Vandergriff Introduction, “Exposing the Deliberate Erosion of America’s Foundations Through Strategic Overload and Unchecked Fraud”

Only through such bold measures can we dismantle this toxic mix of welfarism and open borders, restoring fiscal sanity and national sovereignty.

Vandergriff Introduction to Washington Examiner Article:

As we enter a new era under President Donald J. Trump’s second administration in 2026, it’s imperative for patriotic Americans—those who proudly wear the MAGA banner—to confront the systemic threats that have been undermining our great nation from within.

The following article “Minnesota’s Somali taxpayer swindle: Welfarism plus immigration without assimilation is a toxic mix” by David Harsanyi shines a spotlight on the rampant fraud within Minnesota’s Somali community, but this is merely a symptom of a far larger, orchestrated agenda by the Democratic party across the United States.

For years, elements within the Democratic Party have pursued policies that align eerily with the Cloward-Piven strategy, a radical plan devised in the 1960s by sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven to overwhelm the U.S. welfare system, create a crisis, and force a socialist restructuring of society. This strategy, originally aimed at anti-poverty programs, has been adapted by progressive Democrats to exploit mass immigration as a tool for long-term political dominance.

The blueprint is clear: encourage unchecked illegal immigration of low-skilled individuals from non-Western cultures, refuse to enforce meaningful assimilation, and funnel them into dependency on government benefits funded by the hardworking middle class.

These newcomers, often lacking the education or cultural alignment to integrate swiftly into American society, become reliable Democratic voters and supporters, entrenching one-party rule in blue states and cities. Under the Biden-Harris administration, border policies led to an estimated 10-20 million illegal entries since 2021, many from regions hostile to Western values, with minimal vetting for skills or IQ metrics that could predict economic self-sufficiency.

Instead of promoting self-reliance, Democrats have expanded welfare access, turning immigrants into a permanent underclass beholden to the party that provides their handouts. This isn’t compassion—it’s a calculated power grab, as evidenced by sanctuary city policies in places like Chicago and New York, where migrant influxes have strained budgets and services, pushing local governments toward fiscal collapse in line with Cloward-Piven’s overload tactics.

The Democratic Party through Information Dominance are masters at 4th and 5th Generation Warfare

Compounding this is the Democratic Party’s sophisticated use of 4th and 5th Generation Warfare (4GW and 5GW) tactics to shield massive fraud schemes, particularly those involving Somali communities in Minnesota and other blue strongholds like Michigan and Ohio.

4GW involves asymmetric, non-traditional conflict like information operations and cultural subversion, while 5GW emphasizes psychological manipulation and narrative control to achieve objectives without direct confrontation.

In Minnesota, Democrats have deployed these methods by downplaying investigations, labeling critics as “racist” or “Islamophobic,” and using media allies to discredit whistleblowers. For instance, when YouTuber Nick Shirley exposed Somali-run daycare centers fraudulently pocketing millions in government funds without providing services, Governor Tim Walz and other Democrats pivoted to accusations of “white supremacy” rather than addressing the crimes.

This narrative warfare protects perpetrators, as seen in the Feeding Our Future scandal, where over 70 individuals, mostly Somali, were charged with stealing $250 million in federal child nutrition funds—funds diverted to luxury cars, real estate, and even terrorist groups like al-Shabaab. Similar patterns emerge in other blue states: In Michigan, Somali-led organizations have faced probes for Medicaid fraud totaling hundreds of millions, while in California, lax oversight has allowed immigrant-focused welfare scams to flourish without aggressive prosecution.

The financial toll is staggering and directly contributes to our ballooning national debt, now exceeding $38 trillion as of late 2025. U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimates that fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs alone may exceed $9 billion since 2018—potentially half of the $18 billion billed—making it one of the largest swindles in U.S. history.

Extrapolate this nationwide: Pandemic-era fraud across federal programs, often involving immigrant communities in blue states, is estimated at $500 billion or more, with Minnesota’s scandals as a microcosm.

This waste, combined with unchecked welfare expansion under Democrats, accounts for a significant portion of annual deficits—over $2 trillion added yearly since 2023—pushing us deeper into debt while middle-class taxpayers foot the bill. Without this institutionalized fraud, protected by Democratic obstructionism, our debt trajectory could be far less dire, freeing resources for American priorities like infrastructure and border security.

To reclaim our nation and Make America Great Again, the Trump administration must act decisively.

1. First, implement a nationwide audit of all federal welfare programs, prioritizing blue states with high immigrant fraud rates, and deport any non-citizens convicted of such crimes.

2. Second, enforce strict assimilation requirements for immigrants, including English proficiency and cultural education, while capping low-skilled entries.

3. Implement Congressman Chip Roy’s (R-TX) call for a several year pause on all immigration to allow for assimilation.

4. Set up a White House website that updates daily on the number of indictments and prosecutions related to these fraud cases.

5. Finally, invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy federal forces against resistant blue states like Minnesota, ensuring full cooperation in uncovering fraud networks until all perpetrators—from street-level scammers to complicit politicians—are prosecuted and jailed.

Only through such bold measures can we dismantle this toxic mix of welfarism and open borders, restoring fiscal sanity and national sovereignty.

Endnotes:

1. Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” The Nation, May 2, 1966, http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/150/endnotes/6/58.pdf (original article outlining the strategy to overload welfare systems for crisis and reform).

2. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Reached a Record 14 Million in 2023,” August 21, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-reached-a-record-14-million-in-2023/ (estimates growth from 10.5 million in 2021 to 14 million in 2023, with continued increases likely); Heritage Foundation, “The Biden Administration Has Brought an Additional 6.7 Million Illegal Aliens into the U.S.,” 2025, https://www.heritage.org/border-security/report/the-biden-administration-has-brought-additional-67-million-illegal-aliens (cumulative estimates since 2021).

3. Center for Immigration Studies reports on sanctuary policies and fiscal strain in major cities, cross-referenced with Cloward-Piven applications to immigration overload.

4. Definitions drawn from military theory; examples of narrative control in immigration debates from various analyses linking asymmetric tactics to policy subversion.

5. Coverage of Nick Shirley’s video and responses by Gov. Tim Walz, as reported in multiple outlets including City Journal and CBS Minnesota, December 2025.

6. U.S. Department of Justice indictments in Feeding Our Future case; $250 million stolen, with over 70 charged, as detailed in CBS News and AP reports, 2025.

7. Ongoing federal probes in Michigan and California Medicaid fraud involving immigrant communities, per U.S. Attorney’s Office statements and news coverage.

8. U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data, “Debt to the Penny,” January 7, 2026, $38.43 trillion, https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/; Joint Economic Committee, Monthly Debt Update, January 2026.

9. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson press conference, December 18, 2025; CBS Minnesota and Minnesota Reformer coverage estimating half or more of $18 billion in high-risk Medicaid programs since 2018 as fraudulent.

10. Government Accountability Office and Pandemic Response Accountability Committee estimates of $233–$521 billion annual federal fraud (2018–2022), with pandemic-specific losses in hundreds of billions; AP analysis of $280–$400 billion in relief fraud.

11. Annual deficit additions exceeding $2 trillion since 2023, per Congressional Budget Office and Treasury reports.

Historical uses of the Insurrection Act include Eisenhower (1957 Little Rock desegregation) and Kennedy (1962–1963 civil rights enforcement), per Brennan Center and Wikipedia summaries; authorizes federal intervention without state consent in cases of rights deprivation or law enforcement obstruction.

Begin Washington Examiner Article:

Minnesota’s Somali taxpayer swindle: Welfarism plus immigration without assimilation is a toxic mix

By David Harsanyi

January 9, 2026 4:16 am

The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued that “it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”

The man was wrong. You can. The result is now on display within the Somali community in Minnesota.

It’s clear that an outsize level of corruption exists among these newcomers in Minnesota. Tax dollars allegedly flow into autism treatment centers to treat children who don’t have autism, and state funds prop up charitable ventures that employ scores of people but fail to engage in any legitimate charitable functions. That’s just what we know from the existing indictments.

In a captioned video posted by YouTuber Nick Shirley, left, a worker at a Somali-American business in Minnesota allegedly receiving government funds declines to answer questions. (Nick Shirley/YouTube)

The Somali fraud story was on a low journalistic simmer for years until Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo at City Journal reported that some of the bilked funds were diverted to the terrorist organization al Shabab. Then, the day after Christmas, a 23-year-old YouTuber named Nick Shirley released a 40-minute viral video of Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota allegedly fraudulently taking funding meant to provide for low-income families.

It’s true that Shirley made some mistakes in his investigation, as is expected from an amateur journalist. He’s also delved into some conspiratorial waters without evidence, unfortunately. Perhaps he’ll become a reliable journalist. Perhaps he won’t. Nevertheless, outlets such as CNN expend more energy trying to discredit his work than moving the story forward — ironic, considering its own atrocious track record on both conspiracies and journalism.

Then again, the Left’s reflexive energies are often aimed at diminishing stories or marginalizing reports that put immigrants in a bad light. But the lawbreaking isn’t new to federal prosecutors who have already indicted nearly 100 people for fraud, a healthy majority of them of Somali descent. Nor is it new to local media, which have tepidly covered various angles of the story for years.

And while most of the reporting not unexpectedly focuses on the fiscal extent of the fraud, there’s a broader, gnawing crisis: the immigrant reliance on welfare.

A captioned screenshot from a post by YouTuber Nick Shirley, right, as he visits one of several Somail-American-run daycare centers in Minnesota that he claims provided no care for children while pocketing large government payouts. (Nick Shirley/YouTube)

Though Friedman’s comments were in response to a question regarding “unlimited” immigration, both legal and illegal, his point about incentives stands. Immigrants, including his parents, came to the United States in the early 20th century, Friedman argued, “in order to use their resources and their capacities and were productive and help themselves and help the rest of the people who are here.” The contemporary welfare state, which has exploded since Friedman made his comments in 1999, means that people are “immigrating, not in order to use their resources in a productive way, but as it were, to be parasites on the rest of the society.”

It’s difficult to work out the exact percentage of Minnesota Somalis who rely on some form of government handout, but it’s likely extraordinarily high. President Donald Trump shared a graph on social media that showed 72% of Somalis were on welfare. It’s unclear where he got those numbers, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. One study, for instance, contends that 86% of Somali households with children receive Medicaid.

When my parents, and hundreds of thousands of others, immigrated to the U.S. as refugees from Eastern Bloc countries in the 1960s and 1970s, they renounced communism in the oath of allegiance to this nation — because collectivism, like Islamism or fascism or any other authoritarianism, is antithetical to the Constitution. Before that, however, they also promised to be self-reliant. The principle driving public charge doctrine is that we don’t want immigrants to be a burden on existing taxpayers, thus denying them the ability to receive assistance until they become citizens.

None of the destructive externalities of dependency change after citizenship. Reliance on the state is antithetical to long-term economic and civic success.

Shirley questions Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Emma Greenman in the state Capitol building after a hearing in which Greenman decried the attention being paid to the alleged fraud and insisted that it is not a partisan issue. (Nick Shirley/YouTube)

Just look at Europe, where numerous large cities feature suburban enclaves, virtual ghettos, teeming with immigrants who subsist on the dole. The most notorious are the banlieues of France, where generationally unemployed Muslims live in crime-ridden suburbs. But in Germany, descendants of Turkish guest workers and their families who came in the 1950s still congregate in the same isolated areas, struggling to integrate, with a large percentage unemployed and subsisting off generous social benefits.

Somali defenders point out that criminality among immigrant groups isn’t unique to this era. And anyone who’s watched a mafia film likely agrees. The big difference is that most ethnic criminals preyed on their own communities because the state wouldn’t or couldn’t properly protect them. In the case of Somalis, they’ve almost certainly been able to engage in the unprecedented defrauding of taxpayers because politicians, either obsessed with identitarian ideas or looking for new constituents, coddle them.

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) responded to Shirley’s video by accusing those who amplified it, including Vice President JD Vance, of being driven by “white supremacy.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey groused about the “racism directed at a black immigrant community,” tying it to the killing of George Floyd.

Since they brought up the question of race, one might ask why other “black immigrant communities” succeed where Somalis fail? Kenyan immigrants, for example, who come from the predominantly Christian nation that borders Somalia, also have black skin, yet they have relatively low welfare and poverty rates. That might be an uncomfortable conversation for Democrats.

Now, it shouldn’t be lost on us that one of the reasons welfare fraud is rampant among Somalis, and others, is our own negligence, permissiveness, and endless expansion of the system. “The three most salient characteristics of Medicare and Medicaid fraud,” Michael Cannon once wrote, “are: it’s brazen, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s other people’s money, so nobody cares.” In Minnesota, the problem is so bad that Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson speculated that perhaps “half or more” of the $18 billion billed to Medicaid in Minnesota since 2018 has been falsified. Even if Thompson’s claim turns out to be an exaggeration, what we’ve seen is one of the biggest swindles in history. Minnesota’s Medicaid program is so easy to scam that it attracts tourists from around the country who con the state out of tens of millions of dollars. This level of corruption is abnormal even by the shoddy standards of government.

So big, in fact, that Walz, who only in 2024 was a vice presidential candidate, was forced to abandon his gubernatorial reelection campaign. Did Democrats, who increasingly view welfare as an unfettered moral good, interfere or slow-walk enforcement efforts to shield Somalis? In November 2025, a state auditor found that the offices of Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, had engaged in a “significant number of instances of noncompliance and internal control deficiencies” related to fraud. In leaked audio, Attorney General Keith Ellison, the top enforcement officer in the state, promises to support the Minnesota Minority Business Association, a group convicted of the “largest pandemic fraud in the United States,” according to prosecutors.

Then again, to be fair, perhaps other states are just as bad or worse. The Biden administration, after all, sent out more than $19 billion in federal funding without requiring attendance verification from child care centers. We don’t know because states such as California refuse to divulge their statistics.

As Americans, we often feel an obligation to celebrate immigrants — all of them, as if everyone who’s ever crossed the border shares identical values, motivations, and achievements. Anything less is treated as an attack on a foundational ideal.

Now, even if you believe immigration is primarily a societal good, as I do, it’s self-destructive to embrace such delusions. There are exemplary immigrants, and then there are those who take advantage of our generosity. Immigrants hold a wide array of ideological, theocratic, and cultural baggage. They have diverse principles, habits, rituals, temperaments, hierarchies of morality, and societal arrangements that form their worldview and inform their behavior — not all of them, or sometimes not even most of them, are necessarily positive. If they were, we’d be the ones emigrating.

And some cultures more easily assimilate into American life than others. Friedman posited that “there are an unlimited number, an infinite number of supply of people who want to live on somebody else’s expense.” This is undoubtedly true. It’s not only about little bits of GDP. Where is the Somali Joe DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra or Enrico Fermi, all of them children of immigrants or immigrants themselves? The most famous Somali in the U.S. is likely to be Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an unsullied symbol of failed assimilation. The congresswoman is a bad immigrant, not because she’s Muslim or black or a Democrat, but because she doesn’t believe in the ideals that should define American life.

HOW MINNESOTA’S SOMALI FRAUD INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX STOLE MILLIONS FROM MEDICAID

We are constantly lectured that citizenship isn’t contingent on skin color, faith, or ethnicity, but rather a set of beliefs. And I strongly concur. But if we are a creedal nation, then we must admit that our ideas are superior and expect newcomers to embrace them. If the U.S. wants both immigration and a generous welfare state, we have an obligation to existing citizens to welcome newcomers who immigrate “to jobs,” not to dependency. Before modern progressivism gained a foothold in our institutions, this was a near-universal belief in the country. Self-reliance is one of the vital conditions of a prosperous citizenry. But we also want citizens to share a common set of ideals — equality, liberty, rights, rule of law.

In both regards, wokeness, welfare, and immigration have been a toxic mix.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/premium/4410409/minnesota-somali-taxpayer-swindle/