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mastodon - Link to source
New Episode of The Kyle Anzalone Show [GUEST] Dave DeCamp: The Escalating Ukraine Proxy War antiwar.com/blog/2025/07/15/ne…

New Episode of The Kyle Anzalone Show [GUEST] Dave DeCamp: The Escalating Ukraine Proxy War - Antiwar.com Blog

The intertwining of military aid, global alliances, and political positioning takes center stage as Dave DeCamp, news editor at AntiWar.
Antiwar.com Blog

mastodon - Link to source

So if you ever wondered how OpenBSD 7.7 (most recent one at the time of writing) works on 23-year old PC, I have recorded a boot process.
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (single-core 1.6 Ghz) from 2002. i386, of course
RAM: 512 Mb DDR2
HDD: Some Western Digital 80Gb hard drive from ~2004
Fresh OpenBSD installation without any tweaks and tuning boots in 88 seconds.
There's definitely a room for improvement such as turning off libraries reordering (we should't worry about security too much on such machine). Less then a minute is easily possible.
But still, results are amazing, I think. It's a 23-year old PC! And it runs the most recent OS without any trouble. Try to do that with Windows 11 or any mainstream Linux distro.
Also, #FVWM is pretty snappy and works just fine.

youtube.com/watch?v=jrCtwh8yqU…

#OpenBSD #RunBSD #RetroComputing #RetroComputers #FVWM


OpenBSD 7.7 boots on a 23-year old computer

If you ever wondered how fast is OpenBSD, here's a video of OpenBSD 7.7 booting on a computer with AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (single-core 1.6Ghz from 2002) and 512...
YouTube
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

mastodon - Link to source

SYRIE. Les gangs jihadistes commettent des massacres de masse à Soueïda
kurdistan-au-feminin.fr/2025/0…

"SYRIE – Les affrontements se poursuivent dans la ville druze de Soueïda où les gangs djihadistes syriens commettent des crimes de guerre, notamment des exécutions extrajudiciaires, des démolitions de maisons et des attaques contre des églises, des symboles et des personnalités nationales, signale l’agence


SYRIE. Les gangs jihadistes commettent des massacres de masse à Soueïda – Kurdistan au féminin

SYRIE – Les affrontements se poursuivent dans la ville druze de Soueïda où les gangs djihadistes syriens commettent des crimes de guerre, notamment des exécutions extrajudiciaires, des démolitions de maisons et des attaques contre des églises, des sy…
Kaf1 (Kurdistan au féminin)

friendica - Link to source
Here’s How Trump Was Manipulated Into Mission Creep korybko.substack.com/p/heres-h…

Here’s How Trump Was Manipulated Into Mission Creep

Zelensky, anti-Russian US hawks, Melania, and the Mainstream Media each exploited in their own way his false expectation that Putin would agree to a ceasefire-partnership deal.
Andrew Korybko (Andrew Korybko's Newsletter)

mastodon - Link to source

ROJAVA. La Turquie a asséché le barrage de l’Euphrate
kurdistan-au-feminin.fr/2025/0…

"SYRIE / ROJAVA – La région du Nord – Est de la Syrie sous contrôle des forces arabo-kurdes est au bord d’une catastrophique humanitaire, sanitaire et écologique à cause du niveau de barrage de l’Euphrate qui a baissé dangereusement à cause de la rétention de l’eau du fleuve par la Turquie colonialiste grâce aux barrages […]
L’article ROJAVA.


ROJAVA. La Turquie a asséché le barrage de l'Euphrate – Kurdistan au féminin

SYRIE / ROJAVA – La région du Nord – Est de la Syrie sous contrôle des forces arabo-kurdes est au bord d’une catastrophique humanitaire, sanitaire et écologique à cause du niveau de barrage de l’Euphrate qui a baissé dangereusement à cause de la réte…
Kaf1 (Kurdistan au féminin)

mastodon - Link to source

Canal Seine-Nord : pourquoi ce projet est-il toujours contesté ?
basta.media/canal-seine-nord-p…

"Ce projet de voie fluviale permettrait de relier la Seine aux grands fleuves du nord de l'Europe. Présenté comme écologique et bénéfique pour l'économie locale, il suscite une contestation croissante.

-
Écologie

/
Décryptages,
Se déplacer demain,
Bétonisation"


Canal Seine-Nord : pourquoi ce projet est-il toujours contesté ?

Agathe Di Lenardo (Basta!)

friendica - Link to source
Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Earth planning date: Monday, July 14, 2025 The Curiosity rover continues to navigate through the region of Mount Sharp characterized by the boxwork terrain. After successfully completing a drive of about 34 meters over the weekend (about 112 feet), the […]

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4600-4601: Up and Over the Sand Covered Ramp

Mars Science Laboratory Mission Team Members (NASA Science)

mastodon - Link to source

Heart-wrenching scenes after nine Palestinian aid seekers were shot dead by the Israeli army while waiting for desperately needed food aid at the U.S.-run aid distribution center on Al-Tina Street, southeast of Khan Younis.

x.com/QudsNen/status/194535770…

#Gaza #Palestine #Syria #iran #lebanon #Genocide #geopolitics
@palestine @lebanon @yemen @irannachrichten #SettlerColonialism
#AntiImperialism #tiktok #cdnpoli
#antiPalestinianracism #canada #usa #yemen
@blackmastodon #freePalestine

in reply to ☀️Blissy☀️

mastodon - Link to source

Shine McShine 🐌

creo que más o menos salió a la vez; lo de la tarifa plana era una forma de time-shering, que se llevaba haciendo desde los 60, la idea era aprovechar que muchas compañías dejaban sus servidores ociosos al final de la jornada laboral, así que les salía más a cuenta alquilarlos esas horas para que gente como nosotros surfeara las superautopistas de la información

mastodon - Link to source

“Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, promises xAI”

theverge.com/x-ai/707442/grok-…

Anyone remember the days when we actually had a bar? Or at least pretended there was one, no matter how low? I miss those days.

#fascism #BigTech #elonMusk #xAI


Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, promises xAI

After a string of controversies involving antisemitism, Hitler, and more, Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, xAI promised.
Hayden Field (The Verge)

mastodon - Link to source

"Staatsräson" ist per Definition Rechtsbruch. bird.makeup/users/rashadalhind…

Rashad Alhindi

2025-07-15 12:49:47

birdsitelive - Link to source

‼️EILMELDUNG‼️
Das Berliner Verwaltungsgericht findet das Verbot der politischen Betätigung des Palästinensischen Chirurgen und Rektors der Uni von Glasgow @ghassanabusitt1 durch die Berliner Behörde rechtswidrig.

Erneut eine Niederlage für die #Staatsräson


friendica - Link to source
Chinese contractor to electrify Iran’s east-west railway en.mehrnews.com/news/234332/Ch…

Chinese contractor to electrify Iran’s east-west railway

TEHRAN, Jul. 15 (MNA) – Iran has awarded a contract to a Chinese company to electrify its east-west railway amid plans to increase freight transit from China to other countries via the Iranian railway.
Mehr News Agency

mastodon - Link to source

Es stand schon als Vermutung in Raum, aber nun scheint es belegt zu sein. Ein brit.-isr. Anwalt, mit engen Verbindungen zu Netanyahu (aktuell Anwalt des Faschisten Duterte vor dem #ICC) hat den Chefankläger #KarimKhan erpresst.
Er habe die Drohung übermittelt, dass Khan vernichtet werden würde, wenn er nicht darauf verzichte die Haftbefehle gegen #Netanyahu auszustellen.

»ICC lawyer linked to Netanyahu advisor warned Khan to drop war crimes probe or be 'destroyed'«
middleeasteye.net/news/israeli…


ICC lawyer linked to Netanyahu advisor warned Khan to drop war crimes probe or be 'destroyed'

The British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court was warned in May that if arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant were not withdrawn, he and the ICC would be "destroyed".
David Hearst (Middle East Eye)
in reply to stephie

mastodon - Link to source

stephie

»According to the WSJ an anonymous source also sent information about the allegations to journalists in an email that contained the phone numbers of the complainant and an advisor to Khan, Thomas Lynch, next to the Hebrew word for telephones.

The IOM then opened another investigation, which was closed in early November.

Two investigations into the allegations had been opened and closed when the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services opened its own external investigation, which is ongoing.«

in reply to stephie

mastodon - Link to source

stephie

»Since being subjected to sanctions by the US in February, Khan has had his American visa revoked and his wife and children have been banned from travelling to the country. His bank accounts have also been frozen in the UK.«

»If the US sanctions the court as an institution, as some experts believe it might, it would prevent many banks and software companies from dealing with it - potentially crippling the ICC's ability to function.«

mastodon - Link to source
Liberating Moments of Subversive Communication..... Loren Goldner & The Wise Brothers
libcom.org/article/liberating-…

Liberating Moments of Subversive Communication..... Loren Goldner & The Wise Brothers

...... Haphazard - often inspiring - sadly final - emails from 2013 to 2022 - between Loren Goldner and David & Stuart Wise plus (on an adjacent web page) Loren's lost text / critique of UK(PLC) over the last 50 years which was on the now mysteriousl…
libcom.org

friendica - Link to source
Secretary-General: The level of death and destruction in Gaza is unprecedented in recent times dailyyemen.net/2025/07/15/secr…

Secretary-General: The level of death and destruction in Gaza is unprecedented in recent times

Many children in the Gaza Strip are no longer matched with the years of education they are supposed to be, after the Israeli war machine prevented them from studying for two whole years. While the world’s children go to school every morning, childre
DAILY YEMEN
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Bilal Barakat 🍉

@Kraemer_HB
Dass es als Teil des Urteils belastbare Vorgaben hätte geben sollen, da gebe ich dir völlig recht.
Aber es ist doch wohl eher die Verwaltung, die durch offensichtlich rechtswidriges Verhalten das Vertrauen der Bürger zerstört, nicht das Gericht, dass das feststellt oder die Medien, die über die Feststellung berichten...
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Bilal Barakat 🍉

@Kraemer_HB
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the distinction between news and opinion journalism.

Einfach trocken über das Urteil berichten geht völlig in Ordnung, und mit dem Urteil in der Hand können dann berufene public intellectuals aufzeigen, wie die Repression von Palästina-Solidarität und die faschistische Demontage des Rechtsstaats Hand in Hand gehen. Als Beispiel für diesen größeren Zusammenhang diskutiert wäre mir der Fall wichtiger als nur einen Schritt weiter zu fragen, was das jetzt konkret für den nächsten Kongress und den nächsten unliebsamen Besucher bedeutet.

mastodon - Link to source
Decline and Rebellion in the UK over the last 50 years - Loren Goldner
libcom.org/article/decline-and…

Decline and Rebellion in the UK over the last 50 years - Loren Goldner

An expansive look at working class conditions and class struggle in the UK in the last half of the 20th Century, through the lens of books by Nicholas Comfort and Owen Jones.
libcom.org

diaspora - Link to source

Les chemins révolutionnaires et le marxisme aujourd’hui


Que nous apprend l’œuvre tardive de Marx sur le rôle des luttes anticoloniales et autochtones dans le dépassement du capitalisme ? Quelles sont les trajectoires révolutionnaires de notre époque ? Le sociologue et militant politique Kevin Anderson évoque son dernier livre et les récentes manifestations aux États-Unis.

entreleslignesentrelesmots.wor…

#marx


Les chemins révolutionnaires et le marxisme aujourd’hui

Que nous apprend l’œuvre tardive de Marx sur le rôle des luttes anticoloniales et autochtones dans le dépassement du capitalisme ? Quelles sont les trajectoires révolutionnaires de notre époque ? L…
Entre les lignes entre les mots

Emmanuel Florac reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

Germany: Two years of Switch-Off – an evaluation
actforfree.noblogs.org/2025/07…

"Two years of Switch-Off – an evaluation April 2024 It has been two years since we first spoke. The call was made in the middle of the ongoing strategy debate in the climate movement. At that time, after Hambi, Danni and directly after Lützerath, the potential of mass actions seemed to have been exhausted for … Continue reading Germany: Two years of

Germany: Two years of Switch-Off – an evaluation | Act for freedom now!

actforfree.noblogs.org

snac - Link to source

"Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console"

theregister.com/2025/07/14/ata…


Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

: Warned that ChatGPT and Copilot had already lost, it stopped boasting and packed up its pawns
Simon Sharwood (The Register)

diaspora - Link to source
Are you tired of being misinformed and deceived? Yes, I can't change that either. But you can let the Undead Network deceive you. Music, digital sovereignty, international politics. D.I.Y. misinformation now available in English and German. #music #politics #diy #misinformation
undeadnetwork.de/blog/

Undead Network News

Art - Music - Digital Rights - Analysis - Politics. Your source for analysis, art and digital sovereignty.
Undead Network News

Emmanuel Florac reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
[GCI-ICG] Theory of decadence, decadence of theory. The worst product of imperialism: anti-imperialism
libcom.org/article/gci-icg-the…

[GCI-ICG] Theory of decadence, decadence of theory. The worst product of imperialism: anti-imperialism

Source in French: Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, Le Communiste No.25, November 1986
libcom.org

mastodon - Link to source

A few words about the Exarcheia riots on 12th April 2025 (Athens,Greece)
actforfree.noblogs.org/2025/07…

"A few words about the Exarchia riots on 12th April 2025 In the evening of April 12th, we chose to confront the forces of repression in the streets of Exarchia. This conflict erupted in a climate of intense police presence in the neighbourhood by the state and attempts to instill fear among those who resist.

A few words about the Exarcheia riots on 12th April 2025 (Athens,Greece) | Act for freedom now!

actforfree.noblogs.org

diaspora - Link to source

Susan ✶✶✶✶

2025-07-06 19:27:31

diaspora - Link to source

Sam Altman’s AI Empire Relies on Brutal Labor Exploitation jacobin.com/2025/07/altman-ope…


Sam Altman’s AI Empire Relies on Brutal Labor Exploitation

Firms like OpenAI are developing AI in a way that has deeply ominous implications for workers in many different fields. The current trajectory of AI can only be changed through direct confrontation with the overweening power of the tech giants.
jacobin.com

friendica - Link to source
Bombs were expensive, bullets cheap! A look at U.S.-Israeli strategy of killing Palestinians in food lines parstoday.ir/en/news/west_asia…

Bombs were expensive, bullets cheap! A look at U.S.-Israeli strategy of killing Palestinians in food lines

Pars Today – The Zionist regime, in its 23rd month of war on Gaza – during which it has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Strip with unprecede...
Pars Today

mastodon - Link to source
The Workers' Dreadnought (Vol. 09 No. 14 - 17 June 1922)
libcom.org/article/workers-dre…

The Workers' Dreadnought (Vol. 09 No. 14 - 17 June 1922)

Including: Durham miners manifesto, Kollonatai's Workers Opposition continued, Workers Opposition joins Fourth International, Luxemberg on the Russian Revolution continued, etc.
libcom.org

mastodon - Link to source

👩🏼I can't believe Trump would do this! ICE was so much better under Biden! Elections have consequences!

🧔🏿‍♂️Uh, check the dates? This happened under Biden.

👩🏼Oh. Well, Georgia is a red state! They chose this!

🧔🏿‍♂️ICE is a Federal agency. Run at the time by the Democrat controlled Federal government.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…

Remember when, under Biden, Haitians fleeing war in their country were whipped and rounded up like cattle by cowboys on horseback?

And Biden acknowledged that this was a bad look, and disciplined ICE by... firing... the horse? 🤡

Seriously. He fired the horse.

Made them switch to quad cycles. 🤷🏿‍♂️

1/N

ICE agents on quad cycles.
ICE Agents on horseback whip and lasso Haitian refugees at the US Mexico border, like some out of control posse.

Irish tourist jailed by Ice for months after overstaying US visit by three days: ‘Nobody is safe’

Exclusive: For roughly 100 days, Thomas says he faced harsh detention conditions, despite agreeing to deportation
Sam Levin (The Guardian)

mastodon - Link to source

Face aux crimes israéliens, l’UE choisit l’inaction et le déshonneur

Le conseil européen des affaires étrangères de l’#UnionEuropéenne n’a finalement rien statué sur son accord d’association avec #Israël, pourtant bafoué. Les 27 se contentent d’un accord sans garantie sur l’aide humanitaire à #Gaza.

Par Clothilde Mraffko › mediapart.fr/journal/internati…

Ursula von der Leyen et Benjamin Netanyahu. © Photomontage Mediapart avec AFP

Face aux crimes israéliens, l’UE choisit l’inaction et le déshonneur

Le conseil européen des affaires étrangères de l’Union européenne n’a finalement rien statué sur son accord d’association avec Israël, pourtant bafoué. Les 27 se contentent d’un accord sans garantie sur l’aide humanitaire à Gaza.
Clothilde Mraffko (Mediapart)

diaspora - Link to source

Some actual good news - Flint, Michigan finishes replacing lead pipes, completing a decade long effort.

goodnewsnetwork.org/flint-fini…


Flint Finishes Replacing 11,000 Lead Pipes, Concluding Activists' Decade-Long Effort to Secure Clean Water

A decade after lead-contaminated water was found in Flint's water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is nearly finished.
Andy Corbley (Good News Network)

Emmanuel Florac reshared this.

diaspora - Link to source

M. Carney doit dénoncer le projet israélien de camps de concentration à Gaza : CJPMO


Montréal, le 10 juillet 2025 – Canadiens pour la justice et la paix au Moyen-Orient (CJPMO) tire la sonnette d’alarme concernant les derniers plans d’Israël visant à déplacer de force les Palestiniens de Gaza et à les concentrer dans une zone fermée à la frontière sud avec l’Égypte, en préparation de leur déportation vers d’autres pays. CJPMO se fait l’écho des préoccupations des fonctionnaires de l’ONU et des historiens de l’Holocauste, qui estiment que ces projets s’apparentent à des « camps de concentration massifs », et demande instamment au Premier ministre Carney de dénoncer ce crime contre l’humanité.

entreleslignesentrelesmots.wor…

#international #israel #canada


Affinités électives des bourreaux (et autres textes)

Le néolibéralisme comme stratégie coloniale en Palestine – conversation avec Toufic Haddad Lettre du Collectif national au ministre de l’Europe et des Affaires Etrangères : agissez pour la su…
Entre les lignes entre les mots

Emmanuel Florac reshared this.

diaspora - Link to source

Lauren Southern’s bombshell memoir - UnHerd


#politics #altright #corruption #madness

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

unherd.com/2025/07/lauren-sout…


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