Nazi to become Republican candidate for Congress

A Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi is set to run as the Republican Party nominee in a congressional race in Illinois.

Art Jones, a frequent guest speaker at white supremacist rallies and a former leader of the American Nazi Party, is the sole candidate to put himself forward for the Republican nomination in the state’s third congressional district, a safe Democratic seat south-west of Chicago.

The expiry of the nomination deadline means the 70-year-old retiree will stand unopposed in the Republican primary on 20 March and enter the race to dethrone the seat’s current incumbent, Democrat Daniel Lipinski.

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Jones’ campaign website “lays out [his] unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic views”, The Washington Post reports.

A section on the Holocaust describes the genocide as “the biggest, blackest, lie in history”, while a section on immigration claims that “any two-legged vagabond from any Third-world, non-white, or non-Christian country is given preference whether they arrived legally or illegally”.

Jones has run, unsuccessfully, for various local offices since the 1970s, says the Chicago Sun-Times. He has sought the Republican nomination for the third congressional district seven times, losing heavily to more mainstream candidates in each instance.

In 2016, he was disqualified from running after a lawyer working for the Illinois Republican Party identified mistakes on his nomination documents.

The state committee has been unable to find any grounds to disqualify Jones this time around, but chairman Tim Schneider told the Sun-Times that the Illinois Republican Party “strongly oppose” Jones’s beliefs and his candidacy.

The feeling appears to be mutual. Despite leading a group called the America First Committee - open to “any white American citizen of European, non-Jewish descent” , the Sun-Times reports - Jones is no fan of the Republican Party or the current president.

At a National Socialist rally in Kentucky last year, Jones denounced Donald Trump as having surrounded himself with “hordes of Jews”, including his Jewish -son-in-law, Jared Kushner.