Lauren Southern: The alt-right’s Canadian dog whistler
Like the Proud Boys, Southern claims to reject racism while embracing the supposedly palatable elements of the so-called “alt-light,” offering observations like “Black people are convinced by the media that they’re living in a system where everything white people do is trying to oppress them,” as she told a Vice reporter early this year.
Southern is a one-time Libertarian candidate for Canadian Parliament and former writer for Canada’s alt-right media hub, The Rebel, and a self-published author, who’s glommed on to the extremist right scene in her home country’s southern neighbor and found internet fame and controversy while becoming the movement’s white, blonde goddess of the moment (since Taylor Swift never returned the neo-Nazis’ affections).
Andrew Anglin, founder and editor of the embattled neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, strenuously objected to the presence of females in the alt-right movement. In his manifesto, published in August of this year, Anglin wrote, “Men are sick of having things explained to them by women. It is a turnoff. And it is absolutely useless. What does a woman have to offer you intellectually? Motivationally? Morally? Absolutely nothing. We need to keep women on the sidelines. Not speaking, not leading, and with no official membership in anything.”
Perhaps this is where Lauren Southern splits with the neo-Nazis — without women like Southern, who will take on the “social justice warrior” feminists? And who will the Proud Boys use as material for their monthly wank? (In Southern’s self-published 82-page book, Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation, she references masturbation five times, including, “ … I don’t masturbate to anime characters. I dress up like them and guys masturbate to me.”)
Before Southern launched her short-lived career as a politician, she first attracted attention with her debut video on The Rebel, entitled “Why I Am Not A Feminist,” in April 2015. “Did you know that every year, more American men are raped than women?” she asks on the video’s page, referring to prison rape. She mentions domestic violence against men, and says 80% of suicides are men, before asking, “If feminism really is a movement dedicated to equality, shouldn’t feminists be speaking out against these and other example [sic] of obvious inequality?”
That sound you didn’t hear was a dog whistle for Anglin and his ilk.
Later, in the summer of 2015, after Southern launched her candidacy for parliament, she appeared at a Vancouver Slut Walk protest (the name inspired by a Toronto policeman who said in 2011 “women should avoid dressing like sluts” to avoid sexual assault) carrying a sign that read, “There is no rape culture in the west.” The Canadian Libertarian Party suspended her candidacy, but she was reinstated after supporters, including Breitbart, objected. Southern received 535 votes in the election, not quite 1% of the vote.
Less than a year later, Southern returned to Vancouver to an event where pro-eugenics anti-Semitic alt-right figure and fellow wannabe politician Augustus Sol Invictus was supposed to speak (Invictus was running for a Florida senate seat, and was prevented from entering Canada at the border, missing his own event). Southern argued with the protesters at the event, and showed up in Canada’s national media once again when one of them dumped a bottle of what appeared to be fox urine on her head.
In December 2016, Southern self-published her polemical book, Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation, with a blurb by Ann Coulter reading “Buy this book before liberals ban it” across the cover. It’s a collection of extreme-right dog whistles, down to the title.
Speaking of the left, but uncannily accurate as regards her own extreme right movement, she writes in the first chapter, “people my age are groping in the dark for meaning, and finding it in increasingly insane, fantastical places.” Her generation, she writes, will “have to accept that diversity is not a strength, it’s a weakness. Its legacy is not peace and love, but division and hate.”
Her second chapter, “How Tenured Hippies Ruined Everything,” is an explicit dog whistle to the extreme right, who detest baby boomers for leading western society to this stage of civilization. “Well, it all starts with the worst generation in history,” she writes. “The baby boomers.”
As for immigration, Southern declares, “In the end the result of mass immigration is the destruction of the economy, of our culture, and of the very moral norms that make those emotional arguments have resonance in the first place.”
Cementing her spot in the rogues’ gallery of the alt-right alongside other self-proclaimed “identitarians” like white nationalist and alt-right leader Richard Spencer, she proclaims, “Individualism and unique identity is the antithesis of global government. It’s the antithesis of the European Union, of the United Nations, of the World Bank. It causes people to rebel in favor of their own interests rather than those of the elites. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are all the proof you need to see this.”
(Southern has defended Spencer in the past, stating, “Richard Spencer is not a white supremacist, he is a white nationalist. He believes in a white ethno-state, he doesn’t believe in whites being superior.”)
As for Islam, here Southern feels in her safe space, attacking the term “Islamophobia” by writing, “Let’s be clear: if the left merely attacked ‘fear of Islam,’ this would still be silly, but at least it would be something we could debate. But to brand such a fear as a ‘phobia’ marks it as an a priori irrational fear: in essence, a form of bigotry.”
Bigotry from an alt-right provocateur? Say it isn’t so, Lauren!
More at: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... -alt-right’s-canadian-dog-whistler