By David Futrelle
As you may have heard, YouTube shitlord Carl Benjamin — known as Sargon of Akkad, though he’s actually from Swindon — recently made his debut as a candidate for the European Parliament running on the racist UK Independence Party (UKIP) ticket. And it went alt-great, by which I mean the opposite of great.
First “Sargon” — a genuinely terrible person who originally found internet fame as a #Gamergater — got into a bit of trouble when confronted about an old tweet of his suggesting that he “wouldn’t even rape” a certain female Parliament Member; instead of apologizing he responded to questions by calling the MP a “bitch.”
Meanwhile, freelance internet archivists have been digging up recordings of some of the terrible things he’s said over the years on Youtube, like this froth-mouthed rant blaming feminism for Elliot Rodger’s misogyny-fueled murder spree.
And this creepy defense of pedophilia “on a case by case basis.”
Oh, and Buzzfeed News reported that Mr. Akkad has been sending supporters who want to join his campaign online to a Nazi-infested Discord server.
It’s hard to imagine any of this winning over the voting public, but Sargon’s “bitch” comments are certainly playing well with the internet shitposter crowd.
On Gab, his fans are even less restrained.
And YouTube of course continues to be a cesspool. These are comments on a Sargon video defending his defense of his rape tweet and calling the press “dirty smear merchants” — a phrase many of his fans took to be a reference to Jews.
While Sargon of UKIP seems to be a big hit with the shitlords overall, ‘s still on the outs with a lot of alt-righists — at one point he started a feud of sorts with the more overtly Nazi types that involved him sending interracial gay porn to them — and so there are probably more posts out there describing him as a “cuck” than there are calling him a “chad.”
But hey, the campaign is still young, and he could well win over a portion of his neo-Nazi critics with some new unhinged rant.
Too bad for him — but good for the rest of us — that most of his online fans live outside the UK and can’t vote for him.
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Fortunately, the EU elections are fairly fringe (somewhat ironically, given the UK’s relationship with itself and the EU, but let’s not get into that absolute mess of ignorance and confusion).
Unfortunately, this gives the new edgelord UKIP more space to move, as it’s not like a General Election (where they get nothing, ever).
Pervesely, it’s the evil anti-democratic EU they (and other anti-EU types, of left and right) hate that gives them the most legitimate platforms, via these elections. I can see Carl of Swindon winning more votes than he ever would running for MP. I don’t see him winning.
That said, it’s not about winning, it’s about continuing the stupid, meaningless-meaningful self-contradictory fuckwit dance of Super Intellect and appeasing the baying seals that are the True Masters of the Universe because they, uh…
Sargon….there’s a name I was hoping I would never hear again.
When Sargon started spouting hypotheticals about “SJWs” spurting jizzy goo all over the place, I was out of there. Something was off about him back then. His followers were none too bright, either.
I apologize if this strays too far off topic, but this is one of few places I feel safe ranting about this kind of stuff. Some time ago, I made several posts on how frustrating it was that the Das Boot TV series (the new one, not the 1980’s movie), and I compared it to Game of Thrones in how it had a bunch of sexist tropes and an unnecessary rape scene, yet also strong and nuanced female characters. I kept watching Game of Thrones because I felt the rest of the scenes and the stories of the female characters were compelling enough to weigh up for the sexist parts, and it felt like they were at least trying to use the violence as an attempt to criticize the misogyny of the setting, and for similar reasons, I kept watching “Das boot”, hoping that the series would still be able to go somewhere compelling with the remaining female characters.
Now, I’m not sure I should have, because in the next to last episode of the season, the 2018 Das boot goes beyond the usual “gritty HBO show” levels of sexism and straight up into “HOW THE F**K DID THIS GET GREENLIT BY A MAJOR STUDIO?!” territory. I’ll just put up a CW for casual rape and extreme racism in possibly the most misogynistic scene I’ve ever seen on screen before. Because in this episode of the series, the titular German U-boat finds a seemingly empty ship with Russian markings and decide to board. They find out that the ship is manned by people who claim to be refugees from the eastern front but it soon turns out that they are human smugglers, and they also kept a young blond woman as a sex slave on board, in addition to a bunch of starving jews in the cargo hold. What then happens is that a German crewman who’s been teased for being a virgin by the others (in the first episode they visit a brothel but he’s too shy to do it with a sex worker) decide to rape the blond woman to lose his virginity, and it’s not treated as a big deal, because she was already a sex slave when he found her or something. Now, using gratuitous rape scenes to show a villain is evil is one thing, and having the hero rape a woman but not treat it as rape because she’s shown to be secretly into him is bad, but this is on a whole other level. The woman is shown to be tied up and gagged, full of bruises, dirty clothes and she cries for her entire screentime, and there is zero possibility anyone missed that she was a horribly abused victim, yet her rapist is not shown as a bad guy. The woman is accidentally killed by a ricocheting bullet right after the rape through no fault of the guy raping her, and throughout the series, he’s only ever depicted as a poor kid who just falls for peer pressure (despite the rape takes place after the guy who virgin-shamed him said he wasn’t at fault for being a virgin) and in the last scene we see of the rapist, an older crewman sits down with him and shares a sad anecdote on how he accidentally caused an explosion that killed people because he fell into peer pressure and tells the guy to be his own man, and it’s treated like a heartwarming moment of bonding and a simple morality lesson about not caving into the demands of others. After he raped a sex slave, and said woman got zero dialogue and died right after serving her purpose as a plot device to let the guy lose his virginity. I swear, if the filmmakers had replaced her by a blowup doll that gets accidentally deflated by the ricochet literally nothing would change in terms of how the scene was filmed or how the writers treat the guy having sex with the doll.
And I haven’t even mention the even worse scene following it, because while that is happening, a different crewman, Franz, is stumbling onto the starving jews. Only two of them are still able to move, and they briefly mention that they’re the parents of the blond woman who got raped, and then they ask Franz to shoot them to put them out of their misery. And Franz is the “hero” of the series, who up until that point has been portrayed as a good guy trapped on the wrong side, he had a Romeo/Juliet romance with a Jewish woman before ending up on the U-boat and in the previous episodes he’s been shown to try and speak up against his more violent colleagues, and what does he do? He pretty much immediately gives them his gun to shoot themselves with, and it’s treated as a tragic and inevitable act of mercy. So to repeat, two Jews ask a German in uniform to shoot them, then they shoot themselves so our “hero” can still be seen as heroic and not have blood on his hands.
And to top it all off, the female leader of the resistance turns out to be brutal and unhinged to the point that when, in the last episode, she takes a high-ranking German hostage, and he asks her what makes her different from the Nazis, she literally says the only thing separating them is the fact that she’s on the winning side. Like, they literally say the resistance is just as bad as the nazis, and the series ends with the German woman who’s been working with the resistance and been the lesbian lover of their leader decides to betray them and get all other resistance members killed to stop more civilians from being killed by the Nazis hunting the resistance. Granted, she also tells the Gestapo officer who killed the resistance member that she hates him and fight him off when he tries to rape/murder her after realizing she had been working with the resistance, but then she immediately saves him from the wounds she gave him when fighting him off and any attempts by the writers to show how the Nazis were evil or tell a nuanced story just feels offensive to me in the end. The part with the smuggler ship felt like something straight out of an incel fantasy, where a guy rapes a woman who conveniently dies so he won’t face any consequences for his crime, and we’re meant to feel sorry for him, and to repeat again, we see Jews begging a German to shoot them.
The fact that this isn’t some 4chan fan-fiction or something made up by one dude in his basement, but a big-budget TV-series that tons of people from multiple countries worked on and regular mainstream TV-channels thought was worth giving airtime, and seemingly not one of them ever stopped and thought that this content might be horrible, scares me, and I’m worried the fact that this stuff being deemed acceptable in mainstream media is helping alt-right and incel viewpoints become more acceptable in mainstream media.
I just hope I’m not alone in being alarmed by the values presented in this TV-series, it’s really been bugging me ever since I saw it in full.
@Von Kaauen:
GYAAAAAH! MY EYES! That’s a fifty yottawatt projection lamp you just unleashed!
But it’s also an excellent description of Trump, his followers, and the rest of the righties.
Wait until someone digs up his comments about Jewish identity (audio is on YouTube) or his video were he used the anti-semitic ‘Happy Merchant’.
Scanisaurus:
That sounds legit awful and full of WTF-ery.
Not a show I could watch, and I’m surprised it got greenlit because the heck?
Adding that to my list of movies/shows to never watch. Thanks!
The whole “This is supposed to be our hero but he just did that? And you still want me to think he’s the good guy? The hell? Are you seriousness
It always sucks.
Autocorrect, I hate you.
Do me a favor and pretend “seriousness” is “serious”, and has a question mark after it?
I used to watch these skeptics’ videos out of sheer boredom and curiosity. What eventually drew the line for me was Dave Cullen (and arguably PJW as well) being a gender policing, anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage shitstain, Sargon’s fans being rabidly anti-Semitic (which makes him and his fans look even more idiotic), and Black Pigeon Speaks shitting on both atheism and the majority Muslim migrants coming to Europe in his videos – he’s no better than, say the majority Muslim Bangladeshis he would hate, who have gone after atheist and secularist bloggers. Would he selectively defend them against atheism, selectively defend the atheists/secularists against the Muslims, or give both a hard time?
@Scanisaurus have you written complaints, or at least convinced people not to watch the show? I’ve heard people complaining of an animated TV series having two of their main PoC characters whitewashed. This animated series came from Italy, so you can imagine the racist motives there.
I’m avoiding it mostly because the show became shit to me, long before whitewashing became an issue for the show. At least with this TV show, many people I’ve regularly contacted are horrified with the new art style because of this. I’d already not recommend people not to watch the TV show up to a certain point, based on things unrelated to race.
Well, at least saying he “wouldn’t even rape” someone implies he knows rape is bad.
That’s something I guess; he’s better than the incels, although that is faint praise indeed.
@Anonymous
No, the “wouldn’t even rape” comment is not about rape being bad. It’s the old trope of rape being a compliment on a woman’s attractiveness. It’s straight-up misogyny.
It’s time we started reclaiming history from the alt-right.
Here’s to hoping you UK people don’t vote him.
@Ooglyboggles I might not vote for anyone at this rate, especially with the Article 17 thing in place and being supported by both those on the left and right.
@rv97
Understandable considering that from my perspective all the UK parties just seems to be full bad actors.
Amtep – you’re right, missed the BBC article. OK, so he *isn’t* better than the incels.
Carl of Swindon’s “case by case” pedo-apologia should be an insta-disqualifier.
As should UKIP membership be for EU election candidates.
I’m a mod on both Kristi Winter’s and Kevin Logan’s youtube channel.
Once on Kevin’s channel Carl tried to debate both Kristi and Kevin at the same time. It did not go well for Carl.
I didn’t catch much of the stream because I was busy wielding the ban hammer on all the Carl fans and haters who kept saying antisemitic and racist stuff as well as horrible jokes about Carl’s wife’s recent miscarriage.
Kristi is currently building an archive on youtube of the shit Carl did over the years. If you have something, message her the link on her twitter.
As for UKIP getting into the EU parliament?
No chance in hell since Farage founded the Brexit party. Most of the currently active UKIP MEPs (21 out of 24) has switched to the Brexit party. They only have three left!
Farage has name recognition going for him. And he’s a security blanket for the mildly racist granny/grampa contingent of voters.
Carl, and Dankula, are complete unknowns for the vast majority of the population. And the Fail calling Carl a ‘sicko’ and Dankula a ‘thug’ doesn’t help either.
The Fail is popular with the target demographic of UKIP.
Good grief. I’m so embarrassed to be British right now.
No, not British. The Scots and Irish voted to remain, the Scots will secede if they have any sense and the Irish have their own problems, which are mostly England’s fault. The Welsh voted leave, but they did not spawn Jacob Rees-Mogg so I’d still rather be Welsh.
English. I am bloody English, like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and this guy.
But at least that means I can do something about him! I can’t do anything about Trump, but I can quite possibly email the UK electoral commission, or the police or something, about Sargon of Akkad. And I shall.
Anyway, on behalf of the UK, I apologise for this particular hairless ape, and I’m going to send a strongly worded email right now.
this has been the plan of conmen all along. to try to convince you everyone is bad, so the only people that end up voting are lockstep authoritarians.
not voting because you let conmen convince you not to?
that’s exactly how you end up with Trump.
at least get rid of the Torries first. THEN you can equivocate about who’s left, or hell, run for office yourself. that’s the way democracy is SUPPOSED to work after all.
The usual trajectory for far-right parties in the UK sees them reach a worrying level of power, then fall apart due to infighting. Hopefully UKIP have reached that stage. The situation is slightly unusual, in that Farage’s new party are likely to get more support than the usual splitters. But the way he’s drawn up the constitution of the party, it’s
pretty much his personal fiefdom, and it’ll probably die when his ego causes him to move on.
I don’t know what Carl’s real motive is here. Does he see this as a chance for power, or is it just a grift?
The thing to remember about UKIP is, it’s entire raison d’etre was served once there had been a vote for Brexit. So it was pretty much abandoned by its founders then.
People like Carl of Swindon and his ilk are rather like children coming across cast off armour after a battle and trying on old helmets and swords.
They can play at being grown ups; but ultimately they have all the potency of those Walt type characters who shop at army surplus stores and walk around playing weekend warriors.
@Moggie:
It’s a grift.
He’s clueless, ignorant, and apathetic.
He’s slowly ageing out of the age range his target demographic (late teen and 20ies edgelord males) is willing to watch, as his birth year is 1979.
Now that his antics have reached national media (e.g. daily fail called him ‘sicko’, channel 4 news really doesn’t like him either) and his usual tactics (just shout down aggressively your opposition) doesn’t work on reporters and makes you even less likeable, he’s become truly unemployable.
He gets his income from his popularity. That has started to wane.
Right now no halfway competent employer will tough him with a ten foot pole.
He used to rake in a lot of money for his antics. He still does. But not as much any more.
And I’m quite sure that he didn’t think about putting some of it away for later.
@Violet: If this is what made you embarrassed to be English, you’re going to have a fun time learning about our history.