I have made a few articles about Felix Kjellberg AKA Pewdiepie and one contains my arguments about how he is actually a reckless edgelord instead of an actual far-right ideologue.
I mention how he never makes excuses for the bigotry of some of his fans, how he was (and still is) slandered by the media and how he only invited one right-wing pundit just to review memes instead of letting him spill verbal diarrhea.
But, for some reasons, I forgot to talk about his own rhetoric.
Below, I am going to list the common talking points of contemporary western conservatives:
1. Equal rights are the same as special rights for women and the minorities
2. Women are happier when they are treated as the “lesser sex”.
3. The Southern Strategy never happened and American Democratic party is still the racist party.
4. Taking down Confederate statues equals erasure of history.
5. The Bell Curve is scientifically legitimate.
6. Any violence committed by Christians of European descent, including the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, and the Crusades, were either justified, exaggerated or fictional.
7. All Muslims are sleeper cells.
8. The world is controlled by globalist Jewish elites.
9. Sexual violence is a trivial matter, unless they are committed by brown Muslims.
I am sure there are more recurring talking points than I mentioned above. But, those will do.
Disturbingly, I have seen how they often they are “discussed” by conservatives, especially by those who make Youtube videos,some of whom prefer to call themselves classical liberals.
But, from all online personalities who have been perceived as far-right, Pewdiepie is the only one who has never talked about those things.
Seriously, I have never heard him openly or discreetly espousing any of those lies. In fact, he barely touches politics and he never talks about history; his commentaries mostly revolve around the non-political aspects of Youtube culture.
The thing about our bigotry is it cannot be hidden completely, no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we deny its existence. Even if we are not prone to Freudian slips, our bigotry will appear subtextually in our messages.
I have encountered so many people online who claim to not be bigoted… and yet, if you read their words between the lines, you will notice how hateful they are.
You cannot say you are not a racist when you believe the mere presence of non-whites is the evidence of white genocide. You cannot say you are not a homophobe or a transphobe when you believe LGBT rights discriminate against cisgender and heterosexual people.
But, with Felix, I haven’t seen any far-right subtexts from his online content.
His commentaries are indeed laced with subtexts… classical liberal subtexts; he is all about freeing humans from any excessive constraints, both in social and legal forms. He disapproved of the “policing” of any kind of activities, as long as they are not violent.
Basically, he is the complete opposite of those far-right individuals who are supposedly all about liberty while advocating for taking it away from those who are different from them.
He, the person who never calls himself a classical liberal, is way more classical liberal than the reactionaries who claim to be ones.
About the Christchurch mosque massacre…
Both his name and Candace Owens’s were implicated because they were mentioned by the shooter. The shooter said “subscribe to Pewdiepie”, a meme created by Felix himself, during the live streamed violence while she was cited as his number one ideological inspiration.
And both public figures reacted differently.
Felix was never cited as an inspiration; the shooter mentioned the name of the most popular Youtuber because he wanted more attention.
But, not only Felix immediately condemned the massacre, he pleaded to his fans to end the meme. After his many controversies, after years of being a reckless edgelord, he has realised he has a responsibility as a public figure for every single one of his public actions… and that includes his inherently harmless meme which he created as a tongue-in-cheek response to his rivalry with T-Series.
Owens, on other hand, responded immediately by laughing it off in her dismissive tweet, despite the fact that she is the shooter’s number one inspiration!
I don’t know about her now. But, at that time, it was obvious she did not have any sense of responsibility as a public figure, even though she was famous in the first place because of her politically charged and definitely-not-trivial messages.
She was not that different from Trump who took days to condemn the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi rally attended by his own supporters.
She was not that different from other right-wing public figures who constantly incite bigotry and yet refusing to acknowledge they might have inspired atrocities like the Christchurch massacre.
But, she and her peers are definitely different from Felix Kjellberg.
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