Recently, a YouTuber named Nick Shirley went viral after posting a video accusing ten Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota of committing over $100 million tax dollars in fraud.
The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families commissioner Tikki Brown responded by saying:
“We do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously.”
And while the guy has been receiving some heavy criticism from reputable news outlets, journalists, and of course, left-wing advocates, he has actually received public support from Vice President and notorious couch lover, JD Vance.
Now, I’m not saying fraud doesn’t exist in Minnesota. In fact, FBI director Kash Patel has addressed “recent social media reports” about Minnesota, writing in a tweet on December 28th that the bureau had “surged personnel and investigative resources” to the state before the public conversation escalated to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”.
“To date, the FBI dismantled a $250 million fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during COVID. The investigation exposed sham vendors, shell companies, and large-scale money laundering tied to the Feeding Our Future Network,” he said.
However, it was clear as day after watching Shirley’s investigation of him running around different towns harassing daycares run by immigrants, asking them to let his group of masked men see the kids, that his claims were a load of bullshit.
I mean, who in their right mind would allow these people in to a facility responsible for caring for children?
Can you imagine if when you were a kid, some group of middle aged dudes just ran in to your daycare to take pictures and videos of you?
Can you imagine if someone allowed this to happen to your children? I can guarantee that would be the last daycare any of them ever visited after I arrived.
What’s crazy is that quite a lot of right-wingers (not all of course) actually believe this shit. Many of them just hear Somalian daycare with the word fraud added on and assume it must be legitimate.
What’s even funnier or actually depressing is that this Nick Shirley kid is obviously not mentally all there. In fact, after just listening to him for a few minutes, you can clearly tell that he is retarded.
Well, the word retarded isn’t socially acceptable these days, so maybe I should say “slow” or ” intellectually disabled”. Either way, the guy is a complete dumbass.
Although it starts to make more sense when you research his background and upbringing.
See, Nick was essentially homeschooled by his mother Brooke Shirley, who has basically been the sole influence on his life since birth.
His parents, Paul and Brooke, have become figures of interest amid the controversy. Brooke, who goes by Brooker Tee Jones on TikTok and boasts over 250,000 followers, is a right-wing influencer in her own right. She has actively defended her son on national television, appearing on Newsmax to blame Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Democratic leaders for allowing alleged fraud to flourish, rather than criticizing Shirley’s methods.
He reportedly did attend public school for some time but spent most of his childhood under a Mormon upbringing which has its own criticisms and is already considered a joke religion.
The kid’s life is so sad that his mom was also his date to prom.
He didn’t have any friends growing up, never got to experience a real childhood such a high school girlfriend, and never received a proper education. Apparently, he can’t even read at an acceptable level.
Rember the show ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?’?
Well Nick definitely isn’t.
In a video uploaded by Channel 5 YouTuber Andrew Callaghan last Monday, Shirley struggled to understand the definition of the word ‘benevolent.’
“Who do you think are the three most benevolent billionaires?” Callaghan asks.
“What do you mean by the word ‘bellevolent?'” Shirley responds, mispronouncing the word, which means having positive intentions.
After Callaghan defines the word for Shirley, the 23-year-old activist names Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and David Sacks as three most well intentioned billionaires.
The clip of Shirley struggling to answer Callaghan’s question went viral on social media with one user on X writing,
“You can’t argue with people who are this stupid. This guy needs a chaperone, not a Pulitzer. All the people saying Somalis are stupid sound like this guy.”
One of the commentators wrote,
Nick Shirley is so stupid that he had to ask Andrew Callaghan for the definition of “benevolent” and mispronounced it after literally hearing the word two seconds ago.
Internet personality Sneako said, “You’re selling merch that says ‘Learing Center’ making fun of people who can’t spell. Do you not know what the word benevolent means bro?”
Richard Hanania also shared another clip from Callaghan’s interview in which Shirley criticized the interviewer for “not publicly denouncing” the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but when Callaghan explained that he interviewed the man who was debating Kirk when he was shot – and, in that video, he said it was “horrible” what had happened – Shirley said he “doesn’t want to watch” the video:
The sad thing is that while most Americans can obviously tell that Shirley is retarded, it didn’t stop our current administration from taking action that affected real people’s lives.
Following Shirley’s video, the Department of Homeland Security launched a deportation effort in the twin cities aimed at deporting illegal Somali migrants. A DHS spokesperson also added in a statement that the Trump administration is “all hands on deck to root out criminals in Minnesota who are defrauding the American people.”
The Trump admin also threatened to freeze child care funds for the entire state of Minnesota.
Luckily, no arrests have actually been made by the administration over alleged fraud.
The Facts for People Who Aren’t Idiots
The Child Nutrition Program is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and administered by state departments of education like the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). This program operates to provide lunch and in many cases breakfast to schoolchildren from low-income households.
Many thousands of such children in Minnesota have relied on the program for decades to stave off hunger by providing one or two meals per day without cost to the children or their families.
During COVID lockdowns, schools were closed and needy children reliant on free meals lost a vital source of nutrition. In response, the federal government authorized the MDE to expand nutrition providers far beyond school districts to include nonprofits and even for-profit restaurants providing food to any children (and their families) that showed up to collect it.
For reasons that are easily understandable in the midst of a pandemic, food recipients did not have to apply for the program at all, let alone verify their identities or document their need.
A 2024 legislative auditor’s report documents in excruciating detail how lax MDE oversight allowed the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, led by Aimee Bock, to exploit this wide-open system to create, promote, recruit and proliferate scam operations in which the children to whom they claimed to serve hundreds of thousands of meals simply didn’t exist.
The result has been dozens of indictments culminating in dozens of criminal convictions. While almost all of those criminally charged (so far) have been East African, Feeding Our Future’s leader and the architect of the entire scheme — Bock — is a white woman.
The fraud model of Feeding Our Future that Shirley assumed doesn’t transfer to child care because the CCAP program works differently in ways that make it impossible for “fake day cares” to exist. CCAP funds are provided by the federal Department of Health and Human Services and are administered by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF).
Rather than being accessed by day care providers directly, CCAP funds must be applied for by parents, who have to provide documentation to county DCYF agencies of their children’s identities and ages and of their particular needs for child-care services in light of the parent’s employment schedule. Once a CCAP authorization is approved, the parents take the CCAP authorization to a licensed day care provider, who is then permitted to bill DCYF up to the amount of the CCAP authorization for day care services they actually provide to the parent’s children.
Day care providers are required to maintain detailed attendance records, which are spot-checked during annual (sometimes semiannual) visits from DCYF inspectors. Day care providers must also meet detailed health and safety requirements in order to keep their licenses.
Day care providers that fail to keep complete and accurate attendance records can and frequently are barred from receiving CCAP funds, and some day care providers have been criminally charged for fraud based on allegations that they exaggerated attendance numbers. DCYF investigators also visit each licensed day care at least annually to ensure compliance with health and safety requirements.
It is true that fraud does exist involving the CCAP program, and it usually comes in the form of billing for services provided to more children than are actually present on a given day. Fraud can also result from day care providers that pay parents to come to the center to watch over their own children in the center rather than watching them at home. But DCYF and its precursor DHS has investigated and successfully prosecuted such cases for many years, and they didn’t need Shirley’s help to find them.
Once you understand how the CCAP system actually works, Shirley’s indicators of fraud evaporate back into the cloud of ignorance and bigotry whence they arose. In the CCAP system, it is simply impossible to have “fake day cares” with no children like Shirley claimed to find because there would be no way to get a CCAP authorization for fake children and no way for a day care provider to bill the government without the CCAP authorization.
And the fraud that does exist can be found in any area of the state; it is not unique to Somalis like Shirley claims. In fact, it is probably much easier to do in rural areas of the state, where DCYF enforcement resources are thinner than in the Twin Cities metro area.
The locked doors and unusual operating hours that Shirley identified are also easily explained. Locked doors are for the protection of the children within. Would you want your children cared for in an unlocked day care where any random person can come in off the street?
Any day care that allowed Shirley and his posse in would likely lose its license and rightly so. And operating hours that start at 2 p.m. — like those of at least one of the day cares Shirley visited earlier in the day— are the natural result of serving a population of working parents that contains a lot of service workers and health-care workers in jobs that do not fit the white-collar 9-5 workday.
Similarly, a day care located at the same location as a previous day care is nothing suspicious because the space vacated by a defunct day care likely has the health and safety features required for a day care license, limiting the startup costs of the new day care.
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