Walter Kirn is the author of Up In the Air and other novels, an essayist and critic, a frequent collaborator with Matt Taibbi at Racket News. and editor-at-large of County Highway. I enjoy and admire his work. Chris Rufo is the pundit and author of America’s Cultural Revolution who brought the issue of Minnesota’s massive public-programs fraud to President Trump’s attention in a big way.
Rufo and Kirn have been arguing about who broke the real story of Minnesota’s massive public-programs fraud on X for a while now. Rufo flags his November 19 City Journal column (with Ryan Thorpe) “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” (the headline is a quotation from an unnamed source). Kirn cites Armin Rosen’s County Highway essay “The shame of our cities.” You can see one rendition of the argument below.
We broke the Somali fraud story on November 12. It triggered a landslide.
But what people are refusing to understand is that nothing about this story was ever secret or hidden from public view.
It was all out in the open, for years. https://t.co/Sk1ocsXHv6
— County Highway (@countyhwy) December 29, 2025
I’ve tried reaching out privately to Walter, but as he’s blasting me publicly, it seems necessary to point out that he’s dead wrong. The exclusive in our story was not the existence of fraud—this has been reported for years in various outlets—but connecting the dots on the… https://t.co/5oNd3nefzO
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) December 1, 2025
Armin Rosen’s account is probably the single best essay yet written on the case. I commented on the Thorpe-Rufo column in “Minnesota’s Somali fraud.” Ann Bauer has ruled in favor of Armin Rosen’s essay.
Dammit. Truth is important.
County Highway broke the MN fraud story. Not a question. The dates are clear.
Chris Rufo added to it. Nick Shirley sensationalized it. But @countyhwy broke it.
Why is this so hard? https://t.co/50yPTRkZOj
— Ann Bauer (@annbauerwriter) January 6, 2026
I hold that the FBI “broke the story” in January 2022 when its investigation of Feeding Our Future “went overt” with the execution of search warrants in the case. United States Attorney Andrew Luger subsequently added to it with his press conference announcing the first 47 defendants charged in the case the following September. Everything since then has “filled out” the story. However, Ann Bauer has instructed me that my dissent from the terms of this particular argument misconstrues the meaning of “breaking the story.”
To “break a story” means to be the first news organization or reporter to publish or broadcast a significant, previously unknown event or piece of information, making it public for the first time.
— Ann Bauer (@annbauerwriter) January 6, 2026
This unedifying argument adds a footnote to a page in the long book of the human comedy. Perhaps both Kirn and Rufo are right, or perhaps they’re both off base. Maybe the phrase “breaking the story” doesn’t apply here.
