Southern listened to him closely for a few seconds. Partway through the ride, her phone rang. Southern finished on set and ordered an Uber to the airport for her flight home to Toronto. “It’s been so overused, I just have no respect for the term.” “The word racist just means nothing to me anymore,” she said. When McInnes brought the conversation closer to home, noting that white “self-hatred” is so rampant that he can’t even find South African wine at his local bar, Southern nodded. In the 19th century, the Zulu people took the land that is now South Africa from another ethnic group, she said, and therefore Blacks are just as responsible for apartheid as whites. Southern’s reporting for Farmlands had rippled through right-wing media-Trump would order Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the issue-and McInnes, now finished with his commentary on gender roles, had Southern discuss her revisionist history. “If you’re not making humans, then fucking stand up, bitch.” Southern, who was joining him to talk about her documentary Farmlands, which focuses on the alleged persecution of white farmers in South Africa, gasped in faux horror. “Then I’ll give them my seat.” The men laughed, and Southern, submitting to the last-minute ministrations of a makeup artist, laughed along-just one of the guys, with long, stick-straight blond hair and an off-the-shoulder, floral-print dress. “Are you ever gonna have kids, give birth, are you going to be a mother?” he asked her. McInnes watched stonily as Southern joined the men. “Proud Boys-stand back, and stand by,” Trump replied, only semi-ambiguously.įrom the November 2020 issue: Right-wing militias are bracing for civil war Last month, debate moderator Chris Wallace asked President Donald Trump to condemn the Proud Boys and white-supremacist organizations. McInnes is a founder of Vice magazine and of the Proud Boys, an all-male, neofascist group that promotes violence against its political opponents.
“This is the patriarchy right here,” Southern bantered. Her fellow guests were all men: an Army veteran, a Washington think tanker, and a radio shock jock. Southern was only in her early 20s, but she had already emerged as the alt-right’s most influential woman. Gavin McInnes took a swig of whiskey from a bottle on his talk show’s on-set bar before bringing Lauren Southern onstage.