Commentary Culture Investigations

Honest media would try to emulate independent journalist Nick Shirley, instead of try to silence him, Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday, following Shirley’s latest expose’ of potential Medicare and Medicaid fraud.“Our administration owes a debt of gratitude to Nick Shirley for exposing one of the most egregious cases of fraud this country has ever seen,” the vice president wrote in a social media post after Shirley reported that he had uncovered $190 million of healthcare fraud in New York City.“If the media was worth their salt, they would take notes from Nick and other citizen journalists who care about investigating stories that affect the American people instead of trying to silence them,” Vance added.Shirley replied to V.P. Vance’s post by recalling an inaccurate hit piece on him by National Public Radio (NPR) Reporter Rachel Treisman and referencing his viral report of a potential daycare fraudster’s misspelled “Quality Learing Center” sign:“Remember when instead of investigating the fraud the mainstream media decided to investigate the person who exposed the fraud? Why? Because they were complicit in the cover up I was right, they were wrong I work for you, they work against you The media is full of learers.”The post included a correction NPR had to make to the story because it grossly understated the amount of potential fraud Shirley had uncovered. “Previously posted Dec. 31, 2025: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Nick Shirley and his colleague claimed to have uncovered $110,000 in fraud. In fact, it was $110 million in fraud,” the correction acknowledged.While that error might be interpreted as a typo, rather than an effort to diminish Shirley’s work, another correction to the same article admits the story falsely attributed a comment to Shirley:“An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Nick Shirley as the person at a White House event on antifa who said he was attacked ‘every time I do my job’ and who accused mainstream media of downplaying violence at local protests during President Trump’s second term. Shirley participated in the event, but the statements were made by a different speaker.”“This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes,” Vice President Vance wrote at the time, praising Shirley’s identification of $110 million of potential fraud in Minnesota and reposting video of Shirley’s report.This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes. https://t.co/Ip6f9IedjL— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 27, 2025

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Christoph Zollinger was once one of Mossack Fonseca’s most senior employees. Now, he’s due to face trial in Germany.

At least $1.4 billion of its tokens passed through a crypto wallet linked to scams, hacks, and human trafficking.

If the problem we’re focusing on is the gap between stated and achieved desires for family size, more immigration can’t possibly be the solution.

Left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed released two pages of his 2025 tax return showing $686,069 in total income, including $292,000 in “additional income” and $262,000 in capital gains, placing him in the top 1 percent of Michigan earners.
But the return does not reveal the sources of that income because El-Sayed released only the first two pages, omitting the remainder that would provide further detail.
El-Sayed told an NBC affiliate in West Michigan that the $292,881 he reported in “additional income” stems from his little-known podcast, America Dissected, as well as from his wife’s psychiatry practice, Mind Work Psychiatry. His corresponding “Schedule 1” form could confirm his claims, detailing the “additional income” in itemized categories like “business income” and “rental real estate,” but El-Sayed did not release that form.
El-Sayed’s capital gains required him to submit a “Schedule D” form that includes additional information about assets sold, something he also did not release. He told the NBC affiliate that the gains stem from the sale of a property that his wife’s parents bought in his name, but he did not specify the location of the property, when it was sold, or for how much.
The release came as El-Sayed faced criticism from his Democratic opponent, congresswoman Haley Stevens, for his failure to release his tax returns and for his delay in filing an updated personal financial disclosure with the Senate until after Michigan’s August primary election. El-Sayed, who has stressed the importance of “government transparency,” initially said he delayed the disclosures because “taxes get complicated, my wife and her family own property abroad, and so getting all those tax forms is a thing.” He later vowed to release his return imminently, saying it would be “pretty mundane.”
“I’m a public servant, my wife is a clinician, at the end of the day we have a pretty standard tax return,” El-Sayed said. “You’re gonna be like, ‘Wow, this is pretty mundane, I don’t know what they were talking about.'”
But the candidate, who has billed himself as a crusader for the working class against the wealthy, does not have a “standard” return when compared with the average Michigander or American. His total income places him in the top 1 percent of earners in Michigan, where the median household income is $68,500, according to IRS data reported by Axios. In Detroit, it’s just $38,000. El-Sayed makes roughly 18 times as much.
An outsized portion of El-Sayed’s income, meanwhile, came from capital gains. In 2021, more than 60 percent of Americans’ personal income stemmed from wages, while nearly 18 percent stemmed from capital gains, according to a 2024 Tax Foundation analysis. Just 19 percent of El-Sayed’s 2025 income came from wages, while 40 percent stemmed from capital gains.
El-Sayed’s tax returns are likely to add to mounting questions about his finances, particularly his real estate portfolio.
In his 2025 financial disclosure, El-Sayed reported two rental properties—one in Ann Arbor and one in India—together worth up to $750,000. Property records show that El-Sayed still owns the Ann Arbor property through a trust belonging to him and his wife. It’s unclear whether El-Sayed’s capital gains came from a sale of the Indian property or a third, unknown property.
It is clear, however, that El-Sayed has become significantly wealthier since his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018, when he released tax returns showing $237,000 in gross income—$25,000 less than El-Sayed’s 2025 capital gains alone.
Some of El-Sayed’s additional income has come from his wife Sarah Jukaku’s private practice. Though El-Sayed has called for universal health care through a single-payer “Medicare for All” system that would cover every American “from cradle to grave,” Jukaku does not accept Medicare or any other insurance and requires patients to pay out-of-pocket, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The arrangement prompted criticism on a Reddit page for fans of the left-wing streamer Destiny. “Jesus, how do I make that much :(,” one user wrote. “Marry a psychiatrist that refuses to take Medicare, Medicaid, or insurance,” another replied.

El-Sayed appears to have spent a sizable portion of his income on a luxury watch collection, a Free Beacon review found. He has described himself as a “sucker” for classic watches and has been pictured on the campaign trail wearing watches including a $4,000 Sinn U1 SE, a $10,000 Omega Speedmaster Moon Phase Chronograph, and a $3,000 Omega Seamaster DeVille. The Sinn U1, a German diver’s watch, earned El-Sayed praise from a watch podcast, Lan Jam.
“[W]e have to include him rocking what looks like the Sinn U-1 SE,” an Instagram post from the podcast declared. “Badass stealthy pick, well done Doc!”
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Time and again, black voters have proven to be more pragmatic than their progressive white counterparts by prioritizing electability over ideology.

When walking scandal Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race, one might have expected the leftist media to stop pretending that rape allegations and Nazi tattoos are no big deal. Instead though, they’ve opted to continue rewriting history, reframing the giant Totenkopf symbol he had emblazoned on his chest into just some tattoo “that some say resembled a Nazi symbol.”The media were using this weaselly “resembling” hedge well before Platner’s campaign buckled under the weight of his own unelectability. But there’s something particularly jarring about these journalists continuing to muddy the waters around Platner’s many controversies now that they (seemingly) have lost any reason to run PR for him. Graham Platner was a leftist media darling before he dropped out of the Maine Senate race.If the media like you enough, a giant Totenkopf inked on your chest can magically become a tattoo “that some say resembles a Nazi symbol.” pic.twitter.com/FFnuU3ybwB— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) July 15, 2026It’s not nitpicking to fixate on the word “resembling,” because the reality is that Platner’s tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol in the same way that a Big Mac resembles a hamburger. It’s technically true, but it also inserts needless ambiguity into a matter of settled fact. The vagueness is not an accident, but rather a deliberate attempt to mislead by muddying the waters.Platner’s tattoo, a large Totenkopf crest on his right pectoral, was the official uniform emblem of the Schutzstaffel (SS), an elite paramilitary organization from Hitler’s Germany. It’s not just associated with the SS; it originated with them, and has only ever been used in that context. Epistemologically speaking, the Totenkopf is more of a pure Nazi symbol than even the Swastika, due to the latter having predated Nazi Germany by several thousand years.The media’s framing, therefore, is intentionally dishonest. It’s the kind of half-lie one expects lefty journalists to tell during a tense midterm season in order to help drag their favored Democratic candidate across the finish line. But again, Platner is no longer the Democratic candidate.Yet still, the lying continues apace. On the July 12 edition of NBC’s Meet The Press, host Kristen Welker prefaced a question to Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) with this preamble:I want to ask you about something else that has been under a microscope: your endorsement of Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine. He has since dropped out amid a swirl of controversies. Congressman, you stood by him during a series of previous controversies, from a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol…This quote contains a clue about why the ambiguous framing of Platner’s didn’t die with his Senate bid.Khanna, along with the vast majority of his fellow Democrats in both the House and Senate, had remained steadfast in his support of Platner even after the tidal wave of controversies came rushing in. The only reason their support for his campaign has since ended is because the campaign itself has ceased to exist. So while Platner is no longer a vulnerable politician in need of the media’s protection, his allies in Congress still have their own elections they need to win.Platner’s tattoo still merely “resembles” a Nazi symbol because elected Democrats turned a blind eye to it. When Welker used that terminology on Sunday, she was extending a helping hand — not to the former Senate candidate in Maine, but rather to the Democratic Congressman sitting in front of her.That’s the reason this terminology hasn’t gone away yet, and that’s why it’s not going to go away before the midterms. Or ever, realistically. Until the media and the Democratic Party stand something to gain from ceasing this rewriting of history, there’s no reason to expect it should stop.