Meet Two Conservative Trolls Grifting Off Minneapolis Chaos

Nick Shirley and Jake Lang try to take the white supremacist message to MN streets.

Jake Lang had a hard day :(

It’s the era of government by trolls and masked thugs dragging people into vans, and two of the Right’s rising young dead-eyed propaganda stars on the front lines of Trump’s war on the Twin Cities are Jake Lang, 30, and Nick Shirley, 23.

So let’s strap on some hip-waders, rub some Vicks under our nostrils, and pull out our 6-foot tongs to get to know them, because the white boys are going nuts for them and their vlogging ilk! YouTubers and podcasters are MAGA’s Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, and most people, especially men under 50, get their news from YouTube and/or Facebook.

Nick Shirley is a YouTube vlogger who got his start with “prank” videos, like “16 YR OLD FLIES TO NEW YORK WITHOUT TELLING PARENTS” (spoiler, the flight attendant quickly FIGURED IT OUT and MADE HIM CALL THEM) and “I tricked TikTokers into auditioning for a Justin Bieber video.”

But following Shirley’s return from a Mormon mission in Chile, land of alpacas and chupallas, his art took a more political MIGRANT CRISIS gotcha kind of turn, like going to the border with Mexico pretending to be a journalist and gasping to learn facts like people, even brown ones, are able to ride over the border in a bus, and then continue on other buses en route to other destinations.

Shirley went to Brazil, for “I Infiltrated Rio Brazil’s Most Dangerous Gang,” and it was one guy holding a gun with a shirt covering his face. Then in ‘23, “I Took Migrants to Visit Joe Biden,” in which Shirley rounded up people in Washington DC, paid them $20, loaded them into a van, and brought them to the White House to demand an audience with Joe Biden to demand more help and benefits.

Credible journalisming! MAGAs liked what they saw, and soon Shirley’s performance art reached JD Vance, who re-posted his Somalian Day Care Center EXPOSE — where day cares wouldn’t let him in to see their children, and/or they had already been shut down so there were no children — with a “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer prizes.”

---

Minnesota Day Care Scandal: A Wonksplainer

---

Shirley soon had 1.8 million subscribers and more than 200 million views, worth about $32k a month in YouTube clicks plus about $1.6 million in sponsorships. Not bad for a guy with a high-school education and the charisma of a leaking bottle of Proactiv!

And then there’s Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang from Narrowsburg, New York.

Once upon a time, he was a college dropout and failed re-seller of hats and vapes. And like Trump, Lang also worked as a “promoter” of “model services,” but unlike Trump, Lang found that the job led him into doing drugs and sinning. And Lang was also obsessed with “liberty,” so on January 6, 2021, he allegedly went to the Capitol armed with a gas mask and aluminum baseball bat and battled police for hours because he thought Joe Biden was going to put everyone on a COVID lockdown forever, and thus figured any assault on a police officer was justified as self-defense.

Lang proudly filmed and posted pictures of himself in the Capitol on Facebook in a distinct floral shirt, some helpfully labelled with arrows, THIS IS ME. And Lang kept on attacking law enforcement officers and posting until 5 p.m., when he was shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. He got indicted on 11 counts for the assaults and was awaiting trial in what he calls the GOO-LAG when Trump pardoned him, and has no regrets. Far from it! He hooted as he left jail:

We’re back, the Patriots, we don’t have to crawl in the corners of Facebook and Instagram being censored, we’ve got X, we’ve got Trump, we’ve got Musk, we’ve got the dream team.

A true-believer NUT.

Once sprung, Lang immediately jumped into January 6 Political Prisoner content full-time. Literally, “Political Prisoner” is the name of his podcast! He employs a staff of six in the Philippines to help produce his podcast and YouTube show, and though his views are in the thousands instead of millions, he books thought leaders like Mike Lindell, and guests on Alex Jones.

Lang is also a rabid anti-Muslim, anti-semitic white supremacist, so naturally he’s running for Senate in Florida. His platform is deputizing the Proud Boys and January 6 “Patriots” to bounty-hunt immigrants as if that’s not what ICE is doing right now already, and against “country club Republicans” as if Trump is not the man who owns multiple country clubs. Don’t try to make it make sense!

In Minnesota Lang saw an opportunity to get some precious attention, and figured he would go burn a Quran on the courthouse steps. But it didn’t work out that way!

“Don’t touch me! Stop it!” whines the guy who beat Capitol police with a baseball bat!

He was heckled and squirted with water until some Black men escorted him out of danger. The whole thing is quite something!

Then he changed his clothes and flagged down a car, and the adventure continued.

Can’t approve of the kicking. And, imagine Lang’s surprise that the car he jumped into was driven by Daye Gottsche, a trans woman!

A bad boy, what?

Lang later whined he was LYNCHED TO DEATH, reposted that he was stabbed and grabbed by the man trying to save him, and that he was the real victim of Gottsche, because given context clues from Gottsche’s other social media posts, they would not have helped him if they had known what a hateful troll he is, though Gottsche says she would have let Lang in her car all over again.

Though Gottsche also “wondered whether, if the roles had been reversed, Lang would have helped her.” And now Gottsche says she’s getting attacked online from right-wing social media accounts.

It is a modern fable for our times! Never let a stranger in your car, or get in a bus with one to a second location. They might turn out to be a troll in disguise.

[CNN archive link / River Reporter / Washington Post]