An Australian YouTuber Has Been Called Out For Publicly Celebrating The Pulse Nightclub Attacks
"When there was the Orlando shooting and the guy was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ or something, I was like [fist pump]".
Perth producer Pogo is the latest in a growing list of YouTube stars revealing their fucked-up views, as an old video has emerged in which he fist pumps to celebrate the 2016 Orlando attack that killed 49 people inside queer nightclub Pulse.
You mightn’t have thought of Pogo (aka Nick Berkle) since the mid-2000s, when his spaced-out, trip-inducing mashups of Disney films like Alice In Wonderland and Fantasia went viral, but he’s still incredibly popular. Busy, too.
Turns out that when Pogo’s not remixing your childhood favourites into ‘chilled beats to study to’, he’s offering alt-right inspired cultural commentary, including ‘feminism is evil’ and ‘gays are an abomination’.
That last comment came from a 2016 video entitled “Why I called my channel Fagottron” — a reference to Pogo’s channel’s URL — which has been deleted. Last month, it was re-uploaded to a YouTube account called ‘Pogo Archives’ which states it’s unaffiliated with the producer.
In the video, Berkle stresses that slur wasn’t an accident, even going so far as to express annoyance that it could be misread as a reference to a ‘fagott’, the German word for bassoon.
“I’ve never liked a grown man acting like a 12-year-old girl, I’ve always found that disgusting,” he says. “So I thought to myself, ‘how best can I express to the world that gays are just an abomination?’ Or, to be more PC about it, ‘how can I best express that to the world that I view gays as an abomination?'”
He then pauses before expressing his happiness about the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
“I don’t want to really get into this, but when there was the Orlando shooting and the guy was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ or something, I was like [fist pump],” he said. “But you know, I’ve got to be a bit careful with that.”
After the video link circulated this week to criticism on Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, Berkle released a video today entitled “Addressing Controversy”. In it, Berkle “deeply apologises”, but also claims that the video — and others in which he voices neo-Nazi sentiments and calls feminism evil — is a satire against “PC culture” inspired by legendary method-comedian Andy Kaufman.
In the 10-minute rant, Berkle covers a lot of ground — he argues he can’t be a misogynist or homophobe as he has gay friends and chats to ‘lots of women’ via Facebook messenger, then expresses admiration for alt-right contrarian commentators including Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, before finally thanking fans who “noticed the jest” of the original video.
He also uses the old schoolyard excuse and says that his use of the slur isn’t restricted to queer men, and instead refers to “dickheads”.
On YouTube, the reaction has been mixed. Some fans are defending Berkle and thanking him for expressing ‘the truth’. Others are pointing out that even if the original video was intended as a joke, it was immensely harmful and that Berkle doesn’t have the right to make light of one of the largest single-incident of violence against the LGBTIQA+ community in recent history.
Watch the video below.