Aimee Bock, the mastermind behind a $250 million child nutrition fraud scheme in Minnesota, has been sentenced to 500 months in prison, or 41.5 years. She’s also been ordered to pay more than $240 million in restitution. Bock was the executive director of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money to several existing and bogus nonprofits while falsely reporting the number of meals served to children and adults. Federal prosecutors had been asking for a 50-year sentence in the case, and Bock, under sentencing guidelines, could have gotten 100 years in prison. A jury found Bock guilty last year of seven criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, and federal programs bribery. The Scam Feeding Our Future utilized two federal programs designed to help feed children and adults in daycare and after-school programs: the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Summer Food Service Program. The organization served as the gatekeeper between the two programs and hundreds of nonprofits. The nonprofits would submit meal counts to Feeding Our Future, which would then seek reimbursement from the federal government. However, some organizations padded the number of meals they said they were serving, and some didn’t serve any meals at all. The Justice Department has charged nearly 80 people connected to the fraud scheme. What Did Minnesota Political Leaders Know? The complete scope and details of the involvement of Minnesota elected leaders in the fraud scheme are still unknown. As the Daily Signal reported in February, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has been accused of helping leaders behind the scheme and profiting politically from the organization. He has said he did not help the leaders of the organization and did not profit from them. Sen. Josh Hawley claimed in a hearing on Minnesota fraud that Feeding Our Future leaders met with Ellison at the end of 2021 and asked the attorney general for “help in getting investigators off their backs.” “They complained to you for upwards of an hour about state investigators going after them, and they begged you to help them, and you agreed to it, amazingly, and we know you did because it’s all caught on tape,” Hawley said. Hawley also accused Ellison of taking $10,000 from Feeding Our Future, referring to reports that Ellison received $10,000 in contributions from members of the organization. Ellison called Hawley’s accusations “a lie.” NEW: Full, very heated exchange between Sen. @HawleyMO (R-MO) & Minnesota AG Keith Ellison about the Minnesota fraud scandal that ended with Hawley telling Ellison he should be in prison & Ellison responding by essentially saying good luck with that. pic.twitter.com/NO83rpJWqA— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 12, 2026 At that same hearing, Gov. Tim Walz was tongue-tied trying to explain why payments resumed to Feeding Our Future after the state’s Education Department stopped payments in 2021 over the alleged fraud. Walz had claimed a court determined the Education Department didn’t have the authority to stop payments. However, as Rep. Jim Jordan noted, the state court released a blunt statement declaring Walz’s statement was “false,” and that the agency “voluntarily resumed payments.” “So, the court is lying or you’re lying?” “I can’t tell you, congressman,” Walz said. “I just simply know what the attorneys at the department believe, which is that it was a misinterpretation.” Though one can question her credibility and motives for speaking out, Bock herself told Fox News in February, “Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison were fully aware of the $250 million child nutrition fraud and did nothing to stop it.” She also recently told the New York Post, “I struggle to believe” Rep. Ilhan Omar didn’t know. “Omar sponsored the legislation that was exploited to make the scam possible.” Dozens of members of the Somali community have been convicted of fraudulently billing the state for millions of meals never served. BOOM! The convicted mastermind behind Minnesota’s MASSIVE $250 MILLION pandemic fraud scheme is facing sentencing this week and prosecutors are demanding 50 YEARS behind bars! Before she went down, Aimee Bock straight-up told Fox News that Gov. Tim Walz and top state… pic.twitter.com/8DCPnogn3Z— Gunther Eagleman (@GuntherEagleman) May 19, 2026 Omar responded with a statement Wednesday to Newsweek, “Any claim that I had knowledge of this scheme is flat-out false.” Meanwhile, the Justice Department is planning to announce “significant law enforcement action involving fraud in Minnesota” later this morning. Ellison wrote in an op-ed for the Star Tribune published in April 2025, “I took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things. I did nothing for them and took nothing from them.” The Daily Signal contacted Ellison’s office for a response to Hawley’s accusations. Brian Evans, Ellison’s press secretary, told the Daily Signal that Ellison already addressed the meeting Hawley referred to in an op-ed for the Star Tribune published in April 2025. In the op-ed, Ellison wrote that his “door is always open” to his constituents. The attorney general explained that in 2021, he “took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things. I did nothing for them and took nothing from them.” This story is developing and may be updated.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed H.B. 4591 on May 19, turning the Stop Harm from Addictive Social Media Act into a law that will reshape how every resident of the state uses major social media platforms. The bill passed with almost no opposition, clearing the House 115-0 and the Senate 42-1. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it brings with it a surveillance apparatus aimed at all users. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The law, sponsored by Rep. Brandon Guffey (R-York), requires covered platforms to repeatedly estimate and verify the age of every South Carolina account holder. The stated goal is child protection. The way it claims to do that is continuous behavioral analysis of anyone who spends enough time on a platform, combined with escalating confidence thresholds and penalties of ten thousand dollars per violation if platforms get it wrong. Here’s how the age estimation system works. Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence. At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner. That last clause is easy to miss and it means any time a platform runs its profiling algorithms on you for ad targeting, content recommendations, or anything else, it also has to re-evaluate your estimated age. The law essentially piggybacks mandatory age surveillance onto whatever commercial surveillance platforms already conduct, expanding the scope of both. Because platforms face significant liability if they can’t meet these confidence thresholds, the law creates powerful incentives to harvest far more sensitive data about users than they do today, including about minors. A platform that guesses wrong faces $10,000 per violation. A platform that overinvests in behavioral profiling to avoid those fines faces no penalty at all. The incentive structure points in one direction. The bill claims it “does not create any duty on the part of a covered social media platform to request, collect, or retain any information from or about any account holder” and that age estimates must be “derived based on information collected and retained by the covered social media platform in the ordinary course of operation.” This is the bill’s central fiction. Platforms that can’t achieve 80% or 90% confidence from existing data will need to collect more data, or face financial ruin from accumulated violations. The law doesn’t mandate new data collection in the same way that holding a knife to your wallet doesn’t mandate you hand over cash. For users classified as children (under 16), the restrictions are extensive. Accounts require verifiable parental consent, with privacy settings locked to the most restrictive levels by default. Platforms cannot show children profile-based feeds, profile-based advertising, or any “addictive interface features,” a category that includes infinite scrolling, auto-play video, push notifications, and display of personal metrics like reaction counts. The verifiable parental consent requirement will force the collection of sensitive personal information from both minors and their parents. Documents that conclusively establish a user’s age and parental relationship are almost always government-issued identification. The bill demands platforms retain documentation proving they obtained valid consent. So a law sold as protecting children’s data will, in reality, build databases of children’s and parents’ government IDs, held by the same tech companies the bill treats as untrustworthy. If a user disputes being classified as a child, the platform can “rely on any commercially reasonable age verification process to resolve the dispute.” The bill doesn’t define what counts as commercially reasonable. Government ID uploads, facial recognition scans, and financial record checks could all qualify. The user who objects to being profiled as a minor gets to choose which form of identity verification they’d prefer to submit to, not whether they submit at all. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post South Carolina’s New Social Media Law Puts Every User Under Age Surveillance appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post When an App Download Turns Into a Government Record appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

At a Glance: Fermented Vegetable Preservation Recipes Proper salt ratios make lactic fermentation self-regulating and incredibly safe for beginners. Start with ferments like sauerkraut and pickles to your build food preservation skill. Trust your senses: smell and taste are your most reliable verification tools. Want to start food preservation but scared of doing it wrong? Today, we’ll start with simple fermented vegetable preservation recipes: a foundational cabbage kraut that builds your skills, a crunchy carrot stick that wins over skeptical kids, a classic dill pickle that replaces your supermarket habit, and two more essential classics to round out your homestead pantry. We’ll also talk about safety standards and verification tools to preserve safely at home. RELATED: Fermenting Vegetables | Everything You Need To Know Choosing Your Fermented Vegetable Preservation Recipe Choosing your first fermented vegetable preservation recipe shouldn’t feel like a high-stakes chemistry exam. We are stepping away from the strict, lab-tested rules of canning and leaning into the wild, self-protecting world of lactic fermentation. The secret is, as long as the salt ratios are correct, the process regulates itself. Recipe 1: Traditional Sauerkraut Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage and one of the oldest preserved foods on earth. The fermentation process creates natural probiotics that support gut health and digestion. You can store it for months in the fridge and costs almost nothing to make. Sauerkraut is the ultimate gateway ferment. It requires no water, just the cabbage’s own juices. Ingredients: 1 medium head of green cabbage, 1 tablespoon of high-quality sea salt. Step 1: Shred the cabbage thinly and place it in a large glass or stainless steel bowl. Step 2: Sprinkle the salt over the cabbage. Massage it firmly with your hands for 5 to 10 minutes until it releases enough liquid to pool at the bottom. Step 3: Pack the cabbage tightly into a clean glass mason jar and press down hard so the liquid rises above the vegetables. Step 4: Weigh the cabbage down (using a glass weight or a smaller jelly jar) so it stays submerged under the brine. Cover loosely and let it sit at room temperature for 1 to 4 weeks. Taste it weekly until it reaches your preferred tartness. Recipe 2: Salty Carrot Sticks Fermented carrot sticks tastes mildly tangy and naturally sweet, making them a whole food snack your kids will actually eat. Carrots fermented in brine develop beneficial bacteria that aid digestion and boost nutrient absorption. Replace store-bought processed snacks with something you made yourself in under 10 minutes. Ingredients: 4 to 5 large carrots (peeled and cut into sticks), 2 cups of filtered water, 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Step 1: Dissolve the salt into the filtered water to create your brine. Step 2: Pack the carrot sticks vertically into a clean mason jar, leaving about an inch of space at the top. Step 3: Pour the salt brine over the carrots until they are completely covered. Step 4: Place a weight on top to keep them submerged. Cover loosely and leave on the counter for 5 to 7 days. Once they taste deliciously tangy, move them to the fridge. Recipe 3: Classic Garlic Dill Pickles These traditional lacto-fermented pickles taste tangy, garlicky, and nothing like the vinegar pickles from the grocery store. Fermentation preserves the cucumber’s natural enzymes and adds live cultures that support a healthy gut. Pickles are also one of the most forgiving entry points for a beginner. Ingredients: 5 to 6 pickling cucumbers, 2 cloves of smashed garlic, 1 head of fresh dill, 2 cups of filtered water, 1.5 tablespoons of sea salt. Step 1: Dissolve the salt in the water to make the brine. Step 2: Place the garlic and dill at the bottom of a clean jar. Step 3: Pack the cucumbers tightly into the jar. You can leave them whole or slice them into spears. Step 4: Pour the brine over the cucumbers, ensuring they are fully submerged. Weigh them down, cover, and let ferment for 1 to 2 weeks on the counter. Recipe 4: Classic Dilly Beans Dilly beans are fermented green beans seasoned with garlic and dill. They’re crisp and tangy. Fermenting dilly beans is the best solution when your summer garden produces more than your family can eat. These greens retain more vitamins than heat-processed versions and deliver the same probiotic benefits as sauerkraut. Ingredients: 1 pound of fresh green beans (ends snapped off), 2 cloves of garlic, 1 head of fresh dill or 1 teaspoon dill seeds, 2 cups of filtered water, 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Step 1: Dissolve the salt into the filtered water to make your brine. Step 2: Drop the garlic and dill into the bottom of a tall mason jar. Step 3: Pack the green beans into the jar vertically. You want them packed tight enough that they hold each other down. Step 4: Pour the brine over the beans until completely covered. Weigh them down, cover loosely, and let ferment for 7 to 14 days before moving to cold storage. Recipe 5: Fermented Red Onions Fermented red onions are thinly sliced onions transformed by brine into something sweet, tangy, and pink. The fermentation process mellows the sharp bite of raw onion while adding gut-friendly live cultures to an everyday condiment. A single jar upgrades eggs, tacos, grain bowls, and sandwiches for the entire week. Ingredients: 2 large red onions (thinly sliced), 2 cups of filtered water, 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Step 1: Mix the salt and filtered water to create the brine. Step 2: Pack the sliced red onions tightly into a mason jar. Step 3: Pour the brine over the onions, ensuring every slice is trapped beneath the liquid. Step 4: Add a weight, cover loosely, and leave on the counter. These ferment quickly. Start tasting after just 3 to 5 days. The Universal Brine Method For any chunky or whole vegetable, you can rely on the universal brine method. Simply mix 1 to 3 tablespoons of sea salt per quart of filtered water. This creates the perfect environment where bad bacteria cannot survive and where good bacteria can thrive. Pour this over radishes, green beans, or cauliflower, always ensuring the vegetables stay trapped under the liquid. Verification, Senses, and Storage Courtesy: brewbuch.com The biggest hurdle for beginners is learning to trust your own senses. Use the sensory test: look, smell, and taste in tiny amounts. If the ferment smells bright, sour, and tangy, it’s safe to eat. If it smells like rotting garbage, your senses will physically reject it. That’s when you throw it out. If you see a thin, white, powdery layer on top of the liquid that’s just Kahm yeast (harmless, just skim it off), but fuzzy, colorful mold means the batch belongs in the compost. Final Thoughts  You do not need to turn your whole kitchen into a factory on day one. Master one skill at a time. By starting a simple jar of sauerkraut today, you are stepping out of the role of a helpless consumer and reclaiming a legacy of competence for your family. Keep a continuous cycle going. Always have something alive and working on your counter. Check out this Youtube video by @Happy Bellyfish: FAQs Fermented Vegetable Preservation Recipes What is the easiest fermented vegetable preservation recipe for a beginner? Sauerkraut is the absolute best entry point. It requires only cabbage and salt, makes its own natural brine, and is incredibly forgiving for first-timers learning to trust the preservation process. Can a fermented vegetable preservation recipe cause botulism? No. Lactic fermentation is naturally self-regulating. The acidic environment created by the correct salt ratio prevents botulism spores from surviving. This is entirely different from the risks associated with improper low-acid pressure canning. Do I need special equipment to start fermenting? You don’t need expensive gear to be self-sufficient. Clean glass jars, basic sea salt, and a smaller jelly jar to use as a weight are all you need to get started safely and effectively. Why did my fermented vegetables get mushy? Mushy vegetables usually happen if the environment was too warm, causing the ferment to process too rapidly, or if the vegetable wasn’t fresh to begin with. Always use firm produce and keep jars out of direct sunlight. How do I know if my ferment has gone bad? Trust your senses. If it smells bright and sour, it’s good. If it smells putrid or has fuzzy, colorful mold growing above the brine line, discard it immediately.

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Another Russian Refinery on Fire

It could be aliens, but it’s more likely “moss animals”.

Imagine having to listen to Rebbeca Black for two days running.

“If you need an exorcism, you can go to California,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Senate hearing on Medicaid fraud. “That's the definition of spending porn,” Sen. Kennedy wrote on X.com, posting video from Tuesday’s hearing, in which he noted that California's Medicaid program also pays for things like tribal prayers, herbal medicines, housing, in-home chefs and student loans. “California will actually pay a healthcare provider – I didn’t know this was a medical expertise – to pay for exorcisms,” Sen. Kennedy told Blanche. The problem, Kennedy said, is that politicians in states like California are “putting up one dollar and the American taxpayer’s putting up nine dollars” to fund their Medicaid programs, so “they see this as free money.” As a result, California and some other states simply expand the types of services they cover, leading to taxpayer funding of dubious medical benefits, Kennedy said. “California has allowed thousands and thousands of these social assistance and so-called healthcare providers” to cash in on the state’s Medicaid program – turning it into “a tier-one slush fund,” the senator said. This proliferation of Medicaid-covered providers has doubled California’s taxpayer-funded spending on its program in recent years, Fox News reports: “Medi-Cal’s spending practices have faced growing scrutiny as California’s Medicaid spending has more than doubled since 2019, rising from roughly $100.7 billion to a projected $222 billion in 2026.” “When you’re spending other people’s money, it’s real easy,” Sen. Kennedy explained.

Even a liberal billionaire who’s spent years dumping fortunes into lefty pet projects understands how economics really works when push comes to shove. Enter The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos gave CNBC co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin a reality check on how ludicrous the left’s tax-the-rich scheme really is when measured up against the data during the May 20 edition of Squawk Box. Sorkin tried cornering Bezos on the bevy of headlines in the media excoriating billionaires, decrying their wealth accumulation and vilifying them for supposedly not paying their fair share in taxes. Bezos wasn’t fazed: “Politicians [vis-a-vis Sen. Elizabeth Warren] are using the age-old technique … of picking a villain and pointing fingers, but the problem is that doesn’t solve anything.” For all the bluster about the need progressive taxation, Bezos anecdotally analyzed how a nurse in Queens in New York City (the literal epitome of lefty taxation) making $75,000 is stuck with a $12,000 annual tax bill. “How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes at all? Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying over $1,000 a month in taxes?” Sorkin didn’t have one of his typically snarky retorts to whip out in rebuttal, so he just deflected to another gotcha question on whether he should be paying higher taxes? The billionaire again dropped another truth nuke: “We already have the most progressive tax system in the world.” He continued: “The top one percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only three percent.” The unspoken issue, as Bezos concluded, is “a [government] spending problem. And that’s a skills issue. Let me give you an example: The New York City school system — they spend $44,000 per student — $44,000! That’s thirty percent more per student than other big cities like Chicago, L.A. and Boston. And it’s three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn’t get better outcomes.” Bravo @JeffBezos. Credit where credit is due. You could tell that Sorkin wasn't even listening to a thing he was saying. pic.twitter.com/h2FnO2mPPd — Joe Vazquez (@JV3MRC) May 20, 2026 Sorkin then used the bourgeoisie-hating ramblings of Sen. Warren to embarrass Bezos for paying a lower effective tax rate when deductions are accounted for, despite the fact that the sum he pays is still measured in billions. Bezos swatted that talking point down like an annoying fruit fly: “People sometimes say I don’t pay taxes. It’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes and again, if people want me to pay more billions then let’s have that debate. But don’t pretend like that’s going to solve the problem. You can double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.” One of the other major points Bezos hit Sorkin with is that the progressive tax scam routinely involves subsidizing demand through bad tax policy while constraining supply through regulations. It’s self-defeating, as Bezos concluded. “You cannot subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy.” Earlier, Bezos emphasized this point by juxtaposing his company Amazon with how the NYC public system is currently run under the leftists who run it: If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee and then when the package did finally arrive, they’d have the wrong item in it anyway. Is efficient government even a real thing? No, and even a liberal billionaire who profiteered off of American capitalism understands this. It’s about time the rest of the low-IQ flunkies in the media got it through their thick skulls too. But who are we kidding?!