began.
[image via screengrab]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to correct a misattributed hyperlink.
