A small city in Oklahoma elected a white nationalist. Will it be able to vote him out?
- Thread starter Stillwater Townie
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I came here to post this ...this is INSANSE !!!!
ENID, Okla. — The photo of Judd Blevins was unmistakable.
In it, Blevins, bearded and heavyset, held a tiki torch on the University of Virginia campus, on the eve of Unite the Right, a 2017 coming-together of the nation’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
Connie Vickers had found the photo online along with others showing Blevins marching alongside an angry mob — a crowd of men recorded throughout the night spitting and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” Vickers had it enlarged at a local print and copy shop. On a January night in 2023, she and Nancy Presnall, best friends, retirees and rare Democrats in a deeply red Oklahoma county, brought it to a sparsely attended forum where Blevins, a candidate running to represent Ward 1 on Enid’s six-seat City Council, was making his case.
They had hoped to get a question in while Blevins was on stage, but settled for confronting him after.
For more on this story, watch NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT.
Hearts pumping, Presnall and Vickers approached the 41-year-old former Marine. From a kitchen trash bag, Vickers pulled out the blown-up photo of Blevins and asked about his ties to white nationalists.
As his campaign manager whisked a red-faced Blevins away, Vickers and Presnall followed, yelling, “Answer the question, Judd!”
“He ran away from two little old ladies,” Presnall recalled.
Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall, best friends and rare Democrats in conservative Enid, confronted Blevins about his white nationalist ties. (Michael Noble Jr. for NBC News)© Michael Noble Jr. for NBC News
Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Blevins won his race, unseating the Republican incumbent, widely viewed as a devoted public servant, who died from cancer later that year. Voters seemed to appreciate Blevins’ bio: a veteran who’d served in Iraq and who’d worked a manual job in Tulsa before moving back to his hometown to take over his father’s roofing business. Blevins described himself as a man of God and extolled the city as a place where “traditional values” remained the norm.
The message resounded in Enid, a city nearly 100 miles north of Oklahoma City with just over 50,000 people. In 1980, more than 90% of the area's residents were white; now less than 3 in 4 are. Enid is both one of the country’s most quickly diversifying places and one of the most conservative, where residents describe the ever-present whirring of jets from nearby Vance Air Force Base as “the sound of freedom.”
It’s not clear how many voters knew about Blevins’ white nationalist ties. There was an article in the local paper, which Blevins labeled “a hit piece,” but beyond the confrontation with Vickers and Presnall, it just wasn’t talked about. Blevins wasn’t asked about it at campaign events or forums and his opponent never brought it up.
But a white nationalist campaigning for office is one thing; his election is another. And Blevins’ win didn’t sit well with many in Enid. It marked the beginning of a fight to expel Blevins from the City Council — a fight for the very soul of Enid that would unite a coalition of its most progressive residents, divide its conservatives and show the power of community organizing.
Over the next year, grandmothers would be branded antifa radicals, local organizers would be accused of attempted murder, and a national white power movement would stake its claim on the City Council. And for a growing number of state and local governments confronting extremism in their ranks, the outcome of that fight — Blevins’ recall election on April 2 — will serve either as a model or a warning.
Blevins has declined multiple interview requests. (In response to questions about his white nationalist ties, he told a reporter, “I hope you find God.”) So when, how and why Blevins got involved with a white supremacist movement may never be known.
What is clear is that from at least 2017 to 2019, Blevins was an active leader in Identity Evropa, one of the largest among the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that collectively made up the alt-right.
In public, Identity Evropa eschewed the racist label, opting instead for sanitized descriptors like “identitarians” who were focused on “preserving Western culture.” But privately, in secret meetings and internal online chat groups, members were clear about their motivations and beliefs. In posts that praised Nazis, denigrated racial minorities and professed the superiority of white people, pseudonymous Identity Evropa members spoke candidly about their goal of normalizing racist ideologies and infiltrating conservative politics.
As the group’s Oklahoma state coordinator, Blevins flyered its major cities and universities with his group’s white nationalist propaganda, organized and participated in banner drops over state highways, and recruited, interviewed and accepted new members into the fold. Blevins marched at the tiki torch rally alongside hundreds of men in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and the next day at Unite the Right, where he carried the original Oklahoma flag.
Blevins remained active in the group even after the rally ended in violence, with beatings of counterprotesters and the murder of a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist. In a 2018 podcast, Blevins, who went by the online moniker Conway, talked about his passion for recruitment.
“As we like to say in Identity Evropa, there’s nothing you can do to stop us,” Blevins said.
Most of this was reported by left-wing news outlets three years before Blevins ran for office.
In March 2019, Unicorn Riot, a media collective dedicated to leftist causes, published Identity Evropa’s private chats, which anti-fascist researchers and journalists then used to identify people who planned and attended the Charlottesville rally: police, teachers and members of the military among them. One group matched Conway to Blevins based on photos, biographical details and Conway’s disclosure that he would be marching at Unite the Right with Oklahoma’s original flag. The progressive news outlet Right Wing Watch published an article soon after outing Blevins to a wider audience. NBC News verified this reporting and unearthed more evidence of Blevins’ white supremacist identity, including posts, photos and a podcast appearance.
After his unmasking, which included antifa activists posting photos of his family and the Tulsa lawn-care business where he worked, Blevins shut down his social media accounts.
In one of his final messages in the Identity Evropa internal chat, he said he was moving back home, and, in one of his last tweets, he hinted at wider ambitions.
Under another pseudonym, Blevins posted that “our guys” — meaning fellow white nationalists — should be supported in pursuing local elected office “such as city council.”
“Basically positions where one can fly under the radar yet still be effective,” Blevins posted.
Full story can be read here
MSN
Chaos erupts after voters unwittingly elect Charlottesville marcher to Oklahoma council
A man who marched at the notorious 2017 "Unite the Right" Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia got elected last year as a councilor in the city of Enid, Oklahoma, and NBC News reports that it has driven a deep rift within the community.According to NBC News, Enid City Councilor Judd Blevins' ties to white nationalists were exposed by two local residents in early 2023, shortly before voters went to the polls.
Blevins was elected weeks later, and NBC News notes that word of his participation in the violent Charlottesville march hadn't spread throughout most of the community by the time voters went to the ballot box.
Since his election, however, it has become more commonly known and has led to voters in the city mounting a recall campaign against him.
"Blevins’ election galvanized an opposition," NBC reported. "In March 2023, around 100 people ... met at a community center. By the end of the evening, they had formed the Enid Social Justice Committee and decided on its first order of business: recalling Judd Blevins."
The recall campaign has seemingly been helped by the fact that Blevins made no effort to distance himself from Nazi groups, and he pointedly said he had "nothing to apologize for" when asked about the campaign against him last year.
In fact, his opponents even said that they would withdraw his recall campaign if he would publicly renounce his past statements in support of white nationalism — but he still completely refused.
That said, the report notes that Blevins has plenty of supporters within the community, including one man at a recent city council meeting who praised him for attending a "demonstration to protect American history" at Charlottesville in 2017.
The election to recall Blevins will be held on April 2nd.
Oklahoma Official With White Nationalist Ties Gets the Boot
An Oklahoma official who marched alongside neo-Nazis at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was voted out of office in a recall election late Tuesday.
Judd Blevins, who had been fighting to keep his seat on Enid’s six-member City Council, lost by 268 votes to his challenger, Cheryl Patterson, according to results from the Oklahoma State Election Board.
In comments made after the election results came in, Blevins thanked all those who “prayed for” and “supported” him during the recall election. But he went on to lash out at those he blamed for his removal.
“It took a coalition of leftists and moderates, an all out media blitz from local, state, and national outlets, and scare tactics about the future of Vance AFB, unfounded in any truth or reality, yet shamefully endorsed by the establishment, to remove a true conservative from office. So be it. This was a trial not just for me, but for many in this community. And many have shown who they really serve. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith,” he was quoted as saying by local outlet KFOR.
Blevins’ recall was initiated after local activists sounded the alarm over his participation in the 2017 rally. Asked at a candidate forum last week to explain his role in the rally and ties to the white supremacist group Identity Evropa, Blevins said he was simply “bringing attention to the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016” and “pushing back on this anti-white hatred that is so common in media entertainment.”
IMO Blevins plays his victim hood card well. How he believes he’s fought a righteous fight and run the race like the apostle Paul is more than a reach for any true Christian. The arrogance and self righteousness of his blasphemous cult leader seems to have rubbed off on this Trump worshipper. Glad they kicked him out. God willing he’ll see the error of his ways, and repent. Now if the rest of the MAGA crowd infiltrating our institutions could see and acknowledge the error of their ways we might be able to put this country back on track to a better place for everyone. And yes Judd that means everyone else that’s not a WASP.
PF5
Deputy
When asked at the forum to explain his involvement in the rally and his ties to Identity Evropa, he responded: “Bringing attention to the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016: securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on this anti-white hatred that is so common in media entertainment.”
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