What the Wind Carried Away: American Excellence and the Effect of Fraud on the American Entrepreneur

The government meant to save its people. It sent out a lifeline in the dark spring of 2020, when streets were empty and small businesses hung by a thread. The CARES Act promised relief—loans for the baker, the welder, the woman who kept her shop standing against the wind. But what was meant as rescue became betrayal. The rope that should have pulled Americans back from the flood was instead used to drag billions into quiet pockets.

By wounding the American entrepreneur—the nation’s enduring icon—the symbolism was profound. The most resourceful citizens were burned, while a facade was built on the backs of the poorest. The architects of this scheme destroyed the American ideal while using the most vulnerable to enrich themselves and their friends.

Recent revelations about widespread fraud in Minnesota have ignited public outrage and triggered a cascade of disclosures about how deep the rot runs. The Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loans—EIDL, the bureaucrats called it—became a river without banks, part of an existing chain of fallen dominos. That river spilled everywhere, and in its wash went truth and trust. The fraud was not the work of a handful of men; it was a system feeding upon itself.

In Minnesota, prosecutors uncovered a lattice of nonprofit facades—men and women submitting paper ghosts in the names of child nutrition, housing programs, and meals for the hungry. The money never reached the children. It bought houses, cars, and passage to elsewhere. Some whisper that it traveled farther still—overseas, to places our wars have already scarred.

Under the governor’s watch—and through the silence of his administration—fraud became a second language. Of the ninety-eight people charged, eighty-five were of Somali descent—an American story tangled in migration, power, and neglect. The new Minnesota flag marks more than a redesign; it signals the loss of a state to pirates who prize theft over integrity, and plunder over excellence.

Investigators now claim that $9 billion bled from public hands, far surpassing the $250 million once tied to “Feeding Our Future.” As the numbers rise like heat, what remains low is the shopkeeper who never saw his check, the seamstress whose small business folded because her name was buried in a pile no one would ever read. A chosen casualty—punished for who she was.

Politics murmur beneath it all—machines running on stolen relief, campaign coffers fattened through digital conduits like ActBlue. Then comes the chorus we know too well: deny, investigate, accuse. But the deeper story lies in the emptiness left behind. Fraud is not just theft; it is cultural erosion. It hollows the space where trust once lived.

The CARES Act began in faith—bipartisan, hurried, vast. It became an instrument of excess. Nearly $200 billion in SBA loans are now deemed “potentially fraudulent.” Behind those sterile numbers lie shuttered cafés, local contractors, hairdressers, and gardeners whose honest applications vanished beneath waves of deceit. Fraud fed fraud until the honest drowned in the same tide that lifted the thieves.

For some, politics itself was the profit. A congresswoman in Florida stands accused of turning COVID relief into campaign currency. In Louisiana, another official drew seven years for the same betrayal. Each indictment sparks outrage, then fades. The pattern remains: public hope converted to private gain.

Yet the cruelest wound is not theft—it is denial. Forty-five percent of SBA loan requests were rejected, primarily in rural America. Those who built with their hands, the smallest firms, met the steepest walls. For every sham company funded, a real one died. The math is obscene: wealth streaming upward, leaving dry wells where work once grew.

Fraud is a mirror held to government—and to us. In its reflection, we see negligence, ambition, hunger. We see how systems born of panic become engines of greed. And we see how easily, in crisis, the word neighbor can lose its meaning.

What this nation owes its entrepreneurs is not more debt or another broken promise. It owes a reckoning—that the craftsman, the clerk, and the farmer are the true lenders of faith. It owes vigilance, not rhetoric. And it owes an answer for how two trillion dollars passed through American hands and left so many empty.

There will be hearings and reports. Names will be traded like currency. But truth—stark as morning light—is slower work. If we seek honor again in our common life, we must trace the river back to its source and close the floodgates ourselves.