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| - Were there actual news reports about Nancy Pelosi's vineyard receiving $14 million from USAID for "experimental farming"? No, that's not true: The story originated in a meme from a satirical Facebook page. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published by the Facebook page "America's Last Line of Defense" on February 24, 2025. It had a caption that read:
We checked. She hasn't experimented with anything. She grows three kinds of grapes. Nothing else.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Feb 25 07:19:12 2025 UTC)
The text in the meme read:
Nancy Pelosi's Vineyard Received $14 Million from USAID for "experimental farming."
If you are in Government. You have no business collection Government money for private ventures. This is why they are all scared.
In case you were wondering why she's so opposed to Congressional audits.
The image even included a satire disclaimer that said, "Nothing on the page is real":
(Source: detail from a Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Feb 25 07:19:12 2025 UTC)
The first comment below the Facebook post linked to an article on "The Dunning-Kruger Times" (archived here) titled "Nancy Pelosi's Vineyard Secures Millions in Federal Grants for "Experimental Farming"", which opened:
Napa Valley, CA - In what critics are calling a miraculous stroke of government generosity, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's luxurious Napa Valley vineyard has reportedly secured millions in federal grants for what she describes as "experimental farming initiatives aimed at addressing climate change, sustainability, and the urgent need for wine equity."
According to leaked grant documents, Pelosi's vineyard will receive $12.8 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies to conduct groundbreaking research on viticulture practices, including solar-powered wine fermentation, AI-driven grape harvesting, and the effects of playing Beethoven to Cabernet Sauvignon vines.
The Dunning-Kruger Times website features an "About Us" page (archived here) page that has the following disclaimer:
About Us
Dunning-Kruger-Times.com is a subsidiary of the 'America's Last Line of Defense' network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery, or as Snopes called it before they lost their war on satire: Junk News
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
According to the page transparency tab of the page, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites debunked by Lead Stories over the years.
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