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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UKIP were pretty destroyed before he started, tbf. The Brexit Party has taken their mantle, and most of their high-profile ‘activists’, so the far right in the UK are far from defeated.
I think that its creepy you give this nobody any thought at all. It outs you as the leftist mirror-image of Sargon really, which in essence is just as bad.
Whatever the results indicate in the broader sense, I just hope this destroys Carl’s fanbase more than the YouTube and Twitter smackdowns already have. There’s no way sunk cost fallacies can overcome a defeat this humiliating.
I want this to serve as a lesson for dumb YouTube trolls: you might be able to fleece a bunch of reactionaries with more money than brains, but out in the real world, where people interact with each other and have real problems that need to be addressed through public policy, obnoxious debate “tactics” and 4chan buzzwords carry little currency.
@Thomas Pain
You mean it read like truth.
Wrong way around, asshole. Your country (and humanity in general) deserves better than you and your fascist friends.
@Moggie:
Heed this warning, United Kingdom. A lot of people (including me) waited too long to take Trump seriously.
@Talonknife:
They probably want to destroy it from within, as Trump and the Republicans are doing to the US government.
The thing is, 4chan has always hated Sargon, and anyone else who shows their face and is open about their lurking, because its antithetical to the draw of 4chan and often leads to people who aren’t used to the environment showing up and demanding 4chan change to fit them.
While the UK is in the EU, legislation gets passed that affects the UK. Kinda hard to oppose, amend, or slow walk it if you don’t have MEPs.
@Thomas Pain
Forgot to ask:
What’s your opinion on Soggy’s use of the word “even”?
@Kevin
If you want to go even weirder, the Alexandra Phillips of the Green party is/was also an executive at everyones favorite manipulation company, Cambridge Analytica.
@ Thomas pain
Yes sugar, thank you for that intriguing incite and opinion that we’ve never heard before. ?
Did you vote for ol’ Sargon, Tom? ?
This is ironic coming from someone who goes by “anon” outside of 4chan.
@Herbert West
Hungarian here, checking in.
The prospect of Hungary leaving (Hunxit?) is an odd, mixed case. Orbán talks a big game about “fighting Brussels”, but on the other hand his oligarchy is built in large part on embezzling EU grants. That’s what his inner circle got rich on, so ironically enough he needs the EU at the same time he’s talking shit about it.
Anyway, to sum up the local results:
1. Fidesz + KDNP (Fidesz + Christian Democratic People’s Party) – 52%
Orbán’s own rabble, plus a handful of ultraconservative Christian bootlickers. They won big here, but it’s tempered somewhat by Orbán’s dream of a major, EU-wide right-wing victory not coming to pass.
2. Demokratikus Koalíció (Democratic Coalition) – 16%
Socialists in all but name. Led by Ferenc Gyurcsány, a former socialist Prime Minister who’s controversial in his own right, though still not even remotely as bad as Orbán. Decent policies, somewhat overshadowed by Gyurcsány’s person. Likely sucked a lot of votes away from the actual socialists, possibly because their campaign was headlined by Klára Dobrev instead of Gyurcsány himself.
3. Momentum Mozgalom (Momentum Movement) – 10%
The surprise result. Centre-left liberals (though keep in mind that a centre-left liberal in Europe would count as a flaming pinko commie in the US), started just two years ago as a movement that successfully forced a referendum to torpedo the costly 2024 Olympics application. They were known to be rising in popularity, but absolutely no one expected them to immediately skyrocket to 10% and get two seats.
4. Magyar Szocialista Párt + Párbeszéd Magyarországért (Hungarian Socialist Party + A Dialogue for Hungary) – 7%
The classic socialist party, assisted by a liberal microparty. Their biggest draw is arguably that said microparty’s president is Gergely Karácsony, the fairly successful and popular mayor of one of Budapest’s districts. They’ve been on the decline since 2010 and have hit their lowest point yet.
5. Jobbik – 6%
Formerly thinly-veiled Nazis, now marginally less far-right. They were one of the 2010 newcomers who made it relatively big, but they’ve shrunk to a fraction of their former size by now.
6. Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement) – 3%
The actual Nazis who split off from Jobbik. Nothing else needs to be said.
7. Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt (Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party) – 3%
The joke party who actually have some fairly sensible ideas and effective activism under the jokey facade. Actually featured on Last Week Tonight last year. Go watch it, it’s worth it.
8. Lehet Más a Politika (Politics Can Be Different) – 2%
The green party. The other successful newcomer back in 2010, but they’ve almost completely self-destructed this time, in no small part because of some nasty internal squabbles that ended up forcing out their two most popular members, Bernadett Szél and Ákos Hadházy. Not coincidentally, both of them, while formally independent, supported Momentum during this campaign, who likely siphoned away most of LMP’s voter base.
9. Magyar Munkáspárt (Hungarian Labour Party) – 0,5%
Literally communists, and completely irrelevant.
@panzerboy39
Haha, nope. “This nobody”. Yet here you are, a brand new account, visiting especially to come and whine about the things being said about carl, brandishing your most fearsome “both sides” arguments and mean adjectives like “leftist”.
Carl doesn’t care about you, bro. Its kinda sad you’ve got anything at all invested in other people’s opinion of him. Just let it go; there will be another 2-bit atheoskeptic crypto-racist arsehole along soon enough, and maybe you can hitch your wagon to their rising star and maybe feel good about your petty, small minded hatred and bigotry again, for a little while.
@Katamount
Weeeell… yes and no. Out here in the real world people are apt to follow terrible people for terrible reasons entirely too often. The real problem for the likes of carl is that as a Big Name Youtuber it might be easy to assume that having one meeeeleon subscribers meant that one was clever, wise, charismatic, interesting, entertaining or all of the above.
Coming out of his normal echo chamber should have been sobering. I guess it remains to be seen.
@Herbert West: 4 Parties above 10% is actually normal for Germany. We have at the moment 7 Partys (2 of them beeing conected) that are in Parlament. That is more than the years before.
We are sending more Partys to the EU than to our national Parlament, because everythink that gets under 5% gets no seat. (there is one execption but that one is rare, the Leftparty was the last were it played a role) So this time more voters (12%) voted smaller partys, (I think at the last national vote there were only 4 %.
We have our problems: Every big party execpt the Greens ignoring the youth, every party execpt the Greens losing in that category big.
And the worst party is strong in a certain part of Germany.
@Talonknife
Same reason that here in Canada, the Bloc Québécois (separatist party) runs for federal elections, and was even the Official Opposition once, despite their main policy being separating from Canada. As Shadowplay says, it’s a way of affecting decisions made concerning the separatist part of the country (or EU, in the UK’s case), but also of making sure they can make their speeches on a broader stage.
And, of course, get paid. I seem to remember some heated discussions about whether Bloc MPs would still get their federal pensions if Québec did separate. The separatists all seemed to be in favor of that. I imagine Farage will insist on getting his if Brexit does happen, too.
Neither the Bloc nor the Brexit Party have the intellectual honesty of Sinn Fein, which runs candidates for Westminster in Northern Ireland, but whose elected members there refuse to take up their seats, thereby concretizing their belief about the illegitimacy of the institution. (It’s a bit different, of course, since the first two don’t deny belonging to Canada/the EU, but don’t want to anymore, while Sinn Fein’s point is that they already aren’t a part of it, but it’s still a pretty blatant comparison.)
@Naziboy88
You’re not fooling anyone. Go hug a cactus.
@panzerboy39
Oh aren’t you original honey. Go away now ya corn husk, no one wants you here.
@Panzerboy
On the 0.001% chance you are actually being serious about this bit – ever ignored a cockroach for a day or so after seeing it? You suddenly got a swarm to deal with. They breed, fast.
Gipsz Jakab: one thing I found odd about Grauniad coverage was that they went on and on about centrists losing and greens and extremists winning … on the same article that said liberal democrats (like Momentum) were the block that grew the most.
You know how you deal with trolls?
Fire and acid. Otherwise they just regenerate.
It always requires fire and acid.
@Who?
Maybe I should elaborate:
What I meant with Weimar is not the total number of parties, but the lack of clear big players.
Weimar was usually ruled by a coalition of three parties who’s election results remind me uncannily of the results Union/SPD/Greens got.
And yes, there were four parties with more than 10% before, I kinda forgot this for a moment. But never with all of their results being so close to each other. It’s not unthinkable that a two-party government will become impossible in the next election.
Why Sargon Why!!!???
@Rabid Rabbit:
I remember that, mainly because I was woken up the morning after election night by my radio saying “It was the Bloc!” to the tune of “Monster Mash”.
The surprising trumpy/brexity vote outcome before trump or brexit. Those were much more innocent times…