The MSM jumps into action … against Nick Shirley, maker of the viral video about Minnesota daycare centers
Your intrepid reporters are on the job:
… [Some in] our present liberal media … seem more concentrated on trying to debunk what Shirley was exposing than on finding out the facts.
CNN had a correspondent confront Shirley outside of one of the daycare centers, asking him about his story, as our sister site Townhall reported. Shirley said he stood by his story, but he invited them to do their “own analysis.”
“So we can make our own analysis?” Whitney Wild responded. What a concept.
They then showed their correspondent, Wild, saying they were looking into the claims. She said they “reached out” to several of the centers that Shirley had visited, “Only one answered and said they are a legitimate business.”
Well, I guess everything is cool, then. They say they’re good, so it must be true.
More at the link.
Meanwhile, as might be expected, Nick Shirley has gotten death threats:
Shirley described the threats during a Dec. 31 appearance on the PBD Podcast, and said he was warned he would be “Kirked,” a reference to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. …
Shirley appeared shaken as he described the toll the threats had taken, particularly the calls received by his family. …
Shirley maintained that his investigation was about financial accountability, not politics.
“I didn’t make this a right-or-left issue,” he said.
But to the left, everything is a right-or-left issue. If it reflects badly on the left, it must be “debunked” and the messenger, and his family, are fair game for threats of violence and for actual violence. The idea is not just to punish that person, but to have a chilling effect on other challenges to the leftist “narrative.”
To those critics who are calling the investigation of Somali-owned daycares “racist,” I say, fine, investigate all of them. Just because the fraud appears especially bad among Somali clans doesn’t mean that other people haven’t figured out how to run this scam.
The media in this country is an absolute poison.
They are legal versions of Quislings, Fifth Columnists.
Everything they do is geared to destroying all those whose policies do not conform with their leftist / socialist / communist worldview (i.e., that of their puppet masters, the demokrat party).
Prof. Reynolds is concise: “They’re not reporters. They’re gatekeepers.”
Now that the holidays are behind us and people are heading back to work, it would be easy for the MSM to just sit back and observe a few child care centers and count how many kids get dropped off for care while their parents go on to work. The MSM has the staff and resources to watch several places for several days at a time. They will either substantiate or debunk Shirley’s claims in a week or so.
The same could be done with the medical care providers who appear to be seriously over billing the government for alleged services.
The Shipwrecked Crew article stated that the Biden DOJ, for some reason, ceased criminal filings in May ’24. Perhaps they realized that they were getting too close to the principal operators and/or disclosing a link to political funding issues, and had to pump the brakes… Just a thought.
Another Mike:
That wouldn’t tell us anything about what was happening prior to the spotlight being shone on them. Now that they’re alerted, they can probably scare up some kids to visit them for a while and then say they’ve been doing that all along.
I was reminded of daycare fraud in the small town of Mattawa, Wa.
I asked Grok to refresh my memory:
Notice Grok repeats the racism charges and “witch hunt rather than substantiated widespread fraud”. I’d consider $2 million as widespread fraud, considering in those days $2 million was real money. Mattawa is probably 80-90% Hispanic– quite a few illegals, even then. My daughter and SIL were both teaching in Mattawa around that time.
The constant here, is the way governments provide welfare benefits to the providers is fertile soil for fraud, whether it be Medicaid, Medicare, Childcare, Housing, Unemployment, etc. It’s based on the same philosophy that liberals use against voter ID. These poor ethnic groups are too uneducated, mentally capable of navigating the myriad rules to access benefits. If the benefits went to the individual, not the provider the level of fraud we are ceasing would be much, much less.
And they LOVE being gatekeepers.
He is a brave young man and those whose crimes he has uncovered are vile and ruthless. I hope law enforcement and States’ D.A., etc. soon begin investing and prosecuting the criminals involved to take the focus off Nick and those around him.
When reading this post I had an image of the montage in “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” where thugs lash out at boy scouts working to do good.
the humor in the comment, relates to what they have uncovered about the Somali foreign minister, and his business ties in Columbus, as with further ties to a dodgy character, in the cash transfer business,
independent sources suggest the money is shipped to dubai, then distributed to parties, unknown
a question that occurs why the embassy in Serbia, of all places,
https://x.com/catturd2/status/2007206117206831388
All the fraudsters deserve deportation or prison, tho I know US prison is unlikely for most of them.
Prosecutions are far more important than convictions, at this point. Get the easy evidence out there, be clear that many not guilty verdicts are given to guilty, in order to avoid criminally punishing the actual innocents.
I’m reminded of Glenn Reynold’s book “An Army of Davids” which came out 19 years ago and talked about the potential of people like Nick Shirley and Cam Higby. As the old Steve Allen song goes, “This Could Be the Start of Something Big”. Additionally I watched a video by Catherine Herridge recorded in 2024 but released yesterday which detailed what I had always thought about outfits like her former employer, CBS News. Her finishing point was ” Independent Journalism Will Dominate 2026″. She has her own show now so I hope she is right for everyone’s sake.
“The MSM” … “our present liberal media”
Why not call them what they are, in everything but name: “Democrat media” or “left-wing media”?
The Right-wing blogs & news orgs have been saturated with stories about Minnesota and Mamdani, mostly repetitive, but sometimes making important big-picture observations.
Not that any of the observations are new, but they help put the two events in context as parts of the same ecosystem.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2026/01/02/minnesota-fraud-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-n2668785
However, Hill and others on the Right fundamentally mistake what the socialist politicians want.
It is not to solve social problems with socialist programs.
It is to obtain power by winning elections through convincing well-intentioned people that they care about solving the problems.
What they really care about is embezzling the money directed toward the problems.
Which is why the problems are never solved.