Somali-American Day-Care Hysteria Is Latest Attempt To Distract Americans with Hate

It happens almost every year.

An overblown, exaggerated, or manufactured controversy involving people of color, immigrants, Muslims—or all three at once—suddenly consumes America’s political discourse.

Remember the summer of 2010? Every media outlet spent the month of August in a frenzy over a Florida pastor's planned burning of the Quran in Florida and the expansion of Park51, a Muslim community center falsely branded the “Ground Zero mosque."

The flames of that controversy were stoked by fringe anti-Muslim bigots who were then elevated from the dark corners of the internet to cable news shows and weaponized by politicians ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.

When will we stop falling for this?

The hysteria over Park51 paved the way for a series of racially charged moral panics in the following years: the Obama “birther” conspiracy that culminated in 2011, the migrant caravans poised to invade the southern border in 2018, the viral videos that claimed to show Black election workers stealing the 2020 election, the stories about Haitian refugees eating pets in Ohio in 2024.

Since 2025, much of the manufactured outrage has targeted American Muslims. Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories that died out years ago have been resurrected by the usual suspects on social media along with politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Even Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that Americans Muslims are on the verge of imposing "sharia law" on Paterson, New Jersey, of all places.

Why this renewed obsession with Muslims?

A poll commissioned last year by the Israeli Foreign Ministry found that the best way to restore support for Israel among Western populations upset about the Gaza genocide was to distract those populations with fear of Islam and Muslims.

Hence why the Israeli government and its supporters have been whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria over the past year. They hope to achieve various goals at once: smearing American Muslims who criticize Israel First policies, shoring up Israel’s eroding support among political conservatives, and distracting the broader public from real issues, whether the Epstein files or the billions of US taxpayer dollars being poured into Israel’s war crimes.

Most recently, this campaign of hate against Muslims has taken the form of racist hysteria targeting Somali Americans, driven by a dishonest and largely debunked video circulated by a conservative social media influencer.

It's also important to recognize that the crimes Americans increasingly care about do not involve Somali-American day-care centers.

That influencer has shown up at Somali-run day-care centers and declared some of them fraudulent because they were empty after hours or because the staff refused to allow random men with cameras to come inside and see the children in their care. The consequences have been real and dangerous. Somali-run day-care centers and businesses have received threats. White supremacist copycats have appeared at childcare facilities demanding access to more children. Millions of dollars in federal childcare funding have been suspended, harming innocent families across Minnesota who rely on those services.

When will we stop falling for this?

Every one of these hate-driven campaigns follows the same pattern. A racist or bigot posts something inflammatory that goes viral. Media outlets amplify it. Politicians exploit it. Then, once the story collapses under scrutiny, the arsonists who started the fire walk away without accountability, only to search for the next group to target.

In this case, the Somali day-care hysteria may have crossed a legal line. While law enforcement has investigated and prosecuted legitimate cases of childcare fraud in Minnesota for years, many of the centers smeared in viral videos have never been accused of wrongdoing and are operating lawfully. Branding them as criminals and exposing them to threats could subject these social media influencers turned amateur detectives to lawsuits for defamation.

In the meantime, the rest of us must refuse to play along with this tired, racist scheme.

It's 2025. No one should have to point out how evil and irrational it is for elected officials to smear an entire race or ethnic group because of the alleged criminals among them. During the peak of the fight against the mafia, no president called for the expulsion of all Italian Americans. It would have been just as racist and insane to subject all Jewish American businessmen to extra scrutiny for the crimes of Bernie Madoff.

It's also important to recognize that the crimes Americans increasingly care about do not involve Somali-American day-care centers. Any Somali Americans and others who actually engaged in fraud are already facing investigation, and some were convicted years ago. Meanwhile, the corrupt officials funneling our taxpayer dollars overseas to support Israel's genocide in violation of federal law and the officials hiding documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes in violation of federal law are all walking free.

That is the real scandal—and the one that deserves our immediate attention.