Lauren Southern’s signal talent is getting attention. The Canadian far right celebrity’s Australian visa dramas last week – wholly administrative in origin – were spun by her and her fans for a day or so as yet another attack on her freedom of speech.

A temporary setback was repurposed as precious publicity, and News Corp papers continued to unfurl the red carpet ahead of her visit.

Her speaking engagements with rightwing YouTuber Stefan Molyneux will go ahead, as will the top-dollar dinner engagements with those willing to shell out $750. But if the notion that she might be prevented from entering Australia was credible, it’s because because Southern has been banned from entering a country before.

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In the judgement of immigration authorities in the UK, Southern’s “alt-right” provocations are not “conducive to the public good”, and accordingly she was denied entry there last March. By her own account, immigration authorities investigated her under “schedule 7 (terrorism act) because of alleged racism”.

Part of the reason appears to be a Southern stunt the previous month, in the town of Luton. There, she attempted to prove a convoluted point by handing out leaflets reading, among other things, “Allah is gay”. She did this “social experiment” in the company of fellow far right social media star, Brittany Pettibone, and her boyfriend, Martin Sellner, who is a leading figure in the European far right group, Generation Identity.

Southern says she chose Luton because it is the home of Tommy Robinson, the currently imprisoned founder of the English Defence League. In May, Robinson was sentenced to 13 months in prison for contempt of court after broadcasting details of a trial from outside Leeds crown court that risked causing it to collapse.

Like Southern, Robinson has been an outspoken voice in anti-Islamic politics. His prominence in the UK has more recently translated to international fame on the far right. Southern and touring buddy Molyneux have made videos separately and together in support of both Robinson, and the #freetommy movement. This cause was the inspiration for a riotous far right protest in London last month.

Southern, Pettibone, and Sellner have engaged in other European provocations. In 2017, they took part in an effort, billed as “Defend Europe”, to disrupt the work of NGOs assisting refugee boats in the Mediterranean. The campaign was crowdfunded using the now-defunct WeSearchr website, run by American far-right provocateur, and alleged fringe Trump adviser, Charles C Johnson. The mission ended in failure after some of their ship’s crew were deported.

This began a run of bad luck for Sellner, in particular – currently he is being prosecuted in his native Austria under hate speech statutes, and for criminal association under what Breitbart called “mafia laws”.

More recently, Southern has appeared impressed by explicitly fascist figures, labelling the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin as “new” and “interesting”.

Last month, for example, she went to Moscow to meet with Dugin, the “National Bolshevik” political philosopher. Dugin dreams of Russian preeminence over an imperial “Eurasia” stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”. He sets out the ideology which would unite this vast realm in books like the Fourth Political Theory, available in English from the fascist publisher, Arktos. This ideology encompasses what Dugin himself describes as a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism”.

Southern’s far-right associations ... should give us pause.

The rest of Dugin’s “traditionalist” worldview, as even the conservative National Review comments, is “straight out of Nazism”. Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written about Dugin, whom he calls “an actual fascist”, and detailed his philosophical influence on Vladimir Putin, and Russian foreign policy. Snyder says that “for years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonisation of Ukraine”.

Dugin has referred to a segment of the Ukrainian people as a “race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes”, called for their “genocide”, and exhorted that those Ukrainians must be “killed, killed, and killed”. One of his English translators is Nina Kouprianova, who is married to leading light of the US alt-right, Richard Spencer.

Southern and Pettibone’s fawning multi-part interview with Dugin, completed last month, is available on YouTube, and is entitled “From Russia With Love”.

Also on YouTube is Southern’s new documentary, “Farmlands”, which addresses an obsession that has drifted from the far right into Australian conservatism – via News Corp papers – the alleged plight of white farmers in South Africa.

Southern’s treatment of this subject is selective, lurid, and plays up to the long-established far right meta-narrative of “white genocide”. One rightwing watch blog called it “white nationalist agitprop”.

Discussing the film with Southern, Molyneux alleged a conspiracy of silence from the media and NGOs on the non-existent genocide, and plumbed white nationalist fears, saying that “they don’t want to scare the whites in the west with what happens when whites become a minority in a highly aggressive and tribalised world”.

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Southern’s far-right associations, her promotion of the key ideas of white ethnonationalism, and her willingness to become directly involved in racial provocation should give us pause.

So, too, should the willingness of News Corporation’s daily newspapers to promote her.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Andrew Bolt railed about her visa problems. Nor that Miranda Devine had Southern on her podcast to talk about how antifa and Muslims cause her immigration woes.

But earlier puff pieces about her visit, and op-eds defending her in regional newspapers, suggest that News has a disturbing inability to distinguish between ordinary, conservative provocateurs, and those adjacent to white nationalist or fascist movements.

This fits with a pattern on the Australian right. Nevertheless, should News later condemn those who protest against Southern’s appearances, we should remember their role in defending Southern, and advertising her shows.