People take part in a UKIP-backed Brexit betrayal rally on December 9, 2018, in London | Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images The rise of UKIP’s YouTubers A trio of social media stars are helping push the U.K.’s Brexit party to the right.

LONDON — It started, as most things Markus Meechan does, with a social media post.

“If this gets 10k retweets, I will join UKIP,” Meechan, a Scottish political YouTuber known online as Count Dankula, wrote on Twitter on June 15. “I'm not joking, this is not a meme. I'm being completely serious.”

The next day Meechan and two other rising stars on the video sharing platform joined the United Kingdom Independence Party in what one of them described a “soft coup.”

The "coup" description was meant as a joke, but they might as well have been serious. Less than half a year later, the party that put Brexit on the political agenda is undergoing a transformation driven in no small part by the online star power of Meechan and his fellow YouTubers, Paul Joseph Watson and Car Benjamin, who posts under the name “Sargon of Akkad.”

“The political landscape in the U.K. is blighted and ripe for a bold UKIP to rise up,” Benjamin told POLITICO in an email. “We are the party of freedom, and we will win.”

While the U.K.'s Brexit party — which hit its electoral peak in the 2014 European elections, finishing first with 24 seats — has largely faded from view in Westminster following Nigel Farage’s departure in 2016, it has been slowly trying to rebuild and remodel itself, supported by the U.K.’s growing online ecosystem of right-wing populism. The new UKIP has yet to be properly tested at the ballot box but its re-emergence as the U.K.’s first post-referendum populist party fueled by social media is symptomatic of a broader international shift in how politics in conducted today, with potentially transformative effects.

Two of UKIP’s former leaders, Farage and Paul Nuttall, quit earlier this month, in protest at the direction the party is taking. Half of its members in the European Parliament followed.

Their departure is likely to hasten UKIP’s swerve toward the far-right, Farage and other internal critics have said, from a party that billed itself as representing “the true voices of Little England” to one that’s more eager to embrace the European or American-style nationalism embraced by Meechan and his friends.

The new UKIP is part of a wider international “Freedom Movement,” alongside the American conservative right, said Benjamin. They “very much consider each other brothers in arms, despite the many thousands of miles that separate them,” he added.

Watson agreed. “It's one, unified effort to preserve Western civilization,” he said in an email.

YouTube army

Meechan, Benjamin and Watson reject attempts to tag them as far-right, alt-right or any other label implying they are racist. They prefer to portray themselves as free-speech warriors pushing back against political correctness.

“If we try to speak about the things we want to speak about, we are called racists, Nazis, bigots etc.,” said Meechan. “We get de-platformed [banned from speaking, either at events or via online platforms] and we are even threatened with violence.”

In a YouTube video setting out his reasons for joining UKIP, Watson said: “I’m pro free speech and against an ethno state. The alt right are for an ethno state and against free speech.”

Watson and Benjamin describe themselves as classical liberals. On Meechan’s Twitter profile he prefers “Professional Shitposter,” adding “I’m not a Nazi, but my dog is.” That’s a reference to a conviction for a hate crime last March, for posting a video in which he had taught his girlfriend’s dog to raise its paw in a Hitler salute whenever he said “Gas the Jews.”

It’s not just Meechan who comes with baggage.

In 2016 Benjamin was roundly criticized in Westminster for tweeting he “wouldn’t even rape” the Labour MP Jess Phillips, after she said rape threats against her were becoming commonplace online.

Watson works for Infowars, a site accused of peddling conspiracy theories, including false claims that the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut that killed 26 people in 2012 was a hoax.

Whatever the controversies, the three YouTube stars bring UKIP an online reach comparable in British politics only to Corbyn and his left-wing Momentum movement.

Watson has 1.4 million subscribers; Benjamin, 860,000; Meechan, 360,000. That makes them some of the biggest beasts in Britain’s growing online nationalist ecosystem, where a web of networked social media platforms, news sites and video accounts amplify each other’s reach.

Watson’s figures alone are enormous: 500,000 views for each YouTube video once it has been up for a couple of weeks, he said. 150 million Twitter impressions a month, 500,000 likes on Facebook a month.

However, only around 12 percent of his YouTube subscribers are from the U.K., according to Watson, though this nevertheless equates to more than 150,000 British YouTube subscribers.

Benjamin’s numbers are also huge. An interview with UKIP’s party leader Gerard Batten uploaded on December 4 on the future of the party had been viewed over 100,000 times by December 10.

The rise of UKIP’s YouTubers can be attributed in no small part to the willingness of Gerard Batten to take a gamble on a change of direction.

All three specialize in short, well-cut but amateur-looking Youtube monologues, laced with sarcasm and attacks on the political establishment.

Watson, the most watched of the three, addresses the camera in front of a large map of the world, mocking the state of international affairs. His hits include “San Francisco is a shit hole” (2.3m views), “Paris is a shit hole” (1.4m views), “The Absolute State of Britbongland” (400,000 views) and “The Islamic State of Sweden” (1.4m views). In his attack video on Sweden, he is pictured dressed in an Islamic face veil.

Meechan’s videos are less overtly political. His hits include “Nazi crackhead wants to fight me” (92,000 views), the Actual State of the UK (871,000 views) and an un-PC song called “Nations of the World” (1.4m views).

Sargon of Akkad, meanwhile, uploads interviews, stage discussions and monologues, focused, again, on questions of identity, populism and free speech.

A video with Tommy Robinson — “Tommy meets Sargon” — from March has 400,000 views. An interview with Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon from October has notched up another 400,000 views — numbers many mainstream British current affairs shows would love to have.

Identity politics

The rise of UKIP’s YouTubers can be attributed in no small part to the willingness of Gerard Batten, who took over as party leader in February, to take a gamble on a change of direction.

“I don’t want to change UKIP, I want to take it to another level,” said Batten, a 64-year-old former telecoms salesman with a penchant for pink suits. “I want us to be a populist party.”

In the 10 months since he took over, Batten has pushed an aggressively hostile line against Islam — labelling it a “death cult” — while embracing Robinson and the controversial right-wing street organization the Democratic Football Lads Alliance.

It was Robinson’s appointment last month as a “personal adviser” to Batten that precipitated the exodus of UKIP’s old guard. Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — is prohibited from joining the party because of his previous membership of the overtly racist British National Party.

Batten’s plan for UKIP may sound generically right-wing, but it signals a significant evolution in British politics — the first avowedly mainstream party to offer a straightforward platform for identity politics, junking the (mild) constraints of the Farage era for the type of cultural nationalism which has proved defiantly popular across Europe and now in the United States.

Batten believes UKIP can tap into the populist vote which is finding its voice online. “I think there’s a massive constituency out there who are fed up with what is happening to them. I really do want to address this tremendous untapped market out there.”

While many in Westminster have written the party off, there are signs Batten’s efforts are working.

When he inherited UKIP, the party was on its knees. Stripped of a reason to exist by the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU and the Conservative Party’s swerve toward a hard Brexit, it was hemorrhaging members and heading toward bankruptcy. Only an emergency request for donations after Batten became leader saved it from going under.

In the 10 months since, the party’s fortunes have improved — slowly, but perceptibly.

UKIP has seen a surge in members during Batten’s tenure — up nearly 50 percent from 18,000 to almost 27,000, according to senior UKIP officials — much of it do to the influence of Meechan and his friends.

From as low as 1 percent in one opinion ICM/Guardian poll in March, the party climbed to 7 percent in a poll in September.

The party’s numbers continue to fluctuate, however. They dropped to just 4 percent in a YouGov poll in December, amid controversy over Robinson’s appointment and its increasing irrelevance in the day-to-day squabbles over Brexit in Westminster after Farage’s departure.

Batten and his Youtube cheerleaders appear unconcerned. “Conservatives in name only are fast becoming irrelevant and will eventually be swept away by the rise of right-wing populism,” Watson says by email.

Batten believes Robinson’s association with the UKIP, along with its tilt to more openly nationalist positions, could bring another surge in support. “What he [Tommy] can bring to the table is access to a million Facebook followers,” Batten told Benjamin in a recent interview posed online.

And indeed, even as Farage was announcing his resignation on December 4, the party was enjoying a mini surge, with 1,000 new members in the first week of December alone, according to the party.

“Yes, I’m taking a few risks,” Batten told Benjamin. “But if I don’t, I could retire next March and UKIP could just stagnate and fade away.”

This is the second in a three-part series on British nationalism and the internet. The first piece looked at how populist news sites have got the government worried. The third piece profiles far-right activist Tommy Robinson.