By Jarrett Stepman, Op-ed contributor Thursday, January 01, 2026Then Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, speaks during a debate at the CBS Broadcast Center on Oct. 1, 2024, in New York City. This is expected to be the only vice presidential debate of the 2024 general election. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Minnesota Somali fraud scandal somehow manages to get worse and worse as the legacy media mostly ignore the issue and Democrats shrug. At the heart of this scandal lies the larger crisis facing the West.
On Friday, independent journalist Nick Shirley released a 42-minute YouTube documentary detailing his efforts to uncover what exactly is going on in Minnesota and how a ring of mostly Somali scammers squelched billions of dollars from taxpayers under the noses of Gov. Tim Walz and state authorities.
Vice President JD Vance praised the video on X and wrote that Shirley did more important journalism than all the recent Pulitzer Prize winners.
The video is certainly worth watching. Among the big findings uncovered is a series of so-called daycare centers and other facilities being funded in the state that have no children in them at all.
In one of the most remarkable scenes, Shirley arrived at a location called the “Quality Learing Center.” Yes, “Learing,” which was obviously misspelled. The center had been licensed for 99 children, but none were there. In front of the building, a woman kept shouting, “Don’t open up, ICE.” Shirley informed her that he was merely a journalist, but she ignored him and kept shouting.
Amazing.
This is just the latest in what is without a doubt, one of the biggest scandals in American history.
According to some estimates, Somali scammers have taken more money from taxpayers in the last few years than the entire gross domestic product of Somalia.
Also, according to the New York Post, the stolen money “accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018.”
It wasn’t long ago that Walz was bragging about how he was sending more money to these childcare programs in the vice-presidential debate against Vance.
Walz and most Democrats seem to be, at most, slightly bothered that they have to talk about this story at all, and have tried to make this out to be a “bipartisan” issue that must simply be managed.
But it wasn’t Republicans who ran the state of Minnesota; it wasn’t Republicans creating these massive entitlement programs. And while there are Republicans who embrace the kind of open-ended immigration that enabled the Somali fraud scandal, they are at least much less prominent in the age of President Donald Trump.
No, this is a problem created by the Left, one that Democrats are apparently unwilling to confront with any level of urgency.
Let’s take a step back here and get back to the rub of this Somali scammer problem at its source. It’s not just about a broken immigration system with perverse incentives, though we’ve certainly had that.
What the Somali fraudsters did was a matter of greed and crookedness, a replication of the kind of schemes that allow one to get ahead in their homeland. It’s immoral, but easy to understand in a basic sense. It’s the kind of corruption that ruins countries the world over, but it isn’t remarkable.
Now, let’s say you really are an old-school New Deal Democrat who believes strongly in the power of government and a robust welfare state. You should be the most enraged by what’s happened, right? After all, these apparently well-meaning programs have become the means by which our modern-day Visigoths have essentially sacked the capital city and turned their programs into a complete mockery of the whole system.
But outrage hasn’t materialized on the Left. If anything, they’re miffed they have to talk about the Somali fraud story at all. A few legacy media outlets have covered it, including CBS News under new management, but they hardly seem to want to make this story part of the “national conversation.” Why is that?
When Fox News columnist David Marcus went to Minnesota to find out what the feeling was in the state about the whole mess, I think he got to the heart of the matter. He found mostly apathy and indifference from the local liberal voters.
“It’s hard to care much about it when ICE is disappearing Somalis on the streets,” said “Anne,” who David described as a white woman in her mid-30s working in tech. Other people he spoke to had similar feelings.
“Just as neat, necktied Portlanders are happy to step over dead junkies en route to brunch, Minnesotans don’t feel the impact of the fraud connected to the community,” Marcus wrote.
I imagine this apathetic attitude is common among the Democratic Party’s most engaged base voters.
New Deal liberalism is dead. In its place is a warped ideology, a new religion. Many blue state programs have been converted into quasi-religious enterprises, fueling what appears to be virtually unmitigated graft, the depth of which we are only beginning to understand.
The government is no longer there to give all Americans a leg up. It’s there to enact an identitarian form of social justice, to sort out the winners and losers of its largesse based on a mystical hierarchy of oppression only fully understood in the inner sanctums of the federally funded ivory tower.
That money was siphoned away by illegal means wasn’t really so terrible, according to this thinking. It was just the product of a mandated secular tithe to soothe the modern liberal conscience, made no less noble by its seedy application. What the oppressed groups do with the money justly given isn’t the biggest problem, after all.
This whole scheme will eventually come crashing down at some point. But for now, it can be safely ignored.
The real problem right now, so this thinking goes, is that bigoted Americans noticed the scandal and might not be so keen about bringing in waves of more Somalis, who are the real victims here.
At worst, this is a temporary embarrassment, a story that needs to just go away so they can keep up the narrative that all people brought to America are really much better than the current, unworthy occupants of our stolen land. These unfortunate, oppressed people need to be protected from the meanies on the Right by any means necessary, even if it means the big government programs they created go bust.
It’s that pervasive mentality, the one exhibited by the woman standing in front of the “Learning” center, shouting about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the real, existential problem we now face.
This toxic, civilizationally suicidal impulse of misguided, self-destructive “empathy” mixed with self-loathing is costing us far more than the billions of dollars already pillaged from state coffers. In the end, it may cost us everything.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
