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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THIS is why Trump should send Alejandro Mayorkas to PRISON​



During President Trump' s first term, Americans were forced to wake up and realize that immigration was a serious problem — and that we were losing who we were and what we stand for as a country.

“And then Biden gets in, who’s this — he’s not even a person. He’s this just sort of like empty vessel ... and what they do immediately with him is not just like turn the immigration spigot back on, it’s supercharged,” BlazeTV host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman tells co-host Christopher Rufo on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“OK, we get in Biden’s four years, the equivalent of 12 years of immigration. The preceding 12 years combined ends up equaling what Biden does — another like eight million illegal immigrants,” Lomez says.


“Millions of these get away, they’re not even processing people at the border. ... Alejandro Mayorkas just decides unilaterally, we’re going to start taking in people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people basically flying illegal immigrants, paying to fly illegal immigrants into the country to be resettled by these refugee programs,” he continues.

“They’re getting hundreds of millions of dollars from DHS to do this. You have hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors, OK? We’re just taking in the world. We’re taking in the entire world.”

“And when I say we, I mean Alejandro Mayorkas, who should frankly be in jail and tried for sedition,” he adds.

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New York Times admits massive fraud under Tim Walz



BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo and his co-author have broken a story on the rampant fraud within Minnesota’s social services system — and now even the New York Times is reporting on what has gone down on the governor’s watch.

“This is fascinating,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere says. “Why would they be doing this? ... Why would Tim Walz be the target of an actual investigation by the New York Times?”

In the New York Times article, titled, “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch,” the outlet writes, “Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in the pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.”

“These are the types of things that we always tell you are going to happen when they set these programs up. They always do happen, and no one cares,” Burguiere says.


“Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections,” the article reports.

Burguiere isn’t surprised in the slightest.

“It’s weird — when you just give away a bunch of free money, a lot of people who want free money show up. That happens all the time. It’s what we say about the border. It’s what we say about all sorts of different communities that are able to access this cash,” he says.

And according to the Minnesota Staff Fraud Reporting Commentary, Walz was aware of the fraud well before he began taking action to stop it.

“Tim Walz is 100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota. We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports,” the account wrote in a post on X.

And according to the White House, the Trump administration is now “terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, indefinitely halting migration from third-world countries, re-examining green cards for every alien from every country of concern, pausing all asylum decisions, and more.”

“I’m sure there are many wonderful examples that escaped a civil war and have done great things,” Burguiere comments regarding Somali citizens. “That being said, a lot of these people are not examples of that situation, and we need to do something about that, not ignore it because we feel bad to call people names because we’re worried they might think we’re racists.”

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Why Trump just revoked TPS for Somalis: The Rufo report that changed policy overnight



On November 19, investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo, alongside reporter Ryan Thorpe, broke a story that went instantly viral, rapidly spreading across conservative media, social platforms, and mainstream outlets.

Titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” the article peels back the layers and connects the dots of yearslong federal investigations into large-scale fraud involving members of Minnesota’s Somali-American community.

“The basic story is this: Over the last 10 years, Minnesota's Somali community — it's about 100,000 people, mostly in Minneapolis, a neighborhood called Little Mogadishu for obvious reasons — has been, you know, conducting fraud at an eye-popping scale,” Rufo explained on a recent episode of “Rufo & Lomez.”

“We're talking about billions of dollars ... that are getting sucked out of taxpayer programs, routed through various fake NGOs into the pockets of Somalis in Minnesota,” he added.

According to Rufo’s reporting, a web of interconnected schemes, enabled by lax oversight under Gov. Tim Walz's administration and Minnesota's generous welfare system, allows these Somali immigrants to exploit various government programs, especially those intended to serve low-income and immigrant families, like Medicaid, child food programs, and food stamps/SNAP.

While the feds have long known about these fraud schemes and have even been able to recover some of the funds and secure convictions, their investigations have been focused strictly on the theft and laundering.

Rufo, however, was the first to ask the question: But where is the money going? His bombshell piece revealed the answer: Much of it is allegedly going back to Somalia, specifically into the hands of Al-Shabaab — a designated terrorist group.

“The other kind of dirty secret of this story is that the Minnesota state government, the Democrats who are in charge, Tim Walz and others, have effectively turned a blind eye to this because they don't want to offend the Somalis. They don't want to earn the accusation of racism with the Somali activists who’re very, very ready and very eager to deploy, and they feel that they need the Somali vote in Minneapolis to win statewide,” Rufo told co-host Jonathan Keeperman.

“So you have this cycle of corruption, payoffs, kickbacks, and political influence, and I hope that the story, which blows open this whole scheme, will have some impact.”

Rufo’s wish is already coming true. Just two days after its publication, President Trump announced the revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota on Truth Social.

Rufo also hopes, however, that his reporting will spark dialogue about immigration, American identity, and how the convergence of the two should determine who we allow into our country and how we expect them to live among us.

He argues that the reigning progressive dogma when it comes to immigration — diversity is strength, all immigrants are the same, and assimilation is a byproduct of white supremacy — has opened the door for Somali clan corruption to colonize Minneapolis and build a billion-dollar fraud pipeline to fund Al-Shabaab.

“When [immigrants] go through the Visa process, it doesn't magically evaporate their former culture,” says Rufo.

“Look at dysfunction in Somalia. Look at corruption in Somalia. Look at how in Somalia money moves. Look at norms regarding theft. ... Now compare it to what's happening here [in Minnesota].”

Today “the primary source of income for Somali-Americans in Minnesota and also the primary source of income for the Al-Shabaab terrorist organization in Somalia appears to be fraudulently obtained United States taxpayer money,” he adds.

Keeperman praises Rufo’s reporting as “super important.”

He urges that “we need to be able to point to specific things to demonstrate the larger point about what Americanism is versus what it isn't and why it's important if we want to preserve America as it is — that we are bringing in people who will make America more like America and less like these other dysfunctional places they're coming from.”

To learn more, check out Rufo’s original reporting here or watch the video above.

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In defense of Karens: Do we owe America’s manager-summoning moms an apology?



Whether she’s demanding to speak to the manager, lecturing the barista, or calling the cops on a neighbor’s backyard BBQ — nobody likes a Karen. That’s why there are hundreds of thousands of internet memes aiming to mock her out of existence.

But maybe we’ve jumped the gun in villainizing America’s entitlement queens. Maybe Karens (irritating antics aside) serve a critical purpose in society.

That’s what Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman — BlazeTV hosts of “Rufo & Lomez” — argue.

“We need to mount a principled, unashamed, and unapologetic defense of the Karen archetype,” says Rufo.

The “Karen,” he explains, “is precisely the person who upholds the civic order. [She’s] the mother, the authority figure who is nosy enough and assertive enough to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You're transgressing these important pillars of our social order.”’

Keeperman, who once “wrote an impassioned defense of the Karen,” agrees: “In a society that is undergoing this decay and in which our sort of infrastructure doesn't work and basic service has been degraded ... the attack on the Karen is a way to avoid ever having to confront that these things are breaking down.”

The Karen, he argues, is one of the only ones bold enough to stand in the gap and demand order and quality in a world of chaos and low bars. Even if Karens do go about it in annoying, “hysterical [ways],” they nonetheless “demand that things work ... demand that there is a certain baseline presumption and expectation of etiquette in our public spaces” — and that, he says, is a good thing.

But not all Karens are equal. The one screaming about micro-aggressions and misgendering is not the same as the one demanding that rulebooks and protocols be followed.

The latter, says Rufo, is a “defender of civilization,” a warrior for “right and wrong,” and a lover of tradition. But this “universal tough mother” who defends what is good, right, and true unfortunately has been conflated with the “tote bag NPR Karen.”

Rule-loving, high-expectation sticklers — annoying as they can be — are the last line of defense against civilizational sloppiness. Mock them into silence and the only Karens left will be the ones policing pronouns instead of pool rules.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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Despite terrorist designation, Antifa still runs wild — and conservatives want real action



Antifa radicals have been causing chaos throughout America for years and have finally been designated as a terrorist network by the Trump administration.

However, they’re still getting away with crimes.

“Antifa radicals in Berkeley, California, disrupted a Turning Point USA event outside of UC Berkeley, punched a conservative in the face. The conservative gets arrested,” BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo tells co-host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“But our policy prescription is, the administration has to dismantle the left-wing terror networks, whether it’s Antifa, other organized militant groups. They have to actually get mugshots, case numbers, inmate numbers,” he continues.


“The tangible evidence that these left-wing terror networks, which are essentially saying that we can control the streets in places like Portland, we can veto peaceful conservative speech in places like Berkeley — we have to ensure that they can no longer do so and can no longer exert control through violence,” he adds.

While Rufo points out that Antifa is still out there disrupting whatever it can, Lomez notes that it was a “huge step in the right direction” that it has at least been designated as a terrorist network.

“The administration is making the right moves and/or saying the right things. What’s missing is the conspicuous action so that your average American, let alone Trump supporter, but just your average American goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t like Antifa, and the administration is doing something about it, and that’s good,’” Lomez says.

But the next step is taking the terrorist designation and doing something with it.

“Let’s just take this case at UC Berkeley, this recent event. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a great tweet,” Rufo says.

“Antifa is an existential threat to our nation. The violent riots at UC Berkeley last night are under full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. We will continue to spare no expense unmasking all who commit and orchestrate acts of political violence,” Bondi wrote.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, and pursuant to his Executive Order designating Antifa as a domestic terror organization, the Department of Justice and our law-enforcement partners are dismantling violent networks that seek to intimidate Americans and suppress their free expression and First Amendment rights,” she added.

While Rufo is glad to see Bondi using such strong wording, he’s skeptical.

“Why hasn’t UC Berkeley been defunded? Just say, ‘Hey, we’re withholding funds until you can establish a basic environment of civil discourse,’” Rufo says.

“You have to make sure that the directive that comes from the, you know, FBI director’s office, the attorney general’s office, you have to make sure that it means something at that regional level, at that agent level,” he explains.

“And I am not convinced that the current leadership, that the current structure, the current techniques that they’re using has sufficiently done that,” he adds.

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Somalis Reportedly Scamming Minnesota Blind — And Allegedly Sending Some Funds To Islamic Terrorists

Overrepresentation in Minnesota fraud cases.

The 5-point plan to turn Trump’s 2025 wins into permanent victory



As the Trump administration nears the end of year one, Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (Lomez), hosts of BlazeTV’s newest show “Rufo & Lomez,” are compelled to not only pause and reflect on 2025, but also to ask the hard questions no one else will — and demand the second-year playbook that actually delivers total victory.

“I think it started out with some very solid wins — kind of blitzkrieg-style action on many fronts — but has the Trump administration hit a stall? Are things going as well as they should be?” asks Rufo.

In this episode, the duo, celebrating the wins and acknowledging the losses, offer a “five-point agenda” aimed at ensuring more success is on the horizon.

1. Reimmigration warfare

Immigration was second only to the economy in issues that drew voters to Trump, who pledged “mass deportations” from the rally pulpit his entire campaign trail. While the administration came out of the gate with ferocious plans to flush illegal aliens out of the country, deportations need to speed up, Rufo argues.

“What we’ve seen is a lot of fireworks, especially when it comes to DHS and ICE activities, but the actual deportations are rather low,” Lomez notes.

But that makes sense. “You're never going to have enough muscle, enough kind of logistical force to deport 15 million people in handcuffs,” says Rufo.

The answer to this problem, they argue, is remigration — the voluntary relocation back to one’s native country. If the Trump administration is serious about hitting high numbers of deportations, it must incentivize people to leave of their own accord.

“If you want to get 10 million plus people to voluntarily leave the United States, you have to make their current life virtually impossible,” says Rufo. “You have to freeze them out of the financial system. You have to have punitive taxation on remittances that makes that economic incentive disappear.”

It is also critical that we begin looking at immigration through the lens of what benefits the American people, he adds. “We have to be ruthlessly selective about which populations are most likely to assimilate, most likely to contribute, and least likely to be a kind of net negative on whatever dimension — economic, social, cultural, [and] political. ... Nobody has a right to immigrate to the United States. That's a decision left to us.”

2. Build a future young Americans can afford

The nation’s younger generations are financially crushed in ways they weren’t just 10 years ago. Home affordability especially is out of reach for the majority of people under 40.

Rufo emphasizes the need for the Trump administration to “make a concrete economic agenda that will improve the possibilities for young people that are entering the work world and becoming adults.”

For starters, says Lomez, “We need to get rid of the regulatory framework that benefits older people at the expense of the young” — things like senior property-tax caps, locked-in low interest rates that keep people from ever selling, and zoning laws and building restrictions that prevent affordable homes from being built.

3. Crush terror networks

“The administration has to dismantle the left-wing terror networks, whether it's Antifa [or] other organized militant groups,” says Rufo. “They have to actually get mugshots, case numbers, inmate numbers — the tangible evidence.”

These terror networks “are essentially saying that ‘we can control the streets in places like Portland; we can veto peaceful conservative speech in places like Berkeley.’ We have to ensure that they can no longer do so and can no longer exert control through violence.”

Lomez says the Trump administration’s designation of Antifa as a terrorist network was “a huge step in the right direction,” but more action is needed. He acknowledges that some of what the administration is doing is probably “sensitive” and might take years to accomplish, but it needs to “explain to the American people what they are doing” and up the consequences for violent members of these groups.

“The other thing that we need to put pressure on,” he says, “ is these institutions that are harboring these people [in terror networks].”

“If you do a good job planting bombs at the Pentagon as the Weather Underground did, you get sinecures at major universities’ you get speaking gigs; you get massive publicity. You become a public intellectual for the left. There are ways of applying pressure to these institutions to prevent them from doing this.”

However, in order to see this through, the right people must be in power. Otherwise bureaucracy slows it down or makes it impossible. Right now there are “certain Cabinet officials [who] are doing an amazing job,” says Rufo. “They're extremely aggressive, [but] others seem to be more in it for the prestige, more in it for the spotlight, more in it the perks of the office.”

“We have to get people that are willing to fight and willing to play hard, and it has to be backed up at the highest level of the government.”

4. Death to DEI

While the Trump administration excelled at ripping up the DEI apparatus in the federal government, the initiative lives on in other places.

“Corporations, universities, school districts have kept this DEI system, a system of anti-white discrimination in particular, as part of their operating procedure,” says Rufo.

The Trump administration must “use the power of the government to say, ‘This stops now. It's a violation of the Civil Rights Act. You don't qualify for federal grants and contracts. You have to stop it.”’

“We need to go back and we need to look at who was making decisions in accordance with this anti-white ideology, but that broadly is encompassed under this sort of woke banner, so this would include like the trans stuff ... and we need to remove them completely,” adds Lomez. “We need to apply maximum coercive pressure on these institutions to get rid of these people. They cannot employ these people any longer.”

5. Bankrupt the universities

To fix broken, ideologically captured universities, we can’t just punish them with investigations or funding cuts, says Rufo. We have to make them financially liable for student loans. “You have to make the universities hold the bag so that when it blows up, they blow up with it.”

This will have multiple positive downstream effects: reduce administrative bloat; stop the admission of unqualified students; end the “everyone must go to college” scam; and shift lower quintiles to trades, apprenticeships, associates degrees, and on-the-job training.

“The Trump administration should figure out how to use this student debt problem and essentially offload it to the universities. Look, universities are not MAGA's base. Punishing the universities is not going to punish MAGA voters — precisely the opposite,” says Rufo, “and so there's got to be a little bit of political calculation that's baked into this formula that yields the outcome that we want.”

To hear more of Rufo and Lomez’s five-point plan for the Trump administration to stack up Ws, watch the full episode above.

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Trump defends H-1B; undercuts his own immigration narrative



Whether it’s building the wall or mass deportations, President Trump’s most memorable position for the past decade has been immigration.

But in a recent interview on Fox News, the president made it clear that his view on H-1B visas doesn’t align with his illegal immigration policy.

“Does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers,” host Laura Ingraham said to the president.

“You also do have to bring in talent,” Trump responded.

“Well, we have plenty of talented people,” Ingram fired back, to which Trump responded, “No, you don’t.”


“You can’t take people off … an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory; we’re going to make missiles.’ … It doesn’t work that way,” Trump continued.

“I mean, the truth is, like, Trump has always been a little squishy on this issue,” BlazeTV co-host Lomez says on “Rufo & Lomez,” pointing to an episode of the “All-In Podcast” where during an interview, the president spoke about preserving student visas.

“Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. … What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said.

“And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country,” he continued.

Lomez tells co-host Christopher Rufo that he believes Trump is compromising with Big Tech, noting that the industry says “they’re dependent on these H-1Bs to sort of continue the business model that they currently have.”

While this is “actually probably true,” he’s not pleased with Trump helping this industry in this way.

“It is not therefore incumbent on the United States people and on President Trump to allow them to continue these abusive practices with regards to H-1B. So while that might be their business model, it ought not to be their business model, and we may have to take some coercive action so that they change their business model,” Lomez says.

However, he also believes that what President Trump has said regarding H1-Bs is being taken "way out of proportion.”

“It is a statement on a news show that is not necessarily reflected in what is actually happening from a policy point of view,” Lomez says.

“By this point, it sort of surprises me that people don’t understand the way he speaks publicly is not always indicative of his policy prescriptions,” he adds.

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Debt slavery for the young, tax breaks for the old — welcome to America’s housing reality



Since 2021, home ownership has become increasingly out of reach for the average American, as both home prices and interest rates have skyrocketed with no reprieve. Earlier this month, President Trump pitched the idea of 50-year mortgages to combat the housing affordability crisis. He even posted a meme on Truth Social comparing himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who’s credited with the 30-year mortgage, and labeled himself the pioneer of the 50-year version.

The proposal, however, immediately drew bipartisan backlash, with critics across the ideological spectrum branding it "debt slavery" or "mortgage suicide."

Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (Lomez), hosts of BlazeTV’s newest show “Rufo and Lomez,” agree that the 50-year mortgage is an economically disastrous idea, not just for the individual homebuyer but for society at large.

“I don't even want to say [the idea] is bad. It's just pointless,” says Lomez. “It doesn't solve any problem that it's ostensibly trying to solve.”

The problem the Trump administration should be zeroing in on, he says, is the massive generational imbalance in America. Our current policies have wealth flowing in one direction: “from young to old.”

“I think this is partly the problem of boomer politics. They are such an outsized political force, and they are so narrowly focused (as is everyone else) on their self-interest that they've lost sight of the larger picture of what they're trying to leave behind for the generations that come after,” says Lomez.

With boomers turning out in huge numbers to block new housing construction, defend senior property-tax caps, and protect incentives that keep them from ever selling or downsizing, the average first-time home buyer today is 40 years old (up from 33 in 2020), while the average home buyer in general is 59 years old.

“The outcome of these various policies and how we think about who can buy a home and property tax rates and how we architect certain incentives — both the sticks and carrots — have basically crowded young people out of home buying, and this is a massive structural failure on our part,” Lomez argues.

The impact is far more extensive than many realize.

“This has massive downstream effects in terms of fertility rates ... and marriage and all the stuff that makes life good. The housing piece of it is a proxy for all of that, but it's a very important piece of that, and we need to fix this problem,” Lomez explains.

“We're going to have to figure out some solution that's better than just going to debt peonage for the rest of your life.”

Rufo agrees, calling the American dream of homeownership “an amazing path for most people” that “should be widely available.”

The idea of a 50-year mortgage may seem like it brings this dream back into the realm of possibility because it “[reduces] the monthly payments on the median house by ... a couple hundred bucks a month,” but what it ultimately does is turn a home into “a speculative financial asset.”

“People aren't going to stay and pay off a 50-year loan,” and by “pushing the payment on the principal back ... for the first decade, you're really not paying down any principal at all. That's pure money to the bank,” says Rufo.

But this doesn’t just impact the individual, he says. It hurts everyone. “If [the 50-year mortgage] works, according to the theory, it will artificially inflate demand even further, which drives up housing prices.”

“The real problem is that we've flooded the country with currency. We've flooded the country by printing dollars, especially after COVID, where all of that money that is floating around the system has gone to these assets, like housing,” says Rufo, dismissing Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal as an idea with “good intentions” but “not a good solution.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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