Episode 20: How Did a Viral YouTube Video Lead to Mass Protests?

This episode of The Reagan Faulkner Show unpacks how Nick Shirley’s undercover video inside empty Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis exposed massive daycare and welfare fraud and exploded into a national firestorm. The recap follows a rapid timeline: Shirley’s viral expose, Trump’s extraction of Nicolás Maduro, protests branded “Hands Off Venezuela,” Governor Tim Walz dropping out of the race, and ICE raids that net more than 1,500 violent illegal aliens while the FBI investigates daycare fraud believed to total around nine billion dollars.​

Reagan details how professional leftist agitators organized “anti-ICE” protests, blocked operations, weaponized vehicles, and escalated rhetoric to “save a life, kill an ICE” and “death to ICE,” even doxxing an ICE agent who acted in clear self-defense. As Walz talks about Minnesota being “at war” with the federal government and likens the moment to Gettysburg, Ilhan Omar joins the resistance, local officials tell ICE to “get out,” and protests spread nationwide, Reagan urges conservatives to support law enforcement and independent journalists, push for mass deportations, and deliver a red wave in the midterms to protect President Trump and his America First agenda.
 

Transcript

0:03

What's up guys and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. So I know a lot has been going on in the news since winter break and really just over the last two or three weeks like post Christmas. So I thought that today we would take a minute and just break down and recap everything that has happened, everything that's going on for all y'all. I know I am chronically on X. It's probably a problem. So for all y'all that aren't chronically on X and chronically online, we are just going to break down what's happened and kind of how we've gotten to this point. I saw a really funny tweet the other day or X post. I don't really know what we're supposed to call them anymore, but it was from Nick Shirley and it was a picture of the Quality Learning Center and he said I'm not sure how we got from this to this and the other picture were the huge protests in Minneapolis. I thought that was really timely and just really a great way to kind of jump off of and recap what's been going on. So let's get right into it. In the last days of December, we saw the independent journalist Nick Shirley, who I just mentioned, we saw his kind of expose of the Minneapolis daycare centers go super super viral. I think I'm not even going to try to pretend like I know how many views and hits and interactions it got, but it was a lot. It was in the hundreds of millions if not more. So basically what Nick did was he went into these Somali owned daycare facilities in Minneapolis and he kind of had a story where he was claiming that he had a little boy named Joey and that he was trying to get Joey enrolled in daycare somewhere and he really just took the government data of how many students these facilities claimed that they housed. He would go to the facilities and he would talk to them and kind of try to ask them like, hey is my kid gonna have a lot of friends here? Are y'all accepting enrollment? And he was turned away from every single one and he also noticed that in all of these facilities there were no children and it wasn't, you know, from my understanding it wasn't a federal holiday. It wasn't a weekend. It was like 2 p.m. 1 p.m. in the middle of, you know, a random weekday. So it was really, really interesting and a lot of people took notice of it and if y'all don't know, Nick has been doing videos for a really, really long time and this was one of his first ones that really, really blew up to this degree. I mean it's the only one that blew up to this degree as we've seen the chaos that has unfolded since. So that was on the very tail end of December. I think it was somewhere between like the 29th and the 30th. So then on January 3rd of 2025, the U.S. carried out an operation in Venezuela to extract Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro because he had indictments in the U.S. for drug charges, weapons charges, things like that, various trafficking of drugs and weapons. So he was extracted from Venezuela and brought to New York City where he is awaiting his trial. And instantly, I mean literally instantly, I woke up to this news at maybe 7, 8, 9 o'clock in the morning that night. Protests, professional signs made, banners, the whole nine and they already dubbed them the hands-off Venezuela protests and they popped up across the entire country. I mean they were in, you know, most of the major big cities where we see protests, you know, New York, LA, I think there was one in Seattle or Portland, you know, big, big cities where these things tend to happen. And we saw quite the, you know, just difference, I guess. Like, I don't even know how to explain it. It was like you saw people celebrating in Venezuela. There was joy. They were ripping down Maduro statues. They were ripping down posters of Maduro, the big dictator posters that were hanging on the sides of buildings and billboards. And then we saw crazy leftists here in the United States just losing it, freaking out, calling Trump a dictator for extracting a literal dictator. Then in the days after we saw people saying, well it's good that Maduro is not in power but Trump shouldn't have done it. Trump didn't do it right. There's the War Powers Act but, you know, frankly because of the situation, they didn't know when they were extracting Maduro. They didn't know when the time was gonna be right, when the weather was gonna be right. They couldn't have alerted Congress and Congress would have leaked it. I mean we know who's in Congress. They definitely would have leaked that. So that was on January 3rd that Maduro was extracted and then the protests popped up and they were calling Trump a dictator for kidnapping Maduro and it was it was a whole thing. So then on January 5th Governor Tim Walz drops out of the gubernatorial race in Minnesota following Nick Shirley's video. And he came out and he said, I'm going to be putting, this is not a direct quote, this is just summary of what he said. He was basically saying he's gonna put Minnesota first and that he doesn't want the fraud and the politics and everything to get in the way of him doing a good job as governor. So it's easier for him, not easier, but it's best for the people of Minnesota for him to go ahead and drop out and really really focus on what's going on, focus on his actual job as governor than to try to campaign and run for office and things like that. So it was really interesting because then back on X a lot of people were like, well if you wanted to put Minnesota first maybe you should have started with putting Minnesota first and not putting fraudsters and criminals and foreign individuals that are refugees here and things like that. Maybe we shouldn't have put all of that first but actually put the US citizens residing within Minnesota first. So he got a good amount of pushback from that and a lot of very prominent Democrats backed him on that and they also just got absolutely, people were going crazy in the comments of those. Like Kamala Harris said that she fully supports Tim Walz and then people were demanding if she knew about the fraud. So it was a whole thing when he dropped out of the race. And then we go to January 5th, 2025 where ICE began carrying out intense operations on Minneapolis following Nick Shirley's video. So Tim Walz dropped out of the race on the same day that ICE went into Minneapolis. So a lot of this is happening back to back to back. So since they went in on January 5th, this was less than 10 days ago, over 1,500 people have been taken into custody by ICE. So we have 1,500 people and we're talking violent, violent criminals, violent illegal aliens, people with sex charges, battery charges, murder charges. Just these are really, really bad people that they're finding right now. They're not just taking your good old neighbor Dan from down the street off the road. It is the worst of the worst that they are finding and obtaining right now. And then the Quality Learning Center that was made famous by Nick Shirley has been shut down and the FBI is investigating multiple, multiple, multiple other daycare facilities within Minneapolis. So we're kind of seeing this double play by ICE taking out illegal immigrants within the city and the FBI investigating the Quality Learning Center and other daycare facilities and holding them accountable for the fraud that has been happening. And again this comes on the wake of, we did an episode about it back in October, but this comes on the wake of the Feeding Our Futures fraud, on the housing fraud within the city, on Medicare Medicaid fraud. There is so much fraud within Minneapolis, specifically from the Somali population, and the daycare fraud is just one out of five. I think this is like the sixth one that's happened. So this has been going on a lot and the FBI busted the Feeding Our Futures fraud and most of the other fraud that we talked about, but now this new fraud has popped up and they're really diving into that. They're estimating that about nine billion dollars overall has been defrauded from federal taxes and from state taxes within Minnesota. So let's jump two days to January 7th of 2025 when the protests against ICE began in Minneapolis and there were literally individuals who are trained in combating ICE. They are trained in disrupting ICE, trying to inhibit ICE from performing their operations. They are trained on if ICE tries to move them or whatever. They're like combat trained against ICE. So these were not just your mom and sister from down the street protesting. These were professional protesters and some sources say that they're paid protesters. I believe it, but I'm still trying to figure out kind of where the money trail is, so I'm not going to make any claims. I'm going to say that allegedly they're paid protesters until I can do more research on it, but they definitely were professionally trained because, I mean, the sources say that they are professionally trained and we've seen the way that they've been acting in the last couple of days and they know what they're doing. So they were out there, they were using megaphones and whistles letting other people know where ICE was, again trying to disclose their location, prevent them from performing operations, and prevent them from obtaining the individuals that they were looking for. And this led to, on January 7th, Renee Good tried to blockade officers and prevent them from performing their operations with her vehicle and then they asked her to step out of the car where she hit the gas and tried to run over an ICE agent and she was fatally shot. So a little bit of backstory about this and in the future I would like to disclose fully and completely who Renee Good is because there's a lot that people don't quite know about her. But we're gonna keep it surface level today and first of all the agent, whose name has been disclosed but I will not be using his name, he had been drug over 100 yards by a vehicle operated by illegal alien Roberto Carlos Munoz on January 17th, 2025, and it led to him receiving over 50 stitches. So he ended up having to break the window of Roberto's car and as he stuck his hand inside the broken window in the back of Roberto's car, Roberto hit the gas and this agent like had his arm stuck inside of the car while the individual was gunning it and he was drug over a hundred yards and got extremely injured. So he was definitely practicing self-defense when this situation occurred because he had already had an issue with vehicles being weaponized. So that happened which led to just an exponential degree of protest. More people were more agitated, more upset, more frustrated. They grew, they lasted many days at this point. So also on January 7th, Tim Walz came out in a press conference and he threatened to deploy the Minnesota National Guard against the federal ICE agents and that same day Jacob Frey, who's the mayor of Minneapolis, held a press conference and told ICE to get the F out of Minneapolis and he said that the officer claiming self-defense was BS, he used the full word. So then that night the protests grew, they grew more, they were marching down the streets and they popped up across the entire country and are still continuing. So we saw protests pop up in Oregon and I think they were in LA, they were everywhere, they were in the Northeast, like they popped up across the entire country, even in North Carolina. So then on January 8th, Tim Walz claimed that the state of Minnesota is quote at war with the federal government and he went on to say this is a direct quote, well I said this yesterday, we've never been at war with our federal government, Walz said, I think in this case the National Guard is their main mission, they have a dual mission. So he's claiming that the best thing that they can do is utilize the National Guard against the federal government and then he went on to talk about the Civil War which was really interesting as a lot of people have pointed out when you say you're at war with the federal government and then you start talking about the Civil War, you know, definitely feels like there's an agenda there, there's definitely something that Walz is trying to say to the people of Minnesota and he says concerning the Civil War, quote, when things looked really bleak, it was Minnesota's first that held the line for the nation on that July 3rd, 1863. I think now we may be in that moment and then he goes on, he was comparing that to Gettysburg, so it was on Gettysburg during that bleak day, it was Minnesota's first that held the line and then he said that the nation's looking to us to hold the line on democracy. So again, he's putting this huge, huge weight on Minnesota saying it's up to them to be like this resistance, this, you know, band of rebels against ICE and against the federal government for the sake of the American people, which doesn't even make sense if we're being quite honest because they are deporting illegal immigrants, they're not deporting American citizens, so really ICE is in the best interest of America, not stopping them from deporting people who have infiltrated our country, but that is besides the point of this video. So then, also on January 8th, two Trinidad members were shot by ICE in Portland, so they were not shot fatally, but they also tried to weaponize their vehicle against ICE agents and the ICE agents acted in self-defense and shot. So this led to more protests, as you can imagine, also led to Portland officials and politicians defending the Trinidad-Oregon members that were here illegally instead of defending the federal government and ICE and those that are trying to protect legal, law-abiding US citizens. So now we are really in this weird window between January 7 and January 13 where we still have protests, we see their rhetoric turning more and more violent, so I'm going to give y'all just a overall mile-high look of what has transpired since then. This is not dates or timestamps or anything like that, this is just everything that has been happening at the protests. So in New York City, there were demonstrators chanting, hang Kristi Noem, as well as chanting, save a life, kill an ICE. So again, there's that rhetoric turning more and more violent, literally calling to murder people within Donald Trump's administration, as well as murder members of a federal law enforcement agency. Now in Minneapolis, protesters and politicians are calling for the arrest of the officer that killed Renee Good. Now keep in mind, the investigation from my understanding is still ongoing, but it appears that he was acting as self-defense. If you look at his video of what was happening, he was videoing with his cell phone, you can see him get hit with the car prior to the shots ringing out. You can look at, there's ring camera footage and security footage and surveillance footage where if you look at the tire, they say that she was turning the wheel to turn away from the officer, but the tire was facing to the left of the officer. So when she turned the tire to the right, it was facing straight in front of the officer, as well as you can see her make direct eye contact with the officer from a different camera angle. So the officer, from all the facts that the public has, was most certainly acting in self-defense, yet in Minneapolis they are trying to arrest him for first-degree murder. Now the officer's name and personal information has since been doxed, and he and his family have received numerous death threats. Even Tom Homan came out and said that in addition to ICE as a whole receiving way more violence and way more death threats in general, way more attacks in general, I think it's up on both counts by over a thousand percent, this ICE agent that shot Renee Good, all of his information has been doxed, all of his information has been leaked, people know where he lives, and he and his entire family are at risk because people are literally calling for his murder. There's social media pictures of him with like wanted signs. It's absolutely insane. So then we have Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who is now boots on the ground in Minneapolis, and he has been attacked at least once, maybe more, physically attacked by protesters, by people that are anti-ICE, and in the video of him being attacked on the street, he was right next to his patrol vehicle, and a bunch of Border Patrol agents ended up having to tackle the guy that actually laid hands on Greg Bovino. Now Greg Bovino is absolutely, he is the guy that they send in when things escalate, like he knows how to handle himself during these situations, so it's absolutely insane as well that somebody dared to lay a hand on him and even got that close to him. Now at the protests in Seattle, there was a crowd with a huge banner that literally just said death to ICE on it. Also in Asheville, North Carolina, one protester was carrying a guillotine, a cardboard guillotine, that said D-ICER. D-E-dash ICER. I think y'all can follow what they were trying to say with that prop. Then over the weekend, back in Minneapolis, Ilhan Omar tried to get access to the Whipple ICE facility where the protests have been occurring, and upon rejection, she joined the protest. She got in the back of a pickup truck, and she called Trump a tyrant. She called ICE terrorists. She said that they were terrorizing neighbors, and that they were there to attack people, and she called the protesters a resistance. She said, quote, this resistance, and then continued to talk about how they're holding the line and basically trying to invigorate the protesters to keep doing what they're doing, which is attacking ICE officers and preventing them from keeping our country safe. Now, a video from the evening of January 12th, which was last night, showed that protesters were trying to fire fireworks into the Whipple ICE facility in Minneapolis. So they weren't trying to fire them into the physical building. I understand that that kind of sounded weird. They have now put up kind of a blockade, a wall of sorts, a fence around the Whipple ICE facility, and there are agents outside of the wall, and they were trying to fire the explosives either into the wall or at the line of ICE agents, which either way is absolutely terrible. So now, throughout the protests, Minneapolis police have continuously been told to stand down. Jacob Frey has been telling them to stand down, to not intervene, to not protect people who are on the ground, like independent journalist Nick Sorter. He claims that he has been attacked, that he has been yelled at. I believe it was he and Cam Higby that were in a vehicle that was actually spray-painted by protesters. They smashed a window, and Nick Sorter actually had to drive through them. I believe that was Nick Sorter and Cam Higby. But the police were not there. They were not anywhere to be found as these people are harassing independent journalists. There's a video of a CNN journalist broadcasting from the protest, and a protester with a mask on got between her and the camera and started demanding to know who she worked for, and then when they found out it was CNN, they walked away and left them alone. But who knows what would have happened had that been Fox, had that been Newsmax, had that been anybody else, OAN, obviously things could have escalated far worse than them knowing that it was CNN. Now, additionally, protesters have tried to storm hotels that they believe that ICE is staying in, and then they've also been conducting, um, I can't remember exactly what they called it, but basically protesting outside of the hotels that they think ICE is staying in, and they're bringing in what they call resistance bands. Like, they're bringing in members of this protest group, playing the drums, playing various different instruments, and literally just keeping the ICE agents awake, which I also read that that wasn't actually the hotel that they were staying in. I'm not sure where they're staying. I don't know if anybody actually knows where they're staying, which is best for them, but they were had, like, kazoos and blowhorns, and they were screaming, and they were playing resistance music, apparently. It was honestly kind of funny, but also terrible at the same time, but if they really think that they can revolt against the federal government, and all they have is a resistance band, and, you know, these people are dressed up in, like, frog outfits, like frog costumes, I don't think they're gonna be the ones to win the revolution. I don't think the frog man is going to be the one to stand up against the literal Marines in federal government. That's just, that's just my opinion. So, now, where we are, throughout this entire thing, throughout all the protests, throughout Nick Shirley leading, literally, like, the expose of the Quality Leading Center has all the way led to Tim Walz calling for civil war, which is, you know, kind of goes back to the expose I was talking about at the beginning of the video. Now, people are calling for Trump to utilize the Insurrection Act within Minneapolis, Minnesota, and against Tim Walz because he ordered the state law enforcement, he claimed that he may have to order state law enforcement to go against federal law enforcement. So, they, some people are calling for the Insurrection Act to be used to stop this from happening, and to allow the federal agents to perform their operations, or perform their job, without being harassed, doxxed, threatened, attacked, all of the things. Um, so, as protests are still occurring, and operations are still continuing, there is general unease throughout the country. I think, if you've been keeping up with it, we're all just bracing ourselves for the summer of love 2020. I saw one post on X where people said it's the winter of hate 2026. So, I think we're all just sitting, and we're like, it's either going to turn into the summer of love, or these people are going to go back to work, or go back to whatever it is that they do, when there is not national issues going on. So, as conservatives, as people who are interested in the well-being of our country, as people who can look at this, and determine that it is wrong, and that people should not be inhibited from doing their jobs, and that we know that ICE is here to protect us, and not here to protect illegal aliens, and spend federal taxpayer money on them, what we need to do is, first and foremost, continue supporting our law enforcement officials, our law enforcement agencies. They're here to protect us. They're here to serve us. They're here to defend us. So, what we can do is protect and defend them, appreciate them, and just, you know, not attack them. Quite frankly, just be supportive, and kind, and, you know, not attack them. Call it out. We can support independent journalists, like Nick Shirley, who is exposing the fraud, and independent journalists, like Camp Higby and Nick Sorter, who are exposing the degree of what's actually happening within these protests, specifically when it turns night, and things get more violent, more out of control, more tense, because the mainstream media isn't really going to report on the reality of what's going on. It is these boots-on-the- ground, independent American patriots that are going to tell you what's going on. They're the ones that are going to get in the car that ends up getting spray-painted and beaten by protesters. So, continuing to support them, and then lastly, we have to remain confident in our elected officials, our conservative elected officials, who are trying to clean up America, who are trying to drain the swamp, who are trying to protect us, and continue to work to ensure that they are elected or reelected in the midterms. That is, in November, we have about ten months until midterms, so really doing what we can as everyday Americans to ensure that there is a red wave in the midterms, and that we can stop this nonsense from going any further. We can ensure that ICE can do their job, that ICE does do their job, that we see mass deportations that we want to see. We have to vote for that at the polls in the midterms. We have to select the primary candidates, whenever your primary is in North Carolina, it's in March. I know in Florida, I think it's in the fall. So, ensuring that you are casting your vote for the people in the primaries that you think will do the best in supporting President Trump's agenda, and just stopping this. Having a FAFO moment, like we kind of see the whole country, and quite frankly, the entire globe happening right now, because it just, it's time for this to stop. It is time for this nonsense to stop. It is time for the endless protesting to stop. It is, you know, obviously I'm pro First Amendment, but when you are beating ICE agents and calling it freedom of speech, that's, that's abhorrent. That is irresponsible, and it is abhorrent. Now, what President Trump is doing with these ICE raids, it is America first. The mass deportations that we will hopefully see is America first, and we have to protect Trump. We have to protect the House and the Senate in the fall in order to protect him, because they already said if they, if we lose the House and the Senate, they're going to try for impeachment. So, we really have to fight for America first at the polls this year, for President Trump at the polls this year, so that he can put America first, so that he can train the swamp, and so that he can save America from the four years of crap that we saw under the Biden administration. So, thank y'all so much for joining me on this episode. I know it wasn't too crazy today. It was really just overall recap of what's been going on. I'm looking forward to hopefully doing an episode on everything that's going on in Iran, because that is completely aside from this. That is an episode in and of itself, as well as doing an episode about the real Rene Good. So, if y'all want more in the meantime, be sure to check, check us out on X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. You're gonna see us on all of those at the Reagan-Faulkner Show, and everything minus TikTok at the Wilmington Standard. And if you want the Reagan-Faulkner Show merch, or anything like that, and be sure to check us out at the WilmingtonStandard.com and ReaganFaulkner.com. Thank y'all so much, and I'll see you on the next one.