Over a turbulent decade, a Canadian woman named Lauren Southern rose from obscurity to become a right-wing firebrand whose every move was dissected by fans and critics alike. Known for her provocative videos and outspoken commentary, she was a darling of the online right until she began to fail to meet its expectations. Her new memoir, This Is Not Real Life, offers a case study in how the internet shapes—and warps—those who rise within it. It also chronicles Southern’s attempt to escape the chaos of online fame and reclaim a sense of self grounded in reality and faith.
Southern’s wariness of the media is why she has turned down every interview request for the book—until now. “The majority of outlets reaching out to me haven’t read my book,” she says. “Of the few who claim they have, most seem to skim just enough to pluck out the most salacious detail for a clickbait headline, ignoring even the surrounding paragraphs that give it meaningful context. That’s not the conversation I want to have.”
“Those looking for shock value will find no shortage.”
Still, those looking for shock value in her memoir will find no shortage. Both The New York Times and Rolling Stone have run articles on the book’s darkest claim: that in 2018 she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Andrew Tate, years before he became a celebrity of the manosphere. And This is Not Real Life teems with rogues and miscreants: Nordic neo-Nazis, cocaine-addled gangsters posing as activists, slippery crypto-scammers, gun-toting South African farmers, and even a Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agent who hounded her with intimidation tactics straight out of a spy movie.
Southern pulls back the curtain on the world of right-wing influencers, exposing the hypocrisy and corruption of many who style themselves as defenders of Western civilization while their private lives make a mockery of the values they claim to champion. And she doesn’t spare herself. With brutal honesty, she describes her drug abuse, rage-baiting, self-justifying alibis, and other lapses in judgment. Though she started as a “true believer,” she tells me, her time online transformed her into a woman with an insatiable thirst for the spotlight.
At its core, This Is Not Real Life is a book about identity, tracing how the persona Southern crafted online spun out of control, taking on a life of its own in the minds of her audience. As she let herself be defined by others’ expectations, her real self gradually disappeared into what she terms a “false performative identity,” in which her audience called the tunes and she obediently danced. Her memoir chronicles her growing alienation from this online identity. She reflects on how the internet “freezes” people, locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist. For most people, the name “Lauren Southern” denotes one of those frozen identities, a digital fossil that can never move on.
One of the most striking aspects of Southern’s story is her description of the parasocial relationship between online creators and their audiences. Fans latch onto influencers, but influencers are shaped just as much by their fans’ desires. The feedback loop of likes, shares, and comments, she explained, created in her an almost irresistible urge to produce content that was ever more extreme—more provocative, more shocking, more “engaging.” Her experience reminded me of René Girard’s mimetic theory, which holds that desires don’t arise spontaneously, but are imitated from the desires of others. When I asked if she was familiar with Girard, she said yes and agreed that his ideas fit with her experience.
“I felt this in a deeply personal way at the height of my career,” she said, “when men desired me simply because so many others desired me online. … Of course, the same pattern drives political discourse and absolutely drove online influencers like me.” What Girard described as mimetic contagion—our tendency to want what others want—both fueled her success and distorted her sense of reality. The reward for amassing likes wasn’t just social validation. “They’re an affirmation that you’re doing the right thing. That you are moral.”
“She bluntly describes herself as ‘an addict, an internet and engagement addict.’”
Southern tells me that the internet itself is a “new drug” that “breeds madness, shared psychosis, between audience and creator.” She bluntly describes herself as “an addict, an internet and engagement addict.” That hunger for attention, for conversation, for intellectual stimulation, is not something she expects will ever vanish. Instead, she says, “I hope to transform my vice into something that can be used for good.”
The dangers remain real: not just for her, but for society at large. “The idea of putting out information or videos simply to maintain a career,” she warned, “is quite literally destroying society. The way we think about morality, about other human beings, about politics—how we engage, how we vote—is being driven by ad revenue and character quotas.” The digital economy reshapes the moral and political landscape itself, eroding our ability to distinguish truth from performance, principle from provocation.
Many readers may be surprised at some of the political views held by the Lauren Southern who emerges in conversation today. Her career as a right-wing internet provocateur was launched a decade ago with a viral video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” Back then, she cast feminism as little more than man-hating hysteria. But Southern has come to believe that her early caricature of the movement was shaped less by serious engagement than by the toxic atmosphere of online culture wars. “In fact, I’ve read feminist writers I really respect,” she tells me, pointing to Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women and bell hooks’ All About Love.
Yet, even as she acknowledges those influences, Southern remains deeply skeptical of labels. “I am pro-woman without any animosity towards men,” she insists, preferring that phrase to the word feminist. “Slapping a label on someone almost guarantees I’ll misunderstand them from the start,” she said. The irony, she notes, is that when conservatives are “doing more cocaine than any liberal you’ve met” and feminists celebrate pornography as empowerment, the tidy categories collapse.
Southern’s critics have long described her as “alt-right,” a term she has always rejected. For years she called herself a conservative, but even that has begun to feel false. “I don’t call myself a conservative anymore either,” she said. “These labels feel increasingly useless in a world that’s so psychologically and politically fractured. The moment I say I’m conservative, people want to know why I’m not wearing a sundress and making sandwiches for some guy. If I say I’m liberal, they’re flipping tables because I dislike open borders and think cultural cohesion is an incredibly fragile thing we’re taking for granted.”
Even so, she no longer hews to every conservative orthodoxy. “Even in the last five years I’ve posted videos to my YouTube channel criticizing hyper-individualist capitalism, the modern workforce, and this ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mythology. I am certainly no communist. I just don’t think the free market talking points of old apply in a corporatist environment so riddled with nepotism and government interference. It’s not a level playing field and pretending it is doesn’t help anyone.”
Her experiences have complicated her views on other topics. She acknowledges that some migrants and refugees have enriched Canada, having become friends and collaborators with several of them in her media work.
Southern’s mistrust of labels extends even to religion. “I even hesitate to call myself a Christian, not because I’m not one, but because I don’t want people to think that means I have my life figured out. I don’t. I’m just someone wrestling with faith and trying to pursue it daily, even if imperfectly. I think it’s often less helpful to keep declaring what you are than to simply embody it.”
Perhaps most surprising of all is her diagnosis of the deeper currents beneath our bitter polarization. “I think the ‘right’ and ‘left’ can often represent sides of ourselves we deny, especially now, as the definitions grow narrower and the division sharper,” she said. Both camps secretly covet what they condemn in their opponents. “The right wants openness, creativity, vulnerability, and the freedom to be a victim sometimes. The left wants structure, protection, and strength. The left wants to laugh without walking on eggshells; the right wants to cry without walking on eggshells. Neither side likes admitting these desires, because they resent the missing parts in themselves—and so they resent the people who allegedly embody them.” It’s a striking statement from someone who made her career in online polemics.
Southern was raised in an evangelical Christian family, and throughout her memoir she describes a yearning to reconnect with her faith, even as her choices carried her further from what she regarded as a faithful Christian life. Only recently, she reports, has she begun to find her way back
“I had to confront the reality that my decision-making needed to be entrusted to a higher power than myself if I wanted real change. Left to my own devices, I would always find a way to muck it up, as I had, time and time again.” I don’t know whether Southern is aware of how redolent of Twelve Step programs such language is, but it fits with her claim that she is an addict.
The final chapter of Southern’s book highlights the importance of forgiveness, something that she believes is desperately needed in the internet age. When every mistake is digitally preserved and can be endlessly replayed, the possibility of redemption seems increasingly remote. Southern knows this firsthand: For many, she remains permanently “frozen” in the persona she projected a decade ago, locked into an identity that no longer reflects who she is. That very permanence, she argues, makes forgiveness not only necessary but urgent.
She regrets her own failure to live up to this imperative in the past, confessing that she has made rash and misguided judgments about other people similar to those now made about her. But she insists that reflecting on these moments of failure is not about redeeming herself in the eyes of the public but “part of an honest reckoning with myself and with God.”