(The Daily Signal)—Democrats and legacy media really don’t want to keep talking about the Somali fraud scandal anymore, but the American people are stepping right around them.
That’s my take as the story about a colossal Somali fraud ring in Minnesota explodes to the point where similar programs in other states are now being rightly looked at with suspicion.
What’s incredible about this whole thing is not just the extent of the scams taking place in Minnesota, but how it’s now all being uncovered.
The most aggressive investigation and reporting on this issue hasn’t been traditional media. It’s a handful of conservative websites and legions of people on X and other social media simply looking through public documents, doing some on the scene investigations and asking questions.
It was an independent journalist, Nick Shirley, who blew up the Somali day care scam. He did some real shoe leather journalism with another investigative reporter but without any institution supporting him.
Sure, some outlets covered what was happening, but they downplayed or failed to follow up on the depth of the problem that exists in Minnesota as Drew Holden at American Compass pointed out.
And what’s happened in Minnesota seems to be the tip of the iceberg.
How many other programs in other states are just extensive fraud operations where state regulators don’t bother—or are discouraged from—investigating whether the money is being used appropriately, legally, or for its original intent?
California will almost certainly be fertile ground for snooping into where the vast amount of public money that the state gobbles up year after year is going. This is a state that spent over $24 billion on preventing homelessness, didn’t track the money and ended up with more homelessness to boot.
So where did all that money go?
There is obviously an easy opening for a mountain of outright corruption in the Golden State, but few in power seem to want to do anything about it. In fact, it seems like they may be benefiting from it.
It’s citizen journalists who are now more frequently “opening the books” on public records, doing some sleuthing and trying to get to the bottom of why our governments are paying out billions of dollars to crooks.
Again, regular people are looking into grants and taxpayer money and are asking questions.
This really feels like the democratization of the original DOGE idea, a mass project by millions of concerned Americans to get to the bottom of where our money is going.
Some government agencies are actively fighting back and trying to obscure public data.
Even worse, many in the legacy, corporate media are apparently quite angry that some people decided to investigate stories they don’t want to cover.
Politico’s Josh Gerstein put this ominous post on X, suggesting that at some point somebody might shoot one of the amateur reporters. He said that he isn’t advocating for this to happen, but this passive aggressive post is certainly quite revealing.
They really are angry and bitter toward the people who just won’t accept the narratives that are being force fed to them over day by corporate media.
However, it’s clear that this kind of reporting can’t be contained in America just yet (good luck to Europe) and in some cases there has been a positive government response. The FBI and some federal agencies are at least saying they are looking into the matter.
And more potential scams are being exposed. Is the same kind of large-scale day care scam happening in Ohio?
Now, maybe nothing comes out of all this.
Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and the people who support him seem to be a lot less concerned with their state budget being plundered and are a lot more concerned about ensuring that their narrative about the limitless benefits of mass scale immigration from Somalia and elsewhere isn’t disrupted.
However, because of the work of a few dedicated people, many of whom are not professional journalists, we may now start to see the depths at which the American taxpayer is truly being outright robbed.
What we do with the information is up to us. There are not an insubstantial number of Americans who are willing to let us all ride this train to perdition in the name of ideology.
But I suspect there are many others who are outraged every day and every year around tax time they are forking over their hard-earned money to con artists, cheats, and American-hating fraudsters.
How much of our country’s debt problem is really a fraud problem? Thanks to a few journalists and independent citizens on X and elsewhere, we may soon find out.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
