Things are going great in the ICE standards department. In a wild article published yesterday, Slate writer Laura Jedeed revealed how non-existent the background check process is for new ICE agents by accidentally getting offered a job as an agent herself. Then it came out that James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor who was revealed last year to be running a brazenly white-nationalist X account1, is back on the job. And yesterday, Stephen Miller encouraged ICE not to let little obstacles like city and state officials interfere with their work. ICE officers, he said, have “immunity to perform your duties,” and any official who interferes with those duties “will face justice.” Happy Wednesday.

MAGA’S Young, Dumb Future

by Andrew Egger

The wilder the situation grows in Minneapolis—ICE growing openly brutal against protesters and observers, career prosecutors resigning in protest over the slanted investigation of the death of Renee Good, Stephen Miller proclaiming to ICE that “you have immunity to perform your duties” and that “no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist” can stand in their way—the more remarkable it is that the whole situation really got going thanks to one smooth-brained 23-year-old YouTuber.

Minnesota’s public-services fraud and its connections to Minneapolis’s Somali population had been an ongoing scandal for years, and were already a large and growing story on the right before Nick Shirley headed there with a camera crew late last month. But Shirley’s highly misleading gonzo video confronting employees of Somali-run daycares and health care centers and claiming to have discovered $110 million in fraud went ultra-viral, racking up hundreds of millions of views and turning the scandal into the story of the moment for the MAGA right. Within days, the White House was surging immigration enforcement to Minneapolis; Vice President JD Vance said Shirley had “done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes.”

If this sort of person doing this sort of work can be so richly rewarded on the right right now, it’s safe to say both that Shirley will be a major fixture of the online right for a