4.6 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
How a mixture of real investigations, wild allegations, evidence of actual fraud, and the right-wing echo chamber ended Tim Walz’s governor campaign in Minnesota.
Guest: Deena Winter, Minneapolis City Hall reporter for the Star Tribune.
Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I've been thinking a lot about what qualifies as an investigation these days. |
| 0:11.6 | I say that because my social feeds are filled with investigations, of all kinds. |
| 0:17.1 | Like there's this one guy I follow who seems exclusively interested in abandoned buildings. |
| 0:23.7 | He takes pictures of empty office parks with drained swimming pools and kitchens still filled with food. |
| 0:30.8 | And then he tells you the story of what happened there, or at least what he thinks happened there. |
| 0:36.3 | Anyway, over the Christmas holiday, I got flooded with a different kind of investigation. |
| 0:45.0 | Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going. |
| 0:48.1 | This is a video from a right-wing YouTuber named Nick Shirley. |
| 0:52.4 | Maybe you caught it too. |
| 0:54.0 | I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to happen. |
| 0:56.0 | Hold Governor Walls accountable for this. |
| 0:58.2 | What was this money spent? In it, Shirley goes door to door in Minneapolis, quote |
| 1:03.2 | unquote, investigating what he calls daycare fraud. |
| 1:07.3 | So right now, they're all getting mad because he's shown the paperwork of this business being |
| 1:11.5 | registered as a business. Seventy-four children, no children. We saw one child when the lady opened |
| 1:16.1 | up the door. What exactly is Nick Shirley alleging here? He's alleging that there were no children |
| 1:22.0 | in the daycares. Dina Winter is a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune. He knocked on the doors of about 10 daycares in an autism clinic and a few other places along the way. |
| 1:32.3 | So the allegation is these places are getting money from the government, but they're not doing anything. |
| 1:37.3 | Yeah, he was alleging there were, if they didn't answer the door or they wouldn't let him in, |
| 1:42.3 | then there was nobody inside, their normal children inside. |
| 1:46.1 | And therefore, it was fraud, which I don't think is how I would go about it, but that's how |
| 1:52.8 | he went about it. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 21 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.