At the start of this year a report from the Wall Street Journal condemning “anti-Semitic jokes” he had used in his videos led to Disney dropping him from its Maker Studios division, while YouTube also cancelled the second season of its YouTube Red reality show, Scare PewDiePie. PewDiePie is YouTube’s most-subscribed creator, with him having over 56 million subscribers on the site and a significant young audience. He also included the “Kekistan” flag, a symbol of a tongue-in-cheek fictional religion conjured up by 4chan users in which Pepe is positioned as a spiritual leader. The 27-year-old YouTuber also uses the game to draw the “autistic screeching” meme, popular among anti-feminists online, though he replaces the head of the figure typically featured in the image with the CNN logo, a reference to the ongoing battle between the news station and Donald Trump’s presidential administration. Though there are still those who argue that Pepe is simply an innocuous meme, there is no denying the correlation between the illustration and online hate groups, with even its creator having distanced himself from the cartoon as a result of it being widely used by racists online (via The Guardian). The video of alt-right leader Richard Spencer being punched earlier this year also saw the white nationalist wearing a Pepe pin and explaining how it had become a “symbol.” In the video PewDiePie uses the game Passpartout: The Starving Artist to draw a series of illustrations, including one of Pepe the frog, an image that was recognized by the Anti-Defamation League as having been co-opted by white nationalists into a racist hate symbol. Felix “ PewDiePie” Kjelberg has included an illustration of Pepe the frog, a meme commonly associated with the alt-right, along with other images co-opted by the deeply controversial group, in a new video that continues his run of appealing to divisive online political groups and figures.
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