The Stories We Hear About from Minneapolis – and the Ones We Don’t

In the USA there are about 60 murders on average every day. In addition, while accurate figures are not available and definitions are debatable, it seems likely that the police and other branches of law enforcement kill (justifiably or not) two or three people daily. Given the relative frequency of such events, why is it that occasionally such a killing is picked up by the mainstream media over here while most are totally ignored?

On the day of writing, Thursday January 8th, the BBC is leading its bulletins with news of the killing of 37 year-old Renée Nicole Good. The BBC website has multiple reports focused on the story, profiles of the deceased, interviews with witnesses, a livestream, reports on protests and video recordings of the killing. In the midst of no end of crises of global significance, and quite a few big UK stories, does a tragic incident in the US from the snowy depths of the Mid-West deserve to dominate our news media to the extent it has?

Coincidentally, the killing of Renée Good occurred about half a mile away from the site of George Floyd’s killing back in 2020. Another death at the hands of US law enforcement that would normally go unnoticed by the world outside Minnesota.

Yet a further coincidence is that both the Floyd and Good killings occurred within two miles of the Quality Learning Centre, the Somali owned childcare business that over the past week has become globally notorious – notorious, that is, if you get your news from somewhere other than the legacy media.

Here’s the odd thing: inside the legacy media there’s been hardly any mention of the Minneapolis Somali childcare scandal. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re in good company. Of the six friends I had lunch with over the weekend, none had, despite it having dominated the news in the US for days.

Of course, you might think there’s nothing odd about this at all, why would anyone in Britain be the least bit interested in misspent taxpayer dollars on the other side of the Atlantic? Well, it looks very much like the childcare scandal in the US has a number of the characteristics of our ‘rape gang’ scandal. Both scandals are dominated by a particular ethnic group. Both scandals have been hidden in plain sight for years.

As with the rape gangs, there have been repeated news reports, criminal investigations, City and State level inquiries going back years. People have been charged and found guilty of fraud, yet the frauds have continued. The scale of the scandal has been downplayed and the frauds have largely continued uninterrupted.

However, the story has been given fresh legs by the work of Nick Shirley, a 23 year-old YouTuber. Shirley had stumbled on the work of ‘Dave’, a Minnesotan, who has spent years compiling evidence of fraud, primarily within the Somali community. The thefts involve the siphoning-off of over $1 billion in taxpayer funds across multiple schemes, primarily from federal and state programmes meant for child nutrition, autism services and day care services.

Shirley’s 41-minute film on X has garnered 139 million views; in addition it’s been seen by millions more on YouTube, Rumble and other platforms. It’s spawned countless memes and has been clipped countless times. What wouldn’t the BBC give for a 41 minute programme that was watched by some 150 million people! Maybe it’s professional jealousy that’s led to it to ignore the story, but I somehow doubt this.

J.D. Vance the US Vice President has been commenting on the film. Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota and the Democrat’s candidate for VP at the 2024 Presidential Election, has, since the release of Nick Shirley’s film, declared that he won’t stand for re-election. Donald Trump himself has questioned the value of hosting any Somali migrants at all.

Across the US multiple citizen journalists, inspired by Nick Shirley’s scoop, have started to dig up similar funding scandals. Additionally, evidence that some of the funding was being returned to local Democrat party coffers in the form of donations has emerged that threatens to tangle the party even deeper into this particular web.

It would be hard to overstate the size of the story in the US. Yet over here, as they say in the States, ‘crickets’!

The BBC covered Tim Walz’s decision not to seek re-election; however, the report didn’t mention the Somali connection until paragraph 16. The BBC’s main reference to the Somali link was to play it down: “State officials have pushed back against allegations of fraud in the video. BBC’s US partner CBS News found no evidence of fraud when it reviewed public records for the centres, although it did find citations related to safety, cleanliness, equipment and staff training.” Does the BBC want the take-away from this to be the idea that Tim Walz has called time on his political career because of deficiencies in staff training in privately owned childcare facilities?

The BBC’s other reference to the Somali links to the Minnesota fraud also sought to play it down by framing the story around Trump withholding aid to Minnesota.

Even the UK’s primary Right of centre newspaper, the Telegraph, has barely covered the story and where it has its line has been about Trump withholding aid to migrants.

Look elsewhere in the UK’s legacy media and you’ll struggle to find much. It’s almost as if there’s a concerted effort at suppression!

Largely, it’s only been on X where the story has been covered. Attempts by the progressive Left to repudiate the story have largely failed. No skeletons have been dug out of Nick Shirley’s cupboard. The evidence provided by ‘Dave’ is largely from public sources or FOIs. Previous convictions and court testimony have shown the veracity of the evidence. Given this, it seems all the more remarkable that the Renée Good shooting should occur just down the road and at a time when any pickup in mainstream media interest in the Somali childcare story can be deflected away. What are the odds that with the massed ranks of the US media in town, suddenly this other story suddenly blows up? Am I being cynical or is this just too convenient – an all too useful distraction for media outlets who’d far rather talk about the killing of a pro-migrant protester than a fraudulent migrant community?

Just like our own rape gang scandal, the Minnesota childcare scandal would likely have been buried if Musk hadn’t acquired X. Likewise, it’s all too probably that if the UK and EU had managed to enforce their various ‘online harms’ regulations then, like all those people in the UK dependent upon the legacy media for their news, the rest of us would also have remained totally ignorant of this huge scandal and its parallels in the UK.

It’s apparent that the George Floyd and Renée Good stories both conformed to a narrative of oppression by the forces of law and order. Both were seized upon and escalated with wall-to-wall coverage, whereas the Somali childcare story, much like the UK rape gang scandal, is seen as challenging the shibboleths of the progressive Left, with the result that it’s downplayed and, where possible, ignored.

In these three stories, all from a small area of downtown Minneapolis, we can see the battle between the two sides play out. It’s crucial that the forces of openness and freedom win out, but Musk is currently fighting a lonely battle in the media world. I worry that without Trump providing cover for Musk and X it wouldn’t be long before that last light of freedom represented by X is snuffed out.