Under Governor Tim Walz, the Minnesota government is little more than a money-laundering scheme--transferring ill-gotten taxes to grifters and grafters.

To be sure, graft is hardly new in government, and Minnesota--despite taking great pride in how clean our government was--has always had its share. For some reason, Minnesotans convinced each other that we were a special Lake Woebegon where everybody was above average, but it was never true. 

But under Walz the grifting and grafting have gone into overdrive, and there has been a new ethnic element injected into the mix: hundreds of millions of dollars have been illegally funneled into the Somali community, much of which has been spent here by newly-minted millionaire crime bosses, and at least some of it being funneled to terrorists in Somalia. 

You probably heard about the $120,000 attempted bribe in the trial of 7 Somalis in the "Feeding Our Future" scandal, about which I will not delve too deep into the details. My friend Bill Glahn at American Experiment, a local, excellent think tank, has devoted his life to documenting the $250 million to $1 billion scandal. 

But you get an idea of the scale of the organized crime here when you think about that one fact: an anonymous person can walk up to a home of a juror and hand over a bag of cash, thinking that this is how business is done here. 

.@deenafaywinter provided authoritative coverage of the Feeding Our Future trial, which featured a bag of cash dropped at the home of a juror last week. https://t.co/4866PUkZv5

— j. patrick coolican (@jpcoolican) June 12, 2024

Really, it shouldn't surprise us. This sort of is how business has been done recently in Minnesota. After all, the Department of Education here in Minnesota KNEW it was dispensing money by the million to fraudsters, but were too afraid to call it out due to racial concerns. It's only because the trial was federal (our own state officials had looked the other way) that the crime is even being prosecuted. 

The Feeding Our Future money came from COVID emergency funds intended to feed schoolchildren who weren't getting their free lunches during school closures. The scammers took the cash and fed nobody. Next time you hear "for the children" laugh in their faces. 

Now another COVID-era program has been revealed to toss away hundreds of millions in cash to scammers. $200 million that was supposed to go to the "heroes" who worked through the pandemic. 

More than $200 million dollars of a $500 million Frontline Worker payment program went to people committing fraud or people with questionable eligibility. https://t.co/SIKuLlLaN8

— FOX 9 (@FOX9) June 12, 2024

We could argue about the wisdom of the program, but I hope everybody can agree that giving 40% of the payments to scammers was a bit excessive. 

40%. 

We could take government officials at their word and accept that they were trying hard under difficult circumstances, or we could get real and start prosecuting the government officials along with the people who committed the fraud. 

You don't lose hundreds of millions of dollars without having an inkling. 

Everything about this scandal stinks, and not just the behavior of the recipients. From what little has come out already, the program short-circuited most of the established protections to minimize fraud. It was an "emergency," so they had to move fast. 

Yeah, right. 

Another explanation is that fraud was the point, and the emergency was the excuse. Just as with Feeding Our Future. 

During the pandemic, all the rules were thrown out the window: voting, government contracting, government spending, who is eligible for what...

Around the country, hundreds of billions of that money was outright stolen. Poof. Gone into the hands of criminals. 

Hundreds of billions. This is not and could not have been an accident. The scale is too large, and the time frame is way too short. 

Any time a lot of money and power are at stake you should expect bad actors to grasp for both. This is probably the best argument against big government, given that even moderates should be able to understand it. 

But apparently few people care enough to fight back against the ever-expanding government.