The Minnesota fraud story has become one of the biggest trending topics in quite a while. Nick Shirley, the independent conservative YouTuber who published a 42-minute documentary on the subject, has racked up 2.5 million views in just five days. Commentary on the various aspects of this scandal, from Democratic Gov. Tim Walz's culpability to Somali immigration and where the money went, has gone insanely viral on social media and YouTube, and cable news is now covering the subject relentlessly.

You are reading Free Media from Robby Soave and Reason. Get more of Robby's on-the-media, disinformation, and free speech coverage.

Shirley has received unending acclaim from conservative commentators—Vice President J.D. Vance implied his work was worthy of a Pulitzer Prize—and a neutral-to-hostile reception from the mainstream media. Outlets like CNN are working to poke holes in some of his specific claims, while acknowledging there is plenty of evidence of fraud throughout the state's welfare system.

I watched Shirley's video, and I admit that it left me feeling conflicted. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that he's not a professional or credentialed journalist; journalism is not a priesthood, and anyone who seeks to report the truth can engage in the craft. Great works of investigative journalism have been achieved by amateurs. Consider Guan Heng, the former Chinese citizen who took it upon himself to document the communist government's atrocities in Uyghur detention camps. In visiting state-funded child care facilities to see if they're actually enrolling children, Shirley was doing something perfectly valid. Moreover, we all know there is a considerable amount of fraud in state services: Prosecutors have charged nearly 100 people, most of them members of the Somali diaspora, in connection with fake charity schemes, Medicare payments, and child care.

Critics have countered that Shirley's methods lack rigor and have questioned whether he visited the daycares during their actual hours of operation. His video draws attention to the fact that the front doors of the daycares were locked and no one would let him in, but in an era of mass social panic over school shootings (which are thankfully rarer than most people understand), there is no daycare in the country that would permit a stranger to simply walk right in. Some local reporters have suggested that the reason Shirley didn't see any kids is because the centers in question had already closed down.

On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake to dismiss what Shirley found, and there's some genuine confusion over the state of the daycares. Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families, explained that numerous childcare facilities had been investigated for serious safety issues, though they continued to receive public funding. One daycare that is featured significantly in Shirley's video, the Quality Learning Center, was permanently closed the week before he visited it, yet local television reporters spotted children still being dropped off at the center. Moreover, the fact that the name of the center is misspelled on the sign hanging above the door does not inspire great confidence. (Anyone want to enroll their child at the Quality Learing Center?)

This school, in particular, seemed beset with problems. One local report contended that the Quality Learning Center had accrued 95 violations over the course of five years for offenses such as failing to keep hazardous materials away from children and improperly keeping records on who was enrolled. Yet the center continued to receive millions in state funding during that time period.

What's notable about that local news item, however, is that it was published almost a year ago, on January 28, 2025. As Reason's Eric Boehm pointed out in his excellent explainer on the welfare fraud story, conservative complaints that no one in the media paid any attention to the story until now are demonstrably false: Local media has been covering Minnesota child care fraud as far back as 2015.

It is true that the story did not become a topic of national news until conservative writer Christopher Rufo began focusing on it. Since then, however, some large media organizations have done commendable work on the story. The New York Times, for instance, published a devastating report on the fraud that laid the blame very squarely on Walz.

Even so, the welfare fraud story has not exactly attracted wall-to-wall coverage from mainstream media, even though it is obvious that these kinds of schemes are hardly isolated to Minnesota or to the Somali community: Taxpayer dollars are misappropriated, lost, or stolen in blue states and in red states alike. Moreover, Walz's selection as Vice President Kamala Harris's running mate in the 2024 presidential election was a perfect opportunity for the national media to follow up on the local fraud reports and make this a big story. For whatever reason, they chose not to.

Conservative media is big and powerful too, though. It's always a bit rich when we hear Republican commentators complaining that the mainstream media has failed to investigate one news story or another, when conservative and independent media journalists are perfectly capable of looking into this as well. To be sure, there are powerful examples of nonmainstream reporters doing incredible work on a wide variety of underscrutinized topics: Gabe Kaminsky, Matt Taibbi, Ken Klippenstein, and others. Sometimes, their work goes unremarked upon by mainstream media, even when it deserves coverage—and then, when it is covered, the mainstream adopts the "Republicans pounce and or/seize" framing.

If mainstream, establishment national media treated the widespread looting of the public coffers as an urgent crisis that deserved at least as much scrutiny as, say, President Donald Trump's renovation of the East Wing, this would constitute a profound public service. American taxpayers and news consumers deserve a media class that is highly attuned to government corruption at the federal, state, and local levels.

A Walz Around the Welfare State

For what it's worth, Walz is doing an absolutely terrible job of reassuring the public that he actually cares about identifying and prosecuting fraud. It's all well and good to push back against attempts to blame the entire Somali community for perpetrating the fraud, but Walz has a weird habit of shifting accountability by highlighting the criminality of "white men." If you assert that we should ignore crude racial collectivization and then immediately claim that actually white people are the real problem, you are not helping yourself.

Grounded

But the worst take of the week relating to this story comes from Politico's Josh Gerstein, who wrote on X: "At some point, the amateur effort to knock on doors of home daycares intersects with robust stand-your-ground laws."

At some point, the amateur effort to knock on doors of home daycares intersects with robust stand-your-ground laws

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) December 30, 2025

These two things don't intersect at all. Stand-your-ground laws establish the right of individuals not to retreat from dangerous situations and instead defend themselves, as long as they have the legal right to be there in the first place. You can't shoot someone just because they knocked on your door; that's because knocking on someone's door isn't placing them in danger.

And a special shoutout to leftist streamer Hasan Piker—who recently returned from a Jane Fonda-style propaganda tour of China—who opined that it was a crime to barge into a daycare with a camera.

idk what kind of fraud somalis in daycares are doing but i think it's a separate crime to try and storm w a camera into a daycare w kids in it??

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) December 28, 2025

Piker apparently didn't watch the video, either. Shirley knocked on the door: He did not break into the premises of the Quality Learning Center, or any other center.

---

This Week on Free Media

No Niall Stanage this week, but I am joined by Amber Duke to break down the welfare fraud story, Trump alienating Joe Rogan, and our top entertainment choices of the year. Please subscribe to the Free Media YouTube channel—we've got big plans in 2026!

---

Worth Watching

We spent Christmas in Detroit with my dad, which means rewatching all my family's favorite Christmas movies: Jim Carey's How the Grinch Stole Christmas (which I find delightfully weird despite its mixed reception), the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol (a real gem), and It's a Wonderful Life. That last one has never been my favorite, but apparently Christian Britschgi has thoughts and we plan to address it on FREED UP this week. (Are you watching FREED UP? You should be!)

We also watched the first of the new Dune movies, which my dad likes less than the 1984 version. Talk about a spice-y take! (Get it?)