With the increased number of immigrants and refugees in the West, a revival of extreme right-wing movements has swept across the world.
Activists from this extreme right-wing, also known as the alt-right, recruit sympathizers by tugging at their fear of “the other” stealing jobs, raping women and destroying their culture.
Lana Lokteff’s anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric is a clear example of the ideology these movements are built on.
“They want you, straight white guy, destitute, suffering and dead. They want your daughters brainwashed to disown you and your sons groveling at the feet of anti-whites. You know who they is,” Lokteff said in one of her videos, alluding to Jews.
She and her Swedish husband, Henrik Palmgren, founded alt-right media outlet Red Ice TV, which contains talk shows, radio shows and interviews with various like-minded individuals. Their YouTube channel — which boasted 333,000 subscribers — was banned in October 2018.
In one of the talk show episodes, Lokteff interviewed white nationalist Greg Johnson, the editor-in-chief of publisher Counter-Currents, about his “strange new respect” for Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik.
Breivik is a far-right terrorist who committed the 2011 Norway attacks, killing 77 people, 69 of whom he shot dead at a summer camp. His attacks were cited as an inspiration by the Christchurch terrorist, fellow Preacher of Hate Brenton Tarrant, the murderer of British MP Jo Cox and a US coast guard officer accused of plotting a white nationalist attack.
Lokteff believes that diversity was forced into communities as an act of hate and that the US “can never, ever, ever be too white.”
She preaches in her video about what she thinks European and Western countries should be like instead.
“This concept of a white ethno-state simply means a country of European people whose immigration policy ensures that their ethnicity remains the majority. Yes, folks. European people are ethnic too. It’s not just a term to describe non-white spiciness,” Lokteff said in her video.
Although she comes from Russian descent, she believes she is a “true refugee” as her family fled the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, others are just fleeing poverty.
Jacobin magazine, a democratic socialist quarterly publication from New York, said Lokteff accused refugees in Europe of being responsible of the increased crime rates and described them as “lazy bums, packing the welfare offices, who flock in for the incentives.”
According to Jacobin, Lokteff described Muslim immigrants as invaders — using the same term used in French author and nationalist Jeap Respail’s novel “The Camp of the Saints” — and said that European countries must “remain for European people.” She also accused the immigrants of perpetrating violence against women.
“If the women who were raped got together and made their voices heard that they were raped by migrants, it could undo years of a massive cover-up in a matter of minutes,” Lokteff was quoted by Jacobin.
She was also quoted by numerous publications as a Holocaust denier with an anti-Semitic streak. Harper’s Magazine, a monthly general-interest publication in the US, said that Red Ice TV began to explore conspiracies about race and question the Holocaust in 2012. This is the same year in which Lokteff joined the team.
When Seyward Derby wrote “The Rise of the Valkyries” for Harper’s, she found an interview of Lokteff from 2016 describing Jews as “parasites.” In a follow-up email between the two, Lokteff clarified that she meant all the parasites who were taking advantage of US, including Israel.
The white extremist is not shy of her ideologies; she is proud. Lokteff advised her audience to embrace the title of being a “far-right extremist.”
In one of her videos, she said: “The next time a leftist or anyone else charges you for being a far-right extremist, laugh in their face and say, ‘thank you,’ because it means you are a healthy human being living in the real world. You don’t need to defend common sense, truth, and mother nature.”
