Kleptocracy

Migrant Fraud as a System Feature, Not a Bug

During my time in the provinces of Eastern Afghanistan, I was exposed to two heretofore alien cultural modes, one good and one bad. The first (benign) one was the condition of living with a group of men as a team, with minimal (by modern standards) comforts, and maximal purpose. We were light infantrymen, fighting a strange kind of counter-insurgency - although I suppose they’re all strange. Our life was lifting weights, maintaining our vehicles and weapons, engaging in the odd firefight, and sometimes visiting the large bases to reload and refit and to plug ourselves into the strange digital world of Facebook and make calls home.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that the depression and aimlessness experienced by veterans coming home (which worsen combat trauma symptoms, and are all medicated heavily as a matter of course by the Veterans Administration with generally awful results) has far more to do with the loss of that lifestyle and the reengagement with the lonely emptiness of modern life than it does with PTSD or sleep problems or any other purely psychiatric condition.

[7] What It Felt Like to Come Home

The other (malign) mode that I encountered was the rather brutal and disgusting world of the Pashtun man. Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. Cannabis use was endemic. Dogs were treated cruelly. Women were completely absent - when we’d convoy through Kabul we’d see the large, glittering wedding venues where large celebrations of men only would honor the groom. Closer to our home base there were no wedding venues or restaurants or businesses of any kind - they simply didn’t exist. I don’t know if women had their own wedding celebrations (I imagine they did) but they weren’t public. They couldn’t take place in rented halls or clubs or restaurants. Children were tolerated, but struck often and made to do labor. It was not uncommon to see a seven-year old girl herding 100 goats or gathering rocks for one of the oddly common rock walls that cross the landscape (distinguishing one square of empty, rocky dust from another). Because it’s the work of at least a decade (usually two) to accumulate the savings to pay a dowry and get married, and because there is no other sexual outlet for Afghan men, homosexuality is devastatingly common. Men put kohl around their eyes and dye their beards magenta and often hold hands when they walk alongside one another. None of these memes have the same cultural or sexual meanings in Afghan culture as they do for Americans but they certainly didn’t reduce the ridicule or revulsion of American troops. When we’d make climbs to the ANA or ABP mountain outposts that it was our duty to support (which we did dozens of times - hours of trekking with heavy machine guns and boxes of ammo, carried or borne on donkeys) we found dirty, garbage-strewn trenches where tea and marijuana and perhaps opium were plentiful, but ammunition and soap were in short supply. There was always one or two shy, lithe young men who were clearly the recipients of the men’s sexual attention. We were told as much, with the kind of casual tone that one might use to describe their favorite hobby. Worst of all was the demonic miasma that clung to that land: pederasty. We never encountered boys being raped. Speaking for myself, I would have intervened if I had, almost regardless of any consequences.

But it was known that an inordinate number of men had a sustained hunger for the bodies of young boys (and not girls - for some reason that I am uninterested in considering). “Women are for birthing, boys are for pleasure” is a common piece of Afghan folk wisdom and there are open, celebrated subcultures in which men show off their abused young companions, who often seem to revel in the attention - a testimony to the strange and potent means that human cultures have for creating and enforcing perverse norms and status markers.

It is undeniable that such things exist, and that such behaviors are revoltingly common in certain cultures. It seems undeniable that the men I encountered would, if released into a country full of foolish young women in yoga pants with lax laws, be much more likely to attempt horrifying acts of sexual assault. They certainly would not be sexually appropriate. How could they? They don’t even understand our conception of the term. Men who enjoy raping boys will enjoy raping boys even after moving to a new country. Men who kick dogs or punch wives won’t experience epiphanies simply because they gain residency in Europe or Australia or the United States. Men who see society as a brutal and sinister landscape where theft and predation are permissible, as long as the consequences aren’t too dire or the victims too important, will not come to see the world differently simply because multiculturalists insist that it be so.

And cultures where theft and intertribal violence and fraud are common will display those patterns even after being transplanted to a new hemisphere.

The fact that we live in world in which there are different cultures, with different norms and behaviors and flaws (which is as definitely true as anything can be said to be) poses serious problems for the multicultural project, since our societies are more merciful and soft and comfortable and naive than any others, and certainly more so than any societies that existed historically. Faced with this reality, the multiculturalists have a few responses, and they seem to vary depending on which objection is being raised. (This is always the mark of a weak idea, by the way, this reactive and disingenuous bobbing around without ever actually stating what you believe and why).

If the matter is being discussed in nonspecific terms (not in the context of Pashtuns and their long history of violence and pederasty but in the context of cultural differences in general) then they will default to cultural relativism: “cultures are just different… not better or worse.” Asked to account for slavery in Saudi Arabia or the frequent gang rapes on the streets of Cairo, they’ll usually try to shift the blame. “Colonialism is the reason that crowds of Egyptian men frequently feel comfortable assaulting women in their cities, and no crowds seem to emerge to stop this behavior.” Colonialism (or imperialism, or capitalism) is the reason why Afghan men have a predilection for pedophilic rape. Personally, I’m not particularly interested in reasons, when it come to this topic. Colonialism obviously isn’t a sufficient explanation. This narrative has about a dozen gaping holes, and certainly couldn’t account for Afghan culture anyway; the country might have been considered a colony of the Soviet Union, but that mostly occurred in the 1980’s and this problem seems to stretch back for centuries. But that wouldn’t change this very nasty fact: certain populations of men are particularly susceptible to be violent and predatory and sexually aggressive because these qualities simply aren’t stigmatized in the same way in their cultures. This is just an anthropological fact. And if you bring those men to your country you will bring those traits with them. If you get to this point, the multiculturalist will probably try to pull statistical sleight of hands, or to ignore the important concept of ‘per capita’, or to focus on all of the crimes of white men. None of that changes the reality. None of it answers the objections. It’s a way of ducking the problem, and refusing to engage with it because its implications are dark and unpalatable.

To be honest, I think that everyone understands that bringing Afghans into a Western country increases the risk of sexual assault of women and children. What the multiculturalists think (I believe), which I’ve never heard any of them actually say, is that the rise in sexual assaults is worth it. Depending on their motivation for being multiculturalist, it’s either worth it to help a lot of poor foreigners, or it’s worth it to achieve demographic and cultural and economic changes in the country in question. Just as multiculturalists will not frankly state their evaluation of the problems of multiculturalism, they will often similarly refuse to be honest about their motivations. They will often pretend ignorance, or claim that their policy preferences are motivated by the former reason (helping unfortunate souls) when instead they’re motivated by the latter (social engineering for the benefits of their class). If a person really wanted to help a group of poor aliens they would probably donate some of their own time or money, or at least be willing to live around the aliens and get to know them. Neither of those usually seems to be the case.

So it is possible that the flood of migrants to Western countries (most of them, simultaneously) and the deliberate indifference and campaign of silence and obfuscation by the various professional classes of each nation has some ulterior motive. It is possible that these new arrivals are being allowed to come (hell, incentivized to come) and permitted to stay - despite the glaring social problems - because their presence is useful for the long-term political goals of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and for those of the administrative state.

The first stage of the administrative state is acute, and conditional. Programs are established in response to a limited and urgent social need. The entitlements and social programs will certainly solve the problem, and the program will certainly be pared down or eliminated as need vanishes.

Need doesn’t vanish. It never does. It grows, and it’s redefined.

The second stage of the administrative state is chronic. Funding is established now, thousands of of bureaucrats depend upon the structures for employment and perhaps millions of citizens now receive their benefits regularly. They’ve become emotionally dependent upon them and they feel entitled to the assistance. This contributes to a sedentary, antisocial cast of thinking in which the citizen is merely a passive recipient of state resources.

Education becomes unnecessary - as long as a person is receiving the benefits, what does it matter? Self-improvement and ambition become penalized, threats to continued receipt of the assistance. Political independence becomes impossible. Just as the state under socialism controls all of society, and therefore precludes any effective political opposition or alternative, the administrative state controls the short-term financial futures of many voters, and so they become vassals. They will vote for whichever leader or party promises them future benefits, and the more the better. This effect is extremely corrosive upon democracy. It was probably the single biggest factor in the popularity of the Nazi Party once it had gained control of the German government. It has led to multiple economic collapses in Argentina, and it’s the main factor in the decades-long economic sclerosis afflicting Europe. An undisciplined society without strong family bonds that develops the ability to vote yourself resources inevitably leads to the downfall of the system. This is never acknowledged on the left. In our country the recipients continue to be spoken of with the language of need, but the relationship is really one of political and economic dependence. The administrative state flourishes alongside this kind of abject dependence.

Need is assumed to be total, and beyond criticism. Any suggestion that individuals or communities might be able to wean themselves off of the assistance is treated as somehow inappropriate, hostile, uncouth. It is hostile - to the fortunes of the administrative state.

The tertiary stage of the administrative state is its final, floridly pathological condition. In the tertiary phase, the pretense of need and useful social assistance becomes increasingly shallow. Everyone who’s paying attention can see the outlines of the relationship: political support and fealty for unearned resources. The driving urge becomes total expansion, at almost any cost. The pretense of ‘need’ is increasingly ignored by a captive media complex and by the politicians themselves, and money is distributed wastefully, heedlessly, fraudulently to all participating groups. We are currently in the tertiary phase of our administrative state.

But what if your society is conditioned by decades of life under a stable law-and-order regime? What if an inconveniently large number of citizens want to make their own futures? Business owners and workers that want to succeed on their own efforts, poor people who dream of savings and homeownership, families with two working adults that simply don’t need generous assistance to pay their rent or buy food (and don’t think that others should be receiving these things for life)? Then you have a serious obstacle to the growth of the administrative state.

It’s important to understand that these systems have their own incentives and their own dynamics, quite apart from the values and intentions of most of the participants. A teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system might simply want to arrive at school and educate her students, but the system is devoted to minimizing accountability in order to preserve the jobs of its less competent workers and increasing spending as quickly as possible, regardless of educational outcomes. In fact, the two things cannot be linked, for that will make expansion too difficult; modern public schools cannot reliably educate students and we no longer really expect them to. There are millions of PMC members who are simply parroting the shallow open borders talking points they’ve heard in legacy media programs. There are millions of naive humanitarians who want to help the teeming developing world (although never personally). Those motivations are irrelevant to the logic of the Blob. They are useful, but not determinative of its organizational incentives. Those kinds of ideas and impulses can be used by radicals and by a frightened political class to undermine the stability and security of native populations, in the case of importing Afghans to Great Britain. Similarly, those kinds of ideas and impulses in the United States can be used to justify the importation of new populations which would be better for the growth of the administrative state. Prostrate, unambitious, low-IQ newcomers are good for this. New arrivals from cultures of open theft and fraud and intercommunal suspicion are better.

Somalians began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the 1980’s and (especially) the 1990’s. The Somalian civil war began in 1991, followed by famine, and Christian charities began bringing over refugees (and many more economic migrants) and assisting them. In 2020, with the apogee of the administrative state in this country and the pattern of various cultural groups set, the Biden administration effectively opened America’s doors, incentivizing only those who were poor enough to be lured from their homes by food assistance and free hotel accommodations and only those who were dishonest enough to claim asylum when it didn’t legitimately apply. The fact that many Somalian arrivals were honest people fleeing trouble initially was irrelevant to the administrative state. It understood that we now had an alien culture within our borders which could be used to grow its own size and funding streams apace and it began to use that group for its purposes.

Afghanistan is a brutal place, where the strong have nothing but contempt for the weak and (sometimes) predatory hunger. When a critical mass of Afghans moves to the West, the weak - women and children and the old - suffer. Dogs don’t do too well either.

Somalia is a corrupt and violent landscape of tribal strife. Forced to the margins of their dry land on the Horn of Africa, the tribes of Somalia have spent decades fighting one another and stealing everything that came within their reach: UN food aid, Western development money, container ships. It is not presumptuous or racist or inappropriate to state a simple fact: in Somalia, theft and corruption have very different cultural valences than they do in the West. When a critical mass of Somalians to moves the West, theft and corruption and previously unknown tribal hostilities result.

When a culture like the hardscrabble, cynical, endlessly corrupt tribal networks of Somalia meets a high-trust environment like the modern United States - where there’s not just wealth and comfort to be easily had but where significant numbers of citizens have embraced a masochistic kind of cultural self-hatred, where they rejoice at theft and even unpunished violence which harms the mainstream, and where any criticism or investigation of the newcomers will be stridently criticized and treated as illegitimate - the effect is similar to the introduction of an open flame to a pool of gasoline. The effects might make certain people uncomfortable to discuss, and they might be politically disastrous for the administrative state and its champions, but they are now undeniable. They are also, to the mainstream, indefensible. So the reality must be hidden and distorted.

The recently unearthed fraud began, it seems, in 2016 (not during COVID, as is often reported) but it would be a mistake to regard this as a discrete operation, separate or remarkable in any way. This is merely part of a dense and thickening web of rent-seeking, slowly choking the vitality and productiveness from our society like weeds in a garden. The now-disgraced Mayors Tiffany Henyard and Brandon Johnson, the growing number of electoral fraud accusations and USAID, the Chicago teachers’ unions and the California homeless ‘advocacy’ network and the city government of Boston and Oakland and the Somali community of Maine joins Minneapolis, the latest site of this parade of kleptocracy… along with a thousand other actors and locations, mostly still hidden, in this epic parade of theft and incompetence.

The model seems fairly straightforward: progressive politicians use the appropriations process to fund nonprofits or social services or public unions or community grants, and those vehicles are then blatantly abused, stretched beyond credulity. The stated purposes of the programs are mostly ignored, and money flows to a network of clients and patrons and hangers-on. The progressive government (regulators, investigators, legislators) and the legacy media do everything they can to ignore the warning signs… which become more numerous and outstanding as time goes on.

Keep in mind, these takings are surely just the tip of a very large iceberg and the pattern will continue. Regulatory and investigative agencies and political leaders and legacy media companies will try to conceal what is going on, and will only react openly once the word is truly out (which never seems to occur through any of those channels). You will continue to see a complete absence of Democratic Party governing structures or regulators or mainstream media organizations breaking these kinds of stories. This seems to be what happened in Minneapolis, in this most recent iteration, as far as we can tell. Here are the details that have come to light:

1. In 2016, allegations of fraud emerged in Minnesota. The states’ Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) was allegedly being robbed by a myriad of organizations which had been founded by members of the Somalian diaspora in that state. The organizations were providing nonexistent daycare services to nonexistent children, and siphoning most of the funding.

2. In 2020, Representative Ilhan Omar sponsored the MEALS Act, which allocated open funding to feed children nationwide. It increased funding, automatically enrolled millions of children who were receiving other benefits, and dramatically increased reimbursements. Within two years, whistleblowers emerged in both Maine and (especially) Minnesota, accusing the Somalian communities in both states of initiating vast fraud schemes: overbilling and collecting money for nonexistent children. This joined the already established pattern of fraud by daycare and medical providers, which had been occurring for years.

   Essentially, every major avenue which paid out contracts or involved ‘community funding’ was defrauded by a population which simply didn’t recognize the tradition of American citizenship.

   Those who pointed this out were called racist.

3. Starting in 2022 and continuing into 2025, nearly 90 Minnesota Somalians were indicted by federal agencies. State investigations were hastily closed and people who raised the alarm were silenced, punished, or fired. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and prominent Maine politicians (including Governor Janet Mills) participated in this silencing.

4. A new flurry of indictments in 2025, plus the open forum of X and other unconstrained social media platforms (information about this issue has been systematically suppressed on Google and YouTube and BlueSky, etc. and studiously ignored by legacy media at the local and national level) forced the story back into the public discourse. Rep. Omar appeared on CNN and bemoaned the actions of third parties, saying (in reference to the 2020 MEALS Act) that “a lot of the guardrails did not get created” despite the fact that she had authored the legislation.

   This pattern of incredible information suppression goes much deeper. It seems fairly clear that Rep. Omar might have married her brother (her 2nd marriage, of 4). While I haven’t seen definitive proof of this claim, I can spot the pattern of media obfuscation: claims that are not strictly proven are automatically labelled ‘false’ and decisions by Biden-era agencies (to not indict Omar for marriage fraud) are assumed to be fair and definitive, without any acknowledgement of the powerful ideological biases at work (a standard that would never be applied to Trump’s FBI). Mostly, there’s just been silence. Generally, when people have the truth on their side they’re happy to air out the situation. As I say, I can’t be sure, but I am familiar with this pattern after dozens of similar cases.

5. Ties between some of the most prominent indicted fraudsters and Rep. Omar are fully substantiated. Campaign workers, close advisers, restaurant owners who helped fund her campaign and hosted multiple official campaign events, and friends of years have all been arrested in connection with this scheme. The claim that Omar didn’t know (as people living in the lower middle class suddenly became millionaires by feeding thousands of children who never seemed to materialize) strains credulity in the same way that Omar’s personal wealth increase from $67,000 to more than $30,000,000 strains credulity. In respect to Rep. Omar’s net worth, that is a 44700% increase in net worth in four years. That’s a better return than the one gained by Bernie Madoff. Have you seen a mainstream news story explore this remarkable fact? I have not.

6. In November of 2025, the total cost of the fraud for the MEALS Act scheme alone is estimated at $8 billion, making this - if proven - the largest single instance of government fraud in American history. Other schemes are quickly uncovered by government agencies and investigators who are suddenly eager to dive into the murky waters (after doing nothing for years). Daycare centers, Star Autism Center (which paid kickbacks to Somalian parents who had their children diagnosed with autism, costing Medicaid at least $6 million in fraudulent spending), Gateway Community Services in Maine, which was audited 3 times from 2020 to 2022, and found to have overbilled the state in each instance (costing Maine millions of dollars), is finally cut off from funding, etc.

   

7. Nick Shirley does something that any local or national news organization could have done, at any point in the past decade: he goes around to dozens of ‘daycares’ and ‘community medical providers’ to speak to the employees. He finds empty buildings, locked doors, sullen and evasive and hostile responses… from a community that has participated in this fraud as collectively as such a thing could be, and which feels entitled to steal the wealth of the United States for themselves (buying luxury cars and taking vacations and sending many tens of millions of dollars back to Somalia in remittances).

A few final reflections:

• The negligence and disingenuousness of the legacy media cannot be overestimated. Its proper role is not to hide corruption and reluctantly try to obfuscate it and protect the corrupt after the stories gain irresistible traction. The media should have reported on all of this years ago (including the allegations about Rep. Omar) and any explanation which excludes an accounting of this failure is worthless.

• Racism, hostility (towards America and towards white men), and grievance politics - sustained by Rep. Omar and by many others - is inextricably bound up with these schemes.

  

  This alone should discredit these kinds of attacks. If there’s no way to distinguish actual racism from spurious and obfuscatory dodges, or if those distinctions aren’t being made, then the category itself becomes worthless. It’s already fairly worthless across much of the mainstream, but it still has a bite in the strange and cloistered world of the PMC and that has everything to do with status signals and ideology, and nothing to do with actual racism.

• 21 States recently had their SNAP funding cut because they refused to provide information about recipients to the federal government. The recent government shutdown was about many things, but one of the central disagreements involved reimbursements to regional hospitals for medical care provided to illegal immigrants. Observe the outrage when Elon Musk made it a personal (temporary) mission to cut federal waste and fraud.

  The administrative state is no longer really even trying to maintain the pretense that it’s careful about spending money, or that it is vetting recipients. The Blob’s structure is indistinguishable from the interests of the PMC, and so that class has, in the past 20 years, slowly internalized the new reality: waste and fraud and abject dependency are good, because they grow the Blob and increase class power. Everyone understands that this reality is outrageous to hardworking people in middle America, so narratives are still crafted and distractions still thrown out, but the tone of the conversation as changed. 30 years ago, everyone agreed that government waste was bad. Now our most privileged class wants government waste. They just don’t want to be understood to be wanting it.

This isn’t the kind of question which would be explored in the cultural mainstream (where the assumptions are so fixed and artificial and the borders too tightly constrained to actually allow for many accurate investigations into contemporary social structures) but it is at least possible that the former Democratic Party model of interest groups and public entitlements and funding of institutions is being overtaken by the kleptocratic model, in which more public money is taken faster with the same result of impoverishing the middle class (clearly a goal of many progressives - look at California) and benefitting a captive political constituency. It must be said that in either case - interest groups & entitlements OR kleptocracy - the model is profoundly incompatible with the old republican vision of American government, in which society is comprised of a mix of individuals, communities, families, small-holders, and elites, who vote based upon their principles and narrow political interests and values. Having a vast and prostrate underclass who is voting in order use the state to get money from the people who earned it has its own destructive negative feedback loop. The state grows ever larger, the underclass grows ever more acquisitive and resentful, and the productive and independent parts of the society are bled dry. Kleptocracy simply speeds this process up, and disguises (or attempts to disguise) the dynamics of malignant redistribution.

Kleptocracy is now certainly a part of our political system to some extent. I would challenge those who don’t consider it a major element to explain the events of the past 5 years without it. Explain not just the importation of immigrants at a vast scale, but the forest of nonprofits and churches and contractors who immediately began to grow rich off of their presence. Explain the media’s deep reluctance to report on any of this. How many articles have you read about waste or corruption in migrant-centered nonprofits? Explain the ongoing and pervasive denial of the PMC to account for not just the parasitic structures of government dependency but the mere existence of significant cultural differences themselves. Explain the complete absence, in news or films or fiction, of any honest exploration of these topics. There very well might be other factors contributing to the trends of uncontrolled migration becoming a beloved cause on the left, and to the growth of the trend of kleptocracy. But these trends are real. The fact that both of these developments has been in progress for many years now, that the cultural sense-making organs seem to be completely unwilling to even countenance the most basic outlines of the situation (the cultural differences at play), that the media seems to have a total blockade on reporting corruption of nonprofits or ‘humanitarian’ organizations (at least until the matter becomes too public to ignore), and that the powerful still refuse to consider the experiences or electoral wishes of their constituents - all of these facts seem rather sinister. I could imagine a model in which narrow self-interest and ideological prejudice accounts for some of the reluctance of the system to address this growing problem. But I don’t think that can account for all of it, and it doesn’t explain why the powerful (the secretive influences and the policymakers that drive so much of our political machinery) are staying the course, despite the social harms and electoral risks involved.

It’s all rather mysterious - unless you consider the possibility of motivations so sinister that they are unsayable in the mainstream. That embargo won’t last forever. Eventually the tidal wave of corruption will grow large enough that any denials will appear ridiculous. We might already be there.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year. Take care of yourself.

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