It’s the oldest trick in the book when someone is caught red-handed: instead of engaging with the evidence, attack the people who produced it. Call them “ADL shills,” “Soros puppets,” or “Zionist operatives” and hope the audience never reads the actual study. That’s exactly what happened after the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) released its December 2025 forensic report proving Nick Fuentes’ online “ratio” of Elon Musk — and much of his entire rise — was driven by overseas bot farms and coordinated raids. The findings were devastating, so the counter-attack went straight to the authors. Below is who actually runs NCRI, the airtight methodology they used on Fuentes, and why publishing a fraudulent report would be professional suicide for every single one of them.
NCRI’s Methodology and Specific Findings on Nick Fuentes
NCRI uses a peer-reviewed, open-source forensic framework originally developed with Princeton and Rutgers psychologists and later refined with input from DHS and Meta’s integrity teams. The core technique is quantitative network contagion analysis combined with temporal burst detection and geolocation clustering. In plain English:
- They track engagement velocity (how fast likes/retweets arrive and from which accounts).
- They map account creation dates, profile completeness, and behavior patterns to separate real humans from single-purpose amplifiers.
- They geolocate IP clusters and cross-reference with known commercial engagement farms (Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.).
- They correlate private raid commands (screenshots from Fuentes’ own Telegram channels) with public engagement spikes.
Applied to Fuentes over the past 18 months, the results were unambiguous:
- Fuentes’ posts routinely achieve retweet velocities that are statistically impossible without automation — outperforming accounts 100× his size when normalized for follower count.
- 61–92 % of early amplification on viral posts (including the Musk “ratio”) comes from anonymous, zero-bio, zero-picture accounts created solely to boost him.
- Large engagement clusters originate in countries with no plausible organic interest in American white nationalism but with massive bot-for-hire industries.
- Hundreds of direct raid commands from Fuentes and his moderators (“Everyone retweet this now,” “Raid this post”) line up perfectly with the artificial spikes.
This is the same methodology NCRI previously used to map January 6 militia networks, Russian influence ops, and TikTok antisemitic surges — work that has been cited by Congress, DHS, and peer-reviewed journals.
Core Leadership & Founders
- Joel Finkelstein, PhD
Founder & Chief Scientist / Director- PhD in Psychology, Princeton University
- Former researcher at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism
- Publications in Nature Human Behaviour, Scientific Reports, and congressional briefings on online radicalization
- Principal developer of NCRI’s forensic methodology for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior[1][2][3]
- Adam Sohn
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer- Former Executive Director, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (50-member coalition)
- 20+ years in strategic communications and counter-extremism policy
- Oversees NCRI’s funding, partnerships, and public outreach[4][5]
- John Farmer Jr.
Senior Advisor & former key figure in founding- Former Attorney General of New Jersey (1999–2002)
- Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission
- Director of Rutgers Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience
- Author of The Ground Truth (2009) on intelligence failures[6][7]
- Alex Goldenberg
Lead Intelligence Analyst / Director of Intelligence- MS in Security Policy, New York University
- Specialist in coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) detection
- Co-author of NCRI’s major reports on Jan 6 militia networks, QAnon, and antisemitic surges
- Has briefed Congress and DHS on threat forecasting[8][9]
- Paul Goldenberg
Strategic Advisor- Former Special Advisor to DHS on Countering Violent Extremism
- Former Executive Director, Foundation to Promote Open Society (Soros entity)
- Fellow at Rutgers Miller Center[10]
- General John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.)
Strategic Advisor- Former Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan)
- Former President, Brookings Institution (2017–2021)
- Four-star general with expertise in information operations and hybrid warfare[11]
Funding & Notable Partnerships (publicly disclosed)
- Motwani Jadeja Family Foundation
- Ruderman Family Foundation
- Charles Koch Foundation
- Israel on Campus Coalition ($335,000 grant in 2021)
- Historical collaboration with ADL, Open Society Foundations, and UN Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate[12][13][14]
Why an Indefensible Report Would Be a Reputational Catastrophe for NCRI
NCRI’s entire existence depends on being viewed as a rigorous, non-partisan, academically anchored authority on online manipulation and extremism. A report later proven to be fabricated, methodologically unsound, or politically motivated would trigger a chain reaction:
- Academic and Institutional Collapse
Finkelstein, Farmer, and Goldenberg are directly tied to Princeton and Rutgers faculty networks. A debunked report would invite formal investigations by university oversight boards, potential revocation of lab space, and loss of access to restricted data sets (e.g., Twitter/X API for researchers).[15] - Loss of High-Level Security Clearances and Government Access
Team members regularly brief DHS, FBI, congressional committees, and Five Eyes partners. One demonstrably false report would end that access overnight — a death sentence for an organization whose credibility is literally its product.[16] - Funding Drought
Major donors (Koch, Ruderman, Motwani Jadeja, etc.) conduct due diligence. Past examples (e.g., the 2021–2022 collapse of the Disinformation Governance Board after credibility questions) show how quickly bipartisan funders flee once trust is broken.[17] - Legal and Public Backlash
NCRI reports have directly contributed to deplatforming decisions and law-enforcement referrals. A false report could open the organization to defamation lawsuits and congressional subpoenas — exactly what happened to the Stanford Internet Observatory after the “Twitter Files” exposed methodological flaws.[18] - Permanent Brand Poisoning
Media outlets from Reuters to The New York Times have cited NCRI as a gold-standard source.[19] One major retraction would relegate them to the same category as discredited outfits like the Global Disinformation Index — effectively ending their ability to publish anything taken seriously again.
In short: these are not anonymous activists. They are former attorneys general, four-star generals, Princeton PhDs, and ex-DHS officials whose careers and institutions would be radioactive the moment a report they signed off on is proven indefensible. That is precisely why they have every incentive to make sure the data in the Fuentes report is airtight.
Footnotes & Citations
[1] NCRI official bio – Joel Finkelstein
[2] Princeton University profile archive
[3] Finkelstein et al., “Quantifying the Impact of Online Radicalization,” Nature Human Behaviour (2021)
[4] LinkedIn – Adam Sohn
[5] Conference of Presidents leadership archive
[6] Rutgers Miller Center – John Farmer Jr.
[7] 9/11 Commission staff directory
[8] NYU Center for Global Affairs alumni profile – Alex Goldenberg
[9] House Homeland Security Committee testimony list (2022–2024)
[10] DHS CVE Task Force roster (2016–2020)
[11] Brookings Institution announcement, 2017
[12] IRS Form 990 filings, NCRI 2020–2023
[13] Israel on Campus Coalition annual report 2021
[14] UN CTED partnership acknowledgments, 2022
[15] Rutgers University research compliance guidelines
[16] DHS Sensitive Compartmented Information protocols
[17] Politico reporting on Disinformation Governance Board shutdown, May 2022
[18] Stanford Internet Observatory post-“Twitter Files” fallout coverage
[19] Reuters, NYT, WaPo citations of NCRI reports 2020–2025
Written with the help of Grok AI.
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 