On Friday, independent video journalist Nick Shirley published a video on X that he claims shows widespread fraud involving purported day-care centers in Minnesota. Shirley wrote that he “uncovered over $110,000,000 [in fraud] in ONE day.” The video is the latest public allegation of fraud tied to Minnesota’s Somali community and comes as failed Democrat vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faces renewed scrutiny over the issue.

In the video, Shirley and his team are seen traveling Minnesota and visiting addresses where federally funded day-care centers are supposed to exist. When he arrived, he often found buildings with no children and seemingly no active day-care facilities.

‘There are not enough words to describe the breathtaking failure that has happened under the watch of @GovTimWalz.’

In a clip from Shirley’s video that Education Secretary Linda McMahon shared over the weekend, Shirley is shown standing outside a day-care facility identified as “Quality Learing [sic] Center.” The sign appears to misspell the word “learning.” Shirley says that when he attempted to enter the building during regular weekday hours, it was closed and its windows were blacked out. He also claims the center received $1.9 million in government funding.

In sharing the clip on X, McMahon wrote, “There are not enough words to describe the breathtaking failure that has happened under the watch of @GovTimWalz.”

Blaze Media Illustration and Getty Images

Walz’s office pushed back over the weekend against Shirley’s allegations. Fox News Digital reported Sunday that a spokesperson for Walz said the governor has spent years working to “crack down on fraud” and has taken steps to strengthen oversight of state programs, including launching investigations into several facilities.

The spokesperson also pointed to the state legislature’s role in overseeing the programs and said that at least one business highlighted in Shirley’s reporting had already been shut down by Walz’s administration.

Despite the response, criticism continued. In addition to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Vice President JD Vance praised Shirley’s work, writing on X, “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that the bureau is aware of the allegations circulating online. Patel wrote that the FBI had already deployed additional personnel and "investigative resources" to Minnesota to address "large-scale fraud" involving federal programs, even before the issue gained widespread attention on social media.

“Fraud that steals from taxpayers and robs vulnerable children will remain a top FBI priority in Minnesota and nationwide,” Patel wrote.

Patel also cited previous arrests and convictions as evidence of the bureau’s ongoing efforts to combat fraud in the state.

BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo disputed Patel’s characterization, calling it “misleading.” In a post on X, Rufo said Patel was taking "credit for investigations and convictions that occurred under the Biden Administration," adding that the unresolved question concerns alleged fraud that has not yet resulted in charges. “When do we see arrests, mugshots, and new prosecutions?” Rufo wrote.

Rufo previously reported on alleged fraud involving Minnesota welfare and health programs earlier this year. As independent journalists such as Shirley continue to highlight the allegations, scrutiny of Minnesota officials, including Walz and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has intensified.

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We turned tragedy into sport

Several forces are converging right now, and the result is a perfect storm of confusion, misinformation, apathy, and — most dangerously — runaway conspiracy thinking.

For a long time, I was consumed by true crime: real-life stories filled with mystery, fear, and emotional whiplash. I wasn’t alone. The genre became a full-blown cottage industry, complete with massive conferences, prestige documentaries, podcasts, and feature films.

The problem isn’t asking questions. It is speculation and insinuation masquerading as insight.

At first, I saw little harm in it — especially when victims or family members were included in the storytelling. But once Hollywood began churning out sensationalized, “based on a true story” dramatizations of real-life horrors, something felt wrong.

Then I heard the victims’ loved ones speak out.

They described the pain these projects inflicted — how strangers dissected their trauma, speculated about their grief, and turned the worst moments of their lives into consumable entertainment. In some cases, families practically begged studios to stop profiting from their suffering. The pleas went unanswered.

There is little sign that Tinseltown plans to slow down. Personal tragedy is no longer treated as personal. We’ve crossed a line into a world where strangers don’t just demand access to these stories — they claim ownership of them.

That entitlement hardens quickly. It manifests as amateur investigations, armchair sleuthing, and the conviction that someone online can solve what professionals could not. Too often, that obsession mutates into wild conspiracy theories — narratives untethered from evidence that deepen the damage inflicted on real people already living with loss.

Fueling all of this is another force: social media addiction.

Millions of Americans live on their phones. Filters are gone. Boundaries between public and private have crumbled. Every tragedy becomes content. Every rumor becomes a reel. Every high-profile event risks turning into a true-crime nightmare, complete with TikTok theories and Instagram speculation.

Not all of it is malicious. But much of it is steeped in a moral carelessness that should unsettle us. And while content creators deserve scrutiny, they aren’t the only culprits. Plenty of us are liking, sharing, and amplifying the madness.

That dynamic reached a horrifying peak on September 10, when conservative and Christian commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Almost immediately, conspiracy theories spread — many debunked within hours. In one case, a popular Christian apologist, a friend of Kirk who had been filming him speaking at Utah Valley University that day, was falsely accused of signaling the shooter through hand gestures. The claim was nonsense. It collapsed under minimal scrutiny.

No matter. The damage was done.

Other theories followed. Some insinuated betrayal by those closest to Kirk. Others implied inside involvement without evidence. Each claim compounded the grief of a family and community already reeling from an unspeakable loss.

The problem isn’t asking questions. It’s speculation and insinuation masquerading as insight.

If someone is going to promote conspiracy theories, basic decency demands evidence. To date, none has been produced. And yet the claims persist — entertained, shared, and believed.

Photo by Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

I can’t entirely blame people for their skepticism. In 2016, I wrote a book called “Fault Line” warning that media bias carries real-world consequences. When trust erodes, people stop listening to official narratives altogether. Combine that with the government’s incoherent and often dishonest messaging during COVID, and the ground was primed for disbelief.

For years, progressives dismissed concerns about institutional credibility. Now we’re living with the consequences. A toxic cocktail of distrust, trauma, and algorithmic amplification has left many people — especially the young — drunk with suspicion and untethered from reality.

Add in social media saturation, obsession with true crime, collapsing trust in institutions, and the undeniable presence of evil in the world, and you have a generation raised inside a pressure cooker of dysfunction.

We need to cling to truth. We need to model discernment. We need to help people learn how to question responsibly — without tumbling into conspiracism — and how to rebuild boundaries that preserve perspective and humanity.

Truth-seeking should guide us, not digital frenzy or the dark impulses of the human soul. If we fail to make that distinction, the damage will only deepen.

We must be better.

The algorithm sells despair. Christmas tells the truth.

I recently did something that I usually avoid. I stayed up too late and wandered into the digital sewer we politely call “the conversation.” X, feeds, clips, comments, rage-bait. I knew it would not end well, but I kept scrolling anyway. By the time I finally shut it off, it was clear that the despair and resentment social media produces are not a bug — they are the feature.

The world you see online is a world stripped of context and proportion. Everything is framed as an emergency, everything demands outrage, nothing asks for wisdom. Human suffering is turned into ammunition, children are turned into slogans, and hatred is dressed up as moral clarity. If you sit with it long enough, you begin to feel foolish for believing in decency at all.

God is not dead. He is not asleep. And the story is not finished, no matter how much the algorithm wants you to believe otherwise.

It made me think of a poem I had not thought about for some time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells” is often quoted for its opening lines about peace on earth and goodwill toward men. That is usually where people stop.

But Longfellow wrote the poem in the middle of the Civil War. His country was fractured, his own son a casualty of the fighting, and his wife killed in a tragic accident. The poem is an honest look into the mind of a man laid low.

In the early stanzas, Longfellow describes hearing church bells repeat the old promise of peace. Then reality intrudes, cannons thunder, violence drowns out the song. He writes that it felt “as if an earthquake rent the hearthstones of a continent.” That is what civil war feels like from the inside.

That line has stayed with me for a very long time.

We are not there yet, but the pressure is mounting. Anti-Semitism has returned openly, not whispered, but justified. The Jewish people — history’s most reliable early warning system — are being threatened again, and too many voices respond with silence, excuses, or applause. We swore we would never allow this again. Now it is happening all over the West.

At the same time, the world is edging toward wider conflict. Alliances are hardening, borders matter again. But this time, there is no obvious force capable of stabilizing the chaos. America is busy devouring itself. Europe is exhausted. The rest of the world is watching to see what happens next.

This is the part of the poem most people skip.

Longfellow does not rush to hope. He admits his despair. “There is no peace on earth,” he writes, “for hate is strong, and mocks the song.” Honesty is not weakness. Pretending everything is fine when it is not is how civilizations collapse quietly.

But the poem does not end there.

The final stanza matters because it follows despair instead of denying it. Longfellow writes:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

That is not cheap optimism promising a quick end to suffering. It is a conviction insisting that evil does not get the last word.

That distinction matters a lot right now.

Blaze Media Illustration

Hope is not pretending the algorithm is wrong. It is recognizing that what trends is rarely what endures. The quiet courage that holds families together, the decency that stops violence when no camera is present, the faith that steadies people when institutions fail — those things do not go viral, but they do prevail. History does not turn on outrage. It turns on character.

Every civilization that survives a moment like this does so because enough people refuse to surrender their moral bearings. They do not deny the danger or excuse the evil. They do not outsource conscience to crowds or machines. They decide, quietly and stubbornly, to let their lives reflect the fact that truth still matters.

Longfellow had not yet seen the end of the war when he wrote that poem. He wrote it because despair was real and hope was necessary anyway. The bells did not silence the cannons overnight. But they reminded him — and us — that order is not an illusion and truth is not negotiable.

God is not dead. He is not asleep. And the story is not finished, no matter how much the algorithm wants you to believe otherwise.

Socialism didn’t win New York. Marketing did.

I oppose Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist agenda. But if Republicans are serious about winning elections next year and in 2028, they need to take a hard, unsentimental look at how he just won one of the most consequential mayoral races in the country.

This was not an ideological earthquake. New York did not suddenly “discover” socialism. What happened was a marketing and mobilization breakthrough. Mamdani’s campaign understood attention, simplicity, participation, and distribution better than anyone else in the race.

Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.

Joe Perello, the city of New York’s first chief marketing officer, noted in PRWeek after Mamdani’s victory that the campaign did more than communicate a message. It built an engine that converted online engagement into real-world turnout.

“For marketers and strategists alike, the implications are clear,” Perello wrote. “Growth hacking, iterative testing, and data-driven amplification can convert digital sentiment into real-world behavior. In Mamdani’s case, that meant converting hearts, clicks, and hashtags into ballots.”

Here is the part many on the right do not want to hear: Mamdani did not spend his time lecturing working-class voters about the virtues of socialism or defending failed economic theory. He focused on immediate, kitchen-table concerns and paired them with simple, slogan-ready answers.

Is halal food expensive? Make it cheaper. Struggling to get to work? Free buses. Grocery bills too high? Government-run grocery stores.

He took Bernie Sanders’ 2016-era talking points and filtered them through a polished, Obama-style optimism that voting-age New Yorkers were willing to engage with.

Most voters do not have the time — or patience — to think through how these promises would actually work. They just want to hear that someone intends to make their lives easier.

As Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney observed during Mamdani’s surge in the polls, the public’s lack of understanding about how government operates — and how socialism consistently fails — created the political environment Mamdani exploited. He did not create that environment. He mastered it.

Republicans’ digital blind spot

For years, Republican campaigns have treated digital media as messaging rather than infrastructure. Social platforms are used as megaphones for press releases, fundraising tools, or dumping grounds for cable-news clips. The underlying assumption is that persuasion happens elsewhere — on TV, at rallies, through mailers — and that digital simply amplifies those efforts.

Mamdani reversed that logic. Social media was not an accessory to his campaign. It was the campaign.

His approach drew praise even from outlets like the Guardian, where journalist Adam Gabbatt noted that Mamdani “has won social media with clips that are always fun — and resolutely on-message.”

His team treated TikTok and Instagram like serious growth channels. Short videos were not vanity content; they were experiments. Different neighborhoods, different faces, different tones, different pacing. What held attention? What sparked comments? What traveled across boroughs? Each post generated data, and each data point informed the next iteration.

This was politics run as a full-funnel acquisition strategy. Awareness led to engagement. Engagement led to identification. Identification led to turnout. Republicans can mock the aesthetics, but the mechanics work.

Energy is a signal

One of the most underrated elements of Mamdani’s campaign was how it looked. He was constantly in motion — walking Manhattan, running a marathon, bouncing between boroughs. Rarely behind a lectern. Rarely static. Always visible.

That energy communicated youth, optimism, and confidence in the same way John F. Kennedy outperformed Richard Nixon on television in 1960. A similar contrast appeared in 2024, when Donald Trump’s unscripted, high-visibility media strategy stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ tightly controlled appearances.

The predictable response on the right is dismissal. ‘That’s just TikTok nonsense.’ ‘Our voters aren’t like that.’ Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.

In an age of low trust and low information, energy reads as competence. Movement suggests effort. Visibility substitutes for familiarity. Mamdani’s omnipresence created the impression — fair or not — that he was accessible and engaged with everyday life.

Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

From supporters to fans

The most uncomfortable lesson for traditional campaigns is that Mamdani did not just mobilize voters. He activated fandom.

Much of the campaign content that flooded social media did not come from official accounts. It came from supporters remixing clips, creating fan art, cutting moments to music, and sharing them within their own networks. The campaign made Mamdani easy to clip, easy to celebrate, and then got out of the way.

Wired magazine described it as a rare case of participatory political culture usually reserved for celebrities.

This matters because peer-to-peer persuasion scales faster and carries more credibility than anything a campaign can manufacture. Fan-made content travels further, feels more authentic, and costs nothing. Republicans, by contrast, tend to over-police their messaging, choking off organic enthusiasm in the name of control.

Younger voters understand fandom instinctively. They grew up online. Mamdani did not lecture them about politics; he gave them something to belong to.

The wrong reaction

The predictable response on the right is dismissal. “That only works for Democrats.” “That’s just TikTok nonsense.” “Our voters aren’t like that.”

Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.

Trump understood this dynamic in 2024 when his campaign was largely shut out of legacy media. Figures like Charlie Kirk reached millions of Gen Z voters by blending serious political content with the humor and energy of youth activism.

Algorithms do not have ideologies. Participation is not a left-wing monopoly. Visibility, simplicity, and community are not progressive inventions. In a low-information, high-attention environment, the side that understands distribution wins.

The real danger is not Mamdani’s policies alone. It is a Republican Party that keeps confusing being correct with being effective.

Blaze Media Illustration

What Republicans should learn — now

First, treat digital as organizing, not advertising. Stop thinking in posts and start thinking in systems. How does attention become action?

Second, simplicity wins. Republicans often pride themselves on being right — and then lose because they are incomprehensible. Clarity scales. Long explanations do not.

Third, loosen control. Let supporters remix, clip, and share. Reach matters more than perfect phrasing.

Finally, build communities, not just campaigns. Email lists decay. Ad budgets run out. Communities endure.

The bottom line

I do not agree with Zohran Mamdani’s politics, and I do not want his policies implemented anywhere. But ignoring how he won would be malpractice.

He demonstrated how power is built today — not through party machinery or television dominance, but through attention, participation, and relentless simplicity. Republicans can learn from that reality, or they can keep losing to it.

Disagree with his ideology. But study his marketing. Ignore the lesson at your own risk.

Kids have already found a way around Australia's new social media ban: Making faces

The liberal-dominated Australian parliament passed an amendment to its online safety legislation last year, imposing age restrictions for certain social media platforms.

As of Dec. 10, minors in the former penal colony are prohibited from using various platforms, including Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube — platforms that face potential fines exceeding $32 million should they fail to prevent kids from creating new accounts or from maintaining old accounts.

Australian kids were quick, however, to find a workaround: distorting their faces to appear older.

'They know how important it is to give kids more time to just be kids.'

Numerous minors revealed to the Telegraph that within minutes of the ban going into effect, they were able to get past their country's new age-verification technology by frowning at the camera.

Noah Jones, a 15-year-old boy from Sydney, indicated that he used his brother's ID card to rejoin Instagram after the app flagged him as looking too young.

Jones, whose mother supported his rebellion and characterized the law as "poor legislation," indicated that when Snapchat similarly prompted him to verify his age, "I just looked at [the camera], frowned a little bit, and it said I was over 16."

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Photo by DAVID GRAY / AFP via Getty Images.

Jones suggested to the Telegraph that some teens may alternatively seek out social media platforms the Australian government can't regulate or touch.

"Where do you think everyone's going to?" said Jones. "Straight to worse social media platforms — they're less regulated, and they're more dangerous."

Zarla Macdonald, a 14-year-old in Queensland, reportedly contemplated joining one such less-regulated app, Coverstar. However, she has so far managed to stay on TikTok and Snapchat because the age-verification software mistakenly concluded she was 20.

"You have to show your face, turn it to the side, open your mouth, like just show movement in your face," said Macdonald. "But it doesn't really work."

Besides fake IDs and frowning, some teens are apparently using stock images, makeup, masks, and fake mustaches to fool the age-verification tech. Others are alternatively using VPNs and their parents' accounts to get on social media.

The social media ban went into effect months after a government-commissioned study determined on the basis of a nationally representative survey of 2,629 kids ages 10 to 15 that:

71% had encountered content online associated with harm;
52% had been cyberbullied;
25% had experienced online "hate";
24% had experienced online sexual harassment;
23% had experienced non-consensual tracking, monitoring, or harassment;
14% had experienced online grooming-type behavior; and
8% experienced image-based abuse.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement on Wednesday, "Parents, teachers, and students are backing in our social media ban for under-16s. Because they know how important it is to give kids more time to just be kids — without algorithms, endless feeds and online harm. This is about giving children a safer childhood and parents more peace of mind."

The picture accompanying his statement featured a girl who in that moment expressed opposition to the ban.

The student in Albanese's poorly chosen photo is hardly the only opponent to the law.

Reddit filed a lawsuit on Friday in Australia's High Court seeking to overturn the ban. The U.S.-based company argued that the ban should be invalidated because it interfered with free political speech implied by Australia's constitution, reported Reuters.

Australian Health Minister Mark Butler suggested Reddit was not suing to protect young Aussies' right to political speech but rather to protect profits.

"It is action we saw time and time again by Big Tobacco against tobacco control, and we are seeing it now by some social media or Big Tech giant," said Butler.

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Republicans’ digital blind spot

Energy is a signal

From supporters to fans

The wrong reaction

What Republicans should learn — now

The bottom line

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