Tuesday, January 6, 2026

"Americans Love A Winner"

One of the most persistent images in cinema is George C Scott limning General Patton's words in front of an American flag. So far, Trump looks like the kind of winner Patton imagined, assuming his bet that the remnant of the Maduro regime will cooperate with the US going forward pays off.

The success of the operation vindicates his choice of Secretary Hegseth and Hegseth's purge of the Biden Pentagon, something that had been in question for much of the past year.

The operation was a demnonstration of US technological superiority:

At the core of Venezuela’s defensive architecture was a network of radars supplied by the China Electronics Technology Group, including JYL-1 three-dimensional surveillance systems and the JY-27 metric-wave radar, which for years had been promoted as a supposed “stealth aircraft hunter“. Based on assessments of the swift and decisive operation, these sensors were disabled during the initial phase through intensive electronic jamming, leaving the integrated air defense system without early-warning capability.

. . . The neutralization of the radar network prevented any effective employment of longer-range air defense systems, including the S-300V and Buk-M2 complexes acquired from Russia to establish a layered defense. In parallel, suppression strikes against several Buk-M2 systems—at least two confirmed—completely nullified their ability to respond.

K T McFarland said this at Fox News:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has thrown his entire military at Ukraine in hopes of establishing Russian domination and killing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The bloody war has dragged on for three years, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, while draining both countries. And still, that war grinds on.

. . . President Trump sent a small group of special forces into Caracas. Within three hours, they had captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York to face justice in a U.S. court. No Americans were killed.

I don't think the timing of Secretary Hegseth's announcement that he intends to demote Sen Mark Kelly from his rank as a retired Navy captain was coincidental. He did this in the shadow of the Venezuelan success. Kelly's reply is petty:

"Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn't like, they will come after them the same way. It's outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that," Kelly said in a statement on X.

The problem is that the successful Venezuela raid was the product of "good order and discipline" in the armed forces that Kelly is alleged to have undermined, and he opposes that raid:

The President of the United States just overthrew a foreign ruler and explained to the American people that this is about taking control of the oil reserves of a foreign nation. He said that the U.S. will “run the country” until a proper transition can take place and went right into how U.S. oil companies will benefit from this takeover. He doesn’t understand the risks and costs involved with these poorly thought-out decisions that don’t make Americans any safer today than they were yesterday.

The visible Democrat strategy dsince the raid has been to question its legality and oppose it via Congressional action:

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., called Trump's actions "illegal" and said opposing lawmakers plan to use the "power of the purse" to counter them.

. . . He pointed to a war powers resolution, whose cosponsors include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that senators intend to soon bring up for a vote to block further military action in Venezuela.

The problem for the Democrats is that the raid, at least so far, makes Trump a winner, and as Patton understood, Americans love a winner. Some Democrats recogtnize the potential problem, but so far, only Sen Fetterman has spoken out publicly:

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is breaking with many Democrats by praising the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, saying Americans across party lines once agreed he needed to be removed.

"I don't know why we can't just acknowledge that it's been a good thing," Fetterman said Monday on "Fox & Friends."

"We all wanted this man gone, and now he is gone. I think we should really appreciate exactly what happened here."

the rest are remaining circumspect:

Some Democrats are grumbling at their party's largely oppositional stance to President Trump's raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, saying privately that their colleagues should be celebrating.

. . . These lawmakers argue it could be a major political miscalculation if the party fails to applaud the downfall of a brutal dictator with sufficient volume, even given grave concerns about the operation's legality and longer-term ramifications.

I'm inclined to trust Rump's instincts. As long as he acts decisively without any disastrous outcomes, Americans will want to be on the winning side.

posted by test @ January 06, 2026   0 Comments

Monday, January 5, 2026

In Other News, Tim Walz's Career Is Over

The New York Times and other sources are reporting:

Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) is reportedly going to announce on Monday that he will drop his bid for reelection to a third term, according to a report from the New York Times. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now considering running instead.

“Mr. Walz and Ms. Klobuchar met Sunday in Minnesota, where he informed her of his plans and she confirmed her interest in running to replace him,” the paper reported. “For Mr. Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2024 election, the departure caps a brief rise in national politics.”

Both the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal had begun to sense blood in the water after the new year. Per the WSJ:

The massive welfare-fraud scandal in Minnesota dogging Gov. Tim Walz as he seeks re-election in a state that has prided itself on good governance is giving Republicans a potent line of attack against a critic of President Trump.

The unsuccessful 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee is still favored by nonpartisan analysts to win in November. But the large-scale theft—still being tabulated and growing—is a major distraction for Democrats as outrage and embarrassment swell in Minnesota and beyond.

From the Post:

Democrats are favored to win the governor’s race in 2026; Republicans have not won a statewide election in Minnesota since 2006. Walz won reelection by about 8 percentage points in 2022, when some of the fraud cases had already surfaced, and it’s not clear that the new attention to the issue has affected his approval in the state. There are no clear recent shifts in available surveys.

Notice how, even as of Saturday, the conventional wisdom at the Post still favored Walz's survival. For undertstandable reasons, the Post appears to have discounted Nick Shirley's impact on the race. But at the first link above, Matt Margolis has it right:

Scrutiny of Walz intensified after independent journalist Nick Shirley and his crew hit the streets, sniffing out over $110 million in fraud in a single day. They targeted outfits posing as child care spots, autism hubs, and welfare fronts—all sucking up government cash. For example, the Quality Learning Center in Minneapolis, licensed for 99 kids, pulled in $1.9 million this year alone. Shirley showed up and found an empty building. Zero kids. Oh, and the sign? Spells "learning" wrong.

It’s been clear for some time now that this story was threatening Walz’s political future. In addition to seeking a third term as governor, he was also considering a presidential bid in 2028. Now it looks like his career is over, and he’s going to have to start lawyering up.

It's worth noting that Trump has been on the right side of the issue all along. Here's a story from last Thanksgiving at Politico:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) pushed back Sunday on President Donald Trump’s claim that Somali refugees are “completely taking over” Minnesota after Trump drew widespread criticism for his attacks on Walz.

Walz said in a Sunday morning interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” that being insulted by Trump was “a badge of honor” after he became the subject of a Thanksgiving eve social media post in which the president cited “the refugee burden” as “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America.”

“As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”

He added: “The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” while also taking swings at progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), criticizing her Muslim faith and speculating falsely that she may have entered the country illegally.

What Nick Shirley did was simply instantiate Trump's ongoing criticisms of Walz. The swipe at Walz for being "serioously retarded" raised the hackles of respectable opinion, but it had the strong subliminal effect that Trump's off-the-cuff blows often have, dating back to "low-energy Jeb" -- and Walz, never the sharpest tool in the shed, drew attention to it himself:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says it is “shameful” that motorists are shouting the “R-word” driving by his home — and that he is “deeply concerned” the hate allegedly started by President Trump could “turn to violence.”

Walz, speaking to reporters Thursday about the state budget, revealed in an aside that drivers have been repeating Trump’s claims that the Democratic governor is “seriously retarded” for letting tens of thousands of Somali immigrants take over his “once great state.”

“This creates danger,” Walz said. “And I’ll tell you what. In my time on this, I’d never seen this before: People driving by my house and using the R-word in front of people.

The image is too delicious. The problem is that Walz was vying for the position of Trump's lead opponent, when he simply wasn't a serious candidate. At this point, with Walz taken out of the running as low-hanging fruit, scrutiny will turn to Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, who are in positions just as shaky -- while Trump and the Republicans still have Somalis as a front-burner issue.

The Wall Street Journal called Walz's witghdrawal "a remarkable political fall for a politician who had ascended to the national stage in 2024 as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee". It was no such thing. It was the inevitable outcome of Kamala Harris's choice of what some have characterized as the only candidate who was dumber than she is as a running mate.

It's a major mistake to underestimate Trump. Let's keep in mind that he took out Walz as a spare-time project, while he was working on at least half a dozen serious matters.

UPDATE: The idea is now being floated that Klobuchar, if she wins the governor's race, could appoint Walz as her successor in the Senate for the remainder of her term. However, this assumes Walz escapes legal accountability for Somali corruption, as well as the campaign issue it would create for opponents in either the primary or general election for her gubernatorial aspiration. Walz at this point is going to be poison for anyone who touches him.

posted by test @ January 05, 2026   0 Comments

Sunday, January 4, 2026

Rachel Maddow Works On A Weekend

Over New Year's I noted that NewsNation and CNN had second-string reporters out in the Minnesota snow, not really covering the Somali fraud as much as doing what they could to get ahead of Nick Shirley's reporting. One of Shirley's insights, I feel pretty sure, was that mainstream media doesn't work very hard, and the Christmas break was a perfect time to drop his video, when the cartel had tacitly agreed there'd be no other news.

I also inferred that Trump and his key people had come up with the same strategy over the Venezuela raid, with the news coming out on one of the deadest Saturdays of any year. Let's remember that for Trump, there's no such thing as bad publicity, he makes the news simply by being Trump. It's a losing game for anyone to try to upstage him, but the suits at MS NOW gave it their best shot: they got Rachel Maddow in on a Saturday.

Part-time MS NOW host Rachel Maddow remarkably showed up to work on a weekend, appearing on the network from a mysterious remote location on Saturday morning to criticize President Donald Trump's military operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

"Not only will [Trump] care about people saying this is illegal, he'll see that as an asset," Maddow said in an appearance on colleague Ali Velshi's weekend morning show, suggesting that the president is a "would-be strongman" who ordered the operation to provoke a war and give himself "expanded powers" against domestic political opponents.

Maddow's appearance on MS NOW—and certainly on the weekends—is a relative rarity. She is believed to be the second-highest paid employee at Versant, the new spin-off company made up of Comcast's discarded cable networks, after CEO Mark Lazarus, but she usually only works on Mondays.

As I noted yesterday, China should be paying special attention to what Trump pulled off in Venezuela, and its foreign ministry immediately reacted:

"China is deeply shocked and strongly condemns the use of force by the U.S. against a sovereign country and the use of force against the president of a country," a ministry statement said.

The Venezuela strike, following the Irsn B-2 raid, has got to put the Chinese on notice that US use of force is likely to be a surprise, unconventional, meticulously planned, and calibrated in such a way as to make any counterstrike irrelevant. This would almost certainly be what would happen just before any Chinese move against Taiwan.

But foreign militsary adventures always have a domestic component. The Venezuela raid has wrong-footed the Democrats:

The vast majority of Democrats are raging at the Trump administration for once again sidelining Congress despite its constitutionally mandated role in authorizing and overseeing military actions.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement: "The Trump administration has not sought congressional authorization for the use of military force and has failed to properly notify Congress in advance of the operation in Venezuela."

Several House Democrats floated the idea of impeachment Saturday, with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) even telling Axios: "We are in 25th Amendment territory now."

It's amazing how unrealistic this idea is -- under the 25th Amendment, Vice President Vance would have to convince, among others, Secretaries Rubio, Hegseth, Nome, Bessent, and Kennedy that Trump was unable to perform his duties, and then he'd have to get two-thirds of both houses of Congress to confirm it. Impeachment would be easier. At the same link,

House Democrats are set to meet virtually for an "emergency" caucus meeting Sunday afternoon, a senior House Democrat told Axios.

Meanwhike,

posted by test @ January 04, 2026   0 Comments

Saturday, January 3, 2026

Trump Pulls The Same Nick Shirley Trick

With respectable journalists still on Christmas break, Trump sends the military into Venezuela and plucks out Maduro and his wife to face indictment and trial on drug and weapons charges, just like that.

The Chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on Saturday morning that “Maduro wasn’t just an illegitimate dictator; he also ran a vast drug-trafficking operation. That’s why he was indicted in U.S. court nearly six years ago for drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.”

Senator Cotton said that he spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who informed him that Maduro is in custody in the United States “and will face justice for his crimes against our citizens.”

“I commend President Trump and our brave troops and law-enforcement officers for this incredible operation. The interim government in Venezuela must now decide whether to continue the drug trafficking and colluding with adversaries like Iran and Cuba or whether to act like a normal nation and return to the civilized world. I urge them to choose wisely,” he said.

As a footnote:

Vice President of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez claimed on Saturday morning that the Venezuelan socialist regime has no information on the current whereabouts of dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores after President Donald Trump announced their capture.

Rodríguez, speaking over the phone with VTV, the Maduro regime’s flagship propaganda outlet, claimed that Venezuela has been “violated, attacked, and assaulted” by the United States and demanded that the U.S. government immediately shows “proof of life” of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

The big thing I noticed is how the mission was planned to take place on January 2, when both Venezuelans and the US press were presumably still recovering from New Year's Eve. Trump himself had been at at Mar-a-Lago since before Christmas , but he was clearly still at work, for instance meeting with Zelensky the previous Sunday and issuing Truth Social posts on Iran and Somali fraud over the course of the week -- but nothing specific on Venezuela.

Let's compare this action with the outwardly similar removal of Manuel Noriega from Panama in 1989-90 under Poppy Bush:

Noriega, who had longstanding ties to United States intelligence agencies, consolidated power to become Panama's de facto dictator in the early 1980s. . . . In 1989, Noriega annulled the results of the Panamanian general elections, which appeared to have been won by opposition candidate Guillermo Endara; President Bush responded by reinforcing the U.S. garrison in the Canal Zone. Following the declaration of a state of war between Panama and the United States passed by the Panamanian general assembly,. . . Bush authorized the execution of the Panama invasion plan.

On December 20, the U.S. invasion of Panama began. Panamanian forces were rapidly overwhelmed. . . . Endara was sworn in as president shortly after the start of the invasion. Noriega eluded capture for several days before seeking refuge in the Holy See diplomatic mission in Panama City. He surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was then flown to the U.S., where he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The Pentagon estimated that 516 Panamanians were killed during the invasion, including 314 soldiers and 202 civilians. A total of 23 U.S. soldiers and 3 U.S. civilians were killed. The United Nations General Assembly, the Organization of American States and the European Parliament condemned the invasion as a violation of international law.

The Panama operation took over two weeks and left hundreds of casualties. The time span between the invasion and the ultimate capture of Noriega gave the usual suspects plenty of time to set up their condemnations of blah blah blah. In the case of Venezuela, the whole thing took place overnight while everyone important was snoozing away. You can bet the news anchors were still at their retreats in Aspen. As of yesterday, the story at Reuters was:

Jan 2 (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said in a New Year's interview that his country is willing to receive U.S. investment in its oil sector, coordinate in the fight against drug trafficking and hold serious talks with the United States.

"We must start to speak seriously, with the facts in hand," Maduro said in his annual interview with a Spanish journalist, originally published in Mexican newspaper La Jornada and broadcast on Venezuelan state television on New Year's Day.

By yesterday night, this was all inoperative. In an interview this morning with Fox:
he said,

I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. The speed, the violence, you know, they used that term. . . . It was extremely complex, the whole maneuver, the number of landings, the number of aircraft. . . the number of helicopters, the different type of fighter jets, we had a fighter jet for every possible situation. . . and they broke into places that were not really able to be broke into, you know? Steel doors that were put there for just this reason, and they got taken out in a matter of seconds. . . . I've done some pretty good ones in other parts of the world, okay? . . . We did another one not so long ago, it was called the knocking out of the Iranian nuclear threat. . .

He imp;lies that casualties on both sides were relatively low, likely much lower than those in Bush's Panama operation. But it's also worth noting that the Iran strike took place on June 22, the period between Memorial Day and July 4 when respectable journalism shuts down for summer break, which is likely to last until Columbus Day lately.

Both Trump and Nick Shirley are re-teaching an important lesson: act when everyone else is snoozing. But Trump is also building a new set of expectations: he does what he wants, but he's unpredictable. In fact, he'll do it at the worst possible time for his opponents, in a way that nevertheless reflects it's been meticulously planned.

In fact, it's becoming clear that the Venezuelan operation was being planned and implemented in detail over the whole course of the past year:

In January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14157 that directed the US State Department to label certain Western Hemisphere drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

. . . In July, the US designated the Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de los Soles)—a criminal organization that the US alleges has ties to the Venezuelan leadership—as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. At the time, the US State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs posted on X that it would use "all the resources at our disposal to prevent Maduro from continuing to profit from destroying American lives and destabilizing our hemisphere"

. . . After authorizing the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American drug cartels, the Trump administration doubled the reward for the capture of Maduro to US$50 million. At the time, an anonymous US official told Reuters that military action against those groups did not seem imminent; another official told Reuters that powers granted in the order included allowing the Navy to carry out sea operations including drug interdiction and targeted military raids.

I love how Reuters has always been the patsy lately.

In August 2025, the US began deploying warships and personnel to the Caribbean, citing the need to combat drug cartels, although most of the fentanyl entering the US is over land via Mexico. On 20 August, Trump ordered three Navy warships to the coast of South America. As of 29 August, seven US warships, along with one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, were in and around the Southern Caribbean, bringing along more than 4,500 sailors and marines.

It's simply astonishing that Trump, the intelligence apparatus, and the War Department were able to bring all this planning and rehearsal off without a leak. Nobody, it seems, had the tiniest inkling; Maduro was setting up a diplomatic campaign with China that very dayL But consider you're China thining about annexing Taiwan. They now have to consider seriously what Trump would do: he could plan almost anything, he could carry it out with incredible speed and surprise, and the US military could bring the whole thing off.

Trump deliberately cultivates an expectation that he acts on impulse -- in fact, that his motives are entirely self-serving and unpredictable. I'm convinced that nothing could be farther from the truth.

But what does this also say about Secretary Hegseth and the War Department? Think about just one tiny part of the whole plan, that the admirals and gemerals were at minimum too terrified to leak. Not the least little peep. Allowing for the relative scale of the different operations, I nevertheless think we haven't seen anything like this since D-Day and the Manhattan Project.

posted by test @ January 03, 2026   0 Comments

Friday, January 2, 2026

Nick Shirley Made Reporters Work Through The Holidays

The video embedded above was made by Nick Shirley, the interlocutor in the vignette, about a month before his big video on the Minnesota Somali daycare centers went viral. What strikes me is he's done his homework: he's in St Cloud, MN, where I noted in this post here that House Republican Whip Tom Emmer, suddenly a big advocate of deportimng Somali scammers, had told his constituents there in July 2015 that nothing could be done about the Somalis. Shirley had clearly been aware of that meeting when he set up this interview, and he knew what questions to ask.

Now he's got legacy media running scared. Quasi-mainstream NewsNation, whose business model seems to be to hire former prime-time anchors like Bill O'Reilly and Chris Cuomo from big outlets once they're past their sell-by dates, had its reporter Rich McHugh out in the Minnesota snow on New Year's Eve knocking on Somali heath agency doors. For some reason, I can't embed the tweet, but the Instapundit post that has it is here.

This is an indication of Shirley's reach: CNN tried to discount his effort:

But the mere fact that CNN had a reporter both out in the cold and indoors trying to reach the Somali scammers on the phone over the Christmas break reinforces the idea that they were actually having to work through the holidays.

And what's really remarkable is that Shirley doesn't fit the conventional journalist mold. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What qualifications does a mainstream journalist need to have to be taken seriously?" It replied,

In 2026, a mainstream journalist is primarily validated by a combination of formal education, demonstrated ethical rigor, and technical proficiency in emerging digital tools.

. . . A bachelor’s degree in journalism, communications, or a related liberal arts field (e.g., political science, history, or economics) is typically required for entry-level roles.

. . . With the rise of misinformation, the ability to verify original sources and differentiate facts from opinions is non-negotiable for credibility.

. . . In 2026, "cultural fluency" is considered a primary currency, requiring journalists to demonstrate deep understanding and awareness of the diverse audiences they serve.

But Shirley is breaking all these rules. Let's start with his Wikipedia entry:

Shirley was raised in Utah. He attended Farmington High School in Farmington, Utah, graduating in 2020.

It isn't clear if he ever even applied for any level of further education, but he clearly comes off in his interviews and presentations as well-spoken. A visit to the speech therapist might polish him up a bit more, but this isn't part of the usual college indoctrination.

Shirley started his YouTube career as an amateur vlogger and prankster at age 16. Most of his pranks involved his high-school friends, while others included publicity stunts such as disrupting celebrity weddings.[7][6][5] He also offered to sell some of his own recorded footage, including of the January 6 attack, to media companies such as CNN and HuffPost.

Shirley said in late 2021 that he would cease his activities on YouTube in order to participate in a religious mission in Chile for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He returned to the platform two years later and began producing political content exclusively.

Like it or not, an LDS upbringing seems to turn out some good kids.

Shirley made multiple videos in support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in the months preceding the 2024 presidential election. He paid a number of Hispanic men $20 each to hold pro-Biden and pro-immigration signs in front of the White House as part of a publicity stunt in favor of Trump. When asked by Reuters whether he had exploited participants in the video, he said he "wanted to give the migrants an opportunity to voice their opinions".

This guy is miles ahead of Reuters reporters with four-year degrees.

Shirley's videos typically feature man-on-the-street interviews in protest locations, migrant shelters, and urban areas. He describes his work as independent journalism aimed at exposing government oversight issues. The Hill wrote that due to his lack of a background in reporting, Shirley has "received pushback from some traditional members of the media for claiming to be a journalist".

But according to this site,

In the United States, journalism holds a singular position among professions, a calling governed not by regulation but by constitutional protection. Unlike medicine, law, engineering, or education, journalism requires no license, formal certification, or governmental approval to practice. This absence of licensure is not the result of oversight or neglect, but a deliberate safeguard designed to protect one of democracy’s most vital institutions: a free and independent press.

I've got to say that Nick Shirley turned my much-expressed attitude that reporters and commentators take great swaths of time surrounding the Christmas holidays off completely upside down, and he did it singlehandedly. And now he's teasing another video: But notice his real knack for building interest: "I had to get security for this video coming out.” Hr's picked this up by himself. They don't teach this in journalism school.

posted by test @ January 02, 2026   0 Comments

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

"Somalis Gonna Somali. They’re A Deeply Tribal People"?

Intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds posted this on Instapundit, linking to a substack essay by Alex Berenson, who is smarter, although I'm not always sure by how much. Berenson says,

It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of tribes.

. . . What it shares more than anything is a commitment to tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, cousin marriage helps sustain tribal identity; marriages between cousins account for two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and nearly as many in some Arab countries.

Wait a moment. Let's rewrite the first sentence: "It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs 10,500 miles from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn in the pre-Colombian era without realizing the importance of tribes." This might sound appealing to Ivy Leaguers, but it's a meaningless statement. By the same token, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Did the names of ancient Romans have a tribal component?" It answered,

Yes, formal Roman names included a tribal component, though it was primarily used for administrative and political identification rather than daily address.

. . . The tribe component is distinct from the nomen, which designated a person’s gens or clan (e.g., the Julii or Cornelii).

While early tribes were geographical or based on old family territories, they eventually became administrative units that did not strictly reflect where a person lived.

Membership in a tribe served as prima facie proof of Roman citizenship.

As Glenn Reynolds would put it, Indigenous Americans gonna Indigenous American. Ancient Romans gonna Ancient Roman; any statement like this is a tautology, and Alex Berenson has said precisely nothing, but I'm sure Cornell undergraduates would disagree. And Glenn Reynolds is a brilliant law professor, huh?

If "tribalism" doesn't explain the penchant of Somali immigrants in large groups to commit fraud, what does? Here's another data point, linked just a few posts down at Instapundit:

The impllcation might be that one group of Somalis in Washington State, many hundreds of miles from Minnesota, is doing the same sort of thing because they're Somalis, which means they're "tribal", or something like that. But this tells us nothing at all, except that like many other groups all over the world and throughout history, they're "tribal". This does nothing to explain day care centers without children.

I think a better approach is what I suggested in yesterday's post, that "faith-based NGOs" appear to have had a uniform agenda of sponsoring large-scale immigration by specific national groups into designated communities in the US interior, to the point that they're disruptive of the communities they target. This includes Venezuelans to Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX; Haitians to Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA; and now Somalis to places like Minneapolis, MN, St Cloud, MN, and Federal Way, WA.

The NGOs' overall strategy, which appears to be uniform across the dozen or so biggest, appears to have been to industrialize the Refugee Act of 1980, which helpfully redefined "refugee" for the purposes of US immigration:

The 1980 Refugee Act aligned U.S. law with language used by the United Nations, defining a refugee as anyone who is unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.

Importantly, this has been our most inclusive definition to date, removing conditions based on people’s nationalities, the timing of their displacement, or the countries from which they were forced to seek refuge.

The Refugee Act created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to rigorously vet refugees abroad using consistent criteria, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to ensure that new arrivals are provided with the services needed to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Funding was provided to contract with a network of vetted and monitored community-based agencies like IINE to provide welcome, housing assistance, connection to federal benefits and local services, English language training, cultural orientation, career support, and legal services.

Before these offices were established, refugee admissions and resettlement could be ad hoc and inconsistent, subject to debate during an active crisis and resulting in different arrangements for different populations. USRAP and ORR were an investment in fairness, better planning, and smoother integration.

In other words, a new, much more inclusive definition of "refugee" was linked with funding, primarily to NGOs, that provided a wide range of social services to "refugee" groups. Some, like Somalis, were identified and brought in en masse to designated destinations where they could efficiently receive benefits via those same NGOs. New groups, like Venezuelans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and so forth, were desingated as a result of the separate Immigration Act of 1990.

This instituted a range of liberalization measures that have recently become controversial, including H1B visas, Temporary Protected Status for certain groups not qualifying as "refugees", and a diversity visa lottery, which admitted the Brown shooter Claudio Neves Valente.

The Immigration Act of 1990 helped permit the entry of 20 million people over the next two decades, the largest number recorded in any 20 year period since the nation’s founding.

TemporarY Protected Status greatly increased the populations of indigent immigrants who would require the industrialized, mass resettlement services the NGOs provided. On one hand, the mass immigrant groups were identified, recruited, flown in, and resettled as cohesive cultural communities in small cities in the US interior that could be given efficiently customized treatment. Another advantage was that, resettled according to this paradigm, they received services in their native language, reducing the incentive to assimilate or learn English.

The services the NGOs offered, as we saw in earlier instances like Springfield, OH and Aurora, CO, were wide-ranging. They included autos made available without licenses, registration, or insurance, and apartment units that could be rented from slumlords without reference to local regulations. They certainly included job training, English language, day care, medical, and legal services that could be billed against federal aid without the need to verify whether the individuals were actually receiving those services.

These are features of the whole NGO industrialized resettlement paradigm, which disincentivize assimilation and maintain migrant populations in a semi-permanent depdendent status, because this benefits the NGOs. Large-scale fraud is going to be an ongoing feature of these programs; it has little to do with the particular qualities of the migrant communities. "Tribal" is a meaningless term that does nothing to identify any specific problem.

The ultimate solution is going to have to be to rewrite the legislation that's created the current environment. Executive orders that stop one or another point problem, or temporary stopping of aid to one or another state, won't solve problems that have 45 or 35 years legislative history.

posted by test @ December 31, 2025   0 Comments

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

All Of A Sudden, Everyone's Jumping On The Somali Fraud Bandwagon

Just yesterday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer called for deportations and denaturalizations of Somali fraudsters:

I have three words regarding Somalis who have committed fraud against American taxpayers: Send them home. If they’re here illegally, deport them immediately; if they’re naturalized citizens, revoke their citizenship and deport them quickly thereafter. If we need to change the law to do that, I will. Our nation will not tolerate those who take advantage of our charity and refuse to assimilate into our culture.

But just like cameras are everywhere, the internet is forever. Via the Daily Caller, Minnesotans Begged GOP Rep To Stop The Somalis Over A Decade Ago — He Told Them It Was Impossible:

Minnesotans begged House Majority Whip Tom Emmer more than a decade ago to halt the flood of Somali refugees to the area, but the lawmaker scolded them for their concerns.

Minnesota’s Somali population is back in the spotlight after YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video canvassing multiple Somali-run childcare centers accused of fraud. However, A resurfaced audio clip from “This American Life” shows that voters were concerned about mass Somali migration long before the recent controversy.

In an episode that aired in October 2016, journalist Zoe Chace narrated portions of the story, including a reflection on a July 2015 town hall event at Aces Bar in downtown St. Cloud. Describing the room as packed, Chace said one constituent told Emmer that he believed most people in the bar “are here to find out how you feel about assimilation of immigrants,” before playing a clip from the event.

“We did not ask for those Somalis. Nobody asked us if we, in St. Cloud, want those Somalis. And we understand that social groups, like the Lutheran social service and the Catholic charities, they’re dumping them in areas like St. Cloud,” the man could be heard stating.

. . . In the recorded town hall, Emmer pushes back on the man, with Chace describing the lawmaker as firing “a warning shot at the implicit racism” directed at Somalis. As Emmer argues that Somalis are one of “the fastest-assimilating populations,” prompting audible groans of disapproval.

Although attention to the Somali fraud problem in Minnesota has been building for several weeks, Nick Shirley's 42-minute video, embedded above, put things in clear focus. The Somali immigration problem is starting to look like just another special case of the bigger issues raised most effectively by City Journal during the 2024 presidential campaign:

Among [Charleroi, Pa's] old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.

This is the same grievance that was raised by the man in the 2015 St Cloud, MN town meeting: nobody got to vote on the migrants. And the St Cloud residents pointed out another problem that surfaced in last year's campaign controversies: the immigrants are settled en masse in selected minicipalities by faith-based NGOs. I askd Chrome AI mode, "Have faith-based NGOs been involved in settling Somalis in Minnesota?" It answered,

Yes, faith-based NGOs like Lutheran Social Services (LSS) of Minnesota and Catholic Charities were significantly involved in helping settle Somali refugees in Minnesota, alongside government agencies and community groups, providing essential services like housing, employment help, and English classes, especially as Somalis began arriving in large numbers in the 1990s.

But even fraud perpetrated by particular immigrant groups is just part of the overall picture. Estimates of the monetary amount are steadily increasing: It's a bit odd that a single video by an unknown investigator managed to wake everyone up over the sleepiest of holiday periods. I don't think respectable media had expected to get back to work until Martin Luther King's Birthday, if not President's Day. And an unlikely focus of the story is Minnesota Gov Tim Walz:

One of the things I find most odd about Walz is that he constantly seeks the spotlight, even though that spotlight hasn't been very friendly to him. Walz is one of those politicians who definitely doesn't grow on the public when they get to know him more. The public outside of his home state, that is. I don't know what's in the water in Minnesota that makes him so popular there.

It's indicative of how thin the Democratic bench is that they thought that Walz was a viable national candidate in 2024. I'm still convinced that the reason Kamala Harris chose him as a running mate was that he was the only option whom she could feel smarter than. She said that she just hit it off with him better than his rivals, probably because he seems dumb as a box of rocks.

In fact, legacy media hadn't been covering the Somali fraud story seriously until the Nick Shirley post. As of December 13,

The massive billion-dollar fraud allegedly committed by Somalis in Minnesota is still being submerged by the broadcast networks in favor of performative outrage at President Donald Trump’s statements at public events disparaging the Somalis and Somalia.

Early in the week, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters found ABC and NBC only touched on the Minnesota fraud in 21% of their Somali coverage. The vast majority of verbiage was negative evaluations of Trump. Add in CBS, and the fraud fraction went up to 31%, in part because "Face The Nation" host Margaret Brennan interviewed Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar about it.

The brilliance of Shirley's video is its visual quality: stopping by day care centers with no children, the misspelled "Learing Center" sign, or the Somalis calling the cops on Shirley for trespassing. It's made to be watched on video; print media will never be quick enough to answer it.

For now, the best measure of the story's impact will be how soon Gov Walz either drops out of next year's governor race or resigns entirely -- or if he does anything at all.

posted by test @ December 30, 2025   0 Comments