Ryan Thorpe

You know, the Smalley community has become a sizable voting bloc in that state.

One person I spoke to for the piece indicated to me, like, you know, look, you don't win the Smalley community, you don't win Minneapolis, you don't win Minneapolis, you don't win the state.

Is that true?

I mean, that's what I've been told.

This individual's plugged in in politics.

So, you know, I took him at his word on that.

But at minimum, the Somali community is like a significant voting bloc.

And it is also established, you know, ties with, you know, significant political actors in the state.

So, you know, whether or not you could potentially carry Minnesota without winning the Somali community, you know, let's put a pin in that.

At minimum, it's a sizable voting bloc you have to take into your political calculations.

100 percent.

And, you know, we know this definitively.

So one of the major fraud rings was feeding our future hundreds of millions of dollars that had been earmarked for feeding hungry children during the pandemic.

That was just totally ripped off by a very large, primarily small fraud ring.

And.

The state bureaucrats, state officials who were overseeing this program had noticed some concerning signs, some concerning trends just in terms of how quick this nonprofit was expanding during COVID.

And so they were going to put a halt on payments until they could kind of figure out what was going on because there were some suspicions that fraudulent activity might be happening.

In response, they filed a lawsuit against the state government alleging racial discrimination against

saying that these payments were being stopped because they primarily serve the Somali community in Minnesota.

More recently, there was a report that looked at a number of scandals under the Waltz government.