Nick Shirley speaks at the Illinois Republican Party Red Gala on June 12, 2026
The ILGOP had independent journalist Nick Shirley as its keynote speaker at its annual Red Gala fundraiser.
Bringing Shirley in brought more media attention than any previous speaker to the event. The Chicago Sun-Times called Shirley, who is most famous for reporting on government fraud in Minneapolis, LA, and elsewhere, a “MAGA YouTube Star” and “far-right influencer” in an article about the event. They ignored the groundbreaking reporting he did in exposing the fraud to a nationwide audience.
Shirley first went viral when he videotaped empty daycares in Minneapolis run by Somali immigrants that were allegedly receiving millions of taxpayer dollars. While investigations into the fraud had been in the works for years. Shirley put a face to all of it by showing the alleged fraud in a format people could readily grasp.
The Sun Times wasn’t interested in reporting on that aspect of Shirley’s work. Instead, they wrote this:
YouTube creator Nick Shirley has filmed himself interviewing Alex Jones outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, called street vendors in New York City “dangerous migrant scammers” and described a “Somali takeover” in Minnesota.
Shirley was also granted permission to accompany ICE agents during arrests in Chicago last year.
The Democrat response to the ILGOP bringing in Shirley was predictable – throw the race card. Again from the Chicago Sun Times article:
“Nick Shirley’s aim is to contaminate our politics with racism, xenophobia, and lies,” a spokesperson said. “By welcoming him to their event, the [Illinois GOP] is revealing just how extreme they’ve become. Illinois voters can see clearly that the party has abandoned working families in favor of serving Donald Trump and his MAGA allies.”
Newly elected ILGOP Chairman Bob Grogan noted accurately in rebuttal, “JB Pritzker and Illinois Democrats are terrified of Nick Shirley coming to Illinois after he exposed billions of dollars in fraud in Minnesota and California. Illinois is next.”
It is absolutely bizarre that people are upset that a 24-year-old is exposing fraud around the country and has gotten noticed for doing so. Nobody should be okay with the amount of fraud being uncovered. And everybody should be a part of uncovering it and holding people accountable for it.
If banks and credit card companies can track billions of transactions and detect multiple attempts at fraud every second, how come the government can’t institute similar protections on taxpayer money?
People are tired of being scammed, and they are especially tired of nothing ever being done about it. And these scams come in all different forms.
There’s the legal scams which are just politicians paying off special interests for services that don’t work, like all the tax incentives to the green energy or the millions to non-profits for violence prevention, parent mentoring, and immigrant support.
And then there’s the other scams, actually fraud, of which there is plenty in Illinois from unemployment, disability, and food stamp fraud to contract fraud.
The latest fraud in Illinois, as alleged in a recent federal indictment, has racism at the heart of it all.
Meet the newest alleged fraudster in Illinois – Vanessa Rhodes.
Multiple news outlets have reported that Vanessa Rhodes, President of Bell’s Better Building, which does business as Twenty Eleven Construction, Inc., gave kickbacks to Ryan Ross, former director at the Chicago Housing Authority’s Property and Asset Management Department, in exchange for her company getting construction contracts.
Ross allegedly received $421,000 in kickbacks. The FOX 32 article reported:
Prosecutors alleged the payments were made in exchange for Ross steering more than $4.8 million in construction, renovation and maintenance work at CHA properties to Rhodes’ company, Bell’s Better Buildings Inc., which operated as Twenty Eleven Construction Inc., and another company affiliated with Rhodes.
The first part of the scam is the fraud that is alleged. The other part of the scam is that Vanessa Rhodes without little doubt, received this lucrative taxpayer-funded contract due to her minority status. In the “About” section for her company, Twenty Eleven notes that they are “Certified” as minority-, women-, and disadvantaged-business-owned enterprises, among other diverse certifications. She’s missing the LGBTQ and veteran add-ons, which would have really increased her contract wins, no doubt.
The diversity hiring mandate is another huge scam going on in Illinois and in every other state. In many cases, these businesses have put a minority, veteran, woman, or disabled person at the head of the company simply to gain an advantage when contracting with the government. In every case, it gives an unfair advantage to certain contractors over others when bidding for work. In most cases, it results in higher costs for the work performed.
Instead of pushing back on the diversity mandate, big businesses have accepted it as a cost of doing business and now celebrate and report their diversity spend.
ComEd publishes a report on it every year. From their 2024 report.
In 2024, ComEd spent $797 million with diverse suppliers, which was 37% of our total contracting spend. ComEd relied on 580 diverse suppliers and 282 suppliers who are based in Illinois.
37% went to “Diverse” contractors!
Exelon has a 42% diversity contract spend, by the way. This is a complete boondoggle.
This happens because of government mandates and political pressure. Frequently, legislators grill the heads of state agencies on their minority contracting percentage. There are diversity spending requirements for those who invest state money, build our roads and bridges, and provide nearly every service in government.
Governor Pritzker even made it a law that non-governmental organizations have to report the diversity of their boards. That isn’t working out very well, according to a Chicago Tribune report:
“As June 2024 came to a close, Gov. JB Pritzker was characteristically bullish while he marked the end of Pride Month by signing into law a requirement that Illinois’ largest nonprofit foundations disclose the demographic makeup of their boards of directors and officers…
As of mid-April, only three of the largest grantmaking foundations in Illinois had published the required demographic information on their websites as the law outlines — disclosing the makeup of their leadership across categories including LGBTQ+ identity, gender, race and ethnicity, disability status and military service…”
The Trump administration, fortunately, like other areas of overt discrimination, is putting an end to the use of, at least, racially-based contracting. On March 26, 2026, Trump signed Executive Order No. 14398, which prohibits any federal contractor from engaging in “any racially discriminatory DEI activities.” States have a lot of federal money sloshing around, so this applies to a myriad of state contracts. Even if only state money is used, however, no one is allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, so all state contracting that gives preference based on race should be challenged in court.
Of course, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is suing the Trump Administration over this new EO. Chicago Sun Times reports,
“Attorney General Kwame Raoul, as part of a coalition of 20 attorneys general, is suing the Trump administration over its attempts to purge “diversity, equity and inclusion” from federal contracting.”
The suit comes in response to what it describes as the “rushed implementation” of a March executive order from Trump that seeks to prohibit federal contractors, including state agencies, from engaging in “racially discriminatory DEI activities.”
Back to Vanessa Rhodes, the MBE, WBE, DBE hire – her company also did work on the Obama Center. According to their website, Twenty Eleven did work on Exposed Aggregate/Cast in Place Concrete. In a Google search, Rhodes and her company were highlighted as a subcontractor under Lakeside Alliance, a consortium of Black-owned contractors doing construction management on the Obama Center.
The associated page, though, highlighting Rhodes, is no longer up. I wonder why.
The entire Obama Center construction project is another boondoggle – massively over budget and facing lawsuits from, unbelievably, their minority contractors.
The initial cost projection was $330 million, but the final cost is expected to be $830-850 million. (Taxpayers have already paid $229 million towards infrastructure for the project.)
One subcontractor filed a $40 million lawsuit, “claiming racial discriminatory practices forced the firm to do extra work that left it at risk of bankruptcy, according to a lawsuit.
Robert McGee, the owner of II in One, which provided concrete and rebar services for the center starting in 2021, filed the lawsuit in federal court last month against New York-based Thornton Tomasetti, which oversees structural engineering and design services for the $830 million project.
McGee isn’t the only one saying they are owed money from the Obama Center. FOX News reported that other contractors are owed money and that taxpayers are at risk to pay up since the Obama Center has only $1 million in reserves. The agreement with the Chicago said that they needed to have $470 million set aside to ensure the center can be maintained.
Here are the details from FOX News:
Concern is mounting that taxpayers could be left holding the bag if the Obama Presidential Center runs into financial trouble, as the foundation behind it has yet to establish a promised $470 million safety net to guard against a public bailout.
The scrutiny comes as a Fox News Digital investigation found multiple contractors and subcontractors claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions on the project, with some alleging they remain locked in payment disputes and face financial ruin just days before the center’s grand opening.
Under its agreement with the city, the Obama Foundation pledged to create the fund, known as an endowment, as part of its 99-year deal to take control of the publicly owned 19.3-acre section of Jackson Park for a one-time payment of just $10…
The contractor disputes have renewed concern of the endowment because critics argue the fund was intended to serve as a backstop if the project ever encountered financial distress. The Obama Foundation disputes suggestions that taxpayers face exposure and said the project is funded through private contributions.
ILGOP Chairman Bob Grogan remarked, “The fact that they have created this probably unsustainable edifice to an ego and then, eventually, if it goes under, who’s going to be caught with the bill time and time again? It’s the taxpayers of the city, citizens of Chicago and the state of Illinois.”
Actually, the fact that taxpayers funded any part of the ugliest building put up in Chicago and allowed him to destroy protected lake-front park land AND put up with any of the diversity contracting mandates is utter nonsense. This entire project is one to watch. There is trouble in the future. If you thought the Bears stadium rebuild that Chicago still owes over $500 million on was a problem, just wait.
Closing thought – Patriots 250 years ago would be appalled at the level of fraud, waste and abuse created by a system that now celebrates racial discrimination rather than seeing it as a fundamental rejection of our founding tenet –
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”