Gamer star PewDiePie was set for the big-time: 53m subscribers to his YouTube gamering channel and a hot deal with Disney to take his clean-cut mug to mass culture stardom. But then he started posting about the Jews.
[Felix] Kjellberg, a 27-year-old Swede whose YouTube antics secured him multimillion-dollar deals with YouTube and Disney, posted a Jan. 11 video that included two men laughing as they held a banner that read “Death to all Jews." He made a total of nine other videos that made anti-Semitic comments or used Nazi imagery, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the news.
Disney, which has owned Maker Studios since 2014, said it was severing ties with him.
YouTube also cancelled his reality show Scare PewDiePie and removed him from its premium line-up of ad-supported channels. Excuses were immediately forthcoming.
"I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online," he wrote, continuing, "I think it's important to say something and I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes."
Here's the sign he paid a couple of Sri Lankans to hold up:
That giggling sociopathic edgyness! The veil of irony spread over it! Imagine that you just got your big family-entertainment break from Disney and the thought that hits you is "right, now to dial that up a notch! Who can I hire to hold up signs saying DEATH TO ALL JEWS?"
It would almost be better if he were a closet fash rather than the soulless vlogger moron he excuses himself as. At least then it'd be the human result of a comprehensible emotion, rather than anomalous output from highly-performant content persona.
