STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Viet Fakery

Did Zohran Mamdani, Melania Trump, Sen. John Kennedy or other prominent Americans go live with a 3 a.m. emergency monologue claiming they were under threat for secrets they were about to expose about President Donald Trump or former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden? No, that's not true: Nearly identical stories mentioning those and other names were published by a network of foreign websites and Facebook pages. There were no news articles about such an event.

The Sen. John Kennedy version appeared in a December 14 Facebook post (archived here) on the "Common Wit" Facebook account under the caption: "JOHN KENNEDY JUST WENT LIVE WITH A 3 A.M. EMERGENCY MONOLOGUE:". It continued:

'OBAMA SENT ME A MESSAGE TONIGHT -- IF I DON'T DROP WHAT I KNOW, I'M FINISHED'

This is what some of the posts looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of images from the identical '3 a.m. monologue' posts on Facebook.)

The "Transparency" tab of the "Common Wit" Facebook page used to promote the Senator Kennedy version (archived here) showed it was run from Vietnam.

(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot, with highlights added by Lead Stories, of the page transparency tab of the "Common Wit" page on Facebook.)

The Terms of Service for the website promoted by the Facebook post, https://foxsocial.feji.io/, say the site is Vietnam-based, a common denominator with hundreds of fake news sites and stories Lead Stories investigated in late 2025.

Lead Stories searched the Google News index of thousands of news sites for news articles mentioning "Sen. John Kennedy", WENT LIVE WITH A 3 A.M. EMERGENCY MONOLOGUE, "OBAMA SENT ME A MESSAGE TONIGHT -- IF I DON'T DROP WHAT I KNOW, I'M FINISHED". Google News (archived here) found none.

But a search on Facebook for the phrase "went live with a 3 a.m. emergency monologue" brought up dozens of results with identical stories about changing casts of celebrities and politicians, accompanied by very similar images showing each person in a broadcast studio, with parallel photos of Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Joe Biden cast as the person making the vague threat about secrets.

Lead Stories found the post about Kennedy threatened by Obama, plus identical posts about:

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened by Obama;
• Kennedy threatened by Gov. Tim Walz;
• Actor Jim Carrey threatened by Obama;
• U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro threatened by Obama;
• ABC News anchor David Muir threatened by Trump;
• Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller threatened by Obama;
• Podcaster Candace Owens threatened by French President Emmanuel Macron;
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, threatened by Trump;
• Trump, threatened by Obama;
• ABC host Joy Behar, threatened by Trump;
• Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, threatened by Obama;
• Rep. Jim Jordan, threatened by former President Joe Biden;
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, threatened by Trump;
• ABC host Whoopi Goldberg, threatened by Trump;
• Late Night host Jimmy Kimmel, threatened by Trump;
• White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, threatened by Biden;
• Late night host Stephen Colbert, threatened by Trump;
• Gov. Gavin Newsom, threatened by Trump;
• MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, threatened by Trump

(Image source: animation of Facebook search results for the phrase "WENT LIVE WITH A 3 A.M. EMERGENCY MONOLOGUE".)