Disinformation and Immigrant Bashing
Understanding and debunking the Nick Shirley “scandal”
The Trump team has been weaponizing disinformation and aiming it straight at immigrants for some time now. Remember back in 2024, with Springfield, Ohio and the Haitians “eating the pets?” All nonsense, but it served its purpose: to vilify a vulnerable “out” group with a false claim so the “in” group dynamics would grow stronger.
The regime is doing it again with Somalis in Minnesota. This time it sent one of its own favored right-wing YouTubers, Nick Shirley, to create fake stories and manufacture outrage over “day care fraud.” White House officials including JD Vance and allies like Elon Musk then amplified the false claims across their platforms.
So what’s the best way to wrap our heads around this latest attack? It can be frustrating to constantly have to play clean up and fact check wild and unproven claims, as we’ve seen in contexts ranging from vaccine disinformation to election fraud conspiracies. But beyond the debunking itself, it’s critical to understand the goals and the methods so we can better inoculate against such things in the future.
Here are some key takeaways to help frame the issue, discredit Shirley’s claims and arm ourselves for what’s ahead.
Disinformation about “Somali fraud” has political value
We should think of the Shirley piece as a three-fer because it actually hits three birds with one squeezed stone.
First, it targets a specific minority community that Trump has put in his sights (calling them “garbage”), creating further racial division and mistrust while conditioning the base to leap to sweeping generalities.
Second, it does so in a light blue state the Republicans hope to flip, attacking both a governor (Tim Walz) and a Congresswoman (Ilhan Omar) whom Trump hates.
Third, it connects “immigrants” with “fraud,” just as the GOP prepares to ramp up its messaging that all the cuts to social services nationwide were necessary to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.”
The timing and subject of the piece were not some coincidence, nor were they, as I’ll discuss below, some independent “citizen journalist” exposing the truth.
Don’t call him Shirley
Shirley first gained notoriety as a right-wing influencer by platforming far-right figures at the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, including Alex Jones.
He also traveled to Kyiv to make a video implying that the war with Russia was not really happening and that our money was being wasted. That led to a confrontation by Kyiv-based advocate Caolan Robertson, who got Shirley to admit that what he was doing wasn’t “journalism” but rather “satire.” (Actually it isn’t satire either; it is propaganda.)
The Intercept recently provided a helpful summary of Shirley’s past work, focusing on his hit pieces on immigration and crime. He often worked with his mother, who is also a right-wing social media influencer. (Sounds like a swell family.)
As The Intercept noted,
Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic and Islamophobic beliefs and conspiracy theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat taking over the country. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.
In one stunt, Shirley paid day laborers to stage a fake protest at the White House while Biden was president. In 2024, he also created videos filmed inside CECOT and other prisons in El Salvador, praising President Bukele’s policies while omitting the human rights abuses taking place inside.
After Trump took office, Shirley tended to crop up in places with state-planned immigration enforcement actions. These included a video in Chinatown in New York City in which he labeled street vendors as “dangerous migrant scammers” and filmed confrontations, later praising an ICE raid that took place there. He also embedded himself in ICE raids in the Chicago area.
Shirley was already tight with the White House when he made his Somali daycare video. Indeed, he attended Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. So it is no surprise that his “report” got the stamp of approval from the likes of JD Vance, who himself traffics in racist conspiracy narratives.
Debunking Shirley’s “reporting”
The problematic nature of Shirley’s videos has been covered by many in the past few days, including by local news affiliates, so I’ll just briefly note the issues here, as excellently summarized by Adam Mockler.
Fraud was already being investigated. Shirley portrayed his story as somehow groundbreaking and newsworthy. But fraud has been in the news in Minneapolis for some time, and there were already scores of arrests around it. He was plowing old ground, trying to sow new weeds.
He approached daycare centers with a masked film crew. Shirley sought access to daycare centers while accompanied by a film crew, two members of which hid their identities behind masks. Shirley was denied entry to the centers in part because who in their right mind would allow total strangers into places with kids?
The absence of children proves nothing. Shirley couldn’t confirm that he actually visited the daycare centers (some of which may have been closed for the holidays) at a time of normal operation anyway. The absence of children in the video doesn’t prove anything except that he visited when there were no kids there. Indeed, in his own video, the hours of operation of a center were listed as beginning after 2 pm, but Shirley’s own phone screen shows he was there at 1 pm.
Shirley visited closed centers. One of the centers Shirley featured and decried for being locked, with blacked out windows and no kids, was actually already temporarily closed. He would have known that had he looked it up. Instead he used it to suggest fraud, when the center had actually been suspended for safety violations. The system had worked to shut down a noncompliant center, but Shirley twisted the facts.
Minnesota has procedures to confirm legal day care operations. The state makes unannounced visits to daycare centers and goes through a checklist of 400 items. Newly opened ones get visited four times a year to cut down on fraud. We’re expected to believe a biased YouTuber uncovered $110,000,000 in fraud in one day, where state officials whose job it is to monitor compliance didn’t? This gives strong “DOGE”-style claims that can’t be backed up. In fact, Shirley’s claims of fraud were based on “capacity,” not actual enrollment, but centers only get paid per actual enrollment.
Zoom out, call out
One more thing. There’s a horrific move that the White House keeps pulling out of its playbook. It takes a specific instance, one that everyone would condemn (think Laken Riley’s or Charlie Kirk’s murders), and then generalizes it to condemn and sanction entire communities. This “group punishment” mentality is designed to generate support for sweeping policy changes aimed at whole classes of people, whether it’s Venezuelan migrants, the trans community, or Trump’s new favorite group to bash on, Somalis.
The Department of Homeland Security can only succeed in its ultimate program of mass ethnic cleansing if enough of the U.S. population goes along with it. That means whenever we see the telltale signs of racial bashing, scapegoating and group punishment, we need to stop the conversation and immediately call it out. They want us all talking about “fraud” and “migrants,” but what we are witnessing is fascism in action.
And that should always be our baseline response.
It would be interesting to know who is financing Shirley's right-wing phony exposes - travel, film crews, etc.
Collective punishment is considered a war crime under international law, as it imposes penalties on individuals or groups for actions they did not commit. This practice is prohibited by treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, which emphasize individual responsibility for criminal acts.