Was a story about Bruce Springsteen's royalties "tanking" because of a radio boycott of his catalog that also mentioned "WDKT Baltimore Morning Drive DJ Joey Barron" real? No, that's not true: A viral meme that included a fictional DJ and radio station originated on 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 "America's Last Line of Defense" on May 21, 2025 accompanied by following text:
They do it to themselves. They get on stage and anger half of their fans, which then angers a good amount of their fans who don't care about politics, which ends their influence.Go woke go broke. Every time.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri May 23 08:57:23 2025 UTC)
The text in the meme read:
Bruce Springsteen's royalties are tanking after radio stations pull his catalog to appease angry fans.
"The boycott is real," said WDKT Baltimore Morning Drive DJ Joey Barron, "We were losing listeners until we pulled him."
Just like Garth Brooks, Bud Light, and everyone else who goes woke, Springsteen is learning that he WILL go broke.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, 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."
"Joe Barron" is a friend of Christoper Blair who passed away. His name is frequently used in Blair's satirical stories as an homage. According to radio-locator.com there is no radio station named "WDKT" (archived here).
Blair's 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'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.
