Fraud: The Entire Story So Far

Country Highway has the single historical synopsis of Minnesota’s journey from “good government” Mecca to a state that New Jersey and Illinois call to tell to dial back the corruption.  And they took it outside the paywall.

It’s big, but you should read the whole thing.  

So – who do we blame?  A naïve social welfare system designed by the homogenous, high trust Minnesota that garrison Keillor has been yakking about for the last 50 years?

An influx of people from a society that is quite the opposite – extremely low trust outside of ones family and clan, with no history of political, social cohesion, and a “get it while you can“ attitude that comes from coping with a couple of decades of civil war?

A political ruling class that exploits both of the above , doesn’t waste crises, and has a bottomless spigot of state and federal money available?

If some of the story seems familiar – it is.  Local conservative media have been covering this stuff for years:

How did so much get so terrible so rapidly? One simultaneous cause and consequence of the Minnesota swoon is outright fraud, the rotten fruit of a partnership between some of the state’s leading politicians and sectarian interests that understand government not as a society’s shared instrument to address its problems, but as a storehouse to pillage. 

Attorney general Keith Ellison, a Democrat, is Minnesota’s highest law enforcement officer. In December of 2021, business leaders in the Twin Cities Somali community met with Ellison in his office in Saint Paul. Bill Glahn, a fellow at the conservative Twin Cities-based Center of the American Experiment and the former deputy commissioner of commerce for Republican governor Tim Pawlenty, obtained and published a recording of the meeting earlier this year. Its contents reveal how different the actual workings of Minnesota’s government are from what the citizens of any fair and generous and functioning society would probably like to believe.

 

In this case, sunlight may not be any kind of disinfectant.  

By the way – while Minnesota’s health and human services, education, childcare and healthcare systems are packed to bursting with fraud, don’t you dare say the election system might be the same.  That’s gonna be different.  Because shut up.