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By Andrew Whalen
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After a wave of support from fellow YouTubers, Felix Kjellberg—a.k.a. PewDiePie—is once again the YouTuber with the most subscribers, surpassing a Bollywood production company and even YouTube's own Sports channel. PewDiePie now has nearly 76 million subscribers on the platform. In a video thanking his fans for their support, PewDiePie urged viewers "DON'T Subscribe to PewDiePie," along the way suggesting some other channels his followers may also enjoy, including a pro-Nazi YouTube channel.
In the video, posted Sunday, PewDiePie shouted out the channel of "E;R," particularly for its video essays on the Netflix adaptation of the anime Death Note, also linking to the E;R channel in the video description. According to Right Wing Watch, E;R's channel has grown by 15,000 subscribers, with 70,000 new video views since the PewDiePie endorsement.
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In the video, E;R jokes about the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, referencing a popular right-wing conspiracy theory regarding her death. In another video, banned by YouTube, E;R critiques the horror movie Get Out, in part by analyzing Jordan Peele's racial heritage, decrying his "race-mixing" and inserting blackface caricatures. In another video, ostensibly about Steven Universe, E;R inserts a speech by Adolf Hitler synced to a slideshow of corporate media figures believed to be Jewish and ending with his own version of the white supremacist "14 Words" slogan.
In addition to anti-semitic and racist content posted to YouTube, E;R is also a fixture on Gab—the Twitter replacement preferred by white nationalists, racists, Nazis and other members of the far-right—where he explained his approach to "redpilling" his viewers on the "(((Jewish Question)))."
"Pretend to joke about it until the punchline /really/lands," E;R writes.
This isn't the first time PewDiePie has flirted with Nazi propaganda, including anti-semitic jokes and Nazi imagery in nine separate videos of his own, resulting in the end of a deal with Disney.
While PewDiePie may be unaware of E;R's older, more openly racist videos, other red flags were even more obvious, such as the description on the Death Note video recommended by PewDiePie, which whines that fear of a YouTube ban for "speech crime" has prevented him from calling one Death Note character a "niglet." Just below the description, a positive note from PewDiePie is the top-voted comment.
UPDATE 4:49 p.m. EST: PewDiePie has posted a video response.
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