Active Cultural Sonar: The Reaction to the Nick Shirley Video is Telling Us a Bunch of Things

which produced seventeen splashes and a drum solo

The echoes are as important as the shout, because the magnificent Somali daycare fraud video is once again showing us the infinite strangeness of the post-information era, the era of hyperreality and pseudo-reality. Direct questions produce distractions, misdirections, accusations, and a tapdancing road tour, but no answers.

First, as predictably as the sunrise, Nick Shirley is literally invading Poland. He’s a TERRIFYING WHITE SUPREMACIST and an EVIL ZIONIST NAZI who is ATTACKING INNOCENT MUSLIMS with his cleverly concocted lies.

Right, there are no children in those Somali daycare centers, iS tHaT whAt tHe jEWs toLd yOu tO saYYAYYYYY!?!? Something something Jews something something, the old standby. Apparently Tim Walz has also called Nick Shirley a racist, because I can find video of Nick Shirley responding to that attack, but I can’t find video of Tim Walz executing the attack, because Tim Walz is such a pissant nobody that he’s basically disappearing. Actual photo of Governor Tim Walz this morning, a meaningless speck in a field of empty space:

.

See the little dot? It governs Minnesota.

Anyway, we’ve watched versions of this cycle over and over again. The “attacking the messenger” tactic is too tedious a response to waste much time on it, but quick reminder: For a couple of years, it was a vicious lie to claim that there’s any corruption or war-related grift in Ukraine, with warnings about disinformation ops and Russian bots and OMFG YOU LOVE PUTIN, until the dangerous disinformation became merely an obvious reality.

2024:

2025:

The “disinformation” scam is still a scam, and the Mary Poppins gatekeepers are still mostly trying to keep you from perceiving reality. The “law of merited impossibility” remains as real as gravity: It’s a conspiracy theory to say that this is happening, and also it is very good that this is happening.

Rob Henderson@robkhenderson

Step 1: It's not really happening Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal Step 3: It's a good thing, actually Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem

9:45 AM · Jun 14, 2021

---

121 Replies · 1.77K Reposts · 10.5K Likes

So I can see the next six weeks in my head. Nick Shirley is a liar, and and and uh of course there were no children in some of those daycare centers, but there’s a perfectly good explanation, and anyway why are you being such a jerk about this isn’t it time to move on?

Second, one of the most common reactions to the video is to say that the mainstream media wouldn’t dare to report on this, and Nick Shirley is the first person to ever have the balls to point out Somali fraud in Minnesota. But that’s not true at all, and the strange fact is that many conventional journalists have been reporting on it for a long time. There are obvious reasons for the difference in reactions, but hold on a minute. This story is seven years old:

This one is eleven months old:

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.

To be continued.