Paul Joseph Watson, Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad have joined Ukip. Let that sink in. This is an in-joke which you’ll only appreciate if you’ve pretty much given up on the mainstream media and you prefer to fight all your culture wars battles online. Because, unusually, I happen to straddle both worlds — it’s an age and job thing — allow me to explain who these people are and why their support of Ukip suggests it might be on the verge of a major comeback.
Watson is a brilliant polemicist (his day job is to work for Alex Jones, the crazy host of America’s InfoWars) whose funny, angry, disgusted daily rants, delivered with his trademark northern-accented snark in front of his map of the world backdrop with his catchphrase ‘let that sink in’ have lured 1.3 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. You won’t see him on mainstream TV or in newspapers because he won’t go there. He sees the legacy media as the enemy.
Count Dankula — aka Mark Meechan, 30 — is the bearded, internet shitposter from Glasgow best known for the ‘Nazi pug’ video he made to annoy his girlfriend. It purported to show the pug giving Nazi salutes to commands like ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘Gas the Jews’. After being prosecuted by Scottish police, he was fined £800 by the courts (for a long, worrying period it looked as if he might face jail: for a bad taste joke) for posting ‘grossly offensive’ material. In real life he is mild-mannered, amiable, not at all anti-Semitic.
Sargon of Akkad is the pseudonym of vlogger Carl Benjamin, whose lengthy, patient, reasoned YouTube commentaries have garnered more than 800,000 subscribers. He’s like a more erudite and polite, long-distance version of Watson. His targets are much the same: identity politics; Social Justice Warriors; third-wave feminism.
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