He’s received support from US vice president JD Vance and X/Twitter owner Elon Musk, but 23-year-old influencer Nick Shirley is currently being branded "illiterate” following an interview with Channel 5 YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, released on Monday.
So who exactly is Nick Shirley?
Well, the content creator has gained a lot of attention for accusing Somali-run daycares in Minnesota of fraud - with Vance claiming Shirley “has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes”.
Yes, really.
At the end of last year, Shirley uploaded a 42-minute video in which he alleged 10 Somali-American-run daycare centres had misappropriated “upwards of $100 million” in taxpayer funds.
Yet, while being interviewed by CNN, caregivers were seen dropping off their children at a daycare centre – something Shirley dismissed as “showing face”.
While questioning some of the methods used by Shirley in the upload, Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families commissioner Tikki Brown said: “We do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously.”
FBI director Kash Patel has also addressed “recent social media reports” about Minnesota, writing in a tweet on 28 December 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.
The Department of Homeland Security said on 31 December that the Trump administration is “all hands on deck to root out criminals in Minnesota who are defrauding the American people”.
Minnesota, of course, being where the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent occurred last week.
On Friday, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins announced the suspension of “federal financial awards” to Minnesota and Minneapolis “until sufficient proof has been provided that the fraud has stopped”.
Then, on Monday, an interview between Shirley and Callaghan went live on YouTube, in which the former mispronounced the word “benevolent”, and was subsequently mocked by X/Twitter users:
Writer Richard Hanania tweeted: “This is literally their favorite journalist”:
“This is the guy who dunks on ‘learing’,” noted another, pointing to merchandise sold by Shirley:
Hanania also shared another clip from Callaghan’s interview in which Shirley criticised 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:
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