Did White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt say "Avoid woke things like math, and you'll love the tariffs." on Fox News? No, that's not true: A screenshot with that quote in a chyron has been digitally fabricated. The original screenshot said "ONE-ON-ONE WITH KAROLINE LEAVITT".
The fake screenshot appeared in a post on Bluesky (archived here) published on April 17, 2025. It read:
The people that promote "alternative facts" are now saying that math is "woke"
Math is math
Math is not "woke"
Math doesn't have illogical values
They are numerical values
This was the image in question:
The screenshot did not have the standard 16 by 9 dimensions typical of television broadcasts, indicating it had been cropped.
A reverse image search led to a February 10, 2025 Fox News video (archived here) that used following thumbnail image:
(Image Source: Fox News)
An additional clue the image had been digitally manipulated is that the chyron in the original image had two different background colors (white and light grey) while the fake one used a solid white background as can be seen in this comparison collage created by Lead Stories:
(Upper image converted to grayscale to enhance contrast)
A Google News search for the phrase "Avoid woke things like math, and you'll love the tariffs." in combination with "Leavitt" did not return any news articles reporting on the supposed quote (archived here), further indicating it was a made up quote.
