Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it a single joke that got him in trouble? The article's wording here is pretty slippery, but it seems to be trying to give the (as I understand it) false impression that "Pewdiepie" was a Nazi humor site. That doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the article.
>The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world's largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word "slut" as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said the Journal took the remarks out of context.)
And I would read the whole thing, the author did a fair amount of interviews but obviously needed to "anchor" this article to current events and chose a poor one in Pewdiepie. The rest is pretty good.
The media is in a dangerously sorry state.
I think the problem with journalism about the alt-right is it's near impossible to tell who's sincere, who's joking, and who's half-joking-half-serious. I've been on 4chan for over a decade and I have trouble telling. It's even harder to tell who's actually influential in the community (tip: it's almost never the people who claim they are).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/1...
The authors posit a couple of potential reasons. I'd also add a tendency to see the world in black-and-white.
The public at large, mainly due to time constraints, have no time for critical thought these days, nor have they ever, so anytime the world looks like its on fire, people are driven ever more into a fantasy narrative of "tomorrow you will die if you don't act today", paving the way for normalization of extreme views of the world and people.
What ever happened to the "Why I Need Feminism" campaign? I could make a dozen signs all on my own, for some serious shit my family and I have had to live through. Yet--according to the attributes that both the left and the right seem to care about the most--I am nothing more than a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man, propped up as a poster-child for what is either wrong (to the left) or right (to the right) with the world. (But that's the thing about posters, they're two-dimensional.) I know better than to take some of my worst experiences with poor excuses for liberals to be indicative of the movement. Every job has its bad employees. But it's really easy to see how other people would see the abuse thrown at them and just wash their hands of the entire situation.
The alt-right is too easy of a target. Let's not let our glee to cut them down turn us into them.
This article seems like a crass attempt to further squeeze mainstream tech conservatives by amplifying this tiny group of nobodies.
