Did various celebrities, including Adam Sandler, Jeanine Pirro and Vince Gill unveil or introduce a "new bill" that would block George Soros from bankrolling protests by classifying such funding as "organized crime under the RICO Act"? 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 and the link provided in a Facebook post with the "Adam Sandler" version went to an article that claimed the story was unverified.
The "Sandler" version of the claim appeared in a viral Facebook post (archived here) published on February 13, which opened:
BREAKING: Adam Sandler moves to block George Soros from allegedly secretly bankrolling protests across America -- by introducing a new bill that could classify such funding as organized crime under the RICO Act.
If passed, Soros-linked accounts could be frozen overnight, triggering a political shockwave nationwide...
Full story below👇👇👇
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun Feb 15 10:58:17 2026 UTC)
An almost identical copy of the story appeared on Facebook page "Beyond The Lens" (archived here). Both posts linked to an article (archived here) titled "BREAKING: Viral Claims About Adam Sandler, George Soros, and Protest Funding Ignite National Debate". That story openly says there is no evidence such a bill exists:
While no verified evidence supports the existence of such a bill--or any direct political action by Sandler--the viral narrative itself has become a flashpoint, revealing deep tensions around protest movements, elite influence, and the boundaries of political power in modern America.
The Facebook page "Beyond The Lens" (archived here) which was used to promote the story had a page transparency tab (archived here) indicating it was run by several people from Vietnam:
(Image source: screenshot of the page transparency tab of the "Beyond The Lens" page on Facebook.)
The Vietnam connection is significant, since fact-checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories coming from a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country here.
A Google News search for news articles mentioning "Soros" and "RICO Act" only brought up old news articles about President Trump threatening to go after Soros (archived here) but no actual stories about someone introducing a bill to do just that..
A search on Facebook for the phrase "moves to block George Soros from allegedly secretly bankrolling protests across America" (archived here) brought up dozens of results with almost exactly the same story but about different celebrities, athletes and politicians. In many cases it would be impossible for them to be introducing a bill: only elected politicians who are part of the legislative branch get to do that. Lead Stories found posts involving:
- Vince Gill
- Jeanine Pirro
- Adam Sandler
- Bob Seger
- Elon Musk
- Kid Rock
- Dale Earnhardt Jr.
- Agnetha Fältskog
- Stephen Colbert
- Johnny Joey Jones
- Dwight Yoakam
- Snoop Dogg
- Stephen Miller
- Sean McDermott
- Ted Cruz
- Brandon Lake
- Joan Baez
- John Neely Kennedy
(Image source: animation of Facebook search results for the phrase "moves to block George Soros from allegedly secretly bankrolling protests across America".)
Lead Stories has published a primer -- or a prebunk -- on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam'"
