Who Is Nick Shirley?

My VIP for this week is Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old man who posted a 42-minute video of himself and David exposing fraud in the Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Four days after his video posted, it had more than 127 million times on X and 2 million times on YouTube, according to Eva Terry at the Deseret News. 

Shirley lives in Farmington, Utah, and served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chili. In November, President Donald Trump presented the Citizen Journalist of the Year award to him at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

I saw an article on Shirley and his video on Friday. Within days, articles about him were everywhere. Terry’s article explained:

At the beginning of the video, Shirley interviewed the Minnesota-native, David (whose last name was not included), on why he started suspecting fraud in his state. David said he began noticing childcare facilities popping up around his office in Minneapolis, but no children would go in or out.

“All I’d see were a couple of guys outside smoking, and I’d go by another one and see the same thing, and I said, ‘Where do these kids play?’” David said. When he started looking into one of the daycares, he found that it was licensed to serve 80 children. His investigation unfolded from there.

Clad in a grey sweatshirt, Shirley went from daycare to daycare in Minneapolis, knocking on doors. With David next to him, Shirley asked adults at the daycares if there were any children present and what they thought about the allegations of fraud.

One daycare Shirley visited, the “Quality Learing [sic] Center,” has garnered exceptional scrutiny online.

When The New York Post went to the site on Monday, they found the parking lot full of cars and saw about 20 children coming in and out of the building – a scene drastically different from the one Shirley observed.

A local told the Post, the scene Monday was “highly unusual,” adding, “We’ve never seen kids go in there until today. That parking lot is empty all the time, and I was under the impression that place is permanently closed.” …

After Shirley and David made their rounds at Minneapolis childcare facilities, they headed over to an office building with 14 Somali-owned health care companies.

Shirley’s investigation builds on the work done by journalists Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, who shed light on Minnesota’s Medicare and Medicaid fraud in City Journal at the end of November. Their investigation quoted then-acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson, as he announced several indictments for alleged fraudsters.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just over-billing,” Thompson said. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”