I’d never really heard anything about Nick Shirley before he uncovered the massive amounts of fraud among primarily Somali-owned day cares in Minnesota. Billions of taxpayer dollars were not just stolen, but at least some of it found its way into the bank accounts of terrorist organizations. The fraud was staggering to many Americans, who had just started to recover from all the insanity funded by USAID.
While that dominated the news cycle for quite a while, at least in conservative media, Shirley didn’t rest on his laurels. He turned his attention to California, where the governor’s press office X account tried to paint him as some kind of a creepy pervert–and considering what the guy who runs that account looks like, someone’s hard drive probably needs to be checked, but it ain’t Nick’s.
Anyway, California Democrats are upset, and now they’re trying to use the law to stop him, but the ramifications may go beyond enabling fraud, as Lee Williams noted.
Assemblymember Bonta certainly doesn’t want anyone like Mr. Shirley to investigate anything in California, so she wants to criminalize such reporting regardless of its First Amendment protections.
“Individuals who provide immigrant support services including legal aid, humanitarian relief, case management, and advocacy are facing targeted harassment. This is not hypothetical,” Bonta said at an April 7 hearing, according to the New York Post.
Mr. Shirley’s response was quick and succinct.
“The enemy truly is within,” Shirley said in a press release Monday. “When our politicians would rather protect fraudsters and illegal migrants, it’s time for us to stand up or face mass oppression from the traitors who ‘rule’ over us.”
Assemblymember Bonta’s bill includes criminal penalties of up to a $50,000 fine and a year in a county jail or even longer sentences in a state prison if the published information results in “bodily harm.”
It’s not if the person who publishes this commits an act of harm, mind you, only whoever publishes either a picture or personal information…like a name, should it result in that harm.
The problem is also that the bill is phrased as if it’s really just about information published for the purposes of bullying or intimidation, but when you uncover fraud and publish pictures, addresses, and names of the people who are involved, the obvious purpose is to stop it. That can be construed, though, as being an attempt at intimidating them into stopping the fraud.
Hence the problem.
But the issue here doesn’t just stop at day cares or fraud. We all know that bad ideas don’t just stop on their own. Once one takes hold, it’s used to justify still more.
Here is the problem that Williams notes:
Can you imagine a similar state law banning reporting about San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention or the state chapters of Demanding Moms, Brady or Giffords? Once AB 2624 is signed into law it’s almost guaranteed, as are similarly unconstitutional state laws in other blue states.
For example, there’s currently an FEC complaint about Giffords reportedly violating campaign finance laws to benefit a number of lawmakers, including California’s Adam Schiff, among many others. Reporting on this could easily be construed as doing so to intimidate Giffords or to encourage bullying of the organization or its leadership.
Honestly, uncovering any wrongdoing, particularly involving an identifiable person or persons, could be presented to a grand jury as such.
And don’t think that California won’t try it, either.
Plus, bad ideas don’t stay put. Someone will carry that particular effort into every other anti-gun state, all to throttle criticism of gun control organizations and activists. I mean, their stance on guns means they care nothing for the Second Amendment, so why should we assume they care about the First?
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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