“The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” said Donald Trump in his State of the Union address last night, as the Democrats booed and heckled him. Media commentators scoffed at Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.

But the President, who estimated that $19 billion had been lost to fraud in Minnesota alone, is if anything underplaying the scale of the problem. The extent of fraud across blue state (that is, Democrat-led) America is truly monstrous, and each week brings fresh revelations of swindling on a truly epic scale.

Trump’s now-withdrawn ICE surge in Minneapolis caused so much drama on its own that most have forgotten what initially provoked it: the national realization that the state was racked with clownish levels of fraud, significantly perpetrated by its small Somali immigrant minority.

First there was Feeding Our Future, which claimed to be feeding 120,000 children per day while actually serving a tiny fraction of that amount. When confronted with suspicion from state bureaucrats, the perpetrators simply threatened public allegations of racism and were able to blow past safeguards to steal more than $250 million. The fraud was so brazen that the perpetrators even sued regulators for being too slow in approving applications and managed to win more than $30,000 in sanctions from a state judge. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison never cracked the case, but did tell the fraudsters in a meeting he was “here to help” them get more money one month before FBI raids finally brought the fraud to an end. Of the 78 people indicted in the case, about 90 percent were of Somali origin.

Feeding Our Future was just the largest fraud among many. The state’s Housing Stabilization Services program, created to help addicts and the disabled and expected to cost  $2 million a year, had to be halted after it ballooned to more than $100 million in only four years. Federal prosecutor Joe Thompson described the “vast majority” of the program as fraudulent and, when he brought his first set of indictments for that fraud, six of his eight targets were Somali.

Immediately after that came the autism center scandal. Minnesota children diagnosed with autism qualify for all manner of government-funded treatment, and “culturally appropriate” treatment options proliferated. Somali children in Minnesota now have the highest incidence of autism in the world, with one in 16 four-year-olds having a diagnosis, a fact which garnered great interest from the medical........

© The Spectator