To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast; and he has over 120,000 subscribers on Substack, a publishing platform whose owners have celebrated Rufo as one of their “best” political writers who readers can “trust.”
This veneer of legitimacy has helped Rufo mainstream an arguably fascist agenda. The 42 year old, after all, largely masterminded the destructive, racist moral panics targeting “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs. He helped spearhead the spurious attack on “gender ideology” in public schools, smearing queer-supportive educators as “groomers.” He helped foment conspiracy theories about fraud at Somali daycare centers in Minneapolis, providing the pretext for ICE’s deadly incursion into the city. And he played a central role in spreading the ugly lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets.
He’s been up front about how he approaches these propaganda campaigns — and how to get those in power to act upon them. “You have to be very aggressive,” he explained once in a speech at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts school where he is a Distinguished Fellow. “You have to fight on terms that you define. You have to create your own frame, your own language. And you have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good.”
This past weekend Rufo introduced an alarming new term that feels like an escalation, even for him: the “Indian Question” — that is, what to do about the very existence of Indian people, citizens and noncitizens alike, in America? Rufo’s new phrase formed the title of the latest episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the BlazeTV podcast he co-hosts with Jonathan Keeperman, a lesser known and less “respectable” proprietor of white nationalist talking points, who previously plied his trade anonymously, from behind the pseudonym “Lomez,” until he was unmasked in a 2024 Guardian exposé.
The prompt for this discussion of the “Indian Question” was a viral, racist post by Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” French wrote on X earlier this month, posting a photo of largely south Asian college students cheering on the University of Texas football team. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” In a follow up post, French made the barely concealed subtext of his message more explicit: “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” he wrote.
As TPM’s Josh Kovensky noted, French’s tweet — an articulation of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory — roiled the right, eliciting some rare, if tepid, denunciations from prominent Republican officials in Texas, and exposing faultlines in the GOP’s coalition over the exact boundaries of MAGA’s ethnonationalism. Are some non-white ethnicities more allowed than others? Are some immigrant groups more prone to being “assimilated” into white, Christian culture?
Keeperman and Rufo’s “Indian Question” episode amounts to an hour-long defense of French’s post. Keeperman offered a tortured tautology about why the south Asian college kids cheering a comeback victory for the Longhorns — some of whom were wearing cowboy hats and throwing up the “Hook ‘em Horns” hand sign — were not properly “assimilated” into American culture: because he said so.
“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” he said. “The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.”
Keeperman then explained that many white Americans, like French, simply have “this fundamental intuition” and a “preference” for “homogeneity” and “they wanna fight to preserve that” as the U.S. inches towards becoming a “majority-minority country.”
“And Indians are like this conspicuous case,” he said, “where they see a difference and they go, ‘I just don’t like that.’ And it’s not because they don’t like Indians or anything like that. Now it may be expressed in, like, vulgar, lurid bigotry of whatever kind, but it also is just a case that they prefer homogeneity.”
Keeperman said French’s tweet might have been crude, but expressed something he and other white Americans have long been too scared to express: that they want to live around other white people.
“I like having a high-trust society,” Keeperman said. “I like living somewhere where there’s cultural cohesion, where I kind of have this unspoken affinity with my neighbors on a sort of ground level that relates to my values and everything else…. And I think Bo French, however impolitic his tweet is, and however sort of emotional and explosive this moment has become on this issue, there’s a real sense in which people are finally just articulating that preference out loud. And they no longer care about these sorts of moral and social pieties that for so long have prevented them from expressing these preferences.”
Rufo nods along with all of Keeperman’s arguments. When Keeperman expresses disgust for the phrase “diversity is our strength,” often used by liberals, Rufo excitedly agrees, saying it “sounds like a slogan from [George Orwell’s novel] ‘1984.’”
It is notable that Rufo has decided to partner so closely with Keeperman, who the Guardian’s Jason Wilson has described as a “key player and influential tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement.” He is indeed an extreme figure, heading up Passage Press, a publisher that Wilson noted reprints “out-of-print or public-domain books by historical fascist and reactionary writers,” including works “by radical German nationalist and militarist Ernst Jünger” and “Peter Kemp, who fought as a volunteer in Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war.”
Hiding behind his “Lomez” account on X, Keeperman expressed violent rage at anti-racist protesters in 2020, and his support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teen who shot and killed two such protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “May a million Kyle Rittenhouses bloom,” Keeperman wrote at the time.
He also once seemed to call for journalists to be murdered en masse. “The press are in fact the enemy,” he tweeted. “They are mewling midwit scum. Sniveling liars and desperate status junkies. My abiding contempt for them is only ever confirmed.” Among a list of “policy proposals” he posted online, Keeperman wrote, “lamppost the journos” — an apparent call for reporters to be hanged.
That Keeperman, like Rufo, is so steeped in far-right and white nationalist spaces online, makes it all the more disturbing and odious that they named Episode 86 of “Rufo & Lomez” the “Indian Question.” The possible reference is striking.
Over 80 years ago, on January 20, 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich convened a gathering of 15 high-ranking Nazi officials at a villa in Wannsee, Germany to discuss “Endlösung der Judenfrage,” or “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
“The Jewish Question” — or “The JQ,” as modern white nationalists frequently call it — is the antisemitic worldview framing the very existence of Jewish people as a problem in need of solving. It’s one of history’s most infamous rhetorical devices; three words that instantly dehumanized an entire subgroup of people, helping provide the permission structure for genocide. Heydrich’s 1942 conference, after all, was where Nazi leadership discussed the nuts-and-bolts of implementing their answer to the “question”: extermination.
That Keeperman and Rufo chose the phrase “the Indian Question” for this discussion reads as a deliberate, trollish nod to the “JQ” — a kind of shitpost meant to “trigger” the left, including reporters at places like Talking Points Memo, into hysterically comparing them to Nazis. The duo does not go as far to call for the extermination or genocide of people with Indian heritage in America, even if they do advocate policies of exclusion and expulsion that scholars have long noted can be precursors to even greater atrocities.
The pair’s “solution” to the “Indian question” is the forced deportation of Indian immigrants who aren’t assimilated, and a complete ban on all immigration. “That means cutting off the spigot right now, getting rid of anybody who’s only here temporarily, and encouraging — through remigration efforts — to compel people who don’t wanna go through that process of assimilation to go back to where they come from and let this thing cool off for a matter of perhaps decades,” Keeperman says.
“Remigration,” as TPM has written about before, is a well-known euphemism for ethnic cleansing. When it comes to the “process of assimilation,” neither Keeperman or Rufo articulate what precisely an immigrant in America will have to do to become fully assimilated, although Keeperman acknowledges that being a “coastal shit lib” would not meet muster.
For Indian-American citizens or other Desi people otherwise allowed to stay in America, Keeperman advocates them being “subjected” to an “assimilation hazing process” that will include instances of “vulgar, defamatory racism” until they have sufficiently left parts of their Indian “identity behind.”
When Rufo asks Keeperman about prominent Indian-Americans in the MAGA coalition feeling excluded or frustrated by the right’s anti-Indian sentiments, Keeperman responded that it’s incumbent upon those people to prove their American-ness.
Although Trump-supporting Indian-Americans — like Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division; Dinesh D’Souza, the pundit and conspiracy theorist; and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance — are some of Keeperman’s “favorite people” who are “super smart” and “tremendously loyal,” he says they nevertheless need to be “making public statements” indicating to Americans, “‘no, we’re on your side here. We wanna help this country be a better version of itself, of America, not something else.’”
When Keeperman promoted his discussion with Rufo about the “Indian Question” on social media, his post went viral, even drawing the attention of an Indian-American congressman.
“Indian Americans are not an ‘Indian Question’ to be solved,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) posted on X. “Treating any American community as a problem because of their ethnicity is racist, xenophobic, and fundamentally un-American. We are a nation born of ideals, not bloodlines. No race, religion, or ancestry has a greater claim to America than another. Indian Americans are as American as anyone. This country belongs to all of us.”
Rufo didn’t seem to acknowledge the online rancor his “Indian Question” episode with Keeperman had inspired, instead moving onto other propaganda campaigns, posting an article he wrote for the City Journal about how public housing in California is allegedly teeming with registered sex offenders.
City Journal is operated out of the Manhattan Institute, the think tank where Rufo derives so much of his legitimacy. TPM reached out to the institute for comment on Rufo pushing the “Indian Question” with Keeperman.
The institute didn’t immediately respond.
