Face Eating Leopards

Lauren Southern, demons, technology, and the Right

The Temptation of St Anthony, Hieronymus Bosch, 1501

Those of my readers who aren’t very online may never have heard of Lauren Southern. A quick primer: she gained notoriety overnight about a decade ago, age 19, among a wave of controversial Right-wing YouTubers roughly concurrent with the first Trump era. Her public career has taken some twists and turns since, culminating - as of this week - seemingly in a final farewell to online public life.

I got talking to her last year, after I reviewed The Women of the Far Right, a strange quasi-academic screed that would have been more accurately titled “E-Girls of the Alt-Right, Whom I Hate-Scroll Obsessively But Am Too Scared To Interview”. The book featured Southern, and I mentioned her in my essay, in the context of the often uncomfortable fit between ideology and motherhood.

Southern reached out to me after reading the review, and we had several long conversations that eventually became an extended interview published last year. Now, she has published a memoir: This Is Not Real Life. I discussed the book this week, again at UnHerd; and even though I turned off all social media notifications after publication, I’ve caught glimpses of the character assassination she has been subjected to since. I won’t quote any, as I don’t want to give them airtime, but man, it’s been ugly.

In what follows, I will not be litigating Lauren Southern’s personal choices. She informs me she’s trying to quit media, and is pursuing a theology postgrad; in this I wish her the best, and consider the rest to be between her and God. What I want to think about here is the broader question I touched on, in that essay that first brought us into contact: the uneasy tussle between sex relations, technology, and the competing forces of “left” and “right”.

And, particularly the way, even in the name of a Right that usually claims to desire ordered life, healthy boundaries, and just authority, internet incentives often push adherents away from those good things toward something much angrier and more destructive. We should take this seriously - not because it’s an argument against conservative ideas, but because it points toward a dimension of digital life that’s far more sinister than we like to acknowledge out loud.