Lauren Southern, a Canadian influencer and former Rebel Media activist, details how viral fame and ideological battles warped her mental health—from "canceled" by mainstream media in 2015 to CSIS monitoring her private life, including family data, after accusing her of Russian ties. She refused cooperation, exposing agent recordings on X, leading to travel restrictions and a two-hour Ottawa hearing focused on perceived bigotry rather than foreign influence. Southern’s experience reveals how political influencers weaponize personal crises for ideological leverage while facing disproportionate, often sexist, scrutiny that blurs reality and activism. [Automatically generated summary]
And then I come into my office one day, I look down at my phone and it's blowing up.
I've got like the New York Times calling me the Associated Press and I see Lauren's a Russian spy headline.
My local paper has pictures of my face saying I'm a Russian spy all over the place.
I'm seeing online.
I'm getting thousands of comments in the middle of the night.
You're going to jail.
I put on makeup every night before bed for two weeks because I was like, I'm going to get arrested.
Oh my God.
I want to look good.
I want to get on mug shotties.
Hey, everyone.
It's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Lauren Southern.
I'm really happy to get to talk to Lauren because she has an incredible story to tell.
And it's a story about something I talk about all the time, how politics can make you stupid, make you angry, hurt you very badly if you don't understand to keep your life going at the same time.
The story she has told in a book called This Is Not Real Life.
She's a Canadian writer, filmmaker, and a former political activist.
If you have been around this business for a while, you know her name.
And if you're new to this business, you may not know her name, but her story is really incredible.
And her book is really well written.
Lauren, it is good to see you.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me, Andrew.
I'm doing really well, all things considered.
The crazy story considered.
It is a crazy story.
And I haven't finished the book yet, but I have to say, first of all, everybody who does this, does this kind of work, gets a lot of crazy male women, and especially attractive women, get unbelievable.
Some of the things you quote in here, like if I had hair, it would have stood on end.
I was just like, it was unbelievable the sort of things you put up with.
But I think you've got to tell people, since you've been out of the business for a while and you've been quiet for a while, I think you've got to tell people what happened.
Tell me, first of all, how you got involved as a right-wing political commentator and why.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I grew up in Canada.
So we were always a little ahead on the kind of social justice curve when all the big progressivism started ramping up in 2014, 15.
And I was in university getting taught about white privilege and, you know, feminism.
And it all irked me a bit.
And I started making content on the internet, went viral at 19 for anti-feminist content, worked for a company called The Rebel Media, doing all sorts of on-the-ground videos about immigration and just every other political culture war topic.
Well before it was a little more normalized now.
So I found myself quite canceled by the mainstream press.
And then 10 years later, after kind of experiencing the underbelly of the political entertainment industry, I found myself all over national news in Canada and the U.S. saying I was a Russian spy with federal agents at my door telling me that if I didn't become an informant for them, I was going to potentially go to jail.
All of this accumulated in a bit of a mental breakdown, to say the least, which prompted me to write this book.
It wasn't actually ever going to be published because I felt the things I wrote in it were a bit too embarrassing to ever tell the world.
It was more to kind of figure out how I got to this point in my life.
How do I end up, you know, going viral and basically everything falling apart from my reputation on the left and the right to being threatened with jail time from federal agents.
I kind of had to write it all down.
And eventually I figured, you know, I need a long break from the internet and I need to at least tell people what happened and the things and the lessons I learned from all the really stupid decisions I've made through my life, some for good reasons, some for selfish reasons.
But I just felt I needed to publish it.
So the thing that struck me right away is that, I mean, you talk about the internet and the internet can be poisonous when you get sucked into it, but it was also being sucked into a sort of way of looking at things that you couldn't refer.
You couldn't refer to anything outside yourself.
I mean, Rebel Media did good work.
I remember Rebel Media pretty well.
But the things that were happening to you, you were becoming kind of an extremist in some ways.
Is that a fair thing to say?
Well, I mean, it's you're always seeking the next kind of hit of attention when it comes to the internet.
What's the next big thing?
You have a feedback loop of everyone telling you anything you do is amazing.
And all of your enemies are giving you the most extreme critiques of you possible.
It's not just, hey, you could consider this a little differently.
It's you're a demon who needs to be assassinated.
And so you're not going to listen to any of the critiques of yourself because you've written that off as crazy people that don't understand you.
And all of the affirmation coming in is so intoxicating.
I think that's undeniable.
Like every creator gets intoxicated by the comments.
We call it audience capture, right?
And it's a more new phenomenon because when you were like a CNN host or Fox News host back in the day, you didn't have a comment section coming in every other second, giving you praise or negativity based on what you were saying.
So I think a lot of people, myself included, did get audience captured to a degree without realizing it.
It's this imperceptible shift.
I don't think there's a single Rubicon that gets passed where suddenly it's like you're not controlling your own mind.
It's that you think you're influencing the internet.
You're making content.
You're looking into the phone screen, but it's also looking back into you.
Your algorithm is impacting you.
What you're seeing every day impacts the way you think.
Even if you find yourself to be the mentally strongest person on earth, everyone is getting manipulated to some degree, especially the people who think they're not being manipulated.
Yeah, well, that's for sure.
You know, one of the things that happens in America, I think it happens even more in Canada maybe, is that every social movement usually social movements arise for a reason.
You know, you have feminism for a reason.
You have even things like socialism.
There's not, it's not like an insane idea that everybody should be taken care of.
But what happens is the left takes over every social movement.
So you start out with feminism saying, well, you know, women should have more choices, more rights.
They should be able to maneuver more in the world.
And then you end up with the family should be destroyed.
Men are toxic.
Marriage is a terrible thing.
And so every movement starts out as kind of having some sense to it, but also then and then becomes left-wing insanity.
And that leads to right-wing insanity because right-wingers end up defending things that they actually don't believe in.
Can you talk specifically about some of the things that some of the rabbit holes you feel you went down that you would not go down if you could do it again?
Yeah, well, I think I, so one big lesson I learned is I very much was commenting a lot on the trad life, What people should do with their relationships, marriage, this kind of stuff.
When I was like 19, 20 years old, I had not had a serious relationship yet, but I certainly read a lot of listicles on the internet saying, This is what a good person does.
If you follow XYZ rules, then that's what will lead you to a successful life.
And I won't pretend that I lived my life perfectly or by any of these rules, but I think that's the problem is that life is not linear.
There's no XYZ way to live it perfectly that's going to result in stability.
There are so many factors that complicate life.
And so I went down that, you know, you need to be a trad wife, tried to do it myself, failed spectacularly, and was kind of forced to confront my own ego and pride that I had at, you know, I'm going to live out the ideology that I have public purported.
It fell apart.
I pretended to be married for years after my marriage fell apart because I was so embarrassed by the idea that I had failed.
And so much of influencing is the public perception.
You know, it's almost less about actually being moral and truthful so much as it is as being perceived as moral and truthful when it comes to public influencing.
And I'm not the only one.
I'm the only one who will talk about that because I've made that decision, but I wouldn't expose other people.
I know plenty of people that their marriages have fallen apart with this or that, and yet they persist to do the trad life influencing online.
So that was, I think I went a bit deep in the delusion that was created out of Norman Rockwell painting memes and learned the hard way.
And the problem was when I learned the hard way, then I kind of went the opposite direction and found myself in a very crazy life circumstance.
I was like smoking weed every day, having, you know, that's a whole other rabbit hole you'll have to read about in the book.
But it's, I really think I went down the Manosphere rabbit hole.
And now everyone has.
I think that's starting to die right now.
The whole hardcore red pill podcast world, the whatever podcast where they invite OnlyFans girls on to kind of humiliate them.
I think I've seen Michael Knowles on there a few times and others, the Fresh and Fit podcast.
I think people are looking at that and thinking, okay, we're getting a little out of hand here.
We're getting a little ridiculous.
The average person doesn't agree with the way this is being portrayed or how people are talking on these podcasts.
Can we all just be a little more normal here?
Even my right-wing male friends that I've known for a decade that were in meme groups, they've grown up and they're like, I just don't even know if I'd have anything in common with someone who portrayed themselves as a trad wife.
This is more of an archetype.
It's a LARP.
It's not encapsulating real human beings.
So I hope that as the internet gets more ridiculous, I hope more people will retreat into reality and their real communities and look around and say, okay, this is giving me a better pulse on things than the increasingly live action role play going on in the influencer sphere.
Yeah, you know, it's funny about the trad wife because I, you know, I have traditional values, I guess, but when I looked at that, it looked like porn to me.
I mean, like essentially for real.
Yeah, it essentially looked like, you know, because in the end, I mean, there are new opportunities for women.
I would hate it.
You know, I wanted my wife to be able to take care of our kids when they were at home.
But at some point, I wanted her to, she's a very smart woman.
I wanted her to become all the things she wanted to be.
It's not like I wasn't interested in what apron she was wearing so much.
You know, it's like that's that's that to me always struck me as a crazy thing.
And yet, and yeah, people do sell it hard.
Yeah.
It just doesn't work for a lot of young people, too.
So there's this model that, I mean, maybe it worked in the 50s or something, right?
But we've also, we're in like a new singularity with the internet.
We didn't have Tinder.
We didn't have Bumble.
We didn't have, you know, a mass amount of porn that existed online.
And also we didn't have the economy where you have to have two people working.
So you can try to force, you know, this, You can try to force this to work, but it probably is going to make your life more difficult in a lot of ways because if your wife is going to be a stay-at-home wife, the average person does not have the money to do that right now.
So, we can, maybe that can be an ideal for you, sure, but we got to, we got to get back to reality and out of commentary sphere.
Well, there's also the there's also the fact that when you read the Bible about the perfect wife, she's doing all kinds of things.
She has all these home industries, she's planning, you know, trading land and all this stuff.
And all that disappeared in the Industrial Revolution, which is when feminism got started, because they'd been women had been stripped of their economic power of a home industry, which I think can come back with the internet.
It's just an amazing, there's a lot of small-mindedness that comes in reactivity.
I mean, I think that's it.
People react to the craziness of the left, and then you get stuck with the craziness of the right.
So, so you were working for Rebel Media, and that was a very interesting story in the book.
I mean, you basically found yourself undercut after not doing what they wanted you to do.
Could you describe that a little?
Yeah, there were a few things I had issue with, and I think this is more normal than ever in the political industry now.
But they were having me do petitions, trying to get people to sign various different petitions for videos I was doing.
And I kept asking, where are these petitions going?
And they wouldn't tell me.
And I didn't think they were ever being delivered.
And eventually I found out that they were just collecting people's emails to sell to advertisers, essentially.
And you know, that's a very common thing in the industry, but it didn't, it didn't sit right with me.
So I was like, I'm not going to do fake petitions, right?
And then the next one was a trip to Israel that they wanted me to go on.
And I always wanted to visit Israel.
I always wanted to see the holy sites.
But the issue was they wanted me to fundraise money for a truth-seeking mission when it was already partially paid for, as well as it was a tours where you're getting brought around by someone who is setting up every single interview with the IDF, with these groups.
And listen, I don't have a problem with it, but I just want that to be disclosed to the audience.
I don't want to collect money, say I'm going on a truth-seeking mission when it's already paid for and when it's a guided political tour, right?
And I got fired for that.
And that was really a shocking experience for me.
It was really quite upsetting because I just viewed the industry as something different.
And I don't think this is unique to Rebel whatsoever.
I think, and I don't think it's unique to Israel.
I've been invited on tours of Russia.
I've been invited on tours of various different countries that are paid, you know, influencer paid for.
I actually think that what I experienced at Rebel Media is the norm in the political industry now, where most of the opinions are bought and paid for.
Most of the, you know, cryptocurrencies that are being promoted, like they just had this, Tommy Robinson held this big rally in the United Kingdom called Unite the Kingdom and Elon Musk was there and all these influencers and UTK coin was sponsoring it.
Goes up to $3 million right after the rally.
Fired From Rebel Media00:16:53
Boom, collapses, right?
I think these rug pull scams are the standard in the industry now.
I think collecting emails to sell them is standard in the industry.
It's just kind of become a money.
Truth is a convenient byproduct of making money sometimes, I think.
Well put, yes, and it's certainly true.
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So you've obviously, I mean, one of the things that really took me aback about this book, and the book is called This Is Not Real Life by Lauren Southern.
And I don't mean to, I hope this doesn't sound patronizing.
Most of the time when people write memoirs like this, they're not that good.
And this is really well written.
So you obviously have talent and you obviously had the talent to go viral repeatedly.
When you found yourself fired by rebel media, what happened next?
Oh, I thought I was screwed because I didn't have the confidence or understanding of what I was providing to the company at that point.
I was too young.
I was like 19, 20.
I decided to make a video just with my phone in my living room.
And that ended up going viral as well, which gave me the realization that, oh my goodness, I can do this on my own.
People want to hear what I have to say.
And I'm a little, I don't know if autistic is the right word, but I've just got a personality where I'll say what I'm thinking, even if I'm not supposed to say it in that social situation.
And I don't think I realized at the time how beneficial that was for internet content creation.
Like the less, you know, socially acceptable you are, the more viral you're going to go on the internet.
And that's kind of expanded to people deliberately being anti-partaking in antisocial behavior to go viral.
You saw, I talk about it in the book, you know, when Vine was blowing up, you had the, oh, the Paul brothers setting their couch on fire and throwing it out the window of their house in Hollywood Hills, getting the police called.
Just doing ridiculous stuff would get you so much attention then.
So definitely my personality helped.
I went to Europe.
I covered a lot of the riots going on there, the immigration crisis.
And then I did a film on South Africa and the farm murders.
And that one ended up probably being the most successful project I ever worked on.
It's been a really strange experience because I got banned from probably three or four countries throughout this process, detained countless times, you know, demonetized, kicked off things.
My Wikipedia is just wild.
And now so many of the things I was talking about then are within the normal discourse.
It's like stuff you'll hear come out of the, you know, the vice president's mouth or on Fox News panels all the time.
So it was now we've got, it's a lot of repetition of the content that was coming out in 2016, I think.
And I'm not saying it's better or worse.
It's just, I think the reason that I went so viral at the time was because I was very early to talking about it.
Not that I was the best person talking about it, just one of the few that was willing to take the slings and arrows at the time, mostly because of my own ignorance, mostly because I didn't realize the impact it was going to have on my life, I'll be honest.
I can't even take credit for bravery.
I was as shocked as everyone else when I was getting banned from countries.
What caused you?
What caused you to take on that particular issue?
Oh, I just saw it and I thought this is true.
I think this is true.
And so I'm going to say it out loud.
I'm going to make a video on it.
I think that the immigration crisis in Europe is going to lead to massive cultural clashes.
I grew up in a city called Surrey in Canada.
That's where I was born.
If you are Canadian, you know what I'm talking about.
It's probably one of the highest rates of immigration in the country.
So it was over 50% immigrant population.
And to me, it was never about the racial aspect.
It was the fact that you could go to the local store and not even be able to speak the same language as the people beside you.
And yeah, definitely watching the cultural clash firsthand.
I, as a kid, I was always a little sensitive to it, wondering, like, what is going on?
Why can't I even speak to my neighbors?
Why are my parents moving out of this neighborhood?
And when I saw this happening on a more global scale in other countries and the conversation beginning, I was like, oh, well, I know this.
I know this from when I was a kid back home.
And I think a lot of the things that became large cultural issues were introduced to Canada well before they were to America, like 10 years beforehand, because we're a little more progressive.
So when I was in high school, I was doing social justice 12 classes, the very first ones that were ever introduced.
And my dad was a big Fox News fan.
So to contrast this, I'd be sitting in my house watching Fox News all day, then going to school, getting told how it kind of what you were talking about, where when you have like the crazy left wing and the crazy right wing, it just this pendulum swings back and forth.
I was definitely radicalized both by the left-wing environment I was in at school and by all of the right-wing content I was consuming at home.
I listened to Michael Savage on the radio every day in the morning.
I think I'm the only like eight-year-old Canadian girl that was doing that.
Yeah, probably so.
At what point in this process did you get married?
That was when I was 23 years old.
I had just published a documentary called Borderless.
And I was, I mean, if you read about the experiences I had in the book, the political industry was just really, really nuts.
I had encountered some crime, some, you know, just a really dark underbelly to that world.
And I wanted out.
I wanted to get married.
And I had met a man who said, you know, I want to marry you.
I want to have kids.
I want to go to church together, everything.
I did not.
I was young, naive, stupid, and did not wait long enough.
We were engaged within like five months of dating or something.
And I was just swept off my feet.
This is my prince in shining armor.
And to be fair, I did grow up on the Disney kind of version of romance, that in the movies and in the anime I'd watch and in the television shows.
Like it was everything I dreamed.
And also, I think that your perception of reality gets a bit stunted when you go viral at 19.
So I wasn't necessarily making the wisest decisions, but we got married and he worked in the, he worked for the federal government in a role that required a security clearance, which ended up causing a lot of tension in our relationship.
And he ended up leaving me for that federal security role, among other things.
He claimed that I had ADHD that he couldn't handle, which I do.
You know, I'm not a perfect person to be around.
But my perception growing up evangelical and with more conservative values, not that I always followed them perfectly to any degree, was, you know, when you get married, that is like till death do us part, not till ADHD becomes annoying and security clearance gets, you know, impeded.
And so this blew up, this blew up my worldview and my perception of reality.
I lived with my parents for eight months, started smoking a lot of weed to kind of cope with the pain.
I couldn't sleep.
I spent a year just like begging and trying to get my relationship back together, spent all my money on counseling, you know, all those calls late into the night, please for our kid, let's get back together.
No, no, no, that didn't work.
And I think that, you know, I understand luckily that isn't necessarily the average person's experience of marriage.
I hope not, certainly, that they're left abandoned and begging for their partner to come back.
But I'm kind of in a strange way glad that it happened looking back.
Have you ever read C.S. Lewis' book, The Problem with Pain?
Yeah, sure.
It just talks about their, you know, pain is God's megaphone for a deaf world.
And I think I had a real ego about understanding how the world worked and the decisions people should make.
And then to see my decisions go so spectacularly wrong caused such an introspection.
At first, it was a extreme the other way.
I'm like, I think all this right-wing trad stuff is completely wrong and I need to reanalyze my worldview because either one of two things is true.
Either I can never have the vision, I can never get married again and have that perfect life with the white picket fence, two kids, the husband, or marriage is a lie and till death to us part is a lie and I can still be happy without it.
So it was like very much one or the other for me.
And I talk about going through this in a book.
And I had a, I have a whole chapter on this situationship I have with a left-wing content creator.
We ended up doing MDMA together and just talking about all these different life issues from both left-wing and right-wing perspectives.
We used to debate all the time on the internet.
And that was like a very strange period of my life.
This was a year after my husband had left me.
I was reconsidering everything.
And I almost went, I definitely was very close on the verge of going like full left wing.
Like I'm just rejecting all of this.
But I think real life has stabilized me a little bit.
And I've kind of realized, you know, nothing is perfect.
There's no perfect vision on either side.
Life is complicated and we have some guidelines we can look to.
But life, life is painful for everyone.
And I think politics in a lot of ways does become an expression of so much of what people express publicly as influencers and commentators is them projecting crises they're going on and they're having in their own life to the wider political world.
You'll have people getting into the manosphere that just had a horrible divorce with a woman that was really cruel to them.
And that's where they perceive the entire world now.
And it's easier to project things onto the world and try to fix that than it is to fix their own lives.
I certainly felt that way as well.
Easier to get into politics.
The destruction of the political world was much easier than the destruction of my own home.
So I delved way back into like the political commentary sphere for a while there as well.
But I'm rambling.
Sorry.
No, no, not at all.
Not at all.
I think you're describing something that I think is happening to a lot of people who are not as talented as you are and are having it privately.
I think, you know, you get sucked into a world that actually, when you say, you call your book, this is not real life.
I think that is a perfect description of the internet.
It's not.
It's not real life at all.
We're kind of running close out of time.
And I'd like to hear about this.
Was it called Tenant?
Is that what it was?
The Russian-backed.
How did you get snared in that?
Well, oh my goodness.
I got a call and they asked me if I'd be interested.
I wasn't really that interested at first.
And then they sent me an offer and it was something really reasonable.
It was like at, I'd have to go look at the numbers.
I think it was like 250K US for all operations.
So to set up a studio, to hire someone to help.
It seemed like a very normal wage.
And it also seemed easier than running my own business.
Like I wouldn't have to do the thumbnails.
I wouldn't have to do the editing, which is what I was doing for my own YouTube channel before.
And I figured I could use the stability.
It was a little bit of a compromise on my part in the sense that I, at that point in my life, I was just making political content for the sole purpose of paying for my child's school and my life and my home.
And I always went into politics in the first place as like a true believer and an activist wanting to change the world.
And now I'd found myself the very jaded adult that I met when I was younger that I got so angry about, right?
I did content with them for a year.
No one ever told me about any, you know, Russian funding behind it.
But I won't lie, I was in this really weird position where I had just gotten invited to join a group called the Valdai Society in an email.
And I was sure that it had to be fake, that it had to be Media Matters pretending to be this group or something.
And they were like, we're going to take you on a 30-day first class paid trip to Russia.
You're going to get to stay in the nicest hotels, you know, go to this meeting.
And we're hosting Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
And I'm like, what?
What are you talking about?
Surely this is fake.
So I start looking into that.
And I start looking.
I'm also getting a lot of different invitations to go to Saudi Arabia, Israel again, all these different places that are very obviously governments trying to pay you and hire you.
And on top of this, I have a lot of influencers telling me, hey, the Biden administration have offered me money to make content for them.
You know, this person behind the scenes is paying me to say X, Y, Z.
And I'm starting to get the sense that the entire political space I'm in, particularly with new influencers that are just working on their own on YouTube, is getting bought out secretly behind the scenes.
So I'm getting extremely suspicious.
I look into a trip I did to Russia in 2018.
I didn't end up publishing any of the videos from it because I got such a strange feeling.
And I discover that the guy who took me on that trip got arrested a few years later for being a Chinese spy.
They were trying to get me to do pre-war propaganda in the Donbass.
They wanted me to make a documentary similar to Farmlands exposing the oppression of the Russian people in Donbass to kind of give a prerequisite for war.
And I was, I was legitimately losing my mind at this period.
Have you ever seen Always Sunny in Philadelphia?
Yeah.
You know, like Charlie, when he's doing the Pepe Sylvia thing, I had that like in my, I was going to a counselor and I was like, I think everything is controlled.
I'm losing my mind.
And then I come into my office one day.
I look down at my phone and it's blowing up.
I've got like the New York Times calling me the Associated Press and I see Lauren's a Russian spy headline.
My local paper has pictures of my face saying I'm a Russian spy all over the place.
I don't know what is real anymore.
I don't know if this is an op within an op.
I don't have any of the inner details.
I'm seeing online.
I'm getting thousands of comments in the middle of the night.
You're going to jail, you Russian.
I think I put on makeup every night before bed for two weeks because I was like, I'm going to get arrested.
Oh my God.
I want to look good.
I want to get on mug shotties.
Anyways, eventually it's like three weeks or something have passed.
And I'm like, okay, this is just internet nonsense.
This isn't real.
This is, I don't even know if this is indictment is real.
And then I get a knock on my door while I'm making chicken pot pie and it's CSIS and they take out the badge.
They've got the local RCMP with them.
And they're like, oh, we brought the RCMP.
So you know, we're not pretending to be agents.
And they dismiss them and they ask, can we come in?
And I guess they're like vampires.
And I'd gotten lawyers at this point who had told me, do not talk to them.
Whatever you do, don't talk to them.
And they're like, okay, you won't talk to us.
We'll talk to you.
They sit me down.
We have a conversation and they tell me tons of things about my life.
They're like, we've been, I love that video you made, Lauren.
We know about your sister.
We know about your family.
We know about all your private data.
All the jokes I've ever made about federal agents monitoring my stuff were suddenly significantly less funny because apparently they did have a folder on me and were watching all of my content.
They probably interviewed me for about for a few months there.
They'd be coming over to my place and telling me this is your last chance to comply with us or you're going to go to jail.
I actually secretly recorded my federal agent and released the audio to X a couple months ago.
Probably not the best behavior.
I'm now, I've now been add to the get detained when I travel to Canada or back home lists.
An Hour of Questions00:02:43
So that's nice.
I get brought in for an hour or two every time I come back home.
But where was I going with this?
Right.
I ended up deciding not to work with them.
I said, no, I think you're lying to me.
I think you're manipulating me.
I don't think you have anything on me.
If you did, you would have arrested me by now.
I think that you're just trying to get me to become an informant for no reason other than you think you can psychologically manipulate me at this moment.
And, you know, in a normal environment, I probably would be happy to help them understand the political dynamic and everything, but this isn't a normal dynamic.
I think that they were doing all of this for political reasons.
I get called out to Ottawa and told I have to testify in front of a council of government officials.
They fly me out there.
I do, I'm supposed to do this two-hour testimony.
And the entire time I knew it, I was so right.
I was like, I think my government is just using this for political reasons.
I don't think they actually care about foreign influence.
If they did, they'd be more concerned about the massive Chinese influence in my country.
We do this giant government hearing panel.
The entire time they're asking me, why are you a bigot?
Why are you a sexist?
Why are you a racist?
None of it has anything to do with tenant media.
And I was thanking my lucky stars that I didn't end up working with the feds.
Got home, had a big cry, wrote about it in my book, and decided to get off the internet for a while to restabilize my sense of reality.
And the feds have not contacted me since, thankfully.
And this is actually my first interview since any of this happened.
Well, I'm honored.
I'm honored.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how to, I don't know if I'll do very many.
Maybe I'll do one or two a year or something.
I'm still trying to analyze how much time I want on the internet.
You know, I'm out of time.
I'm out of time, but can people buy this book on Amazon and so forth?
Yeah, you can find it on Amazon.
This is not real life.
I think laurensouthern.net also, I think, has the book and a little profile about me.
But yeah.
It's a wild story.
Check it out.
It is a wild story.
It really is.
You can get it from your library too, I'm sure.
Well, anyway.
You don't have to pay for it.
It is very nice to meet you face to face.
And I hope things go better for me.
All I can say.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it, Lauren.
Thanks.
Incredible story.
This is not real life.
Lauren Southern.
As I say, you know, everybody who does any kind of public work gets a lot of crazy stuff.
But women, and especially if you're watching this, you can see Lauren's a very pretty girl.
They just get, it's awful.
It is awful.
I was reading stuff in here and I was thinking, how could anybody treat anybody like this?
But anyhow, it's a hell of a story and a really interesting look at the internet.
And if you want an even more interesting look at the internet, come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.