On December 5, 2025, Elon Musk posted a defense of H-1B visas and skilled immigration. Nick Fuentes quote-tweeted him with a short, inflammatory reply: “Your ‘America First’ companies are staffed with foreigners who will never be American. You are accelerating the very problem you claim to be solving.”
At first glance it looked like a massive public humiliation for Musk. Fuentes’ quote-tweet quickly racked up 33,000+ likes and almost 3,000 retweets while Musk’s original post stalled. Groypers celebrated it as the ultimate “ratio” – proof that Fuentes had finally become a mainstream force.
It was fake. The entire surge was manufactured.
Two days later, on December 8, 2025, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University released a 40-page forensic report titled “America Last.” Using platform data, timing analysis, and network mapping, NCRI demonstrated that Fuentes’ account has been systematically inflated for over a year by bot farms, foreign engagement pods, and direct raid commands from Fuentes himself.[1]
This is the same Nick Fuentes who constantly insists “I’m not a fed, I’m not controlled, I’m completely organic and independent.” The NCRI report just proved the opposite: his “grassroots” empire is built on foreign bot farms, anonymous crypto cash, and coordinated deception.
Key findings from the report that destroy the “organic ratio” claim:
- 61% of the first 30-minute retweets on the Musk ratio came from anonymous single-purpose Groyper accounts that do nothing except boost Fuentes content.[2]
- 92% of those amplifying accounts have zero profile picture, zero bio, and were created solely to retweet Fuentes.[2]
- Engagement velocity on Fuentes posts is literally impossible without automation: he beats accounts 100× his size (including Musk) in retweet speed when normalized for audience.[3]
- Large clusters of the fake engagement originate in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Malaysia – countries with thriving commercial bot-farm industries and no plausible interest in American white nationalism.[4]
- Fuentes personally directs raids in real time. The report documents hundreds of examples in his private Telegram channels: “Everybody retweet this right now,” “Retweet her,” “Raid this post,” etc.[5]
Fuentes’ only response was to call it a “matrix attack” from an organization “partnered with the ADL, Soros Open Society, and the UN” and claim it contained “zero proof.”[6] The report, however, contains 40 pages of graphs, cluster maps, and raw data. Dismissing evidence because you dislike the messenger is not a rebuttal.
This is not the first time Fuentes has been caught hiding behind anonymous money and fake metrics.
- In December 2020, just weeks before January 6, a dying French programmer sent 28.15 BTC (~$522,000) to 22 far-right figures. Fuentes received the single largest share: 13.5 BTC, worth roughly $250,000 at the time.[7]
- When subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee in 2022, Fuentes pleaded the Fifth more than 20 times – including to the simple question “Who employs you?” Pleading the Fifth on your employer strongly implies the real employer cannot be admitted in public (very convenient when your “grassroots” operation is apparently run out of overseas bot farms).[8]
Real organic growth for someone with Fuentes’ views is almost impossible in the United States. Less than 3% of Americans agree with Nick Fuentes’ core positions (white nationalism, Holocaust denial, and Christian theocracy), and he personally has never polled above 6% favorability even in Republican samples.[9] Less than 3% of the country shares his ideology – that’s the ceiling he’s pretending to have shattered with a single bot-fueled ratio.[10]
Yet Russian state media (RT) promotes him constantly because he parrots pro-Putin talking points and calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a defense of “white Christian civilization.”[11]
And when he finally got a mainstream platform – the December 2025 Piers Morgan interview – he used it to say Adolf Hitler was “really f***ing cool” because of “the uniforms, the parades, the edits” and claimed modern women have become “fat and mouthy.”[12]
That is the real Nick Fuentes. Not an organic populist hero who ratioed Elon Musk. A marginal extremist with less than 3% domestic support whose entire online “rise” is built on foreign bots, anonymous crypto donations, and lies.
The ratio was never real. Getting caught faking it just proved who he actually is.
Sources and URLs:
[1] NCRI full report announcement: https://x.com/ncri_io/status/1998045603767455803
[2] DataRepublican thread summarizing the bot evidence: https://x.com/datarepublican/status/1997982418653884579
[3] Detailed bot-cluster visuals in the report itself (publicly linked in the above threads)
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Fuentes’ dismissal tweet: https://x.com/nickjfuentes/status/1998201818833428532
[7] Reuters, Jan 2021 – French BTC donation: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/large-bitcoin-payment-made-to-far-right-individuals-before-us-capitol-attack-idUSKBN29J2PL/
[8] January 6 Committee deposition transcript (publicly released 2023)
[9] PRRI American Values Survey 2023 & 2024 (white Christian nationalist / white nationalist proxy measures consistently ~2-3% strong agreement)
[10] YouGov/Economist polling on Fuentes favorability, 2022-2025
[11] Multiple RT articles and video segments featuring Fuentes (2022-2025)
[12] Piers Morgan Uncensored, December 2025 – direct quote at 41:12 mark
Written with the help of Grok AI.
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 