Jeff Hall, by all accounts, has been running a low-key campaign for the Western Municipal Water District in Riverside County, California. However, there is nothing low-key about Hall’s involvement with the National Socialist Movement, reportedly America’s largest neo-Nazi group.
“I want a white nation,” Hall, a 31-year-old plumber, told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t hide what I am, and I don’t water that down.”
Hall is the state director for the National Socialist Movement and has led rallies in Riverside and Los Angeles. In the water board race, he’s seeking anti-incumbent votes, as well as gaining any votes from neo-Nazi supporters.
“We see this from time to time. They push things like school boards—local elections that kind of slip under the radar,” Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, told the Times. “It gives them publicity, it gives them a foothold and it gives them an anchor to spew their bigoted opinions in other forums.”
Hall would not be welcomed on the board. Charles Field, who is seeking re-election to the board’s Division 1 seat, thinks Hall’s ideology would be divisive and not conducive to getting things done.
“The issues that he would bring to the table seem to me to diverge in a very enormous way from the issues we have to deal with,” Field told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. “I certainly wouldn’t care to have his input on employee selection and promotion issues.”
Meanwhile, former California chapter leader of the Aryan Nations, Daniel B. Schruender, is running for one of two open seats on the Rialto Unified School District Board. Schruender claims he’s not a white supremacist, but is “pro-white.”