Black America Web Featured Video
CLOSE
Judd Blevins. | Source: Enid City Council
Another day, another Republican elected official turns out to have white nationalist ties, and once again I’m forced to ask a largely rhetorical question: What is it about GOP politics that consistently brings all the neo-Nazis to the yard?
Meet Judd Blevins.
Last year, Blevins ran a successful campaign to become one of six City Council members in Ward 1 of the small city of Enid, Oklahoma. But before that, Blevins was an active leader of one of the largest white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups of the alt-right, Identity Evropa, and he was one of hundreds of tiki torch-wielding white supremacists who participated in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. After two citizens of Enid found a photo of Blevins at the rally, torch in hand, Klandora’s box was opened and all of his white supremacist skeletons came staggering out of the closet.
From NBC News:
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.
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.
But two weeks later, Blevins had won his race. He’s a white veteran who ran on conservative Christian values, and all he really had to contend with was an article in the local paper about his white nationalist ties, which he dismissed as a “hit piece,” and locals like Vickers and Presnall, who were dismissed as looney Antifa activists.
Eventually, though, the truth became clear and impossible to deny.
More from NBC:
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.
In March 2023, weeks after Blevin won his election, and after the story about his Nazi connection became widely known throughout Edin, dividing the largely conservative community, met at a community center, formed the Enid Social Justice Committee, and made its first order of business a bid to recall Blevins and oust him from his council seat. Now, there’s a recall election scheduled for April 2.
NBC noted that Blevins still has plenty of right-wing support in Enid, including one man who spoke at a recent city council and praised him for attending a “demonstration to protect American history,” which is how he described the Unite the Right rally that resulted in the injuries of dozens of people and the murder of paralegal and activist Heather Heyer, all because a mob of angry white men wanted to protect Confederated monuments made to commemorate traitors and advocates for Black people in bondage.
None of this is surprising of course. Blevin is a conservative Republican, and Klan members, neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists gravitate to the party, including an “honorary” KKK member who is currently campaigning to be governor of Missouri. It also should surprise zero people that a white supremacist was elected into office in Oklahoma, a state where critical race theory was banned into educational oblivion, because, in the minds of Nazi-electing conservatives, systemic racism isn’t real.
This is why white supremacists feel at home in MAGA America. This is what it means to make America great again.
SEE ALSO:
North Dakota Republican Party Leader Resigns After Telling Black People To Leave And Move To Wakanda
The post Oklahoma Residents Scramble To Recall White Nationalist Leader Elected To Enid City Council appeared first on NewsOne.
Oklahoma Residents Scramble To Recall White Nationalist Leader Elected To Enid City Council
was originally published on
newsone.com
