Massive parties, pornography, and binge drinking may not be on the typical path to right-wing media stardom, but for Canadian-American influencer group the Nelk Boys, combining their fratty lifestyle with faux right-wing outrage has skyrocketed them to money and success. 

Once described by the Toronto Star as some of the “most recognizable personalities for young people in North America,” the Nelk Boys have turned their money-making influencer lifestyle into a political force, mainstreaming extremists and some of the loudest bigots in the right-wing media landscape to their millions of followers. 

The group has seen massive success online. With more than 21 million followers across mainstream social media platforms, the Nelk Boys’ videos regularly receive upwards of 5 million views, and the group has earned “tens of millions” of dollars in revenue from various projects, including a hard seltzer line, merchandise, supplements, and fan subscriptions, among other investments. (The name of the group is sometimes stylized as “NELK,” taking the first letter of each of the original members’ first names: Nick, Elliot, Lucas, and Kyle.) 

Originally built on vlogging and performing pranks, the Nelk Boys’ once non-traditional media empire has become a Trojan Horse, allowing the pranksters to share hateful values with their fans, interview right-wing and far-right figures on their Full Send Podcast, and normalize extreme misogyny. 

As Gen Z boys and men begin to lean conservative, groups like the Nelk Boys demonstrate how the right has been successful at using influencers and culture warriors to spread their message and garner support, all the while profiting from their fans and expanding their reach online. 

The Nelk Boys offer a brand of conservatism that is less concerned with traditional right-wing issues; rather, it embraces modern vices like gambling and pornography while engaging in the culture war and sharing a “disdain for the language of liberal improvement.”  

“With our audience, we can build pretty much anything,” Nelk Boys leader Kyle Forgeard told the New York Times in 2021. “Maybe we start a men’s grooming company or we could sell condoms if we wanted to. We could open Full Send gyms. We could do pizza delivery.”

What the Nelk Boys offer is a lifestyle — focused on seducing women, gambling, drinking, fitness, fighting sports, and general shenanigans — that speaks to their large audience of boys and men. Their videos are “laser-targeted at men,” and women are typically only included in videos as props. This lifestyle, coupled with the group’s right-leaning bias, has led the Nelk Boys to join forces with extreme misogynists and incel-aligned figures like alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.

The group’s massive reach has landed them among the upper echelons of the right-wing media world. Members of the group have hosted former Fox News host Tucker Carlson multiple times, and they have twice interviewed former President Donald Trump. The former president recently shouted out the group during a celebration event for Trump’s win in the Nevada GOP caucuses.

The group sells Trump 2024 merchandise and has previously been invited onto Air Force One and on stage during a Trump rally to dance alongside the former president to “YMCA.”

The Nelk Boys also have the potential to lead their audiences into darker corners of the internet, introducing fans to extremist figures and platforms that they otherwise might not encounter. In addition to YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), the group posts their videos on right-wing video sharing platform Rumble, a cesspool of white nationalist propaganda, QAnon conspiracy theory videos, and antisemitism.

The Nelk Boys use pranks to spread bigotry to their audience of millions 

The Nelk Boys have moved on from harmless public hijinks and are now using their viral prank videos to spread bigotry to an audience of millions.

In recent years, the group has put out prank videos promoting anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and racist values. 

Here are a few examples:

In July 2023, the group pulled a “transgender prank” on their friend. In the video, an apparently cisgender woman is seen putting a banana in her pants as a faux penis; then, while kissing, she directs the hand of her unknowing partner to her groin. After the man confronts her, the Nelk Boys enter to reveal the prank. Pranks like these may seem harmless to some viewers, but they not only mock intimate partner violence — which trans people are nearly twice as likely to experience as cis people — they also serve to reinforce the fear and hatred underlying much of the violence that LGBTQ people face.

During another anti-trans prank, the group brought a dog in a tutu to a veterinary office and asked staff members to change the animal's sex.

In an October 2021 prank, the Nelk Boys offered beer to a group of people they thought might be immigrants before tricking them into thinking that officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were coming to deport them.

During a racist prank from December 2023, a member of the Nelk Boys impersonated a UPS driver delivering caged puppies to an Asian restaurant.

The Nelk Boys are linked to misogynistic “manosphere” influencers 

Members of the Nelk Boys are linked to several misogynistic “manosphere” influencers. These figures include Andrew Tate and streamers like Sneako (real name Nico Kenn De Balinthazy) and Jon Zherka — all of whom have promoted violence and abuse against women online. 

The manosphere is an online community of right-wing websites, bloggers, and influencers cultivating a worldview based on regressive gender politics repackaged for the internet age. These figures often push extremism and antisemitism while blaming women for myriad societal woes and treating them as an inferior sex. Many of these figures lure viewers in with content about other topics that interest young men — like weightlifting, video games, and boxing — before diving into extremist content and misogyny, creating a dangerous pipeline.

The Nelk Boys have aligned themselves with Tate and have defended him from ridicule while echoing similar misogynistic talking points. Tate is an extreme misogynist who has promoted violence against women and is currently under investigation for alleged human trafficking.  

During an interview on the Raw Talk podcast, uploaded to YouTube as “WHEN TO TAKE GIRLS SERIOUS,” Nelk Boys member Salim Sirur defended Tate.

“He’s very respectful,” Sirur said. “Whatever Andrew Tate has said that like people have been like, ‘What the fuck,’ or whatever, I wouldn’t apologize for it, man. Honestly, I swear to God, I wouldn’t apologize for it.”

Later in the episode, Sirur complained, “You can’t really give girls validation no more because they run with it. … You give them validation here and there, but you don’t fucking tell them — like imagine if I was like, ‘Bro, you just did the greatest thing of my life.’ Fuck that, man.”

When the Nelk Boys interviewed Tate in 2022 on their Full Send Podcast, they repeatedly allowed him to push extreme misogyny with little to no rebuttal. The episode reportedly received 11 million views before it was removed by YouTube. 

During their interview, Tate:

• Claimed that “the reason that 18- and 19-year-olds are more attractive than 25-year-olds is because they’ve been through less dick.”
• Argued that if he is dating a woman, all of her property becomes his.
• Suggested that “a lot of the world’s problems could be fixed if women walked around with their body counts on their foreheads.” 
• Said, “Beautiful women love misogynistic men. … The only women who don’t love misogynists are the women who are too ugly to get fucked by a misogynist.” 
• Declared that women “are the true currency of ballers.”

The group is also closely linked to manosphere influencer and streamer Sneako, an associate of pro-Hitler rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) who has pushed violence against women and was recorded hitting a woman he argued with. 

Sneako has previously refused to condemn Adolf Hitler and attacked Jewish people online, later saying that “the Nazis had drip” and that the swastika is “aesthetically pleasing.” He is also an associate of white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and spoke at one of Fuentes’ antisemitic rallies, where Fuentes called for a “holy war” against Jewish people.

Nelk Boys member Aaron Steinberg hosted Sneako on his podcast, describing him as a bigot while also praising the influence he’s had on the host’s life. 

“I’m not sure what this podcast is. It’s like, two drunk Jews like bicker and I stand off to the side?” Sneako said at the start of the podcast. 

“He’s also racist, antisemitic, all of the above,” Steinberg responded.

Later, Steinberg admitted that minorities probably don’t like Sneako.

“Women want to attack the fuck out of this guy,” Steinberg said laughing. “If you’re part of the LBGTQ, if you’re Jewish, if you’re Black, if you’re — not Muslim — Christian, or if you’re a woman, trans — you want to attack the fuck out of this guy.”

Members of the Nelk Boys have also partied with and praised Zherka, a self-proclaimed “pedo,” fascist, and woman-hater who has promoted violence against the opposite sex. Zherka has described Hitler as a “good guy,” praised Fuentes, and reportedly flirted with underage girls online.

Mainstreaming right-wing media figures 

The Nelk Boys have also platformed and interviewed several high-profile right-wing media figures on their Full Send Podcast, which has over 2.1 million subscribers on YouTube. Many of these figures — including Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump Jr., and Infowars’ Alex Jones — regularly push hatred, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.

During interviews with right-wing media figures, the Nelk Boys allow their guests to push conspiracy theories and bigotry, sometimes joining in on the toxic rhetoric themselves. 

In interviews with right-wing media figures, the Nelk Boys and their guests have repeatedly made anti-LGBTQ comments:

• During an interview with Owens, she advocated for Uganda’s draconian anti-homosexuality law.
• Later in that same interview, Forgeard bragged that a 13-year-old had approached him to say that he was a fan of the group and had seen their anti-trans pranks and Trump interview.
• During an interview with entrepreneur and former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Vivek Ramaswamy, he falsely claimed that being trans is “a mental health illness.”
• Forgeard responded to Ramaswamy by declaring that his assistant is “the most transphobic one in our crew. … And he’s gay as hell.” 

The Nelk Boys and their guests have also discussed and pushed conspiracy theories: 

• During their interview with Owens, she claimed, “We definitely were not told the truth about 9/11. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, that’s just a fact.”
• Forgeard responded, adding that “the tower 7 thing” was suspicious. (Forgeard was apparently referring to World Trade Center building 7, which, while not hit directly on 9/11, collapsed due to fire damage following the attack.) 
• While interviewing Jones, the group again discussed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and building 7. He also pushed a conspiracy theory about the men’s-only camping retreat Bohemian Grove.

The Nelk Boys also denied the devastating effects of climate change during their interview with Ramaswamy.

“Are we sure this is, on balance, a bad thing? That’s the actual question to ask,” said Ramaswamy on climate change. 

“How can they say that climate change is the biggest threat to our society? That’s just a load of bullshit, honestly,” Forgeard later added.

At the start of their interview with Valuetainment’s Patrick Bet-David, members Steinberg and Forgeard admitted that they sometimes do not research their guest before interviewing them, begging the question: Is this group blindly platforming right-wing media figures with no knowledge of what harm they could be doing?

“You didn’t do much research for this one, did you?” Forgeard asked.

“I did not,” Steinberg responded as both Nelk Boys laughed.

Influence on young people  

Reporting has shown the ways that bad actors have influenced the minds of viewers — even some as young as 11 years old. 

Videos of young, male fans meeting extremist figures like Sneako show just how easily their toxic rhetoric can be picked up by kids.

The Nelk Boys have a responsibility not to promote figures who spread hatred and bigotry to the young fans who idolize them. 

Misogynistic, racist, and extremist rhetoric from toxic influencers does not live in a vacuum online; it can lead to real-world harassment and violence.