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Christopher Rufo Whines about Being Named as the Propagandist Who Rationalized Alleged Klan Act Violence
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Here’s how Christopher Rufo responded to being included in the Klan Act lawsuit filed by Renee Good’s family last week.
It’s hilarious that Rufo claims the lawsuit presents no evidence. What it does is present how his arguments — for which his evidence has been debunked — served as one of two baseless pretexts for the invasion of Minnesota targeting Somali-Americans, most of whom are US citizens. (Nick Shirley provided the other.)
C. The President’s immediate response to false, animus-driven accusations targeting Minnesota’s Somali community
61. On November 19, 2025, Rufo and Thorpe published in City Journal a report titled The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer, asserting that fraud in Minnesota’s public programs was perpetrated in many cases by members of the Somali community and that millions of dollars in stolen funds had reached the terrorist organization al-Shabaab.
62. The terror-financing claim rested on a single named source, retired Seattle detective Glenn Kerns; otherwise it purported to rely on other law enforcement sources that were unnamed. Kerns later told the Star Tribune that the story was “bullshit,” that he was misquoted, that he never traveled to Minnesota to investigate the connection as the piece claimed, and that “[t]hey went way too far on their poetic license to make it into a big story.” Kerns also said: “I was pointing him in the right direction to start digging. That was all.” Thorpe acknowledged that Kerns’s original statement was that he went down to the state, and that his editor changed it to say that he went down to Minnesota. Kerns complained to City Journal soon after publication and received no response.
63. This is not the first time Rufo has targeted a specific immigrant community— in September 2024 he offered a $5,000 reward for proof that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating household pets, after local police said there was no evidence of it.
64. Within hours of publication, Rufo launched a series of posts on X directed at the President, writing that “Somalis are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers and sending cash to terrorists back home,” and publicly calling on the President to revoke Temporary Protected Status for all Somali nationals in the United States, a demand for adverse federal action against an entire national-origin group. He concluded: “It’s time for them to go home.”
65. Rufo was motivated by discriminatory animus against people of Somali descent and origin. He ascribed the fraud to Somali culture, describing what happens “when a tribal mindset meets a bleeding-heart bureaucracy” and “when imported clan loyalties collide with a political class to timid to offend.” Rufo wrote openly that “the fact that Somalis are black is incidental” because “Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia,” and that “different groups have different cultural characteristics. The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway,” concluding that “[a] rational government would amend its policies accordingly.” He also wrote that “the Somali criminal enterprise is incompatible with a generous welfare state.” He was also quoted as writing that “Jews excel in science, business, academia, arts, and entertainment . . . while Somalis excel in welfare fraud.”
66. After his X post, Rufo then made the same demand to end TPS for Somalis to the President on national television, and published his account of the result: “It filtered upward to primetime Fox News, where, on Laura Ingraham’s program, I summarized the piece and called on President Trump to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for all Somalis in Minnesota. Within hours, the president, who had been following the story, announced that he would revoke TPS for all Somali recipients.” In a separate essay he wrote: “The story quickly reached the White House. Within days, President Trump announced that he was revoking the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for all Somali migrants in Minnesota.”
As I noted in this post, Good’s family filed two lawsuits, A garden variety FTCA lawsuit, which is how one normally sues the government for killing someone they shouldn’t have, and this Klan Act one, which names as defendants Jonathan Ross, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, Tom Homan, Todd Lyons, Greg Bovino, and the masked goons who were there when Ross killed Good. Both lawsuits pair up one of the firms that got a big judgment in the George Floyd murder (which is one of the firms that is suing Benny Johnson in Chicago) with Kevin Riach, who has been a defense attorney on certain kinds of cases arising out of the Minnesota invasion, including the Cities Church case and the MN-15 one. Riach is the guy who has revealed that the MN-15 case is part of a much larger investigation of leftist organizations, notably the SEIU, predicated on fabricated legal prosecutions.
As such, I think this lawsuit may be best understood as a counter to DOJ’s effort to claim people like Don Lemon and Riach’s client, Isaac Sant, and (in Chicago) Kat Abughazaleh engaged in a conspiracy against DHS goons by noting that, especially in Minnesota, where the DHS goons were targeting a population of Somali-Americans who are predominantly US citizens, the DHS invasions were actually a conspiracy to deprive entire classes of American citizens of their equal protection.
And Renee Good got killed because she supported her neighbors, just like white voting rights activists got murdered by the Klan during the Civil Rights movement.
6. Ross’s shots were the predictable and intended product of the operation that put him on Portland Avenue. His conduct was in furtherance of a carefully planned, coordinated effort between senior federal officials and private actors to make two ethnic communities in Minnesota – Minnesotans of Somali and Hispanic descent and origin – the object of aggression and abduction, and to silence, by intimidation, arrest, and violence, the neighbors and allies of those targeted communities who observed, documented, and warned of that campaign.
The use of the Klan Act in this context is particularly notable given how, in the secrecy of a grand jury, Matthew Skiba claimed that the Broadview 6 protestors that an ICE goon drove into were just like the MAGAts who almost forced a Joe Biden campaign bus off the freeway in Texas in 2020. Wendy Davis had some limited success using the Klan Act to avenge that assault on democracy (albeit success likely to be overturned by the Fifth Circuit). Effectively, Skiba claimed it was fair to charge Kat Abughazaleh for being driven into because Wendy Davis sued right wingers who premeditated an ambush of a campaign bus.
Plus, here the application here is not metaphorical. Count II of the lawsuit uses a part of the Klan Act that was written to address Klan hoods.
335. The second clause of § 1985(3) reaches circumstances in which “two or more persons . . . go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws.” Congress wrote that clause in 1871 to reach exactly what it describes: bands of men who concealed their identities and rode the public roads to strip a hated class of the law’s protection.
[snip]
337. They went in disguise on the highway. Renee Good was killed in her car on a public street, Portland Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets in Minneapolis. Defendant Ross and the John Doe Agents were traveling that public roadway in vehicles, in disguise, when they encountered her; they stopped their vehicles in the roadway; they surrounded her car in the roadway; and they shot her in the roadway. More broadly, the disguised movement of these Defendants and their fellow agents along the public streets and highways of the Twin Cities was the operation’s principal method: agents in unmarked vehicles roved the public ways, boxed in and stopped civilian vehicles, blocked roads, and demanded that people prove their citizenship on the roadside.
338. They went in disguise on the highway for the purpose of depriving persons of Somali descent and origin and Hispanic persons of the equal protection of the laws. The purpose of the roving, disguised patrols was to stop, interrogate, seize, and remove people who appeared Somali or Hispanic, irrespective of citizenship or immigration status, and to intimidate those communities into silence.
It’ll be some time before we see whether this lawsuit will meet with success; it took Davis’ lawsuit five years to meet limited success. But even if it gets the more expansive discovery granted in a civil case than Riach has gotten in the criminal cases he has defended, it will be an important part of holding these goons accountable, of showing how Stephen Miller fabricated conspiracies, in part with the help of far right propagandists like Rufo and Shirley and Johnson.
But this has one advantage over the Davis lawsuit: the Somali-Americans are more obviously covered under the Klan Act than Joe Biden campaign staffers are — though I expect defendants to say that Good had no tie to that class. (I would be unsurprised to see one of the Somali-Americans kidnapped by DHS joined this suit or suing in parallel.)
And that’s where Rufo comes in, as a propagandist who laid one of two pretexts for this assault on the civil rights of Somali-Americans.
316. The conspiracy was motivated by invidious, class-based animus against people of Somali descent and origin and against people of Hispanic descent and origin. That animus was expressed, repeatedly and publicly, by the President, Defendants Miller, Rufo, Shirley, and Bergquam, in the statements set out above, including that Somalis are “garbage” who “come from hell,” whose “country stinks,” and who should be sent “back to where they came from”; that “the Somali refugee experiment in our country has failed”; that Somali Americans exhibit “persistent issues in every subsequent generation”; that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs,” “bringing crime,” and are “rapists”; and that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The conspirators acted as they did because of the conduct’s adverse effects upon people of Somali origin and upon Hispanics, and not merely in spite of them: the classes were the operation’s announced predicate, its target-selection criterion, its measure of success, and the intended audience of its intimidation.
As noted above, Rufo bragged on TV about his influence on Trump on stripping Somalis of TPA protection. Who knows what further discovery might show? Who knows whether any of the anonymous law enforcement officials on which he relied are, in fact, named defendants in this suit?
He bragged just a year ago that he got Trump to target Somalis. But now, Rufo is whining that his bullshit attack has been identified of part of an unlawful invasion of Minnesota, one just like the Klan violence of Reconstruction.
The post Christopher Rufo Whines about Being Named as the Propagandist Who Rationalized Alleged Klan Act Violence appeared first on emptywheel.