Democrats, Somalis, And The Legacy Of The "Welfare Queen"
The most potent attack on the American welfare state just got 250,000 times stronger.
In 1976, a seemingly longshot candidate for the Republican nomination for president introduced a powerful meme to the American psyche: the specter of welfare fraud:
“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
This wasn’t a lie exactly, but nor was it the straight truth. The figures were embellished, the scale of the problem exaggerated, and many of the details fudged. It was a yarn that Hollywood - a town this presidential candidate knew well - might have regarded as being “Based On A True Story,” or perhaps, “Inspired By True Events.”
The real person described was a Chicagoan named Linda Taylor, an inveterate conwoman and fraudster. She was also suspected of kidnapping, and even homicide. You know her as the “welfare queen;” though that term didn’t actually come from the presidential race that made her famous. The moniker is generally credited to the Chicago Tribune’s George Bliss, though it also appeared in a Rochester, NY periodical, the Democrat and Chronicle, around the same time.
The idea was powerful, and would go on to shape how the United States discussed social welfare for the subsequent 50 years, right up to today.
Right up until that framing was eclipsed by a conservative Youtuber named Nick Shirley, whose 42-minute video absolutely showered the 25/26 holiday season with partisan angst, racial animus, and a surge of nativism so strong, it would take the Wolfgang Peterson-worthy abduction of the president of Venezuela to get people to change the subject.
“The Great Communicator”
It almost never happens anymore that a sitting president is challenged in a primary election by a member of his own party. It used to be fairly common though.
In 1976, after years of frustrating stagflation, skepticism about the continuation of détente with the Soviet Union, and lingering butthurt over his having pardoned Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford was in hot political water. You kind of have to feel bad for the guy.
His luck carried him so far, only to run out just when he needed it the most. He’d been such an impressive man, until he assumed the most impressive office in the world, at which point, he just couldn’t catch a break.
Ford was a football star, a war hero, a successful attorney, and a well-liked member of the House of Representatives. He is the only president in US history never to have won a national election for either President or Vice President - he was tapped for VP after Spiro Agnew resigned in scandal, then took the big chair when Nixon followed suit after Watergate. Past that though, nothing went his way.
He couldn’t get the economy firing, couldn’t restore the country’s Vietnam-tarnished reputation, or his own pardon-tarnished one. He was almost assassinated, twice, both times by a woman. Which okay, I don’t want to sound sexist or anything - women can be assassins too - but there’s something weird going on when two of them take shots at you within the same three week period. Also, he slipped on the stairs of Air Force One and went crashing to the bottom, which cemented his image in the public eye as a bumbling klutz - ironic, for a guy who might have been the most physically fit president we’ve ever had.
Anyway, when it came time for him to run for victory on his own terms, he was opposed from the right by former actor and arch-conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Reagan almost took him down too; this wasn’t a negligible challenge. Their battle went all the way to the convention that year, where Ford won by a hair’s breadth before promptly losing to Jimmy Carter.
The rest is history. Carter proved a better guy than a president and served only one term before a resurgent Reagan smoked him in the 1980 general. The Gipper went on to become an icon of the right, revered more than perhaps any other postwar president. His popularity stayed high during his eight years in office, dipping only during the ‘83 recession and again during Iran-Contra.
It’s hard to believe, given the state of today’s GOP, but the Republicans were not always an especially right-wing party. Excepting war, Richard Nixon’s resume of accomplishments reads like that of a fairly progressive Democrat; we have him to thank for NOAA, OSHA, and the EPA.
Of course, Tricky Dick left a cloud over both party and country when he demonstrated that being a president and being a thuggish, criminally-inclined paranoiac were not mutually exclusive. It was arguably Ronald Reagan who did more than anyone to lift that cloud, and to make the GOP truly, madly, deeply conservative.
Reagan united what we now call “movement conservatives,” through his right-wing approach to domestic policy, his tough talk against the Soviets, and his steadfast refusal to eat shit for the Vietnam debacle. That last one was hugely important. The country that had galloped so valiantly to victory in World War II was, during Reagan’s ascension, undergoing a crisis of of both confidence and identity. How had events in Indochina spiraled so horribly out of control? How had the mighty United States been forced to flee with its tail between its legs by a bunch of barefooted rice farmers in silly hats?
Reagan almost single-handedly put an end to that reckoning. Nope, the US was not the problem. We were the “shining city on a hill” (actually from his farewell address, but the sentiment was a consistent one through his years campaigning and in office).
Here’s Reagan in August of 1980:
“For too long, we have lived with the ‘Vietnam syndrome.’ ... It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. ... We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful... They fought as well and as bravely as any Americans have ever fought in any war.”
On the home front, Reagan’s legacy was just as powerful. It was from him that we got the zingers, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and also, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Then of course, there was the “welfare queen.”
Perception vs. Reality
It’s difficult to know whether the meme would have been as salient without a man of Reagan’s charisma and actor-trained communicative talents behind it. But the question is academic. The idea of the “welfare queen” became a central fixture in the partisan back and forth over public entitlements. It also set the tone for much of our racial discourse in the post civil rights era - this despite Linda Taylor’s having been mixed race, and at least partly white (when it suited her).
Welfare fraud - whether through SNAP, Social Security, Medicaid, etc - is less common than Americans think it is, though the numbers are still significant. A GAO report conducted during the pandemic years - when fraud was more prevalent than is typical, owing to lax reporting requirements - offered an estimate of $233 - $521 billion, or about 3-7% of federal obligations. That’s a real problem, but these programs are far from the free-for-alls that some conservatives like to imply they are.
As to identity, Linda Taylor wasn’t really representative of anyone, beyond career criminals. Her race was ambiguous, and changed often, depending on what was going to be the most expedient for whatever scheme she was cooking up.
Still, “welfare queen” came to exist in the public imagination primarily as a single, black mother. Per capita, black Americans do receive welfare benefits at higher rates than do white Americans, though the overall number of whites is higher due to their larger share of the population.
How the meme became racialized is a thorny topic. Reagan himself never explicitly tied the issue to race - he was taking aim at entitlements programs more broadly - though the word ‘explicitly’ is doing some rather heavy lifting there. The setting of the story - Chicago - as well as the media context surrounding crime and urban decay at the time of these campaign appearances left Reagan vulnerable to attacks by the left that he was deploying a racist “dog-whistle.”
These claims in turn opened the left to criticism that they weren’t playing fair either. Democrats were charged with exploiting a protected minority group to fend off valid attacks over their fiscal malfeasance and naive stewardship of the Great Society.
The partisan horns would remain so locked for many decades to come.
Stalemate
A visualization I find useful in imagining the post-Reagan benefits discourse is that of two wizards trading spells. Think: Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort squaring off, a green beam pushing against a red one, with a ball of explosive energy in the center.
For a partisan visualization, see below:
The right’s contention that welfare fraud represented a major fiscal problem, as well as an intolerable crime against the American taxpayer, was potent. More so for the fact that, whether by Reagan’s deliberate design or just happy political accident, it vigorously picked at the country’s racial scabs, and forged a compelling avenue for racial grievance.
“Those people are taking your hard-earned money to buy bon-bons and Cadillacs. Will you stand for it?”
Although, the counter-charge was also potent. The fear of being labeled a racist was bipartisan - near-universal - and it was an easy bit of mud for Democrats to sling. Welfare fraud may have been a dog-whistle, but it was also a trap for the right. They could complain about it, but only in the most banal, bean-counting terms. If they went too far, got too exercised, pounded the podium too hard, they would be accused of cynically fanning the flames of race conflict.
The raw numbers also seemed to favor the Democrats. Obviously, the desirable amount of fraud in a system is zero. But even the highest reasonable estimates put forth by Republicans were in the single digits. So the Grand Old Party wasn’t just cynical, wasn’t just racist, and wasn’t just cynically racist, it was hysterical to boot.
In the subsequent years, the collision point between the blue spell and the red spell shifted somewhat from the center (welfare reform was a major campaign pledge by Bill Clinton, for example) but it never shifted much. The welfare state remained intact, with only the odd work requirements tweak or beefing up of the application process offered to change things.
Until now.
The Somali Angle
Watching the reaction from the left to the Nick Shirley video has given me the strong sense that Democrats do not fully understand the danger in which their political worldview has just been placed.
There was already strong evidence, predating Trump’s second term, that welfare fraud was a crime disproportionately common among the US’s Somali diaspora. The filmmaker purports to visit a number of daycare and health centers in the Twin Cities whose names appear in public record as being the recipients of significant federal funding. Everywhere he goes, he finds shuttered buildings, empty parking lots, and doors being slammed in his face by caught-looking Somalis.
Let’s go ahead and get my own opinions out of the way here before we carry on:
I thought the Shirley video was pretty shady, which is why I haven’t linked to it here. It would not surprise me to learn that most or all of it was misleading. If I ran a daycare, I wouldn’t open my doors to a rando Youtuber and a sidekick giving Racist Uncle vibes either.
Even the revelation that it is largely false though will matter very little in political terms. Those determined to believe its authenticity will continue to do so, regarding any exculpatory evidence as a put-up job. Those determined to discredit Shirley, meanwhile, will seize on every wrinkle the reporting to imply that all of it is a bogus, racist lie. The needle will not move.
It is not racist to be mad about a recent immigrant group committing widespread public benefits fraud.
Some of the people crowing about this do appear to care more about the identity of the fraudsters than about the fraud itself.
Legacy media and the Democrats have utterly bungled their response to this, electing to focus more on discrediting Nick Shirley than on trying to figure out if he was right. That’s a bad look, and gives the impression that they have something to hide.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a worthless stooge.
National Democrats need to stop taking their cues on this from Walz and the rest of the Minnesota DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, which is what Democrats are called in the Land of 10,000 Lakes). The DFL has good reason to pander to the Somali community: despite being very small, it votes as a bloc, and can swing elections in the North Star State. This dynamic is not true nationwide, however. Across all 50 states, Somalis are only concentrated in a handful of urban areas, outside of which, it makes no sense to treat them as being above accountability.
Probably no one should be treated as being above accountability…
If Democrats are worried about blowback against innocent Somalis, the best thing they can do is vigorously pursue prosecutions against the ones who broke the law, rather than give the appearance that they’re running cover.
The worst thing they can do is go around genuflecting about how Somalis “built” the communities in which they settled. They simply did not. Minneapolis, Boston, Columbus, et al were “built” long before the mid-90s, which is when Somalis started coming to the US en masse. Enough of this silliness. It’s like saying that Pedro Pascal “built” the MCU because he played the lead in the latest film. That would be just weird, and not true. It would also be kind of insulting to guys like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans whose movies actually did define the franchise. It’s totally possible to say, “Pedro Pascal was a great addition as Mr. Fantastic,” and not act like he was in on the ground floor of this thing when he just factually wasn’t.
But my opinions on Somalis, or immigration, or collective guilt aren’t important here. At issue is the broader dynamic. Remember, until this recent Christmas break, this is what the entitlements debate looked like this:
Now? It’s more like this:
A few things have happened to change this.
We won’t know the precise numbers for some time, if we ever do, but the scale of what is being alleged by Trump and other Republicans is larger now than anything that came before. Estimates by prosecutors put the figure in Minnesota alone at $1 billion (twice the upper estimate made by the Covid-era GAO for the whole country). By some accounts, it could be more than $9 billion. That places this in a very different ballpark from anything Ronald Reagan was discussing.
Per our wizard analogy, there’s a lot more oomph behind the Republican spell these days.
There’s also a lot less oomph behind the Democrats’.
The best defense Democrats had in decades past is one they don’t have at all now: the threat of the racism charge. A lot of them fled Twitter after Elon bought it, so maybe they don’t know, but Republicans actually no longer give a shit whether Democrats call them racists or not. By their reckoning, Democrats call them racists all the time, and will continue to, even without cause.
Democrats warning, “Keep this up and we’ll smear you as racists!” is a bit like Gallagher warning, “Keep this up and I’ll smash this watermelon!” It’s probably happening one way or the other.
And I really don’t think anyone on the Blue Team understands how serious this is. Already, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota until the fraud can be properly investigated. State agencies are under the microscope too, and even some private charities. Elon Musk just approvingly shared a condemnation of Lutheran Social Services for their role in immigrant resettlement, supposedly to the most welfare-generous states.
These are landscape-altering developments. Republicans just pulled a gun in this knife fight, and Democrats have nothing to match it. As a supporter of the social safety net, this strikes me as kind of a problem.
So maybe Democrats would like to stop attacking a 20-something Youtuber and get in the actual fucking game?
One, semi-apocryphal story about a “welfare queen” set the terms of this debate for 50 years. What’s going to happen now that it’s a quarter million, and Democrats can’t make people shut up about it anymore?
I've worked in Medicare and Medicaid for years including institutions directly responsible for prosecuting fraud. And more broadly I've worked for the government and contractors and private industry and around CMS and the DC area.
I would not take estimates of fraud too seriously. That is, I think all official estimates are probably low. Laughingly low. If your defense is "some agency said its only X%" you should ask what would happen to that agency if it provided a higher number.
"Its foolish to talk about fraud because its only X%" is basically you just grabbing onto a number you want to hear because you don't have to change your priors fundamentally if its true.
I would also say that "fraud" is usually only considered "fraud so brazen and retarded that even under a system that incredibly hard to convict it can be convicted on."
There is a far larger amount of fraud that is painfully obvious to anyone that looks at it, but we can't get it prosecuted. I remember finding a pharmacy charging 100x cost for a compounded pill whose contents if actually taken would certainly cause death...and I was told there was likely nothing we can do about it. The pharmacy was literally named "(pharmacy fraud name) 2", which they started down the street from "(pharmacy fraud name) 1" which they shut down every few years and start a new one.
And even that isn't all of "fraud". There is also just "providing services you know are useless to poor people with no copays so they don't care." That's not technically fraud, but it costs a lot of money and does no good. You might call it "waste" but again you run into "anyone with common sense knows this is bullshit but you can prove it in court (and appeals court)."
Anyway, it's pretty obvious that MN democrats sold money to Somali's for votes. This is basically how every single urban (often ethnic) political machine works. The history of the Democratic Party is as urban political machines going back forever.
This is especially a problem now because so much spend (such as medicaid) is almost entirely paid for by the federal government. So "defrauding" the federal government brings money into the state. Local politicians are often incentivized to steal from the state and the state politicians and incentivized to steal from the feds. This was by design with Obamacare BTW, and blue states should thank heaven red states haven't expanded Medicaid and turned it into the massive fraud machine it is.
As someone who works in the system in Minnesota, I can tell you the Somali criminal welfare fraud network is so much worse than anyone knows! A fraud complaint from a government worker or a member of the public against any other ethnic group will be investigated, but not Somalis. If you report Somali fraud, it can hurt your career. If a fraud investigator tries to investigate, they will be directed to work on “higher priority” issues. If a prosecutor tries to go after it, the State Dept of Human services will not cooperate. So far, it has been vastly understated by all except the highest federal estimates of 9 billion—likely just since it turbocharged in 2020, but it has been known since 2000. The legislative auditor reported just a tiny bit of it in a report in 2019 which was a limited hangout. The ability to “not notice” at every level of government is huge. No other immigrant group has ever done this level of criminal fraud—the Hmong did not, the Mexicans did not, the South Americans did not, the Ukrainians did not. We have never encountered this before, and unlike other groups, it doesn’t even slow down in the next generation. There are so many deserving families on the day are subsidy waitlist…but there is no safety net for them, because the Somalis took it all. Are there honest Somalis? Sure! They don’t receive any form of welfare & they work at least 40 hours per week. That is how to recognize them.