Is Nick Fuentes Winning Over Women on the Left?
TikTok is where most outsiders misread the signal. Fuentes is extremely shareable — he basically speaks in soundbites. Every other line is a joke, and many of those jokes land. When they don’t, that in itself can be funny. His thick Chicago accent, his cartoonish tone of voice—the man was made for broadcasting, for better or worse.
It’s true that he has inspired a viral “sound” several times, but on TikTok that doesn’t equate to fandom. A sound is just a short audio clip that users layer under their own videos. It might come from a movie, a podcast, or a livestream; it doesn’t matter who said it. What matters is how easily it can be reused to set a mood or deliver a punchline. Popularity here measures remixability, not admiration. Serial killers, pedophiles caught red-handed, and random bystanders could theoretically all go viral this way. Fuentes happens to clip well.
There is a dedicated and TikTok-native Fuentes fandom, but searching through the misspellings and alternate tags that users reference him with (to avoid the filter TikTok uses to suppress content about him), only a few prolific editors dominate the results. The rest is noise—ephemeral accounts spun up around attention spikes.
The interviews I conducted reflect what the feeds suggested. Several sources said their very online friends, regardless of politics, share Fuentes clips because he’s funny. The same people said no one they know actually watches his multi-hour streams. One woman described him as “weirdly unhateable,” and suggested he’s a bit of a meme—another way of saying the trend is more of a joke than a nascent political shift.
There is, however, a small female fandom orbiting Fuentes, many of whom identify as being on the left. On Tumblr, a community calling itself the Nickstorians—or “Nickblr”—treats him less as a leader and more as a character. It’s classic fandom culture: inside jokes, shipping, fan art, fan fiction. On Archive of Our Own, there are twenty-six Fuentes fanfics, most of them seemingly quite sincere. There’s enough to prove a subculture exists, but not enough to signal a wave.
Fuentes may keep appearing in mainstream venues while his clips circulate as meme shorthand. His style is built for sharing, as controversial (and outright hateful) as many of his views are. Right now, it seems like that reach measures curiosity and remixability, not political conversion, though. Across my conversations, his politics remain a dealbreaker. At least for now.
