YouTuber PewDiePie Gives Shout Out To Nazi Sympathizer

Last year, YouTuber PewDiePie lost a partnership with Disney after he live-streamed a video of himself convincing two Indian men to hold up a sign that read “Death to all Jews.” Even before then, in videos, PewDiePie made references to Adolf Hitler and swastikas that Nazi and alt-Right outlets.

“[I] said publicly a year and a half ago that I was gonna distance myself from Nazi jokes and that kinda stuff,” he said.

The YouTuber, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, gave a few shoutouts to other YouTubers in one of his videos. This may seem insignificant but consider that he has over 76 million subscribers. One of the shoutouts was for an anime review video made by a user “E;R,” who posts exclusively racist, anti-Semitic and white nationalist content. Since the shoutout, E;R’s channel has added 15,000 subscribers.

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On Tuesday, Kjellberg responded to criticism of the shoutout, saying he can’t be expected to do a deep dive on everyone he gives a shoutout to.

“All I said was I like this guy’s anime review,” he said. ”[He] apparently likes to have hidden and not-so-hidden Nazi references in his videos and obviously if I noticed that I wouldn’t have referenced him in the shoutout.”

But the references aren’t hidden at all. In one, E;R shows a picture of dead Jews during the Holocaust and in another, he plays four minutes of an unedited Hitler speech.

In fact, in the video PewDiePie shouted out, there’s what’s been called “extremely racist content”, as well as a joke about Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed in the Charlottesville Alt-Right attack.

E;R’s channel has seen tremendous growth after PewDiePie pointed attention towards him. Kjellberg is the third most popular channel on YouTube as of today and remains the most popular independent creator.