Tim Walz Is Leaving, But The Somali Fraud Scandal Is Spreading To Other States

New election dynamic will drag Democrats down, regardless

Tim Walz has dropped out of the 2026 Minnesota governor’s race and a potential historic third term as governor. “Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences”, Walz declared, self-serving to the end.

“Even as we make progress in the fight against the fraudsters, we now see an organized group of political actors seeking to take advantage of the crisis,” because the partisan politics are the most important progress Minnesota can make. Amy Klobuchar will reportedly run in place of Walz, putting a Senate seat in play when Democrats already face a tough midterm in the upper house of Congress.

The Minnesota Somali fraud bubble has now claimed its first significant political casualty. Details of the relationship between Minnesota Democrats and Somalis have begun to emerge. Journalist Armin Rosen writes that whereas Aimee Bock, the CEO of Feed our Future, “was the central node of the fraud, she was not actually its mastermind.” As I recently wrote, the insularity of Somali tribal networks served to spread the frauds. Rosen explains that clan rivalries extend even to their relative perceptions of law enforcement:

The fraud spread so widely and quickly that it appeared to have no real architect. Word of the Feeding Our Future money galloped through the Somali community, which kept the secret from non-Somali Minnesota with ironclad discipline. The clan system acted as both pathway and protection for the fraud. One Twin Cities Somali alleged to me that most of the Feeding Our Future scammers were from the Hawiye clan, while a similar fraud, run through a group called Partners in Nutrition, was a Darod grift. Upon hearing this description of the frauds, another source alleged that while the vast majority of FOF scammers were in fact Darod, most of those prosecuted have been Hawiye. It is difficult to assess such claims, though they speak to the endurance of the clans as the chief organizing social framework for Somalis 35 years into the community’s arrival in free and democratic America, as well as the ease with which the clan can become a vector of corruption.

As I also observed last week, there were many local reporters doing the same work as Nick Shirley before he went ‘viral’. One of them was Liz Collin of Alpha News, who interviewed me a couple of years ago. “In late September, Collin followed a tipster’s lead and observed a storefront adult daycare in south Minneapolis”, Rosen writes. What followed sounds very much like the activities observed at the Quality Learing Center.

There was no one behind the counter, and no one entering or leaving. She then called the daycare before a reporting visit. Thanks to the warning, the operator had been able to find “six or seven older East African women. It was a small office in a strip mall with a few chairs and tables and no TV.” The place was then empty again on several subsequent visits. The organization had received $1.2 million in public money in 2024.

Walz has resigned, but the scandal is still spreading. “Right wing influencers” are suddenly looking up public information on state websites and finding an epidemic of fraud in their own, blue states. When they knock on doors like Liz Collins, they become a campaign of “harassment” against Somalis, in the legacy media framing, which is another way of complaining, like Walz, that Republicans might benefit from exposure of Democratic Party complicity in the biggest fraud scandal the world has ever seen. But there are just too many of these “right wing influencers”, and too many of them are accredited local journalists, to stop the truth from coming out.

MASSACHUSETTS. YouTuber Mike Urban shows how easy it is to spot potential fraud, and how frighteningly widespread potential fraud is, just based on what can be gleaned from public records online. Somali names predominate in these sorts of reveals. He notes that the fraud seems to have actually choked out legitimate private daycare businesses, raising the cost of child care in Boston.

WASHINGTON. The Center Square, formerly Watchdog.org but still a production of the Franklin Center, has done some legwork on potential fraud committed through DCYF (Department of Children Youth and Family services). As conservative as some of these outlets are, they do not say much about Somali culture or its role in the scandal. They focus on the very obvious fraud.

OHIO. Josh Williams, a Republican in the Ohio state house running to unseat Democrat Marcy Kaptur in the 9th US House district seat. He is already making a campaign issue out of viral videos from Anthony Rubin of Muckraker.com that are quite similar to Shirley’s in Minnesota. We can expect demands for accountability to become a midterm refrain of the Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, seem to hope this will all just go away.

MAINE. State Republicans are making political hay out of Gateway Community Services LLC, which appears to be an empty building in the usual manner of fraudulent Somali services companies. But is it racism to notice? Plot twist, nobody cares if it is racist to notice.

IDAHO. Lawmakers are calling for “enhanced fraud prevention measures” and “heightened reviews” of past disbursements for child care are underway. The sudden interest is directly tied to potential Somali business fraud on the same model as the other states.

One resignation will not be enough political blood sacrifice to silence this scandal because it has already spread past Minnesota. To repeat what I said on New Years’ Day:

Legacy media seems determined to ignore and minimize the story even now, but I do not think they can hold out forever. Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to deflect, defame, or sputter in whataboutery. Nobody cares if you call them racist anymore. If shutting down billion-dollar schemes to defraud the taxpayer is ‘racist’, then prepare to watch a significant number of taxpayers vote like ‘racists’, and not care.