I spent an evening with fans of Lotus Eaters – the hit podcast shaping Britain’s new far-right culture | Oliver Haynes

At a sold-out show in its home town, Swindon, all the bombast and conviction driving this Restore-linked outlet was there to see

I f I asked you to name a popular politics podcast, what would you think of? Maybe The Rest Is Politics for centrist dads. Novara Media’s Downstream for young lefties, perhaps, or Triggernometry for conservatives.

While these podcasts have achieved mainstream success and recognition, the contemporary media landscape also allows fringe political shows to gain huge audiences and influence without the mainstream ever acknowledging them.

One such media product is The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, a collective YouTube channel and website led by the YouTuber Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad) that has advocated for, among other things, “remigration”. Remigration, in the words of co-presenter Luca Johnson , is “not just about [the removal of] the illegals, it’s also about the legals and all those foreign communities that have been forced on us”.

Most podcast platforms are opaque on listener figures. The Rest Is Politics is reported to have more than 700,000 listeners an episode. With several episodes a week, it remains a bigger product than Lotus Eaters, but with almost 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than a million weekly views on free YouTube clips alone, Lotus Eaters is also one of the biggest political podcasts in the UK. Apple podcasts currently ranks the audio version at 50th on its news charts, ahead of dozens of podcasts set up by established publications.

I recently attended Lotus Eaters’ live show in Swindon, where the podcast is based. Although they don’t quite have the O2-packing ability of The Rest Is Politics, they managed to fill a 700-capacity venue with tickets starting at £50. The demographic was overwhelmingly male and mostly under 40. It was split largely between suit-wearing, moustachioed elder millennials and metalhead and gamer types, with the occasional couple or father-son duo in the mix.

A speech by Firas Modad, one of the presenters, reflected the worldview of this movement. He had recently returned to his home country of Lebanon to find that in his religiously and ethnically mixed village there were problems with the water supply. He found that this was because there was conflict over water between ethnic groups, and one group had decided to siphon it for themselves.

This encounter, claimed Modad, is a parable for understanding Britain’s future, in which something as simple as water provision collapses due to racial diversity. He also warned that “political entrepreneurs” – individuals who identify a niche market among the citizenry and exploit it for political gain – would use ethnic grievances to advance their own ambitions. The solution, according to Modad? “Deport. Deport. Deport.” The irony of complaining about political entrepreneurs stoking ethnic grievances was lost on the audience.