More internet fun at the expense of another far right, aspiring politico. This time it’s Carl Benjamin, aka the internet ranter known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, amongst other, less polite epithets.
Sargon’s one of the extreme right-wing internet figures that Gerard Batten has invited into his party in order to restore its flagging membership and electoral viability, like Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan, alias Count Dankula, and Tommy Robinson. Dankula’s notorious as the idiot, who was convicted of anti-Semitism after he trained his girlfriend’s pug to make the Nazi salute when he shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Gas the Jews’. He put videos of it on YouTube, and claimed it was all just a joke. The Glaswegian Jewish community thought otherwise, prosecuted, and the judge agreed with them. And Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon, is the islamophobe who founded the EDL, then was involved with Pegida UK. After having been in the BNP, of course. He’s now Batten’s special adviser on Islam and prisons, because he’s been in a few, and not just for hate speech and contempt of court, but also for other crimes like assault and mortgage fraud. And now UKIP have chosen Sargon to be their candidate for the European elections for the southwest. Which isn’t surprising, as he comes from Swindon.
A few days ago Sargon put up a five minute people announcing his candidacy. Kirsti Winters, an American academic teaching in Germany, who is a feminist and a political scientist, put up this spoof video. It’s another piece of careful editing done to make Sargon look stupid. The video begins with the statement that UKIP is a ‘rational party for rational people’. It then shows Sargon introducing himself, and saying that he doesn’t want to be elected to the European parliament, and pleading with people not to elect him, as he won’t do sh*t. He also claims that he’s a ‘centrist moderate’ but comes from a part of the community, whose voice isn’t being heard. And he is firmly opposed to far-left ideology, which he will expose on the internet if he comes across it.
Well, Sargon is many things, but he most definitely isn’t a ‘centrist moderate’. For some bizarre reason he sees, or claims to see himself as ‘centre left’, but that’s only by the standards of the mid-19th century. He also describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, which means that he stands for absolute free trade, the total privatisation of the economy and the destruction of the welfare state. As for being a member of a section of the community whose voice is being stifled, I have heard that Sargon’s Jewish and has a Black grandfather. But those aren’t the ethnic groups he means. Sargon’s a member of the manosphere, that section of the internet that believes feminism has gone far too far, and is a seething mass of resentment about how White men are under attack from aggressive feminism, anti-racism, ‘social justice warriors’ and other extreme left-wing ideologies. He has several channels in which he finds the most extreme or ridiculous feminists, Black or other ethnic minority activists or campaigners for gay and trans rights, criticises them and tries to claim that they are somehow representative of all feminists, Blacks, gays and transgender people.
I mentioned him a few days ago in a piece I put up about UKIP’s choice of Count Dankula as one of their candidates for the European elections. Zelo Street put up another piece on the pair at the same time, which gave a few more details of Sargon’s unpleasant opinions. Like the tweet he sent to Jess Philips, when she was talking about the vile misogynist messages she had been sent, including rape threats. Sargon’s tweeted ‘I wouldn’t even rape you.’ He also told a group of other extreme rightists on a livestream, in which he was taking part, that they were ‘behaving like a bunch of n****ers’ and ‘White n****ers’ when they started to fall out among themselves. Sargon isn’t, as far as I know, actually a member of the Alt Right. He defines himself as a civic, rather than ethnonationalist, which means that he believes that anyone born in a country is a citizen, regardless of their colour or ethnicity, rather than that only Whites have citizenship. On the other hand, he does hold many of their views, so that one of the leaders of the Alt Right has said that he’s a gateway into them. He’s certainly said that an Alt Right government would be less of a threat to him and his family than an ‘SJW’ (Social Justice Warrior) one.
As for the slogan underneath the spoof UKIP banner at the start of the video, ‘Service guarantees citizenship’, SF fans will spot that as the motto in Robert Heinlein’s highly militaristic novel, Starship Troopers, filmed in the 1990s by Paul Verhoven, the man who gave us Robocop and Total Recall. In the film and the novel, only those who have served in the military qualify as citizens with the right to vote. Heinlein started out as a socialist before moving to the extreme right, and he really believed this. So, apparently, do many UKIP officials and politicos, as they’ve also repeated it. Whether they really believe it, or even know where it comes from, is debatable. It may be they’re only using it to draw in extreme right-wing SF fanboys. But it’s there, nonetheless.
As for ‘a rational party for rational people’, Sargon’s party of the internet sceptic community, but it seems that this has increasingly given up promoting atheism or attacking ‘unscientific’ beliefs, and become dominated instead by self-proclaimed right-wing intellectuals attacking anything to the left of them. So much so that it’s fair to say that parts of it do resemble the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vesey and its bizarre, twisted, deeply insular inhabitants. Like Tubbs and Edward and their ‘local shop, for local people’.
The best thing genuine liberals, moderates and leftists can do is take Sargon’s advice, and not vote for him or UKIP, if they don’t want this country run by a horde of deeply xenophobic, misogynist gammon. Some of whom may well have Tubbs and Edward’s snub noses.
