Around the same time, Connie Vickers was conducting her own investigation. She pored over Blevins’ old posts, collecting the ones where he mentioned Hitler admiringly and joked about wearing a swastika armband. Vickers scoured news footage from Charlottesville for Blevins. She collected screenshots and forwarded them to her friend Nancy Presnall. She made her sign. Armed with that evidence, representing the Garfield County Democrats, Presnall began speaking at City Council meetings. At a meeting in January 2023, a week before the candidates’ forum, she warned about Blevins’ candidacy and support, calling it “an underlying evil that is coming into our town.”
Blevins won by 36 votes in an election where 808 people, less than 15% of the ward’s 5,600 registered voters, came out — a dismal turnout on par with municipal elections across the country.
The credit — or the blame — for Blevins’ victory depends on whom you ask. Some say it was name recognition; Blevins shares a last name, but is no relation, to the beloved owners of the only locally operated grocery store, Jumbo Foods. Most credit a local conservative activist who managed his campaign and his supporters from the Enid Freedom Fighters, a Facebook group-turned-political force that warred against mask mandates and then certain library books. Blevins’ campaign materials, which leaned into this hard-right Republican identity, were unprecedented in an Enid City Council election — which had always been nonpartisan.
Blevins’ win represented the kind of quiet progress white power groups had been preaching. As the alt-right splintered after Charlottesville, leaders urged their members to log off the internet, remove their masks and get involved in the political establishment.
“The Republican Party is comprised largely of white, aging baby boomers,” white supremacist James Allsup told Identity Evropa conferencegoers in 2018. “As baby boomers age out, the positions they hold will become vacant all throughout society and somebody will have to fill them.”
Most of the avowed white supremacists who ran for office in 2018 lost. Increasingly, though, far-right activists and extremists, including those espousing white supremacist beliefs, are faring better. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism identified more than 100 right-wing extremists running for office nationwide. Nineteen won.
The fallout from these local elections has rocked communities from Florida to Idaho. Christian nationalists in Ottawa County, Michigan, pushed out their moderate Republican counterparts in 2023 and took over a county board. The same happened with far-right activists the year before in conservative Shasta County, California.
In Enid, Blevins’ election galvanized an opposition. In March 2023, around 100 people, including Vickers and Presnall, 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 group elected a chair and a vice: Kristi Balden, a 58-year-old mother of three, easily spotted in Enid with her pink hair and white cowboy boots, and James Neal, 48, priest of a small inclusive Orthodox Catholic parish and local firebrand known for his flowing garments and embrace of the LGBTQ community.
They created a Facebook page and urged followers to sign an online petition. They launched a website that laid out the evidence against Blevins. They made buttons and T-shirts emblazoned with images of raised fists, and hosted grill-outs, bake sales and protests.
When former state Sen. Jake Merrick hosted Blevins on his Freedom 96.9 talk radio show in March, he noted Blevins was “under attack.”
“They would like to see me apologize and denounce everything that I’m accused of, but I don’t have anything to apologize for,” Blevins said.
On May 1, two-and-a-half months after he was elected, Blevins was sworn in at City Hall. Dozens of Enid Social Justice Committee (ESJC) members gathered outside, holding signs that read, “What happened in Charlottesville, Judd?” and chanted a riff on the hateful Unite the Right cry, “Judd, we will replace you!”
That would take time. Per Enid law, a city commissioner must serve six months before a recall petition can be filed. In the meantime, the ESJC spoke at nearly every City Council meeting. The last item on the agenda — after prayer, the pledge and a plea from the local animal shelter to adopt a pet in need, after the council addressed the mundane but essential tasks required of local governments, which recently included the reprogramming of traffic lights and a law designating size limits for pet pot-bellied pigs — is public comment. ESJC was such a constant presence that the mayor changed the time allotted for public comment on nonagenda items from three minutes to one.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
