Judson Blevins, a City Council member in Enid, Oklahoma, who was the subject of a HuffPost report about his ties to white supremacist groups, lost a recall election on Tuesday.
Blevins earned 561 votes, but his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, won 829 votes.
A small band of progressive activists launched the recall effort last year after Blevins repeatedly refused to deny or acknowledge significant evidence that he was a leader in the white supremacist group Identity Evropa. He’d also refused to answer questions about photos appearing to show him participating in the infamous 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
At an election debate last month with Patterson, Blevins finally acknowledged that he did, in fact, attend the “Unite the Right” rally, the largest gathering of white supremacists in a generation. At the rally, where marchers shouted racist and antisemitic slogans and engaged in violence, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring dozens of others.
Blevins told the assembled crowd that he participated in the rally because he “felt it was important to protest the removal of statues of American soldiers,” referring to a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which the city of Charlottesville had planned to topple. He did not, however, address why he joined the infamous tiki-torch march through the University of Virginia campus on the eve of the rally, when participants chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Nor would Blevins say whether he attended the rally as a member of Identity Evropa, a deeply racist and antisemitic group that has since disbanded.
In his closing statement at the election debate, Blevins said he was confident that he would survive the recall election.
“I firmly believe on April 2, voters are going to reaffirm that I am the best to represent them,” he said. “It is my hope, it is my prayer that when they do, that decision will finally be respected by all.”
After the election debate, Father James Neal, a local progressive activist, confronted Blevins, asking him whether he was now a member of Patriot Front, a secretive white supremacist group whose masked members are known for holding flash mob-style demonstrations in cities across America. Blevins refused over and over again to answer.
Neal’s question stemmed from HuffPost’s report, which found that Blevins’ campaign for City Council had received a nearly $2,000 donation from a Texas man with business ties to a member of Patriot Front.
Blevins was elected to the council by a slim margin in early 2023, even though four years earlier, the media outlet Right Wing Watch — building off evidence collected by anti-fascist researchers — had published an article identifying him as the pseudonymous “Conway” in leaked Identity Evropa chat messages.
The “Conway” account posted many racist and antisemitic messages and posted photos of Identity Evropa propaganda he claimed to have placed across Oklahoma, including on university campuses.