Did the Minnesota Vikings football team denounce Tim Walz as a man whose values they do not support? No, that's not true: The comment comes from a satirical Facebook page that explicitly warns readers not to take it seriously. America -- Love It Or Leave It categorizes its Facebook page as satire/parody.
The claim appeared in a post on Facebook on September 3, 2024. On a field of purple, the Vikings' team color, the post read:
The Minnesota Vikings Have Denounced Tim Walz: 'We Don't Support His Values'
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Sep 5 14:07:04 2024 UTC)
The account that posted the claim, America -- Love It Or Leave It, identifies itself in its Intro section as
A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery. Nothing on this page is real.
Its "About" page provides a link to a website that describes America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) as "a network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery" (archived here.) The site also admonishes readers that
Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.
There is no evidence that the Minnesota Vikings ever denounced Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate and governor of the team's home state. Lead Stories searched on Google using keywords, visible here (archived here), and found no credible reporting to corroborate the claim.
The search did find, however, that the post about Walz was repeated on another Facebook page called North Carolina Conservatives, where it appeared (archived here) on September 3, 2024, without any satire disclaimer.
ALLOD
The site is part of the "America's Last Line of Defense" network of satire websites run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine along with a loose confederation of friends and allies. He runs several websites and Facebook pages with visible satire disclaimers everywhere. They mostly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.
Every site in the network has an about page that reads (in part):
About Satire
Before you complain and decide satire is synonymous with "comedy":sat·ire
ˈsaˌtī(ə)r
noun
The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site's pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you're still having an issue with that satire thing.
Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites who omit the satire disclaimer and other hints the stories are fake. One of the most persistent networks of such sites is run by a man from Pakistan named Kashif Shahzad Khokhar (aka "DashiKashi") who has spammed hundreds of such stolen stories into conservative and right-wing Facebook pages in order to profit from the ad revenue.
When fact checkers point this out to the people liking and sharing these copycat stories some of them get mad at the fact checkers instead of directing their anger at the foreign spammers or the liberal satire writers. Others send a polite "thank you" note, which is much appreciated.
Lead Stories has contacted the Minnesota Vikings for comment and will update this story if they reply.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about claims that appeared on the America's Last Line of Defense network can be found here.
