e election claim that involves a big shredding truck and somebody told me today that's fake news. It's been debunked. So I removed it. But it makes me wonder how many times am I going to get fooled by fake news? Probably a lot. And I thought I should almost keep track of it because you know that's one that I should start with 2026 and find out how many times do I get fooled? Is it more? Am I more likely to be fooled because people are better at fooling people? Am I getting dumber and older? I don't know. But watch out for me, will you?

All right. Here is something that I feared was true, and I'm pretty sure it is. I don't know about you, but if you're watching this podcast, it's probably true that your news and social media bubble is non-stop stories about money laundering and Somalians and basically bad behavior as well as rigged elections. Do you have that experience that all day long I pick up my phone, I go to X, "Oh, there's another state. There's another fraud. There's another fraud. There's another fraud." And of course the algorithm is doing that. But here's what I was afraid of. I was afraid that no normies ever see these stories. And that's what I'm starting to hear. People are saying, "I went to things like I went to lunch with my neighbors and not one of them had heard about the Somalian fraud and stuff." Just hold that in your head that your neighbors haven't even heard, they're not even aware that there's a massive money laundering fraud problem. They've never heard it.

Now, that doesn't mean it's never been on the news, but the news doesn't cover it like social media does. So I'm completely immersed in this world where every freaking story is about somebody stealing my money. But if you were not paying attention to that bubble that I'm in and you were in a different bubble, you haven't even heard of it. That does not seem like a healthy situation, does it?

Oh my god. Well, speaking of the bubble, so here's some more stuff in my bubble. Eric Dordy is reporting on this. Well, part of the reason that my bubble is different is I listen to a lot of independent journalists. Apparently in Minnesota as far back as 2018, whistleblowers were reporting these frauds, these Somali basically money laundering frauds. And that they had the whistleblowers all had the same experience that they were told that they couldn't talk about it or they'd be blamed, they'd be accused of being racist or islamophobic. Now my how things change because once Trump got elected now we can talk about things that we should be talking about.

All right let's do a sip. So if Trump had not been elected and he had not basically gotten rid of DEI and our blocks on free speech, if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter, we still wouldn't know about this. Just think about how close we were. You know, you probably saw the other day that Elon Musk estimated that at the low bound, the theft might be 1.5 trillion a year at the low end. 1.5 trillion. That would be essentially the entire deficit. And you might remember, I keep bragging about this, but I'm actually kind of proud of it that I told you that people like me who have a background in budgeting, you know, that was my day job in corporate world was a lot of budgeting. You develop a kind of intuition about where something is wrong. And several years ago, I started saying, I don't see how we could possibly be in this much of a deficit hole unless the amount of fraud was so high that is unimaginable. Now, at the time, I did not get a lot of agreement, but today I think every one of you agrees today that at least some big portion of it was just fraud. So I'm going to give myself credit for that one.

Anyway, I saw that HUD thinks they may have found 5.8 billion in improper rental aid payments according to Newsmax. That's housing and urban development. Now, they haven't confirmed that, but there are some red flags. And what I like about this is that I'm noticing in the government that they've turned spotting fraud into a competitive sport. So you should expect to see more and more department heads say, "Hey, we found some fraud. I found some fraud. I found more fraud than you did." So we're going from an environment in which if you mentioned the fraud, you were racist to an environment in which people are competing to see who can find the most. And people are competing to come up with the best idea for finding the most. That is a good sign. So 2026 might be just wild.

Speaking of that, Health and Human Services just froze child care payments to Minnesota because it was all going to fraud. Not all of it, but massive amounts were apparently going to fraud. At the same time, what do you think Tim Walz said when it was announced that the government was going to stop payments because the payments were almost all fraud? What would Tim Walz say about that? Well, here's what he said. It's almost unbelievable. He said that this is Trump's long game. Quote, "He's politicizing the issue to defund programs to help Minnesotans." Really? Really? Does he really think that Trump sits down in the morning and says, "What can I do? How can I hurt those children in Minnesota in a way that will help me?" That is just batshit crazy. It's so obvious. He has no real response to that. How in the world does that make sense to his followers? Oh, Trump has a long-term plan to damage Minnesota. What? Why would anyone have that plan? For political reasons? I mean, you really have to twist yourself up to make that make sense. No. Obviously, everything is political. You know, that part's true, but what are the odds that Trump is doing it because it's part of his long game to hurt Minnesota? That's insane.

Bill Pulte, I saw him on a show yesterday. He's the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and he said that they're using AI and Palantir to flag potential fraud. So I think that's the model you're going to see. I think people will be doing the Bill Pulte model where you partner with maybe private companies and the private companies spot potential flags and then you look into it. So basically every part of the government that gives away money is probably going to move to that model. Let's call it the Bill Pulte model.

And it should be no surprise, Fox News is reporting that now we know from new surveillance photos, the surveillance video that the parents in Minnesota might have been in on the fraud. So they've got video all the way back from 2018, of course, in which parents are seen to be checking their kids into daycare, but then just turning around checking them out. So I guess it was the checking in part that made it look legitimate. Are you surprised that parents might be part of the scheme? No. Nope.

All right. New York Post is reporting, I saw Liz Collin is reporting on this, that there's a former homeland security agent who claims that when reports were given to the Minnesota, he claims that prosecutors ignored Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that they quote just evaporated. So there was no shortage of people noticing and there was no shortage of people reporting it and when it was reported they just slow walked it and then made it go away. So corruption. Yeah. Do you know how much ignoring you would have to do? You would have to have a lot of people ignoring a lot of things for a long time. Like