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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Chris Bray has an interesting take

If you click on that last link, you’ll see a local TV news journalist going to one of the same daycare centers that Nick Shirley went to, and doing it long before. But you’ll also see a bunch of obvious differences in framing that turn out to be extremely important. Nick Shirley just said there are no children here; the mainstream journalist did a questions are being raised story, a “some claim” thing, noting the presence of regulatory violations. He even says out loud that he didn’t see any children at the supposed daycare center, but he can’t quite bring himself to stick the landing. He needs a government official to say that there are no children there. He needs an official narrative to advance. Watch for yourself if you want to see the difference.

There’s almost no difference between the facts aired by a Minneapolis TV station in January and the facts aired by Nick Shirley in December, but the tone and the framing are from a different universe. Mainstream journalists have been saying for years that some say there is fraud in Somali social services in Minneapolis. Controversy is swirling. Questions are being raised. Officials are looking into. Their instinctive focus is on narrative, on what is being said. They pull back. Nick Shirley races forward, and lavishes attention on the agitated response. Legacy media haven’t ignored the story; they’ve tiptoed up to its edges a thousand times.

See also the remarkable example of County Highway, which recently produced a long, detailed, deeply reported, and thoroughly grounded story on Somali social services fraud in Minneapolis, with eagle-eyed political context. Sample from a long story of what County Highway put into print well before the Nick Shirley video:

The state’s entire view of its role in society would soon change in ways that made the frauds far easier to execute. In 2016, Minnesota introduced a $35-million program that provided direct funding to state-based nonprofits working on issues of racial equity. Over the next few years, the state embraced an easily abused model of service delivery through private-sector clients, even as evidence mounted that these programs were beacons for fraudsters.

In 2018, a whistleblower claimed that over $100 million in payments through the state’s childcare assistance program had been fraudulent. The way the scam worked was dismayingly simple: Daycares and other childcare providers, which require a license to operate in Minnesota, would obtain names and identifying information for children eligible for state-subsidized care and then bill the government for services they hadn’t actually rendered. Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash. In 2017, Twin Cities travelers declared $100 million in physical cash transfers out of the country to airport customs agents.

But this story produced something like a fraction of one percent of the attention that Nick Shirley got with a dramatic video, which is an…interesting thing to notice.

Swiss cheese: Information has to flow through a long series of gates that don’t overlap, overcoming the faked-up reactions and distractions, overcoming the absence of patience among consumers of information, overcoming official uninterest and calculated distortion, and probably a dozen other gates that we can think of if we put our heads together.

Note that the first point here collides with the second point: All the people saying that Nick Shirley suddenly just made up a fake story to get clicks or advance his evil far-right agenda run head-on into the problem of a decade of the same topic being discussed.

Nick Shirley wasn’t the first, or anything near it. But he was the one who broke through, for reasons that can be discovered and elaborated. That’s something to think about as we consider all the things that need to be dragged into the light in a sick political culture.

Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash.

Mark Koran identifies cash being funneled to radical Islamists? Nominative determinism strikes again!

For the local news reporter, I think the problem there is being employee of the network. If he (or they) come right out and say in a public broadcast "this is fraud", then they leave themselves wide open to being sued (see Trump and the BBC, where I do think the Beeb did put its thumb on the scale).

So unless they have good reason to believe the state is looking into this and next week they'll be reporting on the cops showing up to arrest the operators, they have to be careful and festoon the story with "it is said", "some claim", "officials are investigating".

Shirley and those like him, who are in essence one-man-bands who can fall back on "I'm a private citizen", are freer to make such accusations.

Doesn't take away from the Minnesota state government apparently sitting on its hands for years while an entire range of scams went on, but the journalists can only do so much. Now, indeed, it is a question "did they do as much as they could? were they, too, worried about being called racist?" but sometimes the media is hobbled.

This. A suit for libel can destroy your news organization. The bigger the org, the more you are gambling.

Also, it is next to impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that fraud is happening as an individual reporter.

  • "No, this is merely our office address, the actual daycare is elsewhere"
  • "No, we will not tell you where due to security concerns"
  • "No, you can not enroll your own kid, but I will gladly put you on the waiting list and call you if a spot opens up."

Basically, if you can not compel cooperation, you have no way of meeting that level of proof. Even if you knew that a given child was supposed to go to a daycare, observing their flat and confirming that it does not go to a daycare for a week will not prove a thing, because you see, that was just the one week where the daycare was closed, bad luck.

For a government official, things would look very different.

  • "I know from the documentation you submitted that this is supposed to be the site of the daycare"
  • "Oh, they went on a field trip today. Great for them, just give me their location. Keep in mind that I also know the home addresses of all the kids."
  • "Oh, all of the kids called in sick today? That is unfortunate. What are their symptoms? We will just have our official government doctors check in on the kids at home, free of charge."
  • "We just surveilled the entrance of your daycare center for a month and found that no kids ever entered. Have anything to say about that?"

But if the government is willing to sweep everything under the rug (because the truth would help the detested MAGA racists), then you are out of luck.

"No, you can not enroll your own kid, but I will gladly put you on the waiting list and call you if a spot opens up."

Which can indeed be a legitimate excuse, because in our own place we have a waiting list as long as your arm and if we had twice the capacity, we could fill it.

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