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Notes -
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.
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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