By David Futrelle
The results are in for the European elections, and as a confused American I have no idea what they mean, for the UK or Europe as a whole. (I’ll leave the explanations to people who understand this better than me.)
But there’s one thing that’s clear to even me: Barring a miracle, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), is toast, and a good part of the blame for that rests on the shoulders of YouTube-blabber-turned-UKIP-candidate Sargon of Akkad, aka Carl Benjamin of Swindon.
UKIP earned a whopping 3.3% percent of the vote, winning the party a grand total of zero seats in the European Parliament. In Swindon, Sargon’s home town, the party scored a little better, but the dropoff in votes for UKIP from the last elections was even more humiliating than in the country at large.
To be fair, most observers agree, the real cause of UKIP’s implosion was Brexit kingpin Nigel Farage’s defection to his brand-new Brexit party, which came in first in the election, boosted by all the former UKIP voters who defected with Farage.
But Sargon definitely didn’t help. Indeed, he may have driven the final nail into UKIP’s coffin. Over the course of his brief campaign, Sargon managed to embarrass himself and his party so thoroughly that neither may ever recover.
He began his candidacy by doubling down on a rape joke directed at a Member of Parliament, and spent much of his time answering questions about the joke and other horrific comments he’d made in the past — including a pretty creepy take on pedophilia (“it depends on the child”).
Also, he got milkshaked, and at one campaign stop he was pelted with fish.
But it wasn’t just Sargon who was constantly getting asked questions about his rape joke and other awful statements; other UKIP candidates spent so much time dealing with the Sargon issue that a top party official told the Guardian yesterday that she thought
Ukip’s EU campaign has been overshadowed by Sargon of Akkad’s disgusting comments and rape jokes and things he has said in the past. That’s very much marred Ukip’s reputation.
Naturally, Sargon’s many detractors online — of all ideological stripes — reacted with glee to his massive failure, prompting one person to post this meme highlighting this rare moment of agreement between Twitterers and the trolls of 4chan.
And then there were these memes:
On Twitter, the jokes and comments were mostly clean, if not always polite.
Things got a little more … intense on 4chan’s /pol/.
Here are a couple of fans defending Sargon and fellow far-right election-loser Tommy Robinson:
Noe everyone was quite so positive about poor defeated Sargon.
And I guess we’ll classify this Anon as an “undecided, leaning towards no.”
The memes were a little, er, cruder on 4chan as well.
On YouTube, meanwhile, Nazis and ex-GamerGaters are ganging up on poor Sargon. On the left, Kevin Logan has delivered this brief but edifying analysis:
But the man himself was, at least publicly, unperturbed by his loss and by the damage he did to UKIP, declaring in a new video that. well, he meant to do that.
Sorry, wrong video. In Sargon’s actual video, he explained that election night
went exactly as expected. I know that a lot of people for some reason thought that UKIP were going to do all right in this election and I have to say I’m sure that I made it clear that we weren’t going to.
And he apparently is going to … keep on campaigning and holding debates even though the election is over and he lost?
Because this campaign really was quite a phenomenal thing in my opinion. Now it didn’t translate the polls obviously because there’s too much else going on but we achieved a hell of a lot. We now know exactly how to run these kinds of campaigns and like I said … I’m going to do these bigger and better every month. We’re going to leaflet to let locals know we’re going to be there. That’s going to get the local press involved. We are going to fill out the town squares regarding these debates.
Well, best of luck with that I guess. It can’t go any worse for him than the election itself did.
Who am I kidding? Of course it can, and it probably will.
Oh, by the way, I made gifs.
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He didn’t get milkshaked once, he got milkshaked four times.
How do we really know he’s a reverse King Midas? He might just be one of those people who show up when things are already turning to crap.
Which, as signs go, isn’t really any better.
Brexit was a wrexit even before he came along to bobble it up further. The man’s as useless as udders on a bull.
Except, of course, when it comes to risibility.
Lmao literally 0 seats. Dearest leader he is not.
The UKIP has been a running joke for years, even before their flirtation with racists and the sewers of the Internet. In the Irish language political comedy, “Crisis Eile”, [about a disgraced member of the Dail (Irish Parliament) sent to Brussels], the British EU presence is represented by a manic UKIP politician obsessed with his “Bacon Rolly Polly” motion. The UKIP’s direct effect on Irish politics is nil and they think it’s worth mocking.
If only the real UKIP was so whimsically and harmlessly amusing.
I’ve been taking a much needed partial break from the news lately, but good to see this.
To be fair, UKIP was already collapsing before Carl of Swindon and his felt alt-right edgelords signed on–they got 2% in the 2017 General Election, and have had a lengthy series of embarrassing leaders over a fairly short span of time, most notably Gerard Batten’s immediate predecessor Henry Bolton, who was forced to resign due to an affair with a racist Page 3 girl. (Yes, really.) It’s just this turned out to be treating your mortal illness with strychnine.
“Neo-Jacobin” Well that’s a new one. I’m not sure what it says about them that they have to reach back to the French Revolution to describe their conspiracy-theory ladened boogeyman.
And in a sign of how brave these manly alt-right nitwits are, Tommy Robinson didn’t just get beaten, he got beaten so badly he snuck out of the count room rather than have to be there when his trouncing was officially announced.
And the alt-right does what does best when they have to wear their asses as hats: Feast on their own and disavow ever knowing the person.
Article only serves to reinforce writer’s/ reader’s prejudiced opinion re ukip and Benjamin; hence reads like merely so much more globalist propaganda.
I haven’t been able to take as much pleasure as I would have liked in UKIP’s implosion.
At this election, UKIP served, in an Overton Window kind of way, to make Farage’s new vehicle seem almost respectable. Farage, who is known to have been in contact with Steve Bannon, and who has now topped the poll in almost every constituency with a “party” which has no members and no declared manifesto. He’s now demanding a place at the negotiating table, and could be in coalition with the Tories after the next general election.
I know Farage is a difficult person to take seriously, but I fear we ought to start thinking of him less as Roderick Spode, more as Oswald Mosley.
Dude looks like Al from home improvement.
Is anyone else reminded of that scene in the Lion King where Scar gets eaten by his own hyenas?
Good analysis, but you forget one important thing: Farage defected and formed the Brexit Party for the same reasons that people like Carl of Swindon joined it in the first place. Farage may be very right-wing, but he’s a single-issue wonk, and his baby is Brexit. He thought that UKIP was getting taken over by the alt-right, the tipping point for him coming when Gerald Batten appointed Tommy Robinson to a leadership position, and he felt that this was staining the image of Brexit and causing it to become associated with extremists.
As for the overall election results, as an American looking at The Guardian‘s coverage, I’d say it’s a wash. Both Labour and the Conservatives lost big, the former leaking support from Remainers who defected to various pro-Remain parties, and the latter from Brexiteers who defected to the Brexit Party. Overall, however, the combined vote of the pro-Remain parties — the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Change UK, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru — exceeded that of the Brexit Party and UKIP; while the Brexit Party got the largest number of votes, that’s because it consolidated virtually the entire pro-Brexit vote in a way that none of the pro-Remain parties did.
Yeah, well, it is hard to say that those elections went good (and this is damn an euphemism).
In term of “declared” far-right, UE Parliament has now 115 far-right members (indicated by the brown color on the graphics), and in my country, along with Italia and England, they made the higher score, which is a damn shame and clearly not reassuring.
If you add the nationalists, sovereinists and some “without label” members to those (which are so close to the far right that i can barely understand why they are not labeled as so), they make about 25% of the Parliament. It is closed to how many they had before (but bigger nonetheless), mainly because many nationalists and sovereinists just declared themselves far right this time (116 NatSov and 37 FR before, 115 FR and 58 NatSov now), so that remains clearly threatening.
That does not bode well for UE. Trump and Putine might be jubilating.
It just got even weirder.
(In the style of television talent shows) I bring you, in no particular order:
Alexandra Phillips, Green Party, South – East England.
Alexandra Phillips, Brexit Party, South – East England.
Yes, two separate people, with the same name, both of them elected, both in the same region – and with diametrically opposed positions on the whole sorry mess.
This remains interesting, in a ‘can’t stop looking at the trainwreck politics’ kind of way.
German seat distribution looks uncomfortably weimarian: no real big parties anymore, just three bigger ones, with a total of FOUR parties above 10%. If this repeats in the next federal elections, forming a stable government will be rather difficult.
In France the FN might actually win the Presidency next time.
We might as well take bets on who’s going to leave next.
Hungary? I say Hungary. The eastern european countries should have never joined anyway. They weren’t ready yet, and still aren’t.
So why does the Brexit Party have EU seats? Isn’t their whole deal that they want nothing to do with the EU?
@Talonknife
Yup. We haven’t left yet because our government can’t agree on a deal, or even whether we want a deal. The Brexit party basically ran on the promise that they will be really annoying to Europe (meanwhile they are collecting paycheques) until we leave.
I wish I was making this up.
@Kevin Rooney
“[Farage] thought that UKIP was getting taken over by the alt-right”
As I understand it, it’s actually the opposite. He’s an opportunist, but he’s been in cahoots with alt-right figures (particularly those that funded UKIP and now BP) for years. He left because he could no longer run the party as his personal fief, and disorganised, incompetent far-right members were spoiling his comfy little grift. He’s thoroughly a part of the far-right, capitalising on the willingness of the alt-right to follow any in-group charlatan, and making bank from destroying the country.
I agree with Queex. Brexit isn’t an end it is a means. People like Farage and Rees-Mogg have largely moved their own money out of the UK. They know Brexit will tank the economy and pave the way for deregulation and privatization ostensibly needed to deal with the economic crisis.
Farage is absolutely a Mosely figure, while being at the same time a pure grifter 100% in it for personal gain (as in, living in luxury on vast undisclosed donations from dodgy characters like Banks; taking his MEP salary (and future pension) while barely bothering to turn up).
Also – remarkably – the Brexit Party is technically not a political party at all (e.g. you can donate, but you can’t be a party member; it has no members). It’s a company. Which afaik Farage wholly owns.
The day he gets tired of it/it no longer serves his purposes, he can wind it up and keep all the money with no legal redress.
Thomas Pain: unless you are being satirical about Paine by knocking off the ‘e’ I find it pretty hilarious that you are using this user name.
The far right in Britain uphold what Paine rejected: the monarchy, the elite, ‘tradition’, etc.
As for prejudice – the word means ‘pre-judged’, and no one here has pre-judged the far right. We are well informed on the nature of the far right, and that is why we mock them.
I am only stating the obvious, of course, but if anyone needs help reading “Thomas Pain”‘s post: “globalist” in this context means “Jewish” (as in Stalin’s pet phrase, “rootless cosmopolitans”).