An anti-Semitic white supremacist and Holocaust denier will is about to get the Republican nomination for a U.S. congressional seat in Illinois.
Arthur Jones, a former leader in the American Nazi Party is the only candidate seeking the GOP nod for the seat in the heavily Democratic 3rd Congressional District, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Jones, 70, was the only person to qualify for the Republican primary in the heavily-Democratic 3rd District, according to the report.
“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.
Jones has a campaign website containing a section called “Holocaust?” in which he calls the genocide of six million Jews “the biggest blackest lie in history.”
No other Republicans will appear on the ballot in the primary, which will take place March 20.
The Anti-Defamation League has long tracked Jones, who protested the 2009 opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and has spoken at many neo-Nazi rallies. “He is, by every definition, an anti-Semite and unrepentant bigot,” the ADL’s Chicago-Upper Midwest regional director, Lonnie Nasatir, told the Sun-Times.
Jones gave a speech last year at a gathering of the National Socialist Movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center called one of the “most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.”
In his speech, Jones said he was sorry he voted for President Trump, who “surrounded himself with hoards of Jews” like presidential advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner.
