I’ve been hearing about corruption in Minnesota for many years. The short summary, since I’ve been regularly seeing articles about it in our newspapers since at least the start of the COVID pandemic, is that the state exercised poor regulatory oversight of charitable foundations, and some bad actors moved in to exploit that. The problem exploded during COVID as state and federal services were expanded to cope with the social disruption caused by the disease, and a few people figured out that founding phony charities was a good strategy for siphoning off tax dollars…a lot of tax dollars.

Honestly, I was tuning out all the news about the Feeding Our Future scam back in 2020, because it was all about the state slowly stamping out all the scammers. We’ve had a steady throb of stories in this state about crooks getting arrested for lying about these fake charities, slowly getting prosecuted, and typically getting convicted — the justice system grinds slowly, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved, and while many have been convicted, even today most of them haven’t been sentenced. When your local news is a steady drip of incremental stories about infamous con artists getting court dates, it’s hard to sustain focus. It’s been a slow cleanup of a ghastly mess, where frauds were claiming to set up meal delivery for schools, getting paid by the state, and then not actually delivering anything.

Except now it’s blowing up again because Republicans have discovered a racist angle to it. A lot of the schools not-served by these services were in poor Somali communities, with the complicity of Somali con artists, because as usual poor people are ripe for the picking with promises of free money. So now there’s a story Republicans can seize upon: poor black people were stealing our money! Never mind that state officials were aware of the problem and have been trying to do cleanup and improve regulatory oversight for over a decade and that it’s not just a Somali problem.

For instance, here’s the organizer of the scheme, Aimee Bock:

Whoops. I guess we’re going to have to round up all the white women and deport them. Just can’t trust ’em.

Keep in mind that Minnesota has a population of 80,000 people of Somali descent. Something like 80 were involved in the crime, so sure, indicting over 3 million white women in the state because Aimee Bock stole millions of dollars seems fair.

For a more thorough overview of the scheme, here’s a fast-talking white woman to compress the whole convoluted mess into 24 minutes.

One of the more crazy accusations coming out of the demented Right is the claim that the Minnesota state flag, which is blue and has a star on it, was designed to resemble the Somali flag, which is blue and has a star on it. You be the judge.

The Manhattan Institute carried out a poll that dissects the current Republican coalition. It’s not a particularly trustworthy think-tank — Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow, and it publishes the City Journal, a magazine that only catches my eye because it is egregiously racist and pro-eugenics — so don’t accept its conclusions without question. A major result of the poll is that it detects two broad categories within the party that are somewhat in conflict, but also have much in common with each other.

• Core Republicans (65%)—longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier; and
• New Entrant Republicans (29%)—recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.

I don’t like either group. The Core Republicans are boringly familiar, they fit the old stereotype of Republicans. The New Entrant Republicans are much more interesting and unexpected (to me), and have a more complex perspective. They’re a mess, and I don’t understand how they’ve aligned themselves to Republicans — they mainly look a bunch of flighty and weird people who bumble about looking for self-justification of their views, some of which I might agree with, except they somehow end up supporting Trump.

This description starts out positively, and ends up horrifically.

But a sizeable minority—new entrants to the GOP coalition over the past two presidential cycles—look markedly different. Younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past, this group diverges sharply from the party’s core. They are more likely, often substantially more likely, to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain. They are more supportive of left-leaning economic policies, more favorable toward China, more critical of Israel, and more liberal on issues ranging from migration to DEI initiatives. A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence. Yet they overwhelmingly identify as Republicans today and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Yikes. “A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence” — I think that alone is enough to explain why they ended up in the Trump camp. That’s the glue that is holding the coalition together.

With one other feature: they’re crackpots. This is the lunatic party.

Over a third of the Republican party thinks vaccines cause autism, that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Holocaust was exaggerated, that 9/11 was engineered by the US government. Over half believe Trump’s claim that his election losses were criminally engineered, and that the pandemic was produced by China. They’re nuts. This party is not salvaged by the fact that most might disagree with these conspiracy theories, it contains a substantial number of loons.

This explains a lot about the Republican party.

Although I’d like to see a similar analysis of Democratic voters — I’m lacking too much context here.

You’re not convincing me that I should get out of my American bubble, UK. What’s this I hear? You might end up making Nigel Farage your prime minister? Haven’t you noticed how the US is self-destructing after electing a flaming buffoon to the presidency? Don’t repeat our mistake.

The latest revelation is that Farage’s behavior as a schoolboy. He was a goose-stepping bully singing Hitler youth songs!

When he was 17, a teacher wrote a letter protesting the prospect of Farage being appointed prefect at his school. She was in disbelief that he was even considered for the role.

She wrote: “You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.

“Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views, and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set that he had to be removed from his lesson …

“Yet another colleague described how, at a [combined cadet force] camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs; and when it was suggested by a master that boys who expressed such views ‘don’t really mean them’, the college chaplain himself commented that, on the contrary, in his experience views of that kind expressed by boys of that age are deep-seated and are meant.”

The letter concluded: “You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.”

He was, of course, appointed to the position anyway.

We should all learn from this: don’t let young people with fascist impulses get away with it. They don’t get better, except in the sense of getting better at concealing it for a time, but give them a little bit of power and the viciousness reemerges. Nigel Farage is the UK’s Stephen Miller wearing clown paint.

The letter expresses dismay that Farage hasn’t even apologized. I don’t give a damn whether he can put up a facade of regret — his actual identity as a racist and anti-semite was exposed, and no amount of “I’m sowwy” would make up for it.

Some UK citizens are retaining a sense of humor about it all, though.

“APPARENTLY it costs the NHS over E300,000 a year to remove foreign objects from people’s rectums. Why aren’t we removing British objects instead? was Brexit all for nothing?
– Gerry Paton, London”

Humor seems to be all we have left, unfortunately. This is the era when entire countries turn themselves into a joke.

I just assumed that since the US government has been such an overwhelming shitshow, it was distracting us from the better job being done in the nation to our north. The prime minister is Mark Carney, who leads the liberal party, so he must be doing good things. Maybe not.

A University of Toronto professor, Laura Tozer, teaches a grad level course in climate and climate policy. She has a few complaints for Carney to address.

“Every single semester, a student raises their hand in my class and asks: ‘Professor, is there any hope on climate change?’ How about this year when the new semester starts in January, you get to look them in the eye and answer,” she wrote in her letter, posted on LinkedIn, which also rattles off the laundry list of climate rollbacks under Carney.
X Suspended Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations in Alberta

X Weakened methane regulations

X Scrapped the Oil & Gas Sector Emissions Cap

X Abandoned Canada’s consumer carbon pricing system

X Ended Canada Greener Homes retrofit program to electrify and improve household efficiency

X Ended Canada Greener Homes Loan Program to electrify and improve household efficiency

X Ended the Electric Vehicles (iZEV) program

X Delayed Canada’s Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate

X Passed bill C5 ‘Building Canada Act’ to allow government to override 12 laws and 7 regulations, including the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, for designated projects

X Committed to clawing back Canada’s anti-greenwashing legislation

> Announced plans to eliminate a tax on private jets and yachts

X Weakened the Alberta industrial carbon price from the $170/tonne it should have been (if the federal government enforced its own policies) to $130/tonne

Whoa. I’ve been ignoring Canada (forgive me, you know we Americans kind of have our hands full), but apparently the Canadian government has been fucking up, too. It sounds like Carney has been fully captured by the oil interests and is giving up on conservation efforts.

How is he doing on health policy and vaccination? Is he planning to take over Greenland? I’m afraid to look.