March 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:10
4027 Thought Criminal | Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux
After Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner were detained when attempting enter the United Kingdom and banned from the country - Lauren Southern was held under the terrorism act. Lauren Southern joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the being banned from the United Kingdom, the erosion of freedom of speech, and the details of her recent detention. Lauren Southern is an independent journalist and the author of "Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation." Order "Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation" now: http://www.fdrurl.com/lauren-southernFarmlands Documentary: https://laurensouthern.net/farmlandsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCla6APLHX6W3FeNLc8PYuvgTwitter: http://twitter.com/lauren_southernFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/lauren.southern.589Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
She, of course, is an independent journalist and the author of Barbarians, How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation, and also the extraordinarily powerful Farmlands documentary.
You can check her out at laurensouthern.net forward slash farmlands and twitter.com forward slash Lauren Underbar Southern.
Doesn't look like you're out.
I know you're out. Doesn't look like you're out.
What's happened?
What's been going on? Yeah.
So I'm still in Calais right now.
I guess they never really prepare you for what occurs when you get banned from a country.
I didn't really think about it, but in my case they literally just clopped me on the other side of a border fence and said au revoir.
And I just kind of was left there like the guy from Pulp Fiction looking around.
I don't know where to go.
It's early in the morning, nothing's open.
Walked around for an hour, found a McDonald's to sit in, but You probably want to jump long before that to the beginning of all this shenanigans where I was detained and banned from the UK at the Calais border crossing.
Yeah. What was going on?
Of course, you knew what happened with Brittany and her boys.
So what was the, I mean, how did you feel heading in?
How did you feel stepping up to the fine, friendly cats behind the glass?
What was going on? So, of course, I had heard a few days before I decided to cross the border into the UK. I had plans to meet Brittany.
I had plans to meet Tommy.
I was where I was going to end my trip and then head back to Toronto.
And I figured maybe I would be stopped and questioned at the border because of what happened with Brittany and Martin.
But I did not expect what happened.
Ended up happening. So when I got to the border crossing, I had taken a bus.
They gave me a double take when they scanned the passport and said, you need to wait here.
I need to check some things. Went to the back, took them about 15 minutes.
Then they told me to get my luggage off the bus and bring it in.
They put it, they searched it all, put it in a locked room and then put me in a detention center.
Basically, I guess they have like a garden there.
You've got some washrooms, some biscuits, Koran or Bible, whatever, uh, Whatever you like, and they took me in for questioning.
Now, I thought it was just going to be basic level questioning, kind of like what Brittany and Martin went through, although theirs was pretty crazy.
They were gone for like three days.
But once the border guards were done with me, just the regular border guards, I was asked, called out of the detention center by the UK police, who handed me This form.
And it says, Schedule VII Terrorism Act 2007.
And they gave me a serious look and said, we need to inform you now that you are being investigated under the Terrorism Act and we are going to take you in for questioning.
These are all your rights.
Read through this. You have one call you can make after this.
You're ours for questioning and detainment.
And it just kind of hit me like, This is not the same situation that Brittany and Martin went through.
They were not detained for terrorism.
What have I done? What memes did I post?
I don't know. Based on truth in advertising, Lauren, these are your rights.
Was the word rights in quotes or not so much?
I don't even think they said these are your rights.
It was just like this document tells you what's going to happen and what's going on with you.
I can't remember exactly, so I don't want to get anything wrong here, so I'm not sure exactly what was said there, but got this document, tried to read through it before I went into questioning, and to be honest, I I'd be lying a bit if I said it wasn't a tiny bit fun because I did kind of get to use a lot of the knowledge that I learned from watching interrogation movies and watching libertarian videos about how to protect your rights.
And I went in there and it was almost exactly like a movie.
They took me into a small little warm room.
They had that giant recording device on the table, their notebooks, three cops with the whole professional bulletproof jacket and everything.
And they turned on the tape recorder, made me say my name, and began the interrogation.
And it was one of the most bizarre lines of questioning I have ever been through in my life.
They asked me what my political ideology was.
They confiscated my speech and went through that in another room, a speech I gave to Belgian nationalists, Flemish nationalists.
They asked me about my friends, Tommy Robinson, Then one of the most bizarre ones is they asked me about my religion, and when I said Christian, they asked me if I was a Christian extremist, how radical of a Christian am I? And right after that, they asked me how I felt about running over Muslims with a truck.
You know, as Christians do.
I know, I literally started laughing.
I was like... Generally, a pretty awful thing to do.
I didn't even know how to respond, and I had to apologize.
I was like, I'm sorry for laughing.
It's just, this is insanity.
I even mentioned to them, I'm like, I think you're questioning, your priorities are a little mixed up.
How often do you see...
I kind of gave them a bit of my thoughts on that, and they said, we have problems with right-wing terrorism, too, and we need to deal with that.
How do you feel about right-wing terrorism?
It's all over my social media.
I've condemned right-wing terrorism.
I have said, I don't care who is doing it.
Killing people, running over people, whatever.
It is wrong. They could just go and look at my social media and not detain me and question me on this for hours.
So that was a big part of it.
But another big part was they really wanted to see my cell phone and my laptop and they Told me, they were like, you need to give us your phone code right now.
We need to go through your phone.
And I said, nope, I refused.
They said, okay, if you don't give us your phone code, because you're under the Schedule 7, we can basically do whatever we want.
So if you don't give us your phone code, we're going to take it for seven days.
You're going to be sent in to have your blood taken, fingerprints, mug shots, and be put away in a Safe location and we're going to get our hackers in to download all of your phone contents anyways.
So you give us your phone code or this is going to be a whole heck of a lot worse for you basically.
I said go right ahead.
I want legal representation.
I'm not giving you my code.
Go right ahead. So that actually worked.
That actually worked. I never had to give them my phone code.
The legal representation really messed them up.
They couldn't get in touch with a solicitor for me.
It's like hours of me sitting in this hot room, then bringing me water, trying to get me in touch with legal representation.
I don't know. It was just a very bizarre situation.
But the thing that really...
So this has been about three hours of questioning.
They gave me a few questions after I asked for a solicitor and they couldn't find me one.
They promptly ended the interview and said, we've got a call from the UK Border enforcement or border forces or something.
You need to come out right now with us.
And then I sat in the detention centre and they brought me a form that said you've been banned from the UK for racism, for handing out racist pamphlets.
So my kind of three-hour questioning period with the counter-terrorism was ended because they just banned me.
But this is an interesting tidbit because I spoke to a lawyer today who said It almost sounds as though they used the Schedule 7 terrorism act to detain me for long enough to find something to ban me from the country for.
So that's what the legal advice I was talking to said, that that's what it sounds like happened, because they just ended the terrorism investigation as soon as they found a reason to ban me from the country.
Wait, sorry, are you trying to say that a law That was brought in to protect a people against terrorism ends up being used against non-terrorists?
That the scope of the entire government program has expanded way beyond its original mandate, in fact, kind of ignores its original mandate and is targeting the innocent.
Boy, there's one for the history books.
Yeah, so I'm going to look into that more, but based on my experience, because I thought it was very bizarre.
I was like, suddenly you don't care about me running over masses of people with my truck?
When you found a reason to ban me, that's a little bizarre.
So that explanation makes a lot of sense to me.
But the explanation to ban me certainly did not make a lot of sense, considering the racist allegations were regarding an incident last month where I went to go film a video in Luton.
We were doing social experiments where we were planning on kind of spinning off a Vice article that claimed Jesus Christ was a gay man.
Or argue that he was a gay man.
And we were like, oh, let's try this with other religions and see how people react to show how silly vice is.
And we were going to do, in front of a few different religious buildings, like, your god is gay.
And see if some people had conversations, see if some people stole the banners.
We ended up just doing the Islam one because people got very mad and we had a pretty crazy day regarding it.
And we never got around to doing the other ones, so we were waiting to do those before we published it.
Those Islam posters that said Allah is a gay god were the reason I was banned from the country under claims of racism.
Now, I'm not sure what part of Allah is a gay god has anything to do with racism, but that's what my forum that I've got right here says.
So... Now, I wonder if the people who had made The article or the argument that Jesus was gay, I wonder if they would be banned from the UK for racism as well, or I'm going to guess not so much.
No, I somehow doubt that.
But I don't even think it has to do with the forums.
I don't think it has to do with them thinking I'm racist or any of that.
Well, maybe. But I think it's more so that they are afraid.
Tommy Robinson has just gone independent and he is planning on taking Europe by storm.
He's been doing interviews with Brittany Pettibone.
The right wing in Europe is no longer afraid of being silenced.
They've already had their cars burned down.
They've already had their friends punched in the face and had to get in battles on the street.
They've already had them slander and silence.
They've dealt with it all. They don't care anymore.
The right wing It's becoming more and more popular in Europe, and I think they are afraid of it.
And Tommy Robinson is a big target for the UK. They're very afraid of what he is capable of in spreading the truth, quite frankly, about what is happening there with immigration.
Brittany Pettibone and Martin would have helped bolster his message.
I planned on going there to help bolster his message.
So they found ridiculous reasons to ensure we could never come to that country.
And help him with that. And that's just my opinion.
That's why I think it happened.
I think it's far too coincidental that Brittany and Martin, two days before me, were going to meet with Tommy, and then I was going to meet with Tommy.
But that's just my opinion.
Yeah, and of course, that means that they're tracking what you guys are planning, they're putting you into databases, and, you know, having this big, cold 1984 Sauron eye staring at your every online move.
Kind of an odd experience, I suppose.
Yeah, I mean, sorry, I'm just like processing.
I'm still processing a little because I didn't sleep much last night.
They kept me up all night doing the questioning process.
It's certainly not a point in my life that I ever thought I would reach.
I never thought I would be dragged into a room and questioned under terrorism legislation.
I feel very bad for my father who didn't get to speak to me but got a call from an officer at like 4 in the morning saying your daughter is being detained under international terrorism acts.
It's not a good time for him.
This is not a future that I expected to have to face.
And I think that's a big thing that you probably have to deal with, Stefan, is you talk about these futures that we're going to have to face and everyone calls you insane.
Everyone calls you crazy. Everyone says you're exaggerating and it's all going to be okay.
And then we actually hit this point.
We hit the point where South Africa has taken the land.
We hit the point Where young right-wingers are being detained and banned from countries for their opinions.
I think this is the beginning of something far, far darker and harsher happening.
And if three of us can be banned in just one week, I mean, what's to come?
What's to come? Are all of our Orwellian fears really being materialized right now?
It is a big moment.
And it is a moment of Transition and it is lines being drawn and it is people being pushed to more and more difficult places emotionally, psychologically, from an activism or movement standpoint.
It is a shutdown on people getting together.
It is a shutdown on free speech.
It is a shutdown on organization.
And of course, if it had happened to left-wing journalists, there would be a huge outcry.
And of course, there is to some degree, and of course, there are some people who are celebrating as if somehow what's happening to you, what happened to Martin, what happened to Brittany, is not also going to happen to them as well.
Like to everybody who's like, oh yeah, well, you know, they're racist and blah.
This word, like whatever pejorative they're throwing at people like you and others who They're going to throw at anyone they disagree with, which is going to be everyone eventually.
And so this is the time where you really have to stand up on principle.
And even if you disagree with what Lauren is doing or other people or what I'm doing, this is where you have to stand up on principle because it will not stop here unless there is real pushback in a legal and peaceful way, real pushback against just this kind of Putting your finger on the scale.
This is not neutral. I mean, you've got 400 jihadis coming back after fighting for ISIS. Welcome back into the United Kingdom.
Here, here's some welfare. Here's some free stuff.
You know, you're welcome back. You can reintegrate and so on.
It's not going to stop at this point.
It is only going to continue and it is only going to expand.
And it is time for people to really sit up and see what is going on.
It makes me think back to when you had people like Richard Spencer band from the UK, and of course Michael Savage and a few others, Pamela Geller.
And many people, even within my own sphere, were like, ah, Richard Spencer, he kind of deserves it.
But yeah, it made it to me.
I'm not Richard Spencer.
Most people don't put us in the same category, but The story of first they came for the white nationalists is not just a silly set of lines.
It is manifesting itself in reality quite visibly right now.
And it's very funny.
I have blue checkmark verified liberals all over my timeline on Twitter right now, of course, praising this, saying, oh, it's so ironic that people who are border restriction advocates are being restricted at the border and not allowed in the country.
At what point did I say I think people who love the culture, speak the language, are entering legally and want to contribute to society should be banned?
At what point? Never.
Never. And they're just gloating in this censorship.
They're gloating in this totalitarian act by their government.
And this is something that is already used against left-wing individuals.
This is something that is already used against To silence people on their side, but they don't care because they just get to make that cheeky tweet.
They get to make that sassy remark, and that's what matters to them.
And it's sick. It's really, really sick.
And it's sad to see them misinterpreting it so vastly and not taking the implications of this more seriously.
I mean, Brittany and Martin were held for three days in an actual prison.
That shouldn't happen to anyone.
That's insanity. Not anyone, I mean anyone who is innocent, just for their speech.
It blows my mind.
This is the great challenge, of course, that the left is going to face.
And it has to do with the supposed Muslim ban that Trump was talking about, which of course was banning people without verifiable paperwork with no real security apparatus from a list of countries drawn up by the Obama administration.
And they say, well, you can't ban people based upon an ideology.
That's wrong. That's immoral.
You cannot ban people based upon what they believe.
And all of the outrage Well, it looks like they don't like to acknowledge just how similar, in some senses, they are to the right.
They do believe In banning people who they think ruin their leftist utopia.
They do believe in keeping people out who ruin what they want to see as their culture.
But they are not Western culture.
Their ideology of progressivism is not what built up the UK. It's not what gave people the rights they have today.
They are not the ones that...
It reminds me of that thing from Rules for Radicals where Gandhi's party immediately banned hunger strikes after they got power.
Because they're totally fine as long as it's being used against the people they hate.
And as soon as it's the other way, it's wrong and it's immoral, it's evil.
There's no consistency, like you're saying.
Well, and it reminds me as well, if you look at the sort of communist revolutions, how the revolution always ends up eating its own children and how it's like, well, surely we can throw counter revolutionaries in jail.
Well, sure.
We all hate counter revolutionaries.
Guess what?
Everyone's a counter revolutionary and they all end up in gulags.
They'll get you to hate someone, slap a label on them, then expand that label to include everyone.
And then suddenly you have no rights really left at all.
And to, I mean, the idea that you get stopped on a terrorism suspicion charge and then it's like, oh, we found a way to have you not be in the country.
So off you go.
Suddenly the terrorism thing doesn't matter anymore.
That is, to me at least, from the amateur outside eye, I mean, just ridiculously transparent.
They don't want you in the country. They don't want you causing trouble and what that means of course is that there are elements within the UK that they believe will cause trouble if you and Tommy get together or if you and Brittany get together or Martin and so they just don't want people getting together who might raise questions or might bring arguments and data to bear that might go against a particular direction the country is going in and they simply want to push back Against that and you as the people who are stomped and not say the jihadis means that whoever's the most reasonable is going to get banned.
And also because I think we cause trouble for them and the current state of things and the Establishments inertia that they have in this progressive Direction now I I do want to mention that I don't want to be the forever conservative having the boots stomped in My face, victim. There are some things that we are trying to do about this.
I've been speaking to legal representatives.
It looks like there's some opportunity to push back against this.
We've had amazing support, Brittany Martin and I, from most of the right-wing community who are 100% backing free speech.
And that's very cool to see. Even big figures like Bill DeFranco saying, this is utterly insane.
So the world has not all lost their mind, which It gives me a lot of hope, even if the government certainly has, and those in power have, but it fixes downstream of culture, as Andrew Breitbart famously said.
And while the culture is still moving in our direction, we're winning over Generation C, it seems that we may be able to compete with some of this stuff.
And I'm talking to my legal representative right now, and we'll see how that goes, meeting up with Brittany and Martin to Try to compete against this because there were a lot of things that were highly out of order that were done to us that will be very questionable in a courtroom.
Yeah, well, I guess just another example of how diversity is a strength.
And the other thing, too, is that it's really hard to know, at least for me, tell me what you think, Lauren, it's really hard for me to know What to call people like us.
I mean, of course, you know, there's lots of pejoratives and lots of labels, conservative, right wing, neo, this far extreme, blah, blah, blah.
But basically, I think we're just interested in human freedom.
We're interested in allowing people to make their own choices free of coercion.
We're interested in free speech.
We're interested in engaging people in an intellectual and verbal and argumentative level.
And people, of course, are going to try and characterize that as somehow right-wing.
And I have to correct people all the time.
I don't consider myself right-wing.
I'm not a conservative. I mean, I am very interested in human freedom.
I'm very interested in minimizing the coercive nature and power of the state.
And I'm very interested in free speech.
But I just sort of want to point out, and let me know what you think, the labels are there to sort of alienate us and push us to some other place.
On the sort of field of humanity.
Oh, they're over there. They're a different color.
They wear a different stripe on their jerseys.
They're bad thinkers. They're wrong thinkers.
And it's free. You can hate them.
You can label them. You can box them in.
And them and the rights are taken away.
It's like, well, we didn't like them anyway.
But we have very great common cause with all people interested in human freedom, with all people who are interested in freedom of speech.
And don't let people other you.
Don't let people give you these labels.
Don't just believe the labels that are put on people.
Figure out what they're actually saying.
We might have a lot more in common with people than they think.
Yeah, the labels of far right is what every single headline says about me, whether it's from the right or the left.
I tend to say alt-right more, but I kind of shrugged it off.
I'm like, they'll call me what they want.
What can I do about it?
But it's very true.
When I sit down with anyone, left or right, we end up agreeing on far more than we disagree on in most cases.
Because Truly, maybe the way I say things is a little different.
Maybe I'm a little more blunt than others.
Maybe I'm not as convoluted in giving my reasons for why I want closed borders.
But if you really sit down, have a hot chocolate with me and talk about it, I think anyone who disagrees with me vehemently or thinks I'm some fascist Nazi would really get along with me a lot better.
In fact, the Kent police that had me detained We had some laughs and were enjoying talking.
I know they got orders from higher-ups to do a lot of the questioning, so it wasn't entirely their fault.
But the people that had taken me in to interview me as a terrorist, we were getting along just fine.
Laughing, bantering, agreeing.
And no, I hate that I even had to specify this in the room there.
I don't want to kill anyone.
I don't want to run Over anyone with cars.
That is absurdity.
I think that's evil. I think that's horrific.
That's horrible. Just like you, I want more freedom.
And unfortunately, I think that freedom is something that needs to be defended.
It's that classic saying of we don't lock our doors because we hate the people outside, but because we love the people inside.
And there are some steps that must be taken to preserve that.
And if that's a radical view, so be it.
But I don't think too many people would think that's insane.
Well, and of course, there are other people who are saying, oh, you know, you want closed borders and now you're not allowed into a country.
Well, you could easily flip that around and say, well, what about all the people who want open borders who are cheering at you not being allowed into a country?
Is it just open borders if you have the right ideology?
Actually, that probably is kind of true, come to think of it.
But the amount of hypocrisy there is astonishing, astonishingly high.
There are more people protesting or getting upset about some small-government free-market people coming into a country than literally battle-hardened ISIS fighters with jihadist intentions.
I mean, if that doesn't give people pause about how far we've drifted from our actual ideals as a Western society, boy, I don't know what will.
Right, and the things that were used, the reasons that were used to deny myself, Brittany, and Martin access to the UK Were not policies that I would support anyways.
I would not support detaining someone and kicking them out of the country because they once made a joke poster to test a theory.
Like, I would not support that.
That's insanity. I don't care if they were making a joke poster the other way around.
Like the vice writers who said, is Jesus gay?
I think they should damn well be allowed in the UK. Damn well be allowed in my country, Canada.
I don't think Brittany or Martin would want Black identitarian activists to be banned from the UK either.
This is not an inconsistent position that we have on immigration.
We want battle-hardened ISIS fighters not allowed in the country because they're going to behead our friends and family.
That's not a crazy position.
So to think that this is somehow hypocritical of us is very, very, very silly in my opinion.
Well, and how much would people actually agree with the idea or the argument?
Human beings are always going to have disagreements, and people are going to have great cases on just about every hexagonal side of an issue, and the way that we should resolve it is words, not swords.
Keep the S out of human interaction.
Words, not swords. And if we do not allow people to resolve their disputes according to words, eventually, sooner or later, it will escalate to violence.
And the free speech is the way you stop That escalation to violence.
And of course, if we can have a peaceful, reasonable, negotiated settlement to human disputes, isn't that infinitely preferable to coercion either on the private or the public sphere?
I mean, so many people would fundamentally agree with us.
You know, if you have a conflict with your spouse, you don't pull out your magnum and try and resolve it that way.
You use your words like everyone was taught when they're in grade one.
Use your words. Not your fists.
And this argument that it is somehow an incitement of violence to disagree with certain groups is actually completely false.
Groups should always be subject to criticism, just as you are, just as I am.
Groups should always be subject to criticism.
That's how we all improve, individually and collectively.
And if you're going to ban people from coming in, then you're the ones starting the fight.
They're the ones who are blocking you by force from lawfully going as a lawful citizen into a country to perform lawful actions such as talk to people about ideas and talk to the citizenry about ideas.
There is a victim here.
I think the victim is the peaceful people like you and Martin and Brittany who simply wanted to go and speak with people they are curious about and talk about ideas that move you and motivate you.
And it is the other people who are calling for force to be used to prevent you from doing that.
And we do not want to give people that kind of power to start letting people in and out of a country based upon Some ideology that is peaceful in its essence.
Right. Right.
And that's one of the great shames, as you say.
I think many people would agree with us if they heard us.
Most of my generation, they discount our ideas not because they genuinely disagree with us, but because the ideas have been set before them on Our enemies' terms, so to speak, on progressives' terms.
They've defined what nationalism is.
They've defined what freedom is.
They've defined what free speech is for these people and handed that to them.
And they never get to hear our ideas for themselves.
They've never gotten to hear our whole interviews, our whole YouTube videos.
They get to hear the little sliced-up pieces of the worst takes.
And they certainly don't get to hear people like Martin or Brittany at Speaker's Square One of the oldest spots of free speech in the UK where you had even George Orwell stand there and speak his mind.
They don't get to hear it in the first place.
So how would they know if they agree with us or not?
How would they in the first place?
It's very sad. My generation, for the most part, never even had a chance to reject a lot of conservative right-wing ideas.
Yeah. And I can't help but think of my own Family on the British side and the Irish side who fought so valiantly to preserve freedoms within the United Kingdom.
And if there was an army of the dead that come back to life and see what their untold levels of suffering had created or produced, I'm not sure they would have been quite as keen to fight that fight even in the first place.
Right, right.
It's greatly depressing how much we spit on our ancestors' graves and the freedoms that they've built up for us.
And you know what?
You could say it's for some security.
What's that great quote?
If you give up freedom for some security, you'll lose both and deserve neither.
Something along those lines.
But we're not even doing it for security.
Not even for security.
We're doing it for...
Well, even the legal representative I've had said that this may have been expediated because of some political grudge that someone had because she'd never seen anything go through this quickly.
She'd never seen bans just happen like that.
And so some political grudges because people are simply Salty about other opinions.
I don't know. It's certainly not for security and it's certainly not in favor of freedom.
It's something entirely different than that.
Well, I mean, as you know, there's a whole industry that is devoted to calling people like us evil.
And once you can dehumanize people and their ideas and their arguments and their data, their evidence, once you can dehumanize people to that degree, once you can get people to believe The label of evil or bigoted or xenophobic or racist or whatever.
Well, then it's almost like you've unleashed the mob to do what they will.
And really that is sort of the point of painting with these broad brushes.
Very sophisticated and deep arguments.
And arguments, you know, I mean, they're called far right and so on.
This didn't used to be far right.
This used to be absolutely mainstream up until even as recently as a couple of decades ago.
It was absolutely mainstream.
That if you have an idea and an argument, you submit it to the public square and you take your chances.
And that the best way to get rid of bad ideas is to give them a microphone and a spotlight and let everyone hear the case.
This was, like what's called far-right or extremist, this was Western culture.
Bitterly and hardly won and fought for for centuries.
Up until a couple of decades ago, this was.
Mainstream. This was what we were all about as a society, using words, not swords, settling disputes in the public sphere with reason and evidence.
This is exactly the Socratic tradition that has been struggling to find its emergence in the West for thousands of years and did for quite some time do so.
It's not far right. It's not extremist.
It's not xenophobic. It's not any of these things.
It's just freedom.
And for everyone who's painted but these labels and everyone who sees these labels, you know, stop and think.
Are the people who put these labels on us, do they have your best intentions?
Do they have good reason?
Do they have good evidence? Or are they riot-inciting ad hominem merchants attempting to smear for the sake of discrediting rather than debating, rather than arguing?
And if we give up our capacity to argue, we do not give up The inevitability of conflict, we just move it to an entirely different and very uncivilized arena.
It's sad, because even amongst the people that support freedom and love freedom, and I'm guilty of this as well, we have to have these precursors to whenever we defend it, where I say, I don't necessarily agree with these people.
No matter what you think of these people, I know they're a bit crazy and insane, but we should support freedom.
But we have to have all of these kind of safety barriers of making sure we've got some sort of distance from them before we defend their freedom, because it's just such a scary world to even be associated with these lepers of the far right, these lepers of the Alt-right, whatever you want to call them, but you're so right in saying that it's just freedom.
It's just defending freedom and you shouldn't have to even bother with these buffers.
I do it too sometimes where I was defending Jada Franzen from going to jail and I was like, no matter what you think of these people, you know, but I mean, damn, it's just freedom.
It shouldn't be so controversial and we shouldn't have to tiptoe it, tiptoe around it so much just to try and defend something that is so integral in our history.
And it's so integral in creating peaceful democracies.
Well, and it didn't used to be that.
I mean, I certainly remember when I was growing up, there were people who were defending some of the most awful people around with some of the worst ideas around.
And no one in a million years would say, when I was a kid, Oh, if this person is defending this horrible group, they must necessarily sympathize and agree with everything that they say.
I mean, this was the Voltairian tradition from centuries ago, where Voltaire said, I think it was Voltaire, it's been misattributed a bunch, but that doesn't really matter.
The point is that the quote says, I disagree with everything you say, but would defend to the death your right to say it.
And this idea that the defense of free speech means that you agree with everything, all the content of the person you're defending is how they get you.
You understand everyone out there, this is how you lose everything.
Because they say, well, if you're defending this guy who's terrible, you must be terrible too.
And they're like, well, I don't want to be thought of as terrible.
That's how they get you. And then the next guy becomes terrible, and the next woman becomes terrible, and then the next group becomes terrible, and then they're right at your doorstep, and there's so many of them, and you've compromised so much, there's nothing left to say.
It's been a real shame.
I've been reading some comments on Philip DeFranco's video and some of the left-wingers going on there saying, Phil, do you know what you're doing?
Lauren Southern associated with this person once, and you're defending her?
She's a fascist, this, that, and the other.
And I mean, they're shaming someone just for defending my free speech because I associated with someone else.
These are real comments that are getting tons of upvotes on there.
And I worry, I do, that the more mainstream will read these and say, oh, well, I better not Defend that free speech again.
Oh, well, I better not go near that again.
I don't want to deal with this criticism.
But it's good to see there are still some people out there who, despite the hordes of trolls and left-wingers jeering and laughing and celebrating these bans, they're still sticking up for what's right.
And there's been a lot of people, really, a lot of great people out there supporting us.
Well, this, it's the family tree game, right?
Where you say, well, you did a show with this person once, you talked to this person once, and you didn't attack them for everything that they said.
You tried maybe even to find some common ground with them so that you could have a better conversation or whatever it is.
And then it's like, okay, but because you came into the orbit of this person, you agree with everything they say, and you can keep going that.
You know, it's a six degrees of evilness.
You know, you could always find someone that you can hop, skip, and jump to, or the dominoes that you can hop, skip, and jump to, to find someone who's got a reprehensible opinion based upon some dominoes that fell, and you can trace that.
And I hate to point out that this is not an argument.
It is not an argument to say You, your cousins, brothers, roommates, daughters, duck owner, said this.
Therefore, you know, I mean, that's not an argument.
Deal with people as individuals.
Deal with the arguments, the reason, or the evidence they're putting forward.
And the moment you start chasing that family tree of evil, everybody should just recognize you don't have a good counterargument.
You're actually kind of half endorsing what someone says.
Because if what they say is crazy, just point out that it's crazy.
Point out the reason why it's bad.
Point out how the evidence. Then you don't need to go chasing this family tree crap.
And this hierarchy of immorality, you just point out that what this person does.
I don't need to say, well, Stalin, you see, Loren, Stalin associated with this guy who was seen kicking his dog.
No! I could just deal with Stalin and Stalin.
I don't need to chase... This lineage.
And this is a very, very lazy thing.
And of course, it's only one-sided, right?
I mean, the fact that you got pictures of Obama with Farrakhan, ah, that doesn't matter at all.
I mean, so I just, this is a really important point for people to understand that this six degrees of pedigree evil or something like that is a confession that there's not an argument and it's very, very tragic.
And of course, it works because I don't think people are, you know, quite as aware of what a terrible ploy this is.
That's how every, literally almost every Media Matters article I've ever seen about myself or friends of mine is written.
In fact, in my last Media Matters article they wrote about my South Africa reporting, they even mentioned you.
They said, and she went on this show with far-right Scientific race realist, Stefan Molyneux, whatever it might be.
They mentioned one of my tour guides and someone I interviewed once went to a conference that Jared Taylor was at.
They went into this long list of whoever's cousin, son, brother.
And it's like, when you meet someone, do they come up to you and shake your hand and say, hey, once I was at the AMREN conference and I sat beside Jared Taylor, just so you know.
No, I had no idea about the past of any of these people.
Not that I care that much that they went to AMREN. Probably interesting speeches there.
But no one knows these things when they meet people firsthand.
No one says that stuff when they shake your hand initially.
And the fact that Media Matters thinks this is an argument.
The fact that even the border police that I sat down with asking me, so tell me, you know about Britney Pettibone, do you?
How do you know Pettibone?
How do you know Tommy Robinson?
They're my friends! Why does it matter?
I'm going to go have tea with Pettibone and talk about girly things.
Like, what the heck?
What insane world are we living in?
I literally wanted to just go sit down with Brittany and talk about relationships or something, and...
We both, the two of us, get banned from the country.
It's such a bizarre world I'm living in.
not the future. - Oh, and just for those who are following along at home, when Lauren says relationships, that is not code for running over anyone in a bus.
I just like, that's not a dog whistle, that's not a code, that doesn't mean anything other than sitting down and talking about relationships.
And listen, we're friends, there are other people who are friends, We disagree on some stuff.
We agree on some stuff.
Not everybody has to be your carbon copy photo mirror person in order to have a relationship with them.
Maybe that's a little bit more on the left because they're pretty ferocious in like you stepped out of your Chinese marching band formation and therefore we're going to call it an airstrike on you.
We can disagree and I can revise my opinions and I can get better information.
Same thing can happen to you.
And I don't know, everybody who's interested in free speech, everyone who's interested in private property to a large degree, everybody who's interested in telling the truth, you know, I'm a big fan of that as well.
We've got a lot in common.
Does that mean we agree with everything on it?
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
What matters is that we maintain the conversation that is colloquially called civilization and not Get the customs officials, not get the border patrol to do our non-arguments for us.
But stand and face people.
If you think that they're wrong, stand and face people.
I do hours and hours of call-in shows.
And people, if they disagree with me, come on.
Let's have it out.
We'll have a discussion.
We'll sort it out. Be fantastic.
Don't have guys with guns do your non-arguments for you.
That is cowardly. That is reprehensible.
And I tell you this as well.
It's not going to make it go away.
It's just going to make it less conciliatory in the long run.
And we really, really want to avoid that.
Well, the not going away thing is one of the great silver linings to this is Martin tweeted out, you can ban the speaker, but you can't ban the speech.
You can ban the person, but you can't ban the idea, basically.
And Tommy flew up to Vienna, grabbed Martin's speech, and is taking it to Speaker's Corner this Sunday.
So You can't kill an idea.
It doesn't matter if it's coming out of Martin's mouth or Tommy's, it's going to be set at Speaker's Corner.
And that is a very important silver lining to recognize.
Unfortunately, I didn't have any epic speech planned or anything, so if anyone wants to go to London and pretend to be me and Brittany and talk about relationships in our stead, you can feel free to do that.
But no, it's really good to see People kind of taking up that torch.
I mean, if I, like you were saying, you have people that may disagree on some matters or another, but I have lawyers contacting me that disagree.
They don't like people who are labeled, quote unquote, far right.
They're very, almost neoconish.
And they talk to me and say, I want to help you because I appreciate free speech.
Multiple lawyers. If I didn't have that...
These kind of laws would be further down the line than they are now if we didn't have some matter of unity, if we didn't have some matter of agreement.
This issue is so much bigger than my petty little battles, than my petty little arguments and little jabs that I can go at people for.
There's a much bigger picture here, and I think we all need to work at that, everyone who has an appreciation of freedom, myself included.
You know, and if you're young and You have a vague inkling that at some point in the future you might have a really original idea that might be startling to people, that might be upsetting to some people.
You kind of need to recognize that if we start to lose our capacity to speak, we lose our capacity for creativity.
We lose our capacity for honesty with the world.
And what do we gain?
We gain conformity.
We gain a kind of deadness.
We lose the capacity.
It's something that's fundamental, Lauren, is we actually lose the capacity to love and be loved.
Because to be loved and to love is to be authentically yourself, to be honest, to show courage, Be some sort of magnificent human being so that people can admire you in your life and love you just as you admire and love them.
And we give up the essence of who we are.
We give up our creativity, our honesty, our capacity for love, our devotion to truth, to reason, to evidence, to freedom.
And that is such a precious thing that we have.
I mean, there are a lot of people out there.
Maybe they're not going to have a lot of original ideas.
But they sure as heck are going to benefit from people who had original ideas.
You know, original ideas like, hey, maybe we can have a society without slavery.
You know, that was really, really shocking to people at the time.
What are you talking about? Every society throughout all the history of the universe has had slavery.
You're like repealing gravity.
Well, it was really, really upsetting.
A lot of people got really mad.
At the people who weren't that keen on having slavery around.
Equality for women under the law, radical, radical idea back in the day.
Maybe gone a little bit too far now to female supremacy sometimes, but the original idea, equality for women under the law, fantastic.
Really, really upsetting to people.
Really, really made people mad. Separation of church and state, people hated that stuff.
Back in the day, freedom of speech was hugely opposed back in the day.
So just because the mob hates it doesn't make it bad.
In fact, these days, I would go so far as to say, if the mob hates it and if the government opposes it, it really deserves your open-minded attention.
It's very funny.
In the speech that they confiscated from me to go read through to see what kind of hate speech I was talking about, I speak about the leftist idea of the right side of history.
And they always kind of throw this at us and they say, you're on the wrong side of history.
Don't you want to be on the right side of history with us where people don't attack you, where people don't criticize you, when you're so right that...
Within history, all of the people who've had some of the best ideas have been the most attacked.
They've been killed for their ideas, tortured for their ideas, gone through brutal, brutal periods of their lives to change the world.
And that's not to say I'm some perfect saint that has wonderful ideas, but persecution is not a sign of being inaccurate or on the wrong side of history.
If anything, it's the opposite.
And what we call the right side of history today is simply the right side of inertia.
It is simply the right side of where things are going at the moment and I wish people understood that better.
I wish that was something that was an idea that was discussed in schools today and wasn't just assumed as everything you read in your textbook is what should be assumed and what is right and what is good.
Asking questions, the Socratic method of debating and discussing It's certainly a loss in this day and age, and it's only getting more and more hammered out as people are silenced, kicked out of their classes, banned from countries now.
I mean, it seems like free speech is a dead horse that we're beating here because we had these battles back in like 2013, 2014, kind of the campus free speech battles, but it just goes to show that you leave it for a tiny bit to that kind of Cancer starts to grow again, eating away our freedoms.
And you've got to keep a real strong eye on that.
Freedom is not free, to put it simply.
The wrong side of history is also known as not an argument.
And I sort of imagine like the late Roman Empire.
What do you mean you want smaller government, free markets and private property rights?
You're on the wrong side of history.
And it's like, well, you know where this...
Side of history takes us is to the dark ages, right?
Maybe being on the wrong side of history when things are going down is actually a good idea, you know?
I mean, if the plane's going down, you jump out at the parrot, you're on the wrong side of the plane trajectory.
It's like, yeah, that is actually where I am, and I'm very pleased for it.
And the last point I want to mention, get your thoughts on it, Lauren, is that it has sort of struck me lately, trying to sort of understand this mindset of the people who just like throw slurs and don't ever rebut arguments and so on.
I think that if you're embedded in a conclusion, it's really, really tough to understand the thought process of people who are engaged in thinking as a long-term process.
You know, I've always said philosophy is not a set of conclusions any more than science is a set of conclusions.
It's a process of more evidence, better reasoning, and it's a continual improvement process.
And this is why, like, it always frustrates me when people try to pigeonhole me ideologically, not because I'm so precious or whatever, but Because it's a process of thought, reason, evidence, getting good criticism, refining, and all of this.
If you're involved in that process, it's really hard for people who've just, they've got a conclusion, and this is it, you know?
Like, the government saves people, the free market is evil, and anybody who's concerned about immigration is a fascist, or whatever it is, right?
If you just have those conclusions, and you're dug deep into them, Then it's really hard, I think, to look at other people, people like us, and not say, well, these people just have their conclusions.
They're dug into it.
They're ideological. They don't understand that my thinking has evolved enormously over my life and certainly over my 11 years as a public intellectual.
My ideas have changed enormously.
They should. I mean, any scientist who believes exactly the same thing at the end of his career as he did at the beginning of his career is scarcely a scientist.
That's completely dogmatic.
And so I just want to invite people, rather than saying, here's a label, you're an ideologue, these must be your conclusions, listen to the arguments, listen to the evidence, join the conversation.
That's what I really, really want people to, like, obviously, unfortunately, there are a bunch of people in the UK who now are not being allowed to join this conversation, at least face-to-face.
But join the conversation.
It is a process.
Lauren's beliefs evolve, my beliefs evolve, that's the whole point.
The whole point. Nobody has the final answers.
We have a good methodology, reason and evidence, but nobody has the final answers.
It is a journey. And I really, really want people to join in the journey of civilization, to join in the journey as we are all archaeologists dusting away the dusty dinosaur bones of truth and trying to excavate something that we can hold onto that will stand the test of time.
Don't jump to conclusions.
Don't let your moral outrage be programmed by people with ill intent.
Join a conversation.
Could be a conversation with us, could be a conversation with anybody, but join a conversation.
Have the humility to know that it is a journey and recognize that it is through debate, through conversation, through free speech that we all can progress and the alternative is very, very grim.
I've always seen it as your free speech and my free speech, or any free thing for that matter, left or right.
It's like a hurricane coming at pillars of salt and sand that people have, and it's really scary to tear down people's life pillars and for them to have to rebuild their ideas and what they thought of the world from absolutely nothing.
It's horrifying. You don't want to be a blank slate.
The world is confusing and scary enough for especially millennials, but to have those few things that they thought were truth Torn away from them by reality.
That's a terrifying process.
But the thing is, whether it was our hurricane or another, the hurricane of just reality, nature or something else, eventually those pillars of salt and sand would fall.
And by being truthful to people, by being honest about what's going to happen in their future, the effects of feminism, the effects of the attacks on free speech, the effects of open borders, by being honest, you save a lot of heartbreak in the future and you help people build up sturdy foundations of reality and help them build something that is not only sturdy but is dynamic and will be able to adapt and learn from all these different situations and won't just crack in an earthquake or something but it's very important that even though it'll upset the world around us that we start building actual pillars of good arguments and ideas and thought processes.
Yeah. You know, back in the 1940s, 1950s, a few, few researchers were starting to say that smoking might not be that great for you.
But they were on the wrong side of history.
They were on the wrong side of history.
Everybody knows smoking is fine for you.
Four out of five doctors recommend, right?
Just recognize these guys have good data.
They had good arguments. I'm sorry?
We're so different from them.
We are in the most technologically advanced time in history.
Of course, that makes us more smart than our ancestors, so much more smarter.
Just because we're all the shoals of giants.
RAOUL PAL: The internet is great for getting-- it's great for spreading good information.
It's also great at spreading absolutely terrible conclusions.
I'm glad it's not on call where the hand comes up on the camera like this.
And I wanted to remind people, please, please check out the work that Lauren has done in South Africa.
It is very powerful stuff.
And you can check that out at laurensouthern.net forward slash farmlands.
We'll put the links to all of this below.
And to keep up with Lauren, if you can, if you can, I'm tired just following the Twitter feed.
It's twitter.com forward slash Lauren under by Southern.
I really, really appreciate your time today.
And we'll stay in touch.
And I hope your next travel is a little bit less exciting.
