Independent conservative journalist Nick Sortor has in recent weeks shone an unflattering light on the thuggery of anti-ICE rioters and imported grifters in Minneapolis.
The efficacy of his reportage — which led on Thursday to at least one arrest — appears to have made him a prime target for radicals who have circulated his image for street-identification purposes, mobbed his vehicle, and attacked another journalist whom they mistook for Sortor.
'At least Minneapolis Police haven't erroneously arrested me ... yet.'
Sortor shared footage taken by fellow journalist Cam Higby on Sunday revealing the latest lengths radicals have gone to stop him: stealing his camera and dragging him down the sidewalk.
"A group of Somali thugs just ROBBED me of my $1,000 camera in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis," Sortor indicated in a Sunday evening X post. "Then they DRAGGED ME DOWN THE STREET as my hand got trapped in their door handle."
Footage of the incident shows a black-clad woman wearing a face covering approach Sortor's vehicle on the driver's side, grab the journalist's camera through his open window, and take off running.
In the video, Sortor — who told Blaze News the "Somali thief reached IN to my vehicle and ripped the camera out of my hand, breaking the wrist strap" — quickly exits the vehicle and chases the woman on foot.
"The Somali mob then ran interference for them as I tried getting it back, giving the thief time to flee," said Sortor.
Video confirms that while attempting to capture the apparent thief — who climbed into a red Kia — Sortor is obstructed by multiple shrieking onlookers and then nearly tackled to the ground by a black male wearing a mask.
Sortor appears to get his hand stuck in the door handle of the fleeing suspect's vehicle such that when it accelerates down the sidewalk, the journalist is dragged alongside it for a considerable distance.
After the suspect flees the scene, a shaken up and bloodied Sortor tells his associate, "They just stole my camera."
Women in face coverings and other apparent critics of Sortor encircle the journalist as he makes his way back to his vehicle, ordering him to leave. One of the women admits on camera that they followed Sortor to the scene.
Footage shows a Minneapolis police officer telling the journalist after the incident that he should leave the area and that individuals were calling the department to accuse Sortor of harassment.
"We don't need this stuff to keep happening," says the officer. "This level of hostility, obviously, it's not going away."
When asked how his treatment by radicals and police in Minnesota has compared with his treatment in Portland, Sortor told Blaze News, "Much like Portland Police, Minneapolis Police submit to the mob and have been completely neutered by the left-wing government out here. However at least Minneapolis Police haven't erroneously arrested me ... yet."
Sortor was arrested when covering an anti-ICE demonstration on Oct. 2 in Portland, Oregon. After determining that it couldn't make a disorderly conduct charge stick, the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office declined to pursue the case. Sortor indicated last month that he plans to sue the City of Portland for allegedly violating his civil rights when targeting and arresting him.
Sleuths have alleged that the vehicle in which the suspect fled the scene is registered to an individual whose address is listed as the SpectrumWorks Center in Spring Lake Park, Minnesota. Blaze News was unable to reach the autism support center for comment.
Cam Higby noted that "it's the owner of the vehicle who's address is allegedly the autism center. The robber may have hopped in someone else's vehicle."
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Mattel released a Barbie doll this past week that has sparked an important discussion about what representation looks like in doll form — and why a pretty girl wearing headphones and a cute outfit might not be representative of a severe autism diagnosis, or why we shouldn’t be celebrating something we can try to understand and prevent.
“President Trump ended DEI in the government, and I was really, really, glad about that, but it appears there was more work to be done. We need to end the DEI in toys,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”
In Mattel’s press release on the new Barbie doll, it writes, “The autistic Barbie doll features elbow and wrist articulation, enabling stimming, hand flapping, and other hand gestures that some members of the autistic community use to process sensory information or express excitement.”
It also writes that her eyes are “shifted slightly to the side, which reflects how some members of the autistic community may avoid direct eye contact.”
“I’m not making fun of people with autism. I actually think it’s terrible. And I’ve done a lot to try to help get us to the place where we can figure out what is causing autism, but we are at this weird place where the left is like, ‘Actually it’s great if people are autistic. Actually I love that my family member’s autistic. I hope we get more autistic people,’” Gonzales comments.
“I want to solve what’s happening to people. I want to solve why so many people are being diagnosed with autism, why so many people can’t make direct eye contact, why so many people need noise-canceling headphones,” she continues.
“It's absurd. It’s absolutely absurd,” she adds.
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When NewsNation reporter Leland Vittert was diagnosed with autism as a child, his father did not treat it as a disability but rather a tool to be sharpened — and Vittert believes this was a huge factor when it came to finding success as an adult.
And while Vittert credits his upbringing for his ability to overcome adversity, it was his college experience that led him to realize he needed to change, not the world.
“I think college was the first time I started realizing that I needed to change, right? Because my dad spent, you know, all those nights that I was so upset saying, ‘Look, when you get older, the same qualities that are making you ostracized and bullied and having all these issues are the qualities that’s going to make you successful later in life,’” Vittert tells Stuckey.
“He was correct in many ways. He did not tell me in eighth grade that an eighth grade middle school classroom is great training for a Washington newsroom, which would later turn out to be very true. Still is,” he continues.
His dad often told him a story about being blackballed from all the fraternities while he was in college.
“He never got a bid at any one of the fraternities that was on campus. And it was a way of sort of explaining to me, right, that he understood the isolation. He understood what I was going through. And the same thing happened to me,” Vittert tells Stuckey.
Vittert was told that he wasn’t getting a bid and called his dad that night.
“It’s snowing at Northwestern, bitterly cold. Tears are freezing on my face. And I called my dad. I said, 'I’m just like you.' And then I said to dad, I said, ‘I need to understand that it may not just be everybody else. I’m going to have to change.’ And that really became the college experience,” he explains.
“To me, going to college wasn’t really about learning economics, which I majored in, or journalism, which journalism school is pretty useless. But it was about learning as a person and trying to put all of those lessons that my dad taught me into effect,” he continues.
Vittert found that with hard work, he was able to channel who he was into what he wanted to be — and he found that journalism was one of those industries “that just yield to hard work.”
“If you just work hard and outwork everybody, that is of enormous value in journalism,” he says.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
In the modern world, a diagnosis is often worn as if it’s a badge of honor.
But not everyone sees it that way. And Leland Vittert, an American journalist and anchor for NewsNation, certainly doesn’t.
Vittert, who is diagnosed with autism, tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey that the adversity his diagnosis caused him did not hold him back, but rather helped him become the successful journalist and reporter he is today.
Vittert didn’t speak until he was “well past 3,” and he had “lots and lots of problems in typical school.”
“If a kid touched me or looked at me the wrong way or whatever, I’d turn around and slug them,” he tells Stuckey, explaining he was “pretty aggressive” and had “big sensory issues.”
“Dad’s idea was to hold my hand through the adversity. And I think what he realized was that I was going to face that adversity later in life, which I did. ... I had to learn how to adapt and how to interact with the world as the way the world interacted, not as the way I wanted to interact with it,” he explains.
And it was a struggle, he tells Stuckey, noting that he “couldn’t figure out how to relate to people emotionally the way they were emotionally.”
“I couldn’t figure out how to, you know, read a room, when to stop talking. All of these things I was going to have to learn,” he says. “And if you’re put in bubble wrap and told how wonderful you are all the time, you’re never going to learn that, right?”
That’s when Vittert’s father decided to prioritize self-esteem.
“So, when I was 5 or 6 years old, I was doing 200 push-ups a night. And after a couple months of doing that, you get some kind of reward. But my dad wanted to teach me that self-esteem is earned, not given, which is a very different philosophy, I think, than what we see now,” he tells Stuckey.
After self-esteem, Vittert’s father prioritized teaching him “how the world works socially.”
“So, my dad started spending hundreds of hours with me. Thousands of hours. Still is my best friend. ... We’re recording this a little before noon, and I’ve already talked to him, I think, three times today,” he tells Stuckey.
“So, he would then take me out to lunch, and we’d go out to lunch with any of his friends. And because I spent so much time with him, I could sort of talk about business and politics and news and those kinds of topics,” he recalls.
“But as soon as we’d sit down at some diner for cheeseburgers and milkshakes, as soon as his friend sat down, I would either start blasting him with questions or blasting him with stories about my push-ups. And my dad would tap his watch. And that was my dad’s way of saying, ‘OK, be quiet,’” he explains.
“And the idea was, later on, as we were driving home, it was like, ‘OK, when Mr. so-and-so was talking about his weekend and you interrupted it to talk about your push-ups, why did you think he would be interested in that?’” he continues, telling Stuckey that he and his father would then role-play how Vittert could have asked the friend more questions about himself.
“It was this very minute-by-minute teaching of the emotional and human dynamic,” he adds.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo broke a massive story surrounding the Somalian community in Minnesota last week. Members of the community “allegedly participated in complex schemes related to autism services, food programs, and housing.”
Prosecutors estimate billions of taxpayer dollars have been stolen and some of it has ended up in the hands of a terrorist organization in Somalia.
"For example, the Housing Stabilization Services Program — meant to cost $2.6 million per year — exploded to $104 million annually by 2024 and $61 million in just the first half of 2025 before being shut down because the vast majority of it was fraudulent," explains BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on "Relatable."
Somali-owned nonprofits like Feeding Our Future were also claiming to feed thousands of children daily "with fake rosters and invoices," before using the money to fund luxury vehicle purchases and "overseas real estate," she continues.
“Say you were a Republican who had been running in Minnesota and you had run on, ‘Hey, we got to cut spending, and we have to cut the taxpayer dollars that we are giving to Feeding Our Future.’ What would the liberal media have said? ‘Oh, you’re evil. How dare you DOGE this. You don’t want to feed innocent children. You want these innocent children to starve,’” she says.
Separately, a $14 million autism services fraud ring allegedly paid Somali parents cash kickbacks to enroll kids, despite the children not having autism diagnoses.
“What are we doing?” Stuckey asks. “I mean, if this is happening in Minnesota, and this is actually being uncovered in Minnesota, which is pretty incredible, like, what’s happening in California? What’s happening in Illinois? What’s happening in New York? What is happening in Houston, these Democrat-run places where there are these large Somalian Islamic groups?”
“I mean, you’ve got to give them credit. They look out for themselves. They’re going to put themselves first. They’re looking out for Somalia. They’re looking out for Afghanistan. They’re looking out for Islam. They’re looking out for their people,” she continues, pointing out that these scandals have "erupted" since Governor Tim Walz (D) took office in 2019.
“If he ran right now, every Democrat in the state of Minnesota would vote for him. I mean, we already had someone in the state of Virginia win after texts were leaked that said that he wanted to kill his opponent's children,” Stuckey says.
“So I don’t think that fraud is, like, the moral limit that the current Democrat Party has,” she adds.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Everybody has a diagnosis these days.
Not just adults — kids too. It doesn’t matter if you're 8 or 38, there's someone somewhere waiting to explain away whatever's different about you.
Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.
It's not a quirk of your personality or a flaw in your character or a wound in your soul. It's a illness. Never mind that the symptoms are vague or the evidence that it's a discrete medical condition are lacking — a pharmaceutical cure will fix it.
Just pop this pill, and you will be like everyone else. Isn’t that what you want?
All the kids these days have ADHD or autism. Which often makes me wonder if any of them do. Or if these conditions exist at all.
Autism certainly seems real in its extreme forms, but I am not at all convinced that it's at the far end of a continuum. I don’t really think being a little “on the spectrum” is a thing. Those people are just a little weird and need stronger guidance on how to get on in life.
I have a friend who was an engineer at Google. He told me half the people he worked with claimed to be “on the spectrum,” and according to him, it was all bull. They didn’t have medical problems; they had personal problems. They were guys who never learned how to interact normally, so they just ended up being kind of weird and rude.
As for ADHD, it's so obscenely overdiagnosed that it's essentially fake at this point. The market has been so oversaturated by ridiculous and erroneous diagnoses that whenever I hear about another kid with ADHD, it tells me more about the doctors and the “system” and less about the kid.
Are some kids better at sitting down at a desk for three hours at a time? Sure. Are more girls than boys better at doing it? Yes. Is there a gender factor here when it comes to diagnosis? Absolutely.
Boys don’t learn the same way girls do. But much of modern education ignores this fact. So when boys fidget or get bored, it gets chalked up to ADHD. This is more or less common knowledge by now. So the only thing a boy being diagnosed with ADHD tells me is that he doesn't get enough recess.
Of course, there are extreme cases. There are kids who genuinely don’t seem to be able to focus at all. Something like actual ADHD exists in a small number of boys, but that doesn't negate the broader truth: Instead of seeing people as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, we decide to overmedicate when someone isn’t exactly like everyone else.
My mom worked with special ed kids. Some of them had mild disabilities, some more extreme. In some cases, it was clear they would need supervised care their entire lives. But in other cases, it wasn't clear just what, if anything, was wrong — besides a certain learned helplessness reinforced by doctors and parents.
Nowadays ADHD diagnoses aren’t just for kids; adults are getting in on it too. Believe it or not, an increasing amount of men and women, especially women, in their 30s and 40s are discovering that they too have ADHD — a discovery that inevitably “explains everything.” My wife sees reels on Instagram all the time, along with ads selling various solutions.
What's that? You couldn’t focus at your computer, clicking on an excel spreadsheet, sending pointless emails for seven hours at a time? Shocking. No, you don’t need ADHD medication. You need to do something else with your life. Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.
Overmedicalization and overdiagnosis is a deep problem in our society. Not just because the result is an increase in prescription drug use, but because the individual human being is lost or suffocated a little bit at a time. Everyone is different. Everyone has skills, and everyone has weaknesses. Everyone learns in a different way, and everyone focuses on different things too.
RELATED: Drugged for being boys: The TRUTH behind the ADHD scam
Some people are just a little awkward, a little weird, a little absent-minded, or a little dry. Sure, they should try to meet society halfway in some reasonable sense — but that happens through early teaching, parental guidance, community expectations, and personal effort, not through a pill you pop every day. For most of the 20th century, we relied far more on those nonmedical supports.
All the pill-popping flattens our individualism and undercuts our own agency as humans. It presupposes that one cannot make oneself better, one cannot work to act right, and that one doesn’t have any control. This is a lie. Yes, of course, there are people who suffer with truly debilitating problems who need medication, and they should get that medication. But it is a small fraction of the population. Most people can make themselves better when they set their minds to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not into alternative medicine or any of the hippie stuff. I’m not denying that there are people with problems who are helped most effectively with medication. I’m thankful for the blessings of modern medicine and the advancements we continue to see every year.
But we have a problem with overdiagnosis in our country. We have a problem with losing sight of the individual. We have a problem with people who want to give up their agency and turn it all over to a pill, and we are worse off because of it.
The death of an anti-ICE agitator in Minneapolis this past weekend occurred right near an 'autism clinic' at the center of a $14 million Somali fraud scheme.
thefederalist.com