A number of prominent women in the racist alt-right movement have rallied to defend a Florida middle school teacher who was suspended after reports revealed she hosted a white nationalist podcast and had bragged about injecting her white nationalist ideology into the classroom.
The Huffington Post reported Saturday that Dayanna Volitich, a middle school teacher in Florida, had been secretly hosting a white nationalist podcast and espousing her white supremacist beliefs using the online screen name “Tiana Dalichov.” Reporters found instances of Volitich bragging that she had used her position as a teacher to instill her beliefs into her students, which led school board administrators to suspend Volitich while the situation is investigated.
Since Volitich’s suspension, her allies in the alt-right movement have come to her defense by attacking reporters, lobbying the school board in Volitich’s district, and asserting that Volitich does not actually hold beliefs that would be problematic in the classroom.
Lana Lokteff, a radio host for the white nationalist outlet Red Ice whose appearance on Volitich’s “Unapologetic” podcast drew the attention of the press, called the media’s discussion of Volitich’s views “pathetic” and insisted that her beliefs are “rational, honest [and] just.”
On last weekend’s edition of Red Ice TV, Lokteff spoke at length about her belief that reporters covering the fringe right are consumed with a “witch hunt” to “sniff out teachers everywhere” who hold secret white nationalist beliefs. Lokteff said that she had fantasized with Volitich about the possibility of whites-only schools, where “the kids would be scoring so well and it’d just be like peace and good times.”
“There’s teachers who are like, ‘Oh, communists didn’t kill people. Hammers and sickles are awesome.’ I mean, there’s teachers that talk like this. There’s never been a witch hunt of them. It tells you who controls the schools,” Lokteff said.
Later in the video, Lokteff says she “had this feeling something was going to happen” when she appeared on Volitich’s podcast.
Ayla Stewart, a white nationalist who advocates “traditionalist” values among women and uses the moniker “Wife With A Purpose,” placed a call to Volitich’s school to ask that she not be terminated from her position. Stewart is an alt-right YouTube personality who gained notoriety for issuing a “white baby challenge” and for having a scheduled speaking slot at last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Video via the blog Angry White Men:
“I would like to just let people in the school district know that there’s a lot of us that don’t feel her views are extreme at all,” Stewart said on the call, which she recorded and posted online. “And we feel that if a teacher had been organizing with a Black Lives Matter group or something of this sort, or Latino race-based group, that she would not have come under fire and she would not have been removed from the classroom.”
She added, “There’s a lot of people out there, myself included, who feel that there’s nothing wrong with white people advocating for their race.”
Stewart encouraged her fans to also call the school district and voice their support for Volitich. For example, she convinced anti-feminist vlogger Lacey Lynn, an Eagle Forum member currently being groomed by white nationalist women, to call and thanked her personally on her on Gab account.
Bre Fauchex, co-host of the “This Week on the Alt-Right” podcast, also voiced her support for Volitich. Fauchex hosts a network of podcasts that have featured many prominent alt-right guests such as Paul Ryan challenger Paul Nehlen; Greg Johnson, who is the editor-in-chief of a white nationalist imprint called “Counter Currents”; and YouTube vloggers James Allsup and Tara McCarthy.
On Twitter, Fauchex claimed that Volitich was a “sweet teacher” who simply “did commentary online under a pen name.” She added that liberals are “NOT tolerant, loving, accepting, or peaceful” and “destroy everything they touch.” During the most recent episode of “This Week on the Alt-Right,” Fauchex claimed the report exposing Volitich’s white nationalist views was “sabotage” and claimed that Volitich “was always a mainstream conservative” and was never “alt-right and she was never a white nationalist” but happened to be “red-pilled on race.”
Fauchex expanded on these views on her blog, where she specifically singled out HuffPost reporter Rebecca Klein, who co-authored the report that led to Volitich’s teaching suspension. On the blog, Fauchex placed Klein’s name in “echoes,” the triple parentheses used by white nationalists to highlight Jewish people for targeted harassment, and claimed Klein held “radically anti-white positions.” From the blog post:
My co-host of On the Write was the victim of a hit piece by (((Rebecca Klein))) of the Huffington Post. A “reporter” with radically anti-white positions.
We knew this was coming beforehand and suspected the scale might be very large.
[…]
She has requested privacy at this time, otherwise I would be making videos and trying to gather more support. But the sensitivity of the situation requires that I don’t for the time being.
Hail Tiana!
The women supporting Volitich are among a handful who survived the alt-right’s brutal purity testing of women last year, in which female pundits who did not have children or had dated people of color were cast away and relentlessly harassed online. The incident, which came to be known as “Thotgate,” led to the movement losing some of the women who had been seen as the most successful at recruiting “normies”—a term used to describe the yet-to-be-indoctrinated masses. Some of the women who remained in the movement have seen it as their mission to continue that work.
Women who survived the alt-right purging, although few in number, now share a tight bond and have united toward advocating “Trad” lifestyles, which is one of many niche spin-offs of the ever-splintering alt-right movement that encourages women to reject feminism and to have children and be homekeepers.
