Popular YouTuber JonTron Has Some Wild Thoughts On Immigration He’d Like To Share

Jon Jafari is a popular YouTube gamer and comedian better known as JonTron. He’s the founder of Normalboots — a network of channels including Did You Know Gaming and Peanutbuttergamer — and was the original cohost of the “Let’s Play” channel Game Grumps. Between those projects, Jafari wields influence over an estimated 12 million subscribers, not counting minor cameos and crossovers elsewhere within the YouTube community.



Image: Screengrab via JonTronShow

More recently, Jafari has claimed that Mexican immigrants are setting up “ethnic enclaves” in the US “to break parts of America off back into Mexico”.

Wow, how scandalous, Steve King doesn't want his country invaded by people who have contempt for his culture and people! NAZI!!! — Jon Jafari (@JonTronShow) March 12, 2017

Jafari began his descent into madness on Monday, when he tweeted a defence of Iowa Representative Steve King’s controversial claim that “[we] can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies,” a remark that has since been condemned by just about everyone except for white nationalist David Duke. From there, Jafari’s tweets led him to agree to defend his position during a conversation with professional streamer Steve Bonnell, better known as Destiny, on Twitch. Yes, yes, we’re getting to the interesting stuff shortly.

Over the course of two hours, Jafari’s comments on the stream ranged from baseless to deeply inflammatory. In addition to his ludicrous claim about Mexicans attempting to somehow recapture American land, he said that “we don’t need immigrants from incompatible places” and that white people were going through a “demographic displacement” due to immigration, which he likened to apartheid South Africa. Truly the mind reels. But wait, there’s more.

Jafari also claimed that wealthy black Americans commit more crimes than poor whites (citation badly needed), the court system doesn’t display bias against people of colour (it does), that Irish and Italians were always considered “white” in America (they weren’t), and that Black Lives Matter doesn’t disavow violence (it does). “We’ve gotten rid of discrimination in our Western countries,” said Jafari, only to later state that “nobody wants to become a minority in their own country”.

The source of Jafari’s anxiety seems to be the looming possibility that whites will become a minority in the United States, which he projects will happen by 2042. And despite Bonnell asking repeatedly why that matters, Jafari instead stumbled through far right talking points vilifying immigrants as lazy criminals and demanding the need for America to have a unifying culture (though he was unable to express why that would demand a white majority). “White interests” and “tribalism” were something he harped on repeatedly but was unable to quantify or defend the importance of. Bonnell pointed out that Jafari is half Iranian and half Hungarian himself. Jafari appeared open to the idea of immigration, conceding that “if they assimilated they would enter the gene pool eventually”. One imagines Mengele would be proud.

@OmniDestiny @alarabi98 @Laurence_Russel If a nation cannot decide who to let in, or remove, it is not a nation at all — Jon Jafari (@JonTronShow) March 13, 2017

Jafari was quick to jump on Bonnell the way many in the far right do when criticised: By claiming that someone is trying to police their thoughts. Jafari is free to think whatever he wants, and we’re free to think less of him for it.

“I thought he would walk back some of the more extreme things he said, but it seems like he was pushing for something more insidious than what I’d originally expected,” Bonnell told Gizmodo via Twitter. “ie: his ‘gene pool’ comment, his laughing about why black youth committed crime, his comparisons between black people in the US vs Africa.”

We reached out to Jafari and Jafari’s associated channels for comment but had not heard back at time of writing.