Category: Chris rufo
Domestic fraud > Iran war: Christopher Rufo says crushing blue-state scams is the GOP’s political winner
On April 3, BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo released an investigative report in City Journal documenting fraud in the state of California under current Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. According to his team’s research, California lost at least $180 billion to fraud and improper payments in programs like Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid), unemployment insurance, and general welfare since Newsom took office in 2019.
Rufo believes targeting domestic fraud is a fool-proof “political winner” for the Trump administration — certainly more than the Iran war, which he says is “at best a 50/50 issue.”
“Portraying Minnesota and New York and California and other bastions of blue governance as havens of outright fraud, ripping off taxpayers, seems like the kind of domestic policy agenda — along with immigration, along with a couple of other issues — that can be a winner, both substantively … but also politically,” he tells “Rufo and Lomez” co-host Jonathan Keeperman.
Keeperman wholeheartedly agrees: “[Domestic fraud] is such a good thing for us to be focusing our attention on, not just because it’s a huge problem that we need to eradicate from our public life and is creating all sorts of downstream pathologies that are making everyday life just more difficult for ordinary Americans, but because it also demonstrates … the problems of democratic governance.”
The best part is that large-scale fraud isn’t even that difficult to uncover.
“A guy like Nick Shirley just takes a camera, finds some public documentation, and just goes and knocks on some doors, and you can uncover that easily hundreds of millions, if not billions, in fraud,” he says, “and so yes, this is the best message for the GOP and for Republicans going forward.”
The mass exodus of people from California, Keeperman argues, is evidence that domestic issues are what people care about most.
“California has, despite being one of the nicest places to live in the country, has net out domestic migration and has had net out domestic migration for the last decade, if not longer,” he says.
“People are voting with their feet on this, and so yes — this is all just to say [domestic fraud] is an obvious winner.”
Rufo confirms Newsom’s direct role in California’s out-migration.
“There’s two stats that we came across in this reporting that I think are really important,” he says.
“Under Gavin Newsom, the state’s population has declined by 0.2%, which is the first time that California’s population has declined ever since it became a state … but at the same time that the population declined, Medicaid spending … for low-income people doubled.”
“And so you have the population going down and then the health care expenses under Medicaid doubling,” he explains, pointing out the vicious cycle of fraud money flowing to unions, which funds politicians, who expand the system even more.
The result, Rufo says, is a two-tiered society. The combination of astronomical taxes and high cost of living creates a population where residents are either “rich enough where it doesn’t really matter” or “poor enough where it doesn’t really matter because you have every part of your life subsidized.”
“I think that’s why people are saying, ‘I’m out,”’ he says.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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Trump-endorsed Steve Hilton blows open California’s $400 billion fraud machine in gubernatorial bid
Between sky-high taxes, radical left-wing policies, and staggering levels of fraud, California has turned into such a nightmare that droves of people are leaving every year.
But one man believes he can save the Golden State from its downward trajectory: Steve Hilton.
The British-born conservative commentator is the former senior adviser to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, an ex-Fox News host of “The Next Revolution,” a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a Republican candidate for California governor in 2026. Recently endorsed by President Trump, Hilton is leading several polls against a crowded field, including Democrats and fellow Republican Chad Bianco.
On a recent episode of “Rufo and Lomez,” he joined BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo to expose the depth of California’s depravity and share his plan for a statewide overhaul.
“California today is what you get when the Democrats get everything they want,” says Hilton.
The results of 16 years of unchallenged Democrat rule speak for themselves:
“We have now today in California the highest poverty rate in the country (tied with Louisiana), the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states, the highest cost of living. Everything is the most expensive here: gas, electric, groceries, housing costs — everything,” he lists.
“U.S. News and World Report ranked California 50th out of 50 states for opportunity; WalletHub ranked us as 50th out of 50 for affordability. Chief Executive Magazine [ranked] California 50th out of 50 states for business climate,” Hilton continues, noting that this is “not the end of the list.”
After years of paying “the highest taxes for the worst results,” a “real revolution” is beginning to catch fire, he says. Even though the thought of California — one of the deepest blue states on the map — being run by a Republican governor feels like a pipe dream to many, Hilton believes the state government’s failures are so catastrophic at this point that a red victory is now feasible.
“I really think that this year we could get a major upset and you’ll see a Republican governor elected in November,” he says.
Rufo is thrilled at the prospect of a Republican governor in California for many reasons but especially when it comes to the shocking amount of fraud that’s been exposed under current Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Depending on how you calculate the numbers [and] which programs you include, at the very low end, we had something like $180 billion lost to fraud under Newsom. At the very high end, I think you had something like $400 billion lost under Newsom,” he says, referencing his recent City Journal reporting.
“The scale of these numbers is almost difficult to comprehend. Can you walk us through what you found and what you think the true extent of the fraud is now?” he asks.
Hilton, who launched the investigative initiative CAL DOGE (intentionally modeled after Elon Musk’s federal department), says that what his team has uncovered using just public records, audits, and whistleblower tips is already shocking.
He gives two examples.
“When cannabis was legalized in California through Proposition 64, they said the taxes will go towards substance abuse prevention. Well, we tracked the money down — $370 million of that parceled out in tiny grants to 500+ nonprofits,” says Hilton.
“And when you look at what they do by checking their websites and their annual reports, what do they do? Democrat political activity — registering voters, organizing in the community, all that kind of stuff.”
Hilton’s second example comes from California’s “climate fund.”
Since 2015, the state has allocated $100 million per year to installing solar panels on low-income apartment buildings. However, CAL DOGE found that the program’s own official reports show that only $72 million was actually spent on installing solar panels.
“$928 million, again, goes to all these Democrat political organizations,” says Hilton.
“They take money from the taxpayer and say it’s going for some nice purpose that you think is going to be good, and then it all gets parceled up going to this network of nonprofits that then do things that help the Democrat political machine … and the scale of it is massive,” he adds, noting that CAL DOGE’s range for state fraud is between “$312 billion” and “$425 billion over five years.”
“How can we break that system?” Rufo asks.
To hear Hilton’s answer, watch the video above.
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Fertility has a silent assassin — and it’s everywhere
After a decades-long decline, America is now in the throes of the worst fertility crisis in our nation’s history. A record number of people are not having children.
The big question is why?
Certainly the answer is multifaceted, but there’s one undeniable driver behind America’s as well as nearly every other country’s declining birth rates, says Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies: the iPhone.
On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman speak with Stone about how our most pervasive technology is wrecking the world’s fertility numbers.
While there are many drivers behind globally declining birth rates — infertility issues, financial difficulties, a genuine desire to have fewer children, and even a desire to have no children at all — iPhones, says Stone, are “little sterilization boxes that we all carry in our pockets.”
But it’s not a literal sterilization — “The research suggests that the radiation from them is actually harmless,” Stone says — but rather a social sterilization.
“[Smartphones] change how we socialize together. … Social media replaces in-person interaction; reading stuff online replaces in-person interaction, replaces intermediation in the physical world,” he explains.
“Increasingly, it’s not just that people have fewer babies; they have fewer first kisses; they have fewer one-night stands; they have fewer dinner parties; they have fewer every kind of social interaction … and so as social media and cell phones are just killing life together,” he adds.
This isn’t just speculation either. The data shows a major decline in face-to-face interaction starting in 2008 — just one year after the first iPhone hit the market.
Before 2008, fertility rates across the world would ebb and flow depending on a variety of circumstances, but following the invention of the iPhone, they’ve stayed consistently low, Stone explains.
The social isolation caused by the iPhone has resulted in a decline in marriage rates, which directly impacts birth rates.
Interestingly, statistics show that people who do marry young are having the amount of children they desire.
“There’s no gap between desired fertility and actual fertility on average for people who marry before age 26,” says Stone.
Further, countries that have “religious prohibitions” on iPhone usage for extended periods of the day have also maintained higher birth rates.
“So Israel with Shabbat or Muslim countries, where we know from cellphone data everybody turns off their cell phone for 20 minutes five times a day … still have high fertility,” says Stone.
iPhones, he explains, essentially turn off “the part of our brain that’s supposed to know your tribe and recognize your tribe and really want to have sex with your tribe.”
Simultaneously, it supplies “an endless stream of porn” to keep people sexually satiated without producing children.
To hear more about the factors behind the world’s declining birth rate, watch the full interview above.
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Christopher Rufo drops bombshell report on $26B ‘No White Men’ program — Trump SBA issues quick response
Last week, BlazeTV host and investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, alongside Manhattan Institute Director of Research Judge Glock, published a report titled “No White Men Need Apply,” which pulled back the curtain on the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program.
Despite functioning under the current Trump administration, Rufo and Glock discovered that the program has been awarding government contracts based on race, gender, and social disadvantage — a stark contradiction to the administration’s vows to abolish DEI.
“The Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program,” Rufo says, is “a $26 billion slush fund for government contracts that are available to every identity group except for one: white men.”
“We blew the whistle on this and made the case that this was a corrupt program” and “totally in violation of the president’s stated principles against DEI,” Rufo says.
The reaction from SBA and White House officials was surprisingly humble.
“I got a call from the SBA administrator, Kelly Loeffler. I got a call from a number of people at the White House, some of whom were a bit annoyed that we had brought this scandal to public attention, but all of whom recognized, ‘Yep, we’ve dropped the ball on this. It’s totally unjust. We’re going to take action,”’ Rufo recaps.
And they clearly meant it because just two days after their conversation, Loeffler posted the following announcement to X:
Rufo says, “It’s not a perfect solution. I think the program should be abolished, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.”
But his co-host, Jonathan Keeperman, has questions.
“Is it the case that they’re not just abolishing this whole thing because, as Washington is, there’s just too many people who are sort of dependent on this, some of whom might even be Republicans or friendly to the administration?”
Are we playing the game of, “Look, we know this is bad, but these are our friends, and sometimes in politics, you just got to sort of weigh the cost of alienating people over here versus the cost of kind of just letting these not great things kind of continue because … that’s just the friction of Washington, D.C.?” he asks.
“From my reporting on this, the White House had contemplated just unilaterally winding down the program, declaring it unconstitutional, and taking it to the courts,” Rufo says. “From what I heard from a number of people is that the White House lawyers, Department of Justice said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that. It’s a statutory program. You have to release regulations, go through public comment, do the whole song and dance.”’
“So actually, the action was stalled, from what I’ve been told, for a number of months in kind of legal limbo, and only because we published this story were they able to start getting that policy process moving again,” he contines.
However, there is also, he says, “an element of kind of long-standing corruption and complicity from Republicans” at play.
He gives the example of Alaska, which receives a disproportionate amount of the SBA’s 8(a) contract money, the majority of which is funneled into companies owned by Alaskan natives.
Many of these companies, however, subcontract the actual work to non-native (usually white-run) companies. To abolish the program would anger Alaska native groups, which are both politically and economically powerful in the state.
According to Rufo’s sources, Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), for example, has “made it known throughout the administration, ‘We need to keep this cash flowing,’ because he’s dependent.”
“Tribes are pretty powerful in a state like Alaska … and other red states where there are big tribal populations. They have big lobbying operations. They have big political organizations, a network of businesses, casinos, constructions, contracting, etc.,” Rufo says, “and so there is an element of what I think is legal corruption — even in red states, even with Republican politicians — where they keep this disastrous program alive.”
Regardless, the Trump administration promised to uproot DEI, and Rufo intends to hold them to it.
“It’s been a year. You guys have to get rid of this,” he says.
Even though the SBA is now “letting white men into the program,” Rufo fears that “it will still heavily favor the other groups,” thus allowing the cancer that is DEI to live on.
“The only truly morally defensible position is to get rid of it. And so, I think they should blow it up. I think they should go nuclear,” he urges.
To hear more about Rufo’s investigation into SBA’s 8(a) program, watch the video above.
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‘America demands assimilation’: BlazeTV’s Christopher Rufo and Bessent slam Somali welfare scam ‘open secret’ in Minnesota
BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo participated in a roundtable meeting on Friday led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to discuss the ongoing, rampant welfare fraud by Somalis living in Minnesota.
‘Everyone should be outraged.’
The event was attended by journalists, lawmakers, and local business and nonprofit owners.
“The thing that I found astonishing about this fraud scheme is that it was an open secret for many of the people here in Minnesota,” Rufo stated.
“What I’d like to highlight is that this is a fraud story, but … this is also an immigration story. It’s an assimilation story. It’s a cultural compatibility story,” Rufo continued. “The reality is that the latest numbers, it seems to be that the Somali community, which represents about 1% of Minnesota’s population, is perpetrating approximately 90% of the systemic fraud in this state.”
“I think America works when America demands assimilation. And Minnesota will work when it demands assimilation to the culture of good government,” Rufo added.
BlazeTV host Chris Rufo. Image source: Blaze Media
He called it a “tragedy” that Minnesota, which had previously been known as the United States’ good-government capital, has had its reputation “tarnished as the fraud capital.”
“Everyone should be outraged,” Rufo remarked.
Bessent announced during a Friday press conference that the Treasury Department was launching multiple initiatives to put an end to the fraud rings and hold perpetrators accountable. The new initiatives included investigations into money-service businesses, lowering the reporting threshold for overseas transfers to $3,000 in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, and a new IRS task force assigned to probe COVID-era fraud, among several other steps.
Image source: Blaze Media
During the roundtable, Bessent revealed that there are also plans to provide incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with information.
“If these fraudsters want to turn on each other, we welcome that,” he said. “We will be offering cash rewards to whistleblowers to turn in their fellow conmen and women.”
Bessent stated that the fraud “cover-up” nearly enabled Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) to become vice president.
“What a tragedy it would have been for the American people for someone with no integrity, who was complicit and perhaps corrupt, to assume the office of the vice president,” he added.
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Exclusive: Bessent tells Rufo — ‘When the bear trap snaps,’ Minnesota fraudsters and complicit officials will face justice
While fraud rings in Minnesota’s Somali community have been under federal investigation for years, it was investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo’s reporting that brought the billion-dollar scandals to national attention. Back in November 2025, Rufo published a report titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” in which he and co-author Ryan Thorpe alleged that billions of taxpayer funds were being stolen through schemes in Minneapolis’ Somali community and that millions of those funds were being funneled to the Al-Shabaab terror group in Somalia.
Rufo’s reporting sparked massive federal action, including revoking Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, surging Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, freezing child-care funds, and ramping up prosecutions. Most notably, it led Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to visit Minnesota in January 2026 and launch major FinCEN probes into hawala businesses, IRS audits, and enhanced transfer reporting.
In this exclusive BlazeTV interview with Rufo, Bessent shares what his team’s investigations have revealed about Minnesota’s Somali fraud operations and what steps the Treasury is taking to ensure it stops.
Bessent says his team’s investigations confirmed that the fraud schemes were “bigger than anyone thought” and that money — either excess government-issued funds or stolen funds — are indeed being sent illegally out of the country.
One positive result of the investigations into Minnesota’s fraud rings, however, is that they will provide a “model” for future investigations in the other 49 states.
“Just because of the population sizes — California, Illinois, New York — that what’s going on [in Minnesota] is a microcosm of what’s going on there. And it’s like someone on the panel said today: Benefits have been turned into businesses. It is a cottage industry of teaching people how to form multiple LLCs, how to game the system, how to move money around,” says Bessent, pledging to “follow the money” and explore “recoveries” for cheated Americans.
Rufo calls these predominantly Somali-orchestrated fraud rings Minnesota’s “open secret.” Fraudsters were successful largely because they knew that the cultural standard of “Minnesota nice” and politicians’ “fear of being called racist” would result in the turning of blind eyes everywhere.
“What do you think the right attitude should be as you look at these frauds moving forward?” he asks.
“Clearly the governor’s office does not want to do investigations. So we just want the facts. We want to see where they lead, and we want to put the bad guys in jail,” says Bessent.
Further Minnesota’s soft-on-crime policies that “incentivize” criminality need to be addressed. “You could steal hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, and under the Minnesota laws, you might not even get jail time. You might get a series of paroles,” Bessent adds.
“We have the ability to bring in IRS enforcement, and they don’t monkey around. So the incentive is going to be to stop this.”
Rufo then posed the question that conservatives nationwide are eagerly awaiting an answer to: Will we finally see any big names face justice?
“From [Gov. Tim Walz] on down appears to be at a minimum to have turned a blind eye. There are rumors circulating around this building right now that in fact some have been complicit in these schemes. Is that something your office is looking into?” he asks.
“That’s part of following the money. There are evidently some disturbing tapes of AG Ellison in meetings with people who donated to him calling for political favors to stop the investigations. So we’ll see,” says Bessent.
“And Chris, I can guarantee you when the bear trap snaps, we’re going to get these folks.”
To hear the rest of Rufo’s exclusive interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, watch the video above.
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We used to need guts to sin. Now we just need wi-fi.
Once upon a time, before the digital age swept us up in a current of global access, vices like gambling, pornography, and marijuana were kept in check with what BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman argue was healthy friction.
It’s what made Mr. Johnson blush when he skulked up to the checkout counter at the local video rental with an X-rated videotape sandwiched between two rom-coms. It’s what forced hopeful gamblers to sneak into illegal card rooms at the back of sketchy bars, pockets stuffed with ATM cash withdrawn in small increments to avoid spousal skepticism. It’s what necessitated dark parking lot meetups, secret car compartments, and stashes of air fresheners and breath mints.
But today, none of those physical and social barriers exist. Want to watch an adult film? Jump online; there are millions to choose from. Interested in placing a bet? Easy: Open an app and blow $10,000 on a random ping-pong match without ever leaving the comfort of your bed. Out of weed in a state that hasn’t legalized it? No problem; there are hundreds of dispensaries that will illegally ship right to your front door.
The glowing rectangle that lives in our pocket has pulverized every obstacle that once kept vices reined in.
Keeperman laments the death of “the gray market,” where “public shame and censure” were a real obstacle for vice-seekers but not so large an obstacle that they barred them completely from indulging.
“I think that balance is sort of ideal,” he tells Rufo.
“People, unfortunately, without any of these barriers to entry, they go down these rabbit holes; they start cultivating these bad behaviors, these addictions, and it ruins their lives. And it ruins the lives of the people around them, and it’s horrible for society.”
He remembers working at his town’s video rental shop as a teenager and the “cycle of shame” that commenced every time a local would sheepishly duck out of the curtained room at the back of the store with “Debbie Does Dallas” tucked covertly under his arm.
“It was like, ‘All right, man, like, cool. You’re embarrassed; I’m embarrassed to be doing this.’ … But it was good. That’s how it should be,” he reminisces.
This system of shame and risk also benefited kids. Keeperman recalls the notorious male student who stole Playboy magazines from his dad’s secret stash and smuggled them to school in his backpack so he could charge his fellow delinquents $5 for a week’s rental.
“It’s shameful, and if the vice principal catches you, you’re screwed, man. You’re in the doghouse. … You might get suspended or get these demerits or whatever, and your mom’s going to be mad at you,” he laughs.
But in all seriousness, these were real barriers that kept a lot of kids from engaging in pornography. But today, there’s no need for magazines or smuggling. All kids need to do is run a quick Google search alone in their bedrooms, and they’ll be inundated with graphic content from hundreds of sites. Addiction is all but guaranteed.
Keeperman says that while he takes all necessary precautions to prevent his children from accessing graphic content on their devices, he knows there’s only so much he can do.
“My kid’s going to have a public life. He’s going to have a social life that extends beyond the boundaries that we can draw for him as parents. And I can’t control what the kid next door does. You just can’t. And it’s just too easy. It’s too accessible,” he says.
Rufo says the answer to this problem of a barrier-less world is to re-create the barriers in the digital sphere.
“You have to have a digital version of the back room and the curtain, meaning you have to have ID verification, age verification,” he says.
To hear more of his theory, watch the episode above.
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AI isn’t killing writers — it’s killing mediocre writing
For years, we were warned that artificial intelligence would eventually eliminate the need for writers. In mere seconds, it would be able to crank out essays, articles, reports, blog posts, you name it, rendering flesh-and-blood writers obsolete.
Well, those days are here. AI writing floods our inboxes, social media feeds, and web pages every single day.
But it’s not quite the product we were pitched. While bots can indeed string coherent sentences together, the end result is mediocre at best. Its flat, em-dash heavy, idiosyncrasy-free, polite prose is easily recognizable to average readers, most of whom are disenchanted by the lack of human touch.
It turns out AI — beholden to algorithms and formulas — cannot counterfeit the voices of the deeply complicated, unique creatures that are human beings.
Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman, BlazeTV hosts of “Rufo & Lomez,” believe that AI writing may actually make writers more valuable — but just the ones with genuine talent.
AI is undeniably eliminating the massive class of mediocre writers. The kind of text AI produces is quickly becoming “the default sound or voice of people who don’t have talent, who can’t do things on their own. … It’s becoming the default voice of stupidity,” says Keeperman.
On the flip side, “Anybody who can write at a level above [AI] now has more value.”
The pervasiveness of AI copy seems to suggest that those genuine talents are few and far between.
“I am seeing [AI writing] everywhere. I am seeing it in published books. … Tons of ad copy even for really prominent companies that obviously have huge marketing departments [are] leaning on these sort of tripartite adjectival phrases. … There’s all these sort of syntactical signals that are giveaways,” says Keeperman, “but it’s also making me attuned to people who can write really well, and I find myself gravitating towards those people.”
But that doesn’t mean writers can’t use AI to their advantage. It is an excellent tool for “research,” “aggregating a lot of information,” “analysis,” and “brainstorming,” Keeperman adds.
Rufo agrees. “Terrible writing, [but] it’s good for discovery. … I think for certain tasks, it’s better than a Google search or a search engine search.”
For someone like him, who conducts large-scale research, AI can expedite the process of sifting through hundreds of pages of PDFs, but it’s not fail-proof.
AI is “maybe comparable to an undergraduate research assistant but … an unreliable [one],” says Rufo.
“You double-check the work, and you realize that the AI makes up 30% of the things that it’s telling you.”
“It seems like something that has huge potential, but I just see it slowing down in its improvement. I see it still having some fundamental flaws that would prevent it from being a trustworthy object of delegation,” he says.
“I remain extremely skeptical of the AI doomers or AI fatalists who think that this is going to take over the world and the machines are going to be controlling everything. It’s like it can’t even format citations. I think we’re a long ways away from the AI taking over the world.”
To hear more, watch the episode above
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Debate: Can JD Vance become the right’s great unifier — or does his VP role stand in the way?
The young conservative movement is experiencing a notable leadership gap amid ongoing chaos in the online right-wing space. Sure, there are passionate influencers and rising political voices, but no one has fully stepped up to unify and guide the broader coalition with a commanding presence.
One person investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo thinks might be able to step into the role, however, is Vice President JD Vance. But Rufo’s co-host Jonathan Keeperman isn’t sure Vance is up for the job either.
In this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the hosts debate whether JD Vance can step up as the unifying leader the conservative movement needs amid escalating chaos.
“I’ve been so far a bit surprised that the vice president hasn’t tried to step into this role,” says Rufo, arguing that Vance has both the “charisma” and the “authority” to effectively lead the movement.
“I’ve known JD over the years. … It does feel like he has some hesitation or maybe even some fear,” he adds.
While Keeperman agrees that Vance “has all of the tools and charisma and … the right talking points” to be an excellent leader, his role as the vice president would actually be a hindrance.
“I don’t think JD Vance should actually do that in his vice presidential position. Not right now. I think it’d be a bit presumptuous. I think people might kind of see it as him stepping in to sort of correct a situation that I think needs to just happen organically,” he counters.
For one, Vance’s position prohibits him from “[speaking] candidly about the administration.”
“Whoever is going to step into this role has to feel credible to this audience, and part of that credibility is going to come from just speaking honestly about all of these different things happening in this ecosystem — whether it’s the different personalities, the ideas, the sort of ideology that’s animating Trump but also the specific actions that the Trump administration is taking,” Keeperman explains.
In other words, the kind of leader people will follow needs to be an outsider who can speak brutal truths about the current administration, and Vance, as Trump’s right-hand man, can’t be that person.
Secondly, President Trump is still the top dog, Keeperman explains. For his VP to assume the authority of this role as the leader of the conservative movement “might not sit well inside of this coalition.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Rufo concedes. “We need some sort of native figure to step up in the same way that Charlie Kirk did, in the same way that Tucker had done.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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How Minnesota proved blood is thicker than common sense
Traditionally, immigrants adopt the customs and culture of the natives whose country they have moved into. But as we know, progressives have flipped the script. In their warped worldview, the natives must devolve for the sake of the newcomers in the name of “tolerance and inclusivity.”
Minnesota is the perfect exhibit. After Christopher Rufo’s reporting exposed massive Somali-led fraud rings draining hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds, you would expect the mayor of Minneapolis to condemn the grift. Instead, Jacob Frey went full solidarity mode.
In a December 2 press conference, Frey vowed that city police and staff would refuse to cooperate with ICE and then switched to speaking in Somali to pledge his support to the community.
On the latest “Rufo & Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and co-host Jonathan Keeperman tear into Frey’s performance, dissecting what it really reveals about Minnesota.
“Our police, many of whom are Somali themselves, are trusted partners in keeping people safe. They will not collaborate with any federal agency around doing immigration enforcement work. Our city staff and our law enforcement will not ask the question as to whether an individual is documented or not,” said Frey.
“That’s not American. That’s not what we are about. And we’re going to do right by every single person in our cities,” he continued, before fumbling through several lines delivered in Somali.
“We love you, we stand with you, and we aren’t backing down,” he concluded.
Keeperman points out the darkly comic “synchronicity” of Frey’s stance: “The Nordic populations of the upper Midwest are engaged in the exact same sort of altruistic migration experiment … that their kinfolk are engaged in still in their Scandinavian countries.”
It’s living proof of what he’s been saying all along: “You can’t just strip people of the habits and norms of the groups that they come from.”
In other words, ethnic character travels. It’s true of the Somali-Americans who brought with them the exact same clan-based fraud and grift that is rampant back in Somalia. And it’s true of Minnesotans, who, centuries after their ancestors left Scandinavia, are still running the identical open-borders generosity script — right down to importing a Somali community now accused of massive fraud — because that self-sacrificial impulse never actually left the bloodline.
But Keeperman sees zero chance that Frey or Governor Tim Walz (D) will ever recognize the self-destructive insanity of their immigration stance. “A guy like Jacob Frey or Tim Walz simply just has to lose an election. The people of Minnesota are at some point going to just have to say, ‘We’re not going to do this any more.”’
Rufo isn’t hopeful that Minnesotans are anywhere near their breaking point, however.
Not only was Jacob Frey re-elected as mayor despite stories of Somali fraud circulating in the media for years, but the candidate who narrowly lost to him was Omar Fateh — a radicalized Somali Democrat socialist.
Fateh, Keeperman reminds us, “was committing fraud during the election to rig the Democratic primary in his favor.”
But because Minnesotans are ideologues when it comes to immigration — and can’t bear to fully confront the mess they have invited — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party took “the gloves off” by revoking Fateh’s rigged endorsement, only to pull its punches and refuse to hammer him on the fraud because it makes people “feel too uncomfortable as white liberals in good standing,” adds Rufo.
To make matters worse, Fateh had “long-standing relationships with a number of the people who were arrested and then convicted of these fraud schemes,” he continues. “And so the fraudsters were not the downtrodden, the exiled, the marginalized. … No, these people were tightly knit with Ilhan Omar, with Omar Fateh, with Attorney General Keith Ellison.”
In sum, when Jacob Frey is “the least bad option,” it’s obvious Minnesota is nowhere near ready to address its immigration problem.
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