Little Mogadishu the Chicago Way - John Kass
By John Kass
Sunday December 14, 2025
The massive $1 billion (and growing) Minnesota welfare fraud by Somali refugees and the accompanying tired accusations of racism used to silence whistleblowers led me to think of my Greek immigrant family in Chicago.
We’re not welfare cheaters hiding behind accusations of racism. Family ties were critically important and our clans, but not at the expense of the love we bore America.
The City Journal broke the Minnesota fraud story wide open about the ties to terrorist groups, after Minnesota leftists like the fool Gov. Tim Walz suppressed reasonable inquiry.
Minnesota conservatives screamed for years begging the media pay some attention to the rampant fraud in Little Mogadishu, formerly known as Minneapolis. The City Journal piece is here for you to read.
My family wasn’t from the hellholes of East Africa, but of Greece.
Yet beautiful, civilized Greece had been a savage hellhole too, at least as savage as Somalia for a time, with communist death squads and child murder and raping. It was the mouth of hell.
I was born here, just 10 years after that bloody Greek civil war. You can hear about it here in the Palikari Project.
My family fought the communists.
We hardly ever talked about the civil war there. We weren’t the only ones avoiding family nightmares. Refugee families like the Vietnamese avoid the past as well. They are here, in the future, going to college, full of optimism in America, reaching for the American dream. We Greek immigrant kids loved America, too, all of us, those who would become liberal Democrats and those who would become conservative Republicans and those who would be apolitical.
We eagerly joined patriotic pageants at school. We revered education and educators, and several cousins became teachers. We played American sports, desperately to prove ourselves as Americans. My aunts—there were six matriarchal sisters here in America—competed against each other to make Jell-O molds they learned about in the Chicago Tribune.
We laughed at this, even at the famously delicious “Strawberry Chiffon” Jell-O molds and the horrid ones with the floating fruit chunks. Those Jell-O molds were the epitome of Americana to us, and would be served for desert for Sunday dinner, along with platters of fresh fruit and honeyed galaktoboureko and coffee.
The men would smoke and talk politics and everything was up for discussion. Kids were also expected to participate, and the women. We were so eager to become Americans that we eagerly told stories of assimilating to the ways of the Americani.
We’d fight you if you dared suggest we didn’t love this country.
Our parents kissed the ground of America and saw no shame in loving the country that saved the world and saved us. In the old country my father and grandfather received a hardworking mule to help them plow the fields and survive the famine of the wars. They loved America. They dreamed of it. All Greeks can see themselves in Elia Kazan’s “America, America.” My father dreamed of America since boyhood. We loved this country and counted ourselves fortunate. We would never hurt her or steal from her. In other words, we weren’t Somalis.
Quick story: Years ago, in the spring, I was driving my Thea Tula and Theo Taiki along I-57. They had stayed in Greece when the rest of us came to America.
“Stop I have to get out! Please!” said Theo.
I pulled over on the shoulder of the highway at the edge of a cornfield.
He walked up to the fence and when he turned his face, I could see he was sobbing.
“How flat, how rich, so beautiful,” Theo said sticking his hands into the soil. “One small field could feed a whole village for a year! What a country, my boy, what a country! America, America.”
But I never hear wonder or gratitude from the lips of U.S. Rep Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who was given everything from America. Protection, money, staus, an education. Everything.
Most people don’t know this about Ilhan Omar….😮
FOLLOW @NewswirePatriot pic.twitter.com/thQIjubSV0— Mark Lewis (@Maga4liberty) September 21, 2025
All I hear from her is how she despises our country. Complaints and demands. Few Americans know that she is of the oppressors among the Somali. I watch her seething and hating America, always demanding, sneering at the discovery of billion-dollar fraud. and I can envision her someday ordering our executions.
According to Somaliland Chronicle, her father was of the brutal Somali regime that led to the brutal Isaaq Genocide. And when the bloodthirsty regime fell, her family fled as refugees from the others they had ruined.
” Ilhan Omar’s family were part of the ruling elite under the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party (SRSP) led by dictator Siad Barre, which was a Marxist-Leninist regime that attempted to merge communist ideology with the Koran.
When the Barre regime was overthrown in 1991, Omar’s family fled Somalia, first to a refugee camp in Kenya, and later to the United States.”
Did they flee oppression? Or were they oppressors fleeing accountability? I believe it was the latter.
According to reports, “by both legal and historical standards, despite Ilhan Omar’s team’s spin in numerous recent articles which have been placed in left-leaning online publications, the logical conclusion that Ilhan Omar’s father was almost certainly intimately involved in the Isaaq Genocide is unmistakable. It is supported on the balance of probabilities and the totality of circumstantial and inferential evidence available indicates, more critically, that it meets the threshold that this was the case ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
Why do American taxpayers keep giving the Somali people billions of dollars? Because we’ve been manipulated by the global left to hate ourselves. Because we’re suicidal.
“With the “Feeding Our Future” fraud scandal finally breaking into the national consciousness, some are beginning to report on the nexus to Ilhan Omar, the representative — in every respect — of the Minnesota district that has served as the scandal’s main crime scene.
She is at the center of it.
So how is the Little Mogadishu Way like the Chicago Way? Both are Democrat towns and both have corrupted the people. They play race to bludgeon white liberals into coughing up the cash. And the local news media, dominated by the left, allows it.
In Minnesota, fearful of being branded as racists, state watchdogs were intimidated into silence to allow the Somali fraud to continue.
The same dynamic is at play in Chicago, as Cook County Democratic boss Toni Preckwinkle uses race politics to intimidates judges into keeping repeat violent offenders in jail and Gov. J B Pritzker gives himself social credit for killing the cash bail program. The judges allowed violent offenders out and they wreak havoc and pain. Preckwinkle and Pritzker An innocent young woman was burned alive on the CTA. They fully expect to be re-elected, because they know the power of accusing others of racism if they don’t get what they want.
In the end Democrats keep electing Pritzker and Preckwinkle. And Johnson plays the race card, his only card. And who pays?
The people, or should I say, the sheeple. In Illinois, the sheeple expose their throats to the knife again and again and again. They vote Democrat again and again and again.
I just received Benjamin Weingarten’s book “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.” I purchased it for myself, a gift to me. When I finish, I’ll review it here.
But in another story about the Minnesota fraud, Weingarten writes, “An initial review of the evidence indicates that reporting likely understates Omar’s ties to the scandal, including how much campaign cash she took in and from whom during her political career, among those implicated.
“What’s more, court documents show the U.S. government obtained at least some records connecting Rep. Omar to the fraud. Given the figures in her orbit and Minnesota politics more broadly implicated in the scandal, investigators would have likely come across further ties between Omar and the fraudsters through incidental collection if nothing else.”
The uncomfortable truth for American liberals is that all cultures are not equal. Therefore, not all cultures are compatible with all political systems. In this case, the Somali criminal enterprise is incompatible with a generous welfare state, particularly in the context of a racial politics that intimidates whistleblowers and other honest brokers.
Though this story was particular to Minnesota, disruptive mass immigration is a national phenomenon. During the four years of the Biden administration, America imported millions of foreigners, many illegally.
Some of these have brought, or are trying to bring, negative aspects of their home culture to the United States.”
The City Journal story was amplified by the New York Times, so the left can no longer pretend this scandal can be confined. CBS is now on it, reporting that “luxury cars, private villas and overseas wire transfers: CBS News obtained dozens of files and photos that reveal how Minnesota fraudsters blew through hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars as part of one of the biggest COVID-era fraud schemes.
“The files document a spending spree in which defendants, many of Somali descent, took taxpayer money meant to feed hungry children and used it to buy cars, property and jewelry. Videos show them popping champagne at an opulent Maldives resort. In a text message, one defendant boasts: “You are gonna be the richest 25 year old InshaAllah [God willing].”
Can’t wait until the terrorists come to claim their money.
The CBS story documents feature exhibits from a recent federal trial, many of which are being made public for the first time. The exhibits include:
I suppose you could say that events and culture make them incompatible with American citizenship, but the truth is that no matter what, they must be sent back, And not just the Somalis. But also those from Afghanistan.
The Vietnamese went through hell. But everything they do suggests they want to be part of the American experiment. Not so for Somalis or those from Afghanistan, where tribal and clan ties supersede obligations to America. The solution?
Send them back.
It’s our fault for going to their countries in the first place. America was not meant to be their experiment. They have little or no interest in assimilation, so let’s close the door now. Look at the arrogance and anger shown to Americans near Dearborn, Mich. I don’t want to see Sharia Law in the U.S. They are past the point of no return, at least with me, an immigrant’s son who loves our country.
Put it this way: It just didn’t work out.
I’m not angry at the people of Afghanistan or Somalia. We should never have gone to Afghanistan or Somalia. And gathering tribal people from the stone-age and shoehorning them into America expecting they’ll develop an affinity with The Federalist Papers is not a solution. Not for them or for us. Yes, the Democrats ship them in by the tens of millions, Biden called them to storm the border and the other Democrats and legacy corporate media wanted the migrant poor to become their dependents requiring federal aid. The Democrats upheave our society to get votes. They do not demand assimilation as all political parties demanded when my family came to America, The poor and the desperate are compelled to kiss the hand holding food.
But on a large scale, it is a prescription of failure. We just can’t live this way. Look to Europe and see what caving to the left means. The Europeans are allowing themselves to be devoured. It is so bad now in the United Kingdom that authorities have arrested thousands of Englishmen for daring to speak their minds. That’s not “1984.” That’s not a dystopian novel. It’s reality in 2025.
In a few years, they won’t have a country. Do the Democrats hate America so much they would visit such pain and anarchy upon us? Yes, they hate us that much. The Democrats have broken the immigration system. And any attempts to fix it are met with screeching and accusations that we’re subhuman Nazis.
America must be rid of those who don’t want to assimilate soon or we’ll die. And our children and our country will die. We’re not sheeple to expose our throats to slaughter. We’re Americans.
Remember?
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(Copyright 2025 John Kass)