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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
I've been ignoring this for one huge reason: This video was posted on December 26th. If anyone approached my children's preschool today, they would find 0 children there. Not 0 people, because it's also a Lutheran church and there's always some kind of social happening somewhere. But 0 preschool-aged children. They're all home for winter break.
If a stranger tried to go to my child's preschool during a business day, they would not be let into any classroom. They can call the office or send an email to schedule a walkthough. But if you don't have the phone app for parents or an appointment, you're not getting through the double doors.
The fact that it's a 23 year old doing this "investigative journalism" makes my eyes roll so hard. He has no idea what "normal" would look like in the first place. I'm very tired of this genre of "Watch me make unreasonable demands of people and watch as they're weirdly defensive for no reason."
I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch . I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing. There's enough journalism indicating that this kind of fraud is rampant. I'm just perpetually annoyed that this is what makes people pay attention and become outraged, when this sort of thing has been reported on for a while now across America:
https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-they-did-it-minneapolis-kare-11-team-uncovers-medicaid-fraud-in-peer-recovery-services/
https://kstp.com/tracking-your-tax-dollars/whistleblower-minnesotas-child-care-assistance-program-has-fraud-cases-dating-back-12-years/
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/09/17/a-former-autism-center-employee-tried-to-report-fraud-to-the-state-nobody-responded/
Do you think it was filmed the day it was released?
Yeah, misspelling your school's name on it's front door is a 'nice touch'.
So what are you claiming? You seem to just be swatting lazily enough to not have to think any harder about it. Come on out with a prediction here. Of course Nick Shirly, a 23 year old youtuber isn't going to be a button up investigator, which makes it all the more damning if he's the one to whistle blow massive fraud.
So massive fraud or not?
Yes, massive fraud. No, this video isn't proof of it. This video is just outrage bait.
Was this filmed the day it was released? No, could have been filmed... December 25th? December 24th? It clearly wasn't filmed in the Summer. It's not like this was a culmination of years of investigation.
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