Government fraud meets its worst enemy: Some dude with a phone

Nick Shirley knocked on doors. That was all it took to crack Minnesota’s multibillion-dollar fraud scandal — and expose the failure of the institutions that were supposed to catch it.

Shirley visited Somali-run “businesses” that had received millions in taxpayer funds. His videos showed locked doors, covered windows, and empty buildings where thriving operations were supposed to exist.

When institutions feel threatened, they usually try to personalize the fight. That approach won’t work here.

Within days, the footage racked up more than 100 million views on X alone, triggered a flood of federal scrutiny, and helped force a political reckoning in a state where warnings had gone ignored for years.

Legacy media outlets initially dismissed the story as a “conspiracy theory” — until they couldn’t. Gov. Tim Walz (D) went from defending the programs to demanding crackdowns almost overnight. Federal authorities surged additional personnel and resources into Minnesota. What had been treated as untouchable suddenly became unavoidable.

What happened in Minnesota matters. But what happens next matters more.

You are about to see hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Nick Shirley imitators flood social media. Exposing government waste and fraud is no longer just journalism; it is an incentive structure and a business model.

Independent investigators armed with public records, smartphones, and social platforms will fan out across the country, documenting the gap between what government pays for and what actually exists. And the establishment has no effective way to stop them.

The old playbook no longer works.

When institutions feel threatened, they usually try to personalize the fight. Discredit the messenger. Destroy the movement by targeting its most visible figure. We saw this strategy deployed against the DOGE by turning government efficiency into a culture war about Elon Musk.

That approach won’t work here.

You can’t sue a thousand kids with iPhones. You can’t “fact-check” an empty building that’s supposed to be full of children. Calling something “misinformation” loses its power when the door is locked, the windows are covered, and fraud indictments follow months later.

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Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

What’s emerging isn’t a movement with a leader — it’s a decentralized ecosystem. Accountability no longer depends on a single newsroom or institution. It comes from a generation that has figured out that exposing corruption is vastly more rewarding than working a shift at Starbucks.

That should terrify every political leader who has relied on the assumption that no one is really watching.

A single viral video now generates more pressure than a year of congressional hearings. The Minnesota press corps had years to uncover what Shirley documented in an afternoon. They didn’t look — not because the evidence was hidden, but because looking wasn’t incentivized. Now it is.

This shift is part of the reason I created Rhetor, an AI-driven political strategy firm designed to track what people are actually saying and doing in real time. Using these tools, we’ve identified billions of dollars in questionable spending beyond Minnesota.

In New York City, for example, migrant-related spending is projected to reach $4.3 billion through 2027. Audits have flagged contractors billing the city for empty hotel rooms — charging $170 per night while paying hotels closer to $100 and pocketing the difference.

Chicago has paid at least $342 million to staffing firms charging $156 an hour for shelter workers. Illinois spent $2.5 billion in 2025 under emergency rules with minimal oversight.

These are not isolated incidents. They share the same ingredients as Minnesota’s scandal: emergency declarations, suspended procurement rules, inexperienced contractors, and little meaningful oversight.

And someone is going to knock on those doors too.

The old gatekeepers understand what this means — and they’re panicking. For decades, investigative journalism required institutional backing. Stories could be delayed, softened, or killed outright if they threatened the wrong people and interests.

That system is dead.

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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The new investigative journalism runs on virality, not permission. The reporter is a 23-year-old with a ring light and a Substack. The editorial board is the algorithm. The feedback loop is brutal, immediate, and unforgiving. Get it wrong and the internet will tear you apart. Get it right and the story spreads faster than any newspaper ever could.

This isn’t replacing traditional journalism. It’s filling the void left when traditional journalism stopped doing its job.

Minnesota was the proof of concept. The data was public. The facilities were visitable. The fraud existed for years. Nobody looked — until looking became profitable.

Now it’s profitable everywhere.

The bureaucrats and contractors who built careers on the assumption that no one was watching are about to discover that everyone is. The politicians who treated emergency spending like free money are about to learn that the emergency is over — and the receipts are coming to light.

A generation that treats views like oxygen just learned that fraud is the best clickbait.

Good luck stopping that.