A good editorial from the Star Tribune

It is fair-minded in pointing out that while Minnesota has done a poor job of preventing fraud, it doesn’t justify the racist comments Trump has made. He’ll probably declare it fake news.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

As Trump amped up his verbal and online assault of Somalis last week in the wake of the slaying and critical wounding of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant in Washington, according to charges, the president was asked what Somalis had to do with the deadly encounter. Trump’s response was revealing and toxically xenophobic.

“Ah, nothing. But Somalis have caused a lot of trouble,” he said.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue that the president has opportunistically seized on: the amount of fraud that occurred in Minnesota during and after the pandemic. It’s an issue that won’t go away until it’s fully addressed.

Here is the truth, however: Our elected leaders and government officials can prevent and prosecute fraud without villainizing law-abiding Minnesotans or relying upon racist stereotypes.

Yes, Minnesota demonstrated a serious problem with oversight of state dollars during the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting economic calamity. In a well-meaning effort to help people, Walz and his administration fell short.

In the case of Feeding Our Future, the state trusted that nonprofits and other third parties would honor their responsibilities. This enabled the theft of public resources meant to feed the hungry. While most of the perpetrators were Somali, the alleged mastermind was a white woman, Aimee Bock. This crime wasn’t a product of race or ethnicity, but opportunity and criminal greed.

But that’s not the only fraud. In an October commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune, former Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles detailed the lack of safeguards that enabled fraud in other programs, many of which have led to indictments and prosecution.

Thanks to prosecutors under Democratic and Republican administrations, criminals have faced vigorous prosecution. This is not enough. The public deserves assurances that systemic reform will prevent this from happening again.

Absent this, the state will be unable to credibly launch needed programs to address the growing economic strain on Minnesotans as the cost of living increases and the rate of unemployment is again on the rise.

That said, no specific instances of fraud should ever be used to castigate an entire class of Minnesotans. Minnesotans with German American backgrounds were persecuted as traitors during World War I. Italian Americans were stereotyped as dirty criminals during the 1920s. Hmong immigrants in the 1970s faced distrust and harassment over mistaken assumptions and racial profiling.

Waves of nativist fear have met every immigrant group, and when individuals within those groups committed crimes, they were pinned unfairly on everyone. The answer now is the same as before: Fix the system and police the crime while embracing the individual potential of every Minnesotan to enhance our shared society.

Meantime, any lectures on fraud should come from leaders who want to prevent it, not those who cast slurs and demonize the poor, hapless and innocent. Minnesotans will render their judgment at the polls next year. If our choices are between mushy inaction and spiteful rhetoric, we all lose.

Judging from the responses I’ve seen around this state, people are outraged at Trump’s blatant racism. If he’s planning on running for a third term (unconstitutionally!), he probably shouldn’t count on winning in Minnesota.

Disgustingly racist president says disgustingly racist things

Our horribly racist president went on an ignorant rant about the Somali community in Minnesota.

Donald Trump on Tuesday called Somali immigrants garbage and said they should be sent back home in a rant that came as the administration is reportedly increasing immigration enforcement against undocumented Somalis in Minnesota.

In a xenophobic rant during a cabinet meeting, Trump went off on Somalis and Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative who is from Somalia and is a US citizen. He said Somalia stinks and is no good for a reason.

They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, he said. He called Omar garbage and said we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

These are people who do nothing but complain, he said. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

I’ve taught Somali students. I’ve visited Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, I’ve eaten in Somali-owned restaurants with food by Somali chefs. Fly into the Minneapolis airport and call for a cab, you’ll probably get a Somali driver. I have a lot of respect for Ilhan Omar, she’s fighting on the side of righteousness. I agree with her response to this racist abuse.

Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who fled Somalia’s civil war as a child and has represented Minnesota’s 5th District since 2019, responded on X: “This president’s bigotry won’t silence our contributions to this nation. Somalis built Minnesota stronger. Your hate only exposes your weakness.”

If there is any corrupt, lazy garbage to be removed, it’s the person of Donald Trump. I stand with our Somali citizens over any Republican sleazebag.

Zero surprise

Elon Musk declared that Wikipedia was “woke,” and started his own online encyclopedia titled “Grokipedia”. He was probably tempted to call it Xipedia, but decided to use a different ‘cool’ word. You will not be surprised that he chose the easy routed of stealing all of Wikipedia’s entries and dewokify it by spicing it up with racism. I’ll let someone else suffer the task of doing the actual comparisons.

In his latest quest to fix something far from broken, racist billionaire lunatic Elon Musk decided to unleash his own optimized version of Wikipedia, predictably named Grokipedia, onto the world this week. Now if, like Musk’s own children, you’re not a member of the Elon fan club, you can probably imagine why Musk took on this project. Here’s a man who purchased Twitter a few years ago specifically to refashion it into a neo-Nazi disinformation machine (check), insinuated himself with the second Trump administration so that he could hollow out the federal government (check), and designed electric cars that spontaneously combust, burning their liberal owners to death (check). There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y.

Plagiarism is not a mark of genius, if not being racist is all it takes to be “woke,” shouldn’t everyone aspire to be woke?

It’s all cringe

I occasionally look in on our local racist cult — but not very often, because dear god, they are boring. We have an Asatru chapter near us, in Murdock, Minnesota, which was initially controversial when they bought an old church and announced that they were establishing a whites-only congregation. Since then, though, they’ve been quiet, festering in their small town enclave. That’s a danger, so I check in on their website now and then, because I half-expect to erupt and collapse at some time, which can be either hilarious or horrifying.

Asatru is a very silly religion…although, to be fair, all religions are absurd and fundamentally stupid. New religions just look particularly goofy because the older faiths benefit from familiarity. Mormonism, for instance, is crazy and unbelievable because we know it’s relatively recent and its con man founder, while Catholicism’s origins are buried in the murk of ancient history, and its founder is walled off behind thick layers of myth. Asatru was conjured up in 1972 by a couple of old guys meeting in a cafe in Reykjavik, built on a framework of myths and historical practices from the Edda, a book (the Prose Edda, at least, the Poetic Edda has older roots) written by a Christian in the 13th century. The old Norse religion has been dead for centuries. The Asatru folk are trying to resurrect a faith that has long been dead and buried in its grave.

I live in a state full of the descendants of Scandinavian immigrants, and they all came here steeped in the dogma of the Lutheran church (with a scattering of Catholics), and there was no heritage of Old Norse pagan religion among them.

The local Asatru chapter, called the Baldrshof, seems to be largely struggling to invent a mythological foundation in scraps of lore. A couple of their leaders meet once a week to record a video of their godawful boring conversations about Asatru; their channel is called Victory Never Sleeps, a title that is pretentious and nonsensical. These videos are painful to watch.

They’re 2 or 3 hours long, and they talk fantasy. I can’t watch them. They could be imbedding secret codes and nefarious plots in short messages deep in the long-winded drone and the FBI and I wouldn’t notice. They have been putting out short videos, too, that are more digestible but equally dull and silly. Here’s Matthew Flavel, the head of the local church, babbling.

When people see pictures of us, and see that those guys are Asatru, does that elevate the Aesir and our ancestors, or is it a cause for them to be ashamed?…Does that interaction bring glory to the Aesir and our ancestors, or does it make them cringe?

I have some good news for him: they aren’t cringing, because the Aesir don’t exist and his ancestors are all dead. The bad news for the rest of us is that tales of Norse folklore is a smokescreen. The rest of the world around them are doing the cringing. And we know that they have a different motivation. It’s racism.

The myth cycle, our powerful truths, they’re not literal truths, they’re pathways to truth. They show us truth in ways that our mind and our soul is uniquely capable of understanding the divine. And you find that because that’s developed through thousands of years of the experiences of our people. That’s why I think it is uniquely suited to each of as people of Northern European descent, as people who trace their roots back to that font of Aryan consciousness to embrace that spirituality. And you see that expressed throughout Europe and in little corners of the rest of the world that have since been diluted by white genocide. – Excerpt from “Asatru: A White Man’s Religion,” a speech current AFA leader Matt Flavel delivered at the Northwest Forum, a conference organized by white nationalist Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing

If the Ethnic European Folk cease to exist Asatru would likewise no longer exist. Let us be clear: by Ethnic European Folk we mean white people. It is our collective will that we not only survive, but thrive, and continue our evolution in the direction of the Infinite. All native religions spring from the unique collective soul of a particular race. Religions are not arbitrary or accidental; body, mind and spirit are all shaped by the evolutionary history of the group and are thus interrelated. Asatru is not just what we believe, it is what we are. Therefore, the survival and welfare of the Ethnic European Folk as a cultural and biological group is a religious imperative for the AFA. – Second point in the Asatru Folk Assembly’s current “Declaration of Purpose,” featured on the organization’s website

So I keep an eye on the local Asatru, boring as they are. I’m hoping they’re just going to continue to wallow in made-up folklore and fade into irrelevance, but you never know — the Mormons and the Catholic Church were also once a small cult of people with silly beliefs, too.

She was asking for it

A professor in Indiana has been removed from her class after a student complained.

A lecturer in the Indiana University School of Social Work has been removed from teaching one of her classes — “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice” — while the university investigates a complaint by a student against material she presented.

Whoa. The class was titled “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice”? That’s just asking for it. MAGA hates all three of those things. They want uniformity, not diversity. Human rights are a thing to be trampled. Social injustice is what they favor.

Jessica Adams joined the school as a lecturer last year. She spoke at a press conference with campus activist groups Friday against what she sees as an unfair process and accusation.

“I as an instructor should have the ability to bring those ideas into my class,” Adams said.

She said a student submitted the complaint to the office of U.S. Senator Jim Banks over a graphic she used in her class. Adams said Banks’ office then contacted her dean.

I’m trying to see this event from the perspective of the student. They signed up for a course titled “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice” — they had to know what they were in for. Did they think it was going to be a course bashing all those things? No. They were looking for something to complain about.

And they complained to their senator? Jesus. And then the senator tried to dictate what should be taught? Absolutely nuts.

Here’s the graphic that annoyed the student and senator.

What’s the objection? What would offend a MAGA? Be specific. Explain why you would disagree that one of those phrases is fundamentally racist, or supporting white supremacy. That’s the kind of question I would ask of the class, if I were teaching a sociology course (I’m not, fortunately, since I don’t have the expertise).

I am preparing a unit on the misuse of genetics by racists for my spring genetics course. I hope my students don’t report me to Amy Klobuchar or Tina Smith.

A neglected (or hidden) history

Juan Cole makes an interesting point in light of Mamdani campaigning partly in Arabic.

Because so many Arabic speakers have immigrated to the United States since the end of the old Nazi-like immigration quotas in 1965, many Americans may think of Arabic as recent language in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Because he thought he was going to land in Muslim-ruled Asia, Columbus brought along interpreters on his voyage, including Luis de Torres, who knew some Arabic. De Torres was of Jewish heritage, but by then all Jews and Muslims in Spain during the reconquista had been forced to at least pretend to convert to Catholicism. It is likely that the first words a European said to a Native American chieftain in Cuba were “as-Salamu `alaykum,” Arabic for “peace be upon you.”

Wait a moment…but farther north, the first Old World greeting a Native American would have heard might have been in Old Norse. But they were white, so American audiences would be unsurprised.

Alternatively, the first greeting might have been an axe to the face, because Vikings might have exercised raiding extincts, rather than trying to be neighborly. (Columbus turned out to be rather nasty himself — first contact, no matter who it was, could be ugly.)

Of course, those Norwegian settlements proved to be temporary, and Scandinavians did a poor job of colonization until the 19th century, when my great-great-grandparents finally made it over the Atlantic. Muslim settlers had a better record.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims fled Spain rather than convert. While most went to North Africa, it is clear from the genetic record that many covertly went to the New World:

“Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues conclude . . . that the Arab and Berber heritage is much higher in Latin American than in contemporary Valencia, which shows that a lot of Moriscos must have exited to the New World (even though that was supposedly against the law at the time). They write, “One final point, highlighted by the survival of North African-related ancestry in substantial proportions until the seventeenth century, is the widespread presence of such ancestry in present-day South Americans ”
Karoline Cook points to the way Moriscos were perceived by Spaniards in the New World as having useful artisanal skills, such that they sought to bring them over. Some were brought as slaves and never sent back.”

The territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California thus had Arabic-speakers, many of them crypto-Muslims, for generations — throughout the 1500s and 1600s. One Arab woman from a crypto-Muslim community in Spain who married a Spanish gentleman and was taken to Mexico City, Maria Ruiz, ended up being tried by the Inquisition in the late 1500s for having retained her Muslim beliefs.

Isn’t it curious how Americans avidly gobbled up the idea that Leif Erickson and his merry band were early European visitors to the Americas, but this is the first I’ve heard of Arabic-speaking brown people adapting and thriving in these continents in the sixteenth century?

New vermin for a new generation

The Department of Homeland Security is recruiting with a new trope, same as the old trope.

I was never into Halo, but my sons were avid players. I just wasn’t good enough to join in, but I remember the Flood from the many battles waged into the wee hours of the night in my basement. I had to look them up to remind myself of what the Flood were.

The Flood, designated as LF.Xx.3273 by the Forerunners (Latin Inferi redivivus meaning “the dead reincarnated”) and referred to as the Parasite and the infection by the Covenant, is a species of highly virulent parasitic organisms that reproduce and grow by consuming sentient lifeforms of sufficient biomass and cognitive capability. The Flood was responsible for consuming most of the sentient lifeforms in the galaxy – including the vast majority of Forerunners – during the Forerunner-Flood war in ancient past, prompting the activation of the galaxy-sterilizing Halo Array in 97,445 BCE.

Cool. Comparing immigrants to virulent parasitic organisms and threatening to literally destroy them. This is exactly what Julius Streicher would do if he were reincarnated today and was trying to enlist young men to his cause.

The Flood do look like they’d make excellent farm laborers, but they don’t resemble the Central and South American people I know.

Young Republicans, same as the Old Republicans

You’d think they’d learn. The Young Republicans had a signal chat where they thought everything was confidential among themselves, so they indulged themselves in profanity, misogyny, and racism while they were discussing their strategy for taking over the YR organization. Ha ha, it was leaked, and these unpleasant young men have been exposed. They were revealed to be repulsive people who hoped to be the future of the Republican party.

The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

Read the linked article if you really want to know what they had to say. I can say that at least the organizer has “apologized” for the disgusting conversation.

“I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said. “While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.”

Classic. He’s apologizing that people were offended, and further is suggesting that the logs were faked. He was just ridiculously bigoted, he’s been caught, and now he wants to conjure up some plausible denial.

Giunta was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages — often encouraged or “liked” by other members.

When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f–s.”

They’ve all got the same old tired racist “jokes”. Cancel ’em all. Hendrix has already lost his position in Missouri, despite, hypothetically, Missourians not liking homosexuals.

Flush all their careers away for being racist, and the one thing that might condemn them in the eyes of their fellow Republicans, being tech-stupid. Future Republicans are expected to be racist and savvy about communications — fortunately, they all seem to be ignorant idiots.

I already hated Stephen Miller, but…

I hadn’t listened to this report on his history yet. Yeesh. He is and always been deeply racist — we’re talking cartoonish levels of racism. Just a repulsive shithouse pit of ugly ideas. Why is it that his appointment wasn’t a deal-breaker for Trump? How is he still allowed to whisper in Trump’s ear? Why hasn’t the Mainstream Media jumped on how problematic one of the president’s most important advisors is?

Sympathetic pains…rising, rising

Damn, this review hurts for a couple of reasons, but it really shouldn’t. When people say stupid, hateful, hypocritical things, they should be rebuked and their errors made public, right? Especially when they have so amply demonstrated that they are deserving. But sometimes the criticism is so savage that I can feel a faint echo of the pain.

The well-regarded video essayist Shaun has a new target, and just eviscerates a group of people over the course of FOUR HOURS (admission: I’ve only made it halfway through it so far). The people are the authors behind Krauss’s new book, The War on Science, and the video runs on for so long because he thoroughly debunks each and every one of them. Krauss himself gets thoroughly demolished, but then it goes on to document the terrible opinions of Christian Ott, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, and more. I get briefly mentioned and for a second I was terrified that I was going to get shredded, too, but fortunately Shaun is agreeing with my position.

If ever I have to go up against any of the authors, I’m going to have to review this video again and take notes, because no one emerges unscathed.

Wow, that was really brutal…and accurate.