Way to go, Illinois Republicans.
Arthur Jones — an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist — is poised to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs.
“Well first of all, I’m running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany. All right. To me the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket,” Jones told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Indeed, Jones’ website for his latest congressional run includes a section titled “The ‘Holocaust Racket’” where he calls the genocide carried out by the German Nazi regime and collaborators in other nations “the biggest blackest lie in history.”
Jones, 70, a retired insurance agent who lives in suburban Lyons, has unsuccessfully run for elected offices in the Chicago area and Milwaukee since the 1970s.
He ran for Milwaukee mayor in 1976 and 13th Ward alderman on Chicago’s Southwest Side in 1987.
Since the 1990s to 2016, Jones has jumped in the GOP 3rd Congressional District primary seven times, never even close to becoming a viable contender.
The outcome will be different for Jones in the Illinois primary on March 20, 2018.
To Jones’ own amazement, he is the only one on the Republican ballot.
The nutsery isn’t afraid to run out in the open anymore now that we have Trump.
That’s nothing to what I experienced. One of Russ’s close relatives was here for his first Russ’s surgery in 2011 spouting the same crap. I told him he was full to his eyeballs. Then find out he served in the army in Germany. He’s a big time Republican who served 5 yrs. for wall paper hanging if you know what that is. Wonder why Eisenhower made them take pictures and come clean up those places after the war.
The thing about Illinois Republicans is that they’re much more in the mold of Charles Percy or James Thompson than the likes of Joe Walsh. Every once in a while a whackjob pops up and manages to get elected, but they don’t last. In the 1980s there was a state rep from the western ex-urbs named Penny Pullen who actually introduced legislation to quarantine HIV+ people. She lost her next election.
This loon may very well get elected — the Chicago suburbs are died-in-the-wool Republican, especially the western ones (the North Shore is so blue it’s indigo) — but he won’t last for any length of time.
Beware generalities: it turns out from a couple of reports, that district is heavily Democratic, which is probably why this goofball is unopposed in the GOP primary: any Republican with any sense doesn’t want to waste time running a losing campaign.
It will be interesting to see how many people would rather vote for him than for a Democrat.