Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.
Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.
Accusations against Blevins levelled by the group are not limited to his attendance in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi groups protested the removal of a Confederate monument in a demonstration that led to the murder of a counterprotester.
He also has been linked to chatroom posts planning the march, and posted hate group propaganda and recruited members to Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been disbanded.
In addition to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville rally was marked by a state police helicopter crash that killed two.
Blevins’ election to office came after a local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, ran a story about his ties to white nationalism.
“Our initial desire was for either Judd Blevins to address these questions and denounce any sense of neo-Nazism or white supremacy or for Enid’s leadership to step up and get those answers and demand those answers,” the committee’s James Neal said in a petition to remove Blevins.
He added: “Neither of those things have occurred, and we are left to take it to the voters, to the people, to address the issue.”
In his response, Blevins said: “Regrettably, this fringe group has chosen to continue a smear campaign against me.” He maintained that the effort to remove him would be an added cost to taxpayers.
He invoked the wishes of his predecessor, Jerry Allen, who had said: “Mr Blevins deserves the respect of the office, and I hope you give him the opportunity that I was given many years ago.”
Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain. Blevins added that voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.
In November, a resolution to censure Blevins for his failure to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists was brought before the city council. The measure was then dropped after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’ statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.
Blevins acknowledged in recent days that he participated in the Charlottesville rally, where white nationalists held a tiki torch-light parade across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us” and said he had been connected to Identity Evropa.
But he repeated that he is “opposed to all forms of racial hate and racial discrimination”.
He told a community forum that his involvement in the rally and ties to Identity Evropa were to bring “attention to the same issues” that won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.
Those included, he said, “securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on … anti-white hatred”.
When voters go to the polls on 2 April to decide whether Blevins should continue in office, they could opt to replace him with his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church, who is also a Republican.
One of the organizers of Blevins’ recall push, Democrat Nancy Presnall, told the Associated Press: “There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this. This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”
However the vote falls, some of the city’s 50,000 residents are concerned about lasting damage to Enid’s reputation. Some residents blamed a decline in newspaper readership and voter apathy, particularly in municipal elections, for allowing a small group of hard-core Blevins supporters to help him with the seat by a margin of 36 votes out of 808 cast.
Neal, who is pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox-Catholic church in Enid, agreed with that assessment, saying: “I think a lot of people in the community, myself included, thought that he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support that ideology are very passionate and very dedicated, and up until this point we haven’t been.”
The pastor added: “This has been galvanizing and helped us get off our asses, quite frankly, and fight back.”
