The weirdos on the right have been obsessed with The Great Somali Daycare Witch Hunt for a week, so here’s a cheat sheet now that it’s breaking through to normal people.

Why is this happening now?

There will be a gubernatorial election in Minnesota next year and the GOP campaign to take Tim Walz down went into overdrive earlier in December when Mike Lindell threw his conspiracy hat into the GOP primary. Lindell is almost assured to be the GOP nominee now, and he is almost assured to have his butt kicked by Walz by the electorate. It may also have an effect on the statehouse election. The GOP has been desperate to take control of Minnesota and it doesn’t look good for them right now.

Who is behind it?

I posted on Monday:

And late Tuesday it was confirmed:

In a viral video over the weekend, a YouTuber travels to Minnesota, knocking on doors and accusing Somali-owned day care centers of fraud.

Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth said Monday that her caucus steered YouTube creator Nick Shirley to day care sites in Minnesota. Those featured in his widely viewed video have been part of a state-administered child care program using federal money, although some recently had operations or payments suspended.

Would you be surprised to learn that Lisa Demuth is also running for governor on the GOP side? Of course not.

Is there any fraud?

So far there seems to be zero actual fraud. The “evidence” is a video of 2 weirdos harassing people at daycare centers and also healthcare offices (like home health services) with the older guy randomly yelling numbers and announcing new totals, like a Bizzarro World Jerry Lewis telethon.

But I heard there was some kind of healthcare fraud that involved Somali-owned businesses.

Yes, there was a case that the Biden DOJ investigated and got convictions on some Covid-related funding. But this had nothing to do with these day cares.

Oh and that fraud case? A white person was the ringleader.

What about the day cares that got fined?

One of the fines was for not having records or complete records (like vaccination histories) at a daycare. This directly contradicts the video’s claim that there are no kids in the day cares.

But now there are more and more videos surfacing and so maybe there is some fraud there.

There may be fraud there—without an actual investigation, there’s no way to know, but then again, an investigation requires evidence to start. And there is none here. And, as a GOP representative has openly said, the Nick Shirley video was orchestrated as a political op, not an actual fact-finding mission.

Why go after Somalis?

It’s a perfect storm of dumbassery and bigotry:  the GOP is desperate to take down Walz, they have hated Ilhan Omar with a frightening intensity since she was elected to Congress, the new mayor of Minneapolis dared to speak Somali, and the person running the government, Stephen Pee Wee German Miller, hates people of color and wants to deport or kill all of them.

It is also part of the GOP attack on education. Early education helps all kids, especially kids who start out in disadvantaged circumstances, so it’s part of the GOP hit list.

And that target is now over 40 years old. See, not only does early education help kids at a disadvantage, but it also allows women to enter the workforce. But childcare for the kids of white women entering the workforce meant they couldn’t be forced to stay at home and that did not sit well with the Religious Right.

So the GOP went in search of a scapegoat and in 1983 found it in the McMartin preschool trial, where a mentally ill woman accused the school of Satanic practices. The trial stretched on for nearly a decade and in the end the charges were dropped. The GOP got involved too with Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania jumping in to hype it up even more to discredit the entire childcare industry.

And here we are 40 years later, with the entire public education system under attack, the worst racism I have ever seen expressed in public in my lifetime, a right wing that is frantically pushing the “trad wife” lifestyle for young white women, and a group of social media weirdos who understand the right wing social media bubble is about to burst once MAGA collapses but who are also desperate to cash in on the hype for as long as it still exists. (I have so much to say about those topics at another time.)

They guys who made this video are even less nobodies to most Americans than the guy they never heard of who was shot, but since there is a vacuum, there are not dozens, and probably more, right wing weirdos out there now bothering law-abiding Somali business owners and employees because that’s where we are in Stephen Miller presidency.

I’ll leave you with this video. You will notice that during the phone call it is obviously edited 3 times. You will notice that you never see him click on the screen to bring up the actual phone numbers. And of course the real phone number for the business exists and is different.

Happy New Year!