Did actor Robert De Niro call White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt "KKKatherine" and did she respond that her family "fought to end slavery" while his "snuck into the country illegally in the 1920s"? No, that's not true: A meme describing that supposed exchange originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a June 5, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) on the America's Last Line of Defense page under the title "He hasn't responded, and if he knows what's good for him, he won't". The meme, a collage of photos of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and De Niro read:
Karoline Leavitt set the record straight after washed-up loser Robert De Niro called her "KKKatherine."
"My family fought to end slavery," she clapped back.
"Yours snuck into the country illegally in the 1920s."
De Niro hasn't responded.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken by Lead Stories.)
The page bio of America's Last Line of Defense page on Facebook begins with: "A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real."
A search for reports including the "KKKatherine" nickname did not return any results in Google News' index of thousands of websites, (archived here) indicating De Niro never said it publicly.
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, a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives. The page publishes made-up news items in order to get conservatives 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 feature multiple satire disclaimers.
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.
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.
