Far-right e-celeb Lauren Southern is on the comeback trail. And Australian conservatives are more than happy to offer her a helping hand.

Her bid to be taken seriously as a journalist and commentator was given a small boost recently with a slot on Skys Fox News mini-me culture war platform, Outsiders.

The hosts of that program both the ignominiously departed and those that remain have never met a rightwing chancer they didnt like.

But they seem to have a particular affection for Southern, now resident in Australia, who is coming off a curious hiatus from her frenetic work as a far-right influencer.

She bowed out of public life in 2019, claiming she would be looking for fulfilment in a more private capacity, and saying anything she did in future would not be in the same televised firebrand capacity youve seen before.

Before her withdrawal, Southern had come to prominence as a leading light in the so-called alt right as it proliferated across the western world.

She had a stint on Rebel News, which ended in 2017.

While at Rebel she memorably blasted out false rumours on her Twitter account claiming that a mosque shooting in Quebec was the work of Muslims.

But her main vehicle was her YouTube channel, where, among other things, she promoted the idea that white people were subject to an orchestrated Great Replacement by means of nonwhite immigration.

Southern published a video on that concept which is a key tenet of contemporary white nationalist thought in July 2017. In succeeding months, it received hundreds of thousands of views.

The video is now private on Southerns home channel, and oddly absent on the major internet archiving sites.

But a copy obtained by the Guardian sees Southern hitting familiar white nationalist talking points about racial variation in birth rates, white ethnomasochism, and the failure of nonwhite assimilation.

In August 2017, neo-Nazi demonstrators at the Unite the Right rally chanted you will not replace us over two days of street violence. At the end of the final day, one of those demonstrators murdered Heather Heyer, a leftist counterprotester. The same Great Replacement narrative was so appealing to Australian neo-Nazi terrorist, Brenton Tarrant, that he made it the title of the manifesto in which he explained his motivation for mass murdering 51 Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019.

Beyond the promotion of that narrative, between 2016 and 2019, Southern managed to take her race-baiting into a global cottage industry.

She accompanied European identitarians including Tarrants sometime penpal, Martin Sellner on a shambolic, failed mission to turn back refugee boats in the Mediterranean.

She, Sellner, and fellow YouTuber (and Sellners now-wife) Brittany Pettibone were banned from Britain after an Islamophobic stunt in downtown Luton.

And she promoted the false narrative of South African white genocide in a feature-length documentary film.

Her 2018 Australian tour saw Southern sporting a T-shirt bearing a white nationalist slogan; procuring security services from another neo-fascist group, the Lads Society; and receiving dutiful promotion and softball interviews from an array of News Corp properties, including the ever-obliging Outsiders.

After all of this, and her year-long absence, she reappeared in June claiming to have had a change of heart.

In her comeback video, at least rhetorically, Southern was now positioning herself as a kind of centrist, willing to canvas both sides of any issue.

Former allies, like fellow YouTuber and erstwhile Alex Jones offsider, Paul Joseph Watson, have called Southerns new schtick inauthentic, pointing to the bans YouTube had been handing out in her absence to those who shared Southerns old positions.

Milo Yiannopoulos was also critical, and in June offered the view on Telegram (the only remaining social media platform in which he hasnt received a ban) that Southern had popped out just long enough to be exposed and for everyone to forget about what she did, and now shes gonna come right back to milking her beta orbiter followers.

Fortunately for Southern, the Outsiders crew have credulity to burn.

Rowan Dean, the lead interlocutor, didnt sound a single note of scepticism. Instead, he opened the interview by characterising her ban from the UK as an example of her having suffered a lot of abuse. Going over the details of her stunt handing out flyers in Luton asserting that Allah is gay Southern offered it as proof that blue checkmarks, politicians and rich, wealthy celebrities were scaring the people into submission.

In all of the discussion with Dean and his offsiders the Daily Telegraph opinion editor James Morrow and Herald-Sun columnist Rita Panahi Southern was not probed on why she quit the stage, or who exactly, in that case, might have been trying to cancel her. It became clear towards the end of the discussion that she was also there to promote a Sky special the following week on the evils of cancel culture.

Southern is beginning to look like an Outsiders regular.

And now, Southern has been announced as a speaker at another Australian conservative branch-office institution, the local Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Shell speak alongside MP Craig Kelly, Warren Mundine and Mark Latham, among others.

Why would ostensibly mainstream conservatives go so far out of their way to make Southern feel so at home?

A prosaic answer is that her politics aside, she clearly has a knack for media and communication.

Outsiders is good evidence for the near-absence of these talents on the right in Australia. If people buy Southerns volte-face, she might be useful.

And when it comes down to it, there isnt much daylight between the politics of Southern, which are white nationalist, and those of Australian conservatism as it has developed in recent decades.

After her Mediterranean misadventure, a defiant Southern was quoted as saying: If the politicians wont stop the boats, well stop the boats.

She may be an immigrant, but comments like those show she has what it takes to assimilate.

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Lauren Southern is on the comeback trail, and Australian conservatives are all too happy to help - The Guardian