Just five days before the election of 2008, which would catapult him into the presidency, candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in which he made what is now one of his infamous statements: "We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

In typical fashion, the press was too busy making goo-goo eyes at Obama to parse out what he meant by that statement, much less ask why a "fundamental transformation" of America would be necessary or desirable.

Bestselling author and commentator Mark Levin asked what is perhaps the most salient question when he said, "Who wants to 'fundamentally transform' something they love?"

Would anyone announce that they planned to "fundamentally transform" their betrothed days before their wedding? Do parents gleefully anticipate "fundamentally transforming" their child days before its birth?

In the eight years that followed, America got a taste of what Obama had in mind.

His pernicious legacy includes inflamed racial hatreds, a disastrous rollout of kinda-sorta single-payer healthcare (preceded by a litany of distortions and followed by de facto insolvency), an apology tour to the Mideast, the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans (including Ambassador Chris Stevens) and about which the administration lied to the public, and funding terrorism by sending $400 million in cash on pallets to Iran.

But another one of Obama's signature moves was his decision to selectively enforce immigration law when Congress would not pass the broad amnesty legislation he wanted.

Obama's immigration legacy continued when his vice president, Joe Biden, finagled his way into the White House in 2020.

The Biden administration (populated as it was with many Obama holdovers) took Obama's dream of amnesty for illegal immigrants and put it on steroids, throwing open the borders, allowing somewhere between 15 million and 20 million of the world's poor to flood into our country, and trotting out shifty Alejandro Mayorkas to state time and time again that "the border is secure."

The phrasing there was deliberate. "Secure" did not mean "the border is closed," but rather, "Come on in — we're holding the door open for you."

Illegals were shuttled across the country by planes and buses, often in the middle of the night. The Biden administration paid nongovernmental organizations billions of dollars to assist with these surreptitious relocation efforts.

Many of these were religiously affiliated, including Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration Relief Services, Episcopal Migration Ministries and World Relief.

All of that is phase one.

Those who want to transform America into a socialist nation understand that they cannot achieve their goals at the ballot box.

Yet.

What they can do and have done, however, is to import tens of millions of the world's poorest and most ignorant. The poverty isn't the problem; the ignorance is.

Migrants to the United States who have seen their previously free, peaceful and/or prosperous nations "fundamentally transformed" by socialism and communism would never vote for that here, no matter how poor they are when they get here.

Escapees from Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, North Korea or any of the former Soviet Union's member countries know all too well the difference between what collectivism promises and what it produces.

But people from impoverished nations with corrupt governments who have never seen a middle class will fall for any glib-tongued politician who promises that everyone will be equal and everything will be free — especially when those same politicians (or their functionaries) are busy writing checks to them.

So, it's important to understand that the fraud being revealed in Minnesota (and, quite likely, in all 50 states) serves two important purposes in the ongoing "fundamental transformation" of America.

First, it is not inadvertent. It is not the result of incompetence or lack of oversight. It is deliberate. It is the beginnings of the redistribution of wealth from Americans to the Third World. The free education, free healthcare, free housing and guaranteed monthly income — all paid for by American taxpayers — is designed to take wealth from Americans — who the left-wing believe have "too much"— andtransfer it to the world's poor.

Second, cultivating a dependence upon government handouts ensures that today's immigrants never become the successful entrepreneurs that their predecessors did.

It's no fluke that none of the "day care" or "autism centers" or "health transportation businesses" are real businesses.

The American middle and upper-middle classes were built by entrepreneurs.

They are the great bulwark against socialism and communism, because their very existence blows a hole in the "class-against-class" arguments that socialists love to use.

Anyone  can make it in America, and countless millions have.

But the Minnesota Somalis, among others, don't know that, because their "businesses" are fake and their "business models" consist of raking in money from NGOs and social service agencies. That's not entrepreneurship; it's grift.

As a result, they have no investment in preserving an economic or political system that rewards initiative, hard work, entrepreneurship, competition and customer service.

They will be only too happy to vote for the socialists who are just waiting in the wings.

And that brings us to phase three.

Where there is financial fraud, there is always election fraud.

That is the longer-term strategy but the most important. All these millions must vote.

If they do not do so voluntarily, their ballots will be harvested and cast for those who let them in and handed them millions. They are brought and paid for.

So, in sum, here are the steps to the "fundamental transformation" of America:

—Create a critical mass of people, domestic or imported, who do not know how to support themselves without government handouts;

—Indoctrinate them to believe that others' success is attributable not to talent and dedication but to racism and exploitation (which, admittedly, requires ignoring the millions of successful minority business owners in the U.S., but collectivists have never let facts get in the way of propaganda);

—Buy their loyalty with "free money";

—Register them to vote (if illegally, this also means preventing the passage of laws ensuring election integrity);

Run socialist candidates;

—Once in office, implement policies that cripple business, private property and personal autonomy.

Viewed in this light, the outrage at the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the raw panic at the exposure of statewide fraud in Minnesota (and elsewhere) should be explicable.

End the weaponized "compassion" industry, end the fraud, and the plans for the socialist transformation of America become much more difficult.

(Related stories may be found here and here.)

Professor Laura Hollis is an attorney and university professor who has taught courses in law and business for more than 30 years. Her legal publications have appeared in the Temple Law Review, Cardozo Law Review and the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. As a nationally syndicated columnist her work has been featured in dozens of print and online publications. Read reports from Professor Hollis — More Here.