As the controversy surrounding Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg has reached a fever pitch this week, YouTube’s most-subscribed star — who was dropped by Maker Studios and saw his YouTube Red series axed in the wake of a string of anti-Semitic jokes on his channel — has remained relatively off the radar. But not for long.
Kjellberg returned to Twitter yesterday and acknowledged supporters while vowing to return with new videos soon. He joked that he paid h3h3productions’ Ethan Klein $50,000 to make a video in which Klein defended his friend and accused the media of manufacturing an outraged response to the jokes.
PewDiePie also retweeted a video from the YouTube comedy channel World Of The Orange, which spoofs a video produced by The Wall Street Journal chronicling Kjellberg’s offenses. The World Of The Orange video, however, jokes that not only is Kjellberg guilty of telling anti-Semitic jokes, but also of recruiting child soldiers to fight for warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rigging the U.S. presidential election in favor of Donald Trump
, and even cancelling the cult 2003 sci-fi series Firefly.Though he’s now network-less, it doesn’t look like that’s going to keep Kjellberg away from YouTube for long. Kjellberg did release a (potentially prescheduled) video on Valentine’s Day after the scandal had broke — though it simply featured he and his girlfriend Marzia Bisgonin playing the video game Genital Jousting. Yesterday, Kjellberg tweeted that more videos were on the way.
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