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Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, on Tuesday recalled City Council member Judd Blevins, a very fine person who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was part of the mob of idiots chanting “Jews will not replace us!” He was also the Oklahoma coordinator for the white nationalist group “Identity Evropa,” which rebranded itself as the “American Identity Movement” after anti-fascist troublemakers hacked the group’s chat logs in 2019, exposing many of the members to public scrutiny. Information in that hack allowed online activists to identify Blevins and link him to racist posts, as documented in this post from RightWingWatch.
Unfortunately, most voters in Enid’s City Council election last year only knew Blevins as a former Marine who worked for his family’s roofing business; once he was elected, his past came to light and a civic-minded group calling itself the Enid Social Justice Committee (ESJC) formed, originally with the intention of calling attention to Blevins’s past in hopes of persuading him to resign, and later to organize the recall.
Blevins was defeated Tuesday by 268 votes, although the election outcome won’t be official until it’s certified. The total turnout for the Ward 1 recall was 1,390, which NBC News reports was “about a quarter of Ward 1’s registered voters and hundreds more than voted when Blevins was first elected last year.” Blevins was turfed out by Cheryl Patterson, a Republican and former teacher who campaigned on bringing “normalcy” back to Enid.
Like lots of white supremacists, Blevins likes to deny he’s anything of the sort; we imagine if we dug around somewhere he may have insisted he only wants a fair shake for white people and what’s wrong with that?
CNN reports that despite his denials, the online identity that was quite clearly Blevins posted a charming comment less than a month before Charlottesville, saying “Hitler never would have allowed this shit,” although the context wasn’t clear, so perhaps he meant slow traffic on rural roads that were replaced by the Autobahn. We kind of doubt it, though. And two weeks before the rally, the same user wrote “I JUST CANT FEEL SAFE IF IM NOT PACKING AN AR WITH A 100 ROUND DRUM AND SPORTING MY SWASTIKA ARMBAND.”
And perhaps just the least bit ominously, in 2019, Blevins posted pseudonymously 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.
Then again, that was a very long time ago before the pandemic, so it’s like dinosaur times compared to now, five years later. This is the future!
At a November 7 City Council meeting, Blevins praised the First Amendment for making everyone free, and referred very vaguely to having turned over a new leaf in the most unspecific terms ever, which is why he didn’t need to apologize for anything.
“It is important for the American people to advocate for what they believe in,” he said, adding, “If we find ourselves having to make apologies when we exercise these rights, then we don’t have them.”
“I am a different man today than I was yesterday,” he continued. “There is no hate in my heart. All there is is the desire to follow the Lord. But I’m not going to apologize for things I never was.”
At another council meeting on November 21, Blevins also nonspecifically said that like anyone, he’s had a few egrets, and they had beautiful plumage, but honest, he was taken out of context, OK?
“All of us have said foolish things in our lives. We’ve said things that we regret, and we have especially said things through the phone that when taken out of context can make you look like a terrible person. I’ve had some of the worst moments of my life put on blast to the world. […] And if I’ve offended anyone in here, then I ask to be forgiven.”
More recently, at a March 26 candidate forum, Blevins explained that when he marched in Charlotte, his goal was simply to bring “attention to the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016,” and where’s the lie, really? Specifically, he said that included the border, immigration also, and “frankly, pushing back on this anti-white hatred that is so common in media and entertainment.”
Blevins certainly had his supporters, which is how he ended up with 40 percent of the vote. During the campaign, NBC News notes, Patterson ran a good-government campaign and avoided going negative, while Blevins went Full Scorched Earth MAGA, accusing Patterson of representing crazy fringe radicals and comparing himself to Saint Donald Himself,
besieged on all sides by a faction of far-left “perverts” and a deep state within the City Council that went all the way up to the mayor, whom he accused of working with the ESJC and orchestrating Patterson’s candidacy. He doubled down on claims that someone from the ESJC had tried to assassinate him by cutting one of his truck’s brake lines. (Enid police found no evidence to support his allegations.)
This time around, the Good Guys won, and that’s an encouraging development!
And now Judd Blevins can go back to being a roofer, at least until Trump returns in glory and wants Blevins for Secretary of Very Fine People, the end.
PREVIOUSLY!
[NBC News / CNN / RightWingWatch]
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