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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Yes he did provide enough proof provided your prior beliefs are well-calibrated. If you are "anti-racist" then he didn't nearly provide enough proof. If your priors are well-adjusted he provided enough proof for systematic, mass fraud to a high enough confidence for this reaction and subsequent investigations.

The people complaining he wasn't rigorous enough won't even care that his methods were effective in bringing public attention and reform to an important issue.

Whether the evidence is sufficient is entirely dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People and deserve to have the Feds descend on them and investigate all their wheelings and dealings with an eye towards making heads roll. Of someone goes out next week and produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas, I'm skeptical that the Trump administration would respond with similar vigor, and I suspect we'd hear about how Christians were being railroaded for political purposes.

  • -10

dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People

I'm not sure how to define "Bad People," but here's an analogy: In the United States, driving at 75 miles per hour on the highway is against the law, but normally it's not thought of as an immoral act. If you get away with it, none of your neighbors will think any less of you over it.

For people from certain subcultures, engaging in massive fraud against the government is perceived the same way. It sucks if you get caught, but otherwise it's nothing to be ashamed of.

If "Bad People" includes "people who don't see anything fundamentally wrong with engaging in massive fraud against the government," then yeah, generally speaking Somali-Americans are Bad People. (Hopefully the next generation will see things differently, and prosecutions and jail time will hopefully change their views.)

Pretty clearly someone in this situation is a brazen fraudster -- either this Youtuber Nick Shirley or the Somalis he was investigating. Given my prior probability assessment that Somalis are "Bad People" as you put it, I am pretty sure it's the Somali day care center operators.

Those subcultures evidently include the president. He has no problem pardoning fraudsters like Joe Milton, George Santos, and others, relieving them of even the obligation to pay the money back. And when he inevitably pardons the DiBiase brothers a few months from now, exactly zero people will be surprised. But I doubt Nick Shirley or anyone else cares about this, because they're less concerned about fraud than they are the fact that Somalis may be the ones doing it.

  • -11

Are you less concerned about the fraud then the possibility that people might be racist?

No. I think that the president's racism and the racism of most of his supporters is beyond a mere possibility at this point. I'm concerned that, guilty or not, in a free society we shouldn't be targeting criminal investigations based on race, especially when we've already shown a willingness to excuse the exact same behavior when it's done by someone we like.

  • -14

I can see the discomfort around this particular case since it feels far enough out on a tree branch and blatant enough that it might actually move the Overton Window back to allowing for explicit judgement of immigrants on race/country of origin.

Also a decent chunk of the discomfort/reaction here seems to be along the lines of shock at how blatant, stupid and low-grade this fraud is. An organized sophisticated fraudster is one thing, but this feels like essentially willful ignorance in the favor of people who don't even present a real bull case for why they're in the country.

Something can be both racist and true.

There is a sub-population of white people in my country, called Travellers (other names were used in the past and, via the euphemism treadmill, are now considered slurs). They do have a worse life than settled people. They are victims of discrimination. They do have a reputation as criminals, scammers, and the likes. This is unfair because indeed not all Travellers, and judging someone solely on their ethnic/racial/outcast background means you can condemn someone who is not guilty.

But at the same time, it is true that Irish Travellers do engage in welfare fraud, theft, petty and large-scale crime, both here in Ireland and in countries where they've immigrated. Construction fraud is an old reliable (they'll turn up, often to the homes of the elderly, and through a mixture of persuasion and coercion get them to agree to unwanted home renovations, spend lots of money on this, and when they've got as much as they can squeeze out, then decamp leaving shoddy work and often need of proper rebuilding behind).

That latter scam happened to a family member of mine. I've got war stories from a job about Traveller scams.

At the same time, I have known since childhood respectable Travellers, many of them settled.

So yeah: it's unfair to judge all Somali-Americans as scammers and low-IQ thieves, but at the same time, scams and crime are likely to happen in the Somali-American communities. Any group which is set apart from the mainstream of society will develop a "them and us" mindset where 'we' are the only real people, and it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all.

The key thing to understand is that it really can be any group. I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic cheating, fraud, and petty theft were. If you weren't trying to game the system in innumerable little ways you were viewed as a rube or a mug. If you called out a fellow student for shoplifting from the corner store or rifling through an unattended bag you'd get a reputation as a scold. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of available "opportunities".

In my experience "it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all." describes the attitude our elite just as much as it does our underclass.