YouTube star Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, promoted an Anti-Semitic channel on a recent video.
Kjellberg often discusses cultural and online news in a video series called “Pew News.” The tone is semi-satirical, though the line is never clearly defined with creators like Kjellberg. On Sunday’s episode, he did a segment where he praised a few other channels on YouTube — and not just video gaming sites either. One of them is a creator known for making content that is anti-Semitic, sexist and homophobic.
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“You also have E;R who does great video essays,” Kjellberg said conversationally. “He did one on Death Note, which I really, really enjoyed.”
E;R — pronounced “EsemicolonR” — is an anonymous creator who focuses on film, anime and children’s cartoons. The content often ranges into the extreme, however, with Nazi propaganda added to otherwise benign properties.
In the Death Note video in particular, E;R cut together footage from the Netflix live-action movie with footage of the car that crashed intentionally into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia last year. They even made a joke about Heather Heyer, the protester who was killed in the attack. Kjellberg left a public like and comment on the video.
That is just one of the E;R videos containing this kind of content, both graphically and ideologically. E;R seems to focus on content for young people. One video mocking the cartoon Steven Universe is titled “Steven Rapeyverse,” and refers to the creator of the show diminutively as “a Jew.” It also includes four minutes of unedited audio from a speech by Adolf Hitler.
Kjellberg is no stranger to this kind of controversy. Last year, Kjellberg himself came under fire when he showed a man holding up a sign that read, “Death To Al Jews” in one of his videos. The incident cost Kjellberg a deal with Disney.
Kjellberg has not responded to this latest storm of backlash, nor has he rescinded his support for E;R.
