This is a good read.
It explains why Dems are feverishly trying to gaslight the country and deploy anti-ICE agitators in Minnesota to divert our attention away from the endemic fraud & corruption that underpins their ability to cling to power in so-called Blue States.
It’s Not A Minnesota Problem, It’s A Blue State Problem
By: Ben Weingarten
January 14, 2026
The left’s dodges and diversions distract from the fact that the fraud is a feature of what we might call The Blue Model of government.
There’s a deeper, darker truth lurking beneath the Somali-dominated, multi-billion-dollar Minnesota welfare fraud schemes that have commanded the attention of federal authorities and stoked nationwide outrage.
And it may explain in part why for weeks,
Democrats and regime media have been gaslighting the country, casting critics as bigots, and shooting the messengers who sent the long-neglected story viral — and why, now, state and local leaders are trying to turn Minneapolis into a powder keg.
These dodges and diversions
distract from the fact that the fraud is a feature of what we might call The Blue Model of government. Fueled by the welfare state and increasingly open borders, it is at core about
political patronage, profiteering, and plunder. Democrats’ survival depends upon a political-business model of vote-buying via legal and illicit wealth redistribution. Suppressing the Minnesota story is critical.
Progressives’ paradigm reveals itself when one connects the dots leading to the
pilfering of an estimated $9 billion — half of the $18 billion doled out across 14 welfare programs since 2018 — and a city on the brink of insurrection.
Minnesota’s Resettlement Infrastructure and Safety Net
Start with the fact that Minnesota created one of the most
generous welfare systems in the nation. Though not unique to the North Star State, its system is marked by
woefully inadequate safeguards, particularly in its administration of federal aid-to-state programs.
Enter the
mass importation of Somali migrants, seemingly without consideration of their nature, the attendant risks, or of whether absorbing them was in America’s national interest.
Following the collapse of Mogadishu’s Marxist-Islamist Barre regime, and the subsequent tumult of
the early 1990s, the State Department prioritized the Twin Cities area for resettlement. It did so, in part, it appears, because of the state’s substantial safety net and robust refugee resettlement infrastructure — such as the extant agencies to whom the feds largely outsource resettlement.
Refugees often rely on welfare, and the Somali population has proven extraordinarily and persistently reliant upon it. According to a recent Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis, some 89 percent of Somali households with children receive some form of welfare benefit; 54 percent of Somali-led households receive food stamps; and 73 percent of such households have at least one family member on Medicaid.
The clannish population also comes from said Marxist-Islamist milieu and is concentrated in urban areas. All of these factors made it a particularly ripe voting bloc for the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to court.
State agencies, several of which helped make Minnesota the home of the Somali diaspora, have long been
ideologically committed to open borders. Their budgets have swelled in proportion to the number of foreigners relocated into the U.S. via the United Nations refugee bureaucracy, working hand in glove with Foggy Bottom. These agencies’ bent and incentive structure arguably militated against the national interest — as was clear more than 20 years ago.
They would help Minnesota become
a magnet for Somali migrants placed elsewhere in the country. The population of Somali immigrants or those with Somali ancestry in Minnesota exploded, per CIS, from more than 50,000 in 2010, to more than 115,000 in 2024 — largely
concentrated in Minneapolis, population 425,000, and the surrounding areas.
That the population swelled in part due to fraud has gone overlooked.
Thousands of Somali refugees entered the U.S. via a family reunification program that, between 2008 and 2012, the State Department had to suspend due to massive rates of fraud. The federal government never removed these individuals from the country. This immigration fraud, like the fraud that would come later, could have been anticipated given the endemic corruption in Somalia itself.
Rep. Omar’s Apparent Fraud
The Somali migrant population would prove
not only fraud-prone, but jihadist-prone. A disproportionate percentage of prosecutions brought against those
joining or attempting to join ISIS in the U.S. emanated from Minnesota and were of Somali descent. In 2016, then-State Representative-Elect Ilhan Omar would write a letter to a federal judge presiding over a case covering nine such individuals, calling for leniency in sentencing.
That Omar could rise first to the state legislature, and ultimately to the U.S. House, assuming the seat of Keith Ellison — another radical leftist and Islamist sympathizer linked to the fraud — reflected the growing political clout of this growing population.
Somali migrants enabled Omar’s ascent, first as a state representative, out of the “Little Mogadishu” community from which she hailed. Her alleged criminality failed to derail this ascent. As I detail in my book on Omar, American Ingrate, there is extensive evidence suggesting that the Muslim representative
legally married her flamboyant brother before a Christian minister — the brother a British citizen who would arrive in the U.S. in 2008, attend North Dakota State University with Omar, and then divorce her before returning to the U.K. in 2012. The associated events would potentially
implicate the congresswoman in fraud and perjury pertaining to immigration, marriage, taxes, and even potentially student loans. She of course would deny such claims.
As she sought state office in 2016,
Omar would cast as bigots those who sought to scrutinize her, covered by a protective media — a pattern that would recur at a broader scale with her involvement in the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.
Her rapid rise to the position of Rep. Ellison’s successor, after winning the 2018 election for his Twin Cities congressional seat, reflected not only the growing might of the Somali community that backed her, but her
increasing embrace by Minneapolis’ progressive activists, and ultimately the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
The
fraud scandals that would subsequently emerge, presided over by that party’s leader, Gov. Tim Walz, it turns out, would
implicate not only Omar, but several Omar associates, and a whole slew of other prominent officials — all of them Democrats or Democrat-appointed.
Feeding Our Future Fraud Scandal
This was illustrated in spades just in the
$250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scandal. That scheme saw more than 250 ostensible meal sites crop up, sponsored by the Minneapolis-based nonprofit of that name, to purportedly serve 125 million meals to poor kids unable to receive school lunch during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
The “providers” allegedly sought and received millions of dollars in reimbursement for meals they never served; the nonprofit organization allegedly claimed millions more dollars in
fraudulent administrative fees; its employees allegedly received
bribes and kickbacks from the fake vendors. A significant percentage of the stolen funds ended up laundered through shell companies, spent lavishly on houses, cars, and clothes, and remitted overseas.
Omar introduced the bill that enabled the food-related scam. She held or participated in events at the Somali-owned Safari restaurant that was allegedly Ground Zero for the fraud — including filming a video there touting the program itself. As I reported, based on a review of state and federal campaign finance filings, the
congresswoman appears to have received nearly $14,000 in campaign contributions from almost a dozen individuals prosecuted or implicated in that fraud — most coming during the 2021 primary cycle, subsequent to when Congress passed the legislation facilitating the fraud. One donor included a reported associate, a felon who is purported to have served as the “muscle” for her 2016 campaign for state office. The federal government also introduced into evidence a number of contacts between Omar’s office and those implicated in the fraud in the central Feeding Our Future case.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison likewise collected $10,000 in campaign contributions from individuals tied to the Feeding Our Future fraud. Those contributions came just days after a December 2021 meeting he took with several future defendants, who pleaded with him to help
fend off various state agencies scrutinizing their operations — with at least one participant claiming probes were rooted in racism. The audio recording suggests Ellison pledged his support.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also reportedly received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from those implicated in the fraud.
Mayor Frey’s former Senior Policy aide, Abdi Nur Salah, allegedly registered a non-profit implicated in the Feeding Our Future scandal, and was prosecuted and pled guilty to wire fraud in connection therewith.
Two other appointees, Sharmarke Issa, tabbed to chair the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, and Abdikadir Ainanshe Mohamud, assigned to the Minneapolis Community Safety Workgroup, have also pled guilty to fraud-related offenses.
The wife of a member of the city’s council, Jamal Osman, operated an allegedly
fraudulent meal site that took in $460,000 in reimbursements under the program. Osman would reportedly describe his own lobbying on behalf of the program during a June 2021 party celebrating a Feeding Our Future legal victory of the state’s education department. It had been working at the time to cease payments to the program.
Featured at that party was
State Senator Omar Fateh. Fateh reportedly told the crowd that he had
lobbied Gov. Tim Walz on behalf of the program, and denounced agencies’ scrutiny of the program. Fateh would reportedly receive
$11,000 in campaign contributions from figures tied to the scandal.
And of course, the Feeding Our Future fraud and now series of related welfare frauds would persist under the non-watchful eye of the
Walz administration — an administration that, alongside Ellison, allegedly
ignored warnings of widespread fraud, allowed it to persist, and retaliated against whistleblowers.
Minnesota Democrats’ nexus to this one fraudulent scheme is just the tip of the iceberg.
State’s Machine Politics
What emerges is a picture of Minnesota’s Blue Model: Democrats embraced the Somali population; firmly integrated community members into its political hierarchy; backed programs that would sustain the population; enabled that population to defraud said programs to further enrich it — a form of tribute; and, through negligence or malice, permitted the fraud to persist. In turn, the Somali community provide votes and campaign contributions.
Along the way, others profited pursuant to this system, including associated nonprofit organizations, accountants, lawyers, and secondary and tertiary beneficiaries of the fraud scheme.
This model represents an updated form of Tammany-style machine politics — adopted for the modern welfare state, put on steroids by the lax immigration policies that have plagued our country for decades, and facilitated by, among others, nongovernmental organizations serving as administrative state cutouts.
There remain many powerful reasons for Democrats and regime media to operate as they are today.
Democrats no doubt consider it
imperative to downplay, suppress, and divert our gaze from the mounting Minnesota mess because it could prove politically and legally catastrophic for the state’s culpable Democratic-Farmer-Labor ruling class. Efforts by embattled Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey to try and gin up a George Floyd 2.0 crisis following an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of an alleged anti-ICE instigator that sped her SUV at him may well be
part of an interference campaign — notwithstanding that the Trump administration surged ICE into Minnesota in part in response to the Democrat-driven frauds and its sanctuary policies.
For much of the
local and certainly national media, they too have an incentive to spike the scandals. This is not only on account of their partisanship, but because they
have in large part served as co-conspirators alongside Minnesota’s political class in a grand conspiracy of silence. Many chose not to pursue the various fraud threads and break the stories out of the Twin Cities box. The efforts of Nick Shirley, Chris Rufo, and Armin Rosen to bring the scandals to national attention now — building on years-long yeoman efforts of Scott Johnson and Powerline, Bill Glahn and the Center for the American Experiment, Alpha News, and others — embarrasses their media counterparts and is an indictment of said counterparts’ efforts.
But efforts to stop the bleeding regarding the Minnesota fraud also may serve a deeper purpose.
Exposing Minnesota’s model could lead to national contagion. Under legal, political, and media scrutiny, what will we find in other blue states regarding the defrauding of other government programs, and the nexus between their own political classes and the beneficiaries of those systems — native and immigrant, legal and illegal?
Such scrutiny could threaten not only Democrats’ midterm election prospects, and perhaps those of 2028 presidential contenders, but the party’s entire modus operandi.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/14...state-problem/
