It's 2017. A crowd in Minnesota is waving flags to celebrate a presidential election, and the president they're celebrating is Somalia's. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, better known as "Farmajo," has just won, and Minnesota's Somali community has thrown a party.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar is on the stage. She opens with Somali greetings. Someone hands her a small American flag, and it's upside down.
"Oh, thank you," she says. "Very good!"
Then she waves it at the crowd, union down, while a man standing behind her laughs.
She was hardly the only one. More than half of the American flags in that crowd were upside down. The Somali flags were right side up.
Radio host Larry O'Connor posted the nine-year-old video on X on October 4, and the timing matters. Klobuchar is running for governor of Minnesota. She's trying to replace Tim Walz, who dropped his reelection bid in January after the state's social-services fraud scandal. Election day is November 3, and her Republican opponent, state House Speaker Lisa Demuth, was within two points in the latest poll.
The flag is only half of what's in the video. The rest is what Klobuchar said.
"As you know, we are home to the largest Somali population in the United States, and we are so proud of that fact in Minnesota!" she told the crowd.
Then she got to the policy. "Congressman Ellison and Senator Franken and I worked so hard to reduce redundant regulations on remittances to Somalia," she said, "lessening the burdens for banks."
Remittances are the cash that people in Minnesota send back to Somalia. Those "redundant regulations" were the terror-financing rules that made banks wary of handling the transfers, since Somalia is home base for al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate. Klobuchar, Keith Ellison and Al Franken worked to keep the money moving, and in 2017 she bragged about it to a cheering room.
"We have much to do," she said, "but we are continuing to fight for you."
At one point she used the Somali phrase danta, dalka, and dadka, which means roughly "the interest of the country and its people." She didn't say which country.
(Farmajo, the man they were all celebrating, was a U.S. citizen at the time. He had worked for the New York State Department of Transportation in Buffalo. Two years after becoming Somalia's president, he gave up his American citizenship.)
That 2017 speech holds up worse every year. Here's how it looks from 2026:
Feeding Our Future: About $250 million was stolen from a federal program meant to feed hungry children during the pandemic. It's the largest pandemic fraud case in the country, and most of the defendants charged are Somali. Quality Learning Center: A Minneapolis daycare took in $1.9 million in taxpayer money. Its sign read "Quality Learing Center." It went viral last December when visitors found almost no children inside, the FBI raided it, and it surrendered its license on January 6. The total: Federal prosecutors have said the fraud across Minnesota's social-service programs could top $9 billion. Where the money went: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a federal review of claims that Minnesota welfare money was sent overseas to al-Shabaab. These are the remittance channels Klobuchar worked "so hard" to clear of regulations.
Then there's the flag. The U.S. Flag Code, 4 U.S.C. § 8, says the flag "should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."
Washington Democrats know that rule well, because they enforced it on Samuel Alito.
In May 2024, a photo surfaced of an upside-down flag outside the Supreme Court justice's Virginia home on January 17, 2021. Alito said his wife hung it during a fight with a neighbor over profane yard signs. Democrats treated it as a confession. Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts demanding that Alito step aside from January 6 cases. The press covered it for weeks.
Klobuchar sits on that same Judiciary Committee.
The difference is that Alito's wife hung her flag in her own front yard, while Klobuchar waved hers from a stage, on camera, as a sitting U.S. senator courting a voting bloc.
Her defenders will call it an accident. It may well have been. Organizers of a later Somali Independence Day event in St. Paul said their own upside-down flag was unintentional too. So let's assume the senator simply didn't notice.
That leaves two options. Either a woman who has spent 20 years in the U.S. Senate couldn't tell which way her own country's flag goes up, or she could tell and didn't think it mattered in that room. She's had nine years to say which. Her campaign hasn't responded to requests for comment.
Klobuchar has built her career as Minnesota's sensible, salad-with-a-comb moderate, the Midwestern adult who ran for president in 2020 promising to win over independents. Now she wants to run the state where the fraud happened.
The Flag Code reserves the upside-down flag for "dire distress." Minnesota taxpayers, out somewhere between $1 billion and $9 billion, may feel the description fits. They vote November 3.
