'Women got Trump and Hitler elected': Why the matrons of the alt-right cling to a movement that's 'hostile to their freedom'

A Harper's magazine feature profiled several of the women who are part of the white nationalist, antifeminist "alt-right," a movement that is striving for political legitimacy in the age of President Donald Trump.

"It was women that got Trump elected. And, I guess, to be really edgy, it was women that got Hitler elected,” said Lena Lokteff in Seyward Darby's exploration of the role of women in a subculture dominated by angry men.

"As the alt-right creeps out of the digital shadows and strives for civic legitimacy these social media savvy commentators perform amazing intellectual contortions as they justify participating in a movement that is hostile to their freedom," Harper's said.

At a gathering of right-wing, racist groups in Stockholm, Sweden after Trump's election, Lokteff urged women who follow her ideology to "Be loud. Our enemies have become so arrogant that they count on our silence.”

She continued, "When women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat.”

The alt-right sees its enemies as feminists, the amorphous forces of "political correctness," LGBTQ activists and anyone who questions the idea that white people are genetically and intellectually superior to all other races on the planet. Even as they decry labels like "neo-Nazi" and "racist," they advocate for "racial purity" and "peaceful ethnic cleansing" -- ideas most of the world left behind with the fall of Germany's Third Reich.

Lokteff and a raft of other right-wing extremist women are providing political cover for the viciously antifeminist alt-right movement. She was the only woman who spoke at the Stockholm conference.

She appeared alongside Andrew Anglin, editor of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Anglin frequently and fulsomely rails against white women who have mixed-race children.

“It’s OUR WOMB,” Anglin said, meaning white men. “It belongs to the males in her society.”

Lokteff and her husband operate Red Ice Media, an organization dedicated to promoting antifeminist women pundits who are "bitterly disappointed in the feminist agenda and believe that nationalism has their true interests at heart."

However, as Darby noted, the women embody an awkward kind of cognitive dissonance, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men who "think that female independence has undermined Western civilization."

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