Partly, that’s because a few years ago, he made some Holocaust jokes on his channel, which led to a nuclear-grade backlash. For years, Kjellberg has been trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to shed a reputation as a far-right sympathizer. But he was not a randomly chosen target either. Kjellberg has no connection to either man, and there is zero evidence that their deeds were actually inspired by him. Just to be abundantly clear: As far as we know, these were both sick jokes. “He was kind enough to plan and fund this whole operation - the sly bastard.” “I had the help of a man named Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg,” wrote the shooting suspect, who, like the Christchurch suspect, has pleaded not guilty. even claimed that the YouTuber aided in the plot. In his manifesto, the suspect - accused of killing one woman and injuring three others at a synagogue in Poway, Calif. A few weeks later, another violent white nationalist cited PewDiePie, this time in writing. On March 15, a white nationalist in Christchurch, New Zealand, said, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie” on his Facebook live stream, just before going on a shooting rampage, killing dozens of worshipers inside two mosques. Other people saw him as the flag-bearer of an older, weirder internet culture that was being steamrollered by bland corporate interests and needed to be defended. Some people were cheering for PewDiePie because they liked his videos. But as the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” movement grew, its meaning got blurrier. Like Japczyk’s colleagues at the staffing agency, many people who witnessed these events most likely wrote them off as dumb stunts or random emanations from some Gen Z media universe they weren’t plugged into - which, of course, they were. Early this year, hundreds of Estonian fans held a parade in the nation’s capital city, chanting his name and holding signs that said “Sub 2 Pewds.” Someone chalked “Subscribe to PewDiePie” on a World War II memorial in Brooklyn.
Billboards and fliers appeared in India, Bangladesh and Times Square. For months, tributes to PewDiePie had been popping up all over the world. The printer hack wasn’t an isolated incident. A hacker was claiming responsibility for finding a set of 50,000 printers all over the world with unsecured network connections, taking them over and using them to print these fliers. But it was only when Japczyk got back to his computer that he realized the scale of the operation. Japczyk, now 33, spends more time on YouTube than many of his colleagues and was able to explain the broad strokes: PewDiePie (rhymes with “cutie pie” real name: Felix Kjellberg) was a YouTube megacelebrity with a group of hard-core fans, known as the Bro Army, who often went to extreme lengths to show their support.
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