The billion-dollar fraud in a Democratic utopia

The real world has, once again, intruded on the utopia that progressives fancifully believe in.

The Department of Justice alleges that in Minnesota a group including many Somali-Americans have perpetrated a massive $300 million fraud scheme by accepting pandemic relief funds under the guise of feeding low-income children. The fraudsters claimed to have churned out 18 million meals for their communities. In reality, many of their distribution sites served no meals at all. In other cases, programs for the homeless and autistic children were raided. Prosecutors allege that the total cost of all the various schemes to steal taxpayer money is in excess of $1 billion.

More disturbing still is the allegation one foreign counterterrorism source made to the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo: “The largest funder of al-Shabaab” – a Somali terror organization – “is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

“According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of ‘hawalas,’ informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of al-Shabaab,” reported Rufo and Ryan Thorpe in City Journal. Just one hawala network, a former federal Joint Terrorism Task Force member told the pair, had sent $20 million back home in just one year.

All this happened under the less-than-watchful eye of Governor Tim Walz, the man Democrats spent last year trying to sell as positive masculinity personified – competence, wisdom and folksy, plain-spoken charm all wrapped inside of a face that could have belonged to anyone’s dad.

As it turned out, though, it was the unflattering portrait Republicans painted of Walz that proved the more faithful rendition. The governor is a blubbering buffoon who, like his running mate last year, has fallen backwards into his station in life through some combination of self-indulgent fabulism and dumb luck.

This incident is yet another reminder that the Democratic bench remains starved for both superficial talent and governing capacity. Hence why Kamala Harris felt compelled to turn to Walz to provide a lunchpail-and-hardhat aesthetic instead of picking someone with an actual lunchapail-and-hardhat approach to delivering results. Americans saw the distinction, and their suspicions have been confirmed now.

At this point, Walz has not only been effectively exiled from national politics, but could lose his position in St. Paul come next year’s midterms.

Then there’s the matter of Minnesota’s out-of-control welfare system. The Census Bureau’s most recent Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances found that in 2023, Minnesota spent an average of $46,000 on each resident in poverty. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the state’s welfare spending has skyrocketed by 299 percent since 1990.

In other words, the state has been on a glide path toward the kind of sweeping, Scandinavian-style system that progressives have for years touted as a panacea to all of the United States’ ills. The problem, for its proponents, is that this kind of arrangement depends on exceptionally high-levels of social trust that mass immigration of the unassimilated variety undermines, to say nothing of the scandal unfolding in Minnesota.

And finally, of course, there are the larger questions about American immigration policy raised by this episode. To hear a Democrat discuss immigration is to hear a child discuss their favorite ice cream shop. Pick a flavor, any flavor – there are no wrong choices!

That is a self-evident lie betrayed in dramatic fashion by the Somali fraud scandal. President Trump was wrong to paint with a broad brush when he declared that Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” But he was on surer footing when he lambasted Representative Ilhan Omar, the America-bashing, Somali-born congresswoman and her “friends” for not being “people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Blanket exclusionary immigration bans based on race, ethnicity, or religion are indeed un-American. But so too are naive, permissive policies that allow for the admission of those with not a respect for the United States, but a resentment for it. And it is axiomatic that many of those fueled by such resentment come from particular regions of the world tainted by the twin maladies of Islamism and historical revisionism.

In myriad areas, Democrats’ unwillingness to engage with the world continues to be not just a political anchor tied around their ankles, but a massive liability to the citizens they profess to serve. Until they admit to the hard truths staring them in the face, we’ll all continue to pay a staggering price.