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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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It looks like the recent expose on child care center fraud has led to actual action in response: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/30/hhs-freezes-childcare-payments-minnesota/87965467007/

My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media) but I'd like to consider alternative explanations so I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the failures of traditional journalism here and/or the decision by HHS to cut off funding generally.

Additionally, given that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense are the lion's share of the federal budget, and much of the recent fraud has been Medicare/Medicaid fraud to the tune of billions, how much will this affect attempts at welfare reform? From both sides, both the people pushing UBI and the people trying to eliminate or reduce welfare generally.

As always, the answer is written in the scriptures. Conservatism is an audiovisual culture. The fact that Somalis in Minnesota were milking billions of dollars out of the government was knowable by reading and research. Some people did know it. Some people tried to spread the word (with some success). Knowing the truth of the proposition, "Somalis in Minnesota are milking billions of dollars out of the government," is much less powerful than seeing what these milking factories actually look like in person. No amount of text-based reporting on spreadsheets can elicit the same sense of deep cultural offense as seeing what presents outwardly as a normal American buisiness degenerate into hooded figures barking in Star Wars language in response to the slightest inquiry. The New York Times would never report that.

My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media)

I would say that at a minimum, this is a big factor. Here are a couple of thought experiments:

(1) Suppose you are a junior reporter at the New York Times or CNN and you break this story. How do you think your colleagues will perceive you and/or react?

(2) Suppose you're a citizen journalist who " produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas," How do you think the journalism community would react?

As far as the first question goes, there's not much need to speculate -- just check out the NPR hit-piece on Nick Shirley:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5662600/nick-shirley-minnesota-daycare-fraud

On the second question, it's very likely that you get accolades, job offers, offers of financial support from Leftist-controlled NGOs, etc.

Suppose you are a junior reporter at the New York Times or CNN and you break this story. How do you think your colleagues will perceive you and/or react?

Utterly shocked that you travelled to Minneapolis prior to social media letting you know there was a potential story.

My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media)

Part of it is that it took time to develop the sort of alternative, right-wing media that would actually cover news like this and popularize it. I'm guessing most of us had never heard of Nick Shirley before this (did any of you?). I only heard about it because other, more established channels picked up on it and pushed his video. This eventually percolated all the way up to the Vice President and national media. But without those other, larger, right wing channels, the whole thing would have been quietly swept under the rug. Maybe there's a time when Fox News might have covered it but they just seem pretty useless in general, now.

If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit?

It took about six seconds of googling to find a NYT article from the end of November, a month before the viral video was released. I think your premise is wrong.

To answer the question "why is it blowing up now?": as Hanania has noted on a number of occasions, conservatives by and large don't read. Neutral tone (or even hostile) print journalism isn't going to catch their attention the way video is, even (especially) if the latter is sloppy. For the administration, it's a useful distraction from their own parade of fraud and corruption scandals and an excuse to do what they want to do anyway. Plus the president is a social media addict.

That article covered "meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases" being prosecuted. The video here was about childcare fraud going unprosecuted.

conservatives by and large don't read.

Good thing that problem only afflicts Them, not Us!

The Minnesota fraud is something that was starting to be reported in legacy media and investigated by both state and federal, which the video even admits; all it did is get the administration going. The administration's staffers all seem terminally On Twitter, so a video blowing up on Twitter gets stuff done - I can't imagine it's more complicated than that.

And maybe this would be good for the right, but outside of this recent win from Shirley, they're more interested in commenting on things than going out and doing things.

Did the 23-year-old’s videos actually provide enough proof of fraud that it led to this defunding, or did they provide just plausible enough evidence to give the administration an excuse to do what they already wanted to do anyway?

It seems to me that Trump and his administration have a few goals that this defunding meets: 1) shrink government spending (at least in some areas), 2) emphasize criminal actions by immigrants, and 3) hurt Trump’s enemies. This nicely does all three. It decreases welfare spending, shows Somalian immigrants in a very negative light, and makes Tim Walz look like an enabler of massive fraud. I think it’s probable that at least one of the daycare centers in those videos will turn out to be completely legitimate when all the facts come to light, and it’s possible that the same will hold true for all of them.

Yes he did provide enough proof provided your prior beliefs are well-calibrated. If you are "anti-racist" then he didn't nearly provide enough proof. If your priors are well-adjusted he provided enough proof for systematic, mass fraud to a high enough confidence for this reaction and subsequent investigations.

The people complaining he wasn't rigorous enough won't even care that his methods were effective in bringing public attention and reform to an important issue.

Whether the evidence is sufficient is entirely dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People and deserve to have the Feds descend on them and investigate all their wheelings and dealings with an eye towards making heads roll. Of someone goes out next week and produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas, I'm skeptical that the Trump administration would respond with similar vigor, and I suspect we'd hear about how Christians were being railroaded for political purposes.

In the same way that the Dutch are tall people, sure.

"Dat's Raciss" is the easy, stop-gap answer. I hate to bring up Rotherham in this context, but that was exactly what stymied investigation in part: when eventually the pieces started coming together that no, this wasn't just a few, isolated cases of underclass girls gone wild, people in charge put blockages in the way because "oh no, investigating this would seem to blame the Muslim community and that would be racist/racists would use it as a weapon".

"But they wouldn't do it to Christians" - well, if Christian church groups are engaging in this kind of fraud, they damn well should do it to them.

Also, there seems to be a general fraud problem going back years in Minnesota, if allegations of $9 billion going down the Swanee are correct. Governor Tim says it's only $1 billion but that may just be "cases known about for this specific scam":

Minnesota has been under the spotlight for years for Medicaid fraud, including a massive $300 million pandemic fraud case involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said it was the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam and that defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.

In 2022, during President Joe Biden’s administration, 47 people were charged. The number of defendants has grown to 78 throughout the ongoing investigation.

So far, 57 people have been convicted, either because they pleaded guilty or lost at trial.

Most of the defendants are of Somali descent.

Numerous other fraud cases are being investigated, including new allegations focused on child care centers.

In news interviews and press releases over the summer, prosecutor Joe Thompson estimated the total loss from all fraud cases could exceed $1 billion. Earlier this month, a federal prosecutor alleged that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.

...Among those running schemes to get funds for child nutrition, housing services and autism programs, 82 of the 92 defendants are Somali Americans, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”

...Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud but allowed that the $1 billion estimate could be accurate. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.

As an aside, is there anything Kamala touched for her presidential campaign that hasn't come back to bite her? Timmy boy here was her hand-picked choice because he was biddable, and now here's the track record of This Could Have Been Your VP come out to haunt him.

The defense of “only 1b” is quite the shitty defense

"This scam was only $1b. The other scams, well, we have to wait for the figures".

dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People

I'm not sure how to define "Bad People," but here's an analogy: In the United States, driving at 75 miles per hour on the highway is against the law, but normally it's not thought of as an immoral act. If you get away with it, none of your neighbors will think any less of you over it.

For people from certain subcultures, engaging in massive fraud against the government is perceived the same way. It sucks if you get caught, but otherwise it's nothing to be ashamed of.

If "Bad People" includes "people who don't see anything fundamentally wrong with engaging in massive fraud against the government," then yeah, generally speaking Somali-Americans are Bad People. (Hopefully the next generation will see things differently, and prosecutions and jail time will hopefully change their views.)

Pretty clearly someone in this situation is a brazen fraudster -- either this Youtuber Nick Shirley or the Somalis he was investigating. Given my prior probability assessment that Somalis are "Bad People" as you put it, I am pretty sure it's the Somali day care center operators.

First of all, go ahead and produce such evidence of those circumstances and let's see if you're right.

Second of all, sincerely, I beseech you to really pause and think about your blindspot here. I refuse to believe you're dense enough not to understand a little bit more once you slow down. Do you truly, honestly not see the difference between an unassimilated ethnic group imported from the other side of the planet who then starts defrauding the institutions your taxes go to, and the same being done by people whose grandparents were born here?

But ya, if to get any changes at all you insist that we must first declare groups Bad People, guess what's going to start happening?

Of someone goes out next week and produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas, I'm skeptical that the Trump administration would respond with similar vigor, and I suspect we'd hear about how Christians were being railroaded for political purposes.

I'm sure there's some amount of truth to what you're suggesting, but not for the reasons you're implying. If Christian churches run by Heritage American citizens were committing similar kinds of fraud, most people wouldn't consider it as big of a deal because Heritage Americans would likely be committing such fraud at significantly lower rates (using facial crime rates as the baseline) and because we didn't intentionally import those scammers into the country for the express purpose of disrupting and replacing Heritage Americans.

Again, why is proof the standard here? It shined a light they couldn’t be left unaddressed. Even if we get some legitimate institutions, there’s the bigger question perhaps even worse:

Why are we tax payers funding millions to give free daycare to immigrant populations that we didn’t even ask to import?

The amount of spotlight on “legal” handouts to “legal” immigrants that is absolutely outrageous to middle class Americans getting squeezed is the real scandal. The fraud is just an extra exclamation point on how much the governing elite hates you.

Now of course there are plenty of counter perspectives to the above paragraph, but the point is that it is a legitimate framing of a SUBSTANTIAL part of the population, and the point stands that the media has been complicit in completely ignoring it at best.

Wouldn't one business-related explanation be that local reporting in legacy media is practically dead already?

This was always one of the arguments of what would happen as the internet killed and absorbed more and more of legacy media over the last several decades. Fewer local papers means fewer local journalists. Fewer local journalists means fewer local scandals exposed.

Local journalism was never a perfect guarantee that every scandal would inevitably be exposed, but when there was a small fleet of local journalists supported by subscribers in every medium-sized town in America, I can believe it was far more likely for something like "childcare welfare fraud by Somali immigrants in Minnesota" to be looked into, once an interested local citizen sends the tip in.

I agree that this is probably at least part of it.

Well, define defend. Opinion journalism is cheap. So it’s not really a budgetary concern to drop an op-ed endorsing this, that, them, it or anything. Even if cash strapped outfits offer the aforementioned, it isn’t a refutation of the impact the internet had in gutting all the things newspapers previously used to generate revenue that paid for actual reporting.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press is now PE owned, has one-fifth the staff of even the (formerly Minneapolis, now) Minnesota Star Tribune, and in a small but memorably (to me) depressing occurrence, was using AP wire reports with Chicago datelines to cover the Chauvin trial.

I’ve not seen either paper call the videographer a racist. I’ve seen general defenses of not painting all Somalian immigrants with the same brush. And in Minnesota’s largest paper, a recent op-ed demanding that the video in question be taken seriously:

https://www.startribune.com/somali-community-minnesota-day-care-video/601554742

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