Move over rock ‘n’ roll. The new cultural cutting edge is fandom — and it’s even eaten politics. Corbynism was a fandom, and so, too, is MAGA. But the most influential early innovators in this field came from the “alt-Right”, the online ecosystem that flourished from the mid-2010s until roughly the end of the first Trump presidency.
The alt-Right was never a well-defined ideology or campaign, so much as an edgy, transgressive vibe. Just as rock music scandalised society when it detonated in the comfortable, well-behaved pop world, the alt-Right similarly shifted perceptions and created new celebrities. And according to a new memoir by one of its most controversial stars, just as with rock music the alt-Right ended up being devoured by the same vested interests it set out to disrupt.
Lauren Southern was catapulted to viral notoriety by an anti-feminist video she made in 2015 at the age of 19, instantly becoming the pretty, blonde face of Right-wing radicalism. She supported European anti-immigration activists obstructing the arrival of migrants by boat; she headlined a speaking tour with white nationalist Stefan Molyneux; she defended EDL founder Tommy Robinson. She was also accused of promoting conspiracy theories about “white genocide” and “the great replacement”.
Then, in 2018, she announced she was quitting YouTube to make documentaries; in 2019, she announced her retirement altogether, to focus on her marriage and family. Within a year she was back creating content again. Rumours began to circulate about her marriage; in 2023 she revealed that this had ended and she was living in Canada again. Last year, she told me the story of how her beliefs about family and marriage, shaped by Right-wing online memes, collided with the messy and complicated reality of life when her marriage turned abusive, leaving her questioning everything she’d believed and advocated to that point.
Now, she’s written a memoir. Like all Southern’s content, This Is Not Real Life is compelling, accessible, intimate, and unabashedly partial: in other words, perfectly calibrated for fandom consumption. It reads, in fact, like a rock memoir, because it is a rock memoir. Alongside this, depending on your own affiliations, it could read as confessional, political bridge-burning, or whitewash for a toxic career inciting political hatred and division. But the most curious feature of the book is the way it is both written for her fandom, and also as a critique of political fandom as such.
She dishes the dirt — and what dirt! — on Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate: the former appears as a coke-snorting scammer, while she alleges that the latter is a financial criminal and rapist. She also documents her own journey from teenage ingénue to media veteran, via a political content ecosystem that provided an intoxicating thrill of celebrity but, in her telling, ran less on ideals or principles than money, drugs, and celebrity. The title, This Is Not Real Life, captures Southern’s own gradual realisation that what looked from the outside like activism was actually mostly a show; it also captures the broader digital-era sense that politics has steadily abandoned truth in favour of competing perspectives. The memoir itself occupies an ambiguous position in this: it’s both a confessional and also, avowedly, a skewed one, that has deliberately omitted many details. So is it an intervention in the unreality, or an effort to transcend it?
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Following her first viral video, Southern swiftly became an intense object of parasocial (and sometimes sexual) interest to countless fans and followers. Her fandom was huge. But when we talk about parasocial relationships, we tend to be describing the attachment fans have for the object of their fascination. And yet, as Southern tells it, this really is a two-way street: “The energy around each video was intoxicating. Watching the views climb, the comments pour in, the reaction videos roll back. It was a rush. And it wasn’t just the public we were working into a frenzy. It felt even better when we provoked the police or the government.” The high of internet acclaim was compulsive: “We’d built a little digital crack house.” Why, she asks rhetorically, would “this clueless girl” put herself in so much danger, surrounded by such dodgy people? If you ask this, she says, “you might not grasp the power of hundreds of thousands of people telling you you’re saving the West”.
But even as the comments and likes poured in, she describes this as conditioning her in turn. The responses she received shaped a “people-pleasing kid who craved approval and guidance” into “an AI bot programmed with everything I could find to thrive in the conservative media landscape”: mimetically adopting everything that worked, reinforced by comment-section feedback, viral numbers, and the intoxicating high of online social approval. In response to fan feedback, her content got more and more extreme.
She’d attend feminist protests, cherry-pick protesters’ stupidest assertions, and feed her audience’s most uncharitable stereotypes, pioneering what she describes as “a Pandora’s box of stupidity”. As her fame grew, she expanded from anti-feminism to immigration. She travelled around Europe, filming at anti-immigration protests. Some of them became riots or pitched battles between anti-migration protesters and antifa. She was kettled and gassed. She filmed provocative stunts, such as declaring “ALLAH IS GAY” in heavily Muslim Luton, which got her deported from the UK. She became perhaps the best-known face of the alt-Right during the first Trump presidency, aided — as she acknowledges — by her youth, sex, and appearance.
And even if the nominal aim was conservative politics, the real driver seems to have been less conservatism in practice, than the same kind of raw, furious energy that drove the rock and punk movements. And much as rock and punk were swiftly devoured by showbiz, so too was this new ecosystem of politics-as-showbiz. In tandem, too, as they became more heavily mediated, protests also became unreal, taking on a quality of live-action roleplay with the added buzz of occasional real violence. It was all wildly, transgressively fun, from pitched battles between black-clad Antifa and Right-wingers dressed as Roman gladiators, to finding herself in the Arctic Circle in a bullet-pocked warehouse full of Finnish Nazis.
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But if internet notoriety was as much about showbiz and parasocial buzz as ideals, and protest was as much thrill-seeking as principle, so too the stars and power-brokers of this emerging politics-as-entertainment scene turned out often to be less than sincere in their motives. The book opens with her embroiled in the fallout from her association with Tenet Media, a US-based platform later discovered to have taken funding from Russian state broadcaster Russia Today. She touches briefly, later in the story, on travelling to Russia in 2018, where she interviewed the hard-Right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin; she claims only to have realised much later that it was a PR exercise, brokered by a Belgian politician in the pay of the Russian government. But these were scarcely the only opportunities that turned out to come with ulterior motives.
Southern implies that her first employer, Rebel Media, took funding from the tobacco lobby and perhaps the Israeli government, circulated “petitions” that were really just tools to build mailing lists, and repeatedly fundraised ostensibly for named causes but in reality just for the company’s coffers. She also notes similar behaviour recently admitted by American alt-Right firebrand Steve Bannon, who pleaded guilty to “scamming his own base”, as Southern puts it, in a “Build The Wall” campaign that raised over $20 million but built only a few miles of fencing. Bannon was pardoned by Trump in February this year.
EDL founder and anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, is presented as having transitioned seamlessly into activism from Luton’s criminal underworld. As she tells it, he’s a cocaine-addicted “Peter Pan figure”, who fleeced his supporters for donations, ostensibly to campaign for the cause but in reality with “tens of thousands of these donations being pulled out of ATMs to pay for hookers, blow, and new flat-screen TVs”. By then, though, she and her crew were too deeply complicit to speak up. “Did we say anything? Not really. Not while staying silent benefited us.” And along with insider perks, there was also fear: anyone who tried to speak up would be smeared as “a far-left activist” and have “a mob of sycophantic fans unleashed on them”. Threats, intimidation, the online mob all helped ensure silence around his behaviour.
But that’s nothing on the allegations Southern makes against Andrew Tate — who, she alleges, raped her. (Tate has been charged with a number of similar offences in the UK and has denied all of them.) Southern describes, age 22, being taken by a gurning, coke-addled Robinson to visit Tate in his sleazy Romanian base, nominally to raise funds for a new media platform but — she alleges — really to serve as frontmen for a pump-and-dump crypto scam. Instead, Tate raped her. That’s the upshot of the account she gives: that after the initial meeting, which Robinson ruined by being obviously, incoherently high, she was invited back alone for a second meeting with Tate. Naïve and cocky, she imagined she could save the day; instead, Tate took her to a club, promising all along that the others were coming soon, then plied her with drink.
The two drinks he gave her affected her much more intensely than usual, she says. He took her back to her hotel room and asked to sleep next to her, then forced himself on her. In Southern’s words: “I said no, very clearly, multiple times, and tried to pull his hands off me. He began strangling me unconscious. He repeatedly strangled me every time I regained enough consciousness to pull at his arms. I’d prefer not to share the rest. It’s pretty obvious.”
Why, she reflects, did she not go public earlier, as the allegations against him began to mount up? Southern had no idea who he was, she says, when she first met him; in the light of her own anti-feminist pronouncements, she struggled to make sense of what he’d done. So she decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. She describes going completely off the rails after the rape, into a spiral of cocaine and alcohol. By now her notoriety swept her into a manic fugue of filming, media appearances, clubs, drugs, and transient accommodation. Reflecting on that time, she describes it as falling into a deep, dark abyss in which her idealism about “standing with the ‘good guys’” slowly gave way to a grim realisation that, for most, ideology was merely a hollow front for power. “The way we spoke as if we were rebuilding civilisation, positioning ourselves as the moral counterweight to a decaying world, all while living in quiet hypocrisy.”
But even after her first attempt at retiring from media, the pervasive unreality of her life continued. She details her whirlwind romance and marriage to “Mitch”, one of the men hired to work security for her migrant crisis documentary, and her decision to quit media in order to circumvent the ban on her travelling to Mitch’s home country, Australia. This happened in tandem, she recounts, with a hit-piece published by alt-Right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, that alleged Southern was “a secret leftist” who traded sex for video ideas and scripts.
The sense of unreality and malice compounded when, as Southern recounts, a friend tipped her off that Andrew Tate was fanning these false rumours in his “War Room” private group — a fact that, Southern suggests, served as a pre-emptive smear campaign lest she expose his assault on her. Meanwhile, her marriage swiftly deteriorated from giddy romance to domestic abuse. Isolated in Australia, locked down by Covid, she became increasingly desperate and alcohol-dependent. Finally she managed to obtain a plane ticket to visit family in Vancouver with her son — and never returned to Australia.
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Anyone who tries to make sense of This Is Not Real Life without at least a working knowledge of its setting and principal characters is bound to find it confusing. The book skips back and forth across the timeline, blending Southern’s own reflections and her account of events in a loose narrative only occasionally anchored by dates. We can infer that Southern assumes her readers are already sufficiently marinaded in the relevant lore to know who figures such as Steve Bannon, Tommy Robinson, and Andrew Tate are. And while these have received enough mainstream press coverage to be well known even beyond political fandom, it takes someone truly up to the ears in online politics discourse to know who Steven Bonnell is — let alone grasp the significance of her having had a relationship with him.
Bonnell, also known as “Destiny”, is a Left-wing streamer of similar standing to Southern — but for the other team. Having met and debated a few times early in their careers, Southern recounts a friendship developing gradually between them, after her marriage ended — a relationship that eventually became intimate.
When, in late 2024, their relationship was leaked, fans were shocked and bewildered. From a fan perspective, it was unthinkable to consider any kind of relationship developing, between the respective foci of two fandoms so diametrically opposed as Southern’s and Destiny’s. But in Southern’s telling, having both grown up in the digital panopticon and served as the avatar for huge fan communities, they had a surprising amount in common.
Even so, as Southern tells it, even the camaraderie occasioned by their shared experience of life in the digital fishbowl eventually fell victim to the relentless incentive to take ever more polarised positions. In a scene surely too out there to be fabricated, she recounts her final showdown with Bonnell as taking place on the night Donald Trump was shot, in the apartment of Southern’s friend, MAGA influencer Ashley St Clair — who was then pregnant with Elon Musk’s baby. Bonnell made several provocative posts about the assassination attempt, which prompted a bitter stand-up row and the irreparable rupture of their friendship. Her sorrow is palpable: “I’d come here hoping for clarity about my work, about the internet, maybe even about whether I still had a friend. But now I just felt more fractured than before. More alone. Everything felt impossibly fucked.”
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The dissonance between fans’ reaction to the Destiny revelations, and Southern’s own account of it, cuts to the heart of what her memoir reveals. Digital fandom is a very different experience for those on the receiving end of parasocial attachment. How far is it all just showbiz, in which people fraternise cheerfully across supposedly insuperable political divides? Or, as Southern’s bust-up with Bonnell suggests, do the incentives of clickbait-posting sometimes make those divides insuperable?
A cynic might say of her latest retirement announcement that this isn’t the first one she’s made, and each time she’s come back. We might also note, given the lopsided nature of the dirt-dishing exposés in This Is Not Real Life, that not all bridges seem to have been burned. For all the detail on Tate, Robinson and Bonnell, plenty of other notables are by contrast very lightly treated. Despite his notoriety, Stefan Molyneux is mentioned only in passing. Brittany Martinez and Martin Sellner, leading lights of the Generation Identity radicals, make only the briefest cameo appearances. Critics will doubtless accuse Southern of whitewashing a career as a political extremist; but she is frank about the partiality of her account, explaining that she wished to expose her own shortcomings, not humiliate friends.
Nor does This Is Not Real Life describe any kind of political Damascene conversion. But this isn’t a memoir about leaving the Right behind, nor deciding her political views were wrong. Southern may have somewhat moderated her simplistic youthful opinions, but it’s clear she has not recanted. Rather, it’s about coming of age alongside a new celebrity ecosystem, and discovering that — much as rock ‘n’ roll did — it’s possible to be profoundly corrupted by the experience.
And much as rock music ended up central to the establishment, the clear inference of Southern’s story is that politics-as-fandom today is less a dissident force than a tool wielded by the real engines of power and influence. This Is Not Real Life recounts the mess and chaos of growing up alongside, and in, digital showbiz even as this ecosystem consolidated. Now, Southern writes, she fears it has mutated into a new mechanism of control, disguised as freedom, heralding “An era of technofascism, algorithmic control, data and digital systems”.
“Politics-as-fandom today is less a dissident force than a tool wielded by the real engines of power and influence.”
But while nothing in this brave new-media world can be taken wholly at face value, including perhaps Southern’s memoir, my sense is that if she does make a comeback it will be in a more reflective capacity. The book is peppered with reflections on her Evangelical childhood, contrasted with adult reconsiderations of Christianity — not least a reference to the gnostic experience of digital life that feels unmistakably Catholic. One clear and moving subtext concerns Southern’s spiritual journey: an ongoing arc evidently far from complete, but already bearing surprising fruit. (Southern informed me, at the time of writing, that she is pursuing graduate studies in theology.)
The final chapters describe repeated efforts by well-meaning friends to tempt her back into social media; efforts she characterises as like encouraging an alcoholic to just have one glass of wine. The whole spectacle, she suggests, serves to fill the gap where true spirituality should be: “we all want heroes to be real because we all want to be saved.” The parasocial deities of the online firmament are, as she puts it, like “little Greek gods running around with their worshippers”, poor substitutes for “connection with divinity and a higher purpose”. The end of Lauren Southern’s journey, it seems, is a new but also timeless discovery. Namely: that whether you’re worshipper or deity, the parasocial pantheons of the digital realm are thin substitutes for the real thing.
Andrew Tate has been approached for comment.
