What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.
Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.
This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.
Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.
The clan code also explains something many observers prefer not to see: silence. Silence is enforcement. Those who break ranks are dealt with swiftly. Ostracism is severe and permanent. This clarifies why so few Somalis publicly condemn abuse, even when wrongdoing is obvious. To speak is to choose exile. To remain silent is to survive. In clan societies, loyalty is rewarded more reliably than honesty.
These dynamics are not unique to Minnesota. The same patterns appear wherever clan-based cultures are transplanted into advanced welfare states—Sweden, the Netherlands, and Britain. The logic is consistent. Extract what can be extracted, and when the host weakens, move on. This is adaptation in its purest form. But it is fundamentally incompatible with modern civic life, which depends on social trust rather than blood ties.
Edward Banfield called this phenomenon “amoral familism.” Loyalty inward, indifference outward. Where it dominates, corruption is not a deviation from the system. In truth, it is the system. Public institutions become spoils to be captured, law becomes negotiable, and accountability vanishes.
This failure wasn’t the result of chance, but of choice.
You Will Be Assimilated
In Who Are We? Samuel Huntington traced the foundations of the United States to a specific and demanding cultural inheritance: Anglo-Protestantism, which was rule-bound, future-oriented, and property-respecting. This culture generated habits of work, restraint, and institutional loyalty that made self-government possible. Assimilation was mandatory. Immigration was selective—often brutally so.
Crossing the Atlantic was arduous. The destination offered discomfort, not charity. Newcomers were expected to contribute immediately. They had to prove they could support themselves and burden no one. Family reunification required proof of means. This wasn’t cruelty but the recognition of reality. And it worked.
The Irish, Italians, Jews, and others did not indulge in their differences. They adapted slowly, painfully, and unevenly—but successfully—to the American way of life. Their old-world identities weren’t erased overnight, but they were subordinated to a common civic creed that demanded they speak the English language, work hard, and be loyal to our country’s civic institutions. America wasn’t built by preserving every outside culture—it was built by insisting that no foreign culture could remain sovereign.
That settlement began to fracture in the mid-20th century. Charles Taylor’s essay “The Politics of Recognition” supplied the moral vocabulary for the shift. Taylor argued that liberal societies must move beyond equal respect—treating individuals the same under the law—toward recognition, in which distinct cultural identities are publicly affirmed and preserved. Identity, in this view, is dialogical: who we are depends on how others recognize or misrecognize us. Misrecognition, Taylor argued, inflicts real psychological harm. From this followed the claim that a just society cannot be culturally blind, but must actively recognize and affirm the equal worth of distinct cultural identities.
In theory, this was meant to correct historical injustice. In practice, it redefined citizenship itself. Equality before the law was no longer sufficient. Difference demanded deference. Culture became a claim on the state rather than a private inheritance that individuals carried with them.
Huntington clearly identified the turning point: the rise of a cosmopolitan liberal elite that sought to redefine American identity from a coherent national culture into an open-ended social project. The melting pot gave way to the salad bowl, and unity was reframed as oppression. The “we” of the American people was weakened, then stripped of substance, and finally treated as suspect.
This shift carried romantic assumptions. Pre-modern cultures were recast as pure, victimized, and enriching, a modern revival of the noble savage myth. Internal failures were ignored, and illiberal practices were excused. To criticize was to betray. Tolerance slid into indulgence, and indulgence into surrender.
Will Kymlicka then provided the intellectual scaffolding. In Multicultural Citizenship, he argued that justice sometimes requires group-differentiated rights because individuals need a stable “societal culture” as the background condition for meaningful autonomy. He distinguished between “external protections” that shield minority groups from domination by the majority and “internal restrictions” imposed by groups on their own members, which liberalism must reject. But this framework contains a fatal omission. Once assimilation itself is treated as illegitimate, no coherent mechanism remains for protecting individuals trapped inside illiberal minority cultures. The group is shielded from the majority, while the individual is abandoned within the group.
Minnesota is living with the consequences.
The West and the Rest
This brings us to the convergence now visible: Somali clan structures, Muslim Brotherhood-linked institutions, and the Democratic Party. Multiculturalism made this alliance possible.
Consider the redistributive state. Multiculturalism doesn’t merely tolerate difference—it funds it. The assumption is permanence without assimilation. The assimilationist assumes that individuals fend for themselves. The multiculturalist insists the state will compensate indefinitely. Welfare ceases to be a safety net and instead becomes a settlement mechanism.
Milton Friedman warned, with characteristic precision, that a country cannot simultaneously have a generous welfare state and open borders. One must give way. Minnesota chose neither.
Friedman was explicit that he opposed not immigration itself but immediate access to welfare. He even noted that illegal immigrants in a welfare state could work without drawing benefits. But open borders combined with unconditional welfare, he warned, distort incentives for migrants and host societies alike, and are fiscally and politically unsustainable.
My husband, Niall Ferguson, has spent decades documenting what made Western societies succeed. In Civilization, he formulated the “Six Killer Apps” that supply the West’s vitality: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and a work ethic rooted in Protestant culture. These were, and remain, functional requirements. His central warning was that electoral democracy is the capstone of this structure, not its foundation, and that overexpansive states and proliferating legalism—the rule of lawyers rather than law—can corrode the norms of trust and legality on which prosperity depends.
Such pressures are usually diffuse, but Minnesota concentrated them.
The scale of the Minnesota story matters—not in vague terms, but in hard sums. The Feeding Our Future case alone involves roughly a quarter-billion dollars in alleged theft from a child nutrition program. That is the “respectable” number, the one no one can deny. But it is only the first layer of the problem.
Prosecutors and investigators have uncovered far larger losses across Minnesota-administered programs, figures that push well north of $9 billion. Further investigations are almost certain to uncover billions more. This isn’t petty corruption, nor is it the case of a few bad apples. It is corruption on an industrial scale—the kind that doesn’t occur without protection.
That is where the Muslim Brotherhood enters the picture, long described by analysts as gradualist rather than confrontational. It focuses on overtaking institutions first, language second, and law last. Its aim is not immediate domination but normalization, demographic leverage, and eventual capture.
Minnesota hosts a dense network of Islamic councils and advocacy groups dominated by Somali leadership. Nationally, the pattern is expanding. Each success is framed as inclusion, which is insulated from scrutiny by the language of civil rights. And each success advances a narrow, disciplined agenda that is deeply anti-modern.
The Democratic Party completes the triangle. Immigration shifted from policy to identity. Enforcement became immoral, and illegality was reframed as victimhood. The result is an unmistakable pattern of activists obstructing federal officers, officials retreating from their duties, and a party increasingly reliant on ethnic blocs it cannot discipline without alienating its base.
These three forces—clan loyalty, Islamist strategy, and progressive politics—aren’t identical, but they are aligned. All reject the assimilationist creed, and all benefit when the common culture dissolves.
Again, this wasn’t unforeseeable. Friedman, Gellner, and Huntington all warned us. Ferguson explained what made the West work. The knowledge existed, but what failed was judgment.
Multiculturalism sounds humane and feels enlightened. But it is neither.
A Cautionary Tale
Every successful subversive movement requires camouflage and cover. In Minnesota, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has functioned as both. Formally, it presents itself as a civil rights organization defending Muslim Americans against discrimination. In practice, it has helped recast any scrutiny of their networks, funding, and political behavior as evidence of prejudice. The move is procedural rather than rhetorical. Questions are not answered but reframed.
CAIR’s ideological lineage traces back to networks aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s own writings describe a project of normalization, demographic leverage, and institutional capture. CAIR’s role is to ensure that the process is never named. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s role has been to normalize it within the state.
As attorney general, he occupies one of the most powerful legal offices in Minnesota, with direct influence over what is pursued, what is delayed, and what quietly disappears. Under his tenure, scrutiny of Somali-linked fraud networks has been politically fraught. Investigations that would be routine elsewhere are treated as sensitive, even dangerous, terrain.
Ellison was raised Catholic and later converted to Islam as a young man. Conversion itself is not a crime, nor is it disqualifying. But in a political environment shaped by recognition politics, symbolism matters. One is permitted, even encouraged, to wonder what incentives operate when faith, identity, and power converge so neatly. When legal authority is exercised by figures embedded—culturally or politically—in the very constituencies under scrutiny, neutrality should no longer be assumed; it must be demonstrated. But in Minnesota, it has not been.
A democratic system cannot function when entire communities are treated as untouchable constituencies rather than equal citizens subject to the same law. When identity shields networks from enforcement, the rule of law gives way to selective indulgence. And once that line is crossed, corruption ceases to be an aberration and starts becoming a protected activity.
Each actor wants the same thing: numbers. For Democratic operatives, immigration has become an electoral strategy. For the Muslim Brotherhood, demographics precede influence. For clan structures, welfare extraction funds expansion and reinforces internal discipline.
What we are witnessing is the inversion of sovereignty. Authority migrates away from neutral institutions and toward organized blocs. Law becomes conditional. Citizenship becomes symbolic rather than substantive. At that point, the nation-state still exists on paper, but its essential functions—boundary enforcement, even-handed governance, shared duty—are already in retreat. What remains is administration without cohesion, elections without a demos, and rights severed from obligation.
By abandoning a common civic creed, Minnesota invited competing loyalties. By rejecting assimilation, it rewarded separatism. The result is a system that no longer knows what it is trying to produce. Citizenship becomes a label rather than a discipline. Belonging is decoupled from obligation. The state asks for nothing in return, and therefore receives nothing it can rely on. In such an environment, organized blocs predictably outperform individuals, and networks built on blood, faith, or grievance steadily replace rule-bound institutions.
The cure is not cosmetic reform but a return to first principles. Immigration must once again be selective, conditional, and unapologetic. Entry should be extended only to those willing to accept the host nation’s laws and culture without negotiation, and to do so in practice rather than rhetoric. There can be no automatic entitlement, no presumption of permanence, and no tolerance for systematic abuse. Residency and citizenship are privileges, not humanitarian vouchers. When they are treated otherwise, they lose all meaning.
The welfare state must also shrink—not out of spite, but out of necessity. Open access to benefits financed by others inverts selection. It attracts those best able to navigate and exploit bureaucratic systems rather than those prepared to contribute to them. The incentive structure is perverse, acting as a magnet for opportunism. When dependency is subsidized and independence is optional, dependency proliferates. No society can remain solvent—financially or morally—under those conditions.
Some may see Minnesota as a cautionary tale. It is, but it’s also more than that. It is evidence of what happens when high-trust societies encounter low-trust systems and fail to recognize the asymmetry between them.
The choice is clear: restore the equal application of authority, dismantle misaligned incentives, and reassert assimilation—or watch Minnesota multiply.
