Arkady, Wake Up Before We Disappear
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Ephesians 5:14
When you look at the fraud scandal exploding in Minnesota, you have to ask why it matters. It matters because the failures under Tim Walz were not simply bureaucratic incompetence. They harmed the very communities Democrats claim to defend, especially ADOS communities who have been fighting generational battles in Minnesota long before Somali refugees arrived in the 1990s.
Minnesota’s Black community faces some of the harshest racial disparities in the nation. Homeownership for Black families has plummeted from 42 percent in 1970 to only 26 percent in 2022. Highways like I 94 and I 35W were intentionally built through historic Black neighborhoods like Rondo, destroying generational wealth and displacing families who never recovered. The state now has the nation’s first office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls because the crisis is so severe. Young Black Minnesotans die prematurely at disproportionate rates from violence, suicide, and chronic disease. Despite a growing population, the Black community is disappearing from spaces of stability, opportunity, and wealth.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Somali community, which now numbers close to one hundred thousand people, has become a powerful political bloc with cultural hubs, economic networks, and strong internal support systems. They elect representatives, including Ilhan Omar, who proudly speaks for Gaza and stands fiercely for the interests of Somalia, yet you rarely hear her speak about the collapsing conditions facing the Black Americans she represents in Minnesota.
That contrast only widens when you examine the economic footprint. African Americans generate nearly fifty eight billion dollars in Minnesota. The Somali community generates around five hundred million and has an economic impact of eight billion dollars through additional spending. Yet they receive far more in public benefits and targeted grants than their contribution reflects. ADOS contributes far more than it receives. The Somali community receives far more than it contributes. And yet ADOS is the one being politically replaced.
This is why the Minnesota fraud scandal matters. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were stolen by individuals who were supposed to be feeding children or supporting autistic youth. Some allegedly sent money overseas. Others purchased houses, cars, vacations, and luxury goods. These programs were created for the poor, the disabled, and the vulnerable, including the Black Minnesotans whose neighborhoods were destroyed, whose generational wealth was erased, whose women and girls go missing, and whose families still live with racial trauma embedded in the landscape.
Yet those communities never received the resources. They were displaced twice. First by systemic racism. Now by newcomers who learned how to manipulate Democratic systems far more effectively than the people those systems were supposedly created to help.
And standing at the center of this is Ilhan Omar. She stands boldly for the people of Gaza. She fights passionately for foreign causes. But she is silent when it comes to the needs of Black Minnesotans. She is silent on violence against Black girls. Silent on the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood. Silent on the collapse in Black homeownership. Silent on disparities in health, education, and incarceration. Silent on fraud that directly robs Black communities.
The people she represents at home suffer. The people she centers abroad receive her voice. That silence is not accidental. It is a political choice.
And this is the deeper tragedy spreading across the nation. Foreign born groups and newly arrived migrants, some undocumented, exploit systems originally designed to support the most vulnerable Americans. It was many Somalians that stole tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and syphoned those funds into luxury homes, vehicles, vacations, and in some cases possibly funneled overseas. Meanwhile, poor Black families, disabled individuals, and children in need lost out.
This is not just political failure. It is a failure of perception, a failure of self awareness, a failure of truth. And strangely, it mirrors something Dostoevsky understood in The Adolescent. Arkady’s world is filled with people who pretend to be intellectual, enlightened, and morally superior, yet they are driven by pride, illusions, and a deep refusal to face reality. That is the same spirit at work in American politics today. People cling to their illusions because the illusion feels good. They defend the very systems that hurt them because the truth would require accountability and courage.
“As Dostoevsky wrote in The Adolescent: “They all think themselves so clever that they do not even suspect how stupid they are.””
This describes the mindset of modern Democratic elites, particularly many Black Democrats who believe they are informed, sophisticated, and politically awakened, yet defend the same policies designed to keep them dependent, vulnerable, and politically voiceless. It describes media personalities who claim intellectual authority while ignoring uncomfortable truths. It describes immigrant voices who assume spiritual and moral superiority while standing on platforms built by ADOS suffering. Dostoevsky was not only writing about individuals. He was showing how entire communities can become invested in illusions that destroy them.
And this is the same deception I heard when I listened to Mehdi Hasan on his podcast. He told a story about his father coming to the United Kingdom with three pounds and an engineering degree. He talked about how his father made a life for himself in Western society, how he built something he could not have achieved in India. Mehdi Hasan himself was able to grow up in the UK, receive opportunities, advance his education, and eventually come to the United States where he now stands on national platforms.
Yet from that platform he calls Americans bigots. He calls people xenophobic. He calls white Americans racists and fascists. He verbally assaults the very nation that gave him and his family the prosperity they could never have achieved in the country they left behind. His entire tone is one of moral superiority. He speaks as if Western culture is morally bankrupt and his worldview is the higher standard.
His conversation had room for immigrants and whites, but never for Black Americans whose struggle created the rights and protections he now benefits from. He even had the nerve to post on Twitter that Muslims built America, again erasing the people whose ancestors literally built the foundation of this nation.
And while he condemns America as oppressive, he refuses to speak on atrocities committed by nations within his own religious and cultural sphere. He ignores the violence in Sudan where Muslims kill other Muslims. He ignores Eritrea’s repression. He ignores the oppression of women in Iran. He ignores the brutality in Syria and the intolerance in Saudi Arabia. He ignores all of this while condemning America, a nation that gave him the freedom to criticize it.
He erases ADOS completely, even while benefiting from the structures built on our backs.
This is why listening to Mehdi Hasan was painful. He tore down white Americans as if they are a monolith of evil. He ignored the shared history between Black and white Americans. He erased us completely. It is distressing to watch people come to this nation, enjoy the stability and rights created by the labor of Black Americans, and then treat both Black and white people as morally inferior. It is disgusting. It is dishonest. It is manipulative.
And just today Ilhan Omar appeared on the news responding to a comment Stephen Miller made. When asked about it, she immediately claimed that his statement sounded like something Hitler would say about the Jews. The accusation was extreme and manipulative. This was the comment Miller actually wrote on X:
“No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
There is nothing Hitler like about that. It is an observation about cultural and political transference. It is what has happened in many places around the world, and it is exactly what has happened in Minnesota. But Ilhan Omar chose to weaponize Jewish suffering to silence criticism she did not like.
This is the same Ilhan Omar who tweeted “It’s all about the Benjamins” in 2019, invoking an antisemitic trope about Jews and money while referencing AIPAC. She criticized the United States for maintaining an alliance with Israel, accusing this nation of pledging allegiance to a foreign power. Yet she speaks openly about her own loyalty to Somalia. She was rebuked by Congress for comparing the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban. She has made repeated statements that reveal a hostility toward Jewish people and toward America’s alliance with Israel. Yet she has no problem using Jewish trauma when it benefits her politically. She has no problem comparing white Americans to Hitler.
The hypocrisy could not be more blatant.
It is insulting to hear politicians and media figures act as if the Black American struggle resembles theirs. It is degrading to listen to immigrants, first generation elites, and progressive voices claim our suffering as their own when our ancestors endured nearly four hundred years of brutality in this nation. Black Americans fought within a hostile system, step by step, trying to prove their humanity to a nation built on their backs. Yet the groups who now flood into this country use our story as the foundation for their own rise. They quote Martin Luther King. They quote Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes. They use Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois as performance pieces to claim alignment with the Black community just long enough to manipulate the system.
The tragedy is that these are not our true enemies. Our downfall comes from within. It comes from leaders like Roland Martin, Al Sharpton, Tiffany Cross, Angela Rye, Andrew Gillum, Abby Phillip, and others who sit in seats of influence and defend systems that drain our communities. They defend illegal immigration. They defend abortion. They defend the Section 8 life as if living on government property for generations is a badge of progress. They defend LGBTQ agendas that reshape the definition of family but do not rebuild the Black household.
They tell us these policies are the path to freedom, yet every one of them strips another piece of stability from our communities. They praise dependency and call it empowerment. They insist that we share what we have, but never insist that others share what they receive. Hispanic immigrants assimilate and rise and then look down on Black Americans. LGBTQ advocates demand rights while dismissing the destruction of the Black household. Immigration activists call us bigots if we question what mass migration has done to our neighborhoods.
Our leaders applaud all of it.
We hand over our unborn legacy to abortion clinics. We trade generational wealth for lifelong rent vouchers. We watch families collapse while pretending that dismantling the traditional household is a form of liberation. We live out the very warning Dostoevsky described. We think ourselves wise, progressive, brilliant, fearless, but we are deceived. We are like Arkady’s world, surrounded by people who think themselves clever while walking in ignorance.
We are a people told to support every cause but our own. These leaders defend the systems that weaken us and then blame others for the outcomes created by their own choices. They encourage illusions that keep us blind while the resources and political influence of the ADOS community are handed over to migrants, special interest groups, and global causes that never return anything to us.
This is how we lose our place. This is how we disappear from our own story.
We are long past the point of pretending everything is fine. We are long past the point of believing that the policies we have supported for decades will suddenly begin to work for us. We have carried the Democratic Party on our backs for generations, and in return our communities have been stripped of stability, wealth, safety, voice, and political relevance. We are the only people in this country expected to give everything and receive nothing. We are the only people told that loyalty is our duty and silence is our role.
It is time to stop handing away our power. It is time to stop allowing others to use our pain as their platform. It is time to stop letting people who do not love us speak in our name. Our vote is not a charity. Our vote is not a ritual. Our vote is not a handout to be tossed to the winds of political history. Our vote is a weapon, and it is the only weapon we have left that has not been taken from us.
I am sounding the alarm. I am one voice, a small voice, a lone voice perhaps, but I refuse to be silent. I refuse to watch ADOS communities disappear while everyone else feasts at our table. I refuse to pretend that the policies destroying our families, draining our resources, overwhelming our neighborhoods, and erasing our story are the same policies that will somehow save us.
We cannot wait for leaders who have abandoned us to suddenly change. We cannot wait for media figures who mock our concerns to suddenly understand. We cannot wait for politicians who prioritize foreign nations over Black Americans to wake up. It will not happen. It has never happened.
We must use our collective strength. We must use our voting power with intention. We must sweep the House and the Senate with representatives who will fight for policies that impact our communities, leaders who will stand for our families, our safety, our wealth, and our future. We must stop giving our loyalty to systems that do not fight for us. We must reclaim our political power and use it with clarity and purpose.
We cannot sleep through another generation. We cannot sleep through another election. We cannot sleep through another cycle of promises that die the moment the ballots are counted.
To ADOS: wake up. Wake up to what is happening to your neighborhoods. Wake up to what is happening to your resources. Wake up to the fact that the world is changing while you are being pushed out of your own story. Wake up before there is nothing left to defend. Wake up before your children inherit a nation where their rights, their opportunities, and their legacy have been handed to everyone but them.
Wake up. Stand up. Use your voice. Use your vote. Use your power.
History is not waiting for us.
We must write the next chapter ourselves.
