Roger & Me is Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary about the closure of General Motors plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Through the 1980s, GM shut down multiple Flint factories and laid off tens of thousands of workers while posting profits and opening plants elsewhere, including in Mexico. The film follows the town’s economic collapse in the wake of those closures — empty storefronts, evictions, a local economy hollowed out.
The film’s throughline is Moore trying to get GM chairman Roger Smith to walk through Flint and see what the company’s decisions did to it. Moore shows up at GM headquarters, at shareholder meetings, at a country club, at a company Christmas party, camera rolling, trying to corner Smith into an interview. Smith never grants one. Security and PR staff intercept Moore repeatedly. The film cuts these attempts against footage of the town’s decline: a sheriff’s deputy repossessing furniture, an auto show sponsored by GM in the same period Flint was hemorrhaging jobs.
Roger & Me became a box-office hit for a documentary, launched Moore’s career, and set the template for the confrontational, camera-forward, no-cooperation-required style he’d use again in Bowling for Columbine, Sicko, and Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s taught in film and journalism courses as a landmark of the genre.
Nothing in the film alleges that Roger Smith broke the law. GM’s plant closures and its move overseas were legal decisions made in response to a wave of global competition and labor costs reshaping manufacturing everywhere, not just at GM. Smith’s legal obligation ran to GM’s shareholders, not to Flint — corporate law gives management wide discretion to run a company in its own interest, with no duty to keep an uneconomic plant open for a hometown’s sake. The case against Smith was that he made a decision he was legally free to make, without the human sympathy Moore thought the moment demanded, and that he wouldn’t sit for an interview about it. That’s a moral complaint. It was never a legal one.
Roger & Me wasn’t an outlier. It’s one entry in a much longer tradition of journalism that operates without its subject’s consent and rarely draws fire from the left when the subject is a cause the left already opposed. 60 Minutes built a fifty-year run on hidden cameras and ambush interviews aimed at corporations, scam artists, and government agencies — nobody proposed shielding those targets by statute either. The method in all these cases is the same: show up where you’re not wanted, publish without permission, let the subject explain itself after the fact if it wants to. Nobody organized a bill.
Vilified First, Vindicated Later
In December 2025, independent journalist and YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video alleging widespread fraud at Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota — operators, he claimed, collecting taxpayer-funded child care payments for children who weren't being served. The video went viral within days, amplified by Vice President JD Vance and others, and triggered an immediate federal response.
Before any of Shirley’s Minnesota claims were adjudicated, the press response was immediate and dismissive. A University of Minnesota media law professor told NPR that influencers like Shirley “prioritize fearmongering over fact-checking.” PBS labeled him a “right-wing influencer” pushing fraud claims “without proof.” The New York Times downplayed the story as a single viral video. Some media-law commentators went further, framing the reporting itself as pushing an “anti-immigrant” and “anti-Muslim” narrative. Notice the label doing the work before the facts get a hearing: Moore has been called a documentary filmmaker for thirty-seven years, and an Oscar winner for the last twenty-three. Nobody called Roger & Me an influencer’s video. Shirley, doing the same thing outside the same traditional outlets, gets “influencer” — a word that pre-loads the dismissal before a single claim is checked.
At least one of the centers Shirley named has already resulted in federal action. Fahima Egeh Mahamud, who ran Future Leaders Early Learning Center — one of the businesses in Shirley’s video — was charged and pleaded guilty in July 2026 to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. She admitted to falsely certifying that she was collecting required parental co-payments when she wasn’t — which made her center ineligible for the $4.6 million in Child Care Assistance Program reimbursements it received — on top of $850,000 tied to a separate federal food-program fraud scheme. That’s not proof of Shirley’s specific claim that centers were billing for children or hours never actually served. It is proof that a center state inspectors described as “operating as expected” in January was criminally charged the following month, and its owner later admitted to multimillion-dollar fraud in the very program funding it. Shirley was dismissed as fearmongering months before any of that came out.
Five days after the video went viral, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families announced that inspectors had visited the nine centers named in Shirley’s video — Future Leaders among them — and found them “operating as expected.” That finding got wide pickup as evidence Shirley had overreached. But look at what the check actually measured: whether children were physically present and licenses were active on the day inspectors showed up. That’s a same-day compliance snapshot. It says nothing about whether a center billed the state for hours or children it didn’t serve, which was Shirley’s actual claim. It’s also worth noting DCYF is the same agency whose oversight of Minnesota’s child-care assistance programs sits at the center of a fraud scandal that predates Shirley’s video by years, with more than 90 people already charged in related cases since 2022. An agency clearing its own licensees five days after a viral video put its oversight failures in the national spotlight is not a disinterested source.
The federal government didn’t treat the matter as closed the way the “operating as expected” headline suggested. HHS froze child care payments to the state pending investigation within days of the video going viral, and Homeland Security Investigations and ICE were on the ground in Minneapolis before the week was out. Four months later, in April, FBI and HSI agents were still actively raiding businesses tied to Shirley’s video — the former Quality Learing Center location among them — collecting records and computers. The investigation the state’s five-day clearance was supposedly answering was still open when federal agents were carrying out evidence boxes months later.
Two different outcomes for two different centers named in the same video. Future Leaders produced a federal guilty plea. Quality Learing Center — the business whose misspelled sign became the meme of the whole story — voluntarily surrendered its license in January with no reason given by the state, after officials had earlier said they’d found no fraud evidence there specifically. Both were waved off as debunked in the same news cycle.
Same Method, Different Verdict
Thirty-seven years later, California passed a law about a journalist doing something close to what Moore did — except this time, the journalist is alleging something Moore never alleged against Smith: fraud.
Nick Shirley is an independent journalist and YouTuber who built a following exposing what he says is fraud in taxpayer-funded programs — first at daycare centers in Minnesota, then at immigration-support nonprofits and healthcare facilities in California. His method is the Moore method: show up uninvited, film, ask questions the subject doesn’t want to answer, publish.
Here’s the legislative sequence, in order. Shirley’s Minnesota daycare video goes viral in late 2025. He travels to San Diego to shoot similar content at Somali-run daycares in California; two days after Shirley posted that he’d arrived in the state, Governor Newsom says the local Somali community feels “under siege” by “right-wing provocateurs.” Assemblywoman Mia Bonta — married to California Attorney General Rob Bonta — introduces AB 2624 that same month, titled “Privacy for Immigration Support Services Providers,” extending the state’s Safe at Home address-confidentiality program to immigration-service workers; her office says the bill responds to a broader pattern of harassment predating Shirley. Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio attaches Shirley’s name to it anyway, calling it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” The bill passes the Assembly in May, the Senate later, and Governor Newsom signs it on August 22, effective October 1, 2027. Shirley sues on September 4, represented by America First Legal, arguing the law is an unconstitutional content- and viewpoint-based restriction that chills investigative journalism into fraud at taxpayer-funded nonprofits.
Bonta’s office says the bill was never about Shirley or journalism — it protects workers facing documented threats, full stop. On what the final text actually prohibits, her office has a real textual argument: it bars posting a protected person’s information or image with specific intent to incite imminent violence or create reasonable fear for their safety, not filming, publishing, or accusing someone of fraud. On a narrow reading of that text, a reporter can still show up at an immigration-services office, film, ask hostile questions, name the organization, allege fraud, and publish. Shirley doesn’t buy that reading, and neither does his legal team — which is exactly what his lawsuit is about. Free-speech lawyers, including the First Amendment Coalition, raised real concerns about an earlier, broader version of the bill; lawmakers narrowed it before passage, but narrower isn’t the same as settled, and no court has yet ruled on which reading is right.
IMO, that legal uncertainty is part of the problem, not an answer to it. A law doesn’t have to ban journalism outright to intimidate the people doing it. It just has to make them uncertain whether today’s story is the one that gets them sued, demanded from, or referred for prosecution — and let them find out only after they’ve already spent the money defending themselves. I think that’s what this bill does to reporters covering this beat, whatever its authors intended and whatever a court eventually rules.
So the accurate claim isn’t that California outlawed the Roger & Me method. It’s this: California already has general anti-doxxing law — a criminal statute for publishing someone’s information with intent to cause fear, a civil law letting anyone doxxed sue for damages. Those already covered Shirley, the immigration workers, everyone. AB 2624 didn’t fill a gap. It handed one occupational class a second, class-specific legal weapon that can be invoked against anyone publishing information about them — a civil and criminal claim, plus a formal demand process a reporter has to respond to — on top of the general law that already covered them. A reporter doesn’t have to lose that claim to be hurt by it. Facing a lawsuit or a demand letter over a story you have every right to publish costs money and time whether you win or not — a way to punish a reporter through the process itself, without ever needing a verdict. And that’s exactly what an intent-based standard like this one makes possible: nobody has to prove Shirley intended to incite violence before they can accuse him of it, send the demand letter, or file the claim. Intent lives in someone’s head. Alleging it is free; disproving it in court isn’t. That gap between what it costs to accuse and what it costs to defend is the actual mechanism, regardless of who eventually wins. Roger Smith had no comparable tool available against Moore. The workers named in AB 2624 have it now, against reporters doing something just as legal as what Smith did.
Whatever the bill’s authors intended, here is the actual asymmetry: the confrontational, no-consent style of journalism that made Michael Moore’s career when the target was a legal corporate decision produced no legislative response at all. The same style, aimed at a falsifiable fraud claim, produced a special legal weapon for its targets within months.
The Silence
Michael Moore has not gone quiet on immigration enforcement. He has written at length on his Substack and posted regularly on X about ICE, deportations, and the people he says are being swept up by them — including a widely covered piece arguing that deporting immigrants risks removing the next cure for cancer. He has weighed in on detention conditions, on ICE tactics, on nearly every immigration-adjacent controversy of the last two years.
I can find no public statement from Moore on AB 2624 or Shirley — no Substack post, indexed X post, interview, or podcast discussion. A filmmaker built entirely on the premise that cameras belong wherever the powerful don’t want them has had nothing to say, as far as I can find, about a law aimed at burdening exactly that premise — as long as the camera is pointed somewhere he’s chosen not to look.
Not a New Pattern
This isn’t the first time the same reversal has shown up. In Is Democracy Really Under Siege, and If So, From Whom?, I argued that “democracy under siege” language is less a description of an actual rule change than the sound a party makes when it discovers, after decades of assuming otherwise, that the rules don’t favor it anymore. AB 2624 is one more data point for that argument, but it’s not the only one on record.
I made this case at length in The Democrats’ Love/Hate Relationship With the Supreme Court: nobody called the Court a threat to democracy while it was ruling their way. FDR tried to expand the Court in 1937, when it was declaring his agenda unconstitutional; for various reasons too complex to get into here, that effort was dropped, and the idea sat unused in mainstream Democratic politics for decades. It came back in 2021, when Senate and House Democrats introduced a bill to expand the Court from nine to thirteen seats, a year before Dobbs, once the Court stopped ruling their way. The “assault on democracy” framing arrived with the losing streak, not before it.
The same selective standard shows up in ethics scrutiny, which I covered in Is the Supreme Court Really Partisan and Unethical?: undisclosed gifts and fishing trips became a national media obsession the moment the Court’s majority stopped ruling the way critics wanted, while the revolving door, congressional stock trading, and the post-office book deals and speaking fees that make ex-officials rich — structural corruption that dwarfs any fishing trip — drew no comparable outrage from the same critics. Same category of conduct, opposite level of scrutiny, depending on which branch was doing it.
The same shape shows up in redistricting, which I wrote about in What Is the Uproar About the Latest Supreme Court Ruling on Gerrymandering? Louisiana v. Callais drew a wave of civil-rights outrage this year for a ruling that made it harder to compel a majority-Black district in a state that’s one-third Black. Illinois Democrats, in the same period, drew a map producing fourteen of seventeen congressional seats from a statewide vote split roughly 56-44 — and it generated nothing resembling the same civil-rights framing in the same press corps. Same tool, opposite verdict, depending on who the map benefits.
AB 2624 is that shape again, at statute scale. A confrontational, no-consent style of exposure was a career-making, celebrated genre for four decades when the target was a legal, undisputed corporate decision. The moment the same style produced a specific, falsifiable fraud claim against an immigration-services nonprofit, its targets got an extra layer of legal shielding Roger Smith never had against Moore, plus a governor’s signature and a critic’s nickname stuck to the bill. Nobody has to guess why the reaction changed. The pattern already has data points on the record before this one.
The Doxxing Problem Is Real
None of this means doxxing isn’t a real problem. It is, and the internet and social media have made it worse than anything Moore’s generation of documentarians had to reckon with — a viral clip is permanent and searchable in a way a theatrical release never was. Shirley himself says he can no longer investigate in major cities without a security detail, because activists photograph him and circulate his location to disrupt his reporting. California already has general doxxing laws covering exactly that. AB 2624 added a special layer on top for one occupational class anyway.
The Question Newsom’s Signature Didn’t Answer
Michael Moore never got a bill with his name on it. He spent decades perfecting the exact method that Shirley used — no consent, no cooperation, camera rolling until the subject cracks or the story’s told anyway — and it made him rich, celebrated, and Oscar-decorated instead of regulated. Nick Shirley got a bill with his name attached to it within months of using that same method to allege something Moore never had to prove: an actual crime. On its narrowest reading, the bill doesn’t ban what Shirley does — but Shirley is suing precisely because he doesn’t accept that reading, and no court has settled it yet. What isn’t in dispute is this: California already had a generally applicable doxxing law covering him and everyone else before AB 2624 existed. What Shirley’s targets got, and Moore’s target never did, is a legal weapon Roger Smith never had against Moore, no matter how legal Smith’s conduct was.
IMO, the timeline tells you why: this bill is part of the broader resistance to Trump and Republican immigration enforcement, and its practical effect is to intimidate reporters who go after liberal causes. Nobody has to admit that for it to be true.
IMO, and this is opinion, not something the record above proves on its own: this isn’t really about doxxing, or about Shirley, or even about immigration policy specifically. It’s what happens any time a set of tools — a free press, a Supreme Court, a redistricting map — worked in your favor for long enough that you never had to think about the tool itself, only the outcome. The tool was fine when it expanded rights you wanted expanded, or exposed a corporation that had done nothing illegal, or drew districts that happened to favor you. The moment the same tool turned and started producing outcomes you didn’t want, the complaint stopped being about the outcome and became about the tool — the Court is illegitimate, the map is a civil-rights violation, the reporter is a safety threat. I’ve made this case about the Court more than once. AB 2624 is the same shape, just smaller and easier to see all at once.
Same camera. Same ambush. Same refusal to take no for an answer. The variable that best explains the radically different reaction is who was standing on the other side of the lens.
Sources
Nick Shirley / Minnesota daycare fraud
Fox News: Quality Learing Center voluntarily surrenders license
Fox News: HHS freezes payments, federal “massive investigation” launched
AB 2624 / California
Historical pattern / prior Cranky Old Guy pieces