Social media platforms such as YouTube and Rumble act as superspreaders of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is driving Trump’s violent remigration agenda
Throughout January, Somalis across Minneapolis reported facing harassment, threats, and vandalized businesses after 23-year-old content creator Nick Shirley posted a viral video on X, YouTube, and Rumble in late December baselessly accusing the community of running fraudulent child care centers. It was reposted by Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk.
Shirley’s video came in the wake of “Feeding Our Future” founder, Aimee Bock, a white American woman, being found guilty of a $250 million fraud scheme in March 2025. Further, 56 of Bock’s employees, many of whom are Somali-Americans, pleaded guilty to fraud as of September 2025. Despite ensuing investigations by Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families finding the centers profiled by Shirley “operating as expected,” the Trump administration took advantage of the far-right outrage created by Shirley’s false claims, terminating Somalian immigrants’ Temporary Protected Status, and making Minneapolis and St. Paul the latest targets of his violent remigration strategy targeting non-white migrants, an ethnic cleansing plan for the United States based on the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Shirley’s false claims are just one example of MAGA-connected influencers, who have a history of influencing the Trump administration, spreading anti-immigrant hatred on video platforms like Rumble, which has historically been unmoderated and a safe haven for neo-Nazis that has deep financial ties to key administration figures, and YouTube, where the failure to enforce its content rules has made the site now functionally similar to Rumble. MAGA figures such as Nick Shirley, Jack Posobiec, and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, all capitalize on their strong ties to the Trump administration to spread anti-immigrant rhetoric and conspiracies to large audiences.
Vice president JD Vance reposts Shirley’s video on December 27. In the following weeks, the Somali community in Minneapolis reported several acts of targeted harassment and vandalism against their businesses. (Source: X).
As the Trump administration violently enacts its remigration policy, which has resulted in the deaths of dozens in ICE custody, ICE killing an American citizen, and a DHS officer permanently blinding a protester in one eye, Shirley, Posobiec, and Bongino peddle racist hatred as truth, with clearly devastating consequences.
Nick Shirley
Nick Shirley is a “TikTok prankster” turned influencer with content posted on both YouTube and Rumble who has, since December 2023, successfully entrenched himself in the MAGA movement. Shirley boasts over 1.5 million subscribers and more than 287 million views of his posts on YouTube. His first video on the platform was published on February 9, 2019, with political content beginning to appear in October 2020, leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Shirley was present at the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, and at the time, he said it was “actually terrible what happened.”
Shirley announced a two-year break in content creation on December 16, 2021, serving a Latter Day Saints mission in Santiago, Chile. In the video explaining his absence, Shirley fantasized about becoming “the next Alex Jones,” who he described as “one of the most controversial guys, but also spits probably the most facts out of any person,” when he would return to content creation. Jones is a well-known far-right conspiracy theorist, peddler of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and loser of civil lawsuits in Texas and Connecticut with more than one billion dollar combined judgments for spreading the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting never happened. Jones, who Shirley clearly revered at the time, instigated several violent threats against the parents of the mass shooting’s victims.
Upon his return to YouTube on December 26, 2023, Shirley’s content began to feel more like Jones’ conspiratorial rants than a prankster’s harmless videos, as he began posting a slew of anti-immigrant videos and content promoting the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. In August 2024, Shirley attended the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organized by British anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”). Shirley had the opportunity to interview Robinson, who was quick to invoke “Great Replacement” rhetoric, saying “We’re losing our culture, we’re losing our identity, we’re being replaced,” and “we’re becoming minorities in most major cities.” Shirley nodded along during Robinson’s racist tirade, making no attempt to question the rhetoric connected to the violence often associated with believers in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, such as the Christchurch, N.Z., mosque shooter, who murdered 51 Muslims in 2019 and whose manifesto was titled “The Great Replacement.” Instead, Shirley told Robinson “in the United States the same thing is happening as well, they’re bringing migrants over.”
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as “Tommy Robinson,” tells Nick Shirley that British white people are “being replaced” by migrants. (Source: YouTube).
Another YouTube video documenting anti-migrant protests, titled “Dearborn Michigan Has Fallen… Christians and Muslims Battle,” published on November 20, 2025, documents an anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn, Michigan, a town the online far right frequently targets as an example of “Islamification,” (synonymous to “Islamization”) a “Great Replacement”-inspired term suggesting America is being taken over by Muslims. Shirley invokes the term himself during the video, asking one interviewee if he is “worried about the Islamification of the United States.” The same interviewee, during an extremely racist tirade, said Muslims are “animals and they don’t know how to behave,” a comment that directly violates YouTube’s policies, and that “we will not stand for the Islamic invasion.” Allegations of an “invasion” of migrants, including Muslims, is also a key component of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Nick Shirley asks an attendee of the anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn, Michigan, if he is “worried about the Islamification of the United States,” invoking a racist term clearly inspired by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. (Source: YouTube).
Shirley also has an account on Rumble, albeit one with far less viewership (13,600 followers), that is much newer (his first video was posted on March 21, 2024) than his YouTube channel. He has been re-uploading his YouTube content targeting immigrants, including videos suggesting Ireland is undergoing a “dangerous migrant crisis,” wherein migrants are responsible for Irish people becoming “a minority in their own country.” Following his viral racist video targeting Somalians, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble, offered Shirley a “deal” to “livestream [his] work raw and unfiltered” on the platform. At the time of publishing, it is unclear if he accepted the offer.
In a video posted onto Rumble titled “Inside Ireland’s Dangerous Migrant Crisis,” Nick Shirley claims “the Irish will become the minority in their own country” because of migrants, echoing the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. (Source: Rumble).
Shirley’s ensemble of “Great Replacement” content clearly earned him favor with the White House. He was invited as a guest to the White House “antifa roundtable” in October 2025, and in November was awarded the “citizen journalist of the year” at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort during an event hosted by James O’Keefe, founder of the far-right conspiratorial outlet Project Veritas.
Jack Posobiec
Another propagandist for the Trump Administration is former Naval reserve officer Jack Posobiec. Posobiec earned his stripes as a far-right commentator peddling the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which purported that high-ranking members of the Democratic Party were operating a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, a forerunner to the Qanon conspiracy. Pizzagate gained so much traction that one man entered the restaurant with a gun and opened fire, claiming he was there to investigate the claims. Posobiec is a staunch Trump loyalist, advocating for remigration since September 2024 (when Trump first mentioned it), has boosted the Trump administration’s racist dogwhistles on X, and is currently cheering on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act due to anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.
Posobiec has his own show on Rumble titled Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec. Human Events is hosted on Real America’s Voice, a Rumble channel founded in April 2021 that has around 157,000 followers and a total of over 300 million views. Posobiec also has his own Rumble channel named after the show, originating in January 2022, with 34,900 followers and over 10 million total views, along with one on YouTube, created on November 16, 2021, with 29,000 subscribers and over eleven million views. His content is rife with “Great Replacement” material, with titles such as “MASS IMPORTING DEMOCRAT VOTERS,” “Third World Migrants Have Conquered Our Greatest Cities,” and “The Result of third world migration. DEATH!.” All of these above videos are available on both YouTube and Rumble.
In “THE MAMDANI EFFECT- MASS IMPORTING DEMOCRAT VOTERS,” Posobiec claimed Democrats are “import[ing]” migrants to “change the demographics,” which is a direct reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Posobiec couples this with beliefs that immigrants, who the Democrats supposedly “import” to win elections, plan to “elect one of their own” to “steal the wealth and the affluence” of white Americans.
Jack Posobiec claims that Democrats are “importing new voters” in a scheme to “change the demographics” of the United States, supposedly keeping them in power. (Source: Rumble).
In “Third World Migrants Have Conquered Our Greatest Cities,” Posobiec claims the United States is “mass importing Muslims from the third world, from Somalia to Minneapolis, from the Arab nations, Muslim nations, to Dearborn, Michigan.” His guest, The Blaze commentator Auron McIntyre, said he is “worried about” Islam in the United States, and “if you just stopped shipping these people in, then you wouldn’t have to deal with [lack of assimilation] in the first place.”
Dan Bongino
After a tumultuous year mired with controversy, reported infighting with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and contributing to the Trump administration’s authoritarian crusade against Americans, former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino is returning to his roots as a podcaster through an exclusive deal with Rumble. His channel, Bongino Report, has over 689,000 followers and over 612 million views in total.
Bongino is another Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist. A well-known, right-wing podcaster, Bongino has pushed election denialism, January 6 screeds, and racism about “illegals” to his followers. Bongino repeatedly criticized the FBI, calling it “lost, broken” and “irredeemably corrupt.” Bongino often calls Democrats “communists” and his enemy. This resume earned him the Deputy Director position at the FBI.
While he was previously known for being a “dissident” anti-government podcaster, Bongino’s homecoming, with the re-launch of his podcast scheduled for February 2, 2025, marks the beginning of a new mission — boosting the Trump administration’s racist messaging. Bongino has a history of invoking the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. In a March 2021 panel discussion on Fox and Friends, Bongino claimed that the naturalization of immigrants is part of a liberal “strict power play to stay in power.”
While archives of Bongino’s old show are not available on his Rumble channel, he’s worked with others who push the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and anti-immigrant hate to his audience. In a podcast on his Rumble channel with Nightly Scroll host Hayley Caronia, who has been filling in for Bongino alongside Vince Silverloch, Bongino once again began peddling “Great Replacement” rhetoric, saying “The border being shut down should be the biggest story ever, from entire countries being imported into the United States in two to four weeks to almost zero.”
Caronia also engages in anti-immigrant hate, saying “you can’t argue that these people are here for a better life,” and that “[migrants] are allowed in on asylum claims and then they come here to kill because these people don’t speak English. They can’t read road signs and they’re a danger to society.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso, Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s eldest daughter, who hosts the Bongino Report Early Edition with Evita, also on the Bongino Report Rumble channel, is another example of influencers spreading these conspiracies. On June 4, 2025, in a podcast episode titled “Welcome to the Islamic Theocracy of Great Britain,” Duffy-Alonso said Islam is being “imported through mass immigration from cultures radically at odds with Britain’s historic identity” and is “protected more fiercely than the heritage it’s replaced.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso, who hosts a show on Dan Bongino’s Rumble channel, invokes the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory when discussing Islam in the United Kingdom. She claims “Islam [is] imported through mass immigration” and is “now protected more fiercely than the heritage that it’s replaced.” (Source: Rumble).
YouTube Hits A New Low
YouTube and Rumble, the latter of which built its reputation on hosting banned content from YouTube, now both function as “Great Replacement” superspreaders, with YouTube platforming the same white supremacist propaganda to millions of young Americans, particularly men, as Rumble, which is known for being a safe haven for neo-Nazis.
The United States has approximately 253 million YouTube viewers as of October 2025, far eclipsing cable news networks such as Fox News and MSNBC, which average 1.7 million and 915,000 total viewers during prime time, respectively. Sixty percent of YouTube views come from users aged 18 to 34. Meanwhile, cable news audiences tend to be older. Fox News and CNN viewers have a median age of 55 and 50, respectively.
YouTube has been hosting transnational “Great Replacement” content for years, despite their policy prohibiting “content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups” based on “caste, ethnicity, or race,” “immigration status,” “nationality,” and “religion.” This trend continues today. The aforementioned video about the “Islamification” of Dearborn, Michigan, posted by Nick Shirley, for example, is in direct violation of YouTube’s policy. In fact, one quote in the video is almost verbatim listed as an example of violative content.
Rumble, while not as mainstream as YouTube due to its openly extremist content, still boasted 59 million global monthly active users during Q1 2025, with approximately 60 percent of its audience based in the United States. 72 percent of its users are men, with 23 percent in the 25 to 34 age range, and 16 percent of users in the 18 to 24 age range.
Rumble, which is used by Shirley, Posobiec, and Bongino, is an online video platform, web hosting, and cloud services business that advertises its video service as a platform “immune to cancel culture.” Its financial ties to the Trump administration run deep. Rumble was tapped to provide the cloud services for Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform after Amazon was deemed politically incompatible. In May 2021, far-right figures Peter Thiel and now-Vice President JD Vance invested in Rumble. Then, in December 2021, Trump Media & Technology Group announced that it entered a “wide-ranging technology and cloud services agreement” with Rumble. On February 10, 2025, Rumble announced that the White House had established an official channel on the platform.
Rumble clearly doesn’t enforce its policy, which says “under no circumstances shall…content or material that is grossly offensive to the online community, including but not limited to, racism, anti-semitism, and hatred” be posted on the platform. The platform has a torrid history with hosting extremist content, including clips of Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell yelling Nazi slogans and anti-LGBTQ+ slurs, placing Trump campaign advertisements on those videos, and helping to mainstream neo-Nazi commentators such as Nick Fuentes. Several of the examples listed above, such as blatantly anti-migrant and anti-Muslim comments by Posobiec, Caronia, and Duffy-Alfonso should be deplatformed according to Rumble’s own rules.
As the Trump administration enacts its remigration ethnic cleansing agenda, which is rooted in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, MAGA influencers are using YouTube and Rumble as propaganda machines to normalize white supremacy. Both platforms are responsible for promoting the kind of beliefs which lead to violence against American citizens, such as the killing of a motorist and the permanent blinding of a protester in one eye, not to mention the multitude of targeted mass casualty attacks against Muslims, Jews, Black people, and immigrants based on beliefs in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
