Why I Don't Support The Rufini Family

Despite their GiveSendGo claim, they weren't innocent Trads set upon by feds

(I’m making this edition of my newsletter available to the public, not just to subscribers.)

A few days ago, I posted to my Twitter account a link to the GiveSendGo account of the Rufini family of Connecticut. As I recall, the text of the appeal wrote of the heavy financial difficulties the family faces as the result of the actions of their 15 year old son. The text portrayed the boy, a Catholic, as having been drawn into online extremism, and ultimately arrested by the FBI. I don’t have the text of the appeal in front of me, but I recall that my sympathy went out to the family, in part because (as the appeal pointed out), they identify as conservative Catholics, and we know that the FBI had targeted such people. I hate that the FBI did that, so without knowing precisely what the teenager did, I was confident that I could retweet the appeal in good conscience.

As it turns out, that was unwise of me. Some conservative Christians in the legal world — the kind of people who are normally strongly against the state going after Christians — contacted me to say that I should consider taking down my tweet. They said the kid stands accused of some heinous things, far beyond the kind of stupid online radicalism that some young men fall into. I was given an arrest warrant for the boy’s father; the kid’s arrest warrant has apparently been sealed, presumably owing to his status as a juvenile. The conservative Christians were right: this is really evil and dangerous. I took down my tweet, and explained why, without going into detail, because this family has enough trouble as it is.

Now some bad-faith right-wing actors have turned on me for that, on the grounds that we conservatives should have No Enemies To The Right. (The Rufini GiveSendGo account has since been deleted in the wake of the resulting controversy.) I responded by pointing out that the stuff this kid allegedly did was much worse than I had guessed, and I don’t in good conscience feel that I can encourage people to donate to the family’s cause. That’s never enough for the NETTR crowd, which believes that no matter how wicked and dangerous is the behavior of someone on the Right, it must be defended because The Left Is Worse.

To defend my action, I’m going to make public most of the arrest warrant for the kid’s father, Jerome Rufini, which is not under seal. The FBI and the Connecticut State Police charged the father, a convicted felon, with having firearms in the house where his son could get to them. That seems like an aggressive move, and I don’t necessarily endorse it. I am posting these details below, though, because they detail what the boy (unnamed) is accused of having done.

Here are excerpts from the arrest warrant:

Whatever you think about the justice of the feds charging the father here, it is clear from this affidavit the the Rufini boy was in no way maliciously treated by the authorities. This kid had been racially radicalized, had access to heavy weaponry, and gave indications that he was prepared to use it to kill innocent people.

I do feel sorry for the family, who probably had no idea that their son had been so consumed by online radicalism. Nevertheless, these are not remotely minor accusations. If the Rufini kid were Muslim, and had access to weapons, and had been radicalized by online Islamists to the point where he was casing synagogues and other places, and saying online that he planned to assault them — I don’t think anybody on the Right would muster enough sympathy for the boy’s family to donate to them. Some might; that’s their business. I would want nothing to do with it in that case, and even though the Rufinis are Christian, their case is not, as I thought based on their GiveSendGo appeal, one in which the wicked feds came down hard on a dopey 15-year-old boy for saying ugly, bigoted things online.

Here’s what a sympathetic Internet platform said about the case recently. You can see here why I was initially sympathetic. I thought the kid might have been entrapped by the FBI. I should have been savvier than to take that claim at face value. The Rufinis were fundraising off an account of their ordeal that struck me as misleading, and written in such a way as to play on the natural sympathy Christian conservatives like me have for traditional Catholics, and the antagonism we have for the way our government sometimes behaves. Excerpt:

Rufini posted a fundraiser over on GiveSendGo seeking roughly $20,000 to help get his family back on their feet, as even after the FBI dropped the case the state brought criminal charges on his family that left them spending thousands.

In short, the family’s teenage boy – a volunteer firefighter and altar boy at their local parish – was goaded by FBI agents to take pictures in public wearing ski masks and leave printed out memes on picnic tables, while also pressing him on his access to guns and even sneak photos of his family’s guns.

All of this started when Rufini’s father got too weak after chemotherapy to work at their family business, or care for their 93 year old grandmother. While Rufini worked during the day, their teenage son took up the mantle of watching their grandmother, so he got his first cell phone to keep in touch.

“None of our children, including my son, had been raised with cell phones or unrestricted internet access. It became necessary for him to have a phone so we could communicate while he was alone at my father’s house caring for my grandmother, and so we reluctantly allowed him to have a cell phone. He spent a lot of time alone with nothing to do but wait and think and the cell phone became a welcome distraction. His interests in history and theology led him down a rabbit hole where he was recruited into group chats targeting teenage traditionalist Catholics with extreme political content. We later learned that these chats were being closely monitored, and possibly operated by, FBI agents as part of an effort to investigate Traditional Catholics that was downstream of a broader domestic investigation spurred by the events of January 6th.”

Despite the United States Attorney General Merrick Garland fervently insisting the Department of Justice nor the FBI do not investigate “based on religion” (a leaked FBI memo said they were, in fact, targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholics”), this new attack on Rufini’s family confirms they have done such investigations and still do to this day.

Unbeknownst to us, he was being drawn deeper and deeper into these chat groups and goaded into doing things like take pictures of himself in public wearing ski masks and to print out memes and leave them on picnic tables. They would ask him if he had access to guns (he would go target shooting under the supervision of my brother, who lived in an in-law apartment at our home and owned firearms) and encourage him to sneak photographs of the guns and post them. Ironically, our legal troubles began when he had an attack of conscience and abruptly deleted all of his chat apps. He later told us that he felt using social media was a coping mechanism and it had been affecting his mood and ability to sleep.

Once the teenager broke free of the FBI’s calculated dragnet, Rufini notes the federal agency then assumed “he must have connected to a terror cell in real life and ‘gone dark’ ahead of some potential violent act.”

This was when the FBI built a legal case to raid the family, upon which they promptly stormed their home for purported evidence of a threat while they locked the family in a van.

There was no such plan and they had no evidence of one, but it didn’t stop them from spending two weeks fabricating a legal pretense for a search warrant of our home. At 10:00pm on a Sunday evening we were dragged out of our home at gunpoint, handcuffed and locked in a van while they searched our home for evidence of this imagined plot. Having found no such evidence, they seized my brother’s firearms and had my son hospitalized on mental health pretenses.

While Rufini said he was disappointed in his son’s “severe lack of judgement” online, he found the FBI’s actions and raid on their family and home were “very disproportionate”.

Here’s the headline on the website Catholic Vote’s report on the controversy:

As you can see from the affidavit, this case was about far, far worse things than a teenage altar boy’s “based” memes. We don’t know why authorities settled for minor charges against the kid; maybe after further investigation they determined that he wasn’t a real danger after all. The idea that the FBI entrapped this kid does not seem to be based in anything but guesswork. The fact that the FBI seems to have targeted traditionalist Catholics, while reprehensible, does not negate the allegations in this affidavit, which pointed to the real possibility of a massacre or other violence by this boy. Remember, he identified a specific local synagogue as a place he wanted to attack on a specific date, and encouraged people to firebomb a Masonic lodge. And the Rufini kid, amid posting photos of his family’s AR-15 (to which he had access) and Nazi symbols, said “I wanna kill niggers”.

You don’t think the FBI and the state police had to act in this case? Come on. Whatever else this situation is, it’s almost certainly not about the FBI picking on a poor, naive trad altar boy lured into posting far-right memes, and his family.

I don’t apologize in the least for taking down my retweet of their GiveSendGo appeal. If folks want to give money to help the Rufinis get back on their feet, fine, be my guest. Just don’t do it because I suggested it, having allowed myself to be taken in by the way the Rufini father characterized the situation. That’s the reason I removed my GiveSendGo retweet. I had not wanted to make the arrest warrant for the father public, because they have enough trouble, but I’m not going to sit back and let NETTR cretins dump on me for taking the tweet down because in their one-track minds, the only reason any conservative would reject this stuff is to get an invitation to a Georgetown cocktail party, or whatever self-justification they engage in to numb their conscience to evil. I don’t tolerate it when leftists downplay Hamas’s evil deeds on October 7 because it is inconvenient to their anti-Israel narrative, and I won’t tolerate it when rightists do the same in an effort to preserve their anti-fed narrative.

If these people want to support the Rufinis financially or otherwise, again, go for it. But they’ll need to explain why, given the information in the arrest warrant for the Rufini father — including the allegations that the Rufini kid, who had access to a small arsenal of weapons (including an AR-15 he bragged about online), cased out places for potential attack, and made specific violent threats against specific places, was nothing more than a gullible kid entrapped by the FBI. The arrest warrant said that the FBI was monitoring that Telegram account — as it should have been doing! — but it gives no reason to believe that FBI agents posted on there to goad traditionalist Catholics to express their desire to “kill niggers,” shoot up a synagogue, firebomb a Masonic lodge, or to “warn” people that the local public school around which the weird kid skulked is probably a site of “faggots raping your kids.” How can the Rufinis claim that “there was no evidence of a plan” when the affidavit submitted as part of the arrest warrant for the father quotes the juvenile saying plainly that he intended to attack a synagogue “this Saturday”?

I get it: nobody wants to believe their teenager is responsible for that kind of behavior. Plus, Jeremiah Ruffini, the kid’s father, is a convicted felon who is not supposed to possess guns. The guns in Jeremiah’s house might have belonged to his brother Jesse, who lived with them, but still, there was no indication in the family’s GiveSendGo appeal that Jeremiah is a convicted felon, and that the house was full of firearms to which the 15-year-old neo-Nazi sympathizer had easy access. Note in the affidavit that Jeremiah told investigators that he knew his son took the AR-15 up to his bedroom from time to time. Jeremiah does not come off as a particularly responsible father here.

The bottom line is that this is a much messier and darker story than the Rufinis and their online right-wing partisans have presented. Yes, political and religious conservatives, we do have enemies to the right — and some of them are armed and dangerous. Some of them are targeting our kids while we aren’t looking. It’s shameful and stupid not to recognize that, or to stay silent about it because you fear the opprobrium of the mob. You are answerable to God and to your own conscience, not to right-wing shitposters. If the lie that this was a completely innocent trad Catholic family whose son was corrupted the feds, and who was wrongly targeted by them, is to succeed in separating charitable people from their money, then let it not do so through my efforts.