A viral video by right-wing YouTube creator Nick Shirley, which he claims shows nurseries siphoning off public money, is now under scrutiny on social media.
Nick Shirley’s video — which blew up on X with 127 million views and repeated airplay on Fox News — resonated in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) circles.
It was also shared by US Vice President JD Vance and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“This guy has done far more useful journalism than any of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prize winners,” Vance wrote while sharing Nick Shirley’s video on X.
Meanwhile, Musk said: “A scam is a scam and it doesn’t matter what race someone is.”
What does a viral video show?
Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old self-described “freelance YouTube journalist,” posted a 42-minute video on X and YouTube the day after Christmas.
He argued that nearly a dozen day care centers in Minnesota that receive public funds do not actually provide any services.
In it, he and an elderly man – identified only as “David” – were seen visiting empty daycare centers, bombarding Somali staff with questions and accusing them of not serving any child despite receiving public funds.
They claimed to have uncovered more than $110 million in fraud.
what happened after that
While several reports claimed that the Trump administration ifreezing childcare funding to the state of Minnesota in response to the viral video, the video itself came under the scrutiny of social media users and media houses.
On Tuesday, CBS News reporter Jonah Kaplan posted a video shared on the X CBS News account, offering his “own analysis” of nearly a dozen training centers Shirley visited in his viral video.
Kaplan said in his video that while the locations Shirley singled out received citations for safety and cleanliness issues, there was no evidence of fraud.
“We’ve visited those sites as well, as have state inspectors many times over the past six months, and we’ve found the facts on the ground to be otherwise,” Kaplan said.
“These daycares, a lot of them have been written up for safety violations, things like maybe broken equipment or staff training issues, but that’s not the same as being fraudulent, so it’s important to put it all in context,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan’s video drew widespread backlash for not showing their investigation, leading to a response from Shirley himself.
“Why don’t you go to the nursery yourself and see for yourself. Or you can just keep yapping in selfie mode,” Shirley wrote on X.
Meanwhile, CNN also said it was investigating Shirley’s claim that this and other day care centers in the Minneapolis area were committing fraud.
CNN grills Shirley
In CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” segment, reporter Whitney Wild confronts Shirley outside one of the centers featured in his viral video, which gained particular attention for its misspelled sign, “Center for Quality Learning.”
“Did you come during normal business hours when you came to visit?” Wild asked.
“I came in at 11 o’clock, I believe, and then another day later too. It’s not that I came at the right time for their hours, it’s that – blacked out door, they can’t give you any information, you call that number, no one answers,” Shirley replied in a sweatshirt mocking the center’s typo.
“I wasn’t trying to go in and there should be a way for someone to actually call that number and have someone answer it. These are not real businesses,” he added.
“But surely you don’t think daycare should be unlocked? You shouldn’t be able to just walk into childcare,” says Wild.
