When I grew up in Minnesota in the 1970s and 1980s, it felt like paradise. Bicycles, baseball, barbecue, swimming, and skating on frozen ponds.
That seems like a long time ago—and in a different state. No one here can escape the headlines about the Minneapolis nonprofit group Feeding Our Future, which was supposed to feed children during the Covid pandemic but is now at the center of a sprawling fraud investigation that has uncovered ill-gotten gains of more than $250 million—and counting.
In the last three weeks, City Journal reported that millions of dollars in stolen funds were sent to Somalia, “where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab.” The New York Times walloped Minnesota’s Democratic governor, writing in a front-page headline that fraud had “swamped” the state’s social services system “on Tim Walz’s watch.” President Donald Trump ranted, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents started rounding up illegal Somalian immigrants in Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul, which are home to the largest Somali community in the United States.
