How Many Somali Fraud Schemes Are Running In Minnesota?

I vaguely knew that there was some sort of fraud involvoing the terrorist organization al-Shabaab in Minnesota, but this story brings up another, completely different one:

Around $250 million was handed out by the Minnesota government to provide meals to schoolchildren during the pandemic from 2020 onward.

Instead, it was pocketed by corrupt business owners, including Salim Ahmed Said. He’s the co-owner of Safari Restaurant, where [Rep Ilhan] Omar held her 2018 congressional victory party.

Said was found guilty in August of stealing over $12 million for serving 3.9 million “phantom” meals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He blew much of the money on a $2 million Minneapolis mansion and a $9,000-a-month shopping habit at Nordstrom, according to prosecutors.

. . . Most of the money in Minneapolis was funneled through the now-defunct nonprofit Feeding Our Future.

It allowed both nonprofits and for-profit businesses to be reimbursed with taxpayer money for feeding kids by dramatically loosening oversight, waiving site inspections, and allowing bulk take-home food, with almost no verification.

This is often identified as the Feeding Our Future scandal. Then there's a housing assistance program that so far doesn't have a comvenient name:

In August, state officials shut down a fairly new program designed to help seniors and people with disabilities find housing after discovering "large-scale fraud."

A month later, federal prosecutors charged eight people with allegedly defrauding the program, which was run through the state's Medicaid service, by enrolling as providers and submitting millions in "fake and inflated bills."

Prosecutors said the housing stabilization program was susceptible to fraud because it intentionally had "low barriers to entry" and few recordkeeping requirements. They also noted that spending on the program had ballooned to more than $100 million last year, despite initial estimates that it would cost around $2.6 million a year.

The link goes to great lengths to avoid associating it with a particular ethnic group, but it finally gives the game away:

And in late September, a person was charged with defrauding a third state program — in this case, one that provides services to children with autism. Her company was accused of hiring unqualified "behavioral technicians" and submitting false claims to the state that indicated the staff had worked with children enrolled in the program.

She also allegedly paid kickbacks to parents who agreed to enroll their children in the program, in some cases sending them as much as $1,500, prosecutors said.

The same person, Asha Farhan Hassan, was also charged in September with running a fraudulent food distribution site as part of the Feeding Our Future scheme.

This link gives more detail on the autism fraud case, but again, it goes to great lengths to avoid using the word "Somali":

A 28-year-old Minneapolis woman is now facing federal wire fraud charges tied to a $14 million autism fraud scheme.

. . . Investigators say the 28-year-old woman, who ran Smart Therapy LLC, billed for EIDBI services only to pocket tax-payer money, but never actually helped those children.

In a troubling twist, parents were paid to keep their children enrolled. On the high end, kickbacks reached more than $1,000 per child.

It appears that Asha Farhan Hassan was involved with all three of these schemes, Feeding Our Future, housing assistance, and autism, and the participants were largely or exclusively Somali. A November 19 story in City Journal brought the Minnesota fraud schemes to national attention:

{T}his “network” of “fraud schemes,” which “form a web” that has stolen “billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” involved many members of Minnesota’s Somali community. The Feeding Our Future, HSS, and autism-services cases are far from the only examples. At least 28 fraud scandals have surfaced since Walz was elected governor in 2019. Most of the large-scale fraud rings, according to two former FBI officials who spoke with City Journal, have been perpetrated by members of the Somali community.

. . . Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Somalia fraud story is the scale, with total costs running into the billions of taxpayer dollars. That raises the question: What happened to all that money?

The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.

But this brings is to al-Shabaab:

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.

The City Journal report got results:

The Trump administration is looking into whether Minnesota tax money found its way to al Shabaab, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization and al Qaeda affiliate based in Somalia, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday. And on Wednesday, House Oversight committee chairman Rep. James Comer announced he is launching an investigation into the widespread fraud allegations.

Bessent wrote on X that the Treasury is "investigating allegations that under the feckless mismanagement of the Biden Administration and Governor Tim Walz, hardworking Minnesotans' tax dollars may have been diverted to the terrorist organization Al-Shabaab."

On one hand, Christopher Rufo, co-author of the original City Journal piece, concludes,

Though this story was particular to Minnesota, disruptive mass immigration is a national phenomenon. During the four years of the Biden administration, America imported millions of foreigners, many illegally. Some of these have brought, or are trying to bring, negative aspects of their home culture to the United States.

Indeed, cultural incompatibility was a campaign theme during the 2024 election. Venezuelan gangs took over apartment buildings in Colorado. Haitian migrants overwhelmed deindustrialized towns in the Rust Belt. The Somali fraud story is another point in this plotline.

On the other, so far, nobody has yet tied money from the Somali fraud to either Ilhan Omar or Tim Walz. But money has simply got to be involved. Minnesota state workers suggest that Walz has systematically enabled the fraud:

Whistleblowers alerted Walz to the fraud in its early stages, hoping for a partnership to stop it. Instead of a partnership, they got retaliation.

Employees from the Minnesota Department of Human Services say the state's massive fraud scandal leads straight back to the governor. They claim “Tim Walz is 100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota,” insisting they warned him early but “got the opposite response.” Instead of help, they say Walz “systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression,” backed by certain DFL allies and “an indifferent mainstream media.”

This could also affect the Democrats' 2028 lineup, of which I'll have more to say.

Yet Another Dog Bites Man Story

I noted last month that media, both alt and legacy, had built up the idea that the governor elections in both New Jersey and Virginia were tossups in the polls and even potential upsets. Instead, we got predictable results in both, blue states electing Democrats. Then, almost immediately, we got both alt and legacy media pushing the idea that the special election in the Tennessee 7th House district was a tossup and could be an upset. For instance, intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post, the day before the election:

This week, a special election in Tennessee’s 7th District, pitting GOP military veteran Matt Van Epps against far-left candidate Aftyn Behn, will show them just how far their base can take them.

Going by conventional wisdom, this should be a walkover for Van Epps: The district leans Republican by 10 percentage points, and Van Epps’ policy positions echo those of the previous incumbent, former Rep. Mark Green, who resigned in July to launch a new business.

Spoiler alert: Van Epps won by nine points. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What were the polls showing just before yesterday's election in TN 7?" It answered,

Just before yesterday's special election in Tennessee's 7th Congressional District (held on December 2, 2025), the few publicly released polls showed the Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, with a slight, single-digit lead over the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn.

The most notable and final poll, from Emerson College Polling/The Hill and administered just a week before the election (November 22–24, 2025), found:

- Matt Van Epps (R): 48%

- Aftyn Behn (D): 46%

This 2-percentage-point lead was within the poll's margin of error (± 3.9%), indicating a very tight and competitive race leading into election day.

Real Clear Politics hyped this over the weekend, but if Van Epps won by 9%, this was wildly outside the poll's 3.9% margin of error. This is precisely the same sort of outcome we had in New Jersey and Virginia, which I discussed in this post.

Of course, a 9% margin, even if it made the polls look bad, was low in comparison to Republicsn margins in prior elections, even in non-presidential election years. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What was Mark Green's victory margin in the TN 7 House election in 2022?" It answered, "Mark Green won the election with a victory margin of 21.9 percentage points." This was more than double Matt Van Epps's margin, but the fact that it was a special election right after the Thanksgiving holiday must certainly have been a factor.

But Glenn Reynolds had his knickers in a knot the day before:

But she’s polling better than she has any right to. And she just might win.

. . . Not long ago, it would have been unimaginable for New York City to elect a far-left Muslim mayor with open sympathy for terrorist groups after 2,976 people were killed, and thousands more injured, in Islamic terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

But New Yorkers — at least those who turned out to vote — did just that last month.

Likewise, Tennessee might soon have a congresswoman who will make AOC look like a dignified stateswoman.

. . . [I]f Democrats do pull off a win this week, it will be a grave warning to Republicans about the dangers of complacency.

Roger Simon has an only slightly better take:

What does this mean? Not a lot. I would define it as “Much Ado About Nothing. . . Much.”

. . . The local GOP, with a few exceptions, never got in gear to seriously win this election against the target-rich Behn until the last couple of weeks. The Democrats had been going full tilt for a long while. Don’t blame the GOP voters.

I take "never got in gear" to mean "didn't spend serious money". But the fact is that Van Epps still won by a comfortable margin well outside the polls, when spending for the week prior to election day would have been lost in the Thanksgiving distractions in any case. Commentary prior to the election made the point that Democrats could still say, even if Behn lost, that they'd forced the Republicans to spend money on an otherwise safe race. It sounds as though the Republicans at least didn't spend more than they needed to.

But a much bigger takeaway is this: I think it disproves Joel Kotkin's conclusion over the weekend:

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

. . . Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

I don't think this is true at all. Mainstream and legacy media, enabled by their usual allies, the pollsters, have been running the same sort of psyop over last month's and yesterday's elections: the line is that Republicans are underperforming, and this is due to Trump. And note that, even after the departure of its most visible editors, with new owner Jeff Bezos steering things toward the putative center, The Washington Post still ran a fake news story on Trump and Hegseth ordering the military to "kill them all", with inevitable visions of Keitel at Nuremberg.

We shouldn't kid ourselves about any of this, the media is the media,and that includes a lot of people who convince themselves that even though they're now media too, they're somehow different. That most definitely includes Glenn Reynolds, Roger Simon, and Joel Kotkin.

The Nuremberg Never Mind

Trump's media people, especially 2.0, are pretty darn good, while it's clear that only the B team is left at the Washington Post. I was wondering all Sunday why they dropped the big war crime story -- maybe the biggest scoop since Deep Throat -- on Black Friday, Nov 28, in the middle of a four-day weekend, when everybody would be bloated with Thanksgiving leftovers or off to the Black Friday sales. And then they just stood there while the White House got its ducks in a row the following Monday, which was yesterday.

By then, even Real Clear Politics was having doubts:

"What happened in this case depends on the sequence," [Carl]Cannon said [on the RCP podcast]. "These stories are not precise. Did Hegseth say 'kill them all' after the first drone strike had disabled this boat?"

Tom Bevan suggested these reports are conveniently timed following the recent video from Congressional Democrats urging service members to disobey illegal orders. "Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, and some others were asked if there had been any illegal orders, and they said they don’t know of any. Then, the next week, two anonymous sources leaked this story. Is that a coincidence? I’ll leave it to our listeners."

"This could all be a hoax, particularly when anonymous sources are attacking Trump's administration," Bevan added. "The media and Democrats are reacting as if it’s the absolute truth — and we don’t know that."

Others suggested that Post co-writer Ellen Nakashima, described as an "intelligence reporter", has been behind a series of high-profile hoax stories, including the letter from 51 intelligence officials declaring the Hunter Biden laptop to be Russian disinformation, the Brett Kavanaugh sexual misconduct story, and the Russian election interference hoax. Indeed, in the wake of all the other departures from the Post, it's surprising she's still there.

But by this morning, almost certainly relying on access to "sources" facilitated by the White House, The New York Times provided the context the RCP commentators suaspected was missing:

"According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs."

"But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast."

"Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him."

This additional quote from the Times story (itself behind a paywall) gives further perspective:

The two officials questioned whether the surviving people were Admiral Bradley’s intended target in the second strike, as opposed to the purported drugs and the disabled vessel. They argued that the purported cargo remained a threat and a lawful military target because another cartel-associated boat might have come to retrieve it.

Others have pointed out that on one hand, trhe drug boat crews aren't innocent civilians, but they are probably "unlawful combatants" who aren't wearing uniforms and thus aren't subject to the ordinary laws of war.

But let's grant the likely inference, that the Post story was meant to work in concert with the earlier warnings from the "subversive six" about illegal orders. The timing was nevertheless clumsy -- why did the breathless scoop have to come out on one of the least significant news days of the year? The "subversive six" video came out on Tuesday, November 18. The scoop that finally came up with a specific putative "illegal order" came out a fuil ten days later, while everyone was at the mall.

On top of that, Sen Mark Kelly, who apparently had been cast as the senior statesman in this drama, although he's at best a dollar-store John McCain, hasn't been up to the role:

🚨LMAO! Sen. Mark Kelly is CRYING over @PeteHegseth's post from last night with "Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists."

"He's putting out on the internet, TURTLES with Rocket-Propelled Grenades!" 😂🤣 pic.twitter.com/4W0dpxlktK

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) December 1, 2025

At the same presser, with a background of American flags, he shrieked, “President Trump is trying to silence me, threatening to kill me for saying what is true”.

This just isn't the A team. There isn't going to be a summer blockbuster about this one starring whomever the successors will be to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Who would that be, anyhow? Alec Baldwin?

More Trickles Out About Rahmanullah Lakanwal

Robert Spencer asked over the weekend, "Hey, Why Was the DC National Guard Shooter Naked Except for a Pair of Socks?":

The first photograph that circulated of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot two National Guard members in Washington on Wednesday, murdering one of them, showed him lying on a gurney, naked except for a pair of socks. Initial reports took due notice of this odd fact, without making any attempt to explain it[.]

I'll get back to this. But via the New York Post:

A leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times that the Afghan terror suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023, according to a bombshell email leak.

Despite this, and an alleged failure to maintain his mandated contact with state social services, he still managed to win asylum in April of this year.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s behavior was so disturbing that a local community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, according to emails to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) seen by the Associated Press.

In other words, he was a "known wolf". This pattern, though, extends beyond terrorism, as we'll see. The link continues,

He was brought to the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, moving to Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and their five young sons.

But he reportedly struggled to assimilate, failed to hold down a steady job or commit to learning English, according to the emails.

Alternating between “periods of dark isolation and reckless travel,” Lakanwal sometimes spent weeks in his “darkened room, not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or older kids,” the person wrote.

Lakanwal also failed to stay in contact with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as was mandated by the terms of his entry into the US, except for “interim” weeks where he would “do the right things,” according to the emails.

But his killing of National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom in Washington on Thanksgiving isn't that far from what we've seen in two other recent, highly publicized attacks, Lawrence Reed's burning of Bethany MaGee in an attack on the Chicago L on November 17, and Decarlos Dejuan Brown's attack on Iryna Zarutska in a Charlotte, NC tram car on August 22. All three were predictable, given the backgrounds of the subjects. Of Reed,

[W]hile in police custody, Reed "made repeated spontaneous and unprompted utterances, specifically yelling 'burn bitch' and 'burn alive bitch'". Reed was charged federally with terrorism against a mass transportation system. The charge is punishable by a maximum sentence of life in federal prison and if the victim dies, Reed could be eligible for the death penalty.

Reed has been arrested by Chicago police at least 72 times over the past 30 years, including 15 criminal convictions, and has a history of mental illness. As described by the Chicago Tribune, Reed "was arrested while on pretrial release for an aggravated battery case and has several prior cases in his criminal history, including a 2020 conviction for aggravated arson for an attempt to set the Thompson Center on fire."

Decarlos Dejuan Brown

had been arrested 14 times in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, before the stabbing, with criminal charges dating back to 2007. On April 11, 2014, he was convicted of breaking and entering. While on probation, he was arrested for armed robbery and possession of a firearm by a felon. Brown was convicted of armed robbery and incarcerated in state prison from 2015 to September 2020. Upon release, he initially lived with his family, but his mother told ABC News that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at this point and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied. The Associated Press reported that involuntary commitments are difficult to obtain unless a court finds the person to be dangerous.

The fact that one subject is a migrant, while the other two are from the traditional street criminal class, deflects attention from an argument I've been making that Marx's Lumpenproletariat has expanded to include migrants. All three of these subjects hail from the new Lumpenproletariat, and they also share a feature of the new class alliance: there's a continuing public policy objective whereby the upper echelons privilege the Lumpenproletariat, especially by creating circumstasnces under which warning signs that individuals are dangerous are ignored, "accidentally on purpose".

In this respect, the current violent attacks on ICE and the National Guard are extensions of the class warfare that was manifest in the 2020 George Floyd riots. What was significant then was the move by the elites to glamorize, even canonize, a run-of-the-mill street criminal while calling to defund the police. The Ivy League Republican John Hinderaker is obtuse enough not fully to recognize how this fits in here, but he comes close:

More broadly, we can see that the Democrats’ war on law enforcement is succeeding. It has been focused [this year] mostly against America’s immigration laws, which Democrats hate but don’t have the votes to repeal. Democrats have viciously attacked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, denouncing its agents as a modern-day “Gestapo,” and trying at every turn to interfere with their work. . . . But the real threat lies underneath–the threat that people who are deranged and/or unusually loyal to the Democratic Party will be emboldened to try to kill ICE agents.

No, the point he's missing is they -- that is, members of the new Lumpenproletariat, enabled by conditions created by the elites, which include feckless mental health institutions -- encourage the deranged to attack attractive members of the new working class. That's the practical result of the current class war, the very rich and the very bottom arranged against the middle.

But let's go back to Robert Spencer's attempts to explain Lakanwal's nakedness:

Why had he taken off his clothes after shooting people? The simplest and most obvious answer is the same reason for why Mohamed Atta intended to change into a fancy suit: to meet the virgins. Atta wanted to look sharp; Al Issa wanted to get right down to business.

So also, apparently, did Rahmanullah Lakanwal. Yet neither the establishment media nor law enforcement authorities have made any mention of this. After all, it would only highlight Lakanwal’s identity as an Islamic jihadi, when every public official and mainstream journalist knows that the Islamic character of jihad violence must be denied or obscured at all costs. And so we have the curious phenomenon of the media reporting that this murderer was naked, yet never even attempting to explain why. All in a day’s work for today’s media propagandists.

I would go one step farther and suggest this is, at least metaphorically, a sexually directed attack on an attractive white woman of the working class, not much different from Lawrence Reed's "burn alive bitch" or Decarlos Brown's "I got that white girl". But much more important is that this is enabled and celebrated by the elites. According to Chrome AI mode,

Stochastic terrorism is a term used in social science and criminology for the process by which public, hostile rhetoric from an influential figure leads to random, unpredictable acts of violence by their followers that are statistically probable to occur. The individual acts are unpredictable, but the overall pattern of violence is a predictable consequence of the hateful communication.

But even these individual acts are simply not "unpredictable". The subjects who committed them had already been identified and should already have been in custody or deported. It is the continuing project of the elites to disable the institutions that are meant to prevent these episodes within the community at large.

The Nuremberg Scenario

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect.

The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes:

A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard, telling military service members that is not what they “signed up for” and encouraging them to refuse “unlawful orders.”

Win Without War, a self-described “diverse network of activists and national organizations working for progressive foreign policy,” launched its billboard campaign in September in Washington, DC, before expanding to Chicago, Memphis, and the military bases Ft. Bragg and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Thus the Mark Kelly-Elissa Slotkin "subversive six" ad wasn't without context. But its effect was blunted when Slotkin herself acknowledged to Martha Raddatz, "To my knowledge, I -- I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela". Then last Wednesday's shootings of two National Guard troops in Washington distracted attention from the whole issue.

But don't lose hope! The Washington Post, which brought us Deep Throat half a century ago, is back on the case!

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has declared recent reporting that he may have illegally ordered all people to be killed in a military strike in the Caribbean as “fake news” on Friday evening, adding that the series of strikes of people on boats had been “lawful under both US and international law”.

. . . The remarks came after a Washington Post report this week alleged that Hegseth ordered defense officials to “kill everybody” traveling on a boat that was being surveilled by analysts on 2 September, the first strike of many carried out in recent months by the Trump administration. The White House said – without proof – that the people in the boats in the Caribbean, killed in Pentagon operations, were drug smugglers.

I'm linking to The Guardian's account, because the Post is behind a paywall. But where's the smoking gun?

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Is that it? Apparently so. The rest of the story is just filler to bulk things out, such as:

Trump has said that the US is attacking the boats due to high rates of fentanyl-related overdose deaths. But lawmakers, narcotics experts and former law enforcement officials have rejected that claim, since fentanyl does not come from Venezuela.

So far, only The Guardian has run with this story. This could well be because everyone else is watching football over the four-day weekend, and it'll get legs on Monday. Deliberately shooting survivors, if this happened, would be a violation of international law and US military policy, but even The Guardian's account suggests this may not be what happened:

Throughout the course of the strikes, there have only been a few survivors, including an Ecuadorian man and a Colombian man, who were captured by the US then returned to their home countries.

One boat strike in October, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, led the Mexican navy to begin a search-and-rescue operation for survivors.

Among the few reactions has been, predicatably, from David French:

If true, this is heinous and illegal. You do not kill helpless survivors of a sinking boat. (It enraged us when, for example, the Japanese would machine-gun American survivors in the water.)
You do not kill someone who is hors de combat, and no quarter orders are flatly illegal. https://t.co/lhaL89s650

— David French (@DavidAFrench) November 28, 2025

The Nuremberg scenario has been the ultimate leftist fantasy at least since the 1966 Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, although this itself was just a manifestation of earlier fantasies. As described inb the link,

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell–Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private people's tribunal organised in 1966 by Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and hosted by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Ralph Schoenman, Isaac Deutscher, Günther Anders, Lázaro Cárdenas and several others. The tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.

. . . The tribunal was constituted in November 1966, and was conducted in two sessions in 1967, in Stockholm, Sweden and Roskilde, Denmark. Bertrand Russell's book on the armed confrontations underway in Vietnam, War Crimes in Vietnam, was published in January 1967. His postscript called for establishing this investigative body. The findings of the tribunal were largely ignored in the United States.

So far, the idea of bringing about a Nuremberg scenario strikes me as about as effective as any of the other schemes Wile E. Coyote cooks up from the Acme catalog.

It's Trump's Fault!

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.:

The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Let's parse this out. The argument is that the National Guard troops in Washington have been deployed "performatively", which implies that this is somehow unrelated to their actual function, which is otherwise unspecified (Hurricane relief? Border control? Overseas opeerations?) I did a web search on "performative" and got several definitions that I think reflect what the writer means by using the word in this context:

• done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one's own image
• a pejorative for people that publicly act out in a way to show their goodness and virtue but do not actually do the real work
• done or expressed for the sake of appearance, esp. to impress others or to improve one's own image.

The writer stresses this by asserting the troops' "days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform". That two members should be shot by an aggrieved illegal is just the natural consequence of such a feckless deployment.

But in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination, there were riots in Washington:

As the violence and property destruction continued, President Lyndon B. Johnson called in U.S. troops to quell the disturbance and District of Columbia Mayor Walter E. Washington declared a 5:30 p.m. curfew. About 6,000 troops were mobilized in the District by dusk on April 5, including units from the Army and the Marine Corps as well as the D.C. National Guard.

. . . More than 13,000 soldiers patrolled Washington, DC, during this tumultuous period—the first time federal troops were sent into the capital since the Army dispersed the Bonus Marchers in 1932. The Marines remained stationed at the Capitol until April 12, eventually using barracks on Capitol Hill to rest.

This was, in fact, a "performative deployment". Thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots. As in every such case, they were untrained in law enforcement. Their job wasn't to collar criminals; their job was simply to be the face of authority, to be present on the streets as a deterrent to disorder. All such deployments are "performative". The police are always the ones who actually collar criminals.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it legitimate for military power to be deliberately performative?" It answered,

Yes, military power is considered to be deliberately performative to a significant extent. Actions, from training to actual operations, are often designed not just for their immediate physical effects, but also to signal strength, intent, and resolve to both domestic and international audiences.

Even in the gospels, there's reference to the performative value of the military (Luke 14:31-32):

Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?

And if not, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

But we come to the next question, the risk that troops on such a deployment are endangered. The fact is that there's a certain amount of unavoidable risk that comes just from being in the military. For instance,

Four Louisiana National Guardsmen from the 1st Assault Helicopter Battalion, 244th Aviation Regiment who died in a training accident, March 10, have been identified.

. . . The Louisiana Army National Guard was participating in a routine night-time training exercise with the Marine 2nd Special Operations Battalion. The Black Hawk carrying the four aircrew and seven Marines crashed into the Santa Rosa Sound in Navarre, Florida, March 10.

The two National Guard members were shot while in the line of duty during their deployment to Washington, D.C., while on what were said to be "high visibility patrols" near the Farragut West metro station; i.e., under legal orders to conduct legitimate performative operations. But the Atlantic writer concludes,

We are not at war now. But Trump’s use of the National Guard suggests that he thinks we are not at peace either. The National Guard is stranded somewhere on this battlefield of partisan politics. They are not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.

What's war got to do with it? The National Guard is routinely deployed for disaster relief, riot control, and many other functions outside wartime. Deployments are both inconvenient and risky, but members have signed up for them, and they're paid to be available. But aLso, the National Guard, especially within Washington, can be and has been deployed for purposes that have been hard to distinguish from politics, such as dispersing the 1932 Bonus Army encampment or contributing to the air of crisis that sorrounded the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act during that year's Martin Luther King riots.

There can be no question that Trump's deployment of the National Guard, especially to Washington, DC, was within the scope of his authority. In addition, he was elected to office in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the extent and nature of two related issues, illegal migration and urban crime. Are we "not at peace" over these issues? The National Guard members were apparently targeted by an aggrieved illegal migrant acting as a partisan combatant in something that's hard not to characterize as this same quasi-war, while on an anti-crime deployment. If anything, it's sharpened the the impression we have of the nature of this conflict.

The Pipe Bomber? Never Mind!

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago, I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5.

The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result.

But beyond that, this story has been strange from the start. Blaze Media is Glenn Beck's outfit. Beck, a converted Mormon, has always been just a dollar-store Rush Limbaugh, and Blaze Media has never been known for breaking big new stories. New investigative stories typically come from reporters like Catherine Herridge, John Solomon, or Susan Crabtree. The Blaze Media story comes from Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman, who simply don't have that record.

The second problem is that Baker and Hanneman claim they identified Ms C via "gait analysis", but this doesn't hold water. It implies that some sort of massive AI program reviewed millions of videos of ordinary people walking, compared them to the video on the FBI site of the wandering figure, and lo and behold, it spat out the name of Ms C. I don't think so. I think someone from somewhere in the deep state contacted Baker and Hanneman, said you might want to look at Ms C, and at best, they took a "gait analysis" app and ran it against the FBI video vs one of Ms C walking, and they said doggone it, it's Ms C!

That is, if they did anything like that at all. There's so much hinky about this story that I don't feel compelled to accept any of this. A CBS story from this past Tuesday seems much closer to the circumstances I've surmised:

Multiple sources said that a unit overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drafted a memo identifying the woman and describing allegations that she had placed the explosive devices outside Democratic and Republican party offices. The memo was written after ODNI was made aware of allegations from an outside source, an ODNI spokesperson said.

ODNI officials said the agency received a tip from a person affiliated with a media organization about potential criminal wrongdoing by an individual believed to be working at an intelligence agency and set about documenting it in a memo.

A copy of the unfinished memo was given to senior staff at the security officer's workplace, sources said.

. . . A short time after the unfinished memo began to circulate, the conservative news outlet, Blaze News, published details similar to those in the draft, including the woman's full name.

But the same CBS News story says that after her employer followed up with Ms C, she

cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site.

This seems a little too cut and dried as well. I tend to think there's too much of an effort to wrap up any inconvenient questions and proclaim there's nothing more to see. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, while more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, makes a convincing case for some sort of deep state agenda here:

However, the CBS narrative doesn’t focus on The Blaze or the reporting of Steve Baker, instead the media hit shifts responsibility to Tulsi Gabbard who is operating outside her intelligence oversight lane and conducting independent investigations which includes information from “outside sources.”

. . . Having followed the operations of these embed “intel officials” the motive for this operation against the office of the DNI is clear. You, me, all of us can see with clear non-pretending eyes, the intent of this op was to change the way Tulsi Gabbard is receiving information and to block the delivery of external sunlight.

There’s no better way for the “Seven Ways from Sunday” domestic group to operate than to seed false information (“whistleblower”) to their target (ODNI). Then work to externalize it (Steve Baker), emphasize it (Glenn Beck), build drama toward it, so that eventually it can then be cited as an example to ensure no further assistance is ever accepted. Isolate – Ridicule – Marginalize.

. . . Notice the script, the emphasis, the narrative as it is performed. All of it is entirely transparent.

But other pieces of the story as they've trickled out still strike me as strangely incongruous and oddly coincidental. Take the Washington Metro fare card that was somehow traced to the pipe bombing -- as I discussed here two weeks ago, the version we're given is that the FBI, maybe the same people who found the wandering figure in the hoodie and mask, or maybe not, combed the video from the prior day and identified someone else, someone completely different, who was wandering around the same area and taking photos of things with numbers on them, dumpsters and such.

This turns out to have been a childhood friend of Ms C's then-next-door neighbor, who'd dropped in from out of town, a real MAGA type whom the neighbor didn't trust, but whom he nevertheless lent his extra Metro card, the one he didn't use, to go down to Capitol Hill and wander around and take pictures of things with numbers on them for a book he was writing. Or something like that. Hey, doesn't everyone keep a second Metro card that they never use?

And this was all thoroughly investigated and ruled out as not suspicious. Or something like that. And the guy's then-next door neighbor, just out of the blue, was fingered five years later as maybe the person who was wandering around, completely independently of another guy who was tracked on video taking pictures of things with numbers on them, dropping backpacks with bombs under benches. All of this is completely random and coincidental, nothiong to see here. We're still searching for the suspect.

Except that while I don't normally wander around taking pictures of things like dumpsters with numbers on them, I do watch a lot of true crime shows on TV. One of the most common things you hear is seasoned detectives saying that in their line of work, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Except that when you're investigating two pipe bombs that coincidentally didn't explode on January 6, there are coincidences up the wazoo, but this is perfectly fine.

Another thing I hear pretty frequently is cold case detectives saying when you've got a cold case that ought to be solvable, but it doesn't quite seem to fall into place, you've simply got to go back to the beginning and look at everything one more time. It's hard to think this hasn't yet been done here.

They need to start with Ms C's videotape of her playing with her puppies, but that's just one of a great many things that don't quite fit.