Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
On Wednesday morning in south Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and prize-winning poet, by firing a bullet into the window of her Honda Pilot. You can, and should, watch the disturbing firsthand video footage of the shooting for yourself, from the multiple angles available. Otherwise, the same self-professed “citizen journalists” whose often misleading and Trump administration–backed vertical videos about Minnesota helped bring ICE agents to the city (where they went on to tear-gas outraged protesters and harass high school officials) will feel free to rewrite the story of what really happened here.
To be clear, the only person who directly caused Good’s death is the ICE agent who pulled the trigger. But it’s worth asking how we got to this moment, where a mother driving with her partner could have her life taken by a federal officer at close range, her killer is made out to be the real victim by the president of the United States, and the world’s wealthiest man lies on his social media platform that she attempted to ram into ICE agents. All of which happened after a “senior” Department of Homeland Security official admitted to media sources that the shooter did not act according to protocol, after it was revealed that the agents on the ground blocked Good from receiving medical care, and after dozens of professional video analyses undercut the fallacious claim that she had attempted to harm law enforcement. You can trace it to the self-professed right-wing “independent journalists” who’ve been empowered by the Trump administration, ICE, and the Nazi porn factory known as X to take on vigilante missions as parachute influencers professing to find The Truth but almost always lying.
As Jill Filipovic recently recounted in Slate, the long-public, well-documented investigations of various Minnesota nonprofits and residents—many of them Somali American—over the misuse of federal funds had been widely reported in legacy journalism outfits. Yet the right-wing media, always happy to sculpt a narrative, decided to inflame the issue through fact-free rage bait. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, writing in the think tank’s City Journal, claimed that Minnesotan Somalis were the “biggest” overseas financer of militant group al-Shabab via defrauded funds—based in part on a source who claimed to have been misquoted, and on deliberate ignorance of international law and terrorist financing. Nevertheless, Rufo weaponized the thin story to demonize the entire Somali American community, successfully campaigning to have Donald Trump revoke Temporary Protected Status for all refugees in the demographic. The story continued to fester on X, as Elon Musk boosted sensationalized, fact-free “reports” from various paid Twitter subscribers. This included a viral December video about alleged day care fraud from the 23-year-old YouTuber Nick Shirley, who subsequently earned the federal government’s attention and persuaded the administration to sic ICE troops upon the Minneapolis day care facilities and the tens of thousands of Somali Minnesotans who had nothing to do with the in-process, publicly known investigations.
This isn’t the first time Rufo has falsely smeared entire immigrant groups with the use of spurious “evidence,” whether those be Haitian Ohioans or Venezuelan Coloradans, and it’s certainly not the first time he’s been let off the hook for it. Shirley, meanwhile, has been exposed for falsely targeting active day care centers with the undisclosed help of a statehouse Republican. The YouTuber and X enthusiast has since moved on to other blatant conspiracies like the implication that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had his own statehouse speaker killed last year, and is currently parroting the hoax that Good “threatened and put law enforcement in that unnecessary position.” Nevertheless, these two fraudsters get praise from prominent Musk pal, Trump suck-up, and All-In Podcast co-host Chamath Palihapitiya as noble “citizen journalists” who should expand their disinformation efforts—characterizing concerned Americans independently picking up their iPhones and checking out Minneapolis in good faith, even though Rufo’s work is backed by a well-funded think tank and Shirley’s video was coordinated with a GOP officeholder.
The snake-oil “citizen journalist” is hardly a novel or newly effective presence in the right-wing media ecosystem; some of today’s most notorious MAGA influencers, like Laura Loomer, got their start in the Obama era. But the mythical figure of the phone-wielding lone actor uncovering what the mainstream media won’t tell you has only gained further credence since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, coming to dominate X and, by extension, the MAGA policy sphere. The changes Musk made to the algorithm, coupled with the suppression of outbound links and the heightened prominence afforded to accounts that pay the platform a monthly fee, have demonstrably helped several once unknown, amateur, unscrupulous “creators” earn internet fame and money via bald-faced lies prefaced by an all-caps “BREAKING.” Without Musk’s stewardship and personal boosting, it is far less likely you would ever have come to know or encounter misinformation peddlers (and self-styled “journalists”) like Jackson Hinkle, Mario Nawfal, Chaya “LibsOfTikTok” Raichik, or, yes, Nick Shirley.
A vibe check on such accounts also lays plain how these actors are incentivized to seize upon a buzzy issue—usually having to do with either liberal protests or immigrant Americans—and descend upon an area of interest, sans any real interest in or knowledge of the setting, coming to the same conclusions as so many iPhone warriors before. There’s far-right podcast favorite Nick Sortor, excusing Good’s killing and accusing a peaceful assembly of Minneapolis protesters of direct “INCITEMENT.” There are the “Muckraker Brothers,” taking the incendiary words of one Somali Ohioan to make the case for kicking out the entire diaspora. There’s Savanah Hernandez, the Turning Point USA–affiliated influencer who single-handedly got ICE agents to come to Manhattan and harass various street vendors, baited by her assumption that they were “illegals.” There are various other accounts taking innocuous footage of, say, a parade of Indian Americans in Texas and using that alone to allege a “CRIMINAL” fraud conspiracy.
All these people have scrapped even basic standards of journalistic integrity, public service, double-checking their sources, and including a wide range of voices—instead, merely taking false info or isolated bites out of context and blasting them out as rage bait. The same people who claim to be filling in where legacy media failed are reiterating the exact same dynamics that characterize legacy media’s lowest moments.
This isn’t just the government “meme teams” or the propagandists in the Pentagon press room. This is a direct network for budding MAGA acolytes. Ever since Musk took X in the direction of “maximal truth-seeking” and proceeded to do anything but—dismissing or ignoring his own beloved Community Notes, reconfiguring his chatbot to parrot white nationalist fantasies—the far right has been able to get direct lines to Trump’s inner circle via their paid blue checks and sensationalist lies boosted by bots and anonymous foreign accounts. There’s a reason the infamous neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes can credit X with furthering his fame.
We’ve come a long way from the early days of realizing the potential of video on the internet, when bystander-filmed videos of police shootings helped contradict government and media narratives downplaying racism and aggression within law enforcement. By now, many of the people who filmed those shootings have since been punished and persecuted for telling the truth. (They’re also witnessing Musk and his influencer army attempt to claim George Floyd was not murdered.) Yet people like Nick Sortor are actively encouraging Kyle Rittenhouse to come join them in Minneapolis. ICE had already shot dozens of Americans and killed an activist in Los Angeles and repeatedly lied about the circumstances of all those encounters and threats before, more often than not, retracting their original stories. The FBI director, taking all his cues from Nick Shirley types, feels confident enough about those misleading videos to sideline Minnesota professionals wishing to look into the shooting.
As everyday communities hurt and feel the pressure of federal threats, the “citizen journalists” will enjoy impunity and move on to the next fraud.
