Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, Keith Ellison, recently told a partisan audience that he’s worried about his reelection prospects. He explicitly framed his race against a Republican challenger as a battle between good people and bigots. As he described the composition of November’s electorate, he asked, “Is the base of people who believe in freedom and justice, compassion and mercy, the people, will the people who believe that in the equality of human beings, in the dignity of all human beings, will we show up and vote? Or will the bigots and the racists show up and vote?”
Perhaps Ellison has no choice but to engage in race-baiting smear tactics as a means of distracting from his party’s dismal record in the state. It’s probably easier to attack your opponents as racists than to explain things like a NewsNation report earlier this year in which the outlet revealed it had “obtained a 2021 audio recording in which Ellison pledges support to members of the Somali community — some later convicted in the Feeding Our Future fraud — while they discuss campaign donations to him and his family.”
Federal prosecutors estimated that the fraud that has infamously consumed so much Minnesota taxpayer money may have spiraled as high as $9 billion. That’s a staggering amount of thievery.
Officials said the abuse was so rampant and systemic that Minnesota had become an international destination for fraudsters. “Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” a lead investigator observed late last year. The revelations were so embarrassing that they effectively forced Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) out of his campaign for another term.
The violations continue to pile up. Ellison tries to take credit for some of the prosecutions his office has undertaken against the fraudsters, but whistleblowers have alleged that the Democrats who run the state ignored multiple clear warnings about what was happening for years. Fraudsters wielded racism claims, and the threat thereof, as a weapon against investigations, evidently to great effect.
With little else to fall back on, Ellison is apparently resorting to the same sort of ugly racialist slop, which may explain why he’s had a muted reaction to one of the biggest stories unfolding in his backyard, despite his role as the state’s chief law enforcement officer:
A suburban high school homecoming game was stopped and evacuated this past Friday night due to what law enforcement sources described to local media as “Somali gang activity,” including multiple gunshot victims.
This ugly episode then triggered the cancellation of the subsequent homecoming dance, robbing the students of another major teenage rite of passage. A community meeting hastily scheduled for Monday to address this disgraceful debacle was abruptly shifted to an online format “due to concerns about campus safety,” per an email sent to registered participants. These outcomes are seemingly direct results of foreign gang warfare playing out in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis. A reported shooting at a Catholic church in the same community several weeks ago has also been pinned on the same violent dynamics.
Michele Tafoya, Minnesota Republicans’ nominee for U.S. Senate, slammed the incident on social media, tying it to the leadership of her left-wing opponent, who is Walz’s lieutenant governor: “Eight years of Peggy Flanagan and Tim Walz in power – and now high schoolers who wanted to go to a Friday night football game in Eden Prairie have to duck gunshots from Somali gangsters. It’s completely insane. Minnesotans deserve to be free to live their lives without fear, drive their cars without being carjacked, and let their kids go to a game without worrying that Peggy Flanagan’s policies could put them in danger.” It would be political malpractice not to turn this episode into political ads in a margin-of-error race.
GUY BENSON: THE SUSAN COLLINS FIREWALL
The underlying question is an urgent one: Even in a difficult national environment for Republicans, is there any breaking point for Minnesota’s voters, who’ve repeatedly come close to electing change-oriented conservatives in recent years but have never quite gotten there? Could this, coupled with the fraud, finally be enough? Or will they again rubber-stamp the decline in the name of “progress”? I’ll leave you with this quote about “badly needed public dollars” as a “solution” to this mess:
What could go wrong? Millions, maybe billions, of concerns come to mind.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
