California Moves to Criminalize Exposing Crime

Try to hide your shock.

Apparently, the surest way to show the world that you’re running a perfectly legitimate, above-board operation is to immediately demand a law preventing people from documenting exactly what you do. That’s the clear lesson out of California this week, where the state Assembly passed AB2624—better known as the “Stop Nick Shirley Act”—a bill so hilariously specific in both timing and purpose that they may as well have called it the “For the Love of God Please Stop Cataloguing Our Massive Corruption Act.”

Who had “the Babylon Bee stops being satire” on their bingo card this week?

The legislation appeared shortly after independent journalist Nick Shirley posted viral videos exposing *alleged* fraud in taxpayer-funded learing daycare and hospice programs. Shirley’s investigative method is not especially sophisticated. He essentially shows up with a camera, knocks on doors, asks obvious questions, and discovers things like “empty buildings receiving millions of dollars from people just trying to afford groceries” and “facilities serving fewer patrons than a Blockbuster Video.”

Naturally, Sacramento concluded the real problem here was the dude with a camera employing the radical investigative technique known as “walking into the building.” (Not the billions in aggressively suspicious activity he’s already uncovered, mind you. The filming part. Obviously.)

The bill expands California’s Safe At Home program—which was originally designed to protect victims of domestic violence, stalking, and human trafficking—to now include immigration-service nonprofits and their employees. Under the law, covered organizations could potentially sue people for posting images or identifying information online if it’s deemed “harassment.”

And if you’re wondering whether this might create a convenient legal shield for publicly funded nonprofits that suddenly don’t want independent journalists filming them anymore, congratulations: you are officially spreading “MAGA misinformation.”

Shirley’s work helped expose this grift graft.

The analogies here are almost unfair. Imagine a restaurant banning health inspectors right after somebody found rats swimming in the soup. A husband suddenly adding password protection to his phone the day his wife asks why they got a bill from Ashley Madison. A teenager demanding a deadbolt on her bedroom door as skunky-smelling smoke billows out from beneath it.

“TELL ME YOU’RE HIDING SOMETHING WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU’RE HIDING SOMETHING” has never been legislatively codified quite this efficiently.

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio pointed out the obvious during debate: investigative journalists and citizen watchdogs are often the reason fraud gets discovered in the first place. And if we’re being honest, the government doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of proactively uncovering corruption inside organizations receiving government money from other government entities overseen by people married to other government officials.

(In this case, the bill’s sponsor happens to be Assemblywoman Mia Bonta—the wife of California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Which is awkward. Because if one of these newly protected nonprofits is later accused of financial funny business, the decision about whether to investigate would likely land in the office run by the bill sponsor’s husband. Nothing shady there at all.)

Proponents of the bill insist it’s all about safety. And some of the behavior cited by supporters is genuinely disturbing. One immigration activist described a stranger showing up at her mother’s house looking for her. That’s not muckraking. That’s Future Episode of Dateline behavior. And certainly, death threats are insane and indefensible. Hopefully that part is obvious. But there’s a Hummer-with-an-apartment-inside-of-it-sized difference between peeking under the hood and smashing in the windows. The problem is that modern political language increasingly treats “public accountability” and “harassment” as interchangeable concepts whenever cameras start pointing at taxpayer-funded institutions behaving suspiciously.

To be fair, the bill does not literally say “journalists caught asking uncomfortable questions will go directly to jail.” The actual language focuses on posting personal information with the intent to threaten, incite violence, or cause fear. Which sounds perfectly reasonable right up until you remember that modern political institutions increasingly define “making us look bad on the internet” as a form of violence.

If a newshound doxes a private home address, that’s one thing. If a reporter films a state-sponsored facility operating in public while asking where the patients or children are, that’s literally journalism. Or at least it used to be… before California decided investigative reporting should require written permission from the people being investigated.

The broader problem here is bigger than Nick Shirley. Independent journalism exists precisely because institutional watchdogs are notoriously crooked often fail. Whistleblowers, random weirdos with YouTube channels, irritated parents at school-board meetings, and a handful of obsessive internet sleuths have collectively uncovered more real-world misconduct over the past decade than the entire legacy press corps combined.

And now California’s response is: “What if we made filming them a legal nightmare?” Again: not suspicious in the least.

Having cleared the Assembly, the “Stop Nick Shirley” bill heads to the California Senate, where it will likely continue its triumphant march through the state’s famously transparency-obsessed political machine and straight to Gavin Newsom’s desk for a signature.

Here’s a quick message from the Bureau of Common Sense and Obvious Conclusions: If your organization is legitimately helping vulnerable people, cameras should be your best friend. Transparency builds trust. Documentation protects honest operators. But if your first instinct after a fraud scandal is to criminalize scrutiny, threaten lawsuits, and shield citizen-subsidized operations from public visibility, people are naturally going to wonder what exactly you’re so desperate to keep off camera.

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