#2844: John Fitzgerald

The influx of QAnon-affiliated candidates in the 2020 elections and onwards has been duly documented, but extreme wingnuts have of course submitted their candidacies since the beginning of elections, and in the 2018 midterms, John Fitzgerald wasn’t the only Nazi and Holocaust denier running for Congress. Fitzgerald, who ran in California’s 11th Congressional District, was initially even endorsed by the Republican Party (because of a state party rule, later modified, to automatically endorse any candidate when that candidate is the only Republican on the ballot), and he received no less than 23 % of the vote in the general election. 

Now, Fitzgerald was a one-issue candidate: “Everything we’ve been told about the Holocaust is a lie. So my entire campaign, for the most part, is about exposing this lie,” said Fitzgerald in a radio interview with openly anti-Semitic radio host Andrew Carrington Hitchcock. Elsewhere, Fitzgerald called the Holocaust a “complete fabrication”, and during his campaign he would target voters and urge them to “end the Jewish takeover of America and restore our democracy” and, for good measure, claim that “the Jewish conducted attack on 9/11.” His website also falsely claimed that 9% of U.S. government officials are dual citizens of Israel and that Jews played a “prominent role” in the African slave trade.

 

He does assert that he is not anti-Semitic, however, so there’s that.

 

Diagnosis: Easily dismissed, perhaps, but the level of mindrot among tens of thousands of inhabitants of California’s 11th Congressional District should arguably be deemed a national emergency.