Nick Shirley is determined to let the world know he’s never had sex. This YouTuber, who went from prank videos to lucrative disinformation, seems to believe his sexual inexperience shields him from accusations of lying. “I’m a virgin. I don’t sleep with strangers. You’ll never accuse me of sexual harassment,” he declared on the PBD podcast, insisting he is “religious” and “without vices.”
This statement is bizarre, to say the least, not only because he conflates consensual sex with rape, but also because Shirley was responding to credible accusations that he was spreading a racist hoax to intimidate Somali-American daycare workers in Minnesota. The day after Christmas, the 23-year-old posted videos falsely accusing several daycares of not accepting children and then claiming federal aid for fictitious work.
These videos are clearly fabricated. During their visits to daycare centers, Shirley and her partner, David, a middle-aged man, found the doors locked and were denied access to the children. This in no way proves the absence of children. Any manager would likely have ignored the door in the face of strangers shouting and demanding entry to film the children. But the conservative public, always quick to believe that Black people commit crimes, disregarded this logic and rapidly circulated the video online.
Further examination reveals the absurdity of the situation. Shirley has a history of dishonesty: he has, among other things, paid migrant workers to hold up pro-Biden signs, evidently hoping that voters would believe in their independence. In another video, he falsely claimed that Portland had “fallen” and that “antifascists” had taken over the city.
CNN confirmed that the children were being taken to a daycare center targeted by Shirley. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the daycare centers in question and, once granted access, found the children playing and sleeping peacefully. CBS News reviewed surveillance footage showing children being led into one of the targeted centers. The other centers were already empty; they had closed before Shirley was filmed outside the buildings.
Shirley is accused of racially motivated falsehood, which makes her defense, “but I’m a virgin,” seem illogical, at least on the surface. However, it is more justifiable, from a psychological and sexual perspective, given the right wing’s chronic fear and aversion to daycare centers. Ultimately, the scandal Shirley is exploiting isn’t really about daycare centers. This is part of a larger problem in Minnesota: Feeding Our Future, a fraudulent food bank run by Amy Book, a white woman convicted in March of tax fraud and misappropriating nearly $250 million in COVID-19 relief funds. While Book was the mastermind, the other defendants in the case are Somali Americans. On December 30, a federal judge authorized the government to seize $5.2 million in assets belonging to Book.
If Shirley had simply based his hoax on this real problem, he could have targeted charities fighting hunger in his trap. Instead, he targeted daycare centers, which have no direct connection to the issue, except that—like churches, mosques, schools, and community centers—they are places supposedly receiving help from con artists, help that has never been forthcoming.
It is almost certain that Shirley and his accomplices chose these institutions because they exploited the tendency of paranoid reactionaries to make daycare centers the subject of conspiracy theories. Besides contraception and abortion—whose providers are constantly vilified by right-wing lies—daycare centers are hated by the right because they allow women to work instead of being financially dependent on their husbands. In the 1980s, daycare workers were accused of being Satanists. Today, under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” the scapegoat for male fears about women’s independence has shifted from imagined Satanists to actual immigrants. White women are implicitly accused of exploiting migrant labor to shirk their divine duty to quit their jobs, stay home, and raise their children. Vice President J.D. Vance has openly claimed that daycare centers distract women from their supposed innate desire to be stay-at-home mothers.
Vance certainly doesn’t believe his own rhetoric. It’s simply implausible, for example, that women would think, “Oh my God, I want nothing more than to stay home, but if there’s a daycare center nearby, I have to use it.” His wife has publicly expressed how much she loved working at the law firm that offered on-site childcare and how much she misses it. But Vance seems to have decided that the bulk of support for his 2028 presidential campaign will come from a world of internet-obsessed, sexually disturbed misogynists who admire dubious influencers like Shirley. The vice president’s media strategy has long focused on this heterogeneous group known as “the world of men”: disillusioned divorced men, “forced celibates” (those coerced into celibacy), and adherents of the “red pill,” an ideology that views romantic relationships and marriage as having nothing to do with love, but rather with deception or the subjugation of women by men.
This world of men is not only deeply misogynistic, but also appallingly racist. For progressives who take a look, it can be disconcerting that men in the “Make America Great Again” movement would blame their romantic woes on immigrants. But in the swamp of incoherent resentment that Vance so clearly embraces, the ills of feminism and supposed immigration are seen as part of a vast “enlightened” conspiracy against white men. Before his death, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, regularly asserted that “the ones we really can’t stand are angry, progressive white women.” He portrayed white women as naive and unrecognizable as immigrants. “If hypervigilance is a virus that infects minds,” he wrote, “white women who have been conditioned by certain ideas in college are the most vulnerable.” Influencers like the “TikTok Liberals” portray white women who oppose mass deportations as naive and selfish, wanting nothing more than to keep their nannies.
Shirley himself has adopted this rhetoric. “Liberal white women tend to support those who steal from and plunder them,” he claimed in one post. Another post was even more pessimistic: “Liberal white women’s logic and empathy will eventually kill them.”
In this toxic mix of sexism, misogyny, and racism, it seems plausible that Shirley thought her virginity was relevant. Her anti-immigrant sentiments fit into the broader “Make America Great Again” narrative of expelling supposedly foreign and decadent influences. People like Shirley believe that white male dominance can be restored by adhering to the strict sexual and social norms imposed by conservative Christianity. Abstinence until marriage is part of a larger project to create male-dominated marriages, where wives are so absorbed in raising a large number of white children that they are unable to work. The assault on Black immigrants in a daycare center takes on a different dimension.
a strong symbolic significance; it is perceived as a crucial front in a war aimed at whitening America and returning white women to their subordinate role in the home.
The irony is that Shirley’s virulent attack on his own sexuality only confirms that the attacks on daycare centers, contrary to his claims, are not motivated by a nonpartisan, even sincere, desire to eradicate fraud. This was clear from the start. Shirley admires Donald Trump, himself a convicted fraudster who continues to exploit his office to enrich himself through openly corrupt means. And Shirley has followed in the president’s footsteps: he, too, has a long history of spreading hateful and racist rhetoric against immigrants.
But the fact that he brought up his own sexuality and views on male-female relationships in the debate—when no one else had—suggests that these issues are of great concern to them. The obsession with “purity” is a common fascist obsession, manifesting itself in reactionary fantasies of racial and sexual purity. None of this has anything to do with reality: people of all races and genders are simply trying to get a job, raise children, and live their lives.