The Nick Shirley Effect: One Citizen Journalist Did What the Media Wouldn’t—and It Went Viral
Now people are asking how to crowdfund the next one.
This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Tyler Durden
The Democratic Party entered Monday morning facing a massive firestorm following the viral spread of citizen journalist Nick Shirley’s on-the-ground bombshell investigation into alleged Somali-linked daycare centers siphoning taxpayer funds and operating as apparent front companies.
Shirley’s exposé earned 111 million views on X within three days, significantly increasing public awareness of what appears to be large-scale welfare fraud in Minnesota. The magnitude of the alleged welfare fraud suggests systemic failures in Democrat-run government oversight, with a high probability that irregularities occurred at the local, county, and potentially state levels.
The Democratic Party’s propaganda machine would usually be firing on all cylinders in corporate media outlets at about now to counter the welfare fraud narrative, labeling anyone who investigated or even questioned the suspiciously run Somali-linked child daycare, adult and autism care, home health care, and non-emergency medical transportation industries raking in taxpayer funds as “racists” and “fascists.”
Well, Forbes appears to have received its marching orders.
Continued silence from much of the corporate media only reinforces what we already know: MSM acts less as news organizations and more as de facto public relations firms for Democrats.
Shirley’s exposé was a left-field event for Democrats, as it exposed state-level fraud - something Elon Musk and DOGE had been attempting to uncover and dismantle at the federal level. Instead, recall that earlier this year, Democrats mobilized the protest-industrial complex of dark-money-funded NGOs against Musk and Tesla. There was even alarming left-wing terrorism against Tesla showrooms.
Let’s not forget what happened here...
What America First is beginning to understand is that the success of exposing welfare fraud in Minnesota through a citizen-journalist model needs to be replicated across blue states in a coordinated blitz campaign that overwhelms whatever narrative control the Democratic Party’s propaganda machine still retains.
SPAC King Chamath Palihapitiya on X wrote, “I trust @Cernovich instincts here. If he thinks a grant program can unlock tens of investigative journalists to uncover the breadth and scale of California, many people will support it.”
Palihapitiya’s response was directed at an X user’s idea about a crowdfunding grant program to support citizen journalists who expose fraud in California.
What could soon emerge is an early, crowdfunded, DOGE-like network of citizen journalists - funded by tech bros, supported by private investigators, guided by tips and prior research, and aimed at systematically exposing and documenting alleged Democratic Party fraud across blue states. Such an effort could flood the news cycle with so many egregious fraud cases that Democrats would face immense difficulty mounting any compelling counter-narrative.
This is info war gearing up before midterm election cycle.
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Due to the risks involved, I’ve always respected foreign correspondents and especially admired those covering active war zones. Nevertheless, too much of contemporary ‘journalism’ seems motivated more by a paycheck and publication (‘a buck and a byline’) than a genuine strive to expose thus challenge the corrupt powerful who abuse/exploit those with the least in this increasingly unjust global existence.
Particularly with Israel’s systematic mass slaughter and starvation of Gazan non-combatants young and old, too many mainstream news outlets have been, to put it mildly, editorially emasculated.
Though it may be due to orders from ownership headquarters (perhaps including even that of the supposedly anti-Semitic Guardian newspaper) and therefore beyond their control, I also strongly feel it’s the ethical and moral duty of Western journalists and editors with integrity to publicly expose the compromised news-media product and therefor its facilitator(s). By doing so, such brave journalists can at least then also proclaim they will no longer participate in its creation and/or dissemination.
Over decades, I’ve heard of too many cases of employees not standing up and doing what is necessary for the public and/or human(e) good, instead excusing themselves with something like: ‘I need this job — I have a family to support’. I have to say that — unless, of course, they were actually forced into coupling, copulating and procreating however many years before — such familial obligation status does not actually ethically or morally justify their willing involvement.
Quite frankly, journalists/editors with genuine integrity should and would tender their resignations and even publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s media product, whether it involves self-censored or missing coverage of a brutally lopsided foreign war or that of domestic corporate corruption that will harm the populace.