After YouTuber Nick Shirley’s viral video alleging fraud at Minnesota day care centers that he said were being used by Somali citizens, the Donald Trump administration responded by flooding the country with immigration agents and freezing child care funds. (A judge ruled that the federal government should continue to fund child care subsidies, at least temporarily.) Now Shirley is back on the prowl outside of child care facilities again, this time in California.
Over the weekend, the 23-year-old posted a photo of himself with the caption “Hello California I’m here.” Like his last video, featuring a “source” that was later identified by The Intercept as a far-right political candidate and publisher, Shirley seems to have a local guide: Amy Reichert, a right-wing activist from San Diego who is running for local office. He said to X that he spent two days with Shirley “looking at learning centers” in the city. The accompanying photo appears to show the two of them – the phone tripled – out of business.
Shirley’s playbook is essentially to pull public records from licensed child care centers, seeking citations or reports from state inspectors that she or her “sources” find suspicious. He then visits child care centers and, in the case of the Minneapolis video, wants to “see the children” in the provider’s care. In Minneapolis, the refusal to allow Shirley and her team to visit the daycare centers was taken as evidence that the business was a sham – a claim not supported by follow-up visits. (Maybe a good daycare shouldn’t allow a random YouTuber around their kids?) Subsequent visits by state inspectors found that children were present at the daycares Shirley visited and that they were “functioning as expected.”
Although Shirley has yet to post a video about San Diego, local childcare providers have already reported abuse. One provider told a local newspaper that he came home with the children he was looking after and found two men with a camera outside his house who ended up leaving when he entered with the children.
“For more than a month, Somali child care providers have endured abuse from cyber vigilantes who died for exposing fraud in California’s highly regulated state child care system,” Doug Moore, executive director of the United Domestic Workers of America, said in a statement Tuesday. “In this program, they stalk and threaten our members in their homes and business areas. These instigators planted the seeds of hatred and mistrust in our neighbors after taking over from the president who called the Somali people ‘trash.’ We appreciate our Somali members and their contributions to our families, our union and our communities.”
Shirley’s online presence is as much MAGA propaganda as it is algorithm bait – I described her last week as a “slopagandist” like late 19th century yellow journalism, brought back to age. His content is repetitive, with recurring video titles and recurring themes and filming locations. Unlike a true imagination, Shirley will go wherever the audience’s analysis takes her. In the meantime, the algorithm takes him to day care centers.
