Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Pewdiepie vs the ADL

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Sept. 12, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

10:21

Pewdiepie vs the ADL

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	You may be thinking, where's the Epstein video?
	You promised us a part two, and it's coming, I promise, again.
	Like with the first one, it takes an awful lot of work.
	But in the meantime, I thought I'd talk about PewDiePie, because YouTube drama is a bit of fun, and I haven't produced a video for this channel in a while.
	It's interesting how PewDiePie has always been a kind of outsider towards Silicon Valley and YouTube, presumably because he doesn't live in LA.
	And it's one of those things that's always had him kind of on the margins.
	In the last few years, PewDiePie has demonstrated that he's had a bit of edgy humour in him and has enjoyed poking fun at those who are, let's say, less enamoured with comedy.
	And he got himself in trouble in 2017 when the Wall Street Journal did an investigation into his video library of the last six months and found that he had made like three jokes about Jews and Nazis.
	And this got him in a huge amount of trouble.
	He ended up losing millions of dollars because pressure was put on Disney to sever ties from him, etc, etc, etc.
	This is all old news, but I thought I'd better catch you up on it.
	And you'll notice that he wasn't in 2017's YouTube rewind or in 2018's.
	Something which he lambasted in his own video, YouTube Rewind, but it's actually good.
	YouTube's own rewind video got 180 million views and 2.5 million thumbs up and 16 million thumbs down.
	And his own video on it got 64 million views and 8.5 million upvotes with not even 100,000 down.
	This was of course newsworthy because it showed that PewDiePie had his finger on the pulse of the, I guess we'll call it the YouTube community.
	Those engaged users who actually give a damn about what's happening.
	They like PewDiePie more than they like the corporate culture of Silicon Valley.
	Recently PewDiePie got married and so it was interesting to see that YouTube had tweeted out a short video chronicling his career on YouTube and extolling some of his virtues.
	Married to Marzia, revived our love of Minecraft, reach 100 million subscribers on YouTube.
	What a month to celebrate and congratulate PewDiePie.
	That's interesting, given how much of a black sheep he is.
	In a video displaying his 100 million subscriber play button, he also did a sponsorship for a company called Honey and then announced that he was donating $50,000 to the ADL.
	Which was surprising to a lot of people because the ADL were ones actively defaming him during the episode with the Wall Street Journal.
	It looked very much like someone perhaps from Honey had said something like, we'll pay you an awful lot of money to show our things if you donate $50,000 to the ADL and sort of step back from the Edgelord lifestyle.
	Understandably, a lot of people had a lot of questions, and so Felix tweeted out this.
	Misrepresenting headlines of me has led me down a path of twists with the MSM for years now.
	Previously, it hadn't bothered me much.
	I know who I am.
	But after the Christchurch travesty a few months ago, my own clash with the MSM was manipulated as a tool for destruction.
	I'm not okay with this situation any longer, and I felt responsibility to make changes.
	Making a donation to ADL doesn't make sense to everyone, especially since they've outright spoken against me.
	I wanted to show publicly that I can move past it and move on.
	I think that's important, this just isn't my fight anymore.
	And I think it's important to note that Jonathan Greenblatt, the current CEO of the ADL, had been leading the charge on Twitter against PewDiePie when the Wall Street Journal had decided to take his jokes out of context.
	ADL commends Disney's decision to sever ties with PewDiePie following posting those videos on YouTube containing swastikas and other anti-Semitic content, including an image of two men holding a sign saying, death to all Jews.
	This clearly crosses a line, but is becoming all too commonplace on social media.
	In the past few months, we have seen a proliferation of similar anti-Semitic messages and memes on social media.
	PewDiePie is entitled to his brand of humor, but neither Disney nor any other company has any obligation to support his wide dissemination of hate speech.
	To many people, PewDiePie's donation of $50,000 to the ADL looked like he was bending the knee.
	It looked like he was saying, right, I will pay my protection money as long as you stop calling me names on the internet for the jokes I made however many years ago.
	I'm sorry, I'll try not to make these jokes in future, but if I do, here's a nice chunk of change, so you don't have to get your feathers too ruffled over it.
	Naturally, the progressives were thrilled with this, and you can go to an outlet such as Kotaku, who post articles like, PewDiePie has to explain that his $50,000 pledge to an anti-hate group is legit.
	It's unambiguously good for a respected anti-hate group to receive a cash boon, and Schellberg followed up with a tweet today saying that his motive was earnest, but a contingent of Schellberg's followers aren't convinced he did it out of the goodness of his heart.
	Hundreds of fans posting on 4chan, Twitter and Reddit are spreading the conspiracy theory that Schellberg was blackmailed into donating to the ADL.
	Several emphatically believe that the ADL threatened Schellberg with bad press or censorship on YouTube in exchange for money.
	Well, given that it is the ADL, it's kind of understandable why people would think that, isn't it?
	But I really take issue with the idea that the ADL is a respected anti-hate group.
	It seems to be a very, very partisan, progressive, harassment organization that extorts money from people under threat of calling them mean names.
	I mean, they managed to turn a cartoon frog into a hate symbol for the Nazis.
	I don't know why they'd do that, especially when they admit in their own article about it that the majority of uses of Pepe the Frog have been and continue to be non-bigoted.
	And yet, they still list it under general hate symbols.
	But it's not like the ADL hasn't had enough criticism from its own peers.
	I mean, it's a Jewish organization designed to combat anti-Semitism.
	So it's interesting how, say, the New York Post say that Jonathan Greenblatt is destroying the ADL.
	Or the Jewish news syndicate say, whatever happened to the ADL?
	The attack on Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court is the latest instance of how Jonathan Greenblatt has turned the venerable anti-Semitism watchdog into a partisan outfit.
	Or this editorial in the Jerusalem Post.
	Candidly speaking, I stand by my critique of ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt.
	The ADL is not nearly as respectable and non-partisan as the left-wing partisans are making out because it has become an organ of left-wing partisanship.
	But you know what?
	Fine.
	PewDiePie wants to pay some protection money to the ADL so the radical left-wingers will leave him alone after all of the edgy jokes that he's made.
	I can understand it.
	PewDiePie wasn't looking to become some martyr in the culture war.
	I don't think he was looking to fight the power and stick it to the man or anything like that.
	He just kind of got caught up in this because he is, or was at the time, the biggest YouTube channel that had ever existed.
	It's natural that they're going to train their guns on him.
	But it was interesting that a day later the ADL said, well, still no sign of that $50,000 donation.
	Pay up, we're waiting.
	And then today, PewDiePie uploaded this video.
	Stop!
	I just wanted to interrupt this video because I need to make an announcement.
	Did you guys see the video I made where I celebrated 100 million subscribers?
	It was a video I was really excited by.
	I talked about my journey from going to zero to 100 million subscribers.
	It did have a brand attachment to it, which maybe wasn't the most fitting place, but it was a cool product, so I thought it wouldn't matter.
	When we were planning the collaboration, we thought it would be nice to donate to a charity as a way to celebrate.
	I made the mistake of picking a charity that I was advised instead of picking a charity that I'm personally passionate about, which is 100% my fault.
	Usually when I pick a charity, I take my time.
	I find a charity that I'm really excited about and actually passionate to donate to.
	So when I uploaded the video talking about the charity, it was very brief and people could tell something was off.
	The whole internet just didn't believe it.
	Like, why is he donating to this charity?
	Look at his face.
	Full conspiracy mode.
	And it was very interesting to watch that unfold.
	To be fair, I saw it as an opportunity to put an end to these alt-right claims that has been thrown against me.
	It wasn't to try and clear my name or save grace.
	If it was, I would have done it years ago.
	But after the Christchurch tragedy, I felt a responsibility to do something about it because it's no longer just about me.
	It affected other people in a way.
	And I'm not okay with that.
	I've struggled to figure out how to do that.
	But this was not the right way to go about it.
	I knew it wasn't perfect, but I also didn't know a lot of things that surfaced throughout this whole thing about the charity that doesn't fit at all.
	So I understand why people had concerns about it.
	And these are things that I would have known myself if I had just taken my time.
	This whole thing was planned during my wedding and the honeymoon and 100 million was coming up as well, so it was all very rushed.
	It really doesn't feel genuine for me to proceed with a donation at this point, and I instead wanted to actually do take my time, keep the intent that I had, but just doing it with the right charity and doing it properly.
	So I just wanted to make that clear.
	I'm sorry for all the confusion and I'm sorry for messing this up.
	That's what I do.
	Perfectly reasonable response and explanation as to what happened here.
	I'm happy with it.
	But I find it really interesting that he's wearing a shirt with this particular symbol.
	This symbol, what is this symbol?
	The Iron Cross?
	What?
	During the 1930s, the Nazi regime in Germany superimposed a swastika on the traditional medal, turning it into a Nazi symbol.
	After World War II, the medal was discontinued, but neo-Nazis and other white supremacists subsequently adopted it as a hate symbol, and it's been a commonly used hate symbol ever since.
	PewDiePie refuses to give money to a Jewish organization in a video in which he appears to be wearing an Iron Cross.
	I can't believe they haven't picked up on that yet.
	I don't think that was on purpose.
	I just think it's really funny.

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