It's 'all fake': How MAGA manufactures bogus viral moments and audiences

U.S. first lady Melania Trump arrives to preside over a United Nations Security Council meeting, at U.N. headquarters in New York City, U.S. March 2, 2026. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

NBC audience analyst Denny Carter says far-right influencers recently had to urge their followers to watch Kid Rock’s halftime knock-off show — but even then the purported audience displayed a suspicious “near-total absence of activity in the YouTube chat.”

“[A]ny stream with even a couple thousand concurrent viewers will get flooded with too many comments to track,” said Denny, who works in NBC sports and fantasy football wrangling. “… But it was all fake. Even the president, who both creates and resides deep within the right's all-encompassing unreality, appeared to be watching Bad Bunny’s performance rather than the Republican halftime show.”

Even Denny’s baby-boomer father — so steeped in MAGA culture that he believed the National Anthem was banned in “woke” schools — was “not even aware” of Rock’s halftime show.

But Denny said the performance was just one more example of the bogus oversized audience that MAGA claims it reserves for itself.

“For decades, right-wing organizations have goosed the book sales of conservative authors who have no real audience, buying tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies to catapult those books onto the New York Times bestseller list, giving the books — often clumsily written, heavily manufactured books — the sheen of mass appeal and national popularity,” said Denny.

For example, Denny said MAGA went into inflation overdrive after the 2023 release of the movie, Sound of Freedom, propaganda nonsense portraying efforts to save children from pedophiles.

QAnon embraced and promoted the Sound of Freedom, but the theaters showing it “were entirely or mostly empty during its first weekend in theaters and the film somehow grossed almost $20 million in ticket sales,” said Denny. “As with Melania, these numbers were juiced by conservative organizations buying thousands of tickets that were distributed to no one.”

The sheer fakery of the modern MAGA and right-wing movement is so prevalent that professors like California State University, Northridge history professor Donal O’Sullivan are releasing lesson plans for plowing truth from the swamp of fake memes, fake artifacts and forged documents and video all trying to “assert new truths” and unreality.

“If we give up on truth, we’re back in the dark ages,” said O’Sullivan.

But don’t expect light from MAGA’s need to inflate its viewership and its own importance, said Denny.

“This unreality is beamed into the eyeballs of mainstream editors, reporters, and various online media personalities via social media, leading them to believe that the Kid Rock halftime show, Melania, and all sorts of miserable books written by grifting conservative authors are indeed quite popular,” said Denny.

Influencers then use their platforms to “blast out” the false message to parents, grandparents and coworkers that the U.S. “is split down the middle in every way.”

“This allows these media figures and the outlets they control to base their election coverage on the (false) concept that conservative policies and ideas are precisely as popular and legitimate as those coming from the left,” said Denny. “The right's cultural and political popularity, the thinking goes, is always exactly on par with the left's cultural and political popularity.”

Only it isn’t, said Denny, who compares it more to a massive prop.

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