Never Make a Grifter Into a Martyr
Lauren Southern is a grifter. That's the short version of the story about Lauren Southern. The long version is, for a short time, she was operating a successful grift as the American media and culture was trying it's best not to admit that the "alt-right" wasn't some new splinter movement of youth conservatism, but was in fact, the same old white supremacist/far right ideas in a new glossier package, being marketed to suburbanites and millenials more generally. For anyone who has already had even the slightest interest in the saga of America coming to terms with the infiltration of mainstream politics by self identified white supremacists and their far right kin, the idea that these people are misogynists, is not only not new, it's one of the reasons many of us have argued they need to be fought and defeated at every turn.
Should We Cover Right-Wing Extremism? From the Columbia Journalism Review.
How The Media Covers White Supremacy From NPR.
Terrorism and the media: A handbook for journalists The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Reporters Grapple with the Right Way to Cover the Far Right The Christian Science Monitor.
Lauren Southern is a grifter who didn't even have the decency to feel she shouldn't commit a grift which was about white supremacy, xenophobia and the like, but now, this Atlantic article is setting her up to be some kind of martyr for white feminism. Realistically, the women whom the movement she was championing and making herself a celebrity in was most dangerous to, are not going to be moved by misogyny making it impossible for her to continue her grift. Black, Indigenous and other women of color have long spoken about white women whose feminism doesn't extend to solidarity when BIPOC who are women are being targeted by the violence of racist white men.
The thing about people who make it a point to organize and create social or political movements based on the dehumanization of other people is that they make it a point to organize and create social or political movements based on the dehumanization of other people. Where white supremacy is concerned, white people fall into many different sub-categories they themselves often fail to realize are just further down the list than the usual targets in American white supremacy. White women in these movements all think they're going to be Eva Braun, not the wife of an SS operative or street cop whose husband beat her because he couldn't handle the growing realization either his grand dreams of an Aryan nation weren't going to be realized or came to see he'd been conned in an obvious con. Those wives ended up scrounging in the streets to survive as the Nazis squandered every resource and every Reichsmark because Hitler was simultaneously one of history's most pathetic and horrifying examples of toxic masculinity.
The gay white man who champions anti-immigration policies actually believes the dehumanization isn't going to make it around to him. The same with the white male who is disabled due to mental illness, and supports the ideas which originate in these circles of hate. He never thinks the people he's championing are going to decide it's time to "clean up society" and "do something" about all those useless eaters or that the decision will be to "protect the genetic legacy of the culture and nation" by removing the undesirables who have conditions which have some genetic component, as we believe many mental illnesses do.
In the same vein, journalists who decide to write pieces like this one about Southern, never think they are going to be the ones contributing to the normalization and continued spread of these kinds of conservative extremist ideologies. They are always arrogant enough to believe they will get this incredibly complex and difficult undertaking "right enough." It's hard enough to write responsibly about the various movements in conservative extremism, and damn near impossible to write this kind of "focus piece" about one particular person, specifically because the entire reason they are engaging with you is to further their grift. Good attention, bad attention, they can proffer both into something useful, because this is what fascists do.
Richard J. Evans has a trilogy of books on Nazi Germany, called The Third Reich Trilogy. The first book, The Coming of the Third Reich, details the way the Nazis manipulated the norms and traditions of liberal democracy to seize power. They specifically relied on the self proclaimed moderates to defend their right to speak, and they never engaged the press in anything like good faith. They said whatever they had to say, at the moment, to move forward. Hitler wrote about his ideas about Jews in Mein Kampf, and no shortage of German press and "moderates" would respond to his public comments about Jews as "oh, well, he's just playing to the base" essentially. The German's, much like Americans today, couldn't bring themselves to believe they could go down the road they did. It wasn't so much that it was "unthinkable" because there were elements of German society trying to warn the rest, it was more along the lines that they wouldn't allow for it to be thought of.
Below is a list of other books to make some information available to anyone interested in this topic.
Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It by Shane Burley
Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reid Ross
Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook by Mark Bray
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O Paxton
How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley
This one I have yet to read, but I intend to because I'm very familiar with the other work from this author, including the pieces she published while writing this book.
Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin