Minnesota Nuts, Democratic Party Lootership: The Coddling Of An Immigrant Generation

A study in suicidal empathy and political machinery

Tim Walz is mad that random drivers keep yelling “Retard!” at his house. Here’s an idea, maybe stop acting retarded and people won’t call you that?

It is not possible to blame the Somali diaspora entirely for the predicament they find themselves in, today. Not entirely. Just mostly, and in as collective a tribal manner as that ‘community’ displays themselves. For while a great number of Somalis surely must bear guilt for billions of dollars of alleged pure fraud, the leadership of the state of Minnesota was supposed to ensure that the incoming community got properly acclimated to American lifeways.

Instead, Somalis had the poor fortune to wind up in the Minnesota of Tim Walz and progressive Democratic rule, where everyone is so very, very nice. Like Scandinavian countries, Minnesota developed a social welfare system of high-tax socialist redistribution in a high-trust environment. I should note that I was in Minneapolis in 2011, when the Somali community was already quite visible, and spoke with homeless Black citizen residents of the city who had been displaced by the correlating rise in rents. Since then, rents have risen at 1.5 times the rate of inflation in Minneapolis. Never fear, however! Minnesota was giving out social services like candy, no questions asked, especially when the money came back as campaign cash.

So the problem is not just Walz. Rather, Walz is the walking, talking manifestation of the vulnerability that Somalis saw, and took advantage of, in Minnesota: the mandatory “nice”, the socially-enforced assumption that everyone has the best intentions, and no group of people should ever be distrusted about anything they do, because everyone is an individual blank slate who needs the state in order to thrive. It works fine when 90 percent of your population is Scandinavian. It becomes a problem as soon as a tribal society with very different values arrives in great numbers. Just ask the Scandinavians living with the consequences of mass immigration in Scandinavia, right now.

As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reminded Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation yesterday, “the initial fraud was discovered by the IRS, for which I’m the acting commissioner”. Minnesota fraud was uncovered as tax fraud. “This was not an endogenous thing that the state of Minnesota decided. We had to go in and clean up the mess for them, and this is part of the continued cleanup.” The Trump administration is not doing racism, or anti-immigrant fascism, or Islamophobia, it is investigating criminal tax evasion.

“A lot of money has been transferred from the individuals who committed this fraud, including those who donated to the … governor, donated to Represent[ative] Omar, donated to A.G. Ellison”, Bessent continued. “But they’ve been transferred to something called MBSs”, or money service businesses. According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), the definition of an MBS “includes any person doing business, whether or not on a regular basis or as an organized business concern”, transferring amounts of more than $1,000/day, “regardless of the amount of money transmission activity.”

MBSs are “wire transfer organizations that are outside the regulated banking system”, Bessent explained. Of course, “that money has gone overseas, and we are tracking that to both the Middle East and Somalia to see what the uses of that have been.” Because we have no idea, which ought to terrify any taxpaying Minnesotan.

This is a partial accounting by one group of terrified Minnesota public servants showing how the Somali ‘community’ bilked the taxpayer out of a billion dollars. As the old saying goes, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money. These people will probably appear before Congress in 2026

“Okay, but you have no evidence of that money being used to fuel terrorism, which is what some conservative writers are alleging”, Brennan challenged, because it is impossible for a good-hearted liberal to believe that Somalia might have a wee bit of terrorism going on. It would be terrible if conservatives were right about anything, now, would it not? A catastrophe.

“That’s why it’s an investigation”, Bessent replied, because he is a killer. “We started it last week. We’ll see where it goes.” Then he pointed to the dissembling of Democrats. “Representative Omar tried to downplay it, said ‘oh…it was very tough to know how this money should be used. She was gaslighting the American people.” Then, in a sound bite for the ages, Bessent launched his bid to remain Treasury Secretary in the J.D. Vance administration: “You know, when you come to this country, you’ve got to learn which side of the road to drive on, you’ve got to learn to stop at stop signs, and you’ve got to learn not to defraud the American people.”

Margaret Brennan in the aftershock of her assassination

With the retirement of Nancy Pelosi and the broader diminishment of Democratic Party leadership recognizable enough on a national level for Republican ad programmers to demonize, this is a godsend. It is now destiny that in 2026, GOP spots will feature the face of Tim Walz as a public whipping-boy and use the profiteering of Ilhan Omar as an election issue.

What did Omar know about the fraud and when did she know it? A campaign staffer was responsible for organizing a massive scam, Feed Our Future. Omar “held parties at one of the key restaurants named in the fraud, knew one of its now-convicted owners”, and “even introduced the bill that led to $250 million in fraud”, but claims ignorance. A top aide defended Feeding Our Future on camera in 2021 and adminished state agencies for asking too many questions out of ignorance. Ignorance is the single word that explains her scandal. Democrats plead ignorance of wrongdoing. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” Omar says. How lawless has she been, though?

How did the personal wealth of Ilhan Omar increase by tens of millions of dollars as a congressional representative? The resistance of Minnesota Democrats to any form of accountability is striking, and bound to be unpopular outside Minnesota. Acts of resistance, and words of resistance, thus provide campaign fodder for the Republican Party just as Democrats thought they were ascendant with the socialist youth vanguard. Tim Walz is not even ashamed, he is still running for re-election.

As Bessent noted, Minnesota did not uncover the fraud themselves. Nor were they ignorant of the frauds. Attorney General Keith Ellison met with Somali fraudsters knowing who they were and accepted campaign cash. Democrats have an interest in their ignorance. “This administration is lying” about “our Somali community members”, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty says. “We stand side by side with our neighbors of Somali descent.” Moriarty specifically denies the president’s statement that “roving Somali gangs” terrorize residents. Which is weird, because there are Minnesotans having that ‘lived experience’, as the kids say.

It is important to note that, within Minnesota, resistance remains popular. Indeed, Trump ‘resistance’ being all the rage, Democrats have done their best to make the scandal about Trump. But the Minnesota Somali fraud bubble was a direct result of Minnesota policy and ‘Minnesota Nice’, not the feelings of Donald Trump, or the feelings of Democrats about what words he uses to describe Somalis. The Minesota Somali fraud bubble is tax fraud and public service fraud and political corruption by Democratic Party frauds. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the problem is fraud turtles all the way down.

Christopher Rufo was the original journalist who broke the story, which was then confirmed by The New York Times, along with Ryan Thorpe at the Manhattan City Journal. They allege that the fraud associated with the Somali diaspora has funded the terrorist group Al Shabab. Per the exchange with Bessent, we do not know yet whether this is even true, because it is just now being investigated by the people who are best equipped to find out.

The fraud itself, however, is certain. Scores of people had already been charged and convicted while the local media had largely ignored the developing story. “Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state’s Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud”, the NYT reported. “Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota” (emphasis added).

“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” Joseph H. Thompson, the federal prosecutor who has overseen the fraud cases said in an interview. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.” He is right, and the toxic legacy of George Floyd continues. “This was a huge part of the problem…Allegations of racism can be a reputation or career killer.”

A professor at Macalester College, Dr. Ahmed Samatar, told the NYT that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread” and “Minnesota … proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.” Any Somali could plead weakness, due to poverty, due to ‘structural barriers’, while it was racist, ‘right wing’, and not-nice to ask questions.

“Every time there was a terrorist attack … as investigators we would get together the day after the attack and we would think, we would ponder amongst ourselves: how much Minnesota taxpayer dollars was being used to fund that war?” Scott Stillman testified in 2018 before the Minnesota state senate. A DHS fraud investigator turned whistleblower, Stillman may yet be vindicated by FINCEN investigators if they find a threat to national security.

As Jason Riley observed in an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal last week, Somalis are not the first immigrant group to develop a reputation for lawless behavior. Whereas those prior waves of immigrants developed better relations with law enforcement and “confronting the problem rather than ignoring it or pretending that anyone who speaks out is acting in bad faith”, as he puts it, the Somalis have yet to police themselves, in America, because Minnesota has yet to police them. Somalis did not have to be geniuses at fraud. They merely had to be capable of coordinated effort — easy, for a tribal people — and form patronage relationships with the local party in power.

Something has changed, though. ICE raids have begun in Minneapolis, and the Somalis are complaining, and the mayor of Minneapolis — who won re-election in his city full of Somalis by playing on intra-community divisions — is telling his police not to cooperate. But no one is organizing nationwide ‘No Kings’ rallies just yet.

As badly as Democrats may deplore Trump’s words, they cannot defend the findings of an investigation that has not been finished, that has already proven damning to dozens of people. Suddenly, the dynamics of resistance have changed. Judge Sarah West, who overturned a jury verdict against two Somalis accused of defrauding Medicaid of $7.2 million in November, has attracted the wrong kind of attention for whining about “reasonable inferences” the jury should have made. Jurors express confusion at her choice, but it was a perfect manifestation of ‘Minnesota nice’. Minnesota was too nice, too welcoming, too happy to smash all boundaries.

In psychology, there is a concept called ‘enclothed cognition’, related to the social science concept of ‘cultural reclamation’. Visit Namibia, where Germans carried out a genocide in 1904, and you might see Herero men and women wearing the costumes of their conquerors mroe than a century ago. The Namibian father who famously named his son Adolf Hitler Uunona probably knew nothing more than the power of the name itself. Now a successful politician, Adolf Uunona has dropped his middle name, but kept the power.

To show the world that they were a conquered people, in 2024 Minnesota too put on the clothing of their conquerors. The state flag — now deemed racist because it featured a white farmer and a Native American who were not killing each other — was replaced with a new, less offensive flag that people noticed just happens to resemble the flag of Somalia. Tim Walz introduced it himself, proudly switching out the old for the new, bending the knee. He wanted us to see who is really in charge of Minnesota and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, better known as Democrats. He cannot help himself. His urge to confess was too strong.