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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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search warrant or detain him based on an identification of a McDonald's employee who had never seen him before

It would be especially hard to get probable cause from this given that she’s a made-up person with an AI generated photo that never actually existed.

Wait, what?

•Initial reports that the identifying witness is named Nancy Parker, photo circulated by media

•there’s only one single photo of her in existence and it looks like like something a three year old instance of stable diffusion would crap out on a bad day

•initial reports that she’s 85 and lives in a nursing home and she is technically a “volunteer” at McDonalds so the press can’t interview her and there’s no actual record of her employment.

•FBI quietly says she’s not actually getting any reward money due to a technicality

•all the information about her and the photo all seem to have been subsequently retracted and scrubbed

•all subsequent media reports just call this person “the employee” and don’t give name, age or gender

•So now we have no name, no face, we don’t even know the employee’s age and gender and no one is actually getting a reward

I’ll be interested to see if this person actually testifies at the trial or if they’ll find a way around that

Initial reports from whom? Any reputable media organization? Or people on Reddit? I couldn't find anything about this woman from a reputable source. What I do know is that the police released the 911 call last week as evidence in the suppression hearing and the woman on the call most certainly wasn't an 85-year-old volunteer but someone in management who said she was reluctantly making the call at the behest of customers who insisted she do so. I mean, what's the theory here, that the police already knew who he was and where he was and made up a fictitious person to take credit for the arrest then inexplicably decided to do a U-turn, even though it would have been abundantly clear to law enforcement from the beginning that she may have to testify at trial? Not to mention that there were interviews with McDonald's patrons who were there at the time of the arrest referring to the woman as a manager. I'm not sure what the theory is here.

This article https://thealliancerockband.com/nancy-parker-has-reportedly-been-fired/ says her family removed her info to stop her being harassed, which makes sense to me.