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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.
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 its as bad as it looks, I have to imagine it started off at relatively small scale. Register a few extra kids who aren't actually there, have enough kids around to look legitimate. And if that passes muster, or you notice that the inspectors are lax or nonexistent, scale it up. After a year you have a hundred kids registered and you don't even bother to have them show up.
THEN, you tell your friends about it, and they also try the scam, and it presumably works for them, so they scale it up. And now there's a repeatable business model that can be transmitted easily.
Now its basically organized crime.
Which, I've pointed out before, is a feature of pretty much every group that immigrates here en masse. The Irish, the Italians (obviously), Russian, on and on. Thankfully this isn't a particularly violent mafia, but its the same flavor of "insular community develops a criminal element that springs up from their communities" type development.
Italian organized crime didn't rely on tribal loyalty among Italians (or even Sicilians) to keep things under wraps; it relied on that old standard of violence towards anyone who opened their mouth.
Presumably quite a bit of both.
Al Capone was famously very charitable and generous in his community.
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