Has Representative Ilhan Omar been collecting her dead grandmother's $2,308 Social Security check for 10 years? No, that's not true: The claim originated as a meme on a satirical Facebook page. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The claim originated a meme (archived here) on the "America - Love It Or Leave It" Facebook page on February 22, 2025 under the title "The ones who scream the loudest that audits are unjust are the ones who need to be audited." It read:
Ilhan Omar has been collecting her dead grandmother's $2,308 Social Security check for almost 10 years. No wonder they're so opposed to audits.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sat Mar 1 18:08:55 2025 UTC)
The image even included a satire disclaimer that said, "Nothing on the page is real":
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 illustrations. 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 Lead Stories debunked over the years.
