I’m surprised the Republican hate campaign against Tim Walz that forced him out of reelection as governor of Minnesota and takes out a plausible candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2028 hasn’t gotten more attention. It’s not that the welfare fraud in the Somali community in Minnesota isn’t a worthy story–it’s not great, for sure. A certain amount of fraud is inevitable whenever you have government doing anything, see the faking of benefits across the country during the Covid epidemic as just one of many examples. And maybe Walz’s administration should have paid more attention. But this could happen under any governor’s watch.
The traction the story got was a perfect example of what Democrats completely fail to do – marshal media resources and a propaganda pipeline that creates pressure on the opposite party and sometimes knocks the head off someone. In fact, everything about this story and the destruction of Walz shows how Democrats have learned precisely nothing from the entire world of the Republican machine. Since the election, there has been absolutely nothing done to rethink media approaches, promote alternative media, ratfuck Republicans, and engage in the dirty tricks that matter. “When they go low, we go high” in some serious bullshit, fuck that! That’s loser politics. But it isn’t just Chuck and Hakeem’s terrible approach to these issues, it’s the everyday liberal voter. We don’t do that is such a common thing among liberals. Yeah, it’s why Democrats lose.
Well, Walz is gone and the story as it developed is just wildly, incredibly overblown. Amanda Marcotte has a good perspective on this, looking at one of the far-right lunatics behind it:
Nick Shirley really wants the world to know that he’s never had sex. The YouTuber who moved from “prank” videos to the more lucrative world of creating MAGA disinformation apparently believes that sexual inexperience is an armor against accusations that he’s a liar. “I’m a virgin. I don’t have sex with random girls. You’re not gonna catch me on those sexual allegation charges,” he rambled on “PBD Podcast,” insisting that he is “religious” and doesn’t “have any vices.”
It was an odd rant, and not just because he conflated consensual hook-ups with rape. Shirley was responding to well-supported allegations that he’s perpetuating a racist hoax to terrorize Somali American day care workers in Minnesota. On the day after Christmas, the 23-year-old posted videos falsely accusing various day care centers of not having any real children as their charges, and then billing the federal government for fake work.
A simple viewing of the videos shows they are nonsense. Upon visiting the day cares, Shirley and his middle-aged male partner, David, discover the centers have locked their doors and won’t let them in to gawk at the children. This isn’t proof there are no children. Ideally, not answering the door is how any responsible caregiver would respond to strange, yelling men demanding to come in and film kids. But conservative audiences, ever eager to hear Black people are committing crimes, ignored that logic and spread the video rapidly online.
A deeper dig shows even more how ridiculous this situation is. Shirley has a history of dishonesty, which includes paying immigrant laborers to hold pro-Biden signs, clearly hoping voters would think they were self-motivated. In another video, he claimed Portland had “fallen” and “antifa” had taken “control of the city,” an unvarnished lie.
CNN verified that children were being dropped off at a day care center Shirley had targeted. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the day cares in question and found, when they were allowed access, children playing and napping peacefully. CBS News reviewed security footage showing kids being dropped off at one targeted center. Others were indeed empty; they had gone out of business before Shirley filmed outside the buildings.
Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his “but I’m a virgin” defense is irrational — at least on the surface. But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right’s long-standing fear and loathing of day cares. After all, the scandal Shirley is exploiting isn’t really about day cares. It’s about a larger case in Minnesota of Feeding Our Future, a fraudulent food pantry that was run by Aimee Bock, a white woman who was convicted in March of cheating taxpayers out of nearly $250 million of pandemic funds. While Bock was the mastermind, other defendants in the case are Somali American. On Dec. 30, a federal judge cleared the way for the government to seize $5.2 million in assets from Bock.
If Shirley was only interested in building his hoax on that existing and very real case, he could have targeted anti-hunger charities for his fake sting. Instead, he went after day cares, which are only tangentially related insofar as they are — along with churches, mosques, schools and community centers — sites that were supposed to get assistance from the fraudsters but never received it.
These businesses were picked almost certainly because Shirley and his colleagues have tapped into the long-standing tendency of paranoid reactionaries to make day cares the subject of conspiracy theories. Along with birth control and abortion — whose providers are also smeared constantly with right-wing lies — day care is loathed on the right for allowing women to work instead of being financially dependent on a husband. In the 1980s, day care workers were accused of being Satanists. Now, during the MAGA era, the scapegoat for men’s fears of female independence has shifted from imaginary devil-worshippers to real immigrants. White women are implicitly accused of using immigrant labor as a cheat to avoid their god-given duty to quit work to stay home and raise babies. Vice President JD Vance has been especially loud with his belief that day care is pushing women away from their supposedly inherent desire to be housewives.
These people are freaks. And these are the people kicking our ass.