Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Somali fraud in Minneapolis began long before the cases that have been making nationwide headlines. And one of the first cases involved the abuse of Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) by day cares with fraud amounting to an estimated $100 million in 2015. Minnesota Child Care Services which got its license in 2012 and a year later was already the single largest recipient of (CCAP) funds for the next two years during which time it also accumulated ‘corrections’ for not keeping proper staff records, staff qualifications, cleanliness and crib violations, was one of a number of organizations targeted in the fraud investigations. Investigators also discovered that during just one two week period the Somali day care center billed “for 950 children who did not actually attend the center”, that it billed for children on days when no children attended, and the center was also accused of providing kickbacks to parents. As part of an agreement, the day care center pled guilty to...

Philippe de Lannoy, born to a Protestant family fleeing Spanish religious persecution, arrived in the Plymouth Colony in 1621. His descendants carrying the Delano family name include three presidents; Grant, Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Laura Ingalls Wilder. FDR and the writer of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books may be by far the best known of all the many prominent Delano descendants. The story of the pioneering family persevering through blizzards, droughts and plagues of locusts from Minnesota through Wisconsin to the Dakotas to carve a living from the soil while always remaining hopeful was not just a world away from the ‘Boston Brahmins’ and the Northeastern elites who dominated the country: it was also a deliberate philosophical contrast between independence and socialism. “We have a dictator,” Rose Wilder Lane wrote after FDR’s inauguration. The term was not nearly as outrageous then as it seems now through the distorting lens of time. Prominent liberals (...

What was Renee Nicole Good thinking when her girlfriend yelled, “Drive baby, drive” and grinning she drove her 4,000 lb Honda Pilot SUV at an armed federal law enforcement officer? Her last thoughts were likely of her imaginary white privilege and why it failed to protect her. Good had supported BLM and had inhaled its mythology of ‘the talk’, the idea that law enforcement is a racist institution, that police started out as ‘slave catchers’ and that they exist to persecute black people while giving white people a pass. This would have come as a surprise to the over 2,000 white people who have been shot by police officers since 2020. White leftists go into confrontations with law enforcement officers wearing their imaginary white privilege like the emperor’s new clothes. This ideological fiction that underpins Marxist identity politics works about as well in real life tests as Marxism does. That’s what Renee found out. There is no white privilege. Talk or no talk, assault or threaten a...

In 2014, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a ‘Vision Zero’ plan to eliminate traffic deaths in 10 years. Last year, there were 252 traffic deaths. By the time he left office, traffic deaths were up 26%. Next year, former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti adopted Vision Zero and promised to reduce “traffic fatalities to zero by 2025.” “It is tragic that 200 people are killed each year while moving about our city,” Garcetti vowed. “I am determined to bring that number down to zero.” Since then traffic deaths climbed from 245 to 368 in 2024. In Washington D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser adopted a Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. Instead D.C. recorded a 16-year-high of traffic deaths in 2024. San Francisco also promised to end traffic deaths in ten years, but in 2023 it recorded the highest number of traffic deaths since 2023. A Bloomberg article recently conceded that “it’s hard to find any Vision Zero cities where traffic deaths have declined.” Along with failu...

In October, a politically connected illegal alien was charged with ramming ICE vehicles in Los Angeles. He was shot and wounded by an ICE officer, but after a grand jury indicted the illegal alien, an Obama judge threw out the charges. The case was all too typical of how commonplace car attacks on ICE and immigration law enforcement had become and how sanctuary cities had conspired to legalize them. The death of a radical leftist activist accused of attempting to ram ICE personnel with her SUV in Minneapolis, may be the first official fatality, but it’s also the inevitable result of normalizing car attacks, promoting them as a tactic and then protecting their perpetrators from the consequence. Radical judges and activist groups can protect an activist from the law, but not from a bullet, and driving a 5,000 lb SUV at armed men was always going to end one way. Democrat officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have tried to pretend that the fatal shooting sho...

A few days before New Year’s Eve, when hardly anyone was paying attention, State Department officials visited Geneva and signed a $2 billion aid deal with the UN. The State Department touted the deal as “more lives saved for fewer tax dollars” and called it a “Trump administration humanitarian reset”. The bottom line though is that it represents an initial commitment of $2 billion to the same corrupt and broken UN aid delivery system. Administration officials have emphasized that ‘initial’ $2 billion is significantly lower than the past $8-10 billion in funding, that the deal requires consolidating some of the UN’s bureaucracy and allows for closer management of the money we send to the United Nations. But some are questioning whether we should be providing any aid through the UN at all. The Memorandum of Understanding signed with the UN provides that “initial” $2 billion to a list of 17 countries including Ukraine, Haiti, both Sudans, Kenya, the Congo, El Salvador and others. Some of...

When the Zohran Mamdani campaign promised to “shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods”, there was little response and even less outrage in the media. Had any politician campaigning to run a major city promised to punitively target any other racial group, it would have been a major national story and a future civil rights investigation. Instead, Mamdani was allowe d to go on MSNBC and try to clean up the message by claiming that it was a “description of the neighborhoods” not an “intention of where we would tax New Yorkers” and that “nothing can be worked backwards from some kind of racial goal in this city.” “The use of that language is just an assessment of that neighborhood,” he tried to assure NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s not driven by race. It’s more of an assessment.” Had a politician promised to target people living in “blacker neighborhoods” for a punitive policy and then claimed that he was j...

After the latest wave of exposes made Somali fraud a national story, Democrat state officials from Minnesota to Washington to Maine scrambled to conduct cover-ups and threaten anyone exposing the fraud. The head of Seattle’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, Hamdi Mohamed, “the first Somali woman elected in the state”, convened a meeting with Gov. Bob Ferguson, representatives of Attorney General Nick Brown, Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans, as well as other elected officials, who promised to protect Somalis from investigations and enforcement. Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson, a radical leftist, declared that she stands “in solidarity with our Somali and Muslim communities” who are facing ICE as well as alleged “doxxing, harassment, and hate” which is how investigations of Somali fraud have been described. “My office has received outreach from members of the Somali community after reports of home-based daycare providers being harassed and accused of fraud with little to no fact-chec...