On today's show, host Charlie Kirk is joined by reporter Liz Collin of Alpha News to discuss the latest in the scandal-ridden state of Minnesota, including Governor Tim Walz's decision not to run for re-election and the ongoing investigation into a $9B fraud scheme.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show, hour two of our first show back in the new year.
00:01:14.000Never been so excited to see the calendar flip from 2025 to 2026, the new year.
00:02:03.000And we did not know when we booked you that we were also going to be welcomed by the news that Tim Waltz is deciding not to run for reelection.
00:02:12.000What is the story behind the story here, Liz?
00:02:15.000Yeah, you guys, these last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind in Minnesota.
00:02:19.000You can certainly say that with news and politics, no doubt.
00:02:24.000Governor Tim Walz making it official, actually just about an hour ago here, that he will not seek re-election to a third term as governor.
00:02:33.000There have been many political scandals on his watch.
00:02:36.000We've been detailing all of them, but this billion-dollar fraud scheme seemed to be the last straw.
00:02:42.000In his case, $9 billion in all and counting.
00:02:46.000We now have multiple federal investigations going on here in Minnesota.
00:02:51.000And yeah, compared to mainstream media, I think we've been one of the very few, certainly the most prominent in the state of Minnesota criticizing the governor.
00:02:59.000We have been for several years with our exclusive reporting.
00:03:03.000But we even showed up at that press conference today, our photojournalist, which it's really difficult to even call it a press conference, you guys, but Governor Walls took no questions at all.
00:03:12.000Alpha News tried to get into the room, but we were told we were not on the list, so we could not.
00:03:18.000The governor, it's been years now since they've even responded to our request for comment on any story, but really just a bizarre situation.
00:03:26.000If any of your viewers were seeing this at all play out on X, you have Walls coming off, I think, quite angry.
00:03:35.000He talked about how he was supposedly fighting fraud for his last seven years in office, which came off as a bit of a surprise to any of us paying attention.
00:03:43.000Basically, blaming Republicans and President Trump for all of this, referring to Nick Shirley's viral video, which got an awful lot of attention, called that a right-wing YouTuber.
00:03:55.000And Nick Shirley was breaking into daycares.
00:04:24.000Now, what comes to mind for me, Liz, is he can talk a big game there.
00:04:28.000He can say that, yet I feel like nothing confirms all of the theories and allegations going on in Minnesota more than the fact Governor Walls realizes I can't fix this in the 11, in the 10 months till the next election.
00:04:44.000I have to drop out to give us a shot in this race.
00:04:47.000That seems like the greatest confirmation of all that there's a gigantic scandal here, correct?
00:04:53.000Yeah, I mean, I think Blake Bernie wasn't paying attention.
00:04:55.000It certainly seems that that way, that with what he's saying now, it's almost kind of opposite day, but we see that message again and again from the governor's office.
00:05:05.000But you have some interesting maneuvering happening behind the scenes, and this is something we've been monitoring for months now.
00:05:11.000Even when Governor Walls announced in September that he would run for reelection for a third term, many were very surprised by that with all of the baggage that he carries in the state.
00:05:24.000But now it seems that it seems to be more and more truthful now.
00:05:28.000And this is something we were hearing months ago, that Senator Amy Klobuchar will, in fact, be running for Minnesota governor.
00:05:35.000And then you have perhaps some backroom dealing going on that Walls would then be appointed to her Senate seat because she is not up for reelection until 2031.
00:05:47.000So there would be a special election in 28, but Walls would have some sort of swap out.
00:05:52.000And until then, this is all just sort of speculative at this point.
00:05:56.000But many of these Democrats, one could say that fraud has been happening on the watch of many Democrats here in Minnesota.
00:06:04.000It's been 20 years now since there was a statewide office held by a Republican in Minnesota.
00:06:44.000Obviously, the buck stops with the guy at the top, but it seems like this fraud has, you have to have so many people turn a blind eye to allow the fraud to go this long, this large, this widespread.
00:06:57.000Who needs to be held accountable next?
00:06:59.000Yeah, I think it's a great point, Andrew.
00:07:01.000In many ways, this fraud is almost baked into the legislation that we see passed again and again at the state capitol with these NGOs, these nonprofits that are formed.
00:07:11.000I'll just highlight some recent reporting over at Elpha News within the last few months, but a transportation company paid millions of dollars over what the Minneapolis School District was allowing.
00:07:22.000We find that these vans are either sitting for months on end or, in fact, they're driving around town without any passengers in them at all, a Somali-owned company, several Somali-owned companies working for the Minneapolis School District.
00:07:36.000Well, it turns out that there is some legislation passed in 2023 under a DFL trifecta, so controlled by Democrats, that basically 100% of the reimbursement that is submitted to the federal government will go to the district and those companies.
00:07:55.000And what are the monitoring systems put in place for these so-called rides and services?
00:08:00.000This is all of a sudden assigned to what they consider the homeless and highly mobile population in Minneapolis.
00:08:07.000All of a sudden, there's a 40% spike in homeless kids in Minneapolis.
00:08:12.000So, when you really take a look at a lot of this, the math certainly does not add up.
00:08:15.000It has not been for years, but we continue to detail those stories over at Alpha News from whistleblowers who've been trying to bring this to the attention of prosecutors, of authorities for such a long time.
00:08:27.000I've interviewed recently just a TSA agent who detailed her time at the airport here, how she would watch millions of dollars in cash and carry-on luggage be flown out of MSP on a weekly basis by a couple of Somali men, sometimes the same, sometimes different.
00:08:45.000And this was also corroborated by a former HSI agent who I then interviewed, who talked about how again and again they would present these cases to the U.S. Attorney's Office back then, and there would be no prosecution at all, no charges.
00:09:02.000Very similar with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
00:09:04.000We're hearing a lot about her again as President Trump continues to bring her up, but marrying her brother, the fact that there are questions if she's even a U.S. citizen.
00:09:14.000But so much of this has been reported before and not by the mainstream media.
00:09:20.000The mainstream media is very complicit in Minnesota.
00:09:23.000I know you guys know that well, with perhaps the focus being more on what they do not report than what they do.
00:09:30.000And the Minnesota Star Tribune, Minnesota's largest newspaper, is run by a former commissioner of Governor Tim Walz.
00:09:40.000Yeah, the Star Tribune has really just been exposed as a total.
00:09:44.000It's been so great where they've been like they initially said this is over, you know, this is overreacting.
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00:11:43.000We have Liz Collins standing by, and it's a before we bring her in, I want to play this clip of President Trump just went to, just went ham on Ilhan Omar and the Somali pirates.
00:12:23.000Liz, Trump, I think, is echoing the sentiment of a lot of Americans that we feel where we don't understand why we had to take in hundreds of thousands of Somalians from a culture that doesn't share our values, doesn't assimilate very easily or seamlessly.
00:12:37.000And now we find out they're defrauding us.
00:12:42.000And if you've investigated this, as far as deportations, there's a new report, Liz, just broke.
00:12:48.000I just saw it, so I don't expect you to know about it.
00:12:50.000That even local Hilton hotels and Hampton Inns in the Minnesota or the Minneapolis area are declining ICE agents and DHS officers from getting hotel rooms because the assumption is they're working to deport Somalis.
00:13:21.000But I accompanied them on a ride along for a news story and they talked about just the growing frustration they have with Minnesota, how difficult their job is because you have so few counties in the state that cooperate with ICE.
00:13:36.000So instead of doing these pickups at jails and prisons in Minnesota, instead they have to go out into neighborhoods where they are met by these activists.
00:13:47.000In fact, the Star Tribune has a live reporting feed where they go ahead and blast out where ICE is going to be next.
00:13:55.000So this has been going on now for months in Minnesota, but we went out.
00:14:01.000Yes, they actually are basically promoting this, where ICE is going to be, so they can be met by activists.
00:14:06.000But during our ride-along, we picked up a former Minnesota state employee who was being paid six figures by the state, had worked for two different agencies, and turns out was a convicted felon and was hired anyway and now faces deportation.
00:14:24.000And that was a story that we documented for Alpha News.
00:14:27.000But again, you see this kind of at every turn, sort of this radical leftism that has taken hold in many agencies.
00:14:35.000And I think that that's a perfect example of something that has been playing out here as well.
00:15:24.000You can get a maximum of 20 weeks of family or medical leave.
00:15:29.000And so it seems to me like this is going to obviously present people an opportunity to incorporate a self-employed business, declare that they're paying themselves a certain salary.
00:15:39.000Yeah, and then you go on, you go on your leave for long COVID or whatever, your family member is sick or you have any one of your four wild claims, and you can get a maximum of 20 weeks of leave a year.
00:15:50.000$1,400 a week is what the state will pay.
00:15:56.000Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, Blake.
00:15:58.000And that's what I was talking about, just sort of how this is baked into the legislation.
00:16:02.000In fact, people are actually calling on just a forensic audit overall of the Minnesota state budget at this point.
00:16:07.000I think there are five or six federal investigations now ongoing in Minnesota, and I think they will be taking a look at a lot of this.
00:16:15.000Republicans certainly have been raising alarm surrounding this new law that just went into effect January 1st.
00:16:25.000You had Governor Walls in this, you know, so-called, I guess, press conference today talking about how he's going to be back out in front of cameras tomorrow talking about how great this new law is.
00:16:34.000And there are many questions about fraud.
00:16:37.000Already, thousands of people have been approved for this.
00:16:39.000And speaking with small business owners, whether it's COVID or other mandates that were put in place on small business owners in Minnesota, they have expressed serious alarm.
00:16:48.000The Chamber of Commerce, many departments came out against passing this.
00:16:53.000But again, this has been a Democrat-controlled state for such a long time.
00:16:59.000You're right that tens of thousands of people have fled the state at this point.
00:17:05.000But Governor Walls, in the last seven years, it's really hard to understate how much has happened here, whether it's defunding the police, a lot of these mandates on small businesses, education scores really in the tank at this point.
00:17:21.000Thousands of businesses closing in Minnesota, in addition to people moving out.
00:17:27.000And we've always been known for years as a welfare state.
00:17:32.000The good people of Minnesota, whether it's Lutheran social services, Catholic charities, taking people in.
00:17:39.000But this Somali part certainly has been different, and the evidence has pointed to that.
00:17:44.000It's about 100,000, they say, Somalis in Minnesota.
00:17:47.000You know, I've covered cases where they will be on the stand saying this is our culture.
00:17:52.000They consider themselves business people.
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00:19:41.000He is an amazing journalist who is part of TPUSA Frontlines team doing the sort of guerrilla on-the-ground journalism that the mainstream news media refuses to.
00:19:53.000And now Jonathan has, I mean, he's done amazing work for Turning Point for years, but he is uncovering the extent of Somali fraud in the state of Washington.
00:20:04.000So Minnesota has gotten a lot of the attention, but this fraud and this tendency by specific community in specific kinds of states expands well beyond Minnesota.
00:20:15.000We've heard Ohio, and Jonathan's on the ground in Washington exposing it there.
00:20:19.000Welcome to the show, Jonathan Cho, Frontlines TPUSA.
00:20:51.000What's the state of things in Washington?
00:20:53.000Well, first of all, credit to Nick Shirley, who busted this story wide open in Minnesota.
00:20:59.000And again, this morning, Tim Walz finally saying he's no longer going to run for governor.
00:21:05.000Shirley's coverage had a lot to do with that.
00:21:07.000That's what also inspired, though, our coverage here in Washington.
00:21:11.000As soon as that story broke in Minnesota last week, independent journalist Cam Higbee, along with citizen journalist Kristen Magnusson and I decided we needed to start looking here.
00:21:22.000Magnusson busted an entire list, identified more than 500 Somali-run daycares.
00:21:31.000What we did was simply process of elimination.
00:21:33.000We went through the inspection histories, anything with red flags, serious violations, we decided to go after and we did the divide and conquer approach.
00:21:41.000So after just only four days now and nearly 40 Somali daycares from Seattle to Kent to Auburn to SeaTac, all over South King County, we've uncovered what appears to be possible signs of Somali daycare fraud.
00:21:58.000In at least four cases, the daycare was officially registered with the state of Washington.
00:22:03.000But when we knocked on the door, either no one came to the door and only spoke to us through a ring camera and said, no, no daycare here, never registered, or the person ran us off the property saying, no daycare, go away.
00:22:47.000You heard Tim Waltz saying something similar, Jonathan, with, you know, basically calling him a conspiracy theorist and a right-wing YouTuber trying to downplay the significance of this work.
00:23:01.000What are you doing that's getting under their cross so much, Jonathan?
00:23:04.000Well, it does seem like that seems to be the playbook initially, at least for these Democratic elected officials and also the left-wing corporate media.
00:23:13.000It's pretty much deny, dismiss, and then try to discredit.
00:23:17.000But at the end of the day, we have official public documents.
00:23:21.000You referenced Katie Wilson, the new mayor of Seattle, just a few days ago.
00:23:25.000Went to her inauguration, and she pretty much admitted that her social media post right after this story broke, where she called, you know, all the people knocking on the doors of these Somali daycares to figure out whether or not actual fraud was happening.
00:23:39.000She referred to them as extremist influencers.
00:23:43.000And when Higby confronted her and I confronted her, she admitted she was talking about me.
00:23:49.000So we're clearly living rent-free in our head.
00:23:51.000But again, all joking aside, the fact that a sitting official, this not only includes the mayor of Seattle, I'm talking about the Washington state governor, Bob Ferguson, along with Attorney General Nick Brown, instead of calling for a robust investigation into the Somali daycares, they're now playing defense.
00:24:10.000They're pointing fingers at President Trump.
00:26:07.000This is a proudly capitalist state, and it's kind of got this, people don't understand this.
00:26:12.000Like the Seattle area has this kind of Scandinavian heritage as well, like very intrepid entrepreneurs, very self-sufficient people.
00:26:21.000It's getting completely annihilated from, you know, I would say from progressive left, but the tax base, the massive influx of foreigners, the traffic in Seattle is horrendous now, by the way.
00:26:38.000But it's just, I'm shocked at how much fraud we've explored, we've discovered already in Minnesota, but how much we're about to discover in Washington state.
00:26:48.000And the question that I then have, Jonathan, is that instead of investigating it, they're shooing you away.
00:26:55.000What is the reticence with actually investigating this fraud?
00:27:02.000You know, people like me, Cam Higbee, Kristen Magnusson, and all the other citizen journalists who've been digging, it's because the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, the actual agency, get this, that not only funds these Somali daycares, but is also supposed to investigate the daycares.
00:27:32.000So the best part of this is that DCYF also on its webpage put out a statement basically advising daycares on how to respond to all the people making inquiries.
00:27:42.000But there's no place at all on the website right now to make complaints about suspicious Somali daycares.
00:27:51.000And that's exactly what the Washington state GOP said.
00:27:53.000Jim Walsh, Travis Couture, two state representatives now also leading the charge here, trying to look into what's actually happening.
00:28:01.000They've gone so far to say this is essentially a kickback scheme.
00:28:06.000We've also uncovered that a lot of these Somali daycares have donated to Democratic candidates, not conservative Republican candidates, but Democratic candidates.
00:28:16.000So it's this vicious cycle that they're alleging.
00:28:19.000So again, we are at the very early stages of this investigation.
00:28:23.000In fact, Nick Shirley is a friend of ours.
00:28:59.000Yeah, they were Democrats, but it was sort of like the old school version.
00:29:04.000And now you're getting, whether it's New York or Minnesota, you've got basically a communist running Chicago.
00:29:12.000Now you've got a communist, we'll just keep it what it is, a socialist running Seattle.
00:29:18.000I mean, this is a really scary trend that we're seeing.
00:29:22.000Socialist Seattle, communist socialists running Chicago, socialists running New York.
00:29:28.000I don't know what the heck is going on in Minnesota, but they're basically trying to give away every single dollar that comes into the coffers.
00:29:35.000And it is going to play out exactly how we know it's going to play out, where rampant fraud, rampant fleecing of the taxpayers, and residents that are productive are going to flee the state.
00:30:14.000Just look at the data and the numbers.
00:30:16.000Downtown Seattle, the commercial real estate, the vacancies are at an all-time high.
00:30:21.000You have property values starting to drop.
00:30:24.000You have people now, you know, for example, Amazon and Meta.
00:30:28.000They were going to expand in Seattle, but instead they're moving to nearby Bellevue, which is only 15 minutes away, which is safer, which is pro-police and is simply a better run city.
00:30:40.000So what's happening now, again, in Washington, the concern is that all the patriots who were common sense have now left and there's no one left to fight.
00:30:49.000And maybe it is all by design that the GOP, you know, continues to pass these insane policies, frustrating common sense folk and the folk who are going to challenge them, they're no longer here to do that.
00:31:01.000So again, a lot of theories happening right now, but I'm seeing, again, the data and I'm seeing people now voting with their feet.
00:31:08.000And that's what's happening in Washington.
00:31:36.000Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but actually, it is a problem, though, because states like Arizona get benefited from Texas, Florida, a lot of red states are benefiting.
00:31:47.000Jonathan Cho, I know you are midway on this investigation.
00:31:51.000Please come back when you conclude it.
00:31:53.000We want to platform it, showcase it, and make sure the world knows.
00:31:56.000TPOSA Frontlines, Jonathan Cho, great American.
00:33:48.000You might need to read the Prelude books, too.
00:33:50.000It's a little less weird if you, it's the end of a trilogy.
00:33:52.000If you're reading it as your only book in that trilogy and you haven't read the first two, it's got to be one of the weirdest books you've ever read.
00:33:57.000I stayed in Phoenix and I shot off thousands of dollars.
00:34:02.000I didn't pay for them, but we went to this house and we got there with the kids and they had literal fireworks with the mortar shells, you know, like five-inch and seven-inch New Year's fireworks?
00:35:39.000I think there's a little bit of we have the legal precursor with drugs and narco-trafficking.
00:35:46.000And we have the indictments, and he's an illegitimate person that's, you know, but this is about kind of, I would say this is about two things.
00:35:54.000I'm going to say one that is provable, one that is a bit conspiratorial.
00:35:58.000This is about the messy business of empire.
00:36:01.000And people don't like to hear it, but America, yeah, we're not an empire in sort of a classical Roman sense, but we are an economic behemoth.
00:36:16.000There's Iran, Russia, China that are working to forge inroads in the Western Hemisphere, gain access to mineral rights, gain access to friendly dictators that will allow them to use their countries as playthings.
00:37:09.000Secondly, and this is where I'm going to get your real eye rolls, more so than the Cubans, there is a story, and I would be remiss if I didn't bring it up, that suggests that Trump is, because you've got these voting systems with the origin stories in Venezuela.
00:37:27.000Yes, this is going on on the internet.
00:37:28.000So if you don't want to hear it, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, that's fine.
00:37:33.000That's your, I'm not saying I endorse it.
00:37:35.000I'm just saying people are saying, many people are saying SmartMatic and Dominion have origin stories, or at least one of them does, in Venezuela.
00:37:44.000And the idea is that President Trump is doing this actually as some sort of 3D chess move to find out the truth about the 2020 election.
00:37:57.000I hope that's not the case because I don't think if an American troop gets killed and it turns out that they did this to go after Dominion, I think that would be a catastrophic error.
00:38:09.000Anyways, so the point is, that is one of the theories circulating is that there are, you know, Emerald Robinson, I think, was one of the people that has reported on this.
00:38:19.000Just saying House and Habit did a whole thing on it.
00:38:25.000I don't think that they're going to state this publicly, but I do think that President Trump starts posting on True Social about the 2020 election right after Maduro gets captured.
00:38:37.000Well, he always posts about the 2020 election.
00:38:39.000I think what's most interesting to me is the take that they told Trump, President Trump, that we're doing this for oil, and the math doesn't quite work out in that way.
00:38:49.000Like, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but it's not very good oil.
00:38:52.000It's not as profitable to extract as America's own oil.
00:38:55.000And also, since we're a net energy exporter, we don't necessarily love way lower oil prices.
00:39:45.000Tired of the years of talk from weak politicians executing a fake war on drugs, the cartels, and the third world thugs behind it.
00:39:52.000Let this be a lesson to Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba.
00:39:55.000And I do think there is a point here, you know, and you saw Marco Rubio said it.
00:39:59.000Well, for those of you in the world that still want to mess around with America and you think that Trump's just a man of talk and press conference, that's not it.
00:40:06.000He is a man of action, and there will be consequences.
00:40:08.000I still want to make sure that this plays out the right way.
00:40:11.000We don't get overextended, that the transition can happen to a friendlier government to the United States.
00:40:16.000We can have an actual, real, thriving Venezuela.