Is Nick Shirley’s Somali Exposé an Astroturfed Diversion For Special Interests?

Ultra-MAGA influencer Rogan O’Handley, AKA DC_Draino, was among the gang of social media influencers handpicked by the administration to pimp Pam Bondi’s fake “Epstein Files” binder hoax in February of last year — the first failed attempt at gaslighting the public of many to come — only to have the stunt blow up in their faces when it became immediately clear that:

a.) those were nowhere near the entire Epstein files the DOJ had

b.) there was almost nothing new in the files that wasn’t already in the public domain, and

c.) the files released conveniently did not implicate any other powerful figures in the child sex ring; Jeffrey Epstein, per the official narrative, trafficked hundreds, perhaps thousands, children to himself.

All of which to say: the DC_Draino guy, even if his username is cool, is a member of that MAGA influencer cohort that devotes its entire online existence to cheerleading the Trump regime, often forced to contort themselves into knots in the process, often at the expense of their personal dignity, not to mention any semblance of independence.

Many such cases.

Sad!

Related: MAGA Influencer Accuses AG Pam Bondi of First Amendment Violation on X

Anyway, in the aftermath of his viral Somali fraud exposé, O’Handley recently proposed that a billionaire — seemingly any billionaire looking for a strong return on investment (ROI) — bankroll Nick Shirley’s work.

“To any billionaire reading this: If you want to save this country, start investing in and financially supporting independent content creators like Nick Shirley. I can’t think of a better ROI than paying an ambitious investigative journalist $20,000 a month to uncover hundreds of billions in government fraud with a cell phone camera and some light video editing. It’s not only virtuous, but it will also save you hundred [sic] of millions in taxes since state governments won’t have the moral ground to raise taxes. Free advice.”

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There’s a lot to unpack there.

It could be that I’m just jealous because a billionaire has never offered me $20,000/month to investigate migrant fraudsters.

Related: Elite Media Propagandist Cries at Davos: ‘We Owned the News’

Even so, potential personal grievances notwithstanding, the co-opting of what is meant to be independent media by entities with their own agendas doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the purported spirit of the Fifth Estate.

How do billionaires become billionaires?

By harboring sincere objections to fraud and a desire to root it out?

By sticking to strong, deeply-held moral principles?

That’s certainly the Chamber of Commerce mythology that has dominated the establishment right for many decades.

For the same reason I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I don’t buy it — with perhaps a few exceptions for men who got mega-rich by inventing legitimately impressive and attractive products that organically took the market by storm.

Billionaires become billionaires, by and large, by stepping on throats, colluding with power centers (usually governments) and usually scamming them in the process, exerting ruthless, near-total control over their own organizational hierarchies like Saddam Hussein or any mob boss, and eliminating their competition through underhanded means.

At elite levels of business, ethics mean about as much to a Fortune 500 CEO as they do to El Chapo.

And the general purpose of buying media outlets and/or journalists is to facilitate the throat-stepping.

(The possible exception to the rule might be Elon Musk, who seems to have purchased X as an on-the-spectrum move for social clout, and to ultimately turn it into the “everything” platform he publicly mused about long before the Twitter purchase with proprietary AI, built-in payment systems, etc. Regardless of his intentions, X is still the freest of the major social media platforms, even if it’s far from a pure free speech champion.)

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On a related note, as other have suggested is the case, I’ve become more open to the possibility that the entire Minnesota fraud scandal was astroturfed from the start.

For one thing, if you’re a political operative with connections in media looking to whip the base up into a frenzy, the optics are almost too good to be true.

It’s got all the key ingredients: rampant fraud, Democrat corruption, the incarnation of the cringe liberal beta-male archetype, Tampon Tim Walz (up for re-election this year, by the way), and a Third World migrant population that is arguably the easiest to hate in the world because of its sneering condescension, refusal to assimilate, and unbounded sense of entitlement.

With the exception of seismic events like the attempted Trump assassination of 2024 or 9/11, news stories rarely tend to dominate multiple news cycles the way this one has by virtue of their own inertia.

Related: Senator Demands 9/11 Investigation Into ‘Controlled Demolition’ of Building 7

For another thing, the Somali fraud epidemic had been reported for well over a decade — going back to 2012 — yet it never made nearly the same impact.

The timing at present is notable.

Nothing could have been more red-meaty at a moment when Trump’s approval has dipped to an all-time low and the drumbeat for the foreign wars that he promised not to get America involved in — having just executed a coup in Venezuela, apparently fomented a currently unfolding intelligence agency-facilitated Color Revolution in Iran, and, which hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should, China threatening to potentially drag the U.S. into a Pacific war in the Taiwan Strait if it pulls the trigger on the invasion it’s been promising for years — has picked back up.

None of this should be construed as a personal attack on Nick Shirley; his work was solid and there’s no evidence he’s involved in any kind of psy-op.

In any event, these things have a way of taking on a life of their own once they’re out in the ether.

And, certainly, a large portion of the interest (mine and maybe yours) in the Somali migrant fraud spree is organic, so none of this is to say that it’s not newsworthy or that the Somalis don’t need to be deported en masse or that, more importantly, the politicians and NGOs that taught the Somalis the scam need to be prosecuted and preferably executed, all of which is true.

Still, the timing and magnitude of the story — this particular iteration of essentially the same story that others like Project Veritas have told for over a decade — is curious.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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