Lauren Southern, a YouTube social media “journalist” and far-right activist, appeared on Breitbart radio last weekend, where she parroted the white nationalist talking point that South Africa is in “the beginning stages” of a white “genocide.”
On Sunday night’s episode of “Breitbart News Sunday,” Rebecca Mansour hosted Southern to discuss a handful of her recent activism efforts, including her upcoming film about farm murders in South Africa. Southern’s film, which she created with a far-right South African activist with ties to U.S. white nationalist groups, is designed to stoke fears of an impending white “genocide.”
“This isn’t just a matter of some things heating up and just some people talking and saying, ‘Shoot, kill the Boers’ here and there—just anti-white sentiments in media. This is now a problem of policy,” Southern said.
Discussing African National Congress plans to “expropriate land without compensation for redistribution to landless black South Africans,” Southern warned that white “genocide” is on the way.
“If it continues, I fear there is either going to be the beginning stages of what many people would call genocide,” Southern said. “I use that word very carefully and I say ‘the beginning stages’ but this is something that Genocide Watch has acknowledged before.”
Mansour quickly attempted to peddle back Southern’s statements: “Just for our listeners, I know you caution, you know, you preface, that some people use the word genocide, some people don’t and there is some disagreement there.”
Southern cited the human rights group Genocide Watch to back up her “genocide” warnings about South Africa. In fact, Genocide Watch president Gregory Stanton wrote in 2015: “One of the false uses of Genocide Watch’s model for genocide prediction is the claim by some South Africans, racists in the United States (like the mass killer in Charleston and David Duke), and a few South African expatriates, that South Africa is undergoing a ‘white genocide.’ Genocide Watch has never said ‘white genocide’ is underway in South Africa and in fact South Africa is not even close to stage nine, which would legally be called genocide.”
Southern partnered with Simon Roche, a right-wing extremist who has openly bragged that his group has advanced a “white genocide” narrative about South Africa, to create her documentary. As the blog Angry White Men first highlighted, Roche has been promoted in the U.S. by far-right advocates and conspiracy theorists, despite his deep ties to explicit white supremacist groups such as American Renaissance, League of the South and American Vanguard. Roche has also been openly courting the alt-right while appearing before audiences at Red Ice TV and “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell’s “Radical Agenda.”
One preview of Southern’s documentary also features Dan Roodt, a former official of National Front, a white separatist group in South Africa.
