Hey I’m once again seeing discourse about PewDiePie (probably because he has been welcomed back into the larger community of youtube personalities playing Among Us like Corpse Husband, JackSepticEye and Cr1tikal) and I just want to remind people of his ugly racist history that he has never properly put behind him and in fact continues to perpetuate.
His fanbase has always been racist. He was one of the first big YouTubers and he has always made racially charged jokes and has said the n-word in videos - notably, targeting somebody else with it. I watched his content when I was a young child, I experienced these things first hand. There were racist jokes, rape jokes, and generally sexual jokes targeted for his younger demographic. He has always been known as problematic, as problematic was used back in 2012.
A preamble to his first exposé: in November 2016 he showed up to a taping of his own series produced by Maker Studios (Disney) wearing a shirt with a swastika on it. Somebody told him to change. He denies this ever happened, but acknowledged that the shirt exists. There are photos of him and a friend wearing it.
The thing he got caught for was when he paid two men $5 to write and hold up a sign with the words “Death To All Jews”. His apology was half-assed. He apologized for the way that it came across and did not acknowledge the reasons that it was wrong. Febuary 2017: he descends into utter alt-right reactionism, harassing the WSJ journalist and sending his fans after the publication to the point where the Journal offered to put the journalist in a safehouse.
September 2017, he called somebody he n-word on stream, just weeks after Charlottesville occurred - where his imagery, jokes, and memes were used as motivation. He went on to say he had no idea that Nazis actually existed, that the Nazi jokes he was making weren’t funny anymore, and that he would not be making them anymore.
In March 2019, a white supremacist livestreamed himself saying “Subscribe to PewDiePie” before committing mass-shootings in two Christchurch mosques, killing dozens and injuring more. He responded with a single tweet, that he felt sickened that his name left the man’s mouth, and that his heart went out to the people affected. Later, he called for an end to the Subscribe to PewDiePie meme and promised $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League. He then retracted his decision, saying that he did not want to donate to something that he was not passionate about.
Felix Kjellberg has never made a single attempt to rid his fanbase of actual literal Nazis and white supremacist scum because he built his platform around them. He alone has radicalized probably half of the white nationalist/supremacist/Nazi men in America ages 18-25.
I will never forgive him.
This is taken from the Guardian article from above:
You could say that today’s digital economy has spawned a new “bro-nality of evil”. Racist memes serve as in-jokes that help solidify bonds between alienated white men online. The style of these memes, their overblown exaggerated nature, means we often don’t take them seriously. Dismiss them as jokes. But this is how antisemitism creeps into our lives. Not with a bang but with a punchline.
Happy Chanukkah, everyone.
