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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
I've been ignoring this for one huge reason: This video was posted on December 26th. If anyone approached my children's preschool today, they would find 0 children there. Not 0 people, because it's also a Lutheran church and there's always some kind of social happening somewhere. But 0 preschool-aged children. They're all home for winter break.
If a stranger tried to go to my child's preschool during a business day, they would not be let into any classroom. They can call the office or send an email to schedule a walkthough. But if you don't have the phone app for parents or an appointment, you're not getting through the double doors.
The fact that it's a 23 year old doing this "investigative journalism" makes my eyes roll so hard. He has no idea what "normal" would look like in the first place. I'm very tired of this genre of "Watch me make unreasonable demands of people and watch as they're weirdly defensive for no reason."
I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch . I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing. There's enough journalism indicating that this kind of fraud is rampant. I'm just perpetually annoyed that this is what makes people pay attention and become outraged, when this sort of thing has been reported on for a while now across America:
https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-they-did-it-minneapolis-kare-11-team-uncovers-medicaid-fraud-in-peer-recovery-services/
https://kstp.com/tracking-your-tax-dollars/whistleblower-minnesotas-child-care-assistance-program-has-fraud-cases-dating-back-12-years/
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/09/17/a-former-autism-center-employee-tried-to-report-fraud-to-the-state-nobody-responded/
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In a hopeful-ish development, there appears to be an actual constituency and awareness within the left for the proposition that "allowing fraud undermines the support for the social programs we like".
Sure. In isolation, some few people will be able to grasp the problem. But at someone point, if you actually want to change anything, you have to look at cause and effect. And once that happens, I predict that the overwhelming consensus position will be that infinity fraud is preferable to giving Trump an anti-immigration news cycle.
Or, frankly, telling a brown person "no". After all, the progressives in Tim Walz' government have been getting whistleblower reports about this for years and actively quashing them.
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It's a little difficult to comment with confidence yet, just because there's something like (im)plausible deniability for at least some of the locations, still. Especially near the holidays you'd expect a child care business to be very feast-or-famine, it's not always obvious how closely a given 'business' is tied to a specific number of hours, and a number of violations during an inspection can 'just' point to a small and new business. Even the multitude of businesses with a shared address could mean that the owners are operating out of their homes and have an office park PO box to handle mail -- that's not even particularly unusual for actually-legit service-oriented small businesses.
But there's a lot of stuff that stinks to high heaven. At minimum, compliance had to have completely skipped most of the steps and processes that a normal child care agency had to go through. Even where it's 'real' in the sense that they're doing child care, some of it's probably not real in the sense of paying the claimed fees that justify the various grants and subsidies, and most of it's almost certainly not 'real' in the sense of complying with the long array of standards and regulations.
There's a non-zero chance Shirley ends up facing charges, here, which will be one of the funniest possible endings. ((Of course he's serious, and stop calling him Surely.)) There's a lot of rules about creeps filming kids, with reason.
There's also a >95% chance that there's some org or orgs has been actively farming these businesses or 'businesses' up in exchange for a cut, and is totally within the bounds of the law. Probably has extensive documentation that they cleanly and clearly described each and every regulatory requirement (to people who didn't understand them). The really fun question is how many of them are making political donations. But at best a bunch of particularly shameless small fry might fry; none of the people in the government who should have noticed that Line Went Up will lose their jobs.
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My main question is how the hell did they pull this off? I work in a childcare service that receives government funding (along with charging parents fees) and it is one massive pain in the backside keeping track of all the paperwork (needing to be filed online through the national service provider portal for Early Years Programmes) to receive said funding.
It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.
There must be more to the story than this. Otherwise it sounds like a counterpart to Rotherham: people had suspicions stuff was going on, but some people higher up the food chain shut down any awkward questions because that would sound like racism.
Doesn't reflect well on Governor Tim either, the man put forward as part of the Dream Team to save the nation from Orange Man Bad, much lauded for being the progressive governor of a well-run state.
If regulators are willing to turn a blind eye (potentially because of some greased palms) it's incredibly easy. My goto example is a green energy scandal. A company was (on paper) the second largest producer of biodiesel in the US. They were producing 0 gallons and just making numbers up in a spreadsheet to sell to other companies as green energy credits. The EPA had actually inspected their facilities and saw it was obvious they were producing nothing and did... precisely jack shit about it.
he only reason they were caught is because they were parking their sports cars all over their neighborhood, pissing off local families. The local families thought they were a drug dealer, and this triggered an investigation by local LEO that ended up blowing the whole thing up:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/owner-clean-green-fuel-sentenced-over-12-years-scheme-violate-epa-regulations-and-sell-9
An episode of the TV series American Greed covers the scandal in detail.
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I was wondering about this, thanks. I only found one license that didn't have a record of a violation. There also appears to be an increase in recorded violations the past two years compared to 2022-2023, although that's a glancing judgment. The licenses suggest they receive regular inspections if one doesn't think they are fraudlent. MN DHS claims it has categories of violations with different severity, and one could infer this from the descriptions of the violations on the licenses. It does appear like inspectors are liberal in documenting violations, but individual remedies are possibly unverified and consequences lax.
The public part of these inspections look like they are as well documented or better than food safety inspections. That doesn't mean they are taken seriously. It would make sense to me that the inspectors are cover your ass on the documentation, but lax on enforcement until a problem becomes a risk. I did not see a "center is registered for 90 kids and only 3 are present" violation.
As @hydroacetylene says this is the normalized, machine politics type of fraud. Yeah, if you really really want to you can technically call this fraud, but this is the cost of doing business. There might be more licensed daycare slots in Somali run childcare businesses than there are small Somali children in the Twin Cities* area. Maybe that could be improved, but mostly it's a good thing.
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IIRC there was a Michigan scandal where a low income daycare scheme got shut down because some native blacks were just registering each others children and collecting paychecks. It happens pretty regularly in the US and the answer is often ‘corrupt machine politics’.
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What boggles my mind about this is the numbers. Minnesota only has about 90,000 Somalis, less than 2% of the state's population. And yet they've seemingly managed to embezzle at least $8 billion. Somalia's GDP is only $12 billion. If we assume that all the fraud was done by Somalis, that's $880,000 dollars per person. Just absolutely industrial levels of fraud.
Let it never be said that American immigrants aren't productive at least...
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The most depressing part is realizing this will make no difference. Everyone who mattered was aware this was going on and was fine with it, and that will remain true.
I know it feels good to blackpill, but it does look like roughly 90 people from multiple states are facing charges so far.
You can argue that those 90 people don't matter because the Democrats/Illuminati/Jews/WEF/Rosthschilds/Saurian Aliens from Zeta Reticuli aren't catching a RICO rap, but I'll take whatever wins I can get right now.
While you hang those 90 pickpockets, are another 900 working the crowd watching the executions?
Would you prefer 990 and no show?
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Are such investigations downstream of DOGE etc. querying of government spending? That is, would they be happening if Trump wasn't in office and it was President Kamala and VP Tim?
I have a depressing notion this is so, and I would like to be proven wrong (honestly!)
I've seen Elon Musk making some noises that it is downstream of DOGE investigations, but the man is unashamed about self-aggrandizement.
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Assuming a judge doesn't simply throw out their convictions. It does however seem to be a stake through the heart of the "fraud is so miniscule it's not worth enforcing" argument that's been made about all kinds of welfare programs.
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I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.
These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.
Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.
We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.
I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.
Kindof hard to stomach honestly.
This never happens. If it does, it occurs only in insignificant amounts. Even if the amounts are significant, why do you care so much about what a small fraction of Somali immigrants are doing when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?
It’s called Doing the Bare Minimum in holding up your end of the Social Contract. Paying a lot of taxes just means you’re privileged enough to exploit societal inequities.
Something to cheer you up! The average American’s lifetime taxes paid is $525K, in which case the $8B would be more than the lifetime tax output of at least 15,000 people. MN is a bit higher but still under $600K per person. Highest by state is NJ at almost $1M. *grumpy @The_Nybbler noises*
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Not alone that, this is money supposedly going to the needy, and this means the needy are left unserved and in want, while some people are enriching themselves hand over fist. It's screwing everybody over - the taxpayers, the honest people working in these fields, the people who really do need and deserve the services.
I like the government to fund some welfare services, and I generally dislike bureaucracy. I am also fine with some immigration.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to welfare fraud is effectively steering us towards an equilibrium with less welfare spending and more red tape. (And yes, red tape can very much prevent welfare from reaching the needy, because the needy often are not great at jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy.) If the perps are immigrants, it will also foster an anti-immigrant sentiment as surely as thunder follows lightning.
I wish I could blame some Ayn Rand fans who were working as moles to achieve that outcome, but in all likelihood the officials who turned a blind eye were probably SJ people who failed to think of the consequences. After all, Uncle Sam has plenty of money, and if the Somali skim a bit to keep their relatives from starvation, what is the harm?
Except that the taxpayers and voters feel very differently (I imagine). And sending money to a failed state through intransparent channels is not necessarily net positive.
In short, lawfulness is (at least) instrumentally useful. Even if you feel your cause is good, breaking laws to further it will generally generate a backslash. I imagine SBF did not donate a lot of money to EA in 2025.
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