Shahs and Frauds
Iran and Minnesota in the News
Iran Update
What is now known as the Twelve Day War between Israel and Iran, ending with the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program by the United States, seems to be bearing fruit.
There are massive protests in many, maybe even most, cities in Iran against the theocratic regime. There are even calls for a return of the Shah (the son of the one deposed in 1979), which he has certainly encouraged.
Before people get their hopes up, something similar happened in 2009. The Iranian elections that year were disputed because the candidate most Iranians seemed to support lost to the one the clerics supported. Huge protests ensued. Barack Obama, president at the time, did not support the protestors. In his defense, there might not have been much he could do. But he gave far less support than was given to the people of Eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall twenty years earlier.
The fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran would be a major event. The Iranian Revolution largely started the worldwide Islamic terrorist movement. Terrorism was there since at least the Palestinian attack at the Berlin Olympics in 1972 that killed two Israelis and took nine others hostage, but Iran became an example of what could be possible.
Defeat of Hamas in Gaza, the expansion of the Abraham Accords (a peace agreement between Israel and many Muslim countries), and fall of the Islamic Republic would be all moving in the right direction. The only advance of Islamic violence would be in Western Europe and maybe Minnesota.
Minnesota Fraud
The (surprisingly large) Somali community in Minnesota is under scrutiny for what seems to be a system of fraud on an epic scale. So far the focus has been on daycare centers that, allegedly, don’t enroll any students. One has gone viral for the sign over the door calling itself a “learing [sic] center.”
The scam seems to be the following: someone sets up a center, rusted friends enroll their children but don’t send them there (they might enroll the same children at several of these centers), the center gets federal and state money for the students and the parents get a kickback. The initial numbers in Minnesota alone are approaching $9 billion. That’s almost the entire GDP of Somalia.
There are several reasons this has become a feature of the Somali community and why they are specifically under the microscope. First, you need a close social network to set up something like this at scale. There has to be a large number of people willing to engage in the fraud whom the fraudsters can trust not to report the fraud to authorities. How many people do you know who would give you an immediate thumbs up for criminal activity? Do you know thousands?
Second, initial investigations from 2018 and earlier were denounced as examples of racism. A lot of people really didn’t want to hear about or agree to investigate anything like this because it seemed too much like singling out a specific group of people, and a group that has two victim categories going for them: they are black and Muslim. Liberal Minnesotans were not about to take on that group. Once the George Floyd riots started, these accusations were quickly buried. Then, with the massive money thrown around during Covid and the Biden administration, you had a perfect storm.
Third, it is hard to deny at this point that the Democrats in Minnesota were reaping electoral advantages from supporting the Somalian community. All that money had to go somewhere and all those voters had to vote for someone. In Minnesota, it turns out, one registered voter can sign a form and vouch for up to eight people he brings to the polls. He doesn’t need ID, just his name on the voter list. They don’t need anything, just his word. You draw your own conclusions about this.
As a story this event has legs, as they say. The Trump administration has already halted several forms of payment to Minnesota pending investigation and are starting to look into other states. Online sleuths are looking through public records around the country and finding similar signs to what we see now in Minnesota. Certainly for people on the right this pushes all their buttons: mass immigration, waste of money taken from them in taxes, strong suggestions of voter fraud.
In response, the left has gone on autopilot. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and erstwhile vice-presidential candidate, has denounced these reports as evidence of white supremacy. At the time of writing this post, no major news source apart from Fox has mentioned the alleged fraud, only the Democratic politicians accusations of racism. A legislator in Washington State has already filed legislation that would remove from public view all payments to daycare centers, essentially hiding where all the money is going.
Too Good to be True
While the events in Iran are encouraging, they may be too good to be true. Certainly people are protesting and taking their lives in their hands to do so, but there is a long way to go to take down such a ruthless and fanatical group as the mullahs of Iran.
As for Minnesota, even if not every accusation is true, I’m sure there is fraud going on in regards to daycare, medical care, and all sorts of other government programs. Do you remember what DOGE discovered about just USAID? To think it isn’t happening in every other program is naïve.
But fixing any of these issues will clash with some of the most titanic forces in American politics. First, because Trump is on one side, fully half of all Americans will be on the other. The next problem is race. We’ve already seen how Gov. Walz is responding. Finally is the question of numbers.
Underlying the world view of a lot of Americans, and really the principles of the left as it currently stands, is that almost anything can be justified if only it helps one person. If even one Somali-run daycare center can be found that is entirely legitimate and does good work, a large part of the population will say that any amount of fraud is worth it as the cost of doing business. This is the attitude of those who oppose immigration enforcement because some illegal immigrants are nice people.
Politics is a numbers game. It isn’t only how many people you can get on your side. It is also about how much people are willing to put up with. How many arrests in Iran? How many fraudsters in Minnesota? People have very different tolerances, and those tolerances can change over time and over different issues. How many people need to come out in support of the protestors in Iran? What kind of violence from the regime are they willing to tolerate? How many instances of fraud will be enough to bring about real reform? How effective will the usual blocking tactics be?
These last few questions will apply to a lot of issues we’ll discuss in the year that begins tomorrow.