Not the sort of endorsement most people would be proud of
Here’s a tricky little etiquette question for our age: What does one do when one finds oneself with admirers who are, well, perhaps just a teensy bit fascist?
If you’re a presidential candidate with an orangish hue and a deep dislike of Muslims, you pretend you know nothing about them, even though you retweet some of them on what seems to be a fairly regular basis.
If you’re the YouTube bloviator who calls himself Sargon of Akkad, you see their support as a FLAWLESS VICTORY.
Sargon — not the head honcho of the Akkadian Empire but rather the obnoxious YouTuber who recently started that petition to “Suspend Social Justice in Universities” — recently got a shout-out from one of the speakers at a rally of the English Defence League, a group of far-right do-gooders who think the best way to do good for England is to rail about Muslims and beat people up.
That’s the EDL guy in the picture above, who came to the rally with a little Sargon of Akkad sign and everything.
Sargon’s response:
If I can make racists praise universal freedoms, individual rights and the highest moral fortitude, I win. https://t.co/r9zOdlXj1T
— Sargon of Akkad (@Sargon_of_Akkad) May 10, 2016
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess.
Here’s some footage of EDL members demonstrating their brand of “moral fortitude” to the general public:
And here’s one idealistic young EDLer expressing his love of individual rights and universal freedoms:
So congratulations, Sargon of Akkad — actually Carl Benjamin of Swindon — on your big win.
And while I’m on the subject of Carl of Swindon, I should note that I made a TRAGIC ERROR in my post about his dumb petition against “Social Justice in Universities.” At one point, I declared that “[t]here aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of.”
It turns out that there are some departments of Social Justice that I was not aware of.
Carl of Swindon devoted a considerable portion of one of his videos to pointing this out.
Then, instead of clarifying whether or not his petition was aimed only at these departments of Social Justice, he railed against several academics — well, a recently fired professor and a grad student — who were not actually connected to any departments of Social Justice.
Also, for some reason — my memory is a bit foggy here — he decided to weigh in on trans issues, quoting an anti-trans hate group that has tried to disguise itself as a professional organization of pediatricians as if it were in fact a professional organization of pediatricians.
Note to Carl of Swindon: When making terrible transphobic videos in the future, try to remember that the American College of Pediatricians is a transphobic hate group — literally designated as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center — with perhaps 200 members. The American Academy of Pediatrics, with 60,000 members, is the actual professional organization.
Hope this helps!