The YouTube star known as “PewDiePie” and who produced numerous hyper-buzzed VR gameplays has recently come under fire for featuring allegedly anti-Semitic content in his videos.
PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, lost various partnerships as a result of a Wall Street Journal article that reported on the anti-Semitic jokes in some of his videos. Kjellberg has pushed back, saying that the Journal piece took the jokes out of context.
VIDEO: Disney Drops YouTube’s PewDiePie After Anti-Semitic Posts
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6. Kjellberg has staunch defenders echoing his explanation. In an op-ed at Business Insider, Dave Smith wrote that the controversy surrounding Kjellberg “is a massive overreaction,” citing a tweet from Josh Barro that reads, “See, that’s why you never trust a Jew.”
Smith explained that while the tweet in and of itself would seem offensive, it was referencing a moment in President Donald Trump’s insane press conference in which he began ranting about how he was being unfairly portrayed as an anti-Semite after a reporter from a Jewish news outlet asked him about the increase in anti-Semitic attacks. Context is key for a tweet like that, and the same holds true for Kjellberg’s videos, Smith argues:
Having watched those videos, it is clear to me that the Wall Street Journal (and other news outlets by way of aggregation) reported on those videos in the same way someone could have reported on Josh Barro’s tweet above. The report focused on the content of the issue in question without considering the important context surrounding it — context that makes you realize it’s just a joke, not a real attack on a group of people.
I’m not here to argue the merit of Pewdiepie’s videos or jokes — whether or not they should have been made in the first place, or whether or not Kjellberg was trying to make some kind of point. None of that matters.
Here’s what does matter: If you do watch those videos in their entirety — not just the clips containing the offensive material — it is clear that he is joking.
Gersh Kuntzman had a similar theme in his New York Daily News op-ed defending Kjellberg, pointing out the other absurd things the Indian guys holding the anti-Semitic signs did through the website, including singing “Happy Birthday as jungle boy in the Jungle funny guys.”
“The silly millionaire Swede is saying that our current system of rich people hiring very poor people to do whatever the rich people want is untenable,” writes Kuntzman. “If you can literally exploit a poor Indian guy into saying the worst sentence in human history, you can basically get him and others like him to do anything.”
Nick Pappas of The Liberty Standard and RedState unleashed the following tweet storm about the Kjellberg incident:
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Pappas also took a shot at the Journal:
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However, critics such as the Anti-Defamation League argue: “Just putting it out there brings it more and more into the mainstream.”
7. Kjellberg’s jokes that have come under scrutiny are reflective of today’s “shock culture.” Fruzsina Eordogh pointed out in Forbes that “shock culture” has become more mainstream because of the anything-goes content on sites like 4chan and Reddit:
This is why Kjellberg, a product of the Internet, thought he could get away with doing a comedy bit where he compares people who participate in the YouTube Heroes Initiative to Nazis in red MAGA hats. This is why, when Kjellberg paid $5 on Fiverr for two men in India to dance with a banner “Death to all Jews, subscribe to Keemstar,” his audience, and the YouTube community, laughed at the joke, not just because of the ridiculousness of Fiverr, but because Keemstar as the butt of the joke is a mass-hated and often mocked YouTuber. To these people, and to Kjellberg’s audience, hating on Jewish people never factored into it — everyone in that community agreed long ago that kind of language in sincerity was wrong. Paying people to do ridiculous things on Fiverr is also a popular prank, on places like 4chan, no less.
Pandering to this audience, Kjellberg thought he could safely make a video about how the media is always taking his jokes out of context and portraying him as an actual Nazi watching a Hitler speech in a military uniform. A reasonable assumption that proved to be ridiculous, when the Wall Street Journal actually used that same exact footage to call Kjellberg’s videos “anti-Semitic posts.”
The problem, as Eordough noted, is that while Kjellberg himself may not hold anti-Semitic views, there are others that do, and agree with the literal nature of Kjellberg’s jokes rather than the sarcastic undertones of them.
Source: DailyWire