For one so callow, Nick Shirley is an accomplished liar.
At 23, you might call him tops in the junior circuit.
Listen to the big-league liars: He’s not far from The Show — the future of today’s Republican Party.
Hear JD Vance: ““This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes.”
Whoo, boy. What did he do?
You can’t be a right-wing hero if you don’t know how to lie. It helps to be racist, too. It would be like a mountaineer without a pickaxe and pitons. Lies and race-based smears help get you where you want to go in MAGA world – to the topper-most.
And this young man is on his way.
He’s going to be a featured speaker this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas.
He calls himself an independent journalist, an “influencer.” He’s really just an attentioner with a phone, a monkey-see aspirant to right-wing recognition, particularly from the Big, Browning Banana in the White House.
In 2020, when JD Vance — and then the Big Banana himself — gave life to the unconscionable lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, Shirley went door to door there looking for the rumor-prone. He then shared with the world the fears of one lady who said her aunt’s cat disappeared and surely was stolen by one of those dark-skinned people.
If Shirley were an independent journalist and not a highly susceptible racist tool, he would have contacted Springfield authorities like the “fake news media” did. They confirmed that the slur aimed at Springfield’s Haitian population was garbage.
If the Big Banana were truly a peddler of truth and not a racist by trade, he or his people would have done the same: Ask somebody who knows. But the browning one went ahead and blurted the dogs-and-cats thing out in full saliva as he was being bludgeoned in debate by Kamala Harris.
Recently Nick Shirley raised his rating among online attentioners, particularly the racist ones, with a viral video purporting fraudulent child-care centers run by Somalis in Minnesota.
Shirley didn’t research the matter in the true sense. He simply skulked around 10 centers and showed what appeared to be an absence of traffic and children. “Ghost” centers!
Really? One of the centers had been closed since 2022, so of course it was empty. Meanwhile, state officials investigating fraud after his “scoop” became viral found children in eight of the nine centers Shirley accused of being empty of them.
This is not to say there is no problem with child-care there, or fraud in the field. There is. But Shirley’s report was hyper-misleading.
Ah, but the video provided a cue for our nation’s misleader to resume his harangues against Somali immigrants, whom the top banana has called “animals.”
Punishing every provider for the sins of a few, the president froze federal child-care funding for Minnesota. More destructively, he ramped up ICE activity in Minneapolis, leading to the enforcement horrors that resulted in two Americans shot dead.
Acknowledging he needed to focus on business at hand rather than on re-election, Gov. Tim Walz suspended his campaign.
Thereafter, Shirley preened before his own camera and announced, “I took out Tim Walz.”
Does that sound like an independent journalist?
It sounds more like “news” charlatans such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, whose total contribution to discourse seems to be asking suspicion-generating questions and megaphoning MAGA lies. Facts be damned. They embody confirmation bias, like young Nick Shirley, who like them says he’s a journalist.
Speaking of charlatans, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to yank broadcasting licenses in the last few days over what he calls “fake news” — meaning news not acceptable to the man who appointed him.
That’s rich coming from people who live by the lie and have mastered video fakery like no one ever, led by a president who’d be on trial for election fraud right now had he not reclaimed power.
Hey, Brendan: “They’re eating the pets!”
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
