It Could Happen Here - The Enid, OK Recall Election

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Molly and Robert discuss the successful effort to remove Judd Blevins from the Enid, OK city council after his refusal to acknowledge his ties to a white supremacist group.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And when things fall apart, one of the things that happens is you get a bunch of,

a lot of opportunities for a lot of weird little guys, a lot of Nazis and other kinds of scums start, you know, sliding up to the surface in the hopes that they can get some of the sweet, sweet oxygen of collapse. And that's why we brought onto the program

and are bringing into the network our good friend, Molly Conger, for a little recurrent series I like to call, Look Who's Stalking. That was the stalking joke I wanted to open the episode with, Molly. For the attorney, I am not stalking anyone. I would never do that. That is a crime. This is reporting. It is reporting. And the line between reporting and stalking always clear. You know, I think it's on the publication. Yeah. So, Robert, today's topic is such a perfect mashup of so many of my favorite things. It couldn't be more my speed unless this whole

story took place on a wiener dog ranch, right? Yeah. This story has city council meetings that got rowdy. It has unite the right attendee getting docks. It has the internal comms of a hate group getting leaked. It has regular ass people putting their foot down about hate in their town. It is a year's long arc of one man's journey from fucking around to finding out his evolution from chanting, you will not replace us, to getting replaced at the ballot box. This is the story of Enid, Oklahoma, Ward 1 City Commissioner Judson Gannon Blevins. Oh my God. Oh, we're going back to my old home. That's right. You spent some time in Oklahoma as a kid. So Judd Blevins was raised in the town of

Enid, Oklahoma. And the listener, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is the story of a small town. And I'll be honest, I did. I'd never heard of Enid. But you grew up in the area. Do you have any sort of pre-existing notions of Garfield County? Yeah. I mean, Enid was like a bigger place. I grew up in Idabel, which was really out in the sticks. So, kind of everywhere was more civilization in Idabel, which was really out in the sticks. So kind of everywhere was more civilization than Idabel, but Enid certainly was. Although not much. No one would accuse it of much civilization. It is apparently the ninth largest city in Oklahoma, which is surprising to me. It's an hour and a half outside of Oklahoma City, 76% white, 60% Republican.

outside of Oklahoma City, 76% white, 60% Republican. And according to a 2021 article on Yahoo News that reads like it was written by an intoxicated chatbot, it is ranked one of the most conservative cities in the country. Yeah, that all scans for Enid. Now that scans for a lot of cities in Oklahoma, mind you. Right, they could have named any of them. Yeah. But it has a population of about 50,000, which is actually the same size as Charlottesville, my hometown, and a city that Judson Blevins happened to visit in the summer of 2017. In 2018, the former U.S. Marine

moved back to his hometown to work at his father's roofing business. In 2019, he was publicly identified as a regional leader in a white supremacist organization. And in 2022, he announced he was running for office. I mean, that all that's a very Oklahoma politician route. It's also like, and not a lot like from from roofing to white supremacy, not a wildly uncommon route for people to take in Oklahoma. Don't worry, he's still doing both. not a wildly uncommon route for people to take in Oklahoma. Oh, don't worry, he's still doing both.

Oh, good. I mean, you never want to give up on your passion for roofing. That would have made me sad. Although some of his supporters have pointed out that he hires lots of non-white people to do manual labor. So how could he be racist? Yeah, I mean, you don't want to get up on those roofs yourself. That's dangerous.

It's a hard job. It's hot out. Yeah. This is all pretty Oklahoma so far. On February 14th, 2023, Judd Blevins narrowly won a seat on the Eden City Council, defeating the incumbent by just 36 votes. His past ties to the now defunct white supremacist group Identity Europa were no secret. Of course, by 2023, Identity Europa didn't exist anymore. So I don't blame you if you don't have a clear memory of exactly what kind of Nazi group they were. And I want to make it very clear. I don't want time, distance,

and white polo shirts to soften this. Identity Europa was a neo-Nazi organization. Oh, yeah. They were also just like the most infiltrated group of the Trump era. Like of all the Nazi orgs in the Trump era, I feel like they were the one where every week someone else got inside their comms. Well, I guess Blevins may be part to blame for that as the regional coordinator. Oh, good. So he was doing a great job. But Identity Europa was modeled after the far-right French identitarian movement and sought the creation of a white ethnostate. The You Will Not Replace Us chants you remember from Unite the Right were actually popularized by Identity Europa at their rallies earlier that year. And according to testimony from a former girlfriend, one-time Identity Europa leader Elliot Klein considered himself, quote, an unironic exterminationist. He had violent fantasies about killing Jewish people himself.

So it's not just guys hanging out, right? No. people himself. So it's not just guys hanging out, right? No. Identity Europa was founded in 2016 by Nathan D'Amico, a former Marine who went to prison after drunkenly pulling a gun on a cab driver for quote, looking Iraqi. Well, I guess at least he's honest. But while he was doing his time he read david duke's autobiography oh and he had an awakening right he read my awakening and he had an awakening in prison yeah yeah yeah you know you go to prison for a hate crime you read a little david duke you get some ideas man it it's not a good book like that's my thing about thing about having David Duke's autobiography be like your life changing event is it's not a it's not even a good book, right? Which I guess neither

was Mein Kampf. But I feel like everyone's lying about that one. So according to some, this is so off the beaten path here. This is I have to say it. According to some payments that came out in a divorce proceeding. David Duke made payments to Kevin Strom for ghostwriting it. Kevin Strom is the pedophile who actually said that thing that people think Voltaire said about the Jews. Oh, cool. Yeah. Great. So just something to think about when you're reading David Duke's autobiography in prison, I guess.

So just something to think about when you're reading David Duke's autobiography in prison, I guess. I mean, I guess I had wondered what happens to pedophiles when they're back out in the world. Like, how do you get work as a pedophile? Oh, he has a much younger wife now. No, that was before. Yeah, no, he's got a kid now. Oh, what? No, he shouldn't do that. Yeah.

How is that? Okay, great. Not allowed to live near a school, but I guess they can't stop you from procreating. We should evaluate some of that. I don't know. Back to our friend Nate, right? So Nathan Domingo gets out of prison, makes his own hate group. You may also remember him as the guy who bravely beat the shit out of a 95 pound woman at the rally in Berkeley in April of 2017.

Oh, yeah. And they memed the hell out of that. They squeezed it for all it was worth. They used that image of him beating that woman in the street for promotion and recruitment. D'Amico himself touted a spike in membership applications, which he attributed to the popularity of the video. Identity Europa was heavily involved in the summer of hate, that rash of violent white supremacist rallies across the country in 2017.

They were instrumental in planning his Unite the Right rally. But when the group's Discord server was leaked in March of 2019 and published in full by Unicorn Riot, their leader at the time, Patrick Casey, quickly announced a rebrand. Identity Europa is no more. They were the American Identity Movement now, much to the displeasure of the American Indian Movement, whose acronym they stole. But the rebrand was not successful, and the group died out completely in 2020. And Casey tried to pretend the rebrand wasn't just an attempt to escape the fallout of the leak, but it really was the leak that killed Identity Europa. At least seven active duty military members were identified in the leak. A school resource officer at a high school in Virginia

was suspended. A Minnesota National Guardsman was recalled from basic training. So Judd Blevins was just one of dozens of members of the group to be identified in those chat logs. The work of anti-fascist researchers who identified Blevins in the leaked chats was corroborated and published in an article on Right-Wing Watch by Jared Holt within weeks. And it's about as solid as an ID as you could hope for from a chat log, or depending on your position, the kind of ID you really don't want. A user called Conway was Identity Europa's regional coordinator for Oklahoma. He recruited and vetted new members, organized outings for banner drops and social events, and frequently posted pictures of the white supremacist propaganda he'd been putting up, encouraging others to do the same and offering tips on how to create more effective visuals for the group's online accounts. In over 1,100 posts over a nearly

two-year period, he left a lot of clues. He posted a link to an article in his hometown paper, the Enid News and Eagle. He posted a photo of a relative's baby, details about his parents' lineage, his plans to move home to work for his father's business. And in the lead up to the Unite the Right rally, he excitedly shared in the discord that he would be carrying the original flag of the state of Oklahoma, a red rectangle with the number 46 inside of a white star. And photos from the rally show just one man carrying that distinctive flag that was designed by a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, carrying that distinctive flag that was designed by a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy? Judd Blevins. As he grew into his role as regional coordinator for Identity Europa,

he coordinated member meetups, getting several guys from Oklahoma to drive down to Texas for a get-together. Conway posted about the meetup, and photos posted by other attendees show Blevins standing shoulder to shoulder with other members holding a large Identity Europa banner. standing shoulder to shoulder with other members holding a large Identity Europa banner. Conway even posted about his appearance on a 2018 episode of Identity Europa's podcast, where he emphasized the importance of staying in the you-will-not-replace-us mindset. So by the time he announced his run for office in 2022, it had been over three years since he'd been outed as Conway, the hate group member who attended the Unite the Right rally. And you could see why he would think it would work, right? Because that you will not replace us thing, it's become like the mainstream Republican politics, right? Like this ideology

has at least one in the Republican Party, but it's also one divorced from these guys because even they are like they're too toxic for even the modern Republicans. Like it's remarkable, but I also get why he thought this would work. And I think, I mean, I don't know what his connection remained to other members of IE after it dissolved, but towards the end of it as it was dying, right? So under Elliot Klein, you know, Klein wanted to make a militia for Richard Spencer. He wanted to, you know, build IE into a fighting force. But under Patrick Casey, they sort of moved back towards we should be trying to influence inside of politics. We should be going to colleges and getting, you know, conservative students to become more based right so this

this is a rational course of conduct i think for where he was in 2019 when identity europa died but any case by 2022 anybody in enid you could read his posts praising hitler and celebrating identity europa for striking fear into the heart of the jew his words you know you could see pictures of him at unite the right both on the morning of the 12th in the heart of the Jew, his words. You could see pictures of him at Unite the Right, both on the morning of the 12th in the park and the evening of the 11th with a torch. You could see pictures of him going to Texas for IE meetups. You could see the dozens and dozens of photos he posted in the discord of Nazi posters and stickers he had put up on telephone poles and college bulletin boards across Oklahoma and the posts where he reveled in the media coverage of the recruitment materials he left inside library books.

His hometown newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle, ran an article about the allegations, which he never denied, a month before the election. And without ever having to give a straight answer on the issue, he won. And that could have been the end of the story, right? You know, we've seen this trend in the last few years of these radical right-wing elements trying to melt into the mainstream

Republican party. You know, got these horrible little groipers working in congressional staff positions and, you know, Nazis going to CPAC and not getting ejected. They're getting out of the streets and into the meeting rooms. Yeah. An account tied to Blevins that he recently, for the first time, denied this was him. It's him. This has been widely reported. It was a Twitter account called at abolished journalism posted in 2019, quote, I agree with the argument GOP cannot be changed from the bottom up. However, I do not believe in discouraging our guys from getting elected into smaller offices such as city council, county commissioner, or even state legislators.

Basically, positions where one can fly under the radar, yet still be effective. And that's what this is, right? This isn't a guy who got out of white nationalist organizing and in an unrelated fashion became a local politician. No, he said years before he did this, that this was a good idea that he had. You know, he never said, I renounce my previous actions and beliefs. I regret being an active recruiter for a hate group. He just changed the way he was doing it.

And he said countless opportunities to be clear about what he believes today and whether that's different from the beliefs he espoused between 2017 and 2019. And he won't. He won't say, I no longer identify with the posts I made when I was enthusiastically posting the 14 words. And that's probably because he just found a better way to do it. But there were people in Enid, Oklahoma, who saw right through that. Yeah, this is where the story takes a turn that like, saw right through that yeah this is where the story takes a turn that like i don't know it made me hopeful because the first time i ever met a klansman was you know in oklahoma it was the dad of a friend of mine like he he like this kid bragged about it and i didn't know what a klansman was and i had to go to my parents and like be like hey so you know so and so said this about

his dad what does that mean and my mom was just like well you're not allowed to go to his house anymore that's what that means jesus christ if if if this like if this guy had like if shit had gone well for him i guess that would have been my assumption but that's that was my assumption based on me not giving a fair shake to Enid, Oklahoma. Right. I think that's what's so remarkable about this story is people didn't think Oklahoma could do it. But you know who can accomplish everything they set out to do? Uh-huh. That's right. These sponsors, all of whom are available in Enid, Oklahoma. all of whom are available in Enid, Oklahoma. generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep

getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News

and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud,

but I'm like every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Okay. Alrighty, so... I'm happy

to hear the next part of this. Blevins took office in May of 2023. Local election law requires a six-month wait between being sworn in and when a recall attempt can be initiated. But the residents who opposed Blevins didn't wait quietly. A group called the Enid Social Justice Committee protested his swearing in, with some protesters holding posters bearing a photo of Blevins holding a torch at the August 11, 2017 Nazi march at the University of Virginia. And now this, I didn't even think about it until I was writing this, that what an incredible coincidence of timing, right? So May, 2023,

he's being sworn into office. It was just, I think maybe two weeks before he was sworn in that the first indictment was unsealed against the guys who are now facing felony charges for participating in that torch march, right? So we did an episode on this a little bit ago, but if you're not familiar, the guys who marched in that torch march at UVA in 2017, some of them are now being charged with a felony under Virginia law for burning an object with intent to intimidate. It's obviously a sort of a law aimed at the Klan, right? Sort of a cross burning type law, but they were burning, they had these burning objects and they were menacing people. It was racially motivated. So they're being charged with this felony for burning an object. Fair. It does feel like that's, yeah, a pretty good fit. But so right as he's being sworn in being sworn in, these people are protesting his swearing in with this photo of him with the torch. And a couple of guys just showed up in jail here in Charlottesville on that charge.

So it's just a remarkable cognitive dissonance, right, to see these people, some of his supporters and Enid downplaying the seriousness or even outright denying that Blevins attended this rally. But the guys he was standing next to that day are pleading guilty to felonies. You know, he's up there voting on resolutions and passing ordinances about stormwater management or whatever. I think one of his accomplishments in office was getting a Texas roadhouse in Enid. First off, you shouldn't be proud of having a Texas Roadhouse anywhere. As a, my job used to, sorry. It might have been a Sizzler, I can't remember, something like that. I would be much more excited for a Sizzler than a Texas fucking Roadhouse, I'll say that much. But you know, he's up there getting a, you know, affordable chain steak restaurant in Enid,

but there's a non-zero chance that he could be arrested at any time and extradited on a felony charge. I mean, look, if there's one thing that's appropriate for the sizzler, it's knowing that the guy who put that sizzler there could be arrested on a felony charge at any moment. You know, we don't know what the strategy is. The prosecutor's office, obviously, they're not going to charge everybody who is there, but it's on the table, right? Like he's on video at that march with the torch in his hand. He fits the criteria for the 10 other guys that have already gone to jail for this.

But in November of 2023, those six months had passed. Recall's on the table now. And before the group made the final push to actually file for the recall, they made an offer of reconciliation. All Blevins has to do is acknowledge the truth, denounce his past actions, just own up to it, start making amends, just say, yes, I did that. No, I don't do it anymore. And he can't do it throughout this entire ordeal. He's never owned up to it. There are pictures and video and his own words across multiple online accounts. There's no plausible deniability here. There's no saying, well, maybe that's not him. You know, it's him.

So just admit it and say you're not that guy anymore. But he has consistently refused to even acknowledge it, right? On several occasions, you know, when really pressed, he dismisses that 2019 article by Jared Holt as, quote, a hit piece posted four years ago by a George Soros-funded leftist outlet, calling it smears and slander. Nothing smears somebody like their own words and actions. I'm being defamed by this photograph of me. I'm being judged simply for the things I chose to do. I thought this was America. You know, but he won't actually deny specific facts. You know, he won't say that isn't me in the photo, or I did not participate in that, or I did not post those nice things about Hitler.

He just attacks the people saying it. And while Blevins has never denied the truth of the allegations, some of his supporters do. At one of those council meetings in November of last year, a woman speaking in support of Blevins said the allegations weren't credible as they came from organizations like the SPLC that, quote, only exist to smear conservative Christians. There we go. First of all, the SPLC didn't publish it. It was Right Wing Watch yeah huffington post but whatever susan and it was at that same meeting that the council declined to even vote on a resolution to censure blevins the council was putting forth a resolution to say we don't agree with what that guy did you know it wasn't like punishing him. It didn't actually strip him of any powers. It didn't do anything except say, um, the rest of us, we don't like that.

And they couldn't, they wouldn't even vote on it. It got tabled. And at that meeting, uh, commissioner Derwin Norwood, the only black member of Enid city council offered Blevins his forgiveness and gave him a big hug and told him he loved him. Great. Blevins never apologized, right? You can't forgive someone who hasn't apologized. He had never and still has never apologized. And he was pretty clear on where he stands on apologies,

saying, I am not going to apologize for the lies that others tell. Yeah, it was a great meeting. I watched it from home. I had, you know, I love a meeting. I love a meeting. Yeah, it was a great meeting. I watched it from home. I had, you know, I love a meeting. I love a meeting. Oh, yeah. No, that's, I mean, I don't understand it, but I respect it. So with their peace offering roundly rejected by an unapologetic Blevins, they moved forward to recall. The Enid Social Justice Committee gathered enough signatures to put it to a vote. And in January, Cheryl Patterson threw her hat into the ring to replace Blevins.

And to be clear, this is still Enid, Oklahoma, where 60% of voters are registered Republicans. This wasn't some liberal coup. Patterson is also a lifelong Republican. A candidate formed the week before the election. Patterson was quick to say, right off the bat, the second she opened her mouth, she said, contrary to the rumor, I was not recruited by the Enid Social Justice Committee. And she said, you know, she'd been thinking about running for a while. She loves Enid, but she was pushed to action by her opponent's inability to clearly denounce his past involvement with the white supremacist group. And it is right to see conservative republicans in the south saying

like that that nazi stuff is too much for me yeah i mean and that's like that's actually an important part of turning this shit back is getting these people who are otherwise conservative to draw a line and actually hold to it because it it at least arrests that rightward momentum to an extent and and we're just not going to get out of this unless we have some of that right i'm not i'm not living in a you know in a fantasy land where the city of enid oklahoma is represented by a council of six socialists like that's that's not on the table i accept that but at least their Republicans can say, the 14 words is like, not my vibe. Yeah, literally participating in a white

supremacist terrorist action is a line for us. And I'm glad there's a line. So, you know, she said she was inspired to run for office because he, not because of what he did, but because he couldn't even denounce it, right? That, you know, people can grow and change. I pray that his heart moves, but he's unable to even denounce it. And he really does seem incapable. The very first question at that forum the week before the election was about this, obviously, a lot of the questions were. And he gave another non-denial, right? He said, this election is about the next three years of this city, not about organizations that disbanded five years ago. But he went on to say that he would, quote, gladly plead guilty to speaking out against what is being done to this country and the anti-white hatred in the media.

So he tries to talk around the issue, saying, you know, he was just advocating for the same policies that got Donald Trump elected. But it's not like he was on the local Republican committee, right? He wasn't working on a GOP campaign. He was an organizer for a group that supported those policies of the Trump administration explicitly because they believe those policies were a stepping stone towards the full Nazification of american politics right you know the relationship between those two things troubling concerning but you can't pretend there's no difference between voting republican and holding a torch at the nazi parade and that's what he's trying to do here he's trying to blur that line so you know i'm i'm just being punished for being a proud conservative and And it's like, which part?

People who want free speech. And it's like, which word do you want to say? And at no point during this recall campaign, from when they announced it in November to the election two weeks ago now, at no point during this recall campaign did he publicly denounce any of the white supremacists who supported him. Outlets like VDARE, a white nationalist publication run by an English-born anti-immigration race scientist who lives in a castle in West Virginia, wrote fawning editorials which were promoted by prominent white nationalists, including Identity Europa founder Nathan D'Amigo. Fascist Telegram channels provided guidance to subscribers about Oklahoma's campaign finance laws, which would allow them to donate to Blevins' campaign anonymously, as long as they kept it under $50. According to reporting by Chris Mathias in Huffington Post,

a man in Texas who runs a business with a known Patriot Front member donated nearly $2,000 to the campaign, which made up the bulk of the donated cash. And you might give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, maybe he didn't know he was being endorsed by some of the largest elements in organized white supremacy in America. Sure. But he did. He did know. As a member of the city council, he definitely saw the letters that were addressed to the city council in support of Blevins from the American Freedom Party, an explicitly white supremacist political party that occasionally runs a Nazi for president. But he said nothing. And when a constituent, Father James Neal, asked him directly why his campaign was funded by members of Patriot Front, he told the priest to, quote,

shut up. Again, he chose the company of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, white nationalists, and ethnostate enthusiasts. How can you expect people to believe you're not that guy anymore when you have their public praise, their endorsement, and their money in your pocket? But you know who does not have $2,000 in cash from Patriot Front in their pockets? No, no, they keep that shit in a bag i mean they don't have it uh here's here's our sponsors hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires

from the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet

when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So on April 2nd, that's two weeks ago now as we're recording, the people of Enid returned to the polls and Judd Blevins was voted out of office as Ward 1 City Commissioner by a vote of 829 to 561.

And I don't know if you're a math guy. I'm not a math guy. I can't get a calculator out for this bad boy. But this turnout was significantly larger than the vote that put him into office. A 72% increase in total votes. That's a lot. That's a lot more people who showed up to an off-cycle special election. Yeah. Yeah, that's specifically weird. And unlike the slim margin of just 36 votes that won him the 2023 election, a slim margin of just 36 votes that won him the 2023 election, he lost the recall by nearly 20 points. That's a spanking. You know, it's hard to chalk a loss like that up to a lunatic fringe, right? That's the electorate speaking. But Matthew Giebert, a former State Department

employee who lost his job for failing to disclose his active involvement in white supremacist organizing, noted in his Telegram channel that while the loss is disappointing an open white nationalist winning 40 percent of the vote is quote nothing to despair over and you never got to hand it to the guy who hosts a podcast about the joys of nazi fatherhood or whatever yeah but the numbers are what they are you know he did win 40 percent of the vote yeah this was after months of very public debate in the national spotlight that made it impossible not to know what the allegations were and it's not like these were just diehard conservatives who would walk into the voting booth and put their check mark next to wherever the letter r was right this in

this election the other name on the ticket was a Republican too. Like these were people who walked in there and knowingly and intentionally cast their vote for a guy who used to vet new members for a Nazi club. This isn't a fairy tale. It's reality, right? This wasn't an offensive win by progress or the left or what have you. This was an effective defense. And I hope conservatives can see a little lesson here, right? Like the story is too often one of ever-ratcheting extremism. You can only win if you go further, if you go wilder, if you're appealing to the people who are on the absolute extreme end of what's acceptable to say in the party.

But this was a case where a fellow conservative said, hey, I want to take some books out of the library too. I'm not a liberal, but we just can't be out here saying the 14 words, right? And I think some of the buzz around this story comes from people in bigger cities or bluer states. I mean, honestly, I'm guilty of this as well, who were shocked that, you know, purple haired liberals and progressive clergy even exist in a place like Enid, Oklahoma. But this red state, blue state dichotomy is a myth. Most places are purple. Most places are 60-40. Even in places that reliably, 100% of the time, vote Republican, there's still a large minority of people who are not represented by that. So even in a place like Enid, which is Republican at the polls, you have a pretty big chunk of the population isn't represented on that

two colored map. That doesn't mean they don't care. And when I watched those Enid city council meetings, I saw Charlottesville, right? I've gone to every city council meeting in Charlottesville for the last seven years. Like I know what it it looks like for for people in a town that size to show up and say what the fuck what the fuck are you doing to us right yeah you know it looked like one of our meetings you know i saw regular people moms and students and grandmas and teachers and ladies who bring muffins to the church bake sale people who know that their town can do better than to be represented by a guy who won't apologize for attending the largest Nazi rally on U.S. soil in our lifetimes. Yeah, and I feel a lot for the folks who are kind of not represented by either of the two big lines on the political map. And maybe most of the time feel like, I don't know what the fuck I can actually do or should do, but I know this Nazi shouldn't be at office.

So these were just regular people. These weren't party apparatchiks or, you know, this wasn't the Democrat Party doing this. This wasn't the Republican Party doing this. These were just people who didn't think that a Nazi should be their city commissioner. And that's, I think, another myth at play here, right, is that activist is some sort of separate class of person, that there is some portion of the population whose only goal in life is this nebulous, nefarious thing called activism. You know, it's sort of

this boogeyman of the professional troublemaker. And throughout this process, Blevins and his supporters have smeared the group organizing the recall, the Enid Social Justice Committee, as some kind of fringe radical group. They're Antifa, they're freaks, they're not like us. They're coming for our children. His recall campaign website called the petitioners an unhinged group of left-wing fringe activists. And the campaign website didn't say what he could do for you. It attacked the petitioners and said, this is what they will do to you. And I've seen this in my own city council meetings, right? This sort of bizarre tendency of those in power to write off the people they don't want to hear from as activists. Well, those are people we need to listen to. Those are activists. That's a different kind of person.

Anyone who's asking for something they don't want to do, something that's uncomfortable, something that requires them to look inward or look at the structures they're upholding. They undergo this instant metamorphosis from constituent to activist. This is no longer a voter or a constituent. This is a crazy person. This person isn't your neighbor anymore. They're an activist. Yeah. I think, you know, there are people who wear that mantle proudly and why shouldn't they it's a usually positive thing but the use of the word as some sort of delegitimizing cudgel is so consistent that i think it's worth thinking about when it gets used against the recipient's will yeah and there's no ending to this story right because this is never really over it is happening here it

is happening there and i don't know what's next for blevins maybe he just melts quietly back into society and puts roofs on houses a week after the recall he filed paperwork to change the name of his dad's contracting business from invincible contracting to great plains roofing. The paperwork filed shows that the company is now registered. The company is now registered at his address, a house in Enid that he bought last summer with a VA loan. But now that he's free of the self-imposed restraint of running for office, maybe he leans into it and becomes this guy, right?

Maybe he's just the guy that this happens to, and he goes on the cancel culture grievance circuit. Maybe he goes full throttle and tries to get back into movement organizing. I think his failure to come out and really celebrate the movement and really own it and say, yes, I said that stuff and it's good. I think that failure, as they would perceive it, would hurt him a little bit if he tries to reenter the movement but not so badly that he couldn't do it you know they're so desperate for new material that they would probably embrace him if he wanted to be the figurehead of the month yeah hopefully he just does the roofing thing though yeah yeah hopefully he does the roofing thing and then the

falling off the roof thing and then you know he's not there doing the work himself he doesn't even have a contracting license i checked i hope he hires someone who is like a very large person and they fall off and are okay because they land on him that's that's i think where i'm going here and to be clear that's robert. Yeah, yeah. But that is also the official opinion of iHeartMedia. Yeah, I don't know that he's made any great pronouncements. He hasn't showed up on any Nazi podcasts yet. I will put $10 on a bet that says he will. He'll be on somebody's podcast by the end of the month.

I don't doubt it. But hopefully he just does roofing. Yeah. Stick to roofing. As for Enid, you know, they won a battle that they shouldn't have had to fight. It should be kind of a no brainer that we don't elect guys like this. That's becoming less certain every day. Like the fact that there was any question about how the recall might go is concerning. We shouldn't be in a position of wondering, will people vote for the guy who won't deny he loves Hitler? But I think we can applaud the tenacity of the folks in Enid who did what was necessary in a place where it wasn't easy. Yeah. You know, and there's lessons to be

learned here. Go to the meetings, get a seat in city council chambers, go to the library board meeting, go to the school board meeting. You don't have to be an activist, whatever that means, board meeting. You don't have to be an activist, whatever that means, but be in the room because nobody's going to change the world on their own. And maybe changing the world isn't even a meaningful objective. I don't know what that means. Yeah. But today, maybe there's something you can do with your neighbors to stop the rising tide in your town you can't change the weather but you can put down some sandbags and there are judd blevins is everywhere hiding behind mealy-mouthed rhetoric of conservatism and quietly chipping away at your local institutions yeah so it's doable fighting the judds blevin of uh i i chose a different a different way to pluralize his name, of your, wherever you live, your state, your city, like, is doable. And it's doable if you stick to this very simple platform of like, but not a Nazi, right? We can agree not a Nazi, you know?

you know? And if conservatives have any sense, they could retake a lot of ground by saying like, you know, we love all the stuff you love, fellow conservatives, but we're not that guy, right? If they had any pride, they would stop pandering to the lunatic fringe. Yeah. And it is just kind of looking at how congressional race is shaping up where it seemed like it should have been pretty easy for them to retake the house but you know now they're kind of like flailing a little bit in part because they keep backing these maniacs who just aren't good yeah i don't know I don't really believe that those ideas are popular. They just have fallen into this trap of thinking like, this is the only way to win, so I guess I have to do it.

But you don't. Sorry, the Senate, not the House. Anyway, whatever, we'll cut that. Who cares about those guys? Yeah. But you don't have to do it, right? Be the Cheryl Patterson you want to see in the world. Yeah.

And just be a milquetoast Republican and beat the Nazi. Yeah. At least, I don't know. I'm mixed because, like, I do like it when the Republicans fail over much. But I also feel like it's bad to take the bet of, like, well, if we hope for more Nazis that push people away from the republicans maybe it'll work for us in the long run statistically that that kind of game gamble is uh real dangerous that's not a crime i want to keep turning yeah but yeah that's enid that's enid baby good work enid congratulations to the enid social Justice Committee. Honestly, I'm very impressed.

You get our coveted Oklahoma City of the Month award, which is confusing because you are very near Oklahoma City, but they shouldn't have named it that. Well, that's all I got. That's all I got. Yeah, I was just trying to put a button on that bad boy, but... Yeah. That's Oklahoma, baby. Yeah, good for you. Good for Oklahoma. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Curious about queer sexuality,

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now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season you get your podcasts. with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia,

and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.