Personally I think the US government wastes enough on nonsense so I’m not really bothered. Plus if you look at most wealthy people in the USA they got that way through scamming and crime. I wish I knew how to get money like that.
The fraud is the cover, racism is the real angle.
There was similar fraud uncovered in New York state I believe earlier this year, which was significantly larger in scope, and that story hasn’t even cracked the news. Pointing out the racism here, while correct, isn’t at the core of the issue IMO.
For over 15 years now, I have accepted the hit to my sanity and have tried to follow the white nationalist movement online. I’m talking the actual Stormfront-posting capital W capital N White Nationalists.
To these people, years ago they made the “issue” of Somali immigration into Minnesota and other places across the northern US stretching from the Cascades to the Great Lakes one of the causes they got the most worked up over. I have yet to see a White Nationalist envision a takeover of the entire USA. What they do advocate for, amongst themselves, is creating a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest, possibly reaching eastward across Minnesota and Wisconsin. The reason for this is, take a look at a map of counties in the US with >95% white concentration. If you do you will notice just how white that part of the country is (and how conservative it is, if you overlap it with a voting map). They see that area as “theirs” and the home of a future white homeland.
White Nationalists perceive the immigration of Somalis into Minnesota as the tip of the spear of their great replacement theory. They think Soros et al specifically target the whitest areas of the US and mark them for “replacement”. While this is all obviously ridiculous and gross, these people see it in terms of a life-or-death struggle.
Just like other issues that were only in the realm of furthest edges of the right have been mainstreamed into the GOP and conservative media ecosystem before, this topic and broken containment. It’s a deeply racist idea that no doubt has a ardent champion in Stephen Miller (who I am 100% is a White Nationalist based on pretty much every word out of his weasel mouth) and likely others in conservative leadership. That’s the real story behind this.
Local news covered it in MN. Multiple of the identified day cares were inspected this year. A few haven’t had licenses are not known to be operating. (All daycares are inspected annually.) No one knows what the fuck the YouTuber is on about, and they did not share any methodology. (I.E. Could have filmed over a weekend. No one knows.)
Edit: Daycares are now being broken into and records of children stolen.
I don’t really care because the govt pisses away our taxes on bombs primarily anyway.
I think the ethnicities behind the crime are why it’s been so widely covered and propagandized, more than the crime itself. I don’t think it would be hard to imagine how the media would have treated it had it been all white people. This would have been a one and done story at the national level, if not completely relegated to local news.
I don’t think it’s contradictory to both condemn the crime itself while also calling out the media’s fixation on this specific crime while conveniently ignoring many others. The crime itself is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, especially considering how much tax money gets embezzled by much more powerful (and white dominated) organizations and government agencies every single day, but the media fixation because they’re sCaRy FoReIgNeRs is systemic and much more of a threat.
I used to care but as it became a political tool, it became too much effort to care.
As far as i know, the only exposure is in Minnesota, but that can’t be the only place that these federal dollars were being misused. It smells funny.
The journalist you’re probably referencing is a YouTuber/influencer and has no journalistic credentials that I can find. It feels like an opportunistic popularity grab. Strike 2.
I read that the guy making the video was invited to produce a piece by a possible candidate for governor, opposing Gov. Walz. This tells me that it’s now a political advertisement and has lost any credibility and I don’t care enough to fact check everything,so I’ve stopped paying attention.
The whole thing bothers me. I don’t like it when people don’t follow the rules. Right now, it’s too hard to know the truth, so I’m closing my eyes. There’s enough other stuff to be upset about in life.
Fraud is bad and anyone participating in it should be forced to stop via fines or jail/prison.
Could anyone explain to me what that is and why it has to do with somalia?
This reads like it was written by ‘AI’ :-/
There’s multiple parts.
First there was a massive pandemic relief fraud. A bunch of people exploited programs meant to feed kids, because those programs had relaxed checks during the pandemic. The main organization here is “Feeding our Future” who helped various individuals fraud the government.
Basically they claimed to be serving millions of meals to kids, with fabricated invoices/etc.
In exchange for Feeding our Future helping individuals with the fraud, they required kickbacks from the individuals. A lot of this money was used to buy real estate, especially in Kenya and Turkey (which makes it very difficult to recover the money).
Not everyone involved was Somali, be the majority of the people charged were part of the same Somali-american community.
Recently it was found out that some similar fraud was happening with Somali run daycares. They were getting millions in subsides, while having few to no children present at the daycares.
Tim Walz and the Department of Education are being criticized over various parts of how they handled it. The Minnesota Department of Education had warnings about the fraud as early as 2018, but ignored them. Later on they asked the Feeding Our Future to investigate themselves for fraud (which obviously didn’t work).
When the pandemic meal fraud was discovered in 2021, the MDE decided to continue payments to the fraudsters because they claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to win in court. Tim Walz later claimed a judge forced them to continue payments, but the Judge released a statement saying that was a lie. There’s some speculation that Walz was originally trying to avoid it going to court to avoid it being a big scandal.
Finally when Walz did announce the fraud, he framed it as a success that they caught these people, even though it had gone on for years and huge amounts of money had already been stolen.
Hu, that’s massive!
I should be happy then that here in Germany we just had some crooked politicians and daughters of politicians getting bribed with millions to buy highly overpriced CoViD19 masks in the name of the state. At least she got jail time for it, but that one politician is still roaming free AND is active in politics… Oh, and there is that secretary of transport that signed a contract that will cost the federation 250 million Euros… even when the company doesn’t deliver or the state cancels the project…
Guess what… All of them linked to one particular party!
A journalist uncovered massive contracts for daycare facilities going to somalis that ended up being fraudulent. Some of them were worth billions of dollars.
Not a journalist, a YouTuber.
Ah, thank you. And now the political right puts all somalis under general suspicion…
I don’t have an opinion.
