Carto helped found the Populist Party, which served as an electoral vehicle for white supremacist group and Ku Klux Klan members, such as David Duke in the 1988 presidential election and Christian Identity supporter Bo Gritz in 1992.

Carto ran the American Free Press newspaper which publishes antisemitic and racist books and features columns by Joe Sobran, James Traficant, Paul Craig Roberts, and others.

He served in the United States Army in the Philippines in World War II and earned the Purple Heart when he was shot in the shoulder by an enemy sniper.

[citation needed] On September 10, 1971, the conservative magazine National Review published a detailed critique of Carto's activities up to that point.

[1] The IHR and Carto were sued in 1981 by public interest attorney William John Cox on behalf of Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein.

In that case, which was to eventually last eleven years, the court took "judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during the summer of 1944.

"[15][16][17] The law firm of Robert Von Esch, Jr., representing the defendants, settled with the plaintiff to remove themselves from the case by agreeing to pay $100,000 and an explicit apology for having filed an August 1986 libel suit by the IHR against Mermelstein.

[14] After losing control of Noontide Press and the IHR in a hostile takeover by former associates, Carto started another publication, The Barnes Review, with the focus also on Holocaust denial.

Olympic athlete Bob Richards (1984), David Duke (a founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a future Louisiana state representative, 1988) and former Green Beret Bo Gritz (1992) were the Populist Party's only three presidential candidates.

He spoke at meetings conducted by "Pastor" Thomas Robb, a Ku Klux Klan leader and Christian Identity advocate, and in 2015 participated in the ground breaking ceremony for the Christian Revival Research and Development Center being built on Robb's compound in Arkansas, along with Edward Fields and Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm.

[18] Willis Carto was a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey,[12] a far-rightist who heralded Adolf Hitler's Third Reich as the "European Imperium" against both Bolshevism and the United States, which he considered Jewish-controlled.

[27] That book presented sympathetic profiles of several United States political figures including Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Ford, as well as Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, who used radio to support of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.