The racism grift card

The Minnesota fraud scandal is nothing short of appalling.

It’s alarming that numerous fraudsters, predominantly Somali immigrants, managed to siphon off such a substantial sum from U.S. taxpayers.

These individuals established fake nonprofits, falsely charging the state for services that were never rendered.

One notable organization, Feeding Our Future, claimed it was dedicated to feeding needy children.

In truth, it funneled taxpayer dollars into the overflowing bank accounts of the Somali fraudsters involved.

The grifters milked a billion dollars from the state. They lived lavish lifestyles on the back of the cash they stole from hard-working Americans.

Some of the plundered money was sent back to Somalia, where it ended up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab — the Al- Qaeda-linked terror group.

And all of this happened under the nose of Gov. Tim Walz. It’s  — a scandal of epic proportions.

Yet for me, there’s one aspect of this industrial-scale robbery of the American people that feels especially chilling: It’s this: When officials raised concerns about one of the Somali scams, the scammers threatened to publicly brand them as “racist.”

You will be tarred with the brush of “racism,” the fraudsters warned, and it will be “sprawled all over the news.”

‘Money kept flowing’

And here’s the thing: it worked.

The officials crumbled in the face of the scammers’ shameless playing of the “racism” card.

They carried on funding what they suspected was a sketchy outfit, so desperate were they to avoid being called “racist.”.

This reveals a chilling truth not only about Minnesota but about the West more broadly.

It speaks to the lethal power of the racism grift.

It confirms that accusations of “racism” have become a key weapon in the armory of the duplicitous.

Even the state itself can now be cowed by mere whispers of the r-word.

It was Feeding Our Future that aroused the suspicion of state officials.

The Minnesota Department of Education was alarmed by the number of “feeding sites” that were popping up.

Yet the Somali scammers knew how to silence their doubters — just cry “racism.”

You will be in trouble if you fail to fund “minority-owned businesses,” they said, and the Department of Education buckled.

“The money kept flowing,” as one report says.

It was blackmail. Minnesota officials essentially handed wads of cash to the scammers to buy their silence, to shush their talk of “racism.”

They gave away the taxes of working-class Americans in order to save their own bureaucratic skin — such is the hypnotic power of the “racism” panic.

And it’s not just in the United States; throughout the Western world, state officials are so scared of being called racist that they’ll even turn a blind eye to criminal behavior.

Here in the UK, the “grooming gang” scandal was underpinned by the same moral cowardice.

White working-class girls in towns across England were raped by gangs of men from mostly Pakistani backgrounds, and everyone from cops to politicians looked the other way.

Why? Because, as one inquiry found, they feared “being thought of as racist.”

This is how far the “racism” hysteria has gone — even vulnerable girls can be sacrificed to ward off suspicions of racism.

For me, nothing better captures the harm of the “racism” grift than the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017.

Failed to act

That’s when a radical Islamist blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 mostly young people.

A subsequent inquiry found that one of the security guards on duty that night was suspicious of the young man with the heavy rucksack pacing around the foyer and mumbling to himself — the bomber.

But he failed to act. You know why — because he “feared being branded a racist.”

The “racism” panic isn’t only irritating — it’s deadly. It kills.

Racism is a terrible evil. Yet it seems to me that the “racism” hysteria, the debilitating dread of being thought of as racist, is pretty evil too.

We are governed by a bureaucratic elite that is eaten up by “white guilt.”

These are people who were conditioned by the university system to think of themselves as “problematic” and “privileged” whiteys who must always tread carefully around ethnic-minority groups.

The end result is a culture of fear where the mere mention of the word “racism” is enough to induce panic.

It’s not remotely surprising that nefarious actors are weaponizing the r-word for moral or monetary gain.

From the Somali scammers in Minnesota to the Pakistani groomers in Rotherham, folks have figured out that they can get away with murder — or at least fraud and rape — by playing the “racism” card.

Enough is enough. It’s time we shook off the twin evils of racism and the racism grift.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.