Minnesota’s streets are growing more dangerous by the day, with police officers stretched thin and crime rates that refuse to budge. Yet while everyday folks foot the bill for basic protection, a sprawling fraud scandal has allegedly funneled millions in state welfare dollars straight to Al-Shabaab, the al-Qaida-linked terror group terrorizing Somalia. It’s a betrayal that leaves law enforcement without the resources to fight back, and hardworking families wondering how their money ended up bankrolling bloodshed halfway around the world.
The rot runs deep. A November report in City Journal laid bare how Somali-American networks in the Twin Cities exploited programs like the Child Care Assistance Program and federal meal initiatives, siphoning off tens of millions—perhaps billions—meant for vulnerable kids and families. Providers ballooned from 41 to 328 in just a few years, a 700% spike that screamed fraud.
Federal counterterrorism sources, speaking anonymously, confirmed the cash trail: suitcases stuffed with bills flown out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, routed through Seattle to Somali hawala networks, and ultimately landing with militants. “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” one source put it bluntly.
This is the fallout from years of lax oversight under Democratic leadership. The Feeding Our Future scandal alone saw nearly 80 defendants charged with ripping off $250 million in pandemic meal funds. But the deeper probe reveals a pattern: remittances wired home, then diverted to extremists.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent kicked off a federal investigation in early December, blasting the “feckless mismanagement of the Biden Administration and Governor Tim Walz.” On X, he vowed to act fast “to ensure Americans’ taxes are not funding acts of global terror.” House Oversight Chairman James Comer followed suit, demanding documents from Walz on what his team knew—and why they did nothing to stop the bleed.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, representing swaths of this fraud-riddled state, didn’t mince words in a letter to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. “Minnesota has become the land of 10,000 frauds under Tim Walz. Now, reports have uncovered that these stolen taxpayer dollars are funding Al-Shabaab terrorists,” he wrote. “This is not only a grave national security concern, it’s a slap in the face to the hardworking, law-abiding people of Minnesota.”
Even across the border, Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany warned his state against repeating the mistake, calling out Minnesota’s “staggering $1 billion” scheme as a cautionary tale of unchecked spending on food security programs.
On the ground, the consequences hit hardest where it matters: public safety. St. Paul Police Federation President Mark Ross paints a grim picture of a force on the brink. “We’ve been down anywhere from 50 to over 100 officers since 2020, and we just haven’t recovered from that. Right now we’re about a thousand police officers short in the state of Minnesota, and we’re on pace to lose another 2,000 to 2,500 over the next few years,” Ross said.
Those gaps mean slower responses, burnout, and emboldened criminals. Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension data for 2024 bears it out: 170 murders, 75% involving firearms; carjackings up 5.5%; rapes climbing 5.2%; assaults on officers rising 1.5%. In the seven-county Twin Cities metro, violent crime ticked up 1%—a modest number that masks the fear gripping neighborhoods.
Randy Sutton, a veteran cop and founder of The Wounded Blue, sees ideology at the root.
“The public safety is at risk… we are in a criminal justice crisis in America. Political leadership is destroying public safety through their ideology,” he charged.
Officers now dread the brass more than the bad guys: “Officers are more afraid of their own leadership than of the criminal element and that is the saddest part of this whole story.”
Nationally, over 85,000 cops were assaulted last year, with one shot every single day. In Minnesota, the chill is palpable—some departments underreport to the FBI, skewing the stats and leaving the public in the dark.
“People are afraid to even report crime… and some police agencies aren’t reporting to the FBI. The figures are skewed. We don’t even have an accurate picture of violent crime,” Sutton added.
Governor Walz’s camp pushes back hard, touting the “largest public safety budget in state history” with investments in every department, a new State Patrol headquarters, and a crime lab. Minnesota ranks among the safest states, they say, and the fraud hit federal programs like Medicaid, not local cop paychecks.
But Ross calls foul: “These billions of dollars could have been spent on public safety, but it’s gone… and we’ll never see that money again.” One-time cash infusions won’t fix chronic shortages, he argues. “Those are all projects that need to be done, but what we’re looking for is continued funding all the time. Not one-time funding.” And on the fraud’s origins? “You can’t frame things that way. It all comes from the same pool of money. Those are tax dollars.”
The timing stinks of deeper questions. Walz’s rise, from obscure congressman to Kamala Harris’s running mate, rode a wave of feel-good diversity politics in a state with the nation’s largest Somali diaspora. Yet warnings echoed for years—a 2019 state audit couldn’t “substantiate” terror links but admitted it was “possible” funds slipped overseas.
Federal prosecutors have nailed dozens of Minnesotans for Al-Shabaab and ISIS ties, but only now, with Trump back in the White House, does the full scope get airtime. Is this just incompetence, or something more deliberate—a blind eye turned to secure votes in a key bloc? The silence from Democrats speaks volumes; even as Comer presses for answers, Walz shrugs off the probe, welcoming it only if ties prove out. Meanwhile, cops like those in St. Paul grind on, outnumbered and outgunned.
Fixing this demands real leadership, not press releases. Pump ongoing funds into recruitment and retention. Claw back every stolen dime through aggressive prosecutions. And audit every welfare program with a fine-tooth comb—no more trust, just verification. Minnesotans deserve streets where kids can play without fear, not a system where their lunch money arms jihadists.
As Ross puts it, “It all starts with leadership, political leadership, department leadership, union leadership. We need people to get up and lead.” Until then, the crisis festers, one diverted dollar at a time.
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.