By Selwyn Duke

We’re not sure how many kids Minnesota Somali day care centers took care of. But one thing is for certain:

Some of these facilities took care of financing for al-Shabaab terror networks in Somalia.

This is to the tune of hundreds of millions, too, a former Navy intelligence officer learned while tracking the funds.

And, yes, that would be our tax dollars — transferred to alien enemies with Minnesota officials’ complicity by omission. In fact, while whistleblowers warned of the fraud, Governor Tim Walz and other pols ignored the criminality.

Worse still, with anti-ICE agitation being a nice front-page distraction, this scandal has been swept under the rug.

Americans Unwittingly Funding Jihad

These transfers began as early as 2016, says Phillip Parrish. Parrish is an ex-Navy lieutenant who joined the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2016. He’s also currently running for Minnesota’s governorship. Elaborating on the story, NewsNation wrote recently that Parrish

said he tracked money couriers from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to the Netherlands, then to Nairobi, Kenya, and finally into Mogadishu money exchanges called “hawalas” — the same exchanges the Treasury Department designated in 2012 as fronts for the al-Qaida-linked terror group al-Shabab.

“In 2016, we were already tracking that [sic] was adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars, and that was just what we were tracking,” Parrish told NewsNation. “Then, by now, fast forward nearly 10 years later, yeah, when they’re talking about $9 billion, that’s a real figure, and that’s probably conservative.”

Parrish’s account raises questions about why Minnesota officials did not act on early warnings about fraud schemes that allegedly fleeced taxpayers of billions through fake day care centers and other programs.

Parrish said his investigation began when he noticed an unusual pattern of cash leaving Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

“There’s an interesting pattern here happening, where the money’s coming out of Minneapolis International Airport. Well, where’s it coming from?” Parrish said. “How are they getting it in Minneapolis? Where is it coming from? Well, that led to some research about a list of fake companies. Well, it’s all cash that’s coming out of these fake day cares or day cares with inflated numbers.”

Parrish proceeded to describe “suitcases of evidence” and varying amounts — up to $500,000 — leaving Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport daily. His reports were used by military operatives overseas, he said, but public and state officials generally ignored them.

“Industrial-scale Theft”

Yet even the $9 billion Parrish speaks of is only the iceberg’s tip. Just consider the input of Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Government. Talcove works, his bio states, “with more than 9,000 federal, state and local agencies on fraud prevention and identity verification.” And as he reported in “Inside the trillion-dollar fraud that is funding US enemies” on December 28, organized criminals

steal $115 million per hour from U.S. taxpayers right now, according to fraud detection models run by my organization. That’s $115 million every single hour — not annually, not monthly, but hourly. That comes to approximately $1 trillion a year bleeding out of federal programs.

Note: This is more than 14 percent of our $7 trillion 2025 budget. Now, question: Our national debt is approaching $39 trillion. How much of this is attributable to fraud? Also 14 percent? More?

Worse still, we’re not just selling our enemies the rope to hang us with, to paraphrase the communist saying. We’re letting them steal it. As Talcove also informs, singing Parrish’s tune:

Seventy percent of that money [$1 trillion yearly] lands overseas within days, moving through the same financial pipelines used for drug trafficking, sanctions evasion and terrorism finance.

Moreover, Talcove mentions that the millions going to al-Shabaab are

just a small piece of a much larger pie. During the pandemic, investigators traced stolen relief funds to Russian and Chinese state-backed networks and to organized crime rings in Nigeria and Iran.

Talcove then adds perspective:

This is not waste. It is not a bureaucratic error. It is industrial-scale theft, by which U.S. taxpayers are bankrolling our own destruction.

The U.S. government is the easiest mark in the world, and criminal networks know it. Foreign adversaries know it. The only people who didn’t fully grasp the scale were ourselves.

Financing Evil

The good news, says Talcove, is that the Trump administration is trying to tackle this fraud. As he tells us:

The Department of Justice just launched a new Division for National Fraud Enforcement. So far, 1,750 subpoenas have been issued and 98 defendants charged. They will find fraud in every state, in every major benefit program.

But then there’s more bad news, Talcove laments, stating that

here’s the hard truth no one in Washington wants to say: Enforcement alone will not fix a system still designed to be exploited.

Our system is just too big, too unwieldy, and too complex. Also, too many corrupt big-government state politicians are indifferent to where tax money goes — as long as they retain power.

Consider Walz. It’s widely believed he ignored the Minnesota fraud because he didn’t want to alienate the Somali community. Numbering more than 100,000 in his state, it’s a significant voting bloc. So from this perspective, the bilked billions are just part of the cost of doing business — i.e., buying votes.

How Deep Is the Rabbit Hole?

As to final thoughts, this fraud again underlines why Henry David Thoreau noted, “That government is best which governs least.” While no substitute for a people imbued with virtue (lacking today), there would surely be less theft if more charity were handled privately.

Second, we can only imagine how much evil the stolen trillions have enabled. For example, some of the money went to Nigeria. Well, that’s where Muslim groups have murdered up to 60,000 Christians in the last decade. How much of this has been financed by us — thanks to demagogic politicians who looked the other way?

Lastly, whatever is being done about this fraud, it all ends the moment the establishment regains political power. For having the world’s Walzes in charge means wall-to-wall corruption, where funding evil with our tax dollars is just business as usual.

This article was originally published at The New American.