(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.
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.