By Ted Cox

Republican elected officials speaking at so-called Reopen Illinois demonstrations have addressed protesters openly carrying anti-Semitic signs comparing Gov. Pritzker to Adolf Hitler, and they’ve not only not denounced those protesters but have appeared to welcome their support.

We’ve crossed a very serious line here, and it’s time to denounce it in no uncertain terms, because the GOP is playing with a fire that can spread and overwhelm the political system in ways no different from a pandemic overwhelming the hospital system.

Are they allowing their cause, however misguided, to be hijacked, or are they willingly siding with those protesters? That doesn’t offer much of an option to anyone looking on from outside the fray.

Such anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi protesters are nothing new, to be sure, but they’re usually on the fringe. They’re usually in the shadows. Mainstream politicians don’t usually engage with them, because their views are so extreme and so far outside what’s considered public discourse, even in the no-holds-barred arena of our current politics.

Look at the way Republicans backed away from Arthur Jones, the openly neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who has now run for Congress several times in the southern suburbs of Chicago. In 2018, in fact, he was the GOP standard bearer, having run unopposed in the Republican primary, an oversight we’ll charitably ascribe to a party in disarray under then-Gov. Rauner. GOP leaders, to their credit, denounced him and advised voters in the district to vote against him, and earlier this year they made sure there was another Republican in the race to prevail, as Jones amassed just 10 percent of the vote in the primary election.

But that’s still 10 percent too much, even among Republican voters.

Anti-Semitic signs have been seen at protests against the Illinois stay-at-home order both in Chicago, outside the Thompson Center, and in Springfield, outside the Capitol. One sign at a Saturday protest in Springfield, held by a woman wearing a “Trump 2020” T-shirt, called Pritzker a “Nazi hypocrite,” with swastikas alongside a picture giving him a Hitler mustache. Another placed photos of Pritzker and Hitler side by side with an equal sign between them.

Asked by reporter Mike Miletich of WGEM-TV to explain that sign, a man who identified himself as Doug Walter of Pana, south of Decatur, said, “Are you serious? He’s trying to control all of the people in this country, or this state. … He is Hitler. They are one in the same. They are one in the same.”