Most people in Enid will tell you they didn’t hear much about the allegations against Blevins until after he was elected last year.
As voters trickled into polling stations Tuesday, many said they didn’t vote in that race and had no idea back then that Blevins, a former Marine who now works for his family’s roofing business, had been active in white nationalist groups. Nearly everyone said they didn’t want their city to be known as a place that tolerates hate.
“It does matter what you’ve done. Who you’ve associated with,” said Paul Martin, a cattle farmer and Democrat who said he votes for candidates regardless of party and learned of Blevins’ white nationalist ties only after his election.
“It didn’t come to light until after the vote,” Martin said. “I was really upset.”
The evidence of Blevins’ activism with white nationalist groups was out there. In 2019, he’d been outed by anti-fascist researchers and the progressive media outlet Right Wing Watch. The articles included photos of Blevins in 2017, marching alongside tiki torch-wielding neo-Nazis at a rally in Charlottesville and the next day at Unite the Right, carrying the original Oklahoma flag at an event where counterprotesters were beaten and a woman was murdered.
They included screenshots of Blevins’ posts: racist and antisemitic writings in secret forums and chats where he identified himself under a pseudonym as the Oklahoma state coordinator for Identity Evropa, one of the largest and most active white nationalist organizations in the alt-right movement. But those articles, which named Blevins as “Judson,” don’t appear when you Google “Judd Blevins,” as he is known in Enid.
The reporting, verified by NBC News, was sound. From 2017 to 2019, Blevins was an active leader in Identity Evropa, a group that privately advocated for the superiority of the white race but sanitized its messaging to break into conservative politics, adopting descriptors like “identitarians” with a mission to preserve “Western culture.” Blevins had flyered cities and universities with Identity Evropa stickers, banners and pamphlets and helped the group grow, recruiting new members and planning activities. He marched in Charlottesville and remained a member for at least a year after. Identity Evropa dissolved in 2019; its leadership splintered to other white nationalist groups.
Using a pseudonym, Blevins posted in 2019 that fellow white nationalists — “our guys” — should be supported as they ran for local elected offices “such as city council.”
“Basically positions where one can fly under the radar yet still be effective,” he posted.
Five weeks before Election Day last year, the local paper, the Enid News & Eagle, published a front-page story: “City candidate accused of white nationalist ties.” Blevins called the article fake news. Moreover, he told supporters, the “George-Soros-funded” left’s attacking him in such a way only bolstered his bona fides as a conservative Republican — a label that he had affixed to his campaign signs and mailers, even though his opponent was also a conservative Republican and the race had always been nonpartisan.
“The labels applied to me are the same applied to any American who speaks out against the ruling liberal establishment,” Blevins told the paper.
Blevins won by 36 votes, and the election shook Enid’s progressive residents. In response, they formed the Enid Social Justice Committee and decided on their first mission: to inform their neighbors of their new council member’s white nationalist ties. In November — after six months of activism, protests and heated speeches at the city’s regular council meetings — when it became clear that Blevins would neither explain nor apologize, the ESJC submitted the signatures it had collected and filed a recall petition.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
