An Intense White House Response From a Single Viral Video

A video purporting to expose extensive fraud at child care centers in Minnesota shows the relationship between the Trump administration and self-described citizen journalists.

A 43-minute video posted online in the past week, purporting to expose extensive fraud at Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota, has been viewed by millions of people. It has also set off a series of events that show the symbiotic relationship between the Trump administration and self-described citizen journalists.

It was posted to X and YouTube the day after Christmas by Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old who has made a name for himself in the past two years by producing viral content that aligns with MAGA policies. In the video, Mr. Shirley is accompanied by a man identified only as David, who claims to have uncovered fraud worse than “anywhere else ever in history.”

Specifically, the man says he has identified dozens of child care and autism centers receiving millions of dollars in state funding without caring for any children.

The New York Times could not verify the claims made in the video. Mainstream news sites have reported on cases of social services fraud in Minnesota for years, including a 2,200-word article in The Times last month. But Mr. Shirley’s video hit a nerve, generating attention from conservative media outlets like Fox News and praise from top Republican officials. “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes,” Vice President JD Vance posted on X on Saturday.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into the centers. On Tuesday evening, Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, said on X that the federal government had “frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota.”

The scale of the reaction to Mr. Shirley’s video has few precedents, but it highlights the way the White House seeds narratives about key issues, then rewards sympathetic creators who deliver viral content. That content need not be new, or even particularly revelatory, to succeed.

Equipped with little more than iPhones, Mr. Shirley and other right-wing YouTubers and livestreamers zigzag around the country — and overseas — in search of politically charged footage. In many cases, these digital activists pick up on themes that have circulated for months, or even years, but still generate online outrage and action from a government primed to jump into the fray.

“It’s mutual back-scratching,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how social media is used to disseminate propaganda. “They all have goals that align, and they’re all pointed in the same direction.”

Over the past two years, pro-Trump content creators have covered dozens of protests, political rallies and natural disasters; marched with anti-Muslim activists; and embedded with immigration officials on raids.

An example of the feedback loop in action: Days after President Trump announced on Truth Social in late September that he would deploy “all necessary Troops” to defend “War ravaged Portland,” Nick Sortor, a popular livestreamer, flew to Oregon to cover the protests.

After arriving, he was accused of disorderly conduct and briefly arrested. Attorney General Pam Bondi called him upon his release to say she had ordered a civil rights investigation of Portland’s police department for “viewpoint discrimination.” A few days later, he went on a ride-along in Portland with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.

The next week, Mr. Sortor was one of a dozen content creators invited to the White House for a discussion of the antifa movement attended by Mr. Trump; Ms. Bondi; Ms. Noem; Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff. Mr. Trump called the attendees “very brave patriots,” adding that he would consider awarding them “some very important medals and honors.”

Mr. Shirley, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, was also at that event.

His aspiration for YouTube fame dated back to high school in Utah, where he grew up outside Salt Lake City. He stopped posting on the platform four years ago, when he traveled to Chile as a young missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Until then, his videos were mostly goofy — sneaking into exclusive events, pranking friends and jumping off perilously tall objects.

But weeks after his return to the United States, in late 2023, Mr. Shirley pivoted to more political content, applying a distinctively low-key, nuance-free tone to hot-button issues like immigration, pro-Gaza demonstrations on college campuses and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. The videos took off. Within six months, he had surpassed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

He started with posts from the Mexican border and a few months later traveled to El Salvador, where he said he was the first American to film inside the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, a prison known as CECOT. He roamed the streets of Springfield, Ohio, amplifying false rumors, spread by Mr. Trump, that Haitian immigrants there had been eating dogs and cats.

Mr. Shirley has filmed immigration protests in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago and embedded with the U.S. Marshals Service. In September, he confronted a group of men selling what appear to be counterfeit watches in Lower Manhattan, calling them “illegal scammers.” Less than a month later, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested several of the same men in a targeted raid.

Little has proved as viral as his portrayal of Somalis in Minnesota. Mr. Shirley traveled to the state in July to cover what he called “the rise of Islam” with on-the-street interviews of Somali Americans. He returned soon after Mr. Trump, during a televised cabinet meeting early this month, called members of the diaspora “garbage” who had “ripped off” taxpayers.

Mr. Shirley’s latest video appears to have been filmed on Dec. 17 in and around Minneapolis, where he knocks on the doors of numerous child care and autism centers. In some cases, there is no answer. When someone does open up, Mr. Shirley demands to see whether there are children inside but is never shown any.

At each stop, Mr. Shirley, citing state billing records, announces that the operation is fraudulent because he does not see any children. All told, he claims to have personally uncovered $110 million in fraud.

Prosecutors have exposed financial abuses in Minnesota’s social safety net programs for years. They brought charges in 2022 and have since said they believe more than $9 billion was stolen across several of the programs. To date, 98 people have been charged, nearly all of them Somali Americans.

According to the state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families, one of the locations Mr. Shirley visited, Mako Childcare Center, has been out of business for three years. Another location, Quality Learning Center, got particular attention because Mr. Shirley noticed that a sign over its door misspelled “Learning” as “Learing.” State regulators have documented several lapses at the business for years, including failure to keep hazardous items away from children and inadequate record keeping. None were related to fraud.

“We don’t know if children were or were not present at the time the video was taken,” the Department of Children, Youth and Families said in a statement regarding the video. “When our licensers have conducted visits to the buildings,” it added, “there have been children present.”

At a news conference this week, the head of the department said regulators had conducted unannounced visits at all of the sites in the video this year and found no evidence of fraud. The businesses have not been mentioned in any of the recent criminal cases.

Mr. Shirley first posted a clip from a child care center on X on Dec. 23 and published the full video on Friday. It has racked up more than 128 million views, according to the platform’s statistics.

On Monday, Ms. Noem posted that Homeland Security Investigations agents were “on the ground in Minneapolis right now conducting a massive investigation on childcare and other rampant fraud.” Mr. Patel chimed in, announcing an F.B.I. surge in the state. “We will continue to follow the money and protect children,” he wrote on X.

In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said that “the country should be deeply appreciative to Shirley for shining a light on this issue — the legacy media should take notes.” (Among the news organizations that have covered the issue extensively are The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Minnesota Reformer, Sahan Journal, Minnesota Public Radio and local television stations.)

Mr. Trump had largely ignored the issue until last month, after City Journal, a publication affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, made the jarring and unsubstantiated claim that money from the fraud schemes was a major funding source for Al Shabab, a terrorist group.

Renee DiResta, a social media researcher at Georgetown University, said Mr. Shirley’s story appeared to have all the elements embraced by the administration and sympathetic influencers: fraud, immigration, Islam and race, all wrapped up in a blue state run by the latest Democratic nominee for vice president, Gov. Tim Walz, who is running for re-election.

“They have the political goal of cultivating the energy from these things,” she said. “They seed the allegations; all it takes is for someone to go and try to find evidence to support it.”

Mr. Shirley has enjoyed a huge boost as a result of the attention, adding about 170,000 YouTube subscribers in the past week and pushing his total above 1.25 million, according to Social Blade, a tracking site. After Andrew Tate, a manosphere influencer, asked on social media how he could donate money, Mr. Shirley posted addresses for two crypto wallets. Mr. Shirley has in recent days posted multiple times calling for Mr. Walz to be prosecuted.

On Monday night, another Trump-supporting creator, Anthony Rubin, posted a video showing himself knocking on the door of a child care center in Columbus, Ohio, that he said was “associated with the Somali community.” Nobody answered.

“We’re just getting started,” he said.

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