Gavin Newsom Signs Law Dubbed ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ Days After YouTuber Was Confronted With Crude Sign

Naming a law after the YouTuber who exposed you is not a great look, but here we are. Gavin Newsom just signed a bill that restricts who can film or photograph immigrant service providers and their clients, and everyone involved has been pretty candid that this whole thing was set off by Nick Shirley's videos showing what actually goes on inside some of these taxpayer-funded nonprofits. Instead of answering the substance of what he found, the response was to write a statute that makes it harder for the next person to look.

That's the part worth sitting with. If the work being done at these centers is above board, a guy with a camera and a YouTube channel shouldn't be able to embarrass the whole system by just standing outside with a sign. The fact that lawmakers felt the need to legislate against it suggests the problem wasn't the cameraman.

The "living in fear" framing is doing a lot of work here too. Fear of what, exactly? Of being recorded doing their jobs in public, or fear of the public finding out what those jobs actually involve? Those are very different problems, and only one of them gets fixed by restricting cameras.

We get that harassment is real and nobody wants service providers getting stalked or doxxed. But there's a difference between a narrowly written harassment law and a bill custom-built to shut down one specific journalist because his reporting was inconvenient. California had a chance to address the actual footage. It chose to address the guy holding the phone instead.