THE WOMEN DRIVING WHITE SUPREMACY
The Charlottesville protests highlighted that the alt-right is not just a male disgrace, says US investigative writer Seyward Darby
ACOLYTES OF America’s most extreme right-wing ideologies descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend to protest – the following phrase never ceases to sound ludicrous – the oppression of white people. There were Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members, neo-nazis, and armed militiamen. Many attendees were followers of the alt-right, the burgeoning white nationalist movement best known for trolling and spewing vitriol during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which it supported. In Virginia, protesters carried tiki torches but no apparent shred of decency. One of them killed a woman, Heather Heyer, 32, when he plowed his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators resisting America’s latest display of hate. The President, meanwhile, failed twice to publicly condemn the far right, causing further outrage in America.
Almost all the protesters were men. Based on optics alone, it would be easy to chalk up Charlottesville, and maybe the entire alt-right phenomenon, to white male rage. But looks are deceiving. ‘White women, don’t think the Charlottesville photos let you off the hook for even a second,’ cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux tweeted. ‘A lot of those men went home to cuddles and pie.’
That is indeed part of the story. Kathleen Blee, an expert in right-wing extremism, says much about racist groups appears disturbingly ordinary, especially their air of community, family and social ties. The alt-right is no exception. Its dogma holds that women should
perpetuate white bloodlines – have babies and indoctrinate them with racist, anti-semitic, and anti-feminist views – while men fight to protect them. Many alt-right women wear the label ‘tradwife’, short for ‘traditional wife’, with pride.
Take perky mother-of-six Ayla Stewart, known as Wife With A Purpose to her 32,000plus Twitter followers. She was scheduled to speak in Charlottesville but, given the chaos that ensued, never did. When I interviewed her earlier this year, Stewart said, ‘The alt-right is about sovereignty.’ She said she was vehemently opposed to immigration and blamed the refugee crisis on feminists who have made countries liberal and weak. Stewart praised ‘timid’ women and said men should lead the right-wing revolution. In a blog post after Charlottesville, she wrote that ‘Having a cheery attitude and a listening ear can be invaluable toward helping our men keep up their spirits in difficult times. More positivity, less babbling on, and more listening to our men.’
Other alt-right women focus less on submissive, domestic life. There is Lana Lokteff, an American who runs a media company called Red Ice alongside her husband. Lokteff hosts weekly radio shows, speaks at events and has been praised by former KKK imperial wizard David Duke. She uses her public profile to flatter and recruit women. It was women who got Trump elected,’ she said at an alt-right conference in February, acknowledging the 53% of white female voters who cast ballots for the current President. ‘And I guess, to be really edgy,’ she continued, ‘it was women who got Hitler elected.’ When I asked Lokteff how she pitches white nationalism to women, she replied, ‘There’s a joke in the alt-right: How do you red-pill someone?’ (To red-pill, a reference to The Matrix, is to convert someone to the cause.) The punchline: ‘Have them live in a diverse neighborhood for a while.’
Two other women who deploy racist humour go by the pseudonyms Wolfie James and Cecilia Davenport. They briefly wrote an online advice column that instructed readers, ‘Ask your mom for cooking advice. Ask us about ovens’ – a reference to Holocaust crematoria. They have encouraged women to join the alt-right because, they claim, its men are sexy rebels (‘the masculinity they exude is positively intoxicating’). After Charlottesville, James tweeted that the man who killed Heather Heyer could not possibly be alt-right because his mother is Jewish.
There are others, Tara Mccarthy, who is British, recently founded the popular alt-right podcast Virtue of the West with an American named Brittany Pettibone. Together, they have more than 110,000 Twitter followers. Melissa Mészáros is a Hungarian disciple who tweets under the handle Kittensinurface and is one of the managing editors of Altright.com. All of them seem to recognise that drawing more women into their white nationalist fringe faction is important, if only because there is strength in numbers. ‘When women get involved,’ Lokteff said at the February conference, ‘a movement becomes a serious threat.’
They may not have been carrying tiki torches enmasse, but the women of the alt-right were in Charlottesville, in spirit if nothing else. To downplay their influence is to give it space to grow to even more frightening, consequential proportions.