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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.
Of course it’s not proof. It’s a spotlight, and a question begger about what’s going on and why it took him to highlight it
“well of course there’s fraud, a this guy is pointing to it, but see he’s pointing wrong, so can be dismissed or agreed with where convenient”
It’s just cake-eat-having commentary.
It's like being a Christian and suddenly a street preacher video is blowing up online. The preacher's argumentation isn't sound and he's weirdly confrontational towards a handful of people just going about their day (and yeah, those people are sinners, but it's still confrontational.)
Wouldn't it be kind of frustrating for this to be the thing that takes off as proof of Christianity, and not all the actual scholarship? If I were to say I wasn't a fan, but I still was a Christian, would that be having and eating cake?
The video's author could personally come to my dwelling and fart loudly in my face, cheeks spread wide open and splattering me with the fecal remnants of his last shit and his observation would still be valid: the daycares that don't admit new children and conspiciously don't have any sounds of children (they are not quiet, let me tell you) are frauds and you should be ashamed that you are even defending this position.
Anyone who goes 'he's right, but he didn't say it in GOOD FAITH' should be shot by a firing squad.
I don't know where you get the idea that a daycare center can't sound quiet from the outside? If the kids aren't out in the playground I don't hear them. Our preschool is actually insulated on account of the very cold winters here.
My argument is not, "he's right, but he didn't say it in Good Faith." My argument is the evidence in the video is not sufficient to support his claims. He didn't systematically eliminate other possibilities. It's going to backfire, because it's easy to just show children getting dropped off in these places and Voila! debunked.
Dropping children off in these places after a major expose doesn't debunk. The lack of children despite parents being in on it was the easily visible indicator of fraud that- having been explicitly identified- is easily rectified afterwards to obfuscate follow-on attention and allow motivated individuals to claim that children were always there.
The sort of motivated people who believe this sort of video 'debunks' are also the sort of people who wouldn't be persuaded by 'systematically eliminating other possibilities,' since motivated reason is under no obligation to conceed that other possibilities were properly eliminated based on whatever trivial grounds they have. They could even invent their own grounds of dismissal, like claiming that the videos were made on holidays or weekends where there would be no children.
It's not like such motivated reasoning against anti-progressive activist exposes are unknown. I'm sure you remember when the planned parenthood videos were dismissed as bad faith and misleading for editing techniques that many of the media organizations critiquing it were using, even as the activists posted the full videos which the media organizations rarely do and went out of their way to ignore in order to insinuate deception without, you know, showing the deception.
I don't believe that showing kids being dropped off debunks but it has equal weight as the Shirley video. That's the whole point.
I will say that I was surprised that the kids being dropped off knew where they were going. They weren't dragged in by their mothers. They walked calmly to the door as if they've done it before. First day drop off of all the daycare/preschools Ive seen were no where near as calm.
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