Much like Pinocchio, Nick Fuentes insists he is a real boy. Personally nonthreatening but oddly creepy—also like Pinocchio—Fuentes’s true popularity is the subject of much speculation.
The stakes are high: Fuentes defends Hitler and Stalin and instructs young right-leaning men in the most provocative ways to express racism and misogyny. His cartoonish anti-Semitism has inspired Tucker Carlson to help Fuentes gain a more mainstream audience. This, in turn, has divided the right between those who think the good guys won World War II on one side and Tucker and his sycophants on the other who, like Fuentes, wonder if Churchill was actually the villain of the story.
The Tucker/Fuentes faction is outnumbered, that much is crystal clear. But outnumbered by just how many? And is that gap closing?
Those questions are partially answered by a new study of Fuentes’s online activity and support. The findings are both encouraging and ominous.
Fuentes’s online popularity in raw numbers is staggering. The Network Contagion Research Institute wanted to know how that came to be. So they took the most recent 20 tweets from each of several high-follower, high-engagement Twitter/X accounts and examined all of the retweets for all of those tweets. One of the users studied was Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, so if even Musk was outperformed algorithmically, it could be a sign of unusual activity.
And lo and behold, he was. “The data show that Nick Fuentes obtains an extraordinarily outsized number of retweets within the first 30 minutes (and first 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 20 minutes) of each of his posts. His early engagement outpaces that of even X’s #1 most-followed account (Elon Musk).”
How was this mastery of the algorithm—superior to that of the algorithm’s owner—made possible? Here’s what NCRI found.
The majority of Fuentes’s retweets in that time span came from accounts that retweeted multiple Fuentes tweets in the study group, the first sign of inorganic engagement. In other words, there is a large group of accounts seemingly waiting to retweet Fuentes’s tweets as soon as they go up.
The next question is: Who are these accounts? It turns out that a staggering 92 percent of them are anonymous: no real name, photo, contact or location information. A majority of them were also “groypers,” the Fuentes-types’ tribal nickname, or those whose posts are “almost exclusively” interactions with Fuentes.
Moreover, the study found, a massive amount of the accounts boosting Fuentes were foreign, evidence that the Fuentes social-media phenomenon is reliant on “low-cost amplification clusters and engagement farms that foreign actors often use to manufacture virality, distort platform metrics, and manipulate recommendation systems.”
Finally, Fuentes explicitly directs his followers and viewers to boost his tweets, which might violate Twitter’s terms of service.
What does this mean? That Fuentes’s social media dominance is manufactured. That’s the encouraging part—that it still takes a coordinated foreign farming machine to make someone with the worst opinions imaginable this popular.
But manufactured doesn’t mean “fake.” Fuentes exists, and his show on Rumble attracts a large live viewing. Furthermore, even a fraction of his social media audience would represent a discouragingly large number of real people who like him and share some or all of his unhealthy fixations.
Fuentes is also undeniably talented. His impish performance combined with his Peter Pannish stature makes it easy to forget he is an actual white nationalist who spreads some of the most dangerous ideas on the planet. That’s an obvious problem, because self-deprecating cynicism is harder to keep out of the mainstream than raging skinhead monologues.
There’s another problem, and it has to do with the way partisanship infects everything in American public discourse. Disaffected right-wing young men are quick to embrace provocation for its own sake, believing that there must be a connection between their own misery and the library of ideas that have been withheld from them by gatekeepers. And telling them that something is “offensive” only makes it more attractive to many of them.
And Fuentes gets bipartisan help. The NCRI study found something anyone paying attention has seen recently: “Since September 2025, there has been a noticeable shift in which visual narratives around Nick Fuentes changed dramatically. Previously described and shown in ghoulish, unattractive terms; his image became presented as extremely appealing, even for ostensibly liberal-left outlets.”
And “high-status” descriptions of him in the mainstream media have exploded. Some left-of-center outlets such as the New York Times are telling their audience that, while Fuentes is bad, he is also extremely important. That grows his audience. Others who ostensibly oppose his ideas want very badly to be able to tag all of conservatism with Fuentes’s stink. They have a strong ideological incentive to boost Fuentes’s celebrity even though they have a moral obligation to do the opposite. The result is an ecosystem of negative partisanship that elevates knowingly evil people and ideas. We can call this “prestige inflation,” because Fuentes’s status is manufactured in part by people who want the public to believe that following him is an important part of understanding modern American politics.
Whatever happens with Fuentes, this is a blueprint for foreign actors to follow if they want to derail American civic culture.
To be clear, the mainstream media were the last ones to the party regarding Fuentes. They did not create him or groom him for stardom, and they are not primarily responsible for him. But they should absolutely stop inflating him. And right-wingers who like the repugnant Fuentes should confront how easily they became dupes for foreign actors under the guise of “America first.” Conservatives used to understand that evil exists and isn’t made less evil just because it bothers liberals. Those who still understand that have a responsibility to say so.
