Robert Mackey

Status Scoop | MAGA’s MS NOW Myth: This week, if you’ve spent any time in right-wing media, you’ve probably seen the claim that MS NOW digitally altered a photo of Alex Pretti to make him look more attractive. It's a line that’s been repeated on Fox News, Joe Rogan's popular podcast, MAGA Media shows, in viral X posts, on TikTok, and elsewhere. But a spokesperson for the network, Richard Hudock, told Status that the root claim is false. What happened, Hudock explained, is that a producer late Sunday night pulled an image from the internet not realizing it had been altered, and it briefly aired a few times before anyone realized what had happened. Once the network learned of the error, Hudock said, it was immediately corrected. It goes without saying that it’s a lesson for any network in vetting images more carefully. But the idea that MS NOW intentionally manipulated Pretti’s photo to make him look better is not true—and quite obviously being used by partisans to score points on the network and attack the news media for its coverage of his death.

The people horrified by this were just cheering the White House for manipulating a photo to show an arrested woman cry www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

IDF accepts Gaza Health Ministry death toll of over 71,000 Palestinians killed in the war Although Many International Experts Have Accepted the Health Ministry's Data as Reliable, and Even Conservative Relative to the True Death Toll, Israel Had Refused to Accept the Health Ministry's Coun...

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable.

Biden himself said they were fabricated!

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

There are 3,800 kids in ICE custody.

The puritanical tendency towards maximal security theater drives me absolutely crazy from tech perspective. Activists have a tendency to gravitate toward the most inconvenient option because surely it's the safest! No, actually, a burner phone is the worse option like 50% of the time

Security theater undermining activism is a real thing that happens all the time. People need to sit down and actually learn how to think through threat models.

I’m not trying to put anyone on blast. Because of the decentralized nature of these networks, it’s hard to know who to even consult or how to discuss these decisions. And I’m not trying to attack anyone, but there does need to be a broader understanding that bringing in press (with rules) helps us.

I’m not totally sure how to address this but apparently I’m getting kicked out of ICE rapid response for the moment because I’m allowing press ridealongs, with an extremely strict condition that no other observer be identified. Lots of observers have allowed ridealongs and they benefit us.

Confronted Congressman Tom Suozzi, one of seven Democrats casting the decisive votes to increase ICE funding by $10,000,000,000.

Are we gonna just gloss over the fact two Democrat members of Congress were attacked by Nazi nutjobs in the past week and how that’s not a common thing that happens twice in one week, or…

In a Minneapolis federal court where 16 protesters were charged on Wednesday with assaulting immigration agents, Judge Dulce J. Foster said she was “deeply disturbed” that Attorney General Pam Bondi had published photographs of some of the defendants on social media. Judge Foster said images of people who are presumed innocent should not be shared. “This conduct is not something that the court condones,” she said.

The charges against protestors announced today by Bondi were very clearly done with producing #content as the first priority and law enforcement a distant second. The decision to wave mugshots around is already harming DOJ's credibility in court www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u...

I cannot stress how completely bizarre & unheard of it is for the DNI to be personally present for a search warrant execution, never mind this one.

Even under SCOTUS's dubious reasoning in Trump v. U.S., there is no scenario in which maneuvering billions of dollars to an offshore account to keep it out of reach from Congress and courts is an "official act." This is all criminal and impeachable.

Look, if you want to put every violent right-wing extremist in the country on payroll AND fund for-profit concentration camps, it’s not gonna be cheap

We now know that Alex Pretti was a violent agitator who repeatedly went out armed to deliberately instigate physical confrontations with law enforcement. He is not a victim. He was not a mere “protester.” And he got what was coming to him. Simple as that.

This is pretty much the knee-jerk response from the MAGA grifter class tonight.

The punishment for kicking in a taillight is execution 11 days later.

This is Brad Lander doing pulltabs in the Uptown VFW. He’s one of us now

again, if you are hearing about an empathetic, soulful, new-tone trump pivot calming things down in Minnesota, the people who are telling you this are trying to trap your mind inside a false, alternate reality. please consider why exactly they are doing this.

So my connect the dots here is that there will be some allegation that there was foreign interference in the voting — Hugo Chavez, Italian satellites, etc. — (hence why DNI is involved), making it a nat sec issue that they will use to justify doing something crazy/illegal in Nov

US Space Force had been around almost a year how come they didn't stop the Italian vote-flipping rays, huh? For the love of god things are going to get stupid.

Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County?

Scrolling through the photos of Pam Bondi's "Minnesota rioters," it's just hero after hero. Every photo includes a cowardly DHS agent with their back to the camera.

Bondi thinks she's going to win the propaganda war with this shit, but it's never been more clear that they're losing.

“.. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks on the phone while standing inside a vehicle loaded with boxes outside the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center after the FBI executed a search warrant there.”

@reuters.com

‘Fascism is here now’: the US athletes pushing back on Trump’s America World Series winner Sean Doolittle, Super Bowl champion Doug Baldwin and college star McKenzie Forbes have strong opinions on a troubled era

“I’m really mad so thank you for letting me vent.

Abolish ICE.

We keep us safe.”

@seandoolittle.bsky.social and other athletes opened up to us about the DHS murders and the campaign of state terror being waged in Minneapolis and beyond.

www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/j...

52 U.S. Code § 20511 - Criminal penalties

4/ It cites stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent,” among other violations.

www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

1-28-26 Fulton Warrant

3/ The FBI is seeking to seize numerous records from the 2020 election, including ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls.

The warrant alleges that these may constitute “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.”

www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

1-28-26 Fulton Warrant

1/ NEW: @propublica.org has obtained a search warrant that the FBI is executing for records related to the contested 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., which has not yet been widely shared. It’s an extraordinary document.

Link: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

Of the biggest scandals in US history just this week, I think I’d rank them:

1) Federal paramilitaries invade US city based on racist lies, murder US citizens

2) Slush fund for the president from stolen foreign resources held in Qatar

3) Whatever FBI and DNI are doing re: 2020 election in Georgia

These names are all not in the book

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution Paul Thomas Anderson's action flick leaves much to be desired.

Have you read this? Because it absolutely the read many Black women had after struggling through this movie blackgirlwatching.substack.com/p/one-battle...

These are the Haitians attacked by Vance in 2024 at the urging of Canadian neo-Nazi Geoff Martin, aka "Captive Dreamer," who he appears to follow closely.

They're currently here legally. The admin is abruptly making them illegal, then removing them in a 1940s-style militarized cleansing campaign.