Holocaust Denier Denounced as ‘Nazi’ Wins Illinois Congressional Primary

Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier described as a Nazi by the Illinois Republican Party, won the Republican primary Tuesday in the state’s 3rd Congressional District, a heavily Democratic district that includes part of Chicago and its suburbs, according to The Associated Press.

Jones, 70, unsuccessfully sought the nomination five times before, and his victory Tuesday was a foregone conclusion after the Republican Party failed to draft another candidate to enter the race against him.

“Even if only myself and my wife voted for me, I’d win the primary because the Republican Party screwed up big time,” Jones said in an interview.

The Illinois Republican Party has sought to distance itself from Jones in recent weeks, blanketing the district with campaign fliers and robocalls urging voters to “stop Illinois Nazis,” according to a robocall script provided by the party. Jones said he had received three robocalls himself.

“Arthur Jones is not a real Republican — he is a Nazi whose disgusting, bigoted views have no place in our nation’s discourse,” Tim Schneider, the Illinois Republican Party chairman, said in a statement. He said the party had urged voters “to skip over his name when they go to the polls” and moving forward planned on “vehemently opposing Jones with real campaign dollars.”

A spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party said those dollars would be used to support an independent candidate in the November general election. Party leaders are in talks with several potential candidates, the spokesman said, but have not yet decided which one to endorse.

The 3rd Congressional District of Illinois has not been represented by a Republican since 1975, and few people besides Jones believe he has a chance of winning the general election in November. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat, has represented the district in Congress since 2005, and before that it was represented by his father, Bill Lipinski, since 1993.

The main political battle in the district this year has been a Democratic primary between Lipinski and a progressive challenger, Marie Newman, 53. Both have denounced Jones.

Lipinski, 51, called Jones’ beliefs “bigoted and anti-Semitic” and said they “personally disgust me because I believe that every individual has a God-given right to be treated with dignity.”

Erik Wallenius, Newman’s campaign manager, said Jones’s views were “abhorrent and have no place in the 3rd District, or anywhere.”

Jones is a former member of the American Nazi Party and has been active in the white supremacist movement for years. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, Jones said, he founded a conservative campus newspaper and attended meetings of both the Young Republicans and a National Socialist student group.

He later ran for mayor of Milwaukee as a member of the National Socialist White People’s Party in 1976. He finished fourth in the nonpartisan primary, receiving roughly 5,000 votes, and moved to Illinois the following year, he said.

“This stuff about being a Nazi, that’s in the past,” Jones said Monday. But his campaign website contains a page devoted to the Holocaust, which he said in an interview was “a greatly overblown nonevent” and “an international extortion racket.” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said Jones was just one of several extremists running for public office this year. He pointed to Paul Nehlen, whose primary bid against the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, was denounced by the Wisconsin Republican Party last month, and Joe Arpaio, the immigration hard-liner pardoned by President Donald Trump, who said in January that he was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona.

“It is just nuts that we are in this moment in time when we have intolerance really infecting our political process,” Greenblatt said.

Greenblatt pointed to an uptick in far-right recruiting on college campuses and a 57 percent increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents over the last year as signs that “extremists feel emboldened” in the current political climate.

“It is a sad state, where we are,” Greenblatt said. “This is a bigger problem than Arthur Jones.”