Lotus Eaters Media is a multimedia platform established by the far-right influencer Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad). From an office in Swindon, the outlet produces a daily stream of inflammatory culture war content to a large online audience.

Implementing a production value unusual among the British far right, the Lotus Eaters website hosts an array of text, audio and video content behind a paywall. It also uses mainstream platforms, including YouTube, where it has received almost 400 million views across its two main channels.  

Since its launch in 2020, Lotus Eaters has become increasingly extreme, pushing racist and authoritarian positions whilst attempting to skirt censorship on YouTube. The outlet has also platformed an array of extremist figures and groups, including well-known fascists, and has links to formal political organisations. 

Carl Benjamin

Benjamin first gained online notoriety for his role in “Gamergate”, a misogynistic harassment campaign against female computer game developers and journalists. Gaining a large YouTube following through his commentary on culture war issues, Benjamin has courted controversy ever since, for example using racial slurs and making a series of rape “jokes” about the Labour MP Jess Phillips. 

In 2018, Benjamin and several other far-right social media influencers joined UKIP, then floundering under the leadership of Gerard Batten, in an attempt to “take it over in a soft coup”. He represented the party in the 2019 European elections, gaining national press for his various scandals. His candidacy further damaged the party’s reputation and helped terminate Batten’s leadership. Benjamin has since described formal politics as “too much work”. 

During this time, Benjamin became a fixture at far-right street protests organised by the serial criminal Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson). Despite his atheism, he was also involved in Hearts of Oak, a Christian nationalist outfit that launched in 2020. Benjamin is a regular speaker at various far-right conferences, including the Traditional Britain Group and The Witan, as well as “Men’s Rights” events.

Since launching Lotus Eaters, Benjamin appears to have been radicalised by his own platform, adopting an increasingly extreme worldview.

The Swindon Grievance Factory 

Benjamin invested his own money into Lotus Eaters Media, which officially launched in November 2020 with fellow ex-UKIP activists Callum Darragh (Benjamin’s assistant) and Jonathan Wong (technical duties) as its first employees and Josh Ferme and Hugo Hythloday as its first hosts. 

The move was motivated by fear of censorship, Benjamin claiming that he was at risk of being treated as “basically the same as ISIS” online during the Biden presidency and describing Lotus Eaters as a “safe space for people who are afraid of being persecuted” on mainstream platforms.   

Benjamin’s wider political aim was to found “a rightwing institution” that could foment “a new conservatism that can actually push rightwards for once”, midwifing the careers of new influencers and becoming a “nexus or network for coordinating” among the wider far right.   

Named in reference to Homer’s Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters have intellectual pretensions, for example selling pricey online courses on ancient Greek virtue ethics and others run by the disgraced academic Neema Parvini. The group’s book review segment has covered authors from Karl Marx to Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) and Julius Evola. 

These supposedly high-minded pursuits are undercut by the general tenor of the daily podcast. Unregulated by Ofcom, Lotus Eaters pushes relentless narratives of white victimhood and decline, uploaded under screaming clickbait titles. Hosts typically import some current controversy from X without apparent fact-checking, often “nutpicking” posts from their political enemies for maximum outrage. 

The show has darkened over time. Ethnonationalist positions are taken as read, and discussions can quickly devolve into base racism. Free market economic leanings mingle with calls for brutal state crackdowns against ideological and ethnic enemies. 

At the heart of the group’s outlook is the notion of the demographic “replacement” of white Brits and that “remigration” – a modern euphemism for repatriation – is a cureall. Lotus Eaters has adopted these fixations from the fascist fringe, and subsequently done much to amplify them. For example, in 2022 the outlet coined the phrase “remigration is inevitable”, which has since become a slogan of the international extreme right. 

Lotus Eaters has platformed figures from across the British far right, including Lennon, David Kurten, Ben Habib, Charles Cornish-Dale, Peter McIlvena, Richard Tice, Simon Webb, Laurence Fox, Voice of Wales, Tom Rowsell, Gavin Boby, Ed Dutton, Nick Tenconi, Andrew Bridgen, Morgoth, Callum Barker, Steve Laws and more. It also hosted former Prime Minister Liz Truss in 2024. 

Hosts also have links to formal far-right organisations. This includes the Basketweavers, which was founded by Mark Houghton, a Lotus Eaters contributor; several hosts have attended Basketweavers events. Lotus Eaters has particularly close links to Restore Britain, describing the project as “our battering ram”. The key figures behind Restore – Harrison Pitt, Charlie Downes and Lewis Brackpool – are listed as regular guest contributors and Rupert Lowe MP has himself appeared on the show several times. Benjamin is thanked by name in the group’s extreme “Mass Deportations” policy document.

Hosts Benjamin “Beau” Dade and Dan Tubb were listed as Reform UK candidates in 2024. Dade was sacked after HOPE not hate exposed his article calling for the deportation of a “foreign plague” (anyone who has settled in the UK since 1997) and banning “openly seditious” organisations including HOPE not hate, the BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian and more. Tubb was subsequently also dropped, prompting Lotus Eaters to turn against Reform in favour of more hardline vehicles. 

Among the most extreme hosts is Harry Robinson, who has called for the raising of a white racial consciousness in Britain, claimed that “democracy needs to be destroyed” and that “most European countries could only be saved by the rise of a Franco figure at this point”. Robinson claimed on the show of the Scottish white nationalist Colin Robertson (AKA Millennial Woes) that he attempts to “skirt the line of what’s acceptable” on the show.

The group also sells the Islander magazine, themed around Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and featuring a variety of extreme contributors. However, the distribution has been riven with issues, with many buyers complaining that they have not received copies.