A prominent MAGA influencer with millions of followers who has “never stepped foot in the United States” illegally donated to a QAnon congressional candidate, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet reported for Rolling Stone Wednesday.
Rumen Naumovski is behind Resist the Mainstream, a right-wing content farm that has accrued more than 450,000 followers on X since September 2021. He also runs the X account Defiant L’s, a right-wing meme and news account with more than four million followers that has been lauded by X owner Elon Musk as “one of the best accounts.”
In 2022, Naumovski illegally donated more than $3,000 to support far-right congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who has been accused of being “Q” himself. While Naumovski owns an American-based media company, he still resides in North Macedonia, and admitted in a February opinion piece for The Daily Wire that he’d actually “never set foot in the United States.”
Naumovski’s two donations totaling $3,127 were the largest reported contribution to Watkins’s campaign in the first quarter of 2022, according to Open Secrets. And in the weeks following the donations, Watkins urged his followers on social media to join Resist the Mainstream’s Telegram channel multiple times.
Both donations were made in February 2022 and are attributed to an address in St. Petersburg, Florida, at a registered agent’s office for Raww Digital LLC, the marketing firm that owns Resist the Mainstream. Naumovski owns Raww Digital LLC, but his personal address is listed in Veles, North Macedonia.
Watkins eventually returned the money in April 2022. Naumovski told Rolling Stone that he had no idea he’d needed a green card to make donations to a political campaign. Foreign nationals are in fact barred from making contributions for a political campaign.
Media Matters reported in 2023 that a dozen influencers connected to the QAnon movement boosted Resist the Mainstream and that, despite being taken on and off mainstream social media platforms, the right-wing network had accrued a massive following in alternative spaces—platforms such as Truth Social, Rumble, Gab, and Gettr.
Naumovski’s social media accounts have become fixtures in the online landscape of MAGA Republicans, and their posts have been shared by figures including Andy Biggs, Dan Crenshaw, Eli Crane, Mike Lee, and Nancy Mace, as well as other prominent MAGA influencers. The accounts have shared content pushing election fraud conspiracies about noncitizen voting, a nonissue that has been repeatedly debunked.
In Naumovski’s case, it’s more than clear that there are some noncitizens attempting to interfere in U.S. politics—but they come in the form of anonymous influencers churning out right-wing content and conducting hordes of followers.
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