Far-right activists Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern are set to visit New Zealand next month to do a public talk.
They've planned an event in Auckland on August 3, but no venue has been set and they've been banned from any Auckland Council owned venues.
- Far-right Canadian speakers granted visas to visit New Zealand
- Far-right speaker Lauren Southern says she's 'proud to be white'
- Free speech group says 'dangerous precedent' will be set if they lose lawsuit
The Immigration Minister has labelled their views "repugnant".
So who are these people, and what do they believe?
Stefan Molyneux:
Stefan Molyneux, 52, is a YouTuber, writer, and the host of lengthy Q+A style radio segments called Freedomain Radio. He has 338,000 followers on Twitter and over 800,000 on YouTube but is less well known than Lauren Southern. His most recent YouTube video is called: 'Wait, What? You're Thinking About Marrying A Feminist? Seriously'.
He believes some races are genetically superior to others:
Molyneux believes what race you are strongly influences your IQ, and your IQ strongly influences how economically successful or criminally violent you are.
According to the racist pseudoscience he teaches, white people are ranked higher than the likes of black people, Arabs and Latinos.
He has reportedly claimed that mothers are responsible for men who grow up to be violent:
At a men's rights conference in 2014, Mr Molyneux said mothers were responsible for violent men as they have "an almost universal control over childhood".
"If we could just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases," he said.
"Almost all would be completely eliminated, because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women."
He says women are responsible for men who harm their families:
"Women who choose assholes guarantee child abuse," he says in a YouTube video. "All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes. I don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing assholes," he says in a segment called 'The Matriarchal Lineage of Corruption.
Lauren Southern:
Twenty-three-year-old Lauren Southern is a political activist and internet personality, sort of like a young Tomi Lahren. She used to work for outlet RebelMedia, but now says she's independent. Many of her YouTube videos have millions of views.
She supported an alt-right group stopping rescuers saving migrants at sea:
Ms Southern threw her support behind a group called Generation Identity who target activist groups who rescue migrants, by intercepting them on the water and turning migrants them back to their countries of origin. She attended a protest action with the group in 2017.
"I just want people to not cross borders illegally, obey the freaking law," she says.
She pretended to be gender transitioning as part of a stunt:
In Canada in 2016, she visited a doctor saying she was a gender-nonbinary person, asking for a doctor's note to be able to change her gender identification. The YouTube video 'Lauren Southern Becomes A Man' was a stunt to demonstrate that it's 'easy' to legally change your gender on documents. Ms Southern says this is bad because it means people can be "dishonest" about their gender.
She called Black Lives Matter a terrorist group:
"At times it really does feel like Black Lives Matter is more an ethnic terrorist organisation than a political movement," Ms Southern said in a 2016 YouTube video for Rebel Media.
"Black people are convinced by the media that they're living in a system where everything white people do is trying to oppress them," she told Vice last year.
She said diversity is a weakness:
In her self-published book Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation, Ms Southern wrote that her generation needs to accept: "diversity is not a strength, it's a weakness. Its legacy is not peace and love, but division and hate".
She said Islam is dangerous, but some Muslims can be 'cured':
"Muslims can no doubt be decent and noble people, just as tame wolves do exist, the fact is that Islam the religion is by its nature dangerous to the West," she says in her book.
"Those Muslims we can 'cure' of the worst elements of their religion's doctrine, or who seek to cure themselves and their fellow Muslims, deserve the full co-operation of the West. This does not, and must not, mean that we treat suspicion of that religion as a religion as automatically unreasonable."
She went to a protest and asked feminists to choose Islam or women's rights:
Ms Southern visited a women's protest in November 2017, asking attendees: "Would you rather have women's rights or Islam?"
When one protester asked why she wasn't asking Muslim women that question she said: "their husbands probably didn't let them come".
She went to a rape culture protest with a sign saying it doesn't exist:
At a 'SlutWalk' protest in June 2015, she held up a sign saying "There Is No Rape Culture In The West". She says it's "intellectually dishonest" to hold this view, "go to Africa and you will see a real rape culture".
"Men get fired from their jobs just for making rape jokes, not even raping," she says.
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