Inside Minnesota's $10B Childcare Fraud Scandal - Nick Shirley - #1044

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Who were you on the phone to this morning?

**Nick Shirley** (0:02)
A lot of people have been calling me. I actually can't even keep track of all the numbers. And so today, I just got asked to go talk in front of Congress, just a moment ago. So people are just calling me saying, hey, we want some information, can you tell us about this? We're just trying to gather information. And for instance, today, someone just called me and said, hey, we have a meeting we'd like you to testify in front of Congress on January 21st. So I'll see if I'll do that.

**Chris Williamson** (0:27)
Right. So it's starting to hit the bigger levels of real law, real government now?

**Nick Shirley** (0:33)
Yeah. I mean, within just one day of me posting my video, well, it got over 100 million views in 72 hours. Both in the first day alone, you had Elon Musk retweet it. You had JD Vance retweet it. You had quite literally every major politician retweet it. The next morning, Cash Patel puts out a post on X about it. Then that same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi also puts out a post mentioning my name in that video. Same day, Mike Johnson as well.
It spread across the entire internet and it's the most viral video, the expose on fraud in Minnesota. It's the most viral video by anybody not named MrBeast in an expose format, over 100 million views in 72 hours.

**Chris Williamson** (1:19)
Did you end Tim Walz?

**Nick Shirley** (1:20)
I did end Tim Walz. He is no longer running for re-election of governor.

**Chris Williamson** (1:25)
Tell me the story then.

**Nick Shirley** (1:26)
So Tim Walz, everyone knows him.
He was almost the vice president of the United States and he has a record going on in Minnesota talking about fraud. Ever since 2019, he's known about fraud. He's been talking about how they've been fighting fraud. And he's been enabling this fraud to happen. And so I go and make this video. And I showed the fraud happening and you would think people would be like, oh amazing, this kid just showed that fraud is happening. Instead, Tim Walz goes on TV. He calls me a white supremacist, calls me far right, and he also calls me a delusional conspiracy theorist.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
Are you any of those things?

**Nick Shirley** (2:06)
No. And so then Tim Walz, after calling me all of that, he drops out of running for re-election of governor. So I was right. I show people the truth. And Tim Walz, he couldn't handle it. So therefore, he went to deflecting mechanisms of calling me far right, delusional conspiracist, and a white supremacist. When I was just talking about fraud.

**Chris Williamson** (2:31)
You think that the reason that he's not running for re-election is exclusively because of this story?

**Nick Shirley** (2:36)
Yeah, 100 percent. He knows the baggage is so much that he can't run from it, and he's hoping probably people would think less of it. And so he's going to step aside and not run for re-election.

**Chris Williamson** (2:48)
How much is he culpable? Because Minnesota is a big state. There's lots of stuff going on. He had an election campaign to look after not long ago. Is it his job to be paying attention directly to this sort of stuff?

**Nick Shirley** (3:02)
He's obviously part of it. There's obviously larger communities like the DHS inside of Minnesota.

**Chris Williamson** (3:07)
What's the DHS?

**Nick Shirley** (3:10)
The Department of Homeland Security. But then you also have DHS that receives the money. They kind of give the money to the welfare, Medicaid programs, everything like that.

**Chris Williamson** (3:22)
So not entirely unculpable then?

**Nick Shirley** (3:25)
No. I mean, his office, he said it himself, the buck stops with him. He said that multiple times and he's known about the fraud forever.

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
It is an interesting challenge, right? Because you have some people, anybody that is running for office wants to show, I've got agency and I make things happen inside of my state. And it kind of sounds powerful, Ubermenchi to say the buck stops with me. But when it turns out that the buck is kind of messy and on fire and deserves investigation, you become culpable for the promises that you've made in the past.

**Nick Shirley** (3:58)
Yeah. And at the end of the day, he knows about, he knew about it. He knows that there's daycares all around Minnesota. He actually bragged about that in a debate with Tim Walz. He said, you can go visit him. I visited him. There was no kids.