The local press has recently been doing the heavy lifting Democrats won’t: reminding voters that the candidate Ilhan Omar rushed to embrace, state Senator Omar Fateh, brings a trail of campaign headaches and ethical questions to a city already on the brink. Ilhan Omar’s public endorsement of Fateh was unmistakable, and public reporting has documented both her backing and the scrutiny now swirling around his record.
What should alarm every citizen who cares about honest government is that Fateh’s DFL endorsement itself was later tossed out by party officials after investigators found serious problems with how the Minneapolis convention was run — a scandal that left party insiders scrambling and rank-and-file delegates feeling betrayed. The Minnesota DFL concluded there were voting irregularities and procedural failures significant enough to vacate the endorsement, an embarrassing volte-face that exposed the seams of the local political machine.
Digging deeper, reporters unearthed the kind of campaign chaos conservatives have warned about for years: a volunteer closely tied to Fateh — his brother-in-law — was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury over how absentee ballots were handled, a conviction that raises legitimate questions about how his operation ran elections on the ground. That perjury conviction isn’t a partisan talking point; it’s a federal jury finding that undercuts Fateh’s claims about his campaign’s integrity and should make every Minnesotan uneasy.
The story gets worse when you look at Fateh’s financial entanglements: he returned more than $11,000 in donations connected to the Feeding Our Future fraud probe and was ordered to take campaign finance training after an ethics inquiry over undisclosed ad payments. Those aren’t the actions of a squeaky-clean reformer; they’re the red flags of a candidate surrounded by questionable money and questionable judgment.
And yet, instead of cracking down, much of the national left rallied around Fateh and attacked the party committee’s decision as “establishment” interference — with Rep. Omar leading the charge to condemn the revocation as a betrayal of grassroots organizers. That reflexive defense of a flawed candidate reveals the priorities of the progressive movement: loyalty to tribe over basic standards of transparency and accountability.
Make no mistake about what Fateh stands for: he runs explicitly as a Democratic Socialist pushing a hard-left housing and tax agenda that would hammer small businesses and families still recovering from years of urban decline. Minneapolis doesn’t need another ideologue promising utopia on the backs of productive citizens; it needs leaders who put public safety, fiscal responsibility, and honest elections first.
Conservative readers should take the media’s reporting as a wake-up call: when the press exposes corruption or incompetence inside the left’s ranks, it’s not a favor to Republicans — it’s a service to democratic accountability. Minnesotans who love their city should reject the chaos of backroom endorsements, hold politicians of every stripe to the same ethical standard, and vote to keep socialist experiments and their associated scandals out of city hall.
