Like most candidates running for Congress, Arthur Jones has a campaign website.
It outlines the Republican candidates educational background, stance on issues and how to donate to his campaign to represent Illinois 3rd Congressional District.
It also lays out Joness unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic views.
In a section called Holocaust? Jones describes the atrocities as a racket and the biggest, blackest, lie in history. Under another tab titled Flags of Conflict, he lists the Confederate flag first and describes it as a symbol of White pride and White resistance and the flag of a White counter revolution.
And in his most recent blog post dated Aug. 24 Jones rails against Radical Leftists and blames them for starting racial violence that had roiled Charlottesville about two weeks earlier. Heather Heyer, 32, a protester at a white supremacist rally, died after a driver rammed a car into a crowd of demonstrators. A self-professed neo-Nazi has been charged with first-degree murder in the incident. Jones painted the death as an accident.
Despite his views, Jones is all but certain to become the GOP nominee in one of Illinoiss most prominent congressional districts one that includes parts of Chicago and several suburbs to the west and southwest. Jones is running unopposed in the Republican primary; the deadline for candidates to file was in early December.
His chances of winning the seat are extremely slim. The district is rated safely Democratic, according to Ballotpedia, and two Democrats are facing off: Marie Newman and incumbent Daniel Lipinski. An independent candidate, Mat Tomkowiak, withdrew from the race.
Still, even getting this far in the race is a new milestone for Jones. Over three decades, he has unsuccessfully thrown his hat into the ring for the 3rd District seat seven times, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
When Sun-Times reporter Frank Main drove to Lyons, Ill., to track down Jones, the candidate was no less vocal about his extreme views.
Well first of all, Im running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany, all right? Jones told Main. To me, the Holocaust is what I said it is: Its an international extortion racket.
Jones also told the newspaper that he was once a leader in the American Nazi Party and now leads the America First Committee an organization whose membership is open to any white American citizen of European, non-Jewish descent.
Jones did not immediately respond to interview requests Sunday afternoon. Its unclear how he arrived at the opinion that the Holocaust, a systematic genocide in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime, was a sham.
