Article Demolishing the Lies about Somali Americans as Massive Fraudsters Refusing to Integrate and Backing Terrorists

As you’re no doubt aware, Trump sent his ICE goons particularly into Minnesota to deal with the Somali community there. Right-wing YouTubers had put up videos claiming that the city’s Somali community were fraudulently claiming benefits from the state by setting up fake businesses. These included fake schools with no pupils, like a ‘Quality Learing Centre’ featured in one such video, as well as similar businesses intended to help the community which also had no students, customers or staff. The money claimed for these businesses were allegedly being sent of to support the al-Shabbaab Islamist terrorist organisation back in Somalia. They were also supposed to be falsely claiming money for autism and other disabilities, the money for which was being spent instead on supporting their businesses and stores. The people themselves refused to integrate. Those shown in the videos could not speak English, and there was a very strong impression that most were unemployed. Trump had said in another video that the Somalis were bad people, and he wanted them gone.

However, an article by Richard Michael Solomon in the journal, Current Affairs, reproduced by the Democrats in their Daily Dose of Democracy onlin4e newsletter, has demolished these falsehoods. It points out that the fraud allegations have been around for years, and have been distorted by Trump and the Maga maniacs. The involvement of the Somalis has been exaggerated, while the fact that the ringleader and many senior figures in the network are White has been ignored. The crime rate in Somali areas is the same or lower than in other areas, there is a high degree of self-sufficiency and their level of integration is high relative to the historic record.

Here’s the article:

‘Demolishing lies about Somali Americans
Richard Michael Solomon, Current Affairs: “The conservative Manhattan Institute recently claimed that Somali Americans are siphoning ‘billions of taxpayer dollars’ to a militant Islamist organization in Somalia called Al-Shabaab. The context for the allegation, made by the Institute’s City Journal, is a scandal implicating several dozen people from Minnesota, mostly of Somali descent, who defrauded the government through an autism service, housing program, and pandemic-era NGO called Feeding Our Future. The Trump Administration used these allegations to end Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, forcing hundreds of people to soon leave the country or face deportation. President Donald Trump first announced the plan shortly after the City Journal story went viral—blustering on Truth Social that ‘Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!’

The fraud part of the scandal is real and not particularly new. Minnesota and FBI investigators have pursued the cases for years, including against Aimee Bock, the white woman who led Feeding Our Future. What City Journal authors Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe do is ignore the scheme’s white ringleader and other white suspects. They vastly inflate the numbers, blame Somali culture, and demand Somalis be deported en masse. Their evidence, too, for the Al-Shabaab connection is remarkably thin; key sources within the story itself have since called it ‘bullshit.’ Given Rufo’s track record (he once offered a $5,000 bounty for ‘proof’ that Haitian Americans in Ohio were skinning cats for meat), his rumor-based reporting is not trustworthy. But facts are no obstacle to Rufo’s imagination: in his words, ‘Somalis in Minneapolis are stealing billions from American taxpayers, loading bags of cash onto commercial flights, and funding terrorism back in Mogadishu.’

Right-wing media has used the story to reinforce an emergent narrative that Somali Americans 1) are criminals, 2) drain welfare, and 3) don’t assimilate. Public attention has inspired imitators, including a widely-discredited video by YouTuber Nick Shirley on Minnesota daycares. Deadly ICE raids on Minneapolis have followed. A closer look at the allegations, however, reveals how detached they are from reality.

Rufo and his colleagues are charlatans who incite hatred and division, but their lies are not sophisticated. They rely instead on cheap rhetorical tricks and statistical distortions. Agitators like Nick Shirley similarly borrow from the visual language of investigative journalism, but actually just manipulate their viewers with cheap editing. The truth is that Somali Muslims in Minnesota are a law-abiding community with the same or lower crime rates than other Americans. Their rates of self-sufficiency are high, and measures of assimilation are also high relative to the historic record. So why the bigotry? The lies serve to distract attention from bigger fraudsters and divide working people from confronting those with real power over their lives.”‘

Oi Punk Song About How the KKK Should be Dealt With

Skinheads and Oi music have a reputation for racism and extreme right-wing politics and violence. But not all of them, by any means. I read somewhere, probably on the Net, that Skinhead fashion originally started with the Jamaicans and then was taken over by White working class youth. There’s an anti-racist skinhead organisation. A friend of mine met one of their members years ago at a protest he was on, and there’s a documentary on YouTube about the skinhead organisation that was set up specifically to put a well-aimed Dr. Marten’s boot into the Nazis and other White supremacists.

I found this musical expression of skinhead hate and contempt for them on YouTube. It’s from a band, Oi of the Tiger, and it’s entitled Hang the Klan. It’s loud, aggressive and you can’t hear everything that’s being sung, but the chorus is very clear: ‘Hang the Klan’. There’s footage of the Klan at their wretched cross-burnings and marches, but it ends with the simulated hanging of one of them from a tree. I don’t know anything about this band, but there might be some links to the LGBTQ movement, as a cartoon at the beginning of the video of one of the Klansmen dangling from a tree has the legend ‘F*gs and D*kes Against White Knights (the Klan)”. As Reform goose step around in the polls and Trump is unleashing his ICE goons to arrest anyone who looks at them funny, I thought this might be a suitable song to put up.

FBI Investigating Armed Queers of SLC for Possible Link to Charlie Kirk Murder

Here’s a short video from the Washington Examiner discussing the radical gay and trans group, Armed Queers, who are now being investigated by the FBI for possible connections to Tyler Robinson and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I think the Armed Queers of SLC – which stands for ‘Salt Lake City’ may be the same group I discussed in a previous article, where I called them ‘Queer Resistance’ following an image on the EDI Jester’s video about them. Armed Queers are a radical Marxist group combining the militant defence of gays and trans people with revolutionary politics. They practice on gun ranges, and have been to Cuba to study how socialism works there. They’re also part of a network calling for the country to be taken off the US black list. They have also been associated with the Pink Pistols, a gay gun organisation. The FBI is also investigating the possibility that they have links to other armed, left-wing militant organisations, such as the John Brown Gun Club,, which carried out an armed raid on an ICE facility.

This is all extremely bizarre from a British perspective. I don’t think any other country in the world except America would tolerate private, armed paramilitary groups of either the left or the right. From what I gather, Britain passed its laws severely curtailing gun ownership in the UK in the 1920s due to fears of Communist revolution following the Russian revolution. I think most European countries have similar legislation, especially following the wave of terrorism across Britain, Northern Ireland, France, Germany and Italy in the ’60s and 70s, and in Britain and Ulster up to the Good Friday Agreement in the ’90s.

Back in the 1970s, the very idea of a militant, armed gay group was a joke. One of the jokes by the Two Ronnies from that decade went ‘News Flash. Today a sailor at Portsmouth had his wrist slapped. Police are hunting a hitman for Gay Lib.’ Now it’s become real, partly due to Herbert Marcuse’s recommendation that Communists, now that the working class were no longer interested in it, should appeal instead to the people of the ghetto – Blacks, gays and women. Regarding the Pink Pistols, I can understand why some gays would wish to come together and learn to shoot for self-defence. Although homosexuality is legal under federal law, I’ve been told by American friends that many states still retain legislation outlawing it. And despite considerable progress in making gays viewed as respectable members of society, there’s still considerable hatred of them in some quarters. As there probably is over here. But armed Communist revolutionary groups go far beyond self-protection. I’ve never heard of the John Brown Gun Club, which makes me wonder just how many other armed radical left groups there are out there running around in the Land of the Free.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin Discuss Whether Rachel Maddow Is A Danger to Journalism: Part 1

It’s isn’t just Rachel Maddow. They go on to talk about how the whole of the American mainstream media, including MSNBC, has been corrupted by corporate power, and now reflects nothing but establishment propaganda. Just like the corporatist, Clintonite wing of the Democrats. They also talk about the terror Black and Latino neighbourhoods are living in, thanks to Trump, ICE and the anti-immigrant rhetoric. They conclude by discussing how whole neighbourhoods in Houston and elsewhere in Texas have been gutted by Hurricane Harvey, but aren’t receiving any help, because they’re working class areas and only the business and affluent centres are prioritised. And the immense environmental damage that has been caused by Big Oil, but which goes unchallenged and undocumented, because Big Oil owns everything in those areas, right down to schools and hospitals.

Abby Martin is the courageous and fiercely intelligent host of The Empire Files on TeleSur English and previously, RT. This series unflinchingly exposes what the American military-industrial complex is doing across the world through coups, ‘regime change’ and foreign wars and military interventions. Including the real situation in Israel, where the Israelis have subjected the indigenous Palestinians to nearly 70 years of massacres, brutality and ethnic cleansing.

She also shows how ordinary Americans are being exploited at home, as big business seeks to strip them of welfare, workers’ rights and shift the tax burden on to them, while further destroying any affordable healthcare provision and privatising the public schools. She was so much a threat to the American establishment, that half the report concocted to show that RT was just a propaganda operation being used by Putin to destabilise America was about Martin personally.

I’ve already put up a three-part blog post about a previous 30-minute long segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, in which he and Martin discuss her work and the crimes of American imperialism. I think this segment may have been part of the same interview, but the two have been edited and split into separate parts.

The two begin by discussing how MSNBC, the formerly liberal network, is now just the mirror image of the right-wing Fox Network. Martin is particularly unimpressed by the way MSNBC tried to discredit Bill Binney by calling him a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Bill Binney was the NSA official, who constructed the ‘Thin Spread’ mass surveillance software keeping tabs on people’s electronic information and communications. He’s been praised by Edward Snowden, one of the other whistleblowers on the use of mass surveillance software by the intelligence agencies. They then talk about the lies and propaganda about RT, and how the government is trying to shut it down by having it register as a foreign agent. Martin states that MSNBC is now just the other arm of Fox News, but just parrots Democrat propaganda.

As for Rachel Maddow, one of the lead presenters on MSNBC, and a staunch supporter of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, Martin states that she’s a careerist hack. However, she and the other hacks with her realised that they have to double down and try to explain away why Killary lost to Trump. But they’re so trapped in the elitist bubble, that they have absolutely no idea. One of the reasons Clinton lost was because she didn’t bother going to certain states, like Wisconsin. Martin and Dore joke about whether it was Putin, who stopped her going there. Did he steal her map, hack into her computer and wipe the entry for it?

They then move on to the question of the future of journalism. Martin states that journalism has always been antithetical to business, this is why it’s been corrupted by government and folded into big business conglomerates through mergers. It’s why Martin herself joined RT. She talks about how it was a long time before she realised how compromised journalism actually was, however. She talks about how she went on tour with John Kerry. But journalism hasn’t just been corrupted by the Democrats, nor the Republicans. She states that the future of journalism lies with us, referring to alternative media and the power of the internet. She states that now we don’t need to get a press handout from Monsanto to talk about what they’re doing, or get a statement from the government: they can just talk to the government’s victims.

She then goes on to talk about ‘fake news’, and how this is being hijacked by the establishment to close down alternative media. Bill Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century, has said that he’s going to set up a thinktank to combat ‘fake news’. She and Dore also talk about how the alternative media are being forced to brand themselves to survive, so they have to set up Patreon accounts so people can fund them. But she has a lot of hope for citizen journalism. There is just a need to invest in it, and to follow those journalists we admire. We have to create our own networks. The Intercept, which has done some good work, was forced to rely on a billionaire, and now they have to go begging for money.

Martin then turns to Project Censored, which she praises as a very good, worthwhile alternative to mainstream journalist training. She advises aspiring journos not to go to journalism school, as they will just get into debt up to their behinds, and will be hit over the head with how to be journalists. Only to get a job as an unpaid intern at the end of it. Project Censored, on the other hand, takes in anyone, and you can go in at different levels – as a researcher, or writer, for example. Every year they published the five most censored stories. One of these is that there are 3,000 towns in America, whose water has a higher lead content than that of Flint in Michigan. She and Dore then discuss the alternative, drinking bottled water. Martin refuses to drink most of these brands, because they’re all owned by Nestle. Nestle owns the majority of water bottling plants. They just suck out the aquifers of local towns, which get nothing in return, except for a councillor, who’s on their payroll. And this is apart from the slave labour involved in their chocolate. She states that there is now only one party, and that she has always advised against voting for the lesser of two evils.

Continued in Part 2.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin Discuss Whether Rachel Maddow Is A Danger to Journalism: Part 2

This is the second part of my article about the segment from the Jimmy Dore Show in which the comedian talks to Abby Martin, the uncompromising investigative reporter and presenter of The Empire Files, now on TeleSur English, but formerly on RT.

Dore and Martin talk about the accusations of misogyny that were thrown against anyone who dared not to vote for Killary. Martin jokes that she didn’t, and has been denounced as ‘treacherous’ because of this. She then describes how the Clinton camp tried to explain away the masses of women, who didn’t vote for Killary. Oh, they didn’t vote for her, because their boyfriends told them not to. She makes it clear that this explain also denigrates women because it denies them their own agency.

Martin and Dore talk about how someone can be right about the issues, but wrong on strategy. Bernie Sanders is one of these. He’s right politically, but wrong in continuing to support the Democrats. Martin points out that this happened a few years ago to Michael Moore with Ralph Nader, who ran as a third party candidate in a presidential election. Moore was originally a staunch supporter of Nader, attacking the corrupt Democrat establishment. Now he’s part of that establishment, and has been on his knees pleading with Nader not to run.

Martin then talks about the fear running through Black and Latino communities. Martin states that she doesn’t know about all of it, because she belongs to a more privileged group. But she has Mexican friends, who are now in hiding. Black people are being assaulted. She describes this as a mass psychosis. Undocumented immigrants are afraid of ICE and being deported. She states that this anti-immigrant hysteria has happened before, but it’s been ramped up by Trump. She doesn’t really believe very much in the view that the Deep State is deeply opposed to Trump. She just thinks that they hate him because he reveals the true reasons for the wars now being fought. As when he blandly stated that we should take their oil from those nations America is fighting. But she states that some wars are planned, and believes that if Gore had won, then Saddam Hussein would still have been overthrown. It’s questionable whether this would have been through a war, however.

She also goes on to make the point that many wars aren’t planned, and the current situation is very dangerous. For example, Iran never had a nuclear weapons programme, despite Trump putting them ‘on notice’ and imposing sanctions. She describes these sanctions – against Iran, against Maduro in Venezuela and against North Korea as an act of war. Dore reminds her that North Korea had actually stopped its nuclear weapons programme, in return for America not conducting war games on their borders. But Obama rejected this. And they resumed their nuclear programme when Bush declared they were part of the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Martin then goes on to discuss her investigative work amongst the towns devastated by Hurricane Harvey. One of these was Houston. It’s a town dominated by Big Oil, with absolutely no zoning laws whatsoever so people are living right next to big, highly polluting industrial complexes. They even built a school next to a chemical plant. The plant exploded, but under the counterterrorism laws the company doesn’t have to reveal what chemicals were released into the environment. At the same time, the oil companies don’t have to pay fines during start-ups, shut-downs or disasters. So they can pollute as much as they want, as they won’t have to pay for it.

She also talks about another town she visited, Lakewood, where weeks after Harvey people were left living in their gutted homes. They didn’t see any volunteers, no FEMA officials or anyone from the government. She states that this was an act of pure class war, as these areas were Black and Latino. Back to Houston, she remarks on how, in the aftermath of the hurricane, it was only the business districts and the affluent areas that were up and running within a few hours of the disaster. Volunteers were told not to go into the rougher neighbourhoods, as they would get shot. She and Dore make the point that everyone calls looting was, in the circumstances, just survival.

And Big Oil hides the extent of the problems it causes in these communities, because it owns schools and hospital wings. Thus it’s impossible to study cancer properly, because everything’s compartmentalised. And the doctors and scientists studying it can’t call out who’s responsible, because they’ll then lose their funding. Everyone in those towns works for the industry.

This is clearly an American programme, discussing American issues, but it also reflects the situation over here in Britain to a considerable extent. Journalism in Britain has also been corrupted by the merger of the newspaper companies into big industrial conglomerates, whose proprietors then decide what line their papers should follow and suppress awkward content. And just as Bernie Sanders was reviled by the Clintonite camp of the Democrats, and cheated of his nomination, so the so-called left-wing media over here demonised Jeremy Corbyn. They also lionised, and are still praising Killary to the rafters, and accused anyone, who didn’t support her as a ‘misogynist’. Just like they accused Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters.

The mainstream media over here is also corrupt. The BBC is overwhelmingly staffed at its management levels by very middle class, public school educated White men. It’s leading journalists, most notably ‘Goebbels’ Nick Robbinson and Laura ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg, are arch-Tories, who show their contempt for their audience by scarcely hiding their bias against Corbyn and the Labour party.

The establishment over here is also trying to destroy alternative media sources. We’ve seen the same lies about Russian propaganda levelled at RT by the Theresa May and the Tories. The same algorithms, that have been developed to lead people on the internet away from alternative news sites and the demonetisation campaigns against ‘controversial’ material on YouTube – all set up in the guise of protecting us from ‘fake news’ – are hitting alternative news blogs and vlogs over here.

And you can see the same kind of problems that America is experiencing through the acquisition of schools and hospitals by Big Oil happening over here. Academics have already complained about the way science departments have been shorn of their independence ever since Maggie Thatcher decided that they should work more closely with industry, to the point where many scientists feel that they are just working for their industrial sponsors and partners. So far the media over here has been free of some of the attempts of the media to pour scorn on climate change and discredit climate science, with the obvious exceptions of the Heil and some of the journos on the Telegraph or Times. But you can also see that coming too, especially if the government goes ahead with privatising the NHS and handing schools over to private academy chains, whose heads have their own bias towards promoting business.