By admin 
When I moved to California from Tennessee more than two years ago, I thought I had left conservative clown shows in political spaces behind. But there it was in Sacramento on Wednesday at the Capitol, where YouTube personality Nick Shirley put on a show in the name of exposing fraud that was nothing of the kind.
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Shirley’s has nearly two million subscribers on his YouTube channel. His fans in Sacramento on Wednesday told on themselves by wearing MAGA hats and American flag apparel. Shirley terrorizes groups that try to help immigrants, and these folks cheer him for that as if he were a superstar.
Wearing black shades and a gray pullover with the California flag on it, Shirley was rallying against the newly signed Safe at Work Act, Assembly Bill 2624.
As my Bee colleagues reported Wednesday, the law allows immigration service providers to protect themselves from harassment or violence by removing their addresses from the public record. Shirley and his supporters contend he is a “citizen journalist” whose rights are being restricted by the law. They call it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.”
But here is a news flash: Shirley is not a journalist.
His political stunt outside the Capitol building put me back into the culture wars that I witnessed in Tennessee, where seemingly every week a conservative white man went to Nashville to spout nonsense.
Shirley and the rest of the GOP performers present on Wednesday attempted to mask partisan propaganda as journalism at its finest.
“Politicians have learned that they can use immigrant communities and use nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) and funnel millions upon millions of your tax dollars into these nonprofits, NGOs, and for so long nobody ever looked into it. Then I did,” Shirley said in front of his GOP groupies.
Shirley claims to be uncovering corruption in California’s immigrant communities. In reality, his tactics are cynical and dangerous.
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Just a conservative instigator
Earlier this year in San Diego, Shirley and a crew visited child care centers in San Diego with large Somali immigrant populations, echoing the tactics he used in Minneapolis, where his targets were Somali-run centers.
Cameras were rolling, hoping to catch “evidence” of wrongdoing, but got a rotten goose egg instead. This was not a legitimate investigation, but another sensationalist stunt for online outrage. Shirley’s rise began with a video last December in Minneapolis, where he echoed rumors and innuendo about Somali-run day care centers.
AB 2624 protects case managers, translators, legal advocates, and volunteers who support immigrants by allowing them to keep their home addresses confidential, shielding them and their families from harassment and threats.
The law is modeled after address confidentiality programs for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as for workers in reproductive health These laws aren’t about hiding wrongdoing—they’re about allowing people to do necessary work without becoming targets.
California’s Republican Party has reached a new low defending the bullying stunts of a 24-year-old influencer.
There is no evidence that Shirley’s “investigations” have uncovered systemic fraud in California’s immigrant-serving organizations. What he has delivered, time and again, is conjecture passed off as fact and sensationalism dressed up as civic duty.
He’s done real-world harm to people who serve our communities and the families who rely on them.
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