December 06, 2025

Welfare Fraud In Blue Cities: How Pervasive Is The Kleptocracy?

December 06, 2025/ Francis Menton

If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news.
Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new. The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018. Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number of enrollees.
But things really got going when the pandemic hit in 2020-21. Minnesota became ground zero for Somali fraudsters setting up sites supposedly to feed hungry children, and collecting millions for meals that were never prepared or served. Federal indictments for this fraud — including 47 people charged in the first indictment — began to issue in 2022. Dozens of articles at Powerline have traced the scandal since that time, as the revealed scope of the fraud has gradually gone from the millions to the hundreds of millions, and most recently into the billions of dollars.

October 23, 2025

The New York Times And The Approaching New York Mayoral Election

October 23, 2025/ Francis Menton

In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times.
Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part.
But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times.
As background, yesterday was the occasion of the last televised debate in the three-way mayoral race among Zohran Mamdani (Democrat), Andrew Cuomo (Independent) and Curtis Sliwa (Republican). Election Day is only 12 days away, and early voting starts in two days.

October 17, 2025

October 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, our mayoral election is less than 3 weeks away. Crazed “Democratic Socialist” candidate Zohran Mamdani continues to hold a commanding lead in the polls, with no signs of any tightening.
Among Mamdani’s announced policies are a substantial increase in the city income tax on “millionaires,” a multi-year rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments, having social workers instead of police respond to domestic violence calls, and having Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he shows up in town. Meanwhile, at both the City and State levels, destructive and impossible “climate” policies remain in place, like mandates to have 70% of electricity come from “renewables” by 2030 and to electrify most heat in large buildings by the same year.
You might think that panic would be starting to set in among the productive classes. But in fact that does not appear to be the case, at least as far as I can observe. Instead, most people are proceeding as if none of this is real. Are they right?

September 15, 2025

September 15, 2025/ Francis Menton

On Saturday (September 13) something called the Columbia Academic Freedom Council held a day-long conference here in New York. The Council used the event to hand out awards to some 23 recipients.
Each of the recipients had not only been punished or ostracized somehow for speaking out as a dissenter from the groupthink of academia, but had also fought back in some way.
The day’s program was organized into a series of panels, where each panel’s members were award recipients who got to tell their stories. The recipients included some prominent academics from elite institutions, but also some from less-well-known places, including some from community colleges and high schools.
The entire program was some 10 hours long. I was able to stay for about half of it. In many cases I was familiar with the story of the award recipient, but in many others I was not. I thought readers might be interested in the personal stories from a sample of some of the more and less prominent recipients.

September 12, 2025

September 12, 2025/ Francis Menton

It’s been a very sad few weeks, first with the tragic and senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina on August 22, and now with the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10.
These two killings have suddenly focused the attention of a lot of previously complacent people, and provided some very useful education about the kind of world we live in. But what are the lessons to take away?
One possible lesson is that the world is just irretrievably filled with anger and hate, to the extent that the best that sensible people can do is withdraw into their bunker, keep out of blue states and away from people who follow leftist and woke ideology, stick to a limited circle of family and friends, and avoid dealing with the broader world to the maximum extent possible.
I do not subscribe to that approach.

September 05, 2025

September 05, 2025/ Francis Menton

By some strange coincidence, no sooner did I write yesterday’s post about the thoroughly corrupt CDC and its recently-fired Director, Susan Monarez, than there turns up in today’s Wall Street Journal an op-ed by the same Ms. Monarez trying to justify herself and the agency with regard to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr.
The headline is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC and Me.” The sub-headline (online edition only) is “I was fired after 29 days because I held the line and insisted on rigorous scientific review.” The article is behind the Journal’s paywall, so I will provide some substantial quotes.
The theme of the piece, well-summarized in the sub-headline, is that Ms. Monarez, with the help of CDC colleagues, was fired for trying to hold the line against “pressure to compromise science itself.”