(Daily Signal)—The Minnesota Somali fraud scandal somehow manages to get worse and worse as the legacy media mostly ignore the issue and Democrats shrug. At the heart of this scandal lies the larger crisis facing the West.
On Friday, independent journalist Nick Shirley released a 42-minute YouTube documentary detailing his efforts to undercover what exactly is going on in Minnesota and how a ring of mostly Somali scammers squelched billions of dollars from taxpayers under the noses of Gov. Tim Walz and state authorities.
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
We ALL… pic.twitter.com/E3Penx2o7a
— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) December 26, 2025
Vice President JD Vance praised the video on X and wrote that Shirley did more important journalism than all the recent Pulitzer Prize winners.
This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes. https://t.co/Ip6f9IedjL
— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 27, 2025
The video is certainly worth watching. Among the big findings uncovered is a series of so-called day care centers and other facilities being funded in the state that have no children in them at all.
In one of the most remarkable scenes, Shirley arrived at a location called the “Quality Learing Center.” Yes, “Learing,” which was obviously misspelled. The center had been licensed for 99 children, but none were there. In front of the building, a woman kept shouting, “Don’t open up, ICE.” Shirley informed her that he was merely a journalist, but she ignored him and kept shouting.
Amazing.
This is just the latest in what is without a doubt one of the biggest scandals in American history.
Somalians in Minnesota have stolen more taxpayer dollars than what the Lehman Brothers lost in 2008 which triggered the Great Financial Crisis pic.twitter.com/7m7PAy7wrO
— OkinawaMoongazer (@joeybeastmarket) December 29, 2025
According to some estimates, Somali scammers have taken more money from taxpayers in the last few years than the entire gross domestic product of Somalia.
Also, according to the New York Post, the stolen money “accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018.”
It wasn’t long ago that Walz was bragging about how he was sending more money to these childcare programs in the vice-presidential debate against Vance.
Walz and most Democrats seem to be, at most, slightly bothered that they have to talk about this story at all and have tried to make this out to be a “bipartisan” issue that must simply be managed.
But it wasn’t Republicans who run the state of Minnesota, it wasn’t Republicans creating these massive entitlement programs. And while there are Republicans who embrace the kind of open-ended immigration that enabled the Somali fraud scandal, they are at least much less prominent in the age of President Donald Trump.
No, this is a problem created by the Left, one that Democrats are apparently unwilling to confront with any level of urgency.
Let’s take a step back here and get back to the rub of this Somali scammer problem at its source. It’s not just about a broken immigration system with perverse incentives, though we’ve certainly had that.
What the Somali fraudsters did was a matter of greed and crookedness, a replication of the kind of schemes that allow one to get ahead in their homeland. It’s immoral, but easy to understand in a basic sense. It’s the kind of corruption that ruins countries the world over, but it isn’t remarkable.
Now let’s say you really are an old school New Deal Democrat, who believes strongly in the power of government and a robust welfare state. You should be the most enraged by what’s happened, right? After all, these apparently well-meaning programs have become the means by which our modern-day Visigoths have essentially sacked the capital city and turned their programs into a complete mockery of the whole system.
But outrage hasn’t materialized on the Left. If anything, they’re miffed they have to talk about the Somali fraud story at all. A few legacy media outlets have covered it, including CBS News under new management, but they hardly seem to want to make this story part of the “national conversation.” Why is that?
When Fox News columnist David Marcus went to Minnesota to find out what the feeling was in the state about the whole mess, I think he got to the heart of the matter. He found mostly apathy and indifference from the local liberal voters.
“It’s hard to care much about it when ICE is disappearing Somalis on the streets,” said “Anne,” who David described as a white woman in her mid-30s working in tech. Other people he spoke to had similar feelings.
“Just as neat, necktied Portlanders are happy to step over dead junkies en route to brunch, Minnesotans don’t feel the impact of the fraud connected to the community,” Marcus wrote.
I imagine this apathetic attitude is common among the Democratic Party’s most engaged base voters.
New Deal liberalism is dead. In its place is a warped ideology, a new religion. Many blue state programs have been converted into quasi-religious enterprises, fueling what appears to be virtually unmitigated graft the depth of which we are only beginning to understand.
The government is no longer there to give all Americans a leg up. It’s there to enact an identitarian form of social justice, to sort out the winners and losers of its largesse based on a mystical hierarchy of oppression only fully understood in the inner sanctums of the federally funded ivory tower.
That money was siphoned away by illegal means wasn’t really so terrible according to this thinking. It was just the product of a mandated secular tithe to soothe the modern liberal conscience made no less noble by its seedy application. What the oppressed groups do with the money justly given isn’t the biggest problem, after all.
This whole scheme will eventually come crashing down at some point. But for now, it can be safely ignored.
The real problem right now, so this thinking goes, is that bigoted Americans noticed the scandal and might not be so keen about bringing in waves of more Somalis, who are the real victims here.
At worst, this is a temporary embarrassment, a story that needs to just go away so they can keep up the narrative that all people brought to America are really much better than the current, unworthy occupants of our stolen land. These unfortunate, oppressed people need to be protected from the meanies on the Right by any means necessary even if it means the big government programs they created go bust.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says all of Boston’s accomplishments are thanks to Somalians pic.twitter.com/m8TKofpMfp
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 23, 2025
It’s that pervasive mentality, the one exhibited by the woman standing in front of the “Learning” center, shouting about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the real, existential problem we now face.
This toxic, civilizationally suicidal impulse of misguided, self-destructive “empathy” mixed with self-loathing is costing us far more than the billions of dollars already pillaged from state coffers. In the end, it may cost us everything.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
When are the crooked, lying, grifting, race baiting, election stealing, leftist fiIth, (redundant) going to prison?
Rub a lamp, Pal, rub a lamp.
The woman referenced in this article has some SERIOUS mental problems. I saw the way she reacted with her searing hatred, like she was confronting some kind of imaginary monster, this person and others like her are not merely crazy, they have been whipped into a frenzy and weaponized in a political and spiritual war, this person is completely unaware that she a has become a stooge, the way she talks and her mannerisms indicate she is very strongly mind-controlled and is personally 100% behind whatever the hell has overtaken her brain. This is full-on enthusiastic mind control, it is severe cultist behavior, it is extremely disturbing to watch, and this kind of psychological manipulation, the hallmark of communism, is what needs to be eradicated, I have never seen a zombie like this go off and start calling someone “ICE” when they are obviously nothing of the sort… this mentally handicapped woman is out roaming the streets and will no doubt bump into someone else it feels the need to spew its hatred towards. She was a prime candidate for bear spray that day. That’s just my 2 cents.
It’s a puzzle isn’t it? Maybe something like subliminal persuasion piggy backed on a cell phone signal, cable news, scalar waves? It just seems that a good segment of the population has gone “batshit crazy”, to use a technical term. Just remember all the wack a doodles driving in their cars by themselves fully masked. This alone should have brought serious mass hysteria questions.
The fake news media once again exposed that they are not journalists at all, simply propagandists for the Communist party (Democrats).
Whether Somali’s steal it or our politicians steal it, what’s the difference?
Critical theory, pluralism, relativism … In their reprobate state of mind, they do not know right from wrong, nor do they even care what’s right or wrong. They may even justify the fraud, in their own minds, as some sort of vigilante justice. The same way they celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the healthcare CEO. Who knows what’s going on between their ears. A mess of confusion, angst, fear, wickedness, and who knows what else.