News / Politics
YouTuber turned UKIP candidate hosts tense public discussion in Bristol
YouTuber turned UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin set up shop in the centre on Tuesday to take questions from members of the public and promote his election campaign for the upcoming European elections.
The vlogger-politician, who has been under fire recently for linking feminism to mass shootings in a video he uploaded several years ago, drew a mixed crowd of both protesters and fans eager to hear what the controversial figure had to say.
Bristol24/7 was able to talk to Benjamin as he invited anyone to debate with him, as long as they didn’t mind using a microphone:
is needed now More than ever
After an entrance that saw the 39-year-old from Swindon aggressively confronted by several members of the public, he proceeded to address some of the more vocal protesters’ points whilst the atmosphere was still tense.
Benjamin’s YouTube channel Sargon of Akkad has almost one million subscribers. He first grew to prominence through the Gamergate controversy.
“We’re the party that support Israel, not you,” Benjamin shouted towards two members of the public holding antifascist signs as they were jeered out of the ring of people forming around him.
Benjamin’s team set up microphones to host questions from onlookers and fans, with a growing police presence that saw a protester arrested for throwing ‘soft missiles’ (that turned out to be fruit) in the direction of Benjamin and his film crew.
“We were attacked by some communists,” he quipped to much appreciation from an increasingly partisan crowd, some of who had travelled from Bath, Salisbury and Exeter.
With several onlookers as well as Benjamin himself being so insistent on the importance of calm and controlled debate amidst the hostility, Bristol 24/7 asked if some of the past comments he had made were overly provocative.
“I have to get people to listen to me,” he responded bluntly. “You can’t get people to listen to you if you’re boring.
“If we go back to the Guardian article, the 2014 comments I made on feminism, I stand by all that, I can demonstrate all of this, it is definitely the disenfranchisement of young men that is causing radicalisation of young men. They feel like they have no other option.”
Benjamin added: “It is the sort of inter-sectional left who leap to the defence of whom they consider to be oppressed groups in every instance… regardless of the merit of the conversation, or the thing the oppressed person has actually done. It doesn’t matter for them.”
The crowd gathered around the statue of Neptune on Tuesday lunchtime were predominantly made up of subscribers to Benjamin’s YouTube channel, and were eager to show support for his way of doing things.
“He has a pompous style, and he does have a bit of an ‘asshole’ style,” one fan told Bristol24/7. “He uses trolling in an effective way, but it’s not necessarily wrong. He trolls to an end rather than to just upset people.”
Another subscriber, who claimed to have been following Benjamin online since the age of 16, said: “I got into him and all the other sceptic channels, all of them that have come and gone, but he’s the one I still watch.
“I think he’s one of the only people that’s actually fun to watch. A lot of the other sceptic channels are boring.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmytXiVXoYs
Read more: Change UK launches European election campaign in Bristol
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