Conservatives across the internet are parroting the false claim that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) halted former president Barack Obama from pocketing “royalties” from Obamacare, seemingly failing to realize that the story originated on a satire website.
Major right-wing accounts on X stated that DOGE identified and stopped a $2.6 million annual payment to Obama stemming from the use of his surname to refer to the Affordable Care Act. Many followers took the bait.
“He's been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars,” claimed the popular Conservative Liberty account this morning. “What's your reaction?”
“Obama needs to pay it back!” replied one.
Droves of commenters called for the government to arrest the former president, or at least get him to pay back the money.
The problem? That $40 million is imaginary.
The claims originated on a satire site called the Dunning-Kruger Times, which is part of a satire network called “America’s Last Line of Defense” (ALLOD). The site’s name is a jab at the people who believe its stories, named for the effect of people overestimating their own intelligence.
The blog post even concocted a fake quote from Obama saying, “I never asked for this,” and comments from a fictional DOGE staffer named Rufus Clapp who was "shocked" to uncover the fraud.
The Dunning-Kruger Times has a disclaimer on its site about all of the content.
“Everything on this website is fiction,” the notice reads. “It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe it is real, you should have your head examined.”
Still, ALLOD’s web and social content mirrors genuine right-wing propaganda, which has compelled fact-checking site Snopes to regularly debunk the satire network’s claims.
And nearly all the Facebook commenters on ALLOD’s real-looking post promoting the story believed it to be true.
Over on X, at least some of the posts about Obama’s supposed royalties now include community notes warning readers that the story is false.
For ALLOD’s part, it has a message to its less tech-savvy conservative readers, who it acknowledges do not always understand satire.
“They believe nearly anything,” the disclaimer reads. “While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true, they are still old, typically ignorant, and again—very afraid of everything.”
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The post No, DOGE didn’t unearth $40 million in secret payments to Obama appeared first on The Daily Dot.
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