Category: Blaze Media
What investigators still haven’t asked about Minnesota’s fraud
The national spotlight has settled on the industrial-scale fraud uncovered in Minnesota, much of it linked to networks operating within the state’s Somali immigrant community. To date, coverage has focused on how operators allegedly diverted nearly $9 billion in public funds into shell businesses that existed largely to funnel money to friends and family through no-show jobs and inflated contracts.
That story matters. But it may not be the whole story.
Fraud at this scale almost never stands alone. Where investigators uncover massive deception, additional crimes often lie beneath the surface.
Most of the businesses implicated in the scheme presented themselves as child-care centers, autism service providers, and non-emergency medical transport companies. For readers unfamiliar with immigration enforcement, the reaction is straightforward: Criminals stole money intended for society’s most vulnerable.
For those who have spent decades working in immigration law and border security, a different question arises. Why build an end-to-end infrastructure of licensed service providers unless it served additional purposes?
Videos circulating online show many of these facilities sitting empty — unused day-cares, idle transport vans, and vacant offices. That does not prove the businesses were harmless.
In criminal investigations, fraud rarely exists in isolation. One axiom holds that following the money reveals the perpetrators. A second, less discussed rule also applies: Following the money backward often reveals additional crimes.
Illegal immigration provides a perfect example. The initial violation occurs when an alien enters unlawfully or makes false asylum claims. Additional offenses frequently follow: identity theft, illegal employment, fraudulent tax filings, and payments to smugglers to bring in relatives. Organized crime and terrorist groups have used similar layered fraud models for decades. Illicit revenue becomes seed money for broader criminal activity.
Despite the scale of the Minnesota fraud, little public attention has focused on whether these businesses were used for more than financial theft. There appears to be no comprehensive inquiry into whether any of the entities sponsored employment-based visas, concealed smuggled minors, facilitated labor trafficking, or enabled sex trafficking.
None of those allegations has been proven. But the structure of the alleged scheme bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the network of Health and Human Services contractors through which the Biden administration lost track of thousands of unaccompanied alien children.
According to a City Journal investigation, federal counterterrorism sources confirmed that millions of dollars from the Minnesota fraud flowed back to Somalia, where funds ultimately reached al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization. The report described Minnesota taxpayers as the group’s largest single funding source.
RELATED: Minnesota’s fraud scandal exposes a dangerously loose election system
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
If accurate, that finding raises a far more serious concern. Terrorist organizations do not stop at cash transfers when operational infrastructure is available. A network of licensed service providers — child-care centers, transportation companies, and health services — offers precisely the kind of cover such groups seek to move people, materials, and money discreetly inside the United States.
The full extent of al-Shabaab’s involvement remains unclear. Covert operations rarely reveal themselves all at once. They are built deliberately, in stages, with long timelines. Minnesota records suggest (and the explosion in Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar’s personal wealth seems to indicate) that much of the large-scale fraud linked to Somali-run entities accelerated over the past decade. That timeline raises the possibility that the scheme was still maturing when investigators uncovered it.
If so, authorities may have disrupted a funding and logistics pipeline before all layers of criminal activity were fully deployed.
One point remains undeniable: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Fraud at this scale almost never stands alone. Where investigators uncover massive deception, additional crimes often lie beneath the surface.
Federal authorities should pursue this case to its roots. That means examining every entity, every financial flow, and every operational link — not just to recover stolen funds, but to determine what else those structures were built to conceal.
2025 is so over and so is virtual reality
Mark Zuckerberg, in a 2021 presentation that seemed less a business strategy than a fever dream, rebranded his company from Facebook to Meta. He was selling a future in which we would inhabit a digital utopia, a place where the friction of the physical world, the traffic, the decay, the awkward silences, would be smoothed over by the order of code.
It was a grand vision, one that presumed that the right combination of capital and engineering can solve the human condition.
However, Meta is now quietly retreating from its all-in bet, one of the most expensive experiments in business history.
It was a $60 billion attempt to fix a reality we still prefer to the simulation.
The premise was always seductive, in the way that the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave were seductive: a world that promised to be more pleasurable, more malleable than reality. But the metaverse, as it began to take shape, was less a hyperreal paradise than a clumsy imposition. To enter this new world, one had to strap a computer to one’s face, a set of electronic “ski goggles” that isolated the wearer, blinded him to his surroundings, and demanded a total surrender of attention. The Quest traded the ease of the smartphone, which slides effortlessly into our pockets, for a device that induced sweat, fatigue, and the vague nausea of motion-to-photon delays.
Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship social platform, was intended to be the bustling town square of the new digital age. Instead, it became a study in desolation. By the fall of 2022, the platform struggled to retain 200,000 monthly users, a number that seems almost tragic when weighed against the tens of billions of dollars poured into its creation. Those who did visit found a landscape populated by legless, floating torsos, cartoon avatars that managed to be both childish and uncanny. It was a ghost town, a place where the silence was amplified by the vast, empty digital architecture.
This failure was not without precedent. In the 1990s, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy promised a similar revolution and delivered only headaches and monochrome red graphics, selling fewer than 800,000 units before vanishing into the landfill of bad ideas. In the early 2000s, Second Life was briefly the darling of pundits, who prophesied we would all soon be working and shopping in its pixelated aisles; by 2010, it had faded into a niche curiosity. The pattern is clear: The cultural imagination is enticed by the idea of VR, but the human animal balks at its practice.
There is a stubborn materiality to our existence that the architects of the metaverse failed to overcome. We are embodied beings. We like the warmth of a hand, the smell of rain, the ability to glance at a screen and then look away. The metaverse demanded we leave the physical world behind, a proposition that felt increasingly dystopian.
RELATED: Inside Zuckerberg’s losing metaverse bet
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Marshall McLuhan warned that a medium pushed to its extreme can “implode” into something else, and the metaverse seemed to hit that breaking point, an implosion in which the medium devoured its own appeal. The users did not want to be immersed in a corporate-controlled simulacrum; they wanted convenience. They wanted the blue bubble of a text message, not a virtual meeting in a boardroom rendered in low-polygon graphics.
The retreat, when it came, was swift and brutal, in the way corporate corrections often are. By 2023, a metaverse winter had set in. Disney shuttered its division; Microsoft sunset its social VR platform. The world became captivated by a new technology: generative AI. Suddenly the conversation was not about new worlds but about automated intelligence that could write our emails and paint our pictures. Meta, reading the tea leaves and the plummeting engagement metrics, pivoted. The irrational exuberance for VR gave way to sober retrenchment.
The financial markets, at times the coldest arbiters of value, cheered the death of the dream. When news broke in late 2025 that Meta would cut Reality Labs’ budget and lay off staff, its stock jumped, adding nearly $70 billion in value overnight. It was a signal that the experiment was over. The Great White Whale of tech had once again slipped away, leaving the innovators holding the harpoon, exhausted.
John Carmack, the legendary game developer who tried to steer Meta’s VR ship before resigning in frustration, noted that the company had “a ridiculous amount of people and resources” but constantly “self-sabotaged.” The metaverse was not killed by a lack of technology; the Quest 3 is a marvel of engineering. It died from a lack of human necessity. It was a $60 billion attempt to fix a reality that, for all its flaws, we still prefer to the simulation.
The retreat is less a defeat than a recalibration. Meta is now looking toward “smart glasses,” wearables that overlay the digital onto the real rather than replacing it. The form factor concedes the stubborn fact that we want to remain in the world. The dream of the metaverse, that hyperreal paradise where models replace the real, has been deferred. We have chosen to keep the goggles off, to live for now, in Baudrillard’s words, in the desert of the real.
RUBIO RIPS BRENNAN: Sec. of State is Ready After CBS Host Presses on Maduro Op Limits [WATCH]
![RUBIO RIPS BRENNAN: Sec. of State is Ready After CBS Host Presses on Maduro Op Limits [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Rubio-300x167.png "Rubio")
Margaret Brennan came in with a question.
‘DECENT’ DICTATOR? Maduro Pleads Not Guilty, Says He’s a Good Man Who Was ‘Kidnapped’
According to a New York Post report, Nicolás Maduro pleaded Not Guilty during his appearance in New York federal court on Monday.
![WALTZ ON WORLD STAGE: Maduro ‘Was a Law Enforcement Action,’ Blasts UN — ‘What Kind of Organization Is This?!’ [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/GettyImages-2254783185-300x200.jpg "United Nations Security Council Meets In New York To Discuss U.S. Incursion Into Venezuela")
Take My Governor—Please
Tim Walz has reportedly landed on Kamala Harris’s shortlist of possible running mates. Since I first saw the stories, I have adapted Henny Youngman’s old one-liner about his wife as a mantra: “Take my governor—please.”
Having lived in the Twin Cities and followed his career over the years, I’m going to enjoy the thought of Walz’s departure while it remains a theoretical possibility. I rate Walz’s chances of selection somewhere between zero and zero. Yet he thinks highly of himself and is running as fast as he can to make the theoretical possibility a reality.
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Walz Drops Reelection Bid as Minnesota Reels From Massive Welfare Fraud
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D.) announced Monday he’s abandoning his reelection bid as the state continues to grapple with massive fraud in taxpayer-funded programs that occurred under his watch, a move that comes as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D.) prepares to enter the governor’s race.
The post Walz Drops Reelection Bid as Minnesota Reels From Massive Welfare Fraud appeared first on .
DHS Accuses Hilton of Refusing Rooms to Immigration Officers
The Department of Homeland Security accused Hilton Hotels on Monday of refusing to accommodate federal immigration enforcement officers, claiming the hotel giant deliberately canceled government bookings in Minneapolis.
The post DHS Accuses Hilton of Refusing Rooms to Immigration Officers appeared first on .
Fraud Queen Walz Abdicates, Ice Queen Klobuchar Sharpens Comb
Tim Walz finally came out on Monday to announce he was pulling a Joe Biden and ending his reelection campaign for governor of Minnesota, the frigid left-wing enclave that has devolved into a fraud-plagued hellhole on his watch. The prominent Democrat, who served as Kamala Harris’s flamboyant running mate in 2024, is widely viewed (by Republicans) as the best choice to represent the party in the 2028 presidential election (should Harris decline to run).
The post Fraud Queen Walz Abdicates, Ice Queen Klobuchar Sharpens Comb appeared first on .
Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved by board after 58 years of funding PBS and NPR
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been officially dissolved by its board of directors after Republican cuts to funding for PBS and NPR.
The CPB provided funding for public news for 58 years but was plagued by criticism from the right that it supported left-wing policies and the agenda of the Democratic party.
‘Americans will never again have to worry that a single cent will go towards CPB’s radical programming.’
The organization released a statement Monday confirming the vote for dissolution.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans — regardless of geography, income, or background — had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison.
She went on to call the vote the fulfillment of a “profound” responsibility.
“CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” she added.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana welcomed the news and mocked the CPB.
“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which funneled your money to NPR and PBS to call birds, roads, and country music racist — is officially DISSOLVED,” he wrote. “Good riddance.”
Republicans had criticized public funding for NPR and PBS, while Democrats had criticized defunding efforts as deleterious for rural areas and other underserved communities.
RELATED: NPR hit with scorn over ‘insulting’ article on self-care tips for anxiety from war headlines
“Excellent news,” replied Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri.
“Now, Americans will never again have to worry that a single cent will go towards CPB’s radical programming,” Schmitt continued.
The CPB previously announced in August that it would begin winding down operations, scale down its employees, and hand out whatever funds it had left over after the Republican cuts.
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