In April 2025, online users shared a claim positing that over 600 federal judges signed a petition to impeach U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
For example, on April 8, X user @mjfree, an account with nearly 425,000 followers, posted (archived) a meme showing a photo of Roberts with the caption, "More than 600 federal judges have signed a petition to impeach Chief Justice John Roberts. 'He no longer represents nor respects the laws of our nation.'" The post received over 230,000 views.
(@mjfree/X)
The same meme originally appeared (archived) on April 6 on the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page. The text of the post sharing the meme read, "His peers know he's a globalist on the take, and they made their concerns known."
(America's Last Line of Defense/Facebook)
The owner of the Facebook page commented under the post, including a link to an article (archived) hosted on The Dunning-Kruger Times website and a comment reading, "It looks like this might be the end of his career." The article began:
More Than 600 Federal Judges Have Signed a Petition to Impeach Chief Justice John Roberts
In what legal scholars are calling "both historic and possibly made up," over 600 federal judges have reportedly signed a secret petition to impeach Chief Justice John Roberts. The petition, which no one has actually seen but everyone seems to be talking about, allegedly began circulating last week after Roberts was spotted leaving a D.C. steakhouse without tipping his valet.
According to at least three people standing in line at a Jiffy Lube in Roanoke, Virginia, the movement started when an administrative law judge in Fresno sent a group text to other judges with the message, "We should really do something about John. He's wearing capes again."
The idea snowballed from there, according to Beverly, a woman who sells overripe bananas from a folding table outside a CVS in Des Moines. "My cousin's friend is married to a guy who clerks for a judge who signed the thing," she told reporters. "They're mad about the robes, the gavel slamming, and the whole 'talking in riddles' thing."
Users sharing the rumor on Bluesky, Facebook, TikTok and X seemed to interpret it as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, there was no evidence that federal judges collectively called for Roberts' impeachment.
Rather, the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page and The Dunning-Kruger Times website both belong to the America's Last Line of Defense network of Facebook pages and websites, whose owner describes its content as satirical in nature.
The fictional story spread in the weeks after Roberts issued a rare statement rebuking U.S. President Donald Trump — without naming him — for his attacks on the federal judiciary.
X user @mjfree and the Supreme Court's public information office did not yet respond to requests asking for comment about the matter, including asking @mjfree if the user knew the meme promoted a satirical rumor before sharing the image.
More about America's Last Line of Defense
The bio (archived) for the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page reads, "The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real." The photo included in the post itself displayed a label reading "ALLOD."
Meanwhile, The Dunning-Kruger Times features an "About Us" page describing its content as "a subsidiary of the 'America's Last Line of Defense' network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery." The page also makes a humorous mention of Snopes.
The name of the satire-based website referenced the Dunning-Kruger effect, defined by Britannica as "a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general."
For further reading, America's Last Line of Defense previously published content also labeled satire claiming U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Jasmine Crockett, D-Tex., as well as the family of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., all collected Social Security checks from their deceased grandmothers.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources calling their output humorous or satirical.