Utahns raise alarm about a #DezNat candidate and the troubling views of his campaign team

Is Gregory Smith’s bid for North Ogden City Council an example of the alt-right entering local politics?


Ogden resident Kate Matheson was about to take a social media pause recently when her husband discovered something that troubled them both.

Gregory Smith, a candidate running for City Council in neighboring North Ogden, had tweeted praise for his campaign team, and that team included people with ties to the #DezNat online group. One of them, Athen Jensen, had recently been outed by the account @ExposeDezNat for allegedly sharing antisemitic literature, participating in racist threads, wearing clothing with imagery from fascist Italy and publicly posting violent, homophobic and misogynistic tweets, often using the #DezNat hashtag.

(Jensen tweeted an apology of sorts soon afterward, saying his past comments were “jokes.”)

Matheson decided to use her Twitter following as communications director for the progressive lobbying group Alliance for a Better Utah to sound the alarm.

“I’m supposed to be on break and I’ll be going back on break in a sec,” Matheson tweeted, “but just flagging that a candidate for North Ogden city council has two folks on his campaign who have the alt-right white nationalist hashtag in their bios.”

Read more: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/07/24/utahns-raise-alarm-about/