Ben Weingarten writes for the Federalist about a lesson to be learned from Minnesota’s current government scandal.
There’s a deeper, darker truth lurking beneath the Somali-dominated, multi-billion-dollar Minnesota welfare fraud schemes that have commanded the attention of federal authorities and stoked nationwide outrage.
And it may explain in part why for weeks, Democrats and regime media have been gaslighting the country, casting critics as bigots, and shooting the messengers who sent the long-neglected story viral — and why, now, state and local leaders are trying to turn Minneapolis into a powder keg.
These dodges and diversions distract from the fact that the fraud is a feature of what we might call The Blue Model of government. Fueled by the welfare state and increasingly open borders, it is at core about political patronage, profiteering, and plunder. Democrats’ survival depends upon a political-business model of vote-buying via legal and illicit wealth redistribution. Suppressing the Minnesota story is critical.
Progressives’ paradigm reveals itself when one connects the dots leading to the pilfering of an estimated $9 billion — half of the $18 billion doled out across 14 welfare programs since 2018 — and a city on the brink of insurrection.
Start with the fact that Minnesota created one of the most generous welfare systems in the nation. Though not unique to the North Star State, its system is marked by woefully inadequate safeguards, particularly in its administration of federal aid-to-state programs.
Enter the mass importation of Somali migrants, seemingly without consideration of their nature, the attendant risks, or of whether absorbing them was in America’s national interest.
Following the collapse of Mogadishu’s Marxist-Islamist Barre regime, and the subsequent tumult of the early 1990s, the State Department prioritized the Twin Cities area for resettlement. It did so, in part, it appears, because of the state’s substantial safety net and robust refugee resettlement infrastructure — such as the extant agencies to whom the feds largely outsource resettlement.
