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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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https://archive.ph/IHPLW

Tim Walz isn't seeking reelection.

It's been interesting watching the reaction in my various social circles as this plays out. It seems like it's rapidly coalescing into two distinct narratives depending on tribal alliance:

  1. Walz is hoping to get out of the spotlight before he's indicted in connection to the fraud scandal
  2. Walz fears for his life because insane ultra-MAGA instigators are trying to ruin him.

I don't know if either are actually true, but it's an interesting thing to watch develop in real time.

New Nick Shirley video just dropped and it's a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LmIrwjKQQKc

This one is a long-form, extended interview with David, the older man from the previous video. Apparently he's been investigating this stuff for years, rather obsessively, to the point where he's lost friends and family because they just think he's some sort of crazy racist person for investigating.

It's a bit long and meandering, so it's hard to keep track of all the claims made in it. I think we'll need time to process this and investigate further. I'd like to see this written in text with sources, instead of just a long interview. But among the claims made:

  • That this is all organized by Somali gangs, with the gang leaders bringing retribution on any family that doesn't go along with it. Investigators like David also get threatened with violence.
  • Widespread voter fraud from families living in collective housing. One person collects the ballots, "vouches" for all the people living there with no proof, and then returns a massive ballot stack all voting the same way.
  • "This is the worst fraud in human history." He estimates that a total of $80-100 billion was stolen by fraud in Minnesota
  • "However bad you imagine it is, it's worse. He alledges that basically every social program in Minnesota is now heavily corrupted by fraud. Some of the biggest are schools that might have 10 students, but pretending to get 100 or more so that they can get massive amounts of state funding. Medical services do the same.
  • This is all protected by the government and judicial system of Minnesota. At one point, David did the work to prove that a Somali leader did $7.2 million of fraud. He was convicted unanimously by a jury, but the judge overturned the verdict and left him free to continue collecting more money. The judges are elected, probably with the help of fraudalent Somali votes.
  • This isn't just state money, it's also federal money. This increases the scale, but also increases the severity of the crimes.
  • That Somalians routinely travel back to Somali, taking large amounts of cash with them (well over the TSA limit of $10,000), and for some reason the TSA grants them an exception to this when any normal American would be arrested or stopped for questioning.

So... will this lead to anything further? Tim Walz already said he won't run for reelection, but at this point I no longer think that's enough. The feds need to come purge the entire state government of Minnesota on charges of racketeering and voter fraud.

Frankly, this is the kind of thing that would have resulted in pogroms at any other time in history. Same with the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK; the parallels are striking. Something very drastic needs to happen here, though Minnesotans are not capable of anything like an actual pogrom. Can there be some kind of polite and peaceful alternative that basically achieves the same goals without lots of violence? I can't really see a viable road back from here; the whole system is complicit, locked in, and ideologically committed to its own naivety because the alternative is too terrible to even contemplate.

The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule compared to the personal satisfaction they enjoyed ruining the children of the enemy and getting paid to do so. So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict, let alone anyone with a racism shield to deploy. The only way out is unspoken societal segregation, a hope that islands of sanity will be unmolested by the courts for the crime of being too prosperous and capable. As an overall polity there is no appetite to recognize the beast of racialized hate coming from foreign ethnics and less to address it.

Actually wait no there is one way out. Elect a capable non-scammy minority ethnic that is free to name the beast and act upon it. They will have a short but actionable runway to try and right the ship. A decisive window to act can arrest the decline. If the opportunity is squandered or fumbled (Obama capitulating to progressives after the 2nd midterms) then things get permanently worse. So, good luck with that.

The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule

They got 10+ year jail terms, eventually. (The exceptions were minor players where the only crime they could prove was consensual-looking sex with a 13-16 year old, which normally gets 5 years in England). The rapists who were not British citizens (the vast majority were) have long since been deported.

The Pakistani rape gangs scandal that Musk and right-wing X poasters latched onto is about behaviour which was allowed to continue for far too long in the 1990-2008 period with minimal accountability for the political machines that protected the rapists, not behaviour that is tolerated in 2025. I don't know what is going on between 2nd-generation Pakistanis and chavettes in 2025, but the race/immigration/crime story that right wing media in the UK are pushing nowadays is about crimes committed by more recent humanitarian-route immigrants.

So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict,

The US is not a low punishment society. You are the most punitive society in the rich world for the criminals who are actually caught and punished - the only countries with a higher incarceration rate are Bukele's El Salvador and countries in the middle of severe political repression. (The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many). You guys are also perfectly capable of punishing black criminals roughly proportionally to the number of crimes they commit. The problem is that the US is a capricious punishment society with third-world quality policing and a somewhat random judicial system such that most criminals (and particularly white-collar criminals) go unpunished. (We are still noticeably better off than you on this point in the UK, although moving in the wrong direction fast since the government decided that the criminal justice system would be shut down first as the welfare state for the old eats the economy).

But that isn't relevant here - the point in Minnesota, as in noughties Rotherham, is that the miscreants are protected by a powerful political machine. Tolerating this kind of thing was, and is, a choice.

The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many

Kinda irrelevant to your point, but most executions in the USA happen at the state level, and almost all of those are in southern red states. Federal executions are fairly rare, although Trump has often attempted to clear through the backlog, which makes it look more common.

Executions in the US are spread very unevenly, because it’s a culture wars issue(I suspect more to do with being the only western democracy that uses the death penalty rather than anything in particular about the punishment).

the only western democracy that uses the death penalty

Some of this hinges on how you define "Western": Japan and Singapore are often counted as such in other areas, but get discounted here, for example.

And Singapore executes an order of magnitude more, per capita, than the US. It is a stretch to call Singapore a democracy, but it is clearly part of "the free world" or "Western Civilisation" in a way which most dictatorships are not.