Sargon of Akkad

Carl Benjamin, who posts under the name Sargon of Akkad, is a British YouTuber and podcaster. His online name references the ancient Mesopotamian ruler Sargon of Akkad. He is the sole registered director of Lotus Eater Media Limited, the UK company that operates the Lotuseaters.com podcast and commentary site, and he stood as a UK Independence Party candidate in the 2019 European Parliament election.

Why He Appears in an American-Politics Collection

Benjamin is British, has never sought or held office in the United States, and his one electoral candidacy was a UK contest. He appears here because his YouTube output sits inside a predominantly American commentary network. Rebecca Lewis’s 2018 Data & Society report Alternative Influence, a network study of 65 YouTube political commentators, includes him as one of its named influencers and uses him as an illustration of how the network’s connections work — describing him as separated by only two degrees from Colin Robertson (Millennial Woes) through Dave Rubin, having appeared on both channels. The same report opens with the 4 January 2018 livestreamed debate on scientific racism between Richard Spencer and Benjamin, hosted by Andy Warski and Jean-François Gariépy, which it records as the #1 trending live video worldwide on YouTube that day, running more than four and a half hours with over 10,000 concurrent viewers and roughly 475,000 subsequent views of the archived copy. His removal from Patreon in December 2018 also became a reference point in American arguments about payment-platform moderation.

YouTube Channels

The channel now using the handle @SargonofAkkad (channel ID UC-yewGHQbNFpDrGM0diZOLA) was created on 13 October 2010 and showed 968,000 subscribers on 1 September 2026. A second channel, Akkad Daily (UCitU2-w3XE8ujvUZjcAnhIg), was created on 19 September 2019 and showed 513,000 subscribers on the same date; its channel description directs viewers to Lotuseaters.com.

Data & Society’s account of his output is that he built an audience during the Gamergate period with content critical of feminist game critics and academics, and that he subsequently became, in the report’s words, “a prominent member of the skeptic community” who “promotes ‘classical liberalism.’” The report labels him an “anti-SJW” content creator; that characterization is the report’s, not this project’s.

Removal from Patreon

Patreon removed his account in early December 2018. Vice reported on 7 December 2018 that the account had been removed the previous day, that he had been earning more than $12,000 a month through the platform, and that Patreon told the outlet the removal was for “violation of hate speech in our guidelines,” after he used “racial and homophobic slurs to degrade another individual.”

On 17 December 2018, Patreon published its own explanation, written by Jacqueline Hart. It confirmed the removal, quoted the passages it relied on, and set out two points of policy. First, the material was from an interview on another creator’s YouTube channel rather than from anything hosted on Patreon; Patreon’s position was that because it funds creations made across the internet, it applies its community guidelines to those off-platform creations, including collaborations. Second, it quoted its Community Guidelines definition — “Hate speech includes serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation” — and concluded that in this case the creator “used racial slurs to insult others and specifically linked those slurs with negative generalizations of behavior, in contrast to how people of other races act,” and “also used a slur related to sexual orientation to generally insult others.” The statement closed: “Patreon does not and will not condone hate speech in any of its forms.”

Vice placed the removal in a sequence: the account of James Allsup had been removed in August 2018, and that of Milo Yiannopoulos on 5 December 2018.

2019 European Parliament Candidacy

Benjamin stood for the UK Independence Party in the South West England region at the European Parliament election held on 23 May 2019. Democracy Club’s candidate record places him second on the UKIP regional list, behind Lawrence Webb, and records the alternative name “Sargon of Akkad” against him. The region returned six members. No UKIP candidate was elected: three seats went to the Brexit Party, two to the Liberal Democrats and one to the Green Party.

Lotus Eater Media

Lotus Eater Media Limited was incorporated in England on 16 September 2019, with a registered office in Swindon and the SIC code for reproduction of computer media. Companies House lists one officer and no resignations: Carl Charles Benjamin, director, appointed on the date of incorporation. The company is named as the data controller for Lotuseaters.com and appears in the site’s copyright notice; the site lists Benjamin first among its in-house contributors. The associated show, The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, publishes numbered episodes through a public feed and had reached episode 1496 by 1 September 2026.

What Is Not Established Here

Several claims on the earlier version of this page were removed for want of a source that met this project’s standard.

The page said Benjamin “began posting political commentary videos on YouTube around 2013.” No source supports that date; the channel’s own metadata gives a creation date of 13 October 2010, which is what appears above instead.

The page attributed “over 900,000 subscribers” to the 2016–2018 period. That figure is close to the current count and there is no evidence it was reached then. Subscriber counts here are stated only with the date on which they were read.

The claim that he “subsequently moved to alternative funding platforms including SubscribeStar,” and the list of alternative platforms — Minds, Rumble, Odysee and Locals — were removed. SubscribeStar and Rumble return 404 for the obvious handles; Minds requires authentication; an Odysee page resolves but could not be tied to the subject through any first-party link. The primaryPlatforms field was reduced from ["youtube", "twitter-x"] to ["youtube"] for the same reason: no X or Twitter account could be confirmed as his, since x.com does not respond to automated requests.

The statement that he “co-founded the Lotus Eaters” was replaced. Companies House shows a single director with no resignations since incorporation; the register supports sole directorship, not co-founding, and no source was found naming a co-founder.

The affiliation “Lotus Eaters” was changed to the registered company name, “Lotus Eater Media Limited.”

The claim that the 2019 campaign “drew media coverage, including scrutiny of past remarks he had made online” was cut. It is likely true, but no specific piece of that coverage was retrieved and read during this audit, and generic assertions about coverage are not sourceable claims.

The earlier birthYear: 1979 was unsourced when written but is retained, because the Companies House officer record independently gives a date of birth of September 1979.

The Internet Archive was offline for the whole of this audit, so no Wayback fallback was available for domains that refused automated clients — including electoralcommission.org.uk (403), researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk (403), medium.com (Cloudflare 403, worked around via the publication’s RSS feed) and washingtontimes.com (403). Patreon’s own blog post at blog.patreon.com/on-recent-events now redirects to a news index that no longer carries the article; the Medium version cited above is the surviving first-party text.