Lauren Southern, a former right-wing influencer, has published a new memoir reflecting on her years in the conservative media ecosystem — and eventual disillusionment with it.
“Extremist ideologies don’t survive contact with reality,” Southern told Canadian Affairs in an interview.
Over the past decade, Southern has been a commentator for the conservative Canadian outlet Rebel News, a YouTube personality, and a contributor to the American right-wing outlet Tenet Media.
In those roles, she advanced hardline conservative positions on immigration, feminism, gender identity and free speech. This earned her the labels of “alt right” and white nationalist by critics — labels she has rejected.
Today, at 30, Southern has a new sense of perspective on her role as a woman in that environment.
“There is this aspect of being used,” she said. “But there is also an aspect of agency there, where you start to understand the social rules of this world.”
“You’re taught to use everything you can to maximize your power, and if that is your appearance — if that is the fact that you’re a woman — you have to utilize it,” she added.
Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, an associate professor at the Royal Military College of Canada who studies far-right extremism and online radicalization, says women can play key roles in far-right movements, though their involvement is often overlooked.
“Women are just as capable of being political actors [as men],” he said. “Not recognizing that is detrimental, because it essentially strips them of that agency.”
Roleplaying
Southern says she was recruited by Rebel News founder Ezra Levant in 2015 to create videos for his news site. At the time, she was 18 and a recent high school graduate.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, he must think I have interesting ideas,’” she said in the interview. “Obviously from his perspective he’s thinking, ‘Wow, she’s going to make a good face to get clicks on the internet.’”
Asked why he recruited Southern, Levant told Canadian Affairs, “I don’t have any comments about Lauren Southern.”
Southern soon gave up her post-secondary studies at the University of the Fraser Valley to focus full-time on her media work.
In 2017, she left Rebel News to build a following on her own YouTube channel. She amassed an audience of nearly 700,000 followers by publishing multiple videos a week.
In 2023, she also began contributing videos to Tenet Media, a now-defunct media outlet. The U.S. Department of Justice has alleged Tenet was part of a covert influence operation funded by agents linked to Russia. Its allegations have not been proven in court and the case is ongoing.
Southern was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars at Tenet Media. But she was becoming increasingly uneasy about her role in that media environment, she says, especially following the Tenet allegations.
“What started as this truth‑to‑power thing became this rat race for attention … and I was feeling sick to my stomach about it,” she said.
Southern describes the role of media figures in these spaces as performative, driven by audience dynamics and “infotainment.”
“I was a character — like the parasocial girlfriend in the culture war cinematic universe,” she said, referring to a fan’s one-sided, unreciprocated connection with a public figure.
“Jordan Peterson was the parasocial dad … Hasan Piker is the parasocial bad-boy socialist boyfriend … It’s a fandom.”
Trad wife life
The performative nature of an influencer’s work can extend to their private life.
In the conservative media environment today, a “trad wife” archetype has become popular with some audiences. Trad wife refers to a highly traditional, idealized version of femininity centered on marriage, domesticity, child-rearing and submission.
“You’ve got trad wife influencers, but you also have this cartoonish caricature of the trad wife, which isn’t a real person, but is aimed at being the blueprint — this is what you should aspire to be, or aspire to marry,” said Veilleux-Lepage, of the Royal Military College.
“This is where women start having a really important role in the movement, not as individuals, but as an ideal.”
These narratives often draw on nostalgic visions of an imagined past.
“The political project being offered is one of a ‘Golden Age,’” Veilleux-Lepage said. “A return to a time with clearly defined gender roles.”
Southern says she initially found elements of the trad wife ideal appealing.
She had grown up in a conservative evangelical environment and had had limited exposure to different types of men.
“The men I was around were extremely conservative. They weren’t over‑sexualizing women, they weren’t rude and cursing,” she said.
In her early 20s, she married and had a child, while taking a step back from public life.
“I went in genuinely believing if I just live by these rules, like trad life, [and] apply these standards … this is what is going to fix the world,” she said.
But as she started to see more of the “wider world,” her perspectives changed.
“Then you go out and you meet people, and you realize … life is more complicated than you thought. You realize that these orthodoxies you bought into don’t map onto real humans.”
In a 2024 interview on the YouTube channel Triggernometry, she described how strict notions of spousal submission became untenable once she was a mother.
After the birth of her child, Southern felt she needed to be near her family for support. But her then-husband wanted to move to Australia.
“Within that hardcore trad binary, when my husband said, ‘No, no matter what, we’re moving to Australia’ … I have to submit, at the detriment of probably my own child’s well-being, my well-being and our marriage’s well-being — that doesn’t make sense.”
Her media personality was also used against her within her own marriage, she says.
“Towards the end of our marriage, I found a list in my husband’s office … of every single media figure that had ever written a negative article about me,” she said.
“I was told that this was a contingency list of people he would contact to hurt my reputation if I disobeyed in the marriage,” she said in the YouTube interview. “So if I left … he would contact them and start spreading rumors about me.”
Hard to leave
Southern says the performative nature of media roles can make it difficult to step away. Online figures effectively become trapped by their own reputations.
“What do you do when you’re canceled?” she said. “You have no other job you can get. You can’t even work at a McDonald’s because you’re so canceled.”
Southern, who is today divorced, describes in her memoir the pressure of maintaining a persona even after privately questioning it.
“I wasn’t even fooled by any of it,” she wrote in her memoir This Is Not Real Life, which she self-published.
“I knew most people were posturing. Yet I felt a deep sense of existential dread that people were about to find out just how badly I was posturing. And if they did, what then? How would I take care of my child?”
Veilleux-Lepage say those pressures can be compounded by social isolation, as people involved in extreme movements often erode ties to family, work and community.
“Through their participation in the movement … they start losing their social structure,” he said.
“It becomes a lot harder for them to leave the movement, because their only social network that remains is like‑minded extremists.”
Women don’t stay
Southern says gendered expectations within the far right can ultimately push women out.
These spaces reinforce “delusional male myths,” she said, such as the idea that men can be promiscuous and still expect a “tattoo-free virgin,” while women are held to stricter standards.
“There is no female Elon Musk with 14 baby daddies. There is no female Trump that has a ton of divorces under her belt,” she said in her interview with Canadian Affairs. “There’s endless sweeping and covering for male moral faults, but not for women.”
“If a woman has one blip in your life — a divorce, a relationship that goes public, or sex before marriage — you’re cooked,” she said.
Southern says a series of harrowing personal experiences pushed her to the brink. She has accused British-American social media personality Andrew Tate of sexually assaulting and strangling her in 2018.
Tate has denied the allegations on X, but did not respond to Canadian Affairs’ request for comment.
“I literally had to deal with … having the biggest right‑wing human trafficker in the world try to destroy my life and reputation,” Southern said about Tate. Tate has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming an organized crime group to sexually exploit women.
“I had to deal with my marriage collapsing publicly, getting canceled, getting involved in a Russian investigation, having [Canada’s federal intelligence agency] show up at my door,” Southern added.
“I had a mental break … and I’ve spent the last two years trying to get my brain back in order.”
Asked what advice she would give others, she says she hopes readers can avoid her mistakes. But she also thinks people often only change after experiencing consequences themselves.
“I feel like people have to suffer more, unfortunately,” she said.
Today, Southern is cautiously returning to public life after staying offline for more than a year.
“I actually just finished a video … my first video in half a year,” she said.
“I’m going to see if there’s a healthy way that I can critique the [culture-war media] space from someone that was in it for 10 years, and maybe pull some people out of the more delusional, dark corners.”
As a person who has followed Lauren since 2016, what I see is a young woman who has grown through the agonies of her adversity as well as the warmth of being a mother and the love of her family. This is a great article