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.”
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.”
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"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"
I didn't see a word about it in the NYT until the City Journal reporting. Multibillion dollar fraud that the state of Minnesota refused to notice for race reasons is a pretty big deal
Furthermore, the idea that respectable outlets never start with a narrative and then go looking for evidence is laughable. That is Nikole Hannah Jones' whole Pulitzer Prize winning career
I haven’t watched his video and don’t have a horse in this race, but I’m not sure your critique makes sense. If there’s a significant percentage of the Somali community in Minnesota committing fraud (which Rufo and others have proven to be the case, with the many thousands of fraudulent autism cases), then it’s very easy for them to coordinate and volunteer their children to show up in fake daycares to disprove Nick Shirley and the increased scrutiny.
If I’m staffing a daycare and a guy comes over to me and asks to enroll his child, I would have forms ready. (I might also tell him I’m happy to show him the daycare if he shuts his camera off.) So you haven’t proven that Shirley got it wrong.