I was excited as hell when he dropped the video.. also a bit sad.. BUT HE IS STILL NO.1 Goddammit hahaha
And on the same day, Forbes publishes an article about him being alt-right and the whole sub2pewdipie meme being a marketing campaing masked as a meme. I wonder if they realize the world is not full of conspiracies. Sometimes it's just a meme. Here's a copy-paste of the article if you wanna read, but don't wanna give them clicks: Spoiler: "Journalism" “Subscribe to PewDiePie.” Once a harmless meme, or rather, a marketing campaign masked as a meme, “subscribe to PewDiePie” has twisted into a death cry, permanently appropriated by the alt-right. After his name was invoked by an alt-right terrorist, Pewdiepie tweeted his disgust at being associated with a mass-murderer. And that was all he had to say on the matter. PewDiePie's videos continued as normal, joking and laughing as though nothing had happened. No on-camera condemnation, no disassociation from the alt-right. Felix Kjellberg has 92 million subscribers and counting, a gargantuan audience spread across the globe, but the man only makes major headlines when controversy calls. And for Kjellberg, controversy is a frequent, albeit unwelcome, visitor. Kjellberg’s first big controversy came after the Wall Street Journal edited a compilation of all the exceedingly tasteless jokes the YouTuber made, and implicated that he was a closet neo-Nazi. I defended Kjellberg at the time, arguing that Kjellberg’s brand of childish humor was catering to his immature audience of “edgy” gamers, and that it was unfair to brand the man as something he clearly wasn’t. But in the time since, I’ve come to understand that edgy humor and “ironic racism” is integral to the alt-right’s indoctrination strategy, far from a harmless joke. It’s a fascinating and frightening rabbit hole to fall into, if you’ve got the time to look into it. That massive media backlash against Kjellberg was inevitable; there’s a point where someone is going to hold an immensely popular children’s entertainer accountable for making light of the Holocaust. But since that fateful controversy, Kjellberg has failed to truly distance himself from those who seek to warp his image into an alt-right icon, and even made a series of strange slip-ups that illuminate why hatemongers view him as one of their own. There’s the time Kjellberg said the n-word while playing a video game during a live-stream, which is something that … well, people who regularly use the n-word do. Kjellberg also recommended a video, an anime review, from a YouTube channel that pushes blatantly anti-Semitic and hateful rhetoric through pop culture commentary. The endorsement was reversed and noted as a mistake, but Kjellberg’s video response treated the incident as a joke, an overreaction, another media attempt to slander him. It was a weirdly dismissive response to the fact that Kjellberg had indeed directed his young and impressionable audience to neo-Nazi propaganda, mistakenly or not. And that, to me, is a very strange reaction. Personally, I don’t think Kjellberg is a closet Nazi, or even an alt-right sympathizer. From what I’ve seen of his videos, they’re fairly innocuous; the man’s appeal seems to stem from his authenticity, or at least, the impression of. But he is repeatedly criticized for mishandling the responsibility of his massive platform, for possibly contributing to the ever-growing issue of online indoctrination, and his response has mainly been to laugh. What is funny about that, exactly? There’s a certain point of popularity at which an entertainer ceases to become a person and transcends into a pop culture icon, where every action they take becomes disproportionately influential. The Twitter accounts they (used to) follow become outright endorsements, their tasteless jokes can be viewed as racist dog whistles. When Joe Rogan invites his buddy Alex Jones on to his podcast, that conversation isn’t just two guys drinking and having fun; it’s a golden opportunity for a hateful conspiracy theorist to spread his poison. Like Joe Rogan, Kjellberg’s words and actions are immensely consequential, rippling through society and sparking reactions that the man could never anticipate, nor desire. A creator who has convinced 92 million people to subscribe to their content should concern themselves with the message they are broadcasting, with the implication of their content. Kjellberg isn’t just some guy yelling into his microphone about memes; he has the reach of a major media outlet, and that’s a terrifying amount of responsibility for any individual. Kjellberg likely does not want to bear such a burden (who would?), but it is an inescapable aspect of his popularity, whether he acknowledges it or not. Any writer, influencer, or content creator can attest to the fact that constantly publicizing one’s personal opinions is an immensely stressful activity, especially to a large audience; it’s too easy to make mistakes, to make statements that one later regrets. From watching a number of his videos, I have to confess that I quite like Kjellberg; his content has improved as he’s matured, he can be both funny and insightful. But the subtle connection to the alt-right remains, and Kjellberg’s outright dismissal of the issue is unsettling. I don’t understand why Kjellberg doesn’t actively, aggressively push that segment of his audience away. The alt-right connection isn’t something the media conspired in a fever dream; instead of whining about articles criticizing him, why doesn’t Kjellberg question the fact that neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer sings his praises? That should be a cause for concern, to say the very least. Instead of inviting Ben Shapiro onto an episode of “Meme Review,” why not laugh at the fact that Shapiro dedicates the majority of his time and energy obsessing over pronouns? Isn’t there an opportunity to push away alt-right toxicity through humor? Celebrities associated with the fringes of the alt-right, like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, tend to fixate on their “unfair” portrayal in the media, without appearing to consider the legitimacy of the criticism, that there might be a very good reason why so many people are angry at them. Maybe it’s you, Felix. Dani Di Placido Senior Contributor I'm fascinated by storytelling, in all its myriad forms; mythology, fairy tales, films, television, and urban legends.
I know.. I been following his twitter and feeds.. kinda funny how T Series changed their youtube banner so fast.. Also T-Series interview with BBC lol
Ironically, this video was suppose to be uploaded back in 2018, but because the alarming amount of support from the people, it got delayed which led to editing the original video to this, which was then uploaded intentionally or not at April 1.