“They didn’t put up a third-party candidate? That’s great! That’s fantastic!”
By Natasha Korecki
Politico (6/29/18)
CHICAGO — Illinois Republicans botched four opportunities to stop an avowed Nazi from representing their party in a Chicago-area congressional district. Now they’re paying the price.
Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier who will appear on the November ballot as the GOP candidate against Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski, has become campaign fodder for Democrats as they seek to defeat Gov. Bruce Rauner. And some Republicans even fear the taint from Jones‘ extremist views poses a threat to the party up and down the ticket.
“First, it’s morally wrong and I think it’s really harmful to the party. The guy’s a complete nutcase. He’s a Nazi,” said conservative GOP state Rep. David McSweeney. “This is an absolute political disaster.”
McSweeney’s comments come just days after the filing deadline passed for qualifying a third-party candidate for the general election — which could have provided a safe harbor for Illinois Republican votes. Prior to that, the party had also failed to recruit a candidate to challenge Jones in the primary election, failed to knock him off the primary ballot and wasn’t able to field a write-in candidate against him in the primary.
Running a third-party candidate against Jones in November was among the options left to Illinois Republicans after Jones clinched the GOP nomination by running unopposed. But the deadline came and went this week and that didn’t happen either.
Jones, who told POLITICO he’s running to counter a “two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system,” laughed when he was informed the GOP was unable to put up a candidate against him.
“They didn’t put up a third-party candidate?” Jones asked when reached by phone Thursday. “That’s great! That’s fantastic! …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
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An old campaign photo of Arthur Jones from his race for Milwaukee mayor.
The Nazi I Knew: Still Spewing His Sewage Of Hate
By Mark L. Taylor
The Commoner Call (5/1/17)
When I was in my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, back in 1970, there was a fiery, oddball upperclassman, named Art Jones. He was a tall, gangly kid with limp dirty blonde hair and a nervous energy that made him fidgety and a fast walker and a faster talker. While looking a bit like Ichabod Crane loping across campus he didn’t particularly stand out from other kids on campus except for one thing: he was a Nazi.
I’m not talking some kid with a passing adolescent infatuation with the symbols and gaudy trinkets of the Fourth Reich. Art Jones was a for real Nazi and made sure everyone knew about it. He was known from popping off with loud, quarrelsome Nazi riffs in classes and if you gave him half a minute he’d bore right into you with a Nazi sales pitch full of theory, talking points and quotes from Hitler and Himmler like a high pressure fire hose spewing sewage.
All these years later and Art Jones’ fire hose still spews the sewage of hate.
Now I was from a very conservative John Birch Society home and pretty used to the hard right worldview and language. My politics in my freshman year were solidly Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. I was no Nazi but I wasn’t completely shocked by Art’s racists rants; I had grown up with a more subdued, “politer” suburban version of the same thing. I found Art both repellent and fascinating in a sociological sense at the same time.
One night I was downtown at one of my many favorite bars with a buddy from the dorm and Art was there too. He invited us up to his off-campus den, a cramped little room over some kind of garage or welding shop a few doors down from the bar. The room was typical college guy cluttered except mixed in among the usual chaos of term papers, notebooks, ashtrays, empty beer bottles and dirty dishes were photos of Nazi leaders and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
What ensued was one of the most bizarre hours of my life as we debated Nazism. I don’t recall a lot of the conversation but I do remember that fire hose intensity of racist, smothering crazy. Art’s voice rose with the words sounding like pistol shots. There was a crazy crackling high voltage that was breathtaking. I doubt we stayed a full hour, managing to extricate ourselves from Art’s cramped little world. …