Lauren Cherie Southern / b. 1995 / Surrey, British Columbia, Canada / Political Commentator, Libertarian Party Candidate for the Canadian Parliament, Author, Podcaster
Note: The sources of the following quotations are provided where known; the rest of the quotations presumably derive from Southern’s comments as a candidate for public office, as well as her many writings, online commentaries, interviews, and podcasts
American Family and Culture
In a world that has forgotten the importance of family and culture, those who fight for it are labeled as radicals.
Traditionalism offers a lot of stability in people’s life; it offers a guide for how to lead them to the happiest life.
You won’t see Christians violently attacking people for criticizing their religion like you do with Islam, things like the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Dismissing the guidance built for us over thousands and thousands of years in the form of gender roles, traditional lifestyles, hard work, objectivity, and cultural supremacy was, in fact, painfully stupid.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Diversity
“Diversity is our strength” is a dangerous myth. True strength comes from unity and shared values, not division.
Down Under
It’s a pleasure to land here and see Australia upholding its commitment to free speech and Western culture—something that may not be here for much longer if left-wing Australian politicians continue their pathological worship of multiculturalism.
The reality is, we have had filled rooms wherever we’ve spoken, and in New Zealand, the left and the right have been coming together and saying, “We believe in free speech.”
I think, in Australia, the no-go areas wouldn’t be as bad as in Europe because they’ve got less mass immigration, but I’ve heard some pretty bizarre stories about riots, attacks.
Freedom
Freedom isn’t being able to do what you want; it’s being able to do what you should.
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
The best way to defeat an idea is with a better idea, not by suppressing it.
Never underestimate the power of free speech. It’s the foundation of a free society.
Ideas should be met with debate, not with deplatforming and censorship.
Censorship and silencing of unpopular opinions only breed resentment and further division.
Freedom of speech isn’t about protecting popular opinions; it’s about protecting unpopular and controversial ones.
The battle for freedom and free expression is ongoing, and it requires constant vigilance.
Government
There are so many people that are offended by debate and free speech that sometimes governments cower. It’s just way easier to play into the hands of people who are totalitarian.
The West needs to think of itself as a family again, not as a sugar daddy for other people and their families.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Guns
I think the Americans have it right. The idea of having guns is essentially to protect yourself from a totalitarian government.
Immigration
It seems as though our leaders have almost forgotten about legal immigration and are just leaving our borders open, which is a detriment culturally, financially, and in a lot of other realms for native people.
I don’t know why legal immigration even exists anymore when I can just put on some bronzer, get on a dingy boat, and just show up at the beaches of Sicily with the Koran in my hand.
People think my position is this horrifying, scary, harsh position to say we need to protect our borders and that people cannot illegally enter our nation. This isn’t my opinion—this is the law.
Unchecked immigration is a moral eyesore. It asks our states to fail their most basic obligations by putting the needs of faceless, dubiously friendly strangers over the needs of the citizens they exist to protect and serve.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
“Islamophobia”
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.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
The Left
This is because the most fundamental element of New Left thought is a near total rejection of freedom, morality, and of reason in theory, combined with the abuse of all three in practice.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
We know the future, if left to the hands of the average millennial, is an Ugg boot stomping on a human face, forever.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
[A] steadily increasing number of millennials are finally beginning to wake up to the choice we face as a civilization, and to the value they’ve so long overlooked in traditional standards of morality and beauty. They are wondering: is modern culture really so great if it means we substitute Meghan Trainor for Mozart, Emma Sulkowicz for Da Vinci, or bell hooks for Plato? Is it really such a step forward that our civilization, which once shed both blood and ink debating Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, is now reduced to considering theses like VICE Magazine’s “Dear Straight Guys: It’s Time to Start Putting Things in Your Butt”? Is this all there is, or can we do better?
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Life
The strongest people I’ve ever met are those who have defeated adversity and known what it’s like to struggle.
The Media
The left doesn’t win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.
Come out and say it, Zuckerberg—“Our platform that influences billions of people is being used to propagandize left-wing viewpoints.”
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism for any western country is a massive issue. The lack of integration, the increase of crime, violence, and mistrust in society, the segregation created due to mass immigration, these are only the beginning phases of something I fear will almost certainly get more worse and violent.
The first rule of multiculturalism is that you can’t talk about multiculturalism.
The experiment of multiculturalism was thought up in the minds of tenured intellectuals, put on paper by virtue signaling politicians, and then enjoyed by big business globalists.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Never-Trumpers
With rare, rare exceptions, the anti-Trump “conservatives” were out of touch, boring, lame, ineffective, self-righteous losers without enough flare or original thought to headline an accountants’ convention. Except, as their reading of the polls showed us, the accountants are better at math.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Political Correctness
In the world of political correctness, a conservative is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.
Political correctness is just fascism with manners. I wish people would understand that.
Today’s SJWs [social justice warriors] fall into two, mutually reinforcing and equally toxic camps: PC Authoritarians and PC Egalitarians.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
South Africa
This is quite public knowledge. The South African government has said they’re doing it. They’ve started seizing their first couple hundred farms.
Southern on Southern
I judge people based on merit, on personality.
I’m totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I’m looking to have my views challenged. I’m looking to be corrected.
I don’t think the alt-right would call me alt-right. They call me alt-lite, usually. I just consider myself a nationalist or a traditionalist.
When people put effort in life, it’s more beautiful. But it doesn’t come naturally to me.
I try to surround myself with the people who genuinely believe in changing things, that are angry about it and want to make changes and want to make a change and are willing.
There’s this ridiculous idea that I’m a gender traitor because I’m not a feminist. I’m supposed to be part of a sisterhood: you’re automatically supposed to support all women just because you have the same genitals as them, which doesn’t make sense.
If I were black, I could say I’m proud. If I were Asian, I could say I’m proud. If I were any other ethnicity, I could say I’m proud, because that’s how our culture is, but if I’m white and I say I’m proud, the media will go nuts.
I’m happy with being white. I’m fine with being white. I feel zero shame whatsoever in being white.
I was being taught to believe that, first, I was special, unique, important, and great beyond words; second, that I was completely equal to everyone, which is to say average and mediocre.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Like many millennials, I had a conventional modern education, and it’s only with a lot of painful hindsight and introspection that I can see how deficient it was. Let me give you the biggest, and worst examples: If you asked me in my last year of high school to name five great musicians, I would have probably only got as far as Mozart and Beethoven before drawing a blank. If you asked me to name five great authors, I’d have mentioned Shakespeare and then groped in vain for anything else. If you’d asked me to name five great philosophers, I’m ashamed to say I wouldn’t even have got as far as Plato. If you’d asked me about the history of Western civilization, I maybe could have named the Roman Empire, but you couldn’t get me to tell you what actually happened while it was around.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
I was taught that war, when conducted by communists, terrorists, and agitators, is peace. That freedom, when exercised by white cishet men, is slavery. And most horribly of all, that ignorance is strength.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Tolerance
You don’t have to agree with someone to tolerate their existence.
Tolerance means respecting the right of others to have different opinions, even if you disagree with them.
Triggering
In other words, all those people claiming to be “triggered” aren’t lying: they really are rather like overanxious, emotional children with similarly childlike understandings of language and morality.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Ukraine War
Even if you hate Russia and want to see it nuked or levelled today, you still need to understand your enemy. You need to understand how they think in order to compete with them.
Interview, “‘YOUR WELCOME’ with Michael Malice #198: Lauren Southern,” March 16, 2022.
[The terrifying thing] is that most of the people commenting on this Ukraine crisis couldn’t even point Ukraine on a map a month ago. They have no idea of any of the history. They look at it from a cartoon world view: Putin is just bad, and he’s bad because he’s bad, of course, and if you disagree with that then you’re bad.
Interview, “‘YOUR WELCOME’ with Michael Malice #198: Lauren Southern,” March 16, 2022.
Universities
Not that those professors were blameless angels. Frankly, they’d already been eroding the traditional purpose of a university education for a while when the Boomers showed up: a process that began with the emergence of the Soviet Union, when professors reared on the progressive notions of government-by-expertise fell in love with communism, and fell out with religion.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
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. . . but the most important thing I took away from this class was not my credit, but a strong understanding of what has infected modern education: the curse of the postmodernist, deconstructionist professors making their long march through the institutions.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Western Civilization
They’ll have to accept that Western ideals have shaped our cultures into some of the greatest, freest, most generous, most decent, most egalitarian, and most peaceful on Earth.
Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation (2016).
Women
I think women need to empower themselves instead of asking for handouts.