Why Susie O’Brien is glad Lauren Southern’s visa application has been rejected
FOLLOWERS of “alt-right” activist Lauren Southern will complain the decision to reject her visa is a blow to free speech. But it’s about stopping hate speech. Australia does not need race-bait haters, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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AUSTRALIA does not need race-bait haters like Lauren Southern.
I am glad Southern’s visa application has been rejected, leading to the cancellation of the gun-toting Canadian’s July speaking tour.
A 23-year-old who dropped out of university because she thought she knew enough already, Southern thinks non-white immigration is wrong, Islam is “ruining everything” and “feminism is cancer”.
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Southern says she doesn’t need feminism; she’s conveniently ignoring that she’s the beneficiary of its six decades of advancement for women. Southern’s schtick is to gatecrash rallies for causes she doesn’t support, make a beeline for those holding the most inflammatory placard and grill them for her YouTube audience.
She went to a SlutWalk march holding up a sign that read: “There is no rape culture in the West”.
She pretended to be a man in order to demonise and mock transgender people and laws that protect them.
And she went to a Black Lives Matter rally and suggested the movement had led to more deaths than the KKK. She’s wrong, it hasn’t.
Southern was due to start an Australian tour this week with fellow right-winger Stefan Molyneux when the Australian High Commission denied her visa application. The commission has suggested Southern apply for a visitor visa, although this would preclude her from working, or earning money from a speaking tour, while she was here.
In a video posted to YouTube promoting her visit, Southern said Australians were “at a crossroads”.
“Do you want to retain your culture, do you want to retain your borders, family, identity?” she said.
“Or will the boats keep coming, will the no-go zones keep growing and will you become another victim of multiculturalism?”
Her comments show a breathtaking lack of understanding of our racial and political landscape. Australia is a proudly multicultural nation that does not have open borders or no-go zones.
Australians are capable of handling our own debates on these issues without importing haters like Southern.
The Australian Government’s decision is hardly surprising given that Southern has been already banned from entering the New Zealand and the UK because of her views on race in particular.
No doubt the decision will be seen as a blow to free speech. But it’s not about stopping free speech. It’s about stopping hate speech.
Free speech has never been an absolute right. It’s a privilege, and one that’s regularly abused by Southern.
It’s convenient of Southern to style herself as a “woman with the wrong opinions” but most of what she espouses is just plain wrong.
Offering insulting, abusive views that demonise an entire religious group is different from offering genuine views that advance a debate.
For instance, she’s profoundly anti-Islam, likening it to terrorism. This conveniently overlooks the fact that many Muslims have borne the brunt of Islamic State’s actions in many countries.
Refusing Southern a visa is not evidence of the march of totalitarianism, or the “bug of progressivism”, which is how she wants it seen. Rather, it’s about stopping the spread of inflammatory, hateful, divisive speech based on false narratives designed to make people fear immigrants and refugees.
Southern is often viewed as click-bait for the YouTube generation but she isn’t as smart as she thinks she is. She consistently makes sweeping statements that aren’t based in fact and continues to spout figures shown to be false.
Southern’s Farmlands documentary, which aims to show the oppression of white farm owners due to pro-black economic policies, is full of misinformation.
While there is no doubt white and black farm deaths are a serious issue for the divided country, Southern is happy to reduce a complex situation into a simplistic racial issue. The documentary is little more than self-promotion based on a Trump-like suspicion of the mainstream media.
Rather than offering the real truth, she’s playing in to the hands of white nationalists who refuse to see the fallout from their own racial supremacy.
She also promotes apartheid, which was a racially supremacist policy in the name of white survival, demonising black culture and struggles in the process.
Like much of her work, the documentary contains a striking lack of fact.
Southern’s views of immigration show her to be ill-informed about the state of international refugee crises.
“I don’t know why legal immigration even exists anymore when I can just put on some bronzer, get on a dinghy boat, and just show up at the beaches of Sicily with the Koran in my hand,” she’s said.
In any case, Southern doesn’t need to come here to stir up her bigoted followers; she got 375,000 followers on Twitter and has a best-selling book called Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation.
Southern is photogenic and charismatic, but she’s hardly a worthwhile candidate for free speech campaigners.
Her Australian tour was no free speech manifesto; it was little more than an expensive marketing exercise promoting Molyneux and Southern. The cheapest ticket was $79, and those who wanted a good seat had to pay $20 more for early admission. Those who wanted to meet them for half an hour before the show had to pay $199. Pay $500 and you’d get an extra 15 minutes and some signed merchandise. Pay $749 and they’d throw in dinner as well.
Free speech has never cost so much — in more ways than one.
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
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