One Nazi and hundreds of scientists run for US political office

Arthur Jones

We’ve reached the epitome of Republican policy, even if they’ll never admit it: A former leader of the American Nazi Party is running for Congress in Illinois.

Arthur Jones — an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist — is poised to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs.

“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.

Indeed, Jones’ website for his latest congressional run includes a section titled “The ‘Holocaust Racket’” where he calls the genocide carried out by the German Nazi regime and collaborators in other nations “the biggest blackest lie in history.”

This Nazi has run several times in the past, never coming within a mile of victory. This time he’s the only name on the Republican ballot in a deep blue district, so he’s all but guaranteed to crash and burn come voting day. But still, isn’t nice for district Republicans to be represented by a candidate who shares their beliefs? After all, his campaign promises are basically a recitation of the GOP’s greatest hits: He’s anti-immigration and wants to ban “sanctuary cities” and kick out the DREAMers, he wants to stop the “homosexual agenda”, he wants to repeal Obamacare, he wants to ban abortion and defund Planned Parenthood, he thinks more citizens with guns would help solve gun violence, and he blames “Radical Leftists” for the Charlottesville violence. All that’s missing is a promise to put baby Jesus in every classroom and you’d have a full Rightist talking-points Bingo card.

Republicans don’t like being compared to Nazis, but they can never explain why Nazis keep adopting their policies and running on their ticket to the point where officials regularly have to denounce them. You don’t see that happening with the Democrats, strangely enough.

Karma demands balance, however, and it must sense that an actual fucking Nazi running for Congress is tipping the scales pretty far towards evil, because it’s correcting for it by having the largest number of scientists in modern history running for office, largely in reaction to the anti-science goobers wrecking the country from the White House:

More than 60 researchers and technologists are running for federal office in 2018 as part of a historic wave of candidates with science backgrounds launching campaigns.

At least 200 candidates with previous careers in science, technology, engineering and math announced bids for some of the nation’s roughly 7,000 state legislature seats as of Jan. 31, according to data that 314 Action, a political action committee, shared exclusively with HuffPost.

The group, which launched in 2014 to help scientists run for office, said it is talking with 500 more people and is pressing about half of them to run. An additional 200 such candidates are running for school boards.

[…]

“The attacks on science, of course, didn’t start with the Trump administration, but it has been a catalyst to getting scientists out of the lab and into running for federal office,” [314 Action founder Shaughnessy] Naughton said. “That is one bright spot.”

Having just one of them win would effectively double the number of degree-holding scientists in Congress, which indicates a pretty sorry state of affairs. Still, there’s hope yet.

(via @BadAstronomer & @fark)