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Nov. 24, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
29:20
Lauren Southern and the Russians

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Hey, everyone.
I hope you're well.
It's a little bit late here, but I guess I'm up.
And I just dove into a rabbit hole involving Lauren Southern and her recent testimony in the Canadian Parliament over the tenant media affair.
Now, Lauren Southern has...
I've been on radio silence for a number of months now, ever since the indictment by the DOJ was issued.
And the indictment was of Russian nationals who were involved with the Kremlin, who were sort of former RT producers, who after RT was banned...
With the invasion of Ukraine, decided to, I guess, go rogue in a certain way.
That's probably not the best way to describe it.
But who decided to hire a bunch of independent contractors.
Now, Loren was sort of mid-range in terms of notoriety, in terms of these contractors.
There was Dave Rubin, there was Tim Poole.
There were a couple of people I had never heard of.
I had certainly heard of Southern and Lauren Chen and the bigger names.
Benny Johnson.
That was a big one as he is connected with Turning Point USA and rubbing shoulders with Trump and so on.
At least one or two degrees of separation.
I think he might have even been.
I don't know.
Been to Mara Larga multiple times, written on Trump Force One.
Who knows?
Sorry, my dog is trying to get in on the act.
He has some commentary, so he's right here.
The whole thing, her testimony, the whole thing is fascinating.
And it gets at the general strategy of Russia, which...
Is not so much to promote on-the-nose Russian propaganda.
Not so much to have commentators out there saying Russia's good, Russia's innocent, the special military operation is justified, etc.
That's almost too on-the-nose.
Though you can, of course, find people who will do that, paid or connected to the Kremlin or not.
The strategy seems to be, and this is very similar to what they were doing with RT, the strategy seems to be to sort of promote everything.
It's the spaghetti against the wall strategy of just throw up a bunch of nonsense, see what sticks.
That was what RT would do.
RT, back in the day, would have me on there.
They'd have Alex Jones.
They'd have a guy talking about UFOs.
They'd have a Marxist leftist.
They'd have a Buddhist.
They'd have a pagan.
They'd have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it was sort of, and I would say at the time that I was going on there, which was between 2011 and 2016, it was mostly leftist, you could say.
If it had any sort of discernible bent, it was towards the left.
Now, what can they do?
Now, in the age of Trump, it's promote conspiracy theories, promote stolen election stuff, promote protests against lockdowns and vaccines.
Anything that can jam up the works, anything that is seen as divisive, chaotic, anti-government, conspiratorial, they are into it.
The fact that they were doing Tenet Media, that Tenet Media was sort of grassroots, bottom-up, but also was only a few steps away from President Trump.
Fascinating stuff.
I've talked a lot about this on the Substack, and you can go look at that.
Well, I just listened to...
Lauren Southern's testimony, I listened to her opening statement in Canadian Parliament.
That's available on Twitter.
And I actually had to drive a little bit, so I just listened to the Q&A session.
And I would say this, just to get the conversation started.
I think Lauren Southern's strategy, her demeanor, and her Her attitude towards these lawmakers, her attitude towards the Canadian police, which she revealed in this testimony,
is insane.
And I think it's going to get her in a lot of trouble.
It is unnecessary.
It reminds me of this old line that someone said about Bill Clinton, he would lie when the truth would do.
Unnecessary lying.
I think she showed unnecessary antagonism.
And she refused any sort of self-reflection or not necessarily admission of guilt or anything like that, but a sort of sense of, well, wow, maybe chills went down my spine when this indictment came out,
that I was this close to a geopolitical She didn't show any of that.
I think that would have been very good for her.
That would have helped her out, actually.
Instead, she presented herself as the only one with integrity.
Which is just funny, actually, how ridiculous that is.
And I imagine that some Lawrence Southern fans, if there are any, still...
Or people who sort of resonate with rebel media or that type of thing, or tenant media, conservatives, they might think that this is a great thing, that she just, you know, spoke truth to power,
something like that, never backed down a step.
Lauren Southern is in a tremendous amount of water.
She's in a boiling pot.
The idea that she would act this way strikes me as insane, as delusional, as needlessly divisive.
And she's going to, in a way, encourage the authorities to crack down on her because she didn't show any sense of responsibility.
So her defense was basically that no one watched our videos anyway.
Tenant Media, it takes time to build up an audience.
And Tenant Media was slowly but surely getting pretty big.
After all, they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these videos.
And if you just start out on YouTube, even if your content is really good, you might get dozens of views.
No one knows it's out there.
It's one of those paradoxes of the network effect, of how do you begin?
And the fact is, they were making a good start at having a media company and getting a ton of views and developing an audience.
Cut short by the federal government of the United States.
And then it was banned from YouTube and so on.
And so she makes this argument of no one was watching our videos anyway.
But then, because she is...
You know, she thinks highly of herself.
She talks about how she speaks for the real Canadian people and how she has so much integrity and how she's the first one out there saying these things and other people follow later.
And so on and so on.
And she sort of brags a bit about her own stardom in the media landscape.
So it's contradictory.
It would be one thing if, say, there was some totally unknown and irrelevant professor who's a Russophile, and he's writing articles that no one reads about Russia,
and the Kremlin, you know, just because they're flattered, maybe they pity him a bit, throw him 500 bucks a month, who could genuinely say that even if this were illegal, this had no impact?
You can't make that argument if you're also bragging about the amazing documentaries you made and how millions of people watch your stuff and love you.
It's just inherently contradictory.
She also bragged about how she had total control.
Now, there was an editor that she revealed that was Russian.
And so she mentioned that.
So again, it's this kind of contradiction.
It's like, okay, you might very well write your own script or speak extemporaneously or so on, but the editor is the key.
There's a final word.
Someone has the final word on what goes up, what gets cut out, etc.
And it's not you.
So again, you're not really helping yourself.
She kept stressing how she wants creative control, but again, that's irrelevant.
Because the way that the people in Canadian Parliament think, and I think this is the correct way to think about it, is that they are finding voices that are already or are inclined to amplify what they want to amplify.
And they're going to cultivate these voices.
And maybe on occasion...
They will kind of force them to do something.
There was something in the indictment where one of these sort of players in the scheme was asked to retweet Tucker Carlson videos.
And these Tucker Carlson videos were with him.
And they're notorious at this point.
They're him at a Russian grocery store.
And he's basically saying, isn't this amazing how inexpensive it is?
The fresh Russian bread.
Oh, you can't get this in America.
They must love their country.
So he objected to this because he was like, look, this just feels too much like propaganda.
This is too on the nose.
I would rather not retweet it.
He did retweet it a day later or something, but he hesitated.
So they will, at some point in this relationship, make you do something.
That's the whole point.
They like what you're doing already.
You're already promoting their views and they can call on you, if need be, to promote something.
They can call on you in the future, something you can't even foresee at the moment.
They're going to call on you.
That's why they cultivate you as an asset.
Lauren is either oblivious to this or she is trying to deny it because that would sort of wound her ego.
Her sense of herself is the only one with integrity.
And so she keeps bragging about how she's the truly independent one and everyone should add her on the back.
It's Lauren that has been, you know, it's an indictment, so it's allegations, you know, guilty towards proven innocent, but it's Lauren who's clearly the one involved in this.
She talks about, and this is what I think is pretty interesting, she talks about Her personal relationship with Lauren Chen and Liam, who's Lauren Chen's very curious husband.
Now, Liam doesn't have a social media profile or an internet profile that I could find.
I mean, I don't have tools to do super deep dives.
I just use Google.
But it was very hard to find information on this guy.
There are a couple of photos of him with Lauren Chen smiling.
He's a curious person.
I think it's Liam Donovan, if I remember correctly.
A name like that.
And he has this, you know, Anglo name, but then a very swarthy-looking person.
It's like his face and demeanor doesn't quite fit the name.
Now, that can, of course, easily explain, but it is just rather odd.
Who is this person?
Where did he acquire this name?
I'm just going to let my dog out real quick.
It's starting to bother me while I try to record this.
But Lauren Southern claims to have known Lauren Chen for a decade.
They were besties of some kind.
Now she claims that she had no knowledge that this was a Russian operation, and that, you know, it's fair enough.
How much research do you do when someone's just throwing money at you?
It's cold, hard cash across the barrel.
Are you really going to ask too many questions or are you going to simply take it?
I think that's reasonable.
That argument would seem more reasonable if Lauren Southern wasn't so combative with everyone who talked to her and she wasn't claiming, bragging about her own integrity.
It's just...
Unbelievable, actually.
A couple of other things.
So she was paid $100,000, is what she claimed.
She had $100,000 US of take-home pay.
And she had a quarter of a million dollar budget.
So she was able to pay this out to editors, videographers, sets, etc.
Now, Lauren...
I mean, look, $100,000 is not $100 million.
I get it.
But I think most fair commentators would conclude that Lauren is pretty stupid.
And just the idea that she's getting a $100,000 contract is, I don't know, sort of suspicious in itself.
It's a bit much.
That is a big budget.
That isn't a shoestring operation.
This isn't like, you know, we'll give you $200 a video, which is, imagine what she was getting at Rebel Media or something.
This isn't like we're fighting some young person.
It's all shoestring.
They're living with roommates.
They just want the exposure.
We can pay them little.
It's not that.
It was actually a salary that you can easily live on.
And I don't know.
It's just...
I don't think that's going to help her.
She mentioned a couple of other things.
So when she interviewed Dugan and...
I think she interviewed Dugan with Brittany Pettibone in 2018.
She mentioned that she flew herself out there and that she sort of arranged the whole meeting.
But once she was there...
That she was contacted by Russian officials and they wanted her to do a documentary on the Donbass.
So again, you see this.
They're setting up the invasion by claiming that Russians are being oppressed in the Donbass, etc.
So we need to save the minority population.
Very interesting.
She said she didn't like that and she removed some videos from YouTube that she had posted.
I don't know.
I don't know when she did that.
It's interesting, but it just sort of raises other suspicions of you were in contact with these people just immediately.
What are some other tidbits here?
there are a couple more things that I wanted to mention.
I can't think of them right now.
But the whole thing is worth looking into.
Oh, this is a big tidbit, actually.
So she mentions that she was contacted by the, I forgot what it's called in Canada, it's like CIS or something.
It's basically the FBI of Canada, in effect, and that they came to her home and she was trying to, you know, cook for her.
She claims that they said something to the effect of, you know, you've got a nice life here.
It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
Like, we might throw you in prison.
And she was saying that they were trying to shake her down to be an informant to the federal government.
I mean, this is what I would say to Lauren.
You should probably take that deal.
I mean, are you really going to be thrown into prison on behalf of Lauren Shedd?
Unless you're guiltier than even I imagine, and so you're just being standoffish and not giving them any information.
I mean, this is a real thing.
This is a clear situation in which a geopolitical rival is paying journalists to...
Create their own content and sort of sing a tune.
Maybe a tune that these journalists are already singing, but sing a particular tune.
So a much, much better strategy would be to fall on your sword a little bit.
Say, I didn't fully know what I got into, but the moment that indictment dropped, it sent chills down my spine.
Lauren Chen, do you ever really know a person?
Is someone working behind your back in a way?
I want to cooperate with the Canadian government to the best of my abilities so that this will never happen again and that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.
It's so easy to be cooperative.
So either she is treating this like a
to...
I don't know, get publicity as someone fighting against the government or something?
She's so deluded in that conservative mentality that this is how she understands her predicament.
Or she is quite guilty, and so she is just basically not going to answer anything.
Lauren Chen had, on this kind of scale, Lauren Chen basically took the fifth.
There's the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment in Canada.
You can't testify against yourself.
So she just refused to answer questions.
Lauren Southern was answering them in just a horrible way.
If these people think that you take no responsibility, that you think you're the only one with integrity and they're the guilty ones, they're going to take place.
I don't understand.
Does she not think that this is a big deal?
I mean, this is not some liberal journalist being a jerk.
This is you are potentially involved with treasonous activity.
You could be sent away for the rest of your life, potentially.
I don't know.
The punishment for treason is death.
Maybe not in Canada, but...
You get the drift.
It could be very, very bad if they are able to prove that Lauren Southern knew exactly what was going on and either shrugged, oh yeah, it's kind of fun, or even supported the efforts to undermine Canada.
That is very bad.
This isn't just some, like...
You gotta pay a parking ticket or something.
This is very bad for her, and I don't know why she acted like this.
I think it's just her personality, and I think she's basically delusional.
So, anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter.
You know, I find it hard to answer questions on this, because it's a chat.
But if anyone wants to ask a question, I will, in the time that I...
I'm willing to do this.
So you can ask one there if you want.
No questions.
You guys just want to listen to me talk.
Okay, fair enough.
All right, just some thoughts.
I hope you enjoy these.
These are kind of easy to do, and I might do more of them.
The lack of interaction is what I don't like.
I always like someone to push back a little bit.
What Canadian law would Lauren be subject to?
Ricardo asked that.
I don't know the exact answer to it.
I would imagine there are all of these analogies, but a conspiracy to undermine democracy or undermine the government?
There's simply FARA laws.
You cannot, in the United States, I presume there's some parallel in Canada, you can't act on behalf of a foreign country and be compensated for it without registering.
Yeah, so you can be a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia.
I presume you can't be a lobbyist for Russia at this point, since they've been declared an adversary.
I don't know the exact details of that.
But you could be a lobbyist for Italy, you could be a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, but you have to register as such.
You can't just be walking around, you know, shaking hands, doing interviews, etc., getting paid by a foreign government and not report it.
Sounds like it would be hard to prosecute, Ricardo.
No, it sounds like it would be easy to prosecute.
I don't know.
According to the document, they've got the goods, so no.
The woman I saw there, I don't know.
It's her own personality that she reacts to these things in the way that she did.
But the woman I saw there struck me as just...
Outright delusional.
She also mentioned that she's sort of, she's mentioned that she's leaving social media because it's not real anymore.
There are too many bots and it's unhealthy.
I mean, fair enough.
It's hard to disagree with that.
But she sort of claimed that she was leaving media.
She just wants to be a regular citizen.
I don't know.
She's claimed that before.
Anyway, I will just leave it here.
Unless someone asks a really quick question.
No. All right.
I'll just sign off for here.
It's getting late.
There are some very crude comments that are showing up in there.
You don't think a free speech offense would be effective for her in court?
I think it...
Yeah. Okay.
Let me go back to what I was saying.
Her defense of, I was simply hired, I didn't ask enough questions, and I expressed my opinion.
I do think that that is a fairly good defense.
If you're going to make it, you've got to make sure that the prosecutors feel like you're on their team.
And that you're cooperating.
That you are...
Scandalized by this, embarrassed, shocked, saddened by all of this, and that you want to help out.
If she is going to be hostile towards the government, she reported to the government that she was hostile to the FBI equivalent of Canada.
That strikes me, they're going to punish you for doing that.
If you're innocent, or even more or less innocent, Why would you take that posture?
Why not just work with them?
They've got the goods on this.
It just strikes me as insane and delusional.
And she just can't help herself or she thinks that this is what you should do or this will gain you traction.
She also said, I should have mentioned this earlier, but I'll mention this now.
So she repeated a phrase that I imagine her lawyer gave her, which is that...
I was totally unaware of what was revealed in the indictment.
Now, many of the things that were revealed in the indictment, she was aware of because there were text group chats and things like that.
But I found that legalese interesting.
Now, she's under oath.
She's testifying.
She can't lie.
That would expose her to more jeopardy.
She's lying to Parliament.
But I guess it raises the question, it's kind of like, well, fair enough, you didn't know what was in that indictment.
Well, what do you know, Lauren?
Why did you say that?
It just, I understand you have to use legalese, and she's been counseled to do that, but it just struck me as suspicious.
Again, she starts attacking the disinformation.
She's like, you've spread disinformation because you claim that Dave Rubin had millions of followers.
Well, on Tenet, he didn't have millions of followers.
That was only independently that he had millions.
It's like she's splitting hairs, basically.
And I don't see the point of it.
And it seems a way of distracting from the real issue.
Carl said, Richard, what do you mean when you said in an interview about their mating?
Oh, that's about something else.
Trudeau collapsed soon.
Did she know who Edward Gregorian was?
Yeah, it's a good question.
We'll have to get into details.
I mean, the answer is no to that, but she seemed to know something.
Do you think both Lauren's careers are over at this point?
Yeah. I don't know how anyone could take them seriously.
I mean, particularly Lauren Chen.
Because Lauren Chen was, this was her company.
She was the owner of the company.
I mean, I don't know how Lauren Chen is going to get out of this.
Now, Lauren Southern is one degree removed, at least apparently.
But can anyone take Lauren Southern seriously?
The problem for Lauren is that she's not as well known as Dave Rubin or Benny Johnson.
They had much bigger contracts.
They were all paid more.
But they have more contacts.
They can be independent.
They have other people there to support them.
I would imagine they might even throw Lauren Southern under the bus.
But anyway, Lauren Southern has been so tedious that she's begun to just annoy the hell out of me, to be honest, over the past few years.
So yeah, bye-bye to the Laurens.
All right, guys.
So 75 joined, and I imagine maybe there's more than that with the churn.
So that's good.
All right.
More can watch this later.
All right, guys.
I will talk to you later.
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