by Edward Ring
“Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great—so-called—told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened.”
–Amon Goeth, “Schindler’s List” (1994)
Invoking the Holocaust as analogous to cancel culture is a tasteless stretch. Or is it? We hear the analogy applied almost every day to climate skeptics, who are stigmatized as “deniers.” And when it comes to online censorship, Amon Goeth’s quote from Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece is too evocative to ignore. Because when someone is “canceled” online, they don’t just lose their ability to publish new material. Their entire body of work, their history, their audience, their past, present and future, is wiped out. Almost as if they never happened.
On October 18, 2019, the YouTube channel Red Ice TV was erased. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Red Ice TV is a white nationalist hate site, promoting racist views. At the time of “cancelation,” Red Ice TV had 334,000 subscribers and its videos had been viewed nearly 50 million times.
Today, Red Ice TV is just the latest YouTube channel that never happened. The online megaphone that can reach the world instantly and for pennies, can also in an instant delete you without a trace. If you click on the link to Red Ice TV’s YouTube channel, you get a generic screen with the message “This channel does not exist.”
But why doesn’t this channel exist? Why is it as though it never happened? Why has Lana Lokteff, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, been wiped out by YouTube, and every other major online platform?
YouTube Channels That Flourished, And Then Never Happened
YouTube has been playing a game of cat and mouse with channels they deem to produce “white nationalist” content. Earlier this fall, they deplatformed three similarly labeled channels, then admitted two back. “Replatformed” were The Iconoclast and Way of the World. Gone forever, along with 450,000 subscribers and nearly 75 million video views, was James Allsup.
Red Ice TV and James Allsup can now be found on BitChute. But who watches BitChute? Conservatives and nationalists—and, shall we say it, globalism skeptics—are dangerous when they spread their ideas on a video platform that everybody watches. That platform is, and only is, YouTube.
Standing up for the right of these vloggers to operate without being deplatformed by YouTube, which by any reasonable standard now constitutes a monopoly, is not an endorsement of the content these vloggers produce. But so what? Whether you are defending what they say, or just defending their right to say it, there’s no recourse.
The trouble is, government intervention would probably create more problems than it would solve. Conservative politicians want to regulate YouTube, possibly taking away its exemption from publisher’s liability, because it censors too much. Liberal politicians are also threatening to take away YouTube’s platform exemption, because it doesn’t censor enough. It’s hard to imagine government intervention ending well.
But the status quo isn’t turning out very well for free speech, either.
Vincent James, whose Red Elephants channel has nearly 300,000 subscribers despite being demonetized and algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, explained how leftist activists use “mass flagging campaigns” to take down conservative online platforms.
“What online activists do is post something on Reddit or a ‘discord server’ which is an encrypted online messaging app,” he said, “these mass flagging campaigns will originate from activists using these forums to say ‘all of you go and flag this channel.’” When the platform administrators receive a high volume of complaints, they suppress or erase the channel.
There is no similar sort of online attack mob operating on the Right to silence left-wing voices, and these grassroots online flash mobs have become highly effective at shutting down conservatives online. In the case of sites without large fan bases that can raise objections, the power of the mob to erase is near absolute, and nobody knows how many of these smaller sites are gone as a result. In Red Ice’s case, it didn’t matter that thousands of their fans objected.
Ultimately, if new federal regulations are problematic and online flagging warriors successfully attack channels even if they haven’t violated the First Amendment, YouTube’s managers would be responsible for doing the right thing. In this case, that would mean reinstating Red Ice TV, no matter how repugnant the channel may seem to them. As YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki very recently asserted, “it’s more important than ever that YouTube remains open to anyone.”
While nothing in this report, or the interview that follows, is intended in any way to endorse the views expressed by Red Ice TV, judgment of any kind is not the point. The question we should be asking is simply this: Does Red Ice TV have a First Amendment right to say what its proprietors are saying, and if so, does YouTube have an obligation to offer them a platform?
As Adam Candeub and Mark Epstein, writing for City Journal, put it, “Exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication – not curators of acceptable opinion.”
Maybe there is a general consensus that some of the content produced by Red Ice TV does not constitute “acceptable opinion.” But it should be obvious that supporting someone’s right to speak their mind does not mean you agree with everything he has to say. It should also be obvious that some of the things they have to say need to be said.
How Big Tech Smacks Down the “Right-Wing”
The online platform war began in earnest after the 2016 presidential election, when the liberal management of the social media giants—often egged on by their even more liberal workforces—realized that conservatives, inexplicably, had mastered the art of online political campaigning and did a better job of it than the liberals. Notwithstanding the incessant finger-pointing at the Russians, the smarter heads in Silicon Valley knew they were legitimately outplayed, and vowed never to let that happen again.
The stepped-up attacks on right-wing online content include subtle measures that are hard to detect, harder still to prove, but have huge impact.
Alex Jones and his website InfoWars offers an important example. In November 2016 InfoWars attracted 125 million views. This was the high-water mark for Jones. By July 2018, Jones was still attracting an impressive 25 million views a month, but that represented an 80 percent drop in just 20 months. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.”
Up until summer 2018, most of the steps taken against right-wing content creators took this relatively soft approach, using manipulated results in Google searches, throttling down appearances in news feeds and YouTube recommended videos, shadowbanning on Twitter, and deboosting on Facebook.
But with the 2018 midterm elections looming, the tech giants decided to take off the gloves.
For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, InfoWars was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6, Twitter followed suit. On September 8, Apple banned the InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.
According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid-October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing “political messages.” Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial for USA Today titled, “Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives.”
Other noteworthy casualties in late 2018 included Sargon of Akkad, whose YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Sargon, whose real name is Carl Benjamin, a 40-year-old British political commentator, eventually got his channel back. Yiannopoulos did not, although he has fitfully attempted to pick up the pieces with new online ventures.
The Strange Case of Milo Yiannopoulos
The Yiannopoulos case is telling, because nobody with a sense of humor would consider him to have ever engaged in “hate speech,” much less exceeding First Amendment free-speech protections and advocating violence. Yiannopoulous, denounced by his critics as a right-wing extremist, proudly describes himself as a gay man with Jewish heritage who is specifically attracted to black men. He was offensive, he was outrageous, but it would be hard to claim he was a hardcore homophobe, or anti-Semite, or racist.
For a few brief months in 2016 and early 2017, Milo was arguably the most famous troll in the world. To those who agreed with his politics, he was hilarious. For everyone who wanted Yiannopoulos to disappear, however, his cavalier comments on the subject of pedophilia, which came to light in February 2017, were the last straw. Even Yiannopoulos knew he’d gone too far, and issued a rare apology to no avail.
Whether Yiannopoulos was defending pedophilia, or, only slightly less revolting, was just making light of it, is not really the point. Because to those who found him disagreeable, his articulate, widely shared denunciations of political correctness were a threat, and that is the point. The other takeaway from the Yiannopoulos story is the preposterous double standard that his erasure exemplifies.
In a culture dominated by the Left, we now have “tolerant” parents across America taking their children to “Drag Queen Story Hour,” and flamboyant prepubescent transvestites are celebrated by the mainstream U.S. media. Are these practices, highly sexualized and arguably inappropriate (to put it mildly), which directly involve very young children, any less objectionable than Milo’s fatal transgressions which were made on forums that cater exclusively to adults? Apparently, it depends on who you ask.
Milo Yiannopoulos was making it cool to mock the Left, and his message was influencing tens of millions of people. But by the end of 2018, when Facebook and Patreon kicked him off their platforms, he had already been reduced to a rumor. And then he never happened.
The Intellectual Dark Web
About this time a new term was entering common usage: the “Intellectual Dark Web.” On the website “KnowYourMeme.com,” the Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW, is described as “a phrase coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein referring to a loosely defined group of intellectuals, academics, and political commentators who espouse controversial ideas and beliefs surrounding subjects related to free speech, identity politics and biology.”
This happened in mid-2017, shortly after Eric Weinstein’s brother, Bret, had been harassed for refusing to participate in the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen College in Washington state, where he was a professor. Organized by campus leftists, the “Day of Absence” sought to exclude white people from the campus for a day—apparently to further their efforts at achieving social justice. Stung that his brother’s unwillingness to be banned from the campus where he taught was considered “controversial,” Eric Weinstein identified the Intellectual Dark Web as an antidote.
In May 2018, the New York Times published an opinionated but detailed exposé of the Intellectual Dark Web. It remains one of the definitive mainstream descriptions of the IDW. Here are some of the topics and premises the article lists as typical fare for the IDW: “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.”
A more detailed description of how the tech giants have partnered with financial intermediaries and internet service providers, all the while taking direction from a powerful coalition of activist left-wing nonprofit pressure groups, can be found in an April 2019 American Greatness article “The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web.”
The Establishment Reactionaries
The 20th century produced two writers of uncommon vision who wrote books about the future that have become cautionary classics. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell imagined a hellish future of endless war, where the people are oppressed by a tyrannical regime that erases history, engages in constant surveillance, and punishes “thought crimes.”
Aldous Huxley imagined an equally dystopian future in his novel Brave New World, but where Orwell’s regime used brutality, Huxley’s tyrants used seduction. Huxley’s government of the future employed psychological manipulation, along with abundant drugs and sex, to pacify a population where people led lives devoid of true love or purpose. What both of these authors shared, however, was the belief that future regimes would rely on Pavlovian conditioning.
It would be fascinating to observe either of these literary giants taking a trip into our time (what would have been the actual future for them), to see just how right they were on that fundamental premise.
For a while, the internet was an unambiguously revolutionary phenomenon. Everyone could broadcast truth to the world. What social media has done more recently, however, threatens the internet revolution in two ways: The interactive, personal, instantaneous, and perpetual access to an infinite audience has disrupted the human psyche in ways we are only beginning to understand. And the Pavlovian control of this interaction by a small handful of social media platforms in Silicon Valley has given those companies almost indescribable power.
Virtually all Americans between the ages of 18 and 65 use social media. YouTube is used by 73 percent of U.S. adults, Facebook 69 percent, Instagram 37 percent, Pinterest 28 percent, LinkedIn 27 percent, Snapchat 24 percent, Twitter 22 percent, WhatsApp 20 percent, and Reddit 11 percent. It isn’t uncommon for Americans to use all of these platforms. Among smartphone users in the United States, the average time spent with their device is an astonishing three hours and 10 minutes per day. This is an addiction that has swept through the American population in barely a decade, and it has changed everything.
The ironic surprise in all this is how Silicon Valley’s tech companies have dealt with their incredible power. They have embraced a reactionary politics which is reflected in the choices they’ve made. Who they promote. Who they erase. What online behaviors they reward, and where they direct the herd. To understand why they have a reactionary political agenda, one must understand how the American Left, over the past 10-20 years, moved from opposing globalization to fully endorsing it. This shift, gradual but steady, came into the open with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Trump Catalyzed the Revolution Against Globalism
Donald Trump’s heresy was to focus on the negative impact globalism was having on Americans. He catalyzed a revolution by challenging what had become truisms for the establishment—trade deficits don’t matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, mass immigration helps more than it harms.
What the establishment had ignored was that the benefits of trade deficits are financial bubbles (as American asset prices are bid up by foreign investors) that only enrich wealthy speculators. Free trade isn’t free when other nations cheat. Mass immigration only benefits businesses who want cheaper labor. Meanwhile, homes become unaffordable debt traps, good manufacturing jobs migrate overseas, and immigrants take away jobs from America’s most vulnerable workers.
Trump clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Left’s only concern was how globalization affected the developing world, and exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations.
You can make a moral case that globalization should harm the workers of the developed nations more than it harms the workers of developing nations. You can turn that unavoidable truth into an altruistic virtue, although one that is rather hard to defend in the nations that are being harmed. You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the bidding—and attracts the generosity—of the wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by “free” trade and open borders.
America’s progressive Left did both. They’ve disguised the agenda that disenfranchises American citizens within their own nation by attacking “white privilege” and by accusing those who object of being “white nationalists.” They’ve come to accept the premises of the free-trade economists they’d once despised, with the caveat that climate activism and all that it entails—namely, the mass redistribution of wealth—will mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations which had once bothered them so much.
The Silicon Valley, which by 2019 had a tech workforce reaching an incredible 75 percent foreign-born, epitomizes a culture where leftist globalism is perceived not just as inevitable, but already here. Close behind, fully embracing globalism in all its ramifications, and scrambling to become as woke and worldly as the tech monopolies, are every other major corporation in America, every elite academic institution, every influential entertainer, every so-called mainstream media property.
These are the new empire. These are Big Brother. This is the Brave New World the online censors are protecting. Their path to power was smooth and relentless. And in the face of an alt-right, nationalist insurgency, they are the reactionaries, and Trump along with his supporters are the revolutionaries. Everyone in the world who questions globalism, whether they are right-of-center or left-of-center, are revolutionaries, with all the moral frissons and enticing glamour that being a revolutionary implies.
No wonder Milo Yiannopoulos was so dangerous. He demolished political correctness and revealed its tyrannical hidden agenda, all the while making people laugh. No wonder Alex Jones was a threat when, in between his riffs on human-pig hybrids, he was methodically exposing the supranational networks that are supplanting national governments. No wonder their flourishing electronic footprints were deleted. No wonder they never happened.
The Inconvenient Truths That Must Be Silenced
When considering what truths are inconvenient enough to silence, globalism versus nationalism is the context in nearly every case. An excellent example of this is the experience of Carey Wedler, who has, so far, hung onto her YouTube channel, but was recently banned from Facebook and Twitter.
Wedler is a left-leaning critic of the mainstream media and an outspoken opponent of America’s so-called endless wars. She infers that Facebook and Twitter are both working closely with the shadowy Atlantic Council and that the media and social media giants are engaging in “soft censorship” to remove content that isn’t illegal but the government doesn’t like. Facebook and Twitter never told Wedler why she was banned from their platforms.
Could it be that the active deplatforming and soft censorship being practiced by the social media monopolies, while correlated with their leftist bias, is more accurately described as focused on suppressing anti-globalist content?
If you examine the list of channels, compiled by the Red Elephants’ Vincent James, that are either banned, demonetized, or algorithmically suppressed by YouTube, there is a common thread, and it isn’t stereotypical right-wing content, or “hate speech.” The common thread, stretching from the acerbic James Allsup to the erudite Stefan Molyneux are ideas that question the globalist agenda (as opposed to globalization, which is an economic phenomenon). The narratives of globalism skeptics are dangerous to the reactionary empire. That is the threat.
But what if the majority of ordinary people don’t want open borders? What if they would like the facts, not a bunch of skewed BS, regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity,” and “social justice”? What if they sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?
What if the phony gravitas and one-sided outrage that pours forth from the overpaid thespians who masquerade as top-tier news journalists—think David Muir, Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and the like—is transparently false to anyone who views alternative media?
What if the uncanny unanimity of all these mainstream media sources, at the least, exposes a disturbing degree of consensus, if not actual conspiracy? What if fake news is indeed fake news? So fake, in fact, that it insults the intelligence of anyone paying close attention?
If the mainstream offline media spins the same controlled, agenda-driven stories year after year, and they do, it’s not hard to conclude that social media companies are trying to influence public opinion in much the same manner, in favor of a globalist progressive agenda. No national borders. Anti-racist racism. Anti-sexist sexism. Anything to combat “climate change.” Gender “fluidity.” Corporate socialism. And of course, that tasteless, ubiquitous stretch, “Trump is Hitler.”
The Difficult Conversations That Must Be Had
Which brings us back to Lana Lokteff and her cohorts at Red Ice TV. Are they racist? Are they anti-Semitic? Are they “white nationalists?”
Lokteff claims she is neither racist nor anti-Semitic, although she acknowledges that she is white, and that she is a nationalist. But she asks why those labels are allowed to be used to stigmatize anyone critical of groups claiming to represent a particular race or religion, or to stigmatize anyone critical of an individual who belongs to a particular race or religion. This is a fair question, but it doesn’t necessarily get to the heart of the matter.
To silence her critics, or at least to silence a few of the honest ones, Lokteff and others who are white and who are nationalist may want to strive to visualize an America where they win. What would the nation look like then?
It is reasonable—or it should be reasonable—to expect a nation to defend its culture, its language, and its borders, to care for its citizens, to respect its traditions. So how would people fit in who aren’t white, or who aren’t Christian? To accept someone as an American citizen, what constitutes an acceptable range of behaviors and beliefs? What are reasonable terms for inclusion in the American family?
This is one of the most important questions of our era: If globalism, pushed primarily by the Left, is poised to erase national and ethnic identities, then what sort of push back can preserve nations and ethnic groups in a way where the solution isn’t worse than the problem? What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? Can nationalism be inclusive without becoming meaningless? Can nationalism be compassionate, offering a better model for the evolution of “global civilization,” and still be authentic nationalism? Is there a version of economic nationalism that nonetheless nurtures global prosperity?
One thing ought to be certain: Denying people like Lana Lokteff the ability to voice her observations and opinions on YouTube is a dangerous mistake. Because the concerns voiced by the globalism skeptics are based on hard facts and sound logic, no matter whether they are expressed with grace or with fury. To silence them defers a much-needed debate about globalism and its consequences, at a time when current globalist policies are becoming increasingly unsustainable.
You can’t have mass immigration while at the same time expanding a welfare state. You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as environmentalist laws make it nearly impossible to build the enabling housing and infrastructure to accommodate them, and instead mandate rationing and a higher cost of living.
You can’t have mass immigration at the same time as the unionized public education system, dominated by leftist globalists, teaches immigrant children that they have arrived in a hostile, racist nation. You can’t fundamentally change the ethnic proportions in the nation within two generations, yet demand perfectly proportional representation of all ethnic groups in every facet of American life, from wealth and income to geographic distribution to hiring, promoting, college admissions and contract awards.
All of these things are socially and economically unsustainable; all of them weaken America. To enforce them requires the soft tyranny of Pavlovian conditioning, backed up by a ruthless and pervasive police state. Small wonder that dissident glitches in the online matrix become merely rumors, caricatures, channels that don’t exist; channels that never happened.
In the lengthy interview to follow, Red Ice TV’s co-host and co-founder, Lana Lokteff, expresses opinions that in everyday public discourse are repressed. For most people, the opinions Lokteff expresses generate a conditioned response and are dismissed without further consideration. In reality, the issues she’s confronting are extraordinarily complex and carry epic consequences. By suppressing discussion about them, and by demonizing people who bring them up, these issues, and the policies that have created them, remain unresolved.
After speaking with Lokteff, two things relating to internet censorship seem especially noteworthy:
First, whenever monopoly platforms like YouTube decide to wipe out one of their channels, they ought to be required to publicly disclose specific examples of what that channel did to get itself wiped out. Is YouTube afraid that such disclosures would reveal and expose its bias?
Second, if online censorship moves beyond just enforcing explicit violations of the First Amendment, and it has, then, as Lokteff pointed out, we risk “creating desperate people doing radical things to be heard.”
Here, then, is the story of Red Ice TV, in Lana Lokteff’s own words. Readers are invited to identify, if they can—and since YouTube would not—exactly where she engages in “hate speech” that is too dangerous to be permitted in public discourse. And if all her opinions are not opinions we would share, do we really want to drive these opinions underground? Was the First Amendment only designed to protect the speech with which we agree?
***
American Greatness: Red Ice TV has been banned from YouTube. What happened? What outside groups may have pressured YouTube and what are their tactics?
Lana Lokteff: We had no “strikes,” we were in good standing with YouTube. Then one morning we woke up and our channel was gone. The outside groups that pushed YouTube to ban us include the corrupt and Communist Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters, the Anti-Defamation League, along with Antifa outlets such as The Daily Beast and the Huffington Post. Their tactics are to lie, defame, and snip together partial quotes out of context to justify why you should be banned and then get you banned on the platforms you’d use to defend yourself. Their friends at Google also rig the search results so when you search for us, you only find the lying defamatory sources. That’s one of the reasons it’s aggravating when conservatives, who know that the media lies, nonetheless rely on the media to look for information on us. None of this ever applies to the other side.
AG: Did you anticipate this, and were there any warnings or last-minute indications that this was going to happen?
Lokteff: We were expecting it. Many of our top videos (we had several videos with a million views or more) were deleted. We even had a video featuring the Dali Lama’s comments about refugees ultimately having to go back home to rebuild, which YouTube deleted. Anyone on our side of politics is going to eventually be banned and have to go elsewhere. They have deleted a few channels, then brought them back after there was an outcry from their supporters, sometimes even months later. People made a ruckus for us too, but we haven’t received any response from YouTube. In general, YouTube appears to have more leniency for people who are extra careful to censor themselves and who knowingly tone it down, or are vague in their vocabulary. Well, I thought we were doing that lately too. Some of their reinstatements may be so they can create the illusion of tolerance and it’s also possible that their programmed AI systems are flagging channels and holding them for review.
AG: How many subscribers did you have? What recourse is there?
Lokteff: We had 334,000 subscribers despite having the algorithms rigged against us. There’s not a lot you can do if you’re up against YouTube and their parent company Google. They are a beast of a company with way too much power and they receive government subsidies too. It would take a class-action lawsuit or government stepping in to change their treatment of us.
AG: Leading up to this, what other steps had YouTube taken? When and how were you demonetized? When did algorithmic suppression begin and how much did your views fall?
Lokteff: We started producing video content in 2016, so all of this happened in a matter of a few years. Prior to that, we were doing mostly podcasts. We never monetized the channel as we didn’t want our viewers to see commercials, nor did we want to become dependent. The trouble really started after Trump’s election. YouTube realized that the most popular political channels were on the right (because you can get the leftist narrative everywhere else). So they started fiddling with our ratings, search results, notifications and we stopped coming up in recommended videos. They have stated that they are trying to “disrupt people from going down the rabbit hole.” To some extent, this has backfired on them, because when they try to “deradicalize” viewers by recommending videos such as one by a transgendered liberal with pink hair pushing an SJW message, people only feel more extreme against the Left. They are helping to create their own worst enemy.
AG: What other platforms have you been banned from?
Lokteff: It’s an unbelievable list and this includes not only Red Ice but my small online clothing store and in some cases us personally. YouTube, PayPal, Braintree, Venmo, Zelle, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Wells Fargo, Coinbase (yes, the supposed anti-establishment crypto wallet), Skrill, even Pinterest and iHeartRadio. There are others, too.
When Wells Fargo banned all of our accounts, they sent letters saying we will not do business with you anymore. People in their service department said they had never seen this before, that the directive came from high up and the reason was “sealed,” meaning only higher levels of management could find out what happened. The SPLC, ADL, and other leftist activist groups are tied in with bankers, have connections and put pressure on all of them to ban us.
AG: Did YouTube state what specifically led to your deplatforming? What exact content crossed their line?
Lokteff: Despite days of fans hammering them with messages demanding a response as to why were banned, they did not respond. Meanwhile, they respond on Twitter to other tiny accounts asking petty questions. If you go to the channel now a banner might still show that says something about this channel is gone for multiple and excess hate speech. But of course, they never prove that nor were there any strikes that we could appeal. It’s not hate speech but speech they don’t like.
AG: Do you believe you have ever engaged in hate speech or advocated violence?
Lokteff: No. We have never advocated violence or specifically targeted anyone with violence. If anyone says we engage in hate speech they cannot prove it. For example, there are never any examples of so-called hate speech in the negative articles about us.
However, there are countless channels openly saying they hate white people or hate Trump and that is never hate speech. Hate speech is a lie used by leftists to silence their opposition.
AG: Are you a white supremacist?
Lokteff: I did a funny video about this titled “Am I A White Supremacist?” to respond to this which you can find onBitChute and RedIce.tv. The definition of a white supremacist keeps changing. Now it seems to mean a white person who doesn’t hate themselves for being white. It also seems to mean that if you say something like “I want European nations to remain European” that is also somehow a supremacist view. If you’re asking if I want to lord over nonwhites with a stick, of course not.
No other race gets attacked for loving their people and not wanting them to become a minority in their own nation. No other people would accept this. In fact, non-Europeans write and support our cause often and think white people have lost their minds advocating for suicidal immigration policies. It was called genocide in Tibet, Palestine, and now Kashmir.
We frequently hear from other nationalists around the world who aren’t white. They write and ask why are you doing this to yourselves? When it happened in Tibet it was called genocide. The Dalai Lama knows exactly what it feels like and that is why he defends Europeans and their right to not become a minority.
I have yet to meet an actual white supremacist, that is, someone who thinks they are better than all the other races and wants to oppress them. I don’t know where those people are.
AG: Are you a white nationalist?
Lokteff: I am a European, white, and a nationalist. I want European people to remain a majority in the countries their ancestors built and an immigration policy to protect the nation’s founding demographics. Demographics are destiny. I don’t care what people want to call me.
But no one ever charges blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, or any other people for being a black nationalist, Jewish nationalist, Asian nationalist, and so on.
In Europe they call themselves Swedish Nationalists, German Nationalists and so on because they aren’t a generic white, they are a specific ethnicity with their own culture and language and history. They do not like the term “white nationalist.” A European nationalist is one who wants their country to remain the country of their people, an ethnically homogeneous nation, the way it always has been. To carry on their tradition, heritage, and culture.
Most European nationalists are fine with a small percentage of nonwhite immigration but not to where it upsets the core demographics of the nation. America’s founders would not have accepted this. All of this demographic transformation is new. We rapidly began changing with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which was pushed on Americans without their consent. And by the way, the founders of America were also white and nationalists. They didn’t need to call themselves white nationalists because it was self-evident. Or how about the Naturalization Act of 1790 which stated “free white person[s] . . . of good character”? They founded the country with European people in mind. The thought of one day becoming a minority was unthinkable.
AG: Are you a white separatist?
Lokteff: We’ve been so programmed to hear this loaded phrase which is never applied to any other people on the face of the Earth even when they are violent racial separatists like Africans in South Africa.
People seem to think that just because one wants a homogeneous nation for white people that it means they don’t have friends of other races or can’t travel or have them come visit or trade. That’s a strawman absurd argument. This is never thrown at any other people but whites.
A homogeneous nation doesn’t mean you are cut off from the rest of the world, it just means you don’t support mass migrations of people to other countries displacing the natives.
If you don’t support mass migrations of people as a white person, you get called a separatist. Nobody is calling the Chinese or the Saudis separatists. We have always been separate nations but found ways to get along.
What needs to happen is a halt to immigration in the West. Legal immigration is an even bigger threat than illegal in terms of numbers. Countless studies like Robert Putnam’s have revealed that multiculturalism creates less trust and social cohesion. As if we need a study to tell us that. Mass immigration is dividing us as a people. We were once united. The problems we face with various groups fighting for their own is new, and a product of globalism.
AG: You once interviewed Jesse Lee Peterson. How would you describe that experience?
Lokteff: Jesse is great. We all love him. Sure we may have some points of disagreement but he, too, does not want European Americans to become a minority as he fears it would turn us into South Africa. His best interests coincide with whites being the majority. If all were like him, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.
AG: In the Peterson interview, he said to you that “if you had an all-white nation, you would just start fighting each other.” How do you respond to that?
Lokteff: The most homogeneous white and some Asian countries always top the list of the safest and most peaceful nations in the world. I never said it would be perfect but it would be much better than what it is now. White people will always have their differences but it’s the devil we know. Now we get to fight each other and millions of foreigners in our country who also fight each other.
Now we have skyrocketing violence, a rape epidemic, and divisions like we’ve never seen before. Jesse also agreed that America was a better place before mass immigration. He also said he too didn’t want whites to become a minority as it wouldn’t serve his best interests either. He brought up Detroit and South Africa as examples of what would happen if white people were out of the picture.
AG: Do you believe it is possible for a multiethnic nation to preserve its European culture?
Lokteff: No, people are tribal, especially incoming foreigners who are ruthlessly ethnocentric pushing their interests, culture, and religion. The mass majority of them align along ethnic and racial lines. It’s just the way it is and no free markets and liberal programming is going to change that.
White people are the most tolerant and the least ethnocentric. It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. It’s why our statues are being torn down, traditions and holidays attacked, and ancestors who built the country being constantly denounced. It’s why white kids are learning about white privilege, white guilt, and being taught to hate themselves. It is child abuse and it is the worst racism we are witnessing today.
AG: There are millions of nonwhites who embrace America’s European culture and consider themselves fully American, sharing traditional values. What about them?
Lokteff: What about them? No one’s saying they have to be deported. If they love what made this country what it is . . . European culture, then they should be louder in our defense because that which they love is being torn down and it won’t be the same country anymore.
AG: How do you define globalism?
Lokteff: The total destruction of homogeneous nations, cultures, languages, people and the implementation of a global rootless, materialistic and degenerate culture that makes people dumbed down and easy to control. It means total control by a small group of elites. It also means the death of true diversity. These elites favor a people that is one race, one culture, one language and one system. It is anti-diversity. It is the destruction of everything beautiful that nature and the Gods made.
AG: Are you anti-Semitic?
Lokteff: I wish white people had a word to shield their group from any and all criticism.
No, criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish or powerful elites and interest groups with massive power and influence does not mean you hate that entire group. We criticize anyone trying to infringe on our rights and freedoms, no matter their race or religion. We’ve also been critical of Islam and of course other white people. No groups should be off-limits from criticism but if they are, it tells you the power they truly hold.
Awhile back, Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni said of the term anti-Semitic, “it’s a trick, we always use it.” Meaning Jews who don’t want to be judged for whatever they may be doing or saying, use it as a weapon to silence opposition. And it’s still being used for that purpose. Truth fears no open discussion and investigation.
There are a few individual Jews including rabbis who are critical of mass immigration into Europe but most do not speak up in our defense when Europeans are constantly defending Israel. I’ve heard Jews say they feel safer in multicultural societies because of their history of expulsion from Gentile societies in the past. They feel less likely to be singled out or noticed in a multicultural society. They are also very against nationalism in white countries because they think it is going to lead to a holocaust, meanwhile, they have the ethnostate of Israel.
AG: How do you respond to accusations that you are racist and anti-Semitic?
Lokteff: Does anyone really care about being called a racist anymore? It’s not racist to love your own people, not racist to want your culture, heritage, and language to be preserved. It’s definitely not racist to say “it’s OK to be white” and not feel guilty and not want your children to grow up and be a hated minority, thanks to cultural Marxist agitators.
And it’s not anti-Semitic, not judging or hating an entire group of people, to criticize or question elites who hold a lot of power and influence. I’m sure they see it that way, but then they call me a racist for pointing out things that are anti-white and defamatory to white people. Jews have thousands of organizations dedicated to only their interests. White people do not.
I never thought about race until everyone started blaming and hating white people for everything. If people are kind to me, I am kind to them.
AG: Can you imagine a future where America does assimilate its new arrivals and becomes a cohesive multiethnic but unicultural nation? How would that happen?
Lokteff: Not going to happen. Even in a country like Brazil that had years of migration from various places (without constant anti-white indoctrination), they have all sorts of problems including one of the highest murder rates on Earth.
Throughout history, whether Rome, Egypt, or any place today where we see multiculturalism even in places like India and Kashmir, China and Tibet . . . multiracial, multiethnic societies do not work and they do not last. People are different and we should just accept that. It’s just the way nature made us. In order to maintain true diversity, it requires some separation and division. That doesn’t mean we go to war, it means we respect each other’s differences and spaces. European nations learned to make peace with each other and we were prospering before we opened the door to globalism.
Yes, America was a melting pot but a European one and we had shared European values and cultural understanding, and even then we had some issues.
In America, white people are the glue that holds the current form of multiculturalism together, although countless studies show how multicultural societies create less trust, less social cohesion. But with us out of the picture, various groups will begin to fight each other for power. You can’t replace the people of a nation with Third World foreign peoples and think it’s going to be the same country. If it’s so great, why isn’t any other country pushing this ideology?
In order for something like what you’re suggesting to work (I still think it’s a utopian fantasy), every group must sacrifice everything; their heritage, their history, their language, anything that roots them to their people . . . and surrender to a new rootless religion of globalism but even then, there will still be divisions. Elites pushing globalism don’t want diversity, they’re just using it to destroy it (mainly in white countries). They ultimately want everyone to be the same. They want a mixed-race man of the future where all true unique differences are erased forever. A man with no connection to his ancestors, and his past, is easy to manipulate.
I think it is probably too late for America. The damage has been done and we’re in for hard times but if all leftist agitation disappeared, if immigration stopped, if forced diversification stopped, you would see freedom of association and you would see people self-segregating into their own pockets around the country. People are tribal and they will ultimately choose to live with others like them. Sure, there will be a few hipster multicultural pockets in the cities but that wouldn’t be the norm if people had a choice.
AG: What do you consider to be taboo topics online?
Lokteff: Being a nationalist, loving white people, saying that white people are being demographically replaced, that white people should have nations that are their own, anything questioning the so-called official view of historical events such as 9/11, any conspiracy theories, anything critical of Jewish elites, and also anything fun and edgy making fun of libs or “shitlibs” as the kids call them. YouTube is even going after alternative health channels and those questioning vaccines and Big Pharma.
AG: Where would you draw the line on free speech? Anywhere?
Lokteff: No, I wouldn’t. I think the best course of action is to talk about everything out in the open, more talking. If an idea is harmful or just awful, best to talk about why that is and air everything out from every angle. The best argument wins. The truth should not fear any inquisition. If we do not, that is what creates desperate people doing radical things to be heard.
I also think we just need to uphold U.S. law and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
– – –
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a co-founder of the California Policy Center, a free-market think tank based in Southern California, where he served as their first president. He is a prolific writer on the topics of political reform and sustainable economic development. Ring, a fifth-generation Californian, has an undergraduate degree in political science from UC Davis, and an MBA in finance from the University of Southern California.
Photo “Lana Lotkeff” by Red Ice. Background Photo “Red Ice TV” by Red Ice.
