It is stupidity that powers ‘right-wing star’ Lauren Southern

A WEEK ago I had never heard of Lauren Southern. Now it seems I can’t get away from her.

The trip to Australia by this right-wing Canadian YouTuber has received saturation coverage by just about every media outlet in the country, ranging from The Australian to the ABC, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail and from Fairfax to the nation’s number one news site — which is of course this one!

And all this for someone who has approximately the same number of Twitter followers as Leigh Sales.

But why is Lauren Southern the most talked about woman in the country right now? Is it because of her stunning comments or provocative ideas?

Well, it’s hard to say because most of the news articles I’ve read don’t actually outline what her ideas are.

Instead she is typically just referred to as racist, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and homophobic. And, quite frankly, we have plenty of people like that already here.

Probably hundreds of thousands of them.

So, why all the fuss?

The answer is because someone decided to make a fuss.

Southern has just received the sort of coverage that publicists can only dream of, but the catch is she doesn’t even need publicists.

Because the other thing that Southern is almost universally described as is a right-wing provocateur — her entire strength, her entire business model if you like, is to provoke people.

In other words, Lauren Southern doesn’t need publicists, she just needs protesters. And, predictably enough, left-wing activists have given her more than even she could possibly hope for.

Indeed, over the past week Southern has been complaining about police forces charging her tens of thousands of dollars for protection. In fact, she should be paying the protesters for showing up. They would be a bargain at twice the price.

Of course anyone should have — and does have — the right to demonstrate against things and people they do not believe in, and so they always should.

But it is staggering that far-left activists are still so stupid that they consistently and enthusiastically give the far-right exactly what they want.

And it is even more staggering that the far-right and those who report on it explicitly say this

and yet still the far-left plays entirely into its hands.

I stressed this exact same point when Milo Yiannopoulos came to Australia. And lest the left-wing conspiracy theorists think this is a hate media trick, it was emphatically supported by none other than the august body that is the ABC’s Media Watch.

But as usual nobody listens to me or Paul Barry and so here we go again.

Many on the left think that the answer to right-wing extremism is left-wing extremism. That if fascists have a demonstration then socialists need to meet it with a counter-demonstration, that if the alt-right has an event then the alt-left has to shut it down.

But the truth is that most far-right demonstrations are sad, lonely affairs to which almost no one shows up. It’s only when the counter-protest is on that it gets any coverage from media hoping for a bit of biff. If the left never showed up then nobody would even know these people were there and they would eventually just go home to their granny flats.

When it comes to these alt-right speaking tours, the left’s tactics are even more stupid and also unwittingly sinister. By attempting to shut these events down and deny the speakers the opportunity to even talk, they attract not only the ire of the alt-right but of anyone who believes in free speech — and there are a lot more of the latter than there are of the former. And of course it suddenly makes the so-called provocateur the victim.

And so the idiocy is threefold: You give priceless free publicity to the speech you’re trying to silence, you make a whole bunch of otherwise disengaged people suddenly disagree with you and you instantly turn the object of your hatred into a sympathetic figure.

That is a veritable hat-trick of own goals.

One protester who rushed the stage at a Southern event perfectly summed up this absurd course of self-destruction when she told The Australian, “I love free speech” and then in the same breath: “Hate speech should be interrupted.”

One obvious question springs to mind: Why?

Napoleon famously said: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

In other words, give someone enough rope and they will hang themselves. These are not exactly obscure concepts.

If Lauren Southern’s views are really so extreme or foolish then the best way to discredit her is to let her express them. The idea that her words are so powerful that to even let her speak would be dangerous makes her sound like a wizard from Harry Potter.

Indeed, if the collective intelligentsia can’t mount a winning argument for multiculturalism, feminism or any other of the ideologies it sees as being under existential threat from a YouTube millennial then Lauren Southern is probably the least of its worries.

Hell, I once won an argument with a white nationalist simply by asking him if he ate kebabs.

He did and he looked like a f**kwit. Feel free to use that one next time, comrades