You can take the Somalis out of Somalia …
… but way too many of them bring Somali corruption with them. In Minnesota, it reached terrible proportions, and we’re still finding out its extent:
Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.
In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
Incredibly depressing news – although it’s not really all that new as news, since we’ve been hearing about it piece by piece for quite some time (I’ve written about one of these cases previously, for example here and here).
More:
If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing. It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million.
Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.
On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.
That is what happens when naive virtue-signalers set up such a program. It becomes overrun by fraud, especially when dealing with people with a third-world mentality who consider the bureaucrats easy marks – which they indeed are. The simple truth is that all people bring their culture with them, and they either reject it or continue it when they get here. There are so many Somalis concentrated in Minnesota that apparently assimilation is not all that common. The result is rampant fraud.
And when I say “rampant,” that’s exactly what I mean. This fraud was very organized and sophisticated. Too bad all that energy wasn’t challenged into something more constructive – although it was very constructive indeed for the fraudsters:
“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”
Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had “other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”
“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”
Another fraudulent scheme involved autism claims:
… [O]n September 24, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced his office’s first indictment in yet another fraud case. This time, the scheme involved federally funded autism services for children.
The accused is a woman named Asha Farhan Hassan, a member of Minnesota’s Somali community, who has also been charged in the Feeding Our Future scam. She’s alleged to have played a role in a $14 million fraud scheme perpetrated against Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program.
Hassan and her co-conspirators “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn’t matter, prosecutors suggested, if a child did not have an autism diagnosis: Hassan would facilitate a fraudulent one.
It involved much of the Somali community, because the parents got kickbacks. And get this:
Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.
Nice. As one might imagine, autism claims in Minnesota went through the roof. Hey, maybe it’s even responsible for the supposed rise in autism rates in general – it’s certainly responsible for the increase in Minnesota. This is the sort of increase we’re talking about:
… [A]utism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023. Meantime, the number of autism providers in the state spiked from 41 to 328 over the same period, with many in the Somali community establishing their own autism treatment centers, citing the need for “culturally appropriate programming.” By the time the fraud scheme was exposed, one in 16 Somali four-year-olds in the state had reportedly been diagnosed with autism—a rate more than triple the state average.
Did no one notice? Or was it too unwoke to notice? This guy is noticing, and he’s Somali:
Kayesh Magan, a Somali-American who had worked as a fraud investigator at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and declined an interview request, identified the problem last year: “We must grapple with something that is uncomfortable and true: Nearly all of the defendants in the cases I’ve listed are from my community. The Somali community.”
If you follow the money, what do you find? It leads back to Somalia:
Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.
According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said. …
“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”
I have quoted liberally from the article because the whole picture is staggering.
Somalis have what’s called “temporary protected status” in the US, but there’s little about it that’s temporary. In fact, Somalis have had that status since a 1991 civil war broke out in Somalia. Not all Somalis are here under that program – in fact, the majority are not – but Trump would like to end it, which seems extremely reasonable, and has declared it over.
Here’s how CBS treats the news:
[Trump] also accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, without proof, of overseeing a state that had become a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Without proof? There’s a ton of proof, but CBS assumes its readers are unaware of that.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal will be facing murder charges after all
In unutterably sad news, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom has died, which means that Rahmanullah Lakanwal will be facing murder charges for the DC shooting of two members of the National Guard. The other victim is in critical condition and may not survive either.
This crime brings back horrific memories of the late 60s and early 70s, when many police were ambushed and murdered. Back then the assailants were mostly home-grown, but this one was imported. The Biden administration was warned that people from Afghanistan were being let in without proper vetting after the disastrous 2021 pullout, but it happened anyway. Lakanwal came here during that influx, but was he unvetted?:
Shawn VanDiver, founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a US nonprofit run by American veterans helping to evacuate and resettle Afghan allies in the US said one man’s monstrous actions are now hurting all Afghans who risked their lives for the US in its 20-year war — and the shockwaves are hitting the Americans who helped them find safety.
“He betrayed everybody who helped him,” VanDiver said Thursday. “He betrayed his family. He betrayed every American that helped him get here. He betrayed the United States government. And he deserves to be held fully accountable.”
That article doesn’t go into Lakanwal’s personal history, however, so it doesn’t answer the question of how well he was vetted. Here’s something that speaks to that question:
“This is a deadly combination,” Kent declared, noting that the suspected terrorist “was only vetted to serve as a soldier to fight against the Taliban, AQ, & ISIS IN Afghanistan, he was NOT vetted for his suitability to come to America and live among us as a neighbor, integrate into our communities, or eventually become an American citizen.”
A senior US official confirmed that he had been “vetted to fight” alongside US forces against Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS militants between 2011 and 2021 — but that this was a “low standard” that “has never been used before to let people into the US.”
That raises some interesting questions. So Lakanwal fought to help the US defeat the Taliban – and indeed, although that’s an indication he wasn’t fond of the Taliban, it doesn’t tell us much about why, or about any of his other beliefs. However, once we were leaving Afghanistan, it put him and anyone else who had helped the US at grave risk of retaliation from Taliban forces. The idea of bringing such people here was not just to save them – although that was part of it – but also to establish the idea that if you help the US you won’t be abandoned in the end.
“Prior to Biden it took 18 months or longer for someone to be granted a Special Immigrant Visa, including the applicant needing to flee to a third country so the US government could interview and vet them,” the official noted. “Biden threw all of this out and applied tactical war time vetting to people seeking entry into the homeland.” …
Chad Robichaux, a former Force Recon Marine who deployed to Afghanistan eight times and was part of a coalition effort that evacuated 17,000 nationals from the country in 2021, claimed to The Post that there was “zero vetting” for tens of thousands of Afghans flown out of Kabul in the final days of the withdrawal.
“Probably close to 100,000 of them were flown straight from Kabul to the United States to different airfields, and they were let go into the American population. We have no idea who they are — zero vetting,” said Robichaux, who authored the 2023 book “Saving Aziz: How the Mission to Help One Became a Calling to Rescue Thousands from the Taliban.”
The Biden administration let in an estimated 80,000 such refugees, and their asylum claims were expedited as well. How did Lakanwal end up in Bellingham, Washington?:
The Kandahar Strike Force [Lakanwal] joined was a CIA-backed paramilitary group that fought alongside US forces — but was also accused of being a death squad that tortured and executed civilians.
Roughly 10,000 members of the so-called “Zero Units” eventually settled in Washington State near Seattle. Lakanwal ended up in Bellingham, Wash., with his wife and five children in September 2021.
I assume the FBI will be pretty busy in Bellingham for a while. Here’s an article featuring interviews with some of Lakanwal’s Bellingham neighbors, who seem quite clueless about him and his family except to say that the FBI has visited the apartment where he and his family lived.
Trump has made some announcements, including a “sweeping review of green card holders from 19 countries of concern.” No doubt this will be challenged in the courts.
RIP, Sarah Beckstrom. Such a tragic loss.
Late start
I had a late start today. Pie hangover, I guess.
But here I am.
We’re edging towards the earliest sunset of the year. But not too long from now, the sunsets will start getting later again. I very much look forward to that.
My Thanksgiving meal
I had an extremely small group for Thanksgiving, but the smallest turkey I could find was 12 pounds. And so there are lots and lots of leftovers for turkey soup and sandwiches.
Photos from the meal:
Open thread 11/28/2025
The anti-stuffing spoilsports
Somehow we managed to survive all these years, eating stuffing that was cooked within the cavity of the bird. But now every site warns not to. For example:
…[M]any experts recommend baking the stuffing outside the bird, where it can easily be cooked to 165°F and is less likely to harbor bacteria. However, many people who grew up eating stuffing from inside the bird find it lacking moisture and flavor when it’s baked in a casserole dish, without the benefit of the turkey’s juices.
“Many people find”? Nearly everybody finds, because it’s just a fact that it’s hard to make it nearly as tasty as stuffing cooked within the bird. Moisture and flavor are the point of stuffing, aren’t they?
And this is simply untrue, or only somewhat true:
Luckily, whichever method you prefer, there are ways to get around the problems. If you choose to bake your stuffing alongside the bird, drizzle 1/4 to 1/2 a cup of extra stock over it before it goes in the oven. This will replace the extra moisture and flavor the turkey would have provided. Using a rich, flavorful homemade stock will also go a long way toward providing that indescribable roast-turkey-ness.
It goes a very short way, not a long way, and strands the stuffing short of the goal.
The site does add that if you must stuff, do it this way:
… [D]o not stuff your turkey until right before it goes in the oven. Yes, when faced with a long list of Thanksgiving Day tasks, it’s tempting to stuff the bird the night before, stow it in the fridge, and then just pop it in the oven the next morning. But this will create an optimal environment for bacteria to flourish …
I have never, never ever, heard of stuffing the bird the night before. I suppose somebody somewhere does that, but not me or anyone I’ve ever been around.
Then there’s this:
Instead of this risky procedure, cook any veggies for the stuffing the night before, but do not mix them with the bread, stock, and eggs. (Even if you don’t stuff the bird, just mixing the wet ingredients and the bread can be too inviting to bacteria.) The next morning, heat the stock and combine it with the other stuffing ingredients, then immediately fill and roast the bird. Using warm stuffing and putting the turkey in the oven immediately will help the stuffing spend as little time in the “danger zone” as possible.
Eggs? Who puts egg in stuffing? As I look it up just now online, apparently many people do. I certainly never have done so, and I’m not about to start now:
Finally, when the bird is done, take the temperature of the stuffing as well as the meat. Bacteria cannot survive above 165°F …
This seems to be a decent tip:
If the bird is done but the stuffing isn’t, use this tip that Rodgers shared in his turkey recipe: spoon the stuffing out into a bowl and microwave it until it registers 165°F. This will allow you to have moist, not overcooked meat and safe stuffing at the same time.
A few days ago I searched for my seldom-used and somewhat ancient meat thermometer, and all I could locate was a candy thermometer (the epitome of “seldom-used” and “ancient”). So it was time to buy a new meat thermometer, and I discovered that they’re now digital. Oh brave new world.
Happy Thanksgiving!
There’s a lot to be thankful for.
Hope you have a great meal and a great time today with friends and loved ones.
Please consider this an Open Thread as well.
Breaking news: two National Guard members shot and killed in DC [see UPDATE]
This is the most recent article I could find. Terrible news:
Two West Virginia National Guardsmen have been shot and killed in Washington, Gov. Patrick Morrisey said Wednesday. …
The Guardsmen were in Washington as part of a state deployment.
The New York Times reported that one suspect was in custody, citing police; while the Times quoted President Trump as saying the attacker also had been shot.
The shooting occurred just before 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, at a Metro station about a minute from the White House, according to NBC Washington.
RIP.
UPDATE:
Now I’m seeing that the West Virginia governor may have erred in reporting that they had died:
FBI Director Kash Patel and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said the Guard members were hospitalized in critical condition. Bowser said they were victims of a ”targeted shooting.”
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey initially said the troops had died, but later walked back the statement to say his office was “receiving conflicting reports” about their condition. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the attack and the condition of the troops.
UPDATE II:
It’s a little after midnight, and as of now the wounded National Guard members remain alive but in critical condition. The shooter, who was wounded but not critically, has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal:
A source familiar with the case and a separate law enforcement source told NBC News that the suspect was granted asylum this year.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said earlier that the suspect came to the U.S. from Afghanistan in September 2021 as part of “Operation Allies Welcome,” a program to help those who assisted the U.S. in Afghanistan. …
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order suspending all refugee resettlement in the United States until admissions align “with the interests of the United States.” Thousands of Afghan refugees, including many who had already been approved for U.S. resettlement, are now stranded in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries, and in some cases they have been forcibly repatriated.
However, Lakanwal was one of the crowds of post-withdrawal Afghanis who came here, to much criticism that they were often unvetted. I would guess this was one of the largely-unvetted ones. It’s easy enough to gain asylum, as well. Then again, maybe he was further radicalized here.
Then again, this information is a bit different:
The Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guardsmen in a possible terror attack near the White House Wednesday was living in the US illegally after overstaying his visa, sources told The Post.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, arrived in the US through Operation Allies Welcome, the botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal plan that allowed roughly 90,000 Afghans to obtain Special Immigration Visas under the Biden Administration, sources said.
But Lakanwal, who resettled in Bellingham, Washington, reportedly overstayed his visa, which expired in September, FOX News correspondent Bill Melugin reported, citing federal law enforcement sources.
That article adds that Lakanwal lay in wait to ambush his victims:
On Wednesday, Lakanwal was lying in wait before he rounded the corner near the Farragut West Metro Station in Northwest DC around 2:15 p.m., then allegedly opened fire, striking a female guard in the chest before shooting her in the head, law enforcement sources told The Post.
The crazed gunman then allegedly fired at and struck the second guard — until a third guard stationed nearby rushed to the area and took him down, the sources said.
What’s happening with the Ukraine War?
There’s been a lot of news about the recent negotiations over the Ukraine War, but I haven’t yet written about the topic for the simple reason that I’m waiting for something more definitive. First there was a report about a plan that supposedly was the US proposal but then was said to be Russia’s (there was a fair amount of back and forth bickering about that). Everything else so far seems to me to be rumors and spin. But I thought I’d put up a post so you could discuss it if you want.
Over the years, I’ve learned to ignore early reports about such negotiations where Trump is concerned. Whether alarmist or reassuring, they don’t often seem to accurately represent what ends up happening in a deal. The Ukraine War is an especially intractable-seeming problem. But here are a few articles for your perusal: this, this, and this. There are plenty more where those came from.
NOTE: I may as well put this news here, too: Trump is planning on declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, but he’s doing it carefully to circumvent the inevitable legal challenges:
… [T]he president has instructed the secretaries of State and Treasury to deliver a report within 30 days addressing whether any “Muslim Brotherhood chapters or subdivisions” meet the legal criteria for designation as terrorist groups, with a final decision to follow within 45 days.
The order specifically requires evaluation of the movement’s branches in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
In Chicago, more anarcho-tyranny – and the mayor is in favor of it
In Chicago, there was another terrible crime in which a woman on a train was doused with gasoline and set on fire. The alleged perp, Lawrence Reed (44), is what used to be called a “career criminal.” Byron York writes about his long rap sheet – which included acts of arson as well as assault on women – for which he seems to have gotten something called “mental health probation.” While in a hospital this past August, he assaulted and injured a social worker there.
By that time, Reed had had “72 arrests, eight felony convictions, and seven misdemeanor convictions — a total of 32 years in and out of the criminal justice system.” And yet the judge refused to incarcerate him, instead setting him free with an ankle bracelet monitor which turned out to be pretty much worthless.
Reed couldn’t have been locked up forever for his crimes, but he certainly should have been locked up again and not free to attack still another person. Let’s say he really is mentally ill; the mental health system doesn’t seem to be able to cure him any more than the criminal justice system can. Not all crimes can be predicted and prevented, to be sure. But this one could have been, and was not.
This was no error, either. And just to make that clear, the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said this:
And yet, just days later, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declared, “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence.”
For MaGee — and countless others — the incarceration of a repeat offender with Reed’s record would have prevented a nightmare.
But that’s exactly what he told reporters at a Tuesday press conference, insisting, ”We have already tried that, and we have ended up with the largest prison population in the world, without solving the problems of crime and violence.
“The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country, we have moved past that,” he said, adding, “It is racist. It is immoral. It is unholy and it is not the way to drive violence down.”
Actually, although it hasn’t solved the problem, nothing else has, including all the social work and social justice theories in the world. And until that problem is solved, criminals need to be incarcerated. At least, while they are locked up, they’re not roaming around assaulting the innocent.
But – and this is the point of the word “anarcho-tyranny” in the title of this post – way too many of our leaders no longer understand this simple truth. Just because a problem isn’t totally solved by a certain approach doesn’t mean that, until there’s a better one, it shouldn’t be used. It is immoral to allow criminals free reign to harm the population, although perhaps it makes Mayor Johnson and so many others on the left feel good about themselves.
Chicago has a very high crime rate and many of the victims are black, but anarcho-tyranny means that no one on the left seems to care when black people kill black people, either. AI Google, which certainly isn’t always my go-to resource, has a pretty good definition and so I’ll use it:
Anarcho-tyranny is a political theory describing a government that is simultaneously oppressive toward law-abiding citizens while being ineffective at controlling criminal behavior. This theory posits that a government fails to perform its basic functions of protecting the public and maintaining order, while instead using its power to punish or control innocent citizens, creating a state that is both anarchic (lacking order) and tyrannical (oppressive).
Open thread 11/26/2025
Turkey day
Is on the way.