Right-wing influencers who brought mayhem to Minnesota are now targeting California
A month after the Trump administration began its immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, right-wing creators are turning their attention to a new target in search of fraud: California.
Over the last few weeks, right-wing creators who were instrumental in boosting the Minnesota fraud allegations that predated the administration’s surge of federal immigration agents have been going after a number of California’s social welfare programs, making unsubstantiated accusations of fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork for a similar federal crackdown in the nation’s largest Democrat-run state. They’re already getting support from some of President Donald Trump’s key allies too.
Nick Shirley, the right-wing influencer whose viral YouTube video claimed to uncover a purported $100 million fraud scheme involving Somali childcare centers in Minnesota, posted to Instagram over the weekend announcing his arrival in California. “Secrets out,” Shirley wrote in an Instagram story set to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” It’s unclear what exactly Shirley plans to do, but he claims to be “investigating” Somali-run childcare centers in California as well, according to posts that circulated on X over the weekend.
Shirley is working with Amy Reichert, a private investigator and failed politician who claims to be investigating “ghost daycares” in California. In his Minnesota video, Shirley “investigated” the fraud by showing up to daycares asking to see children. He appears to be applying the same method in San Diego. Reichert posted a picture with Shirley to X on Saturday, writing “California, here we come! When @nickshirlye drops the video, it’s going to be 🔥.” (Local Minnesota outlets published multiple stories covering childcare fraud years before Shirley’s video came out.)
On Sunday, Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump creator and Turning Point USA contributor, published his own “documentary,” in a similar vein to what Shirley filmed in Minnesota. In it, he claimed to reveal a multimillion-dollar “homeless industrial complex” in California. Johnson teamed up with two Republican gubernatorial candidates, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, a former adviser to UK prime minister David Cameron, in the video, which they claimed was an attempt to uncover fraudulent uses of federal funding to support California’s unhoused. Johnson also claimed that the state was “using these federal dollars to rig national elections.”
California governor Gavin Newsom’s office rejected the claims Johnson made in an X post on Sunday, calling the video “literally the conspiracy theory meme in real life.”
Johnson’s most recent video attempts to claim that California’s homeless shelters are primarily filled with undocumented immigrants. His main piece of evidence is a phone call with a purported “whistleblower” whose identity was concealed. (Newsom’s office responded to this claim, calling it “as real as our Free Unicorn for all undocumented people program.”) [Continue reading…]
Shirley might be called a third-generation influencer. His grandmother Lolita, who died last summer, was a dance teacher whose obituary said she performed on the “Late Show With David Letterman” in the late 1990s. In later years, she maintained an Instagram account where she branded herself Grandma Savage (a nickname from Mr. Shirley) and chased the goal of appearing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
An older brother, Ryan, is also now a successful content creator, with 827,000 subscribers to his YouTube videos about travel destinations.
But it is Mr. Shirley’s mother, Brooke, who helped steer his political turn when he got back from his [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] mission [to Chile]. Ms. Shirley has almost 300,000 followers on TikTok, where she calls herself a citizen journalist and has posted from many of the same scenes in Mr. Shirley’s videos. Mr. Shirley has referred to his mother as his producer. When he returned from Chile fluent in Spanish and inspired to try something new, it was his mother who suggested that he travel to the border to film.
“When he got home from his mission, I was like, ‘I know what we need to do,’ she told a reporter for The Columbia Journalism Review last fall. “He hadn’t been living in America. I was feeding him information. ‘Ask this, do this.’” [Continue reading…]