For nearly five decades Willis Carto has been an important but often contentious and polarizing figure in the American "right wing" and the historical revisionist movement.
Willis Allison Carto was born in July 1926 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His wife, Elisabeth, was born in 1937 in Herford, Germany. They have no children.
In 1955 Carto founded Liberty Lobby, a "populist" organization that for years published a nationally-circulated tabloid weekly, The Spotlight. Following its collapse in 2001, Carto and former Liberty Lobby employees launched American Free Press (AFP), a weekly tabloid similar to The Spotlight in style, tone and content. He has since played an important role in running AFP.
Carto also supervises The Barnes Review, a revisionist history journal he founded in 1994 that targets a middle-brow readership.
The Barnes Review and AFP have jointly sponsored several conferences.
Carto has a long record of bitter and litigious fights with persons or groups that he regards as rivals. During the 1980s, for example, he was involved in launching the Populist Party. But soon he was embroiled in conflict with the group's other leading figures, who accused him of misappropriating many tens of thousands of dollars of Party funds. The bitter dispute accelerated the Party's decline and collapse.
For some years Carto and his wife were associated with the Institute for Historical Review, a leading "revisionist" publishing and educational center that was founded in December 1978 by David McCalden with support from Carto and several other persons.
In September 1993 the staff and management of the IHR and its parent corporation terminated all ties with the Cartos after evidence came to light that they were embezzling funds. (This theft was later proven in court.)
Carto responded with an aggressive smear campaign against the IHR and persons associated with it, accusing them of being agents of the Zionist ADL, the CIA, and the Church of Scientology. He also initiated a series of lawsuits against the IHR, its parent corporation, and persons associated with the IHR.
Carto's costly and protracted campaign was not successful. Liberty Lobby was forced into bankruptcy and went out of business. The Cartos likewise filed for bankruptcy, and in early 2002 they lost their home in Escondido, southern California. Since then they have been reportedly been living in semi-hiding in northern Virginia.
In March 2003, authorities in Switzerland issued an arrest warrant for Carto for having embezzled millions from the IHR and its parent company.
Further information about Carto is posted on the Willis Carto Information Site.
 |
 |
 |