A fascinating but lengthy piece on nbcnews.com yesterday about how white nationalists and other once fringe actors from the infamous 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA are now trying to worm their way into more mainstream political power by running for local offices such as city council or school board members.
This story concerns one Judd Blevins, an Iraq war veteran who moved back to his hometown of Enid, OK to take over his father’s roofing business, and decided to run for a position on the city council as a ‘man of God’ and defender of ‘traditional values’ last year. It also details how two Democratic activists (definitely an endangered political species in ruby-red Enid), Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall, did some sleuthing and managed to unmask Blevins as an active participant in the Charlottesville action.
Unfortunately, merely unmasking Blevins as a white nationalist wasn’t quite enough to defeat him in last year’s election, when he eked out a win by just 36 votes against the mainstream Republican incumbent (out of 808 votes in total, less than 15% of the 5,600 voters registered in that Ward) — but it did lead to the formation of the Enid Social Justice Committee (ESJC) whose first order of business was to try and get Blevins recalled at the earliest opportunity.
At his swearing in ceremony dozens of ESJC members held up signs that read, “What happened in Charlottesville, Judd?” while throwing back their own version of the notorious Charlottesville chant, “Judd, we will replace you!” Despite their protests, the ESJC agreed that they would forgo an actual recall attempt if Blevins would simply acknowledge his past actions and associations as a white nationalist, renounce them and apologize. Blevins of course refused to do any such thing since he “didn’t have anything to apologize for.” Among many other things, Blevins was the Oklahoma state coordinator for the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.
Meanwhile the newly elected Mayor of Enid, David Mason (a pro-business Republican), was desperately trying to keep the controversy surrounding Blevins from interfering with his plans to raise Enid’s civic profile and attract more growth. And this is where it really starts to get weird:
In a private meeting in November with Blevins, the city manager and the city attorney, Mason asked: “Was that you in Charlottesville? Is that you in those photographs? Did you write all those hateful text messages?”
“Yes,” Blevins said, according to Mason and the city attorney.
“Are you still involved with those groups?” Mason asked.
“I don’t have to answer that question,” Blevins replied.
“My thought,” Mason remembers, was, “You just did.”
Mason couldn’t remove Blevins, but he wanted to do something, so he wrote a measure for the next meeting’s agenda: a censure that would announce the loss of confidence in Blevins and formally repudiate white nationalism.
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The chamber was packed with members of the ESJC and Blevins supporters for the Nov. 21 meeting where the motion to censure Blevins would be decided. Mason, the mayor, was sure he had the votes.
And then Derwin Norwood spoke. Norwood, the owner of a concrete business, a registered Republican and the council’s only Black member, took the floor for eight minutes. In a fiery speech that sounded at times like a sermon, Norwood told of his own experiences with racism and quoted scripture.
“We need to stop this foolishness, stop fighting, stop bickering,” Norwood said.
And then, although Blevins hadn’t directly asked for his forgiveness, Norwood was moved by the Holy Spirit to offer it. He remembers it like an out-of-body experience.
“Stand up,” Norwood told Blevins. “Do you love me?”
“Yes I do, as a brother in Christ,” Blevins replied.
“l forgive you,” Norwood said, and the men embraced to applause and groans.
With that, the votes were gone. The council voted unanimously to table the matter until after the recall election.
No one — not the mayor or Blevins or the ESJC or Norwood himself — had expected the display, photos of which led news coverage and white nationalist websites alike. Norwood knows his voice carries extra weight when the topic is racism, and he knows that his forgiveness, and that hug, might have given cover to Blevins, but he didn’t see any other way.
Nevertheless, the ESJC went on to collect more than enough signatures to force a recall election, but they still needed a candidate to fill Blevins’ seat, and running one of their own in a ward that tfg carried with 80% of the vote seemed the very definition of delusional — so they managed to recruit a longtime conservative Republican, Cheryl Patterson, to be their unofficial stand-in to replace Blevins. Echoing Warren G Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan, Patterson calls for ‘civility’ and a return to ‘normalcy’ while refusing to say anything negative about Blevins.
Signs for both Patterson and Blevins dot the lawns of Ward 1. Most people don’t show up to City Council meetings and haven’t been following the Blevins saga. There’s no polling in Enid, but in talking to people, those who plan to vote next month are split on who should win.
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But they’re all holding their breath. Mayor Mason is, too.
“Hate has no place in Enid,” Mason said. “And if he were to win again, I think there will be another recall. I think it will continue until someone will beat him. We’re just not going to — that’s not us. That is not who the people of Enid are.”
Let’s hope not, the election is April 2 — and if considerably more than 808 voters will decide the issues are important enough this time to actually get out and vote, maybe we can put Enid on the map in a good way this time!