Berenson: It's Not Just MN, Or Just Daycare; The Deepest Honeypot is Blue-State Medicaid.

Madness.

Think about how often that word describes the contemporary left...

The specifics of all this are astonishing enough.

But what does it tell us about the overall worldview, structure, and ethos of the American left?

I used to say: it's the Woketarian/social/philosophical aspect of the left to which I most strenuously object; I may disagree with its economic positions, but they're at least theoretically on the table.

But this massive system of grift and graft...it simply isn't entirely separate from the left's orientation toward centralization and liberality (in the bad sense).

Stealing people's money may seem like a lesser crime than e.g. constraining their free speech...but money represents an investment of your life--stolen money is stolen time.

When I was on the left, one thing I didn't like about the right was that it seemed so stern. Where was the sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged?? Well, whatever else you might say about that, it seems clearer and clearer that the kind of system such (excessive?) sympathy leads to is a type of organized theft.

And:

I'm more and more sympathetic to a certain attitude on the right that I might describe like this:

If this is what the left looks like when it comes to public money, why think it's much different when it comes to ballots?

Turns out that you can steal millions of dollars from American taxpayers just by hastily filling out a few forms. Are the safeguards on voting really that much more stringent? It certainly doesn't sound that way.

And I might add:

Electoral success is not unrelated to the system of grift and graft... If Democrats lose, the livelihoods of these crooks will be undermined. You think they're not willing to protect their racket with a bit of electoral fraud?

[And, of course: the left has gone all-in on preventing us from adopting more stringent safeguards on voting. God forbid someone might have to obtain and show an ID to vote...]