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SHA-MEME: A punk defaced the Brooklyn War Memorial with the online handle of a YouTube
celebrity popular for streaming video games. Photo by Colin Mixson
Viral vandal
Delinquent defaces Downtown WWII
memorial with name of YouTube star
BY COLIN MIXSON
Some vandal defaced a Downtown memorial
honoring locals who died in
World War II by scrawling the name of
a popular YouTube celebrity on it, disgusting
residents with their choice of
canvas and inspiration.
“Obviously, it shows very little respect,”
said Carroll Gardener Remko
DeJong.
The baddie wrote the graffi ti
— which declares “Subscribe to
PewDiePie” — in chalk on the exterior
of the Brooklyn War Memorial
inside Cadman Plaza Park, where
city offi cials this spring are set to begin
long-awaited accessibility repairs
to the shrine , whose interior features
the names of more than 11,500 Brooklynites
who died in WWII.
And, thanks to the criminal, those
names grew to include the online handle
of the wildly popular video-game
streamer Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg,
whose YouTube channel boasts an audience
of nearly 88-million subscribers
who tune in to watch clips of him
playing games including fi rst-person
shooter “Doom 3,” zombie-survival sim
“Day Z,” and rhythm game “PaRappa
the Rapper.”
An image of the tag was posted to
a page devoted to Brooklyn on the social
media website Reddit on Monday
morning, and the graffi ti remained
emblazoned on the memorial a day
later when this newspaper stopped by
around 2 pm on Tuesday.
The command written in chalk may
be a reference to the so-called “Subscribe
to PewDiePie Movement,” also
known as the “The Great Subscriber
War,” in which the streamer’s fans
TAGGED: The graffi ti written in chalk declares
“Subscribe to PewDiePie.”
Photo by Colin Mixson
promote his handle in an effort to ensure
his channel remains YouTube’s
most-subscribed-to outlet.
That campaign began last year, after
software called Social Blade predicted
another video-game-streaming
channel, T-Series, could surpass Kjellberg
as the platform’s most followed
content creator, according to the website
knowyourmeme.com , which researches
and documents viral Internet
memes and phenomena.
And the YouTube star’s name appearing
on the WWII memorial seems
in especially poor taste considering
videos he posted, and later removed,
after critics condemned them as anti
Semitic. In 2017, Kjellberg posted a
video featuring a man dressed as Jesus
Christ saying, “Hitler did absolutely
nothing wrong,” and another
for which the streamer allegedly
hired two men to hold a sign that read,
“Death to All Jews,” leading bigwigs
at kid-friendly studio Disney to reportedly
kill a distribution deal with the
online celebrity.
/knowyourmeme.com