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Aug. 19, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:45
3385 Black Lives Matter Strikes Again | Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, here with fiery Canadian rebel media personality and reporter Lauren Southern.
She's a journalist and a commenter, and has become known for her on the ground, if not sometimes in your face coverage, of the Vancouver Slut Walk, the Kali Jungle Migrant Camp, and now the Milwaukee Riots.
You can find her information at therebel.media slash Lauren Southern, just like it sounds, we'll put the links below, and on twitter.com.
Lauren, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for having me.
So some of my audience is going to know who you are and some of them are not.
So for the majority, I assume, who don't know who you are, perhaps tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the somewhat exciting field of information passage that you're in.
Oh gee, how did I get into it?
Well, I was a student in British Columbia for a while studying political sciences.
I was always a massive news junkie, loved political books, and that was always what I wanted to do.
I got asked to contribute for the Rebel Media about a year and a half ago, and I made a video called Why I'm Not a Feminist, and it blew up.
First video I ever made for YouTube.
Got over a million hits and since then I've been making content trying to do a little more learning on the ground stuff lately because I like that a lot more.
I'm not a professor.
I'm not a massive academic so I really have enjoyed doing more on the ground investigative stuff in Europe and now Milwaukee where people can sort of learn with me.
So for those of you who are in America or other places who don't know about British Columbia, just think of California North.
You know, it's fairly lefty.
I spent some time out in Vancouver for business and other reasons.
And lovely place.
The visuals are beautiful.
You've got the ocean.
You've got the mountains.
The city is lovely.
But boy, it's a little bit on the lefty side.
Was that your experience too?
Oh, yeah.
Well, most of Canada is on the lefty side.
I mean, other than Alberta, even though they just voted in the NDP, you're not going to find very many conservatives here, which is why The Rebel has done so well, because we've really hit a niche with the only conservative journalism in Canada, other than maybe the National Post, of course.
Right.
Now, your approach is to, I guess it could be Loosely characterized as leaving the studio, getting out into the real world and meeting the flesh people.
Was that something that you had decided to do pretty early on?
Was that something that evolved as you developed your skills?
That was definitely something that evolved.
You know, I kind of had to realize that I am not going to be able to be an educator on a lot of topics because I am so young.
So I'm going to have to go out and see things firsthand and have people learn with me.
So it's going to be something I'm going to be trying to do more often.
And I loved it ever since I went to Europe and got to discover what was going on in Calais with the migrant crisis firsthand.
You know, some of your videos that were actually a bit of an inspiration for that as well.
You did one on Aristotle, I believe, talking about getting first-hand knowledge instead of taking second-hand knowledge and just rewriting everyone else's articles, rewriting everyone else's books, but rather getting it for yourself and seeing it first-hand.
So that's something that's probably I've really, really been into the last five months.
So let's talk about what happened for you when you went to the migrant camps, what the original thesis was and what you found on the ground.
Well, you know, the whole thing has been played off as the Syrian refugee crisis.
And we went to some of these camps, the ones that we were allowed in, that is.
They wouldn't let us into Tempelhof, one of the largest refugee camps in Germany.
They completely ignored our media requests.
So we didn't get to go to that one.
We got to go around the outside a bit.
But we went to a couple of other ones and also the Calais jungle in France.
And when we went in there, what we discovered was, well, All young men, all fighting-aged men, and no Syrians.
Where were the Syrians?
We couldn't find any.
I found one Syrian the entire time I was in the Kalei jungle.
And all these guys, when you spoke to them, they were economic migrants.
I mean, the right had been saying this for a while, that these were all economic migrants and men that just wanted to come to better situations, but they were hopping from country to country, which makes you no longer a refugee at all.
They wanted money.
They wanted jobs.
They weren't there to escape war.
And, you know, it's so funny, because when I was there, you had other journalists there as well, and they were just filming the three kids that were in the area.
They were just filming, getting their narrative going, right?
And I wanted to see it firsthand, because who knows, the right could have been exaggerating, the left could have been right about it, but went to see it firsthand, and the right was right.
Well, generally, you know the right is right when it's not reported on by the media, because when the media finds when the right is wrong, it's, you know, 72-point font in your face, flaming hypertext.
We won't stop if it's on a loop on your cell phone.
They'll implant it in your brain.
They'll visit you in your dreams to point out when the right is wrong.
That's one of my gauges, although, of course, having the on-the-ground experiences is pretty positive as well.
And then, of course, you were down...
I've talked about it a little bit, but if you can give us the backstory for what went on and what you experienced down there, which was shocking but exciting as well.
For sure.
Well, I'm sure you know, of course, Seville Smith was shot on Saturday by a police officer, a black police officer, who was defending himself because Seville Smith allegedly had a gun, pointed it at the officer, had extended clip, and I believe stole 500 rounds of ammo.
And the officer obviously shot him.
I mean, this guy is a family he wants to get home to.
And Black Lives Matter, Nation of Islam, Antifa, all these different groups went into this community.
And Sherman, plus members of the community, and started riots in the area against the alleged murder, what they were calling it, of Seville Smith.
And, of course, the media has just been playing this as a completely different story.
You saw CNN recently.
They showed a clip of Seville Smith's cousin saying, we need to stop the violence, the riots in our community.
And that was the clip that CNN played.
And then later, you see the full clip that wasn't on CNN. She continues her sentence saying, we need to bring this violence and burning and destruction to white neighborhoods.
The media just wasn't portraying it the way things were.
So I got a ticket with my cameraman, and we went down because, quite frankly, you can't get the whole story from mainstream media anymore.
I know that's so cliche, the MSN, the, what do they call it, lamestream media, right?
That's so cliche.
But it's true.
A lot of them don't tell the whole story.
And thank heavens for that, because the worse they are at their job, the more people will come to us.
But sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So we got down there Monday in the morning, went and did some interviews.
Things had cooled down quite a bit by then, but of course there were still, that's when they brought in riot police.
That's when they had shut down most of the park.
They had army vehicles there.
And walking through the streets when we got there initially, there were still bullet shells on the ground.
And it was just a surreal, surreal area to be in to see the burnt down buildings around the area and kind of the aftermath.
And that evening when we got there, they still had a large group of people crowding around the area.
It started with songs and kumbaya, and it started with barbecue and everything, but as soon as all the parents, the people with jobs, the good people in the community who wanted peace started going home to get to sleep, that's when all the young people were left outside.
This is all the young people and the instigators, so Black Lives Matter, Nation of Islam, And Antifa and a bunch of young people.
And that's where the problems start.
And I assume that's where they started the other nights as well.
Yeah, and you were pointing out that there are bored young men.
You know, bored young men, of course, have been the source of a few societal challenges all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
Men who don't get, I guess you could say, roped into jobs and marriage and fatherhood and so on.
You know, young men have an excess of testosterone and when bored...
Their thoughts often drift toward the planet mayhem, and of course the civilizing aspect of certain societal structures, family and work, don't tend to catch as many young men as they used to, and it does give them, you know, a lot of excess energy, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, and it just takes perhaps the right demagogues to come along and point it in negative direction.
Now that was only half the problem was the bored young men.
I have a feeling you can guess what the other half of the problem was though.
Well, I would say media egging them on, instigators coming in from outside the community and riling people up, that sort of stuff.
That's another bit, but single mothers and illegitimacy.
You think me of all people would have got that one in my sleep.
I wake up in the morning, single mothers!
So yes, I appreciate you pointing that out.
So let's break that down a little bit.
Just by the way, we just did this research on this.
Milwaukee leads the nation to In black kids growing up without a father, 83% of the families have kids outside of wedlock.
So, yay Milwaukee, but go on.
Well, this is what I was being told by people on the ground.
You know, there are some really good people in that community that are raising kids with the family intact, and they know exactly what is going on.
They know this is a symptom of single motherhood, of illegitimacy.
I was talking to a mother there just two nights ago, and she was telling me that it's kids raising kids that aren't married.
So you've got parents that aren't that much older than their kids because they had They were having sex in high school without protection.
A lot of them had kids this generation, and they don't know how to parent.
So they actually, a lot of these kids, they weren't just young kids, they were parents rioting with their kids.
They brought their kids to the riots.
And this is what the whole community told me, that all the kids that were out there, they weren't the kids that had the parents that were together.
They weren't just bored young men.
These were the bored kids with their bored parents going out and rioting.
That was probably one of the saddest things I heard.
Well, that is, of course, you see this on Maury at times, you know, there's this phenomenon where it's a black grandmother and it's like, well, wait a minute, no wrinkles, no white hair, no stooped shoulders or anything like that.
And of course, it is frustrating for people within the black community that this is happening because when the media portrays, you know, all these riots and Black Lives Matter activists and so on, the tendency can be for people outside the situation who aren't, you know, boots on the ground like you are.
To think that that somehow represents the black community as a whole.
And of course, it's much more complex than that.
And if we think that people outside the community have problems with these kind of activists and riots, I can't even imagine what it must be like for the people inside the black community must be far more frustrated with these kinds of goings on than people outside the community who are seeing it through that lens of the media.
And you know what?
Those were a lot of the people that I got the interviews with, because the people that were involved in the riots and violence, they were just, get out of my face.
I don't want to be on camera, right?
It was the people that were frustrated that were coming up to me that were saying, I cannot believe this is happening.
I had one young man tell me...
He's like, yeah, we can't trust the government to solve our problems.
We can't trust white people to solve our problems.
First of all, we've been tricked into voting Democrat.
They haven't fixed a damn thing in this community, he was telling me.
And we've been tricked into blaming white people.
We've got to focus internally.
So there are definitely people that understand what's going on.
They understand the core of the issue.
But...
How do you solve that?
As one person in your community that's been basically self-educated, how do you solve that when everyone else is going through this school education, when most of the people in your community have been indoctrinated to vote Democrat, when most of the people in your community are the product of illegitimacy?
It's difficult.
They don't even know the first steps to take.
Well, you know, I think that the solution may, to some degree, come from activism insofar as we need to get the facts out about why particular communities of every ethnicity are going through significant dysfunctions and decay, particularly the family institution.
I think we want to get that information out front and center and then let math do the work because, at some point, the money simply won't be there to fund all of this irresponsible procreation We're good to go.
Absolutely.
You know what was a fascinating thing I was told?
I can't say this was 100% factual because this was just a word of mouth told to me, but I brought two guys with me that had concealed carry permits because we weren't about to walk through that community without being armed.
And they lived in that area.
They grew up in Milwaukee.
And they were saying they had a friend who worked doing the IQ testing in the area of Sherman Park.
That was his job.
He went and collected all the data for it.
And he said when they brought it back, they actually boosted all the IQs in the community so that they would have to pay less in mental disability welfare and so that they wouldn't be deemed racist.
And so that was a, I don't know if that was 100% the truth, but that's what I was told by people who lived in the community, that they had been boosting up these things, that they wouldn't have to put as much money in the community, and so they wouldn't be called racist, right?
Which I found was a very, very interesting factor.
So a lot of these democratic policies of coddling really aren't helping that much.
Oh, it is absolutely brutal.
And we just had Dinesh D'Souza on, who's made a film about this history of racism within the Democrat Party.
And it downgrades the entire community to say, you need our help.
You can't make it on your own.
And we're just going to give you all of these resources.
And without effort, without recompense, that's how you treat children.
That's not how you treat independent and sovereign adults.
And I think this We're just talking about the black community.
It happens in other communities, too.
But this frustration when the government comes in and starts handing out money, the community loses control of the self-policing of its members that is so essential for civilization.
When I was a kid, single moms were kind of looked down on, were kind of scorned.
And way back in the day, when you had the churches and charities and friendly societies dealing with these kinds of issues...
There would be a lot of penalization for irresponsible behavior in order to minimize the social costs of single mothers and their offspring down the road.
Now when the government starts taking over and handing the money, the control is taken away.
From the community and the elders lose out and all of the accumulated wisdom of the elders within the community doesn't exist anymore because they can't enforce anything because the money flows to irresponsible people regardless of the wishes of the community.
That kind of helplessness, I've experienced it in my own life where you want people to do better but they're getting money from the government so they don't need to listen to you at all or anyone for that matter and the government doesn't particularly care.
They're not going by and visiting and trying to help people that way.
It's just a check that comes in the mail.
That community loss of control over wayward members creates such a vicious cycle of increased dependence on the state and growth of the state that it's almost impossible to overemphasize it.
Well, that was one of the major things I was told as well by every single person I interviewed.
They were saying there's no discipline.
Traditional values have been completely wiped out, largely because of this popular culture that has been pushed on almost all young communities of This thug life.
They were saying a lot of the focus in this community wasn't even to get a job or to be successful, but to look rich.
You don't even have to be rich just to look rich.
That was the focus.
This is what a lot of them were telling me.
And a lot of focus on the friend parent, having the cool friend parent that will go and hang out with you.
All these things that are promoted in popular culture to the black community as positive things have been detrimental to them.
They have been just eating at the very core of this community and destroying it.
And this is not an entirely unconscious process.
I mean, back in 1965, LBJ is reported to have said, Basically, with the institution of the welfare state, well, we're basically going to be buying the Negro vote.
I think he may have used a slightly different term, but he's going to be buying the Negro vote for the next 200 years.
And this isn't particularly frustrating, as I've talked about in a recent video, because of how well the black community was doing in the post-war period.
And of course, you know, racism and so on were far greater issues than they are today, when you had black poverty being cut by 50%, when you had massive Influxes of blacks into middle class and professional positions, there was this renaissance that was occurring in the post-war period, and then you get the welfare state, and you can see, you know, the arc of the ball of progress just starts to begin to...
Go down and now we've got the situation which is so different from the original post-war trajectory for blacks that I mean I get tortured with the road not taken because I can see it very clearly in my mind what could have happened versus what did happen and all the effects of that.
Well they had a higher marriage rate than whites before all these policies were brought in.
Once the Democrats started subsidizing single motherhood in black communities that's when it started going straight down.
Have you ever read Ann Coulter's book mugged on this?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, but go ahead.
I mean, I'm a big fan of hers, and her books are fantastic, so that's recommended for people.
I wouldn't talk a little bit about some of her arguments in that.
Well, that's basically, she goes through, in the first few chapters of the book, as you know, she goes through all of the policies that Democrats brought in, and all of this bigotry of low expectations that Democrats brought in, and the stats showing the decline in We're good to
go.
And it was just, it was fascinating to read that and to see the results because, you know what, you can kind of imagine there are pictures that they've shown of the black community before the 50s of all these young black men in suits with young black girls in dresses at the ball looking very, what's the, aristocratic, right?
And as soon as you got that, as soon as you brought in all these democratic policies, that dream was gone, that dream was taken away from them.
Now, do you think that the narrative is beginning to shift?
I have a bit of a habit of believing it's later on in the process than it is, because I think we're significantly ahead of the curve of most people.
Nonetheless, I do feel, Lauren, that it's beginning to shift a little bit.
And this one may be an important turning point, because...
You know, Milwaukee is, you know, significantly black, largely run by blacks, has been a Democrat enclave for many, many years.
It was a black shooting a black who pulled, allegedly, as you say, pulled out a gun on a black officer.
To pin this on white racism seems like such an insane reach.
You need, like, extended tentacle rubber man arms to get there.
And so I think that there was this immediate, ah, it's white racism, and then as the facts come out, and it just is as far from white racism as you can imagine, does it seem that people are beginning to have much more skepticism when these inevitable election-year race-baiting stories come out?
Self-educated people, certainly.
People maybe on the wider scale, certainly, within these small communities, no.
They've got their narrative.
They've...
They've got their thing to be angry about.
They don't care about the facts.
The facts are not important to them.
The anger is important to them.
The hatred is important to them.
It's something that has been brewing for a long time.
And it's not their fault.
I don't blame a lot of these young people because it has been ingrained in them by the media.
When you have sites like Everyday Feminism releasing articles that say And this is a site that people use it for as news, right?
And it says black people or cops are trained to shoot and kill black people at night and lie about it.
That is a real article on everyday feminism.
When these kids are truly taught that, and I spoke to one young man who was yelling that, I know all these cops want to kill me.
He was saying this.
I look at them.
I can see it in their eyes.
They want to kill me right now.
They want to shoot me so badly, but they can't because their boss told them they can't.
They genuinely believe this because of the media, because of Al Sharpton, because of all the race-baiting that has gone around.
And once you've got that misguided kid that has no father in his life, no guidance, he's poor, the education isn't the best there, And he's got this anger and someone to blame it on.
It's real hard to change that around.
It's real hard to change that around.
Unfortunately, I doubt that this young man is going to just turn on your show one day and listen and be enlightened, right?
He's got more important things to do in his life.
It's following the thug life, getting these things that are deemed important in their community, which, unfortunately, education and all these traditional values, getting married, Those aren't important anymore in that community.
I can't really pin it on these kids because they aren't doing it consciously.
They aren't choosing to reject these things consciously.
It's been a thing that's been happening for a while through the media, through their parents that made bad decisions as well.
It was very, very sad to see because I can hardly be mad.
I can hardly be mad at them.
No, I was a socialist when I was a teenager because I'd been raised in government schools and that's what I was taught.
And, you know, I believe the world is round.
I haven't seen it from space.
But, you know, you do have to take a certain amount of what your society says and you can be skeptical to some degree.
But if you become a crazy skeptic, you can't even get out of your room because maybe it's not even a roommate.
Maybe you have to at some point accept certain things.
And yeah, I think that these kids are largely victims of propaganda.
And yeah, I saw the video.
We'll link to that below, that young man.
That is such a wildly different perspective.
Like he's itching to shoot me.
He'd really love to shoot me.
I mean, and this idea that black youths are hunted and that there's just this hatred of the blacks.
That is, you know, that kind of perspective is either going to have to be ameliorated through some sort of facts and evidence or maybe empathetic reaching out, or it does seem to me like it's going to hit a boiling point at some point.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's like I was talking to another person there that was telling me, It didn't matter how much evidence the cops have.
It doesn't matter how much evidence they have.
A lot of these people, especially the organizations there that are coming from out of town, looking for an excuse, looking for an excuse to write, looking for an excuse to raise money, funds, looking for an excuse to be angry.
None of the facts matter.
None of them matter.
How you're going to get these facts to these people is I mean, it's going to have to start with the parents.
It's going to have to start with the leadership.
It's going to have to start at an entirely different level than just putting the facts out there because people still have to make the conscious decision to click on that link to look for them.
And if you haven't been taught to look for another side of the story, you're not going to do it.
So you wrote something here that I thought was quite powerful.
You wrote something in an article.
This is regarding Milwaukee.
You wrote, I met many kind people who were just hurting.
They don't blame white people for all their problems and know when the cops are justified and when they aren't.
And this is something that the media, of course, is going to studiously avoid.
Like in the migrant camps, they'll go to the three kids and film those over and over again.
They're going to avoid, and we've seen examples of this in the media.
There was some reporter who wanted to find some race baiting at a At a Trump rally and cut to a black guy who said, no, we've got all this fighting.
Here's my white friend, you know, and it's like, anti-narrative, anti-narrative, shut it down.
And these people don't get much of a voice, if any, in the media.
And what were they saying to you that you'd like to get across?
Because I do like our capacity in these conversations to get unheard voices across to people.
Well, luckily, I'll have these videos out in the next couple days.
One is coming out today with a guy named Buck, just for Amazing, intelligent guy who's looked into both sides of the stories.
But this was with another woman who is there and raising her kids and has a husband in the community and is working with her church to make youth centers and everything.
Just an amazing person in this community.
But she was telling me the problem is these kids are looking for street corner justice.
And she was the one who told me, she's like, this cop has a family he wants to go to.
This cop has a life he wants to protect.
These kids don't understand that.
When they think they're right, they want to solve it on that street corner right there and then with a gun.
And she's like, these kids haven't been taught that.
Your problems need to be solved in the court of law.
Let yourself get arrested.
Put down the gun.
Go to the law.
Give the judge your story.
Let them go over the facts.
And if you're right, you'll be right.
But she's like, they've been taught no patience.
They've been taught solve it on that street corner now.
And she's like, and if you die that way, it's because you pointed the gun at him first.
It's because you pointed the gun at him first.
And you can't blame white people for that.
You can't blame Republicans for that.
You can't blame cops for that.
And this is things that black people in this community were telling me.
Of course, I agreed with them, but...
This isn't just me.
This is things black people in this community were telling me.
Well, there are a lot of black, you know, there are criminals in the black community and there are great people in the black community and the great people need the protection of the cops to deal with the criminals.
Now, of course, the criminals of every race and ethnicity View the cops as their enemy.
Of course!
I mean, that's the deal.
If you become a criminal, the cop becomes your enemy.
But for those law-abiding good people in every community, the cops are the people you call when you have a problem.
And if you're only going to talk to, I don't want to say explicitly the criminal element, because there's lots of people who resent cops who aren't criminals.
But if you're only going to talk to people who have maybe a naturally negative relationship with the police and not to any of the people who really need the police to help secure the neighborhood, you are going to get a very one sided view of the black community in this particular instance, which is really frustrating.
Because the whole point of being anti-racist is to recognize that there's no such thing as a uniform black community.
There's no such thing as the black community's view of cops.
There's a wide variety of views of cops within the black community, which is kind of the multifaceted thing that helps people avoid that collectivist judgment called racism.
Yep.
And I mean, I don't know where to go from there, but it's it's just become such an ingrained thing in this community itself.
It's hard to change.
And it's also, you know, what was funny, though, is they were telling me that night, you had a bunch of people that were from Antifa who obviously had the cops as their main enemy as well.
They hate the cops.
They're the fascist pigs.
You had people from Black Lives Matter coming.
And these were white people coming and instigating and saying cops are evil and embedding this.
White people were coming to this area.
And one woman told me, she said, this is the most white people we've seen in Sherman Park since the KKK was doing lynchings.
And because all these people were coming here just for fun, just to join in on the fun of burning down this black community.
And that's what made me really angry because it's all these white liberal Democrats that claim to care.
About black people that are coming in, instigating and having them burn down their communities and just introducing the most toxic ideas there.
There was one thing that I really loved.
I can't remember what it was.
Right.
There were three white people holding a Black Lives Matter sign and three guys ran up to them and were like, Black Lives Matter?
Black Lives Matter?
You three white?
You three white?
Why are you holding this sign?
And they're just like yelling at them.
Like, why are you here?
We've never seen you here before.
What are you doing?
They're stirring up the pot.
Bringing in the cop hatred to the community, bringing in all these toxic ideas, and when you've got all those factors going on, when you've got the media, when you've got outside forces that are funded, Black Lives Matter has massive funding, I think you just did a video on Soros, right?
When you've got all of these different factors coming in, no guidance, no interest in the other side of the story, how you're going to fix that around, how you're going to fix that narrative, Man, it's a real tough question.
It's an open invitation, I guess, to liberals that there's a wonderful program called Big Brother, where you can go and find an at-risk youth and become his friend and his mentor.
And, you know, if you wanted to go into poor communities or at-risk communities and be a Big Brother, that might be a little bit more helpful than handing someone a Molotov cocktail.
You know, just I'm going out on a limb here, just, you know, just brainstorming about possible ways that things could be better.
Lauren, now that we've annoyed and enraged people about race, I wonder if we could turn to a different topic and annoy and enrage people about feminism.
Now, that is, of course, to some degree where you got your start.
And I myself bought into feminism, I guess I could say, for an embarrassingly long time.
It just wasn't something I particularly focused on.
It was like, you know, sunlight and gravity.
It's just something you kind of...
You went to the University of Toronto, right?
I went to the trifecta because I went to York.
I went to theatre school in Montreal, which was very lefty, and then McGill, and then U of T. I basically bounced around from left bumper to left bumper until I couldn't see straight anymore.
I managed to hang on to stuff with the free market, and I managed to hang on to stuff with small to no government, but I just didn't really get too far with the feminist thing.
Then Facts inevitably roll their way into your vision and begin to demolish all of these houses of cards.
What was your journey with regards to feminism?
Right.
So when I was younger, I used to go on Tumblr and everything, and I was on kind of right-wing Tumblr.
I liked listening to right-wing radio commentary.
And I didn't really care that much about feminism, but when I was 17, I volunteered for the Conservative Party, actually, before I kind of got into libertarianism.
And they put me on TV when I was 17 years old, which I thought was pretty interesting.
I commentated on politics.
I'm like, wow, I can't believe they're putting me on TV. And they were having a bit of a, after the election, they had an event where the media all came to do interviews and stuff.
And I was beside a young man named Michael.
And he was an extremely intelligent young conservative.
He was halfway through his degree.
I was still in high school.
A man came up to us for French TV and said, I need a young person to interview.
Can you come on the show?
And didn't pick Michael, and I was like, okay, whatever, cool, let's go.
And he whispered in my ear before I went to go on TV to do the interview, you know I only picked you because you're young and female, right?
And I just kind of sat there for a second and was like, Oh, that's why they pick me over Michael every time.
That's why I'm getting all of these awesome opportunities when Michael is far more intellectual than me, when he's just completely beyond me in skills to debate and everything, but they kept picking me because I am a woman and they needed to fill that demographic, right?
I had all these benefits in life for being a woman.
So this narrative of, I'm oppressed, life is so hard, being a woman, never really fit for me.
It didn't...
Didn't quite make sense.
The puzzle pieces were missing for me.
And then I started getting more and more into it.
That's when I kind of did my first Why I'm Not a Feminist video.
I kind of had that basic understanding of feminism being unequal and unnecessary.
But lately, the more I get into it, I'm more looking into the biological stuff.
How feminism has completely destroyed women's happiness.
How it's completely driven them away from their biological purposes and the things that will make them happy.
And an understanding of themselves.
And that's something that I've found really fascinating and very sad.
I'm sure you've seen the statistics of women's happiness just absolutely drop since the rise of second wave and third wave feminism.
And it's been like every decade, this happiness level just goes down pretty catastrophically.
And now, like in America, women in the sort of middle age are like, I can't remember the numbers, half of them or a third of them are antidepressants.
And as far as, you know, That basic Aristotelian thing that happiness should really be the goal of a lot of our life because it's the one thing we get and we don't get it in order to get something else.
You know, we make money in order to spend it.
But happiness is that one thing that should be not day by day because, you know, we all have the up and downs and not for everyone because society is quite complex.
But as a whole, over time, there should really be an increase in happiness.
And that was the promise.
Yep.
That was the promise.
And you know what?
Underutilized and unhappy as a housewife and as a mother or whatever was going on.
And boy, if you just get out into the workforce, have a boss, start paying taxes, get a cubicle, you are going to be so fulfilled.
You'll look back on your life like it was a grim dungeon of discontent.
And that's the promise.
Like, you know, the promise of the government programs to solve poverty, to solve a lack of education, to solve problems with drugs never happens.
And every now and then we do need to stop.
And it drives me crazy, Lauren, that people don't do this.
We need to stop.
Compare the promises to the outcome.
And the promise of feminism was, yeah, you think you're happy now, but just wait until you get what we got to offer you.
And now I think it's time for us to assess and the happiness levels of Western women have confidence.
Raider on the whole.
Well, that feminism thing and just completely getting this whole new narrative of what happiness is, is just a whole part of this Marxist agenda to throw away all these traditions, all these traditions that our ancestors gave us, to tell us, women, ladies, this is what will make you happy.
Pursue this and it'll bring you happiness.
We've discovered this through thousands and thousands and thousands of years and passed this on so that you could be happier.
So that you could be more successful.
People fought and died so that we could pass on this knowledge to you and create a better society, and we've just thrown it all away, and the results are showing.
The results are showing women turning 30 and hitting that wall and regretting everything, just absolutely upset that they don't have children, upset that they don't have a man that was taking care of them, upset with what they've done with their life, and it's all part of this Bigger picture.
And that's why I've kind of expanded on from feminism, because feminism, I realized, was just one small part of a bigger picture of throwing away all our traditions and values and the knowledge of our past.
Well, and feminism is, despite what you may see in Social Justice Warrior YouTube channels, feminism is a failing ideology.
The number of British women who self-identify as feminists is close to the single digits.
It's really beginning to die off.
As the evidence accumulates, I think people are becoming more and more skeptical.
And there's this...
There's a terrible thing, too, because, of course, women are tricked or bamboozled or, I don't know, they see too many Woody Allen movies or whatever it is, and they're tricked into this promiscuity when they're young, you know, which I guess gets you a lot of attention and there's a lot of feel-good pharognomes and all that going on.
But as I pointed out in videos, number of sexual partners is inversely correlated to stability of marriage.
And, you know, there is the old saying, coarse though it may be, that you can't turn a whore into a housewife.
And I think what happens is when women hit their early 30s and they say, ooh, ah, biological clock, which is resolutely kept from women, like this information about how quickly fertility diminishes among women.
And it also, to be fair, does diminish among men, but it's a bit of a flatter curve over time.
This information about fertility is withheld from women, and then they get the baby rabies, they get the Panic diaper sweats and they have not developed the kind of relationships or social circle or relationship skills, how to negotiate, how to compromise, how to find the best in situations.
They just haven't developed these skills in bed hopping and they don't know how to meet good men.
They don't know how to keep good men and that's a long way to go.
You know, if you're 30 and women live into their 80s, that's more than a half century of bitter regret and where does all that frustration go?
I think we've yet to see that really manifest socially, but I think it's going to be quite ugly.
Absolutely.
I was going to write an article about this a while ago.
I kind of feel sad that I was never given these lessons on how to be ladylike when I was younger, on how to be more womanlike, because it was seen as a negative thing growing up.
When I was a kid, it was the coolest thing to say, I'm never going to have kids.
I'm never going to have kids.
I'm going to be an independent woman and all these things, right?
I'm going to do what I want.
And that was the cool thing.
And I was never really taught how to be a woman, right?
And I kind of feel like there's something missing because of that.
And that's just been my personal experience.
But also when I go to these slut walks and everything, I've never understood what is empowering about being a slut.
What's empowering about increasing your chances of What's empowering about getting STDs?
What's empowering about increasing your chances of being a single motherhood and potentially ruining your life?
What's empowering about inevitable self-worth issues after that?
What is empowering about these things and what is empowering and pro-woman about getting rid of the entire idea of what a woman was, the entire idea of what being a female was?
Why can't we say that having children is empowering when that is our major biological function?
Why can't we say that Being ladylike in an amazing support role is empowering.
Why can't those things be empowering when they genuinely make us happy?
Well, and the facts, apparently I'm about to fly, but the facts are very, very clear.
You know, they're talking about rape culture and all this sort of demonology of sinister men floating through the ether about to attack everything with boobs.
This is really frustrating because the facts are very clear that by far the safest place for a woman to be is in a committed marriage monogamous relationship.
That's where she is safest.
You know, what is empowering about sleeping with people you really don't know much about?
I mean, for a woman in particular, let me explain sexuality to you, Laura.
But for a woman in particular, it's a very vulnerable position.
You have a bigger man usually on top and it's you don't know this guy.
He could be some lunatic to be in a committed long term relationship.
Marriage, you know, I think is the best.
But that is where women are the safest.
And so if there is a feminist concern about danger towards women, they should be promoting monogamous marriage, not demonizing it.
And with all this loss of information and statistics and the reality of the situation, when women do want to get married and when they do want to have kids, We're
good to go.
Yeah, well, you know, now I've got all these considerations.
I'm like, well, I don't want to date for no reason.
I want to date to have kids one day because as much as I love my career, I also understand biology and I understand that it will make me happier to have kids and fulfill my biological role in life.
So I do want to have kids one day.
And I also want to find a guy who is going to be able to have stability, buy a home, buy property.
And you know what?
This is what's complicated, though, is there's so many more factors.
I'm not saying there's no good guys out there because there are a lot of amazing guys out there, but we're living in an economy right now where no man is going to be able to buy property around my age.
So when I look at guys, I'm like...
Man, you're such a nice guy, but you can't find a job.
You can't buy property.
You can't get a stable life together because of this terrible, terrible economy.
I don't know if I can be with you because I don't know if I can foresee having kids with you.
It's created all these complications in my dating life.
You've just ruined everything.
Thanks.
Well, I appreciate that.
We'll, of course, put this testimony on the website.
Ruined everything for me.
Of course, I've I've warned people.
Most people didn't take me too seriously, but I warned people back at the beginning of the show and have repeated it ever since that, you know, philosophy is kind of like quicksand, you know, having these values, which, you know, of course, you had a lot innately, but maybe not quite as much in the dating realm.
It is tough.
When I started getting into self-knowledge and philosophy, my dating pool dried up.
But, of course, then I met my wife and it all worked out wonderfully from there.
And, of course, if I hadn't gone through that process, I don't think I would have been ready for such a great woman.
And that's where my desire to have children came from.
I mean, if you have creative abilities or you want to do great things in the world, you can get by without kids because you're creating things of value in the world.
But, you know, once you meet the right person, it's like, must breed, must breed, must breed, because, you know, you can create books and videos and great arguments and so on.
But none of those things are going to circle back and hold your hand on your deathbed.
And none of those things are going to be able to have a conversation with the creation of a brain.
I mean, for women, of course, it's different.
But for men, it's like you just feel like Dr. Frank.
Frankenstein.
Eight minutes of work.
I have a brain that is growing and speaking and creating.
It is just an amazing thing.
Don't even get me started on parenting because we'll be here all day.
Of course, you can have all of these wonderful things.
It's not an either-or proposition, particularly now.
You're working in the media.
You can work from home.
You're going to have friends and family around who can help you with the child raising.
It's not like Now, I must lock myself in the baby dungeon for 18 years, never to emerge or imagine white hair and no skin tone whatsoever.
I mean, there's a lot that you can do these days, particularly in the field that we work in.
That gives you a lot of flexibility and really is in the first couple of years that you need to be with your kids 24-7.
They get a lot more self-sufficient relatively quickly, so lots of choices.
I'm very glad to have raised your standards.
I'm thrilled because that means that when you do find and choose that guy, your certainty of it working out is going to be so much greater, and that level of security is something that I wouldn't trade anything in the world for.
But like I was talking about, I do worry about the majority of people, though, because we are living in a world where you've got European birth rates declining so, so, so, so, so much, because they're not the ones consuming welfare.
They're not the ones getting positions out of...
Affirmative action.
They're not the ones that are getting all these benefits and they're suffering a ruined economy and an inflated...
I don't know if you know what's going on in Vancouver where I'm from, but all of the baby boomers are selling their houses to Chinese investors that are putting millions and millions and millions of dollars in parking their money.
And not a single person there that's a millennial is going to be able to buy a home because they've all been sold to the Chinese.
They're only going to be able to rent.
They're going to be able to get a box in the sky.
So I really worry about the majority of people in my age pool that don't know how to date.
First of all, they're on Tinder all day and they don't know how to hold lasting relationships.
Women don't know what they want.
They don't know that kids are a positive thing in their life, that they have this biological clock.
Men are trying to find jobs, but it's not necessarily the greatest right now, and they're not really going to be able to buy property.
So I really, really am concerned about the majority of my generation and their ability to have families and whether they're going to do it at all.
And it's really going to affect their happiness.
It's going to affect, obviously, society as a whole when you have families The people that are generally the voters of freedom stop breeding and only immigrants that tend to vote left-wing in large government coming in.
There's so many different factors that are included in that.
It's scaring me.
Give me some hope here, Stefan.
Cloning?
Buy a house outside the city and contribute to white flight?
Well, no, I mean, so there is this, and it is a cycle that is, I just talked about this in this It's a giant-ass presentation on Rome.
It is kind of this cycle where feminism, by saying to women, oh, you know, have kids later and do your career first, you know, strong arguments to be made for having kids when you're younger.
You know, I'm not the youngest father on the planet, and occasionally I'm at a play center attempting to twist myself into some lower intestine kid tube, and it's like I get an electric shock and a twinge in my leg.
But anyway...
Oh, have kids later, have kids later.
But for a lot of people, that delay means that you don't.
And that is a big problem.
And there is, of course, a kind of dysgenic reality to massive shoveling of government money around the demographics, which is you generally are taking money from more responsible people and giving it to less responsible people.
And I think it's a pretty well-known phenomenon of late-stage civilizations that intelligent people do not breed very well in captivity, you know, like the hysterical panda bears of some loud zoo.
And there is this thing where, say, okay, well, birth rates are down, and politicians want taxes and they want votes.
So for politicians...
Waiting to grow children is completely impossible because the politician is going to say, well, you know, we need more people in the society or whatever.
We've got an aging population.
We need more young people.
So let's say a politician works night and day to provide some tax breaks or some family-friendly policy.
Okay, so then people start having kids next year and they'll be paying taxes in about a quarter century if you're lucky.
And that's way outside any particular powerful politician's time frame because that's long after he's retired and probably retired.
So the idea of having policies that grow the domestic population is not really very valuable.
However, if you bring in adult immigrants from particularly different cultures where they tend to view big government as a plus, thinking Hispanic cultures or certain Asian cultures and so on, then what happens is you bring in people, they can immediately pay taxes, they can immediately vote for you.
And now it's true that a lot of immigrants will consume more taxes than they pay, but they pay the taxes and you're borrowing.
What you're paying them in services.
And of course, you get people coming in who are using the roads they didn't pay for, they're using the healthcare system they never paid for, sometimes the educational system that they didn't pay for.
But again, all of that is generally debt.
So it's a huge net positive in votes and immediate tax revenues because they're paying more in taxes than you're immediately spending because you're just borrowing and deferring it and selling your bonds and so on.
So it is a huge challenge.
And how we reverse that, well, I mean, for me, at least, speaking positively about the benefits and joys of parenting, I think is very important.
And trying to get people off that selfish treadmill of immediate self-gratification.
Right, that sounds kind of bad, but you know what I mean.
Trying to point that stuff out.
But, you know, again, it's just getting the information out before the numbers crunch.
Because once the numbers crunch, then all of these things will generally reverse.
There was a huge amount of Saudi money that came into America in the 70s, bought up a whole bunch of stuff, and then all of that changed when the economy went down through the tubes and OPEC jacked up the oil prices and so on.
There are these changes that will occur naturally.
Human society, like the planet, is kind of like an ecosystem and it's really tough, especially now with the technology that we have.
To make civilization-ending mistakes.
We do have a lot of warning.
We do have a lot of natural equilibrium.
And in America in the 19th century, of the people who came over, a third of them went back home.
They didn't make it.
They didn't like it.
It didn't work out for them.
So right now, there's a bunch of people coming in because there are particular incentives which can't possibly mathematically last.
And when those incentive changes, well, they'll just...
Things will change.
The tide of human movement goes back and forth, but depending on incentives.
And that, I think, is what we can hope for.
Just getting the right information out is the key, as I sort of mentioned, perhaps to my repetitive detriment.
But I think we have particular challenges.
The challenges of, you know, when I was your age were more around nuclear war.
And, you know, that was a tad more immediate...
Planet-ending and scary than immigration.
And there was no internet to have these kinds of conversations where we could get facts out to people, blow past the gatekeepers.
There's an old science fiction story where some group of people want to get to Alpha Centauri.
It's 4.3 light years away or whatever.
And they build this spaceship that goes somewhere below the speed of light, you know, 10th or whatever.
And it takes a generation or two to get there.
And...
By the time they get there, 40 or 50 years after they start, there are already people colonizing the planet because what happened was a few years after they left, they developed faster than light travel, so boom, they just leaped over them.
And I sort of feel that, you know, we've got this destination called a better, freer world.
And the mainstream media is chugging along with its dumb little propagandistic editing tricks and its repetitive nonsense and so on.
And their population is aging enormously.
I mean, average reader's population is somewhere north of Methuselah's last birthday.
And so we've got this incredible, immediate, unedited, honest, fact-based conversation.
So I feel that the mainstream media is trying to get to a destination.
but we're going to be so much more nimble and so much faster.
And yeah, it's true, the dinosaurs were way bigger than the mammals, but look who won in the long run.
Well, you're quite optimistic.
I mean, your nuclear example, I don't think is quite the same as immigration, just because with immigration, we have historical references of what that ends.
You can kind of predict where that's going to end.
So I'm a bit more of a pessimist than you, I think.
But I'm a pessimist for the world, but I'm an optimist for myself because I can affect my own life.
And I think that a lot of people that you are reaching and that alternative media is reaching can become optimists for themselves as well, which helps everything overall.
Of course, they understand more themselves, they understand the biology, they understand the better ways to pursue life, happiness, have kids, and hopefully that will continue to spread.
But certainly this knowledge has made me more optimistic for myself, but I still...
I don't know if I'm buying the hopeful dream of they'll all go home on their own.
Maybe when the money runs out, but that still ends in a bit of a disaster for everyone.
Well, and, you know, the alternative possibility is that it becomes a Brazil-style gated community seething masses of poor outside the gates, in which case just try and make as much money as you can so you're inside the community rather than outside.
That's my backup.
That's plan B is that approach, you know, just in case optimism.
It's fine to be optimistic as long as you have a backup parachute.
I think that's perhaps.
Now, one last thing I wanted to ask you, Lauren, was...
I mean, you are, I hugely admire your courage, your ferocity, your tenacity.
It is intensely admirable for me.
What is the fallout of, you know, I sort of, I look at you out there and dealing with, you know, a lot of the negativity and hostility that you've engendered.
It's sort of like watching someone, you know...
Rub themselves up against a cheese grater sometimes.
But what is it like, because you're young and all of that, and what is it like for you to be educated about some of the more hysterical and aggressive aspects of what loosely could be called social discourse in the modern world?
Oh, boy.
Well, the problem is I don't have a lot of friends around my age, and I don't have a lot of peers that are, well, I don't surround myself with a lot of people who can't keep up with the conversation.
I quite frankly cannot be around people who can't keep up with the conversation because I don't know how to have small talk.
I don't know how to talk about Susie's drama on Instagram.
I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how to bitch and whine about Drake's new album.
I'm not capable of it.
What I do often do is I take Uber everywhere because I love to sit in cars with different people and I get those conversations, and I'm interested to hear it.
Sorry to interrupt, but my experience has been, particularly in cabs, you can have deeper conversations with someone you're sitting around with for 20 minutes than sometimes friends you've known for 20 years.
Oh, absolutely, because you don't know each other.
You don't know their friends.
You don't know their family.
They know you're not going to tell anyone, right?
So you can have brilliant conversations with people in cabs, absolutely.
I usually have those conversations with older people.
When it comes to younger people, I'm just sitting there cringing.
I remember I was in a car.
I don't want to hurt your brain, but I was in a cab probably, or Uber, a few days ago, and there were these two girls, probably 17, 18, sitting beside each other.
They are just whining back and forth.
They're like, oh my god, did you see this post?
Did you see what Susie said?
She is such a whatever.
Oh my god, oh my god.
She called me this name and the entire conversation for the whole half hour ride was like that.
It was the most unreal thing I had ever listened to.
And I wanted to mention this actually earlier because we were talking about the thug life and how this is affecting the black community.
This isn't just the black community anymore that this toxic ideology is affecting.
Most of black Twitter and this whole emojis everywhere, spelling everything wrong, everything has to be sexualized, is 16 and 17-year-old white girls now that just idolize this life.
They just adore it.
They think it makes them so cool.
They love the rappers and everything.
Wait, wait.
Hang on.
I just wanted to let you know that my optimism might have taken a fatal body blow like a monkey gets fruit straight into the bag of my optimism.
But anyway, go on.
Let's get this 17-year-old doom of civilization.
Well, this is why I'm not as optimistic as you.
I don't know how many Ubers you take with 17-year-old girls talking beside you, but if you do, you'll be sitting there just banging your head as well.
Wait, does it go also something like this?
Like, like, like, like, and then she's all, and then I'm all, and then she's all, and then I'm all.
Anyway, so...
I think they were talking about...
Stacey said, my humor was dry.
I'm not dry.
She's dry.
I don't even know what's dry mean.
She's totally boring.
I think that was their conversation, but it was pretty enlightening.
I don't think people read books anymore.
That's the issue you're having, too.
Oh, like the tablet generation, right?
And with books, in particular novels, I made this case years ago, and I come back to it because there's facts that prove the theory, and I always like it when that happens, but...
Novels give you empathy because novels allow you to know what someone else is thinking that they're not communicating.
And they have found that people who read novels gain significant amounts of empathy, which you're just not going to get at playing Candy Crush or Talking Angela or whatever it is that's on people's tablets.
You need to be able to read because read gives you that window into another person's mind.
It allows you to try on another life for size and it gives you a sense of – it gives you escape from your own mind and you get to inhabit somebody else's perspective for a while, particularly if it's first person, but even if it's third person – And there's author omniscience all over the page.
And so I think you don't get that from movies unless you're going to go and see – I guess you could see a movie with monologues, but that's fairly rare, or voiceovers.
But it's still not the same because of the unreliable narrator problem.
But I think that the loss of novels – I don't think it's an accident that novels arose with better child raising, with more universal rights, which is basically empathy in action, with separation of church and state, which is the acceptance that other people are going to have different beliefs than you, and it's not a violent action – And as novel reading and novel writing rose, so did general human empathy.
And I think that as it's fallen away, it's not the only barometer, but I think it's an important one that as novel reading has fallen away, our capacity to inhabit somebody else's mind...
Yeah, those are particular challenges, which is one of the reasons why I've written novels, because I think that if you can get that perspective out to people, it really helps grow the most precious resource in the world, which is basic human empathy.
Yeah, honestly, I cannot thank my father enough for when I was growing up.
Every night before bed, he'd sit down and tell me and my sister a story.
And it got me into reading when I was growing up.
I read so many books, so many books.
And you see some kids still in the library every once in a while, the lone kid there.
But yeah, I can attribute so much of my life and what I pursued to reading books.
And like I said, that started from good books.
Good parenting that started from my father implementing this love of stories, this love of reading in me.
Well, I really, really want to thank you for the time.
A most enjoyable conversation.
Perhaps next time we talk, you can do the entire interview as a Valley Girl, because that was truly delightful.
I will, too, you know, just so we can get that going back and forth.
But I really, really wanted to remind people, therebel.media slash lauren southerngo, and you can sign up for a subscription.
You can, of course, donate to the fine work that she's doing, bringing on the ground reporting about essential issues to Thank you so much for having me.
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