Did Carl of Swindon — aka Sargon of Akkad — just destroy an entire political party? An analysis, with memes

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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