After a 40-minute discussion of topics like the starvation of Gaza’s children, Kyle Forgeard asked Benjamin Netanyahu whether he preferred McDonald’s or Burger King. It was an apotheosis of sorts for American masculinity’s political evolution. Here was the sharp-as-a-tack Israeli Prime Minister, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, being interviewed by Canadian pranksters who’d built a $100 million empire on fake employee pranks and Spring Break debauchery. “The Whopper?” Forgeard asked, as if discussing fast-food preferences during a humanitarian catastrophe was the most natural thing in the world. “That’s your worst take,” his co-host Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg chimed in, referring not to Netanhayu’s hardline position on Gaza, but to his suggested burger preference.
This recent interview with one of the world’s most significant leaders represents the culmination of a remarkable transformation. The Nelk Boys, whose name combines the first initials of their four Canadian founders (Nick, Elliot, Lucas, and Kyle), began in 2010 as politically neutral YouTubers pulling harmless pranks such as their viral “Coke Prank on Cops”. They’ve since evolved into significant political actors in Trump’s America, relocating from Canada to Orange County, California, to build an empire on outlandish pranks and party documentation, generating 1.3 billion views in the process. At the beginning of their career, they were telling LAPD officers they had “coke” in their car, only to reveal Coca-Cola; now, they are interviewing a politician embroiled in a major regional war. The journey illustrates something profound about how young American masculinity found its political voice, however halting and stuttering, in the algorithmic age.
The transformation wasn’t immediate. For years, Forgeard, who is the sole remaining original member, worked to transform their “Full Send” brand from drinking slogan (“party hard”) to lifestyle empire (rebranded as giving “your absolute best”). YouTube demonetised the group in 2020 for “creating a widespread public health risk” after they threw massive parties violating Covid protocols, but the punishment proved meaningless when they reportedly sold $70 million in merchandise the following year. Their content was laser-targeted at males aged 16-25: fake employee pranks at Walmart, Spring Break documentation, university lecture disruptions. As one analysis noted, they “tend towards the apolitical”, with viewers seeking entertainment rather than ideology. Women appeared only as props; diversity came through their multiracial, multiethnic cast, with Americans, Canadians, and even a gay Brazilian immigrant making conservative messaging more palatable than if delivered by the stale, pale, and male Republican establishment.
The political awakening of the Nelk Boys came in October 2020, when Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship — truly an important point of connection for so much of the latest iteration of the American Right — introduced them to Donald Trump. Suddenly, these Canadian pranksters were aboard Air Force One, dancing to “YMCA” at rallies. “Back in 2020, it really wasn’t [cool to have public dealings with Trump],” Forgeard later reflected. “We were kind of the first podcasters to have him on when it wasn’t cool.” Their reward? Trump thanked them by name on election night 2024, recognising their role in his 15-point gain among young male voters.
Between these bookends lies a fascinating case study in audience capture. In August 2022, the Nelk Boys posted a video of themselves being bullied by Andrew Tate. The footage, which has garnered 11 million views, showed the Tate brothers “demonstrating” how to manipulate women, later spraying the Nelk Boys with champagne after allegedly “stealing their girl”. This went beyond mere entertainment, introducing their young male audience to the manosphere’s toxic gospel of traditional masculinity and female subjugation.
The Netanyahu interview exposed the intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of this movement. When “Steiny” asked why Netanyahu was “so hated worldwide”, the Prime Minister deflected with propaganda about a rabbi’s brother in Europe. When asked about starving Gazans, Netanyahu blamed Hamas while the hosts nodded along. Their most substantive pushback came over fast food preferences. The YouTube comments were brutal: “38-year-old frat bros interview Adolf Hitler,” one user wrote, garnering 117,000 likes.
The backlash forced them into a nearly four-hour damage-control stream featuring an unlikely coalition: Hasan Piker (Leftist streamer and, some hope, the Left’s answer to Joe Rogan), Nick Fuentes (gadfly alt-Right, Holocaust denier who has seemingly feuded with everyone on the Right and argued it’s gay for men to have sex with women), and Sneako (banned from YouTube for alleged antisemitism).
Taken together, it all represents a complete inversion of comedy’s traditional political pipeline. The 2000s Judd Apatow generation of frat humourists, which consisted of slobs or nebbishes such as Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, followed a predictable trajectory: crude masculine comedy led to Hollywood success and eventual performative liberal politics. Rogen, Hill and Cera reunited in 2020 for a Democratic fundraiser, looking old and bloated in Zoom windows while earnestly discussing their enthusiasm for reproductive rights. These were the same comedians who’d built careers on jokes about semen and being gay, and they were now positioning themselves as enlightened male feminists. Their politics weren’t so much sophisticated as simply polished, a professional obligation in Hollywood where being a “good liberal” meant career survival.
The phoniness of this generation’s politics was exposed in moments of crisis. When real working-class grievances emerged, these millionaire comedians retreated into vague platitudes about “doing better” and “having conversations”. They performed progressivism like another movie role, complete with the right Instagram posts and carefully crafted statements drafted by publicists. The “White Dudes for Harris” phenomenon, with wealthy entertainers awkwardly performing allyship, represented the endpoint of this hollow politics: privileged men congratulating themselves for having the correct opinions while changing nothing material about the systems that enriched them.
The Nelk Boys embody the newer, more generous, more small-d democratic pipeline: YouTube pranks lead to Trump adjacency and what might be called “confused conservatism“ (or simple/basic conservatism, if one is being more generous). The bro podcast king Joe Rogan offers intellectual curiosity (however performative); the ascendant, formerly cancelled comedian Sam Hyde offers articulate extremism; but the Nelk Boys offer pure vibes — a vague politics of male-coded cultural resentment that plays on justifiable audience concerns yet lacks ideological coherence. They’re less sophisticated than Hyde, who evolved from edgy comedy to shrewd policy criticism, yet seemingly more committed to the cause than Jake and Logan Paul, whose political engagement remains more transactional. For the Paul brothers, it is their various sports-related undertakings that constituted their real bread and butter.
The data reveals the Nelk Boys’ impact. With 73% male viewership aged 16-25, over 21 million followers across platforms, and videos regularly exceeding five million views, they’ve become what less sympathetic researchers call a “Trojan Horse” for Right-wing messaging. Their evolution from apolitical content to hosting extremists demonstrates what these scholars, who are undeniably political themselves, term the “gateway drug” effect — in which mainstream entertainment content serve as an entry point toward such excesses as “extreme anti-feminism, nativism and overt white nationalism”. Commentary of this kind sounds like the sort of rhetorical overreach that makes most people question the validity of Left-coded academic “research” and, in turn, fail to ask questions about what the long-term impact of the Nelks’ political influence actually is.
Too big to fail or to shut down their profitable operation, the Nelk Boys exemplify how young male content creators are pulled rightward by audience pressure and algorithmic incentives. UC Davis research found that YouTube’s recommendation system leads Right-leaning users toward ever edgier Right-coded content. The economic logic is simple: controversial political content generates higher engagement, conservative audiences provide better monetisation, and platforms reward transgression. The result? A generation of creators profits from performing politics they barely understand for audiences seeking validation of their cultural grievances.
“Too big to fail or to shut down their profitable operation, the Nelk Boys exemplify how young male content creators are pulled rightward.”
These grievances are real. The Nelk Boys’ young followers face legitimate economic challenges: housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, social atomisation, looming AI sunsetting of many white-collar jobs, particularly those offering entry to the corporate world. The manosphere offers clear albeit simplistic answers: feminism destroyed traditional relationships, diversity hiring stole your job, liberal elites hate you for being male. Content creators package these resentments as entertainment, creating what Left-wing researcher Rebecca Lewis calls “reactionary ideologies” sold through influencer tactics.
The 2024 election validated this strategy. Trump systematically courted the manosphere by appearing on podcasts that reached 50 million views, a move that contributed to a 15-point Rightward shift among young men. As the UFC’s Dana White took the podium to praise Trump’s victory, he specifically noted the contributions of “the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”. These weren’t mere entertainers, but political activists who’d successfully converted politically homeless young men into Trump voters.
The phoniness of the Apatow generation created a vacuum for the Nelk Boys to exploit. Millionaire comedians who’d built careers playing pot-smoking man-children tried reinventing themselves as progressive allies, but their working-class cosplay fooled nobody. The Nelk Boys offered something similarly hollow but superficially honest — they never pretended to be sophisticated, socially conscious, or even capable interviewers. Most crucially, YouTube democratised their content in ways Hollywood never could. Any teenager with WiFi could access the Nelk Boys’ world, while the Apatow crew remained products of an insular industry that preached inclusivity while practising groupthink and nepotism.
As Forgeard stood onstage at Trump rallies declaring “We need Trump back and we need him back bad”, he embodied this transformation. The fake employee prankster had become a real political employee, selling Right-wing politics to young men seeking meaning in meaningless or absurd lives. The “Full Send” lifestyle, which was once about partying hard, now meant saving democracy from an addled Joe Biden (to which end, among other things, they sold loads of merchandise that proclaimed “Biden is a half sender”).
In the aftermath of the Netanyahu interview, we can see possible limits to the trajectory. Having platformed alleged war criminals (Netanyahu) and actual Holocaust deniers (Fuentes), where does the Full Send operation go from here? In the attention economy, the answer is always the same: further out there, more extreme, endlessly transgressive until the platform itself becomes the message — wayward masculine energy searching for lost, strayed, or stolen meaning in all the wrong places, finding only more content to consume.
