Young right-wingers are ravenous for content these days, and the mainstream press just won’t do it for them. It’s not news content they want, but infotainment.
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters fits the bill. It offers its audience a concentrated hit of political commentary, drawing on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and alt-right memes. Lengthy recordings are chopped up into manageable 25-minute chunks.
The podcast’s lurid aesthetic might be described as baroque space pimp. Their logo looks a bit like a naff sun wheel with a transmission tower in the centre. It looks like something from a green energy firm.
Lotus Eaters briefly made headlines last year for interviewing Britain’s 49-day Prime Minister, Liz Truss. This was deemed controversial because the Lotus Eaters is the respectable podcast for alt-right shitposters.
Its founder, Carl Benjamin, already well known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, started the podcast in 2019. Over the past six years, he has converted his following into a large audience for the Lotus Eaters.
The Swindon-based podcast has 500,000 subscribers on YouTube today. It relies on paid content and merch for income. This includes a magazine called Islander, featuring such Frogtwitter luminaries as Raw Egg Nationalist.
You might not have heard of Sargon if you’re not perennially online.
Benjamin was involved in the attempt to turn UKIP into an alt-right party following the Brexit vote.
He joined the party and ran for office in the 2019 European elections. His fellow travellers included fellow offence merchant Count Dankula and the conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. Not one of them was elected.
Once a UKIP candidate, Benjamin was dragged through the mud by the mainstream media for his extensive record of using creative and expressive language, specifically his penchant for racial slurs and his rape joke about Labour MP Jess Phillips.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or would not even rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure, I might cave, but let’s be honest, nobody’s got that much beer,” he explained in 2019.
Benjamin later claimed that some rape survivors found his jokes “empowering”. He has since distanced himself from these remarks as part of his two-hour video talking about Lily Phillips’ controversial OnlyFans performance in which she had sexual intercourse with 101 men in one day.
Patreon banned Benjamin in 2018 for his use of racist language, costing him $12,000 a month in revenue. This loss might partly account for his vendetta against liberals and leftists of all stripes.
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters is not a one-man show. Benjamin is just the ringleader, presiding over a roster of presenters who take turns as talking heads. Benjamin runs the show along with Harry Robinson, Josh Ferme and Stelios Panagatiou. Reform UK candidates Benjamin ‘Beau’ Dade and Dan Tubb have also appeared.
It’s so rare to see a woman on the show that its tagline could be: “No women, thanks. We’re right-wing.”
Every week, the Lotus Eaters deliver a smug, self-satisfied commentary on current affairs, prioritising whatever is trending on X, making it part of the social media feedback loop.
Feeding the Dark Id
The podcast of the Lotus Eaters testifies to a broader long-term shift in the media.
As the profits of traditional news organisations have declined, a space has opened up for other kinds of online content. This is often just someone speaking into their laptop, which is how its founder got started.
Using the pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, Benjamin was originally part of the YouTube sceptic scene featuring young guys who produced snarky videos about religion and politics. Many of them began their YouTube lives as liberal New Atheists before reaching a crossroads.
Many YouTube sceptics became involved in radical politics around the time of Occupy Wall Street. Others got their start arguing with liberal feminists online. Can you guess which way Sargon of Akkad went?
Benjamin is a veteran of Gamergate, the infamous online harassment campaign against Anita Sarkeesian, Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu during the online anti-feminist wave of 2014.
I recognise the Lotus Eaters type from my university days. The young fogey conservatives, sporting neckbeards and paisley shirts, reciting Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech for a good laugh.
The Lotus Eaters may be better groomed than the poncho Tories I encountered at university. But they also lack Powell’s cultural sophistication and classical learning, despite their use of long words and alluding to Big Ideas.
The podcast’s “based” heroes include Donald Trump, Argentine President Javier Milei, El Salvadoran “philosopher king” Nayib Bukele, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now awaiting trial for a botched coup attempt.
It reveres Trump for his anti-immigrant agenda, loves Milei for his chainsaw libertarian antics, and celebrates Bukele for lowering his nation’s crime rate by using emergency powers to detain thousands of people without due process.
The dark Id is a potent force on the radical populist right. These guys love the idea they are offending po-faced progressives, who are easy to trigger. Anything that offends the woke left is worth it, just for the thrill.
Simply breaking liberal taboos can be a lot of fun. It’s why Benjamin is on record saying so many needlessly cruel things. It’s the frisson of transgression that drives much of the online right.
“I actually have some advice for you and your niggers, chinks, kikes, spics, fags, retards and 1980s tracksuit wearers. Don’t let words hurt you. They are just words,” Benjamin said in a November 2015 video.
The offence these words cause is the reason to use them. The online outrage economy is vast. Racists and bigots love it, while every minority feels the sting.
“Jewish people, unfortunately for them, have got to drop the identity politics. I’m sorry about the Holocaust, but I don’t give a shit. I’m sorry,” Benjamin said in a 2018 panel discussion.
This was back when Benjamin was still calling himself a classical liberal. He would often clash with open fascists online in those days. In one debate, Benjamin attacked his far-right critics in a very strange way.
“You are acting like a bunch of niggers. You guys can’t even act like white people,” Benjamin added. “You carry on, but don’t expect that I have to debate with one of you faggots.”
Charming words from Benjamin. He has grown so much since then.
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters wisely avoids posting content of this nature. Most of Benjamin’s worst rants have been scrubbed from YouTube since he started making the news.
Nowadays, the mainstream media mostly ignores the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. Yet it is part of an online ecosystem spanning the Anglosphere, speaking for a certain kind of young, disaffected right-winger on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dreaming of Conservative Revolution
Although the Lotus Eaters don’t have a huge audience, it is culturally significant. The ideas they articulate have been growing in the alt-right ecology for years, drawing on paleolibertarianism and radical traditionalism.
Benjamin doesn’t identify as far-right. But this nuance is belied by his appearance at a Tommy Robinson rally, arguing that Britain is an “occupied country” and that immigrants are “colonisers”.
What do the Lotus Eaters want?
They want to stop all immigration and reverse decades of mass immigration by implementing “remigration.”
They want to expand the prison system massively and bring back the death penalty.
They want Britain to return to a culturally and ethnically homogenous past, no easy task in light of its 11 million non-white inhabitants.
And the Lotus Eaters want to shrink the British state, gutting the civil service along the lines of the second Trump Administration.
To be sure, this would make deporting those 11 million people quite tricky, not to mention policing the country. But that’s a you problem, lads!
Means and ends are strangely askew for the Lotus Eaters.
Culturally conservative libertarians are desperate to reverse decades of social liberalism through small-state governance. But they need a big state to achieve this goal.
Rampant capitalism doesn’t care about our traditions or our cultural heritage. The free market doesn’t care if you’re selling child porn or someone else’s kidney, so long as the price is right.
In short, the Lotus Eaters want capitalism without its cultural impact. They want the free market, but with water-tight borders, and total freedom on the internet without OnlyFans.
Many radical conservative movements have demonstrated this contradictory mindset.
The dream of a conservative revolution that finally turns back the clock has never come to fruition. Perhaps this dream is even more utopian than a socialist revolution.
This lack of coherence shouldn’t be surprising. Conservatism is constituted by its contradictions. The radical right doesn’t need to be perfectly rational or coherent to assert itself.
How many of its supporters are ready to see their dreams become reality is another matter. In the meantime, the Lotus Eaters are certainly ready to make money off them.
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Photograph courtesy of Eye DJ. Published under a Creative Commons license.
