The Unbearable Stupidity of Nick Shirley

He should be playing hacky sack, not treated as an investigative journalist

In UnHerd, I wrote about the grotesqueness of the rise of Nick Shirley, who conservatives have crowned the replacement for the mainstream media.

The American Right has found its answer to the mainstream media in the form of Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old YouTuber. On Dec. 26, Shirley posted a video on social media that has received, as of this writing, more than 140 million views across multiple platforms. It involved him going to a variety of Minneapolis-area daycares and health-care providers run by Somali Americans to see whether they would show him their children or produce certain kinds of information, such as their “health-care rates,” to prove that they are legitimate businesses…

None of this, however, means that Nick Shirley was engaging in real journalism. What he did was the equivalent of a reporter covering the mafia randomly showing up at Italian-owned butcher shops and restaurants with a prefabricated narrative that criminal activity must be going on. Almost immediately, Shirley’s narrative began to fall apart. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families last week visited the daycares targeted by Shirley and determined that they were “operating as expected.” Children were, in fact, present at all of the sites, except for one that had yet to open for the day. Apparently, just showing up at a daycare and asking “Can I see the children?” does not get you access to them.

Reporters from the Minnesota Star Tribune visited the 10 facilities in Shirley’s video, and found children in four of them. The other six were either closed or did not open their doors, which would be understandable, given what they had recently been through. At one facility, the paper reported, “the daycare’s phones now ring nonstop from early in the morning to late at night, with people pretending to want to place their children there or threatening harm.”

Read the whole thing here.

For a flavor of Shirley’s work, see him not understanding the concept of a medical plaza, not understanding that how many kids you’re licensed for does not mean you must have exactly that number of kids, and thinking that in America you just go into the offices of health care providers and ask for their “health-care rates.”

When I was in academia, I used to get upset seeing people who went through the motions of doing academically rigorous work through publishing in journals, having a lot of citations, writing in high-level prose, etc., but, when you scratched a bit beneath the surface, they were engaging in a kind of academic fraud.

I was thinking about this while writing this piece. Conservatives appear to have their own media institutions, independent journalists, scholars, pollsters, and intellectual debates. But almost all of it is completely fake. They simply don’t realize that it takes a significant amount of intelligence, hard work, and institutional backing to know something about the world. My friend Renée DiResta writes about the methodology of the right-wing influencer space.

Journalism is evidence → conclusion. This is, at best, conclusion → evidence. The verdict comes first; the hunt for proof comes later.

I call this shopping for receipts: influencers start with a belief or suspicion, then go looking for artifacts that will read as evidence to people who already agree…

That’s why this isn’t only a reversed order of operations. It’s a different information logic entirely: it’s not a conclusion so much as a belief, supported by justifications. The belief relates primarily to identity, and group membership—not facts. The justification just needs to make the belief feel reasonable.

The Minnesota daycare video illustrates this difference. The beliefs—that Somali immigrants are criminals, that the money they’re getting from fraud is funding terrorism, that Tim Walz doesn’t care—were already circulating. Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage“ at a cabinet meeting in December. City Journal published an unsubstantiated claim linking fraud schemes to Al Shabaab. The frame had been established—both with respect to the Somali community in particular, and to immigrants writ large.

Shirley’s video wasn’t a methodical collection and review of evidence to reach a conclusion; it was content produced in response to a belief. The “evidence”—employees reluctant to speak, buildings without visible children—clearly felt like proof to many thousands of folks commenting on X. To those outside the political faction, however, the behavior of the daycare employees seemed like a reasonable response to two strange men with a video camera showing up demanding to see children…

When mainstream media, for example, debunked the eating-the-pets rumors in Springfield, right-wing influencers descended to find “evidence” that the media was lying. The closest they got was grainy years-old footage of unidentified animals (possibly chickens) on a grill at a house inhabited by Africans (not Haitians)—a motte-and-bailey retreat from a sweeping allegation to a niche claim that was still poorly defended. But to the community of believers, it was sufficient.

Shirley looks and talks like a guy who should be selling surfboards in a beach town. He’s immediately recognizable as the not very bright kid we all know who sits in the back of the class and is pretty harmless under most circumstances. His rise to the status of investigative journalist could only have occurred in the context of a movement that lacks any standards orienting it towards truth. I admit getting a chuckle out of Kathy Hochul’s press account mocking him for being dim. This is a key right-left divide at this point: whether you can see pedestrian stupidity when it’s right before your nose, and whether your first instinct is to praise a guy like this as the Woodward of our time or say that he should go back to playing hacky sack.

The American right is so devoid of talent, and so uninterested in taking epistemological issues seriously, that someone like Shirley can just show up with a camera, repeat some talking points based on whatever the online audience is interested in, and get hailed as doing Pulitzer-worthy work by the vice president. Here is Shirley being confronted on his Ukraine “reporting,” which consisted of going to Kiev, filming luxury cars, and telling his audience that American aid is paying for them. He responds by saying it was “satire,” which I’ve noticed is a term that stupid people use in ways that don’t make sense when they can’t defend something. They seem to believe that “satire” is a word that has the magic property of absolving you of responsibility for anything you’ve said or done.

The ideology of the right, of course, cannot be separated from the low intellectual standards of the movement. Rightists believe that foreigners and immigrants are ripping them off, and want narratives that tell that story. In theory, there could be careful journalists who go through the relevant documentation to find iron-clad cases of Somali welfare fraud. But we never see that. Nativist news and informational sources are practically always low quality. It seems that smart people are more interested in more abstract and consequential questions like how large the welfare state should be, or how it should be structured, than who is unjustly profiting off it. The idea of identity-based grievance appeals to a lower type of person. Nativism is rooted in false beliefs, namely that Western societies are primarily harmed through too many interactions with foreigners, and their elites prioritize the needs of non-citizens. If you have high intellectual standards, you don’t believe these things in the first place!

This doesn’t mean that Somalis don’t commit fraud; but for the most part left-leaning elite institutions like the NYT and the Biden administration have given the issue about the level of attention it deserves, up to and including criminal indictments. There really isn’t much for the right to contribute here, except to the extent you want to say that maybe the fraud should have been uncovered earlier. Instead, we have JD Vance blaming Americans no longer having kids on Somali daycares. We’re reaching levels of White Kendism that shouldn’t be possible.

As I mention in the article, the Shirley story is disturbing in a way that is different from standard forms of right-wing slop. Vance doesn’t just declare anything real journalism. He generally doesn’t use that word to refer to the work of his friend Tucker Carlson, for example. Rather, one needs to do something more impressive, like show up at random businesses based on the race of their owners and start harassing them. Rightists are desperate for any of the trappings of real intellectual work to back up what they want to believe. The fact that their confirmation bias can be activated by someone as clearly cognitively limited as Nick Shirley only reveals how little it takes to encourage them.