Edited 90d ago
trump
NEW: The administration is defying Congress on foreign aid that Trump himself agreed to spend.
“It is a huge grab of power from the president, taking powers away from Congress,” said David Super, a leading scholar on administrative and constitutional law.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-defying-congress-foreign-aid-usaid-vought-rubio-constitutional-crisis?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #Law #Congress #Trump #USPolitics #MarcoRubio #Constitution #PublicHealth
“Hello?” a voice said on the other end of the line. This time, the president had picked up.
“I’m writing a story about a big supporter of yours in the oil industry, Jeff Hildebrand,” I said. “Can I ask what you think about him?”
https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-called-trump-hildebrand?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
They trash everything they touch, while keeping up appearances. USA is rapidly becoming a garbage state.
Lawn care company pledges $1M repair damage to the White House South Lawn from the UFC fight
A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls.
A new investigation from ProPublica and FRONTLINE examines federal agents’ response to protesters and bystanders at the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps.
“We see, just, use of excessive force after use of excess force,” one expert said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-trump-immigration-ice-cbp-excessive-force
Lotta fluoride moving through the glowieverse. Welcome to Friday Hell. Hold onto your 
while I poke the global surveillance bear. 
TL;DR:
INDEPENDENT FEDERATED TRUST AND SAFETY (but first I talk about mirroring for a couple of paragraphs)A lot of the URLs can be mirrored to your instance locally and read/replied to/reposted on your instance without making you look at the glowie servers. Paste the URLs into the search bar, they'll show up on your instance. This should probably be easier in most FEs.⁰
You know what's better than archive.today links? Mirroring the shit onto a few dozen fedi instances. You put, e.g., https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/ into the search bar, it is mirrored to your instance. If you reply to it or repost it (or you are on Pleroma and you smash dat like), it is mirrored to instances where someone follows you. 
IFTAS is making another push for centralizing fedi. IFTAS is a surveillance/steering organization that has enough overlap with Newsmast, the Social Web Foundation, Oliphant, FediMod, indieweb.social, hachyderm.io, that they are effectively the same organization. (Sockpuppets are bad when you're LITERALLY HARASSING JOURNALISTS but it is fine to use orgs as sockpuppets. These people spin up 501(c)(3)s faster than most of us spin up domains. The orgs are, not coincidentally, all based in .us/.de/.uk/.ca.) Here's who they are: https://about.iftas.org/advisory/ . The organizations get government/corporate funding through organizations like nlnet or the Social Web Foudnation ( https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/03/27/defederation-on-the-fediverse/ ) or the Ford Foundation through the DIIF. They use this sort of thing as a mechanism to pay themselves, so Newsmast "buys" indieweb.social from Tim Chambers ( https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/03/27/the-next-stage-for-indiewebsocial.html ), who was a member of IFTAS ( https://about.iftas.org/2024/07/12/tim-chambers-joins-the-iftas-advisory-board/ , "Tim has been at the forefront of pioneering strategies that leverage technology to promote social good and a healthier social web. [⋯] Tim’s deep understanding of the disinformation landscape further strengthens his value to the IFTAS Advisory Board." ). The Executive Director of IFTAS is employed by Newsmast and it should probably be really fuckin' easy to call this a conflict of interest. I don't know how much money they move like this: my concern is not with hustlers using tax dollars and "charitable" contributions to get paid for forcing their politics, you know, I don't like it but my main concern right now is that they are trying to kill fedi.
IFTAS has recently been hand-wringing about the ratio of jannies to humans going and pushing the coop model. They've also been very interested in regulation, trotting out the "Oh, it's not the 'wild west' any more! You can't just write whatever you want on the *internet*!" See attached, and see the IFTAS founder's push: https://jaz.co.uk/2026/03/13/there-are-a-million-fediverses-and-theyre-all-regulated/ . Jaz-Michael King, head of IFTAS, incidentally, lists Newsmast as his employer. They are creating a fake problem to force their solution. This is part of the (also attached) broader strategy from the .us/.de/.uk/.ca governments to stamp out "misinformation" on fedi: the .de government refers to fedi as "The Hydra on the Web" and expresses frustration that they can't use NetzDG as a pretext to take down random Peertube instances. (They did indeed say the quiet part out loud and it's in the PDF.) IFTAS's "CSAM detector" (attachment scanner) "ran out of funding" right when the USAID faucet ran dry. ( https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/ ) Before they did, they grabbed about 1.86M files from fedi: https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/content-classification-system-post-mortem/ . (In addition to things like requiring access to a server admin account for "CARIAD", https://cariad.fedicheck.iftas.org/ , a closed-source tool to show you something that fba.ryona.agency / fed.dembased.xyz will already show you, for free, with source, and without requiring you to give them access to read an admin account. Anyone wanna spend a minute spinning up a new instance and checking to see what requests they make exactly?) It's one thing for them to say "Oh, you're unsafe, you said a hate speech" but it's another *entirely* for them to say "You don't use the CSAM protection!" (I don't know about other admins, but speaking of USAID, very few pedos have been visible from here since that dried up. Either they finally, with extremely coincidental timing, realized that I put heads on pikes, or maybe there was not a coincidence.) This is gonna be the wedge. It's easy to say "I don't stop people from discussing their opinions, even if you don't like their opinions", but nobody on the network actually wants to host anyone's CP bin. Oliphant's blocklist is dead now. "Note: As of April 15, 2026, the Oliphant Unified Tier 0 Blocklist has been retired. There are numerous instructions on this page to create your own, but we're moving to a more FIRES-centric model, and I want to support that going forward. Rather than combining various blocklists here, I'd prefer to forward FIRES datasets as a better alternative to sharing moderation advisories, as it is a living protocol." https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist . FIRES is a spinoff of the new Fedimod shit out of *Germany* because YSHL. It is done by IFTAS member Emilia Smith ( https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem , https://github.com/thisismissem ), or at least she's running the Github org. It is worth noting who was on the Oliphant blocklist at "tier 0" from the beginning. (Say what you want about Seirdy but he's at least transparent about his notes.) FSE is always top of all of these goddamn lists, before they got arround to adding Pieville or Gab or whatever explicitly angry racist instances: why is that? (Well, why the fuck do you *think*?) So IFTAS builds these things, then conducts these polls: "Which do you want, this, this, or this?" All of the options are, of course, things they want to push; for example, "What if you had automated threat-sharing? What if you had an automated blocklist?" They give you four choices and all of the options are things they want to push, in some cases things they have already developed. When their 2026 needs assessment survey comes around, I suggest you take it. (There's probably some funding requirement that demands that they do a survey, so they do one to show that it's super important that they get funding; in either case, it's also a classic "manufacturing consent" maneuver, it is old as shit.) You may be familiar with Newsmast ( https://newsmastfoundation.org/about/ ). I had never heard of them until I wrote an MRF that automatically added #ukraine #russia #elonmusk #trump #uspol #putin #economy #antifa to every post on FSE; IDIFTL. ( https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fse;a=blob;f=lib/site/mrf/shut_yr_mouth_about_them_politics.ex;h=2d861996b79deb2a1df69f59fa2d18a0472ff966;hb=HEAD ) To my surprise, a series of bots started reposting everything on FSE. Even shit like @whereverbot and @lainbot. I also started getting scraped by backend.newsmast.org, which is looking for not just posts but tracking follower/following relationships. (Larger write-up https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/377a61ff-78e8-47e8-a2b0-0ed60ac406da , https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/88476363018fe449b766bf0979d40fe470c965459c631a1c4540561560d5b6a4?name=newsmast-glowies.png ). I wouldn't be surprised if the fedi "OSINT" scraper tool (remember the one that was like, "IT EXPOSES WHO TALKS TO WHO" and people just used it for fun instead of being terrified?) from a couple of years back was a prototype for this. There are a lot of instances that are socks used by the IFTAS crowd. For example, the eleven instances¹ that were part of the Fediverse Governance paper ( https://github.com/fediverse-governance/fediverse-governance.github.io ) or instances where they don't even bother to change the links so their "About" page just links to Newsmast's "About" page: https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/e67f127d-f38a-4ef2-ac14-68eb8f8060e2 .
So I mention, like, "They aren't really against centralization. I took the survey they gave last year and the questions ranged from 'completely irrelevant' to 'insulting'; the main problem was that they were looking for a conclusion and the survey assumed the conclusion. That is, the survey existed to validate the thing they wanted to push. It was stuff like 'Do you suffer mental health problems because of unmoderated content?' and 'Would an automated blocking system help you block better?'" https://fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B33GlKrNA7pYVrEnse .
Dots connected this week: the 2023 "Fediverse Governance" paper, IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust and Safety), Newsmast (the organization that is responsible for scraping fedi and also people's following/follower lists to build a social map of fedi), . I can't be the only one to have noticed these people are all the same group, but I have never heard anyone mention it: https://fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B5Ke039Y3bhptYDXpA . Jon Pincus, outspoken IFTAS tendril and member of the "Disinformation Defense League" (which wants a tax on targeted ad revenue to be earmarked for journos, I SHIT YOU NOT), has been bending cwebber's ear; cwebber's now on social.coop (which pulled in $20,000 per month last time I checked), one of the original eleven¹ instances that were part of the original fediverse governance paper (coauthored by Kissane ahead of the founding of IFTAS). A lot of these things that came out of nowhere, they were astroturfed by these people. Here's an example: why all the press about the "CSAM problem" on fedi, where did that come from? These people built a detector, they want to create demand for the detector, so they reach a few tendrils out. hachyderm.io is another great example of the astroturfing. They show up out of nowhere, have a bunch of tech celebrities on there, then the admin starts making these impassioned declarations about how fedi "needs to do $x" or "won't survive without $y".:glowingthedark: cosocial.ca was the topic of this thread where phnt (I should tag people that were involved but I also think, like, maybe they will get spammed) posted this:
https://fluffytail.org/objects/caa22ad6-309a-43ad-86b2-1bac2659e6c5
> The sleezy kind of freedom haters. They are too afraid of backlash that play these dumb masquerading games to look like "the good guys trying to save this network". Their goal is to just turn this place into another corporate Twatter place nobody asked for.
This is accurate. If you have noticed that these people get hostile and instance-block you if you ever question their premise (as happened in that thread when phnt asked some pretty obviously good-faith questions), this is because they are pushing an agenda. People interact with them and exclaim, "How annoying! He refused to explain what he meant, he instance-blocked me for asking why or questioning the approach!" They are trying to present "Choose the color of the bikeshed!" as a choice before you've agreed to let them build a house. The style of interaction is driven by the motives: you think you're talking to a person, but you are talking to an agenda.
They are trying to push an agenda. The agenda is to kill fedi by turning it into a centrally controlled system, these are the mechanics.
There, that's it, that's my tinfoil screed. No action item. Please see my recent posts/reposts over the last four days for more information.
⁰ FediBBS, you type a comma, like you just do `, $url`, but very few things are "easy" on FediBBS. I think, like, this should probably be done in a similar way to the thing I suggested to feld where it's just an object lookup and the frontend. Several of the repos mentioned here are mirrored to https://git.freespeechextremist.com/ now and I think revolver should probably include some kind of "import/mirror git repo" feature in v2, or anyway I have "git support" in there somewhere, so, like, while FediBBS can just do tarball upload, a server that can absorb git repos and let you clone from any node, that'd be cool; I did this with IPFS but IPFS is, as I have mentioned and you may have noticed, slow and terrible and shitty and unreliable and painful.
¹ The Individual Eleven:
https://cosocial.ca/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/cosocial.ca
https://hcommons.social/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/hcommons.social
https://hachyderm.io/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/hachyderm.io
https://masto.donte.com.br/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/masto.donte.com.br
https://mspsocial.net/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/mspsocial.net
https://piaille.fr/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/piaille.fr
https://sfba.social/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/sfba.social
https://social.coop/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/social.coop
https://tooting.ch/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/tooting.ch
https://wandering.shop/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/wandering.shop
https://woof.group/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/woof.group
the_hydra_on_the_web--challenges_associated_with_extremist_use_of_the_fediverse.pdf
Mapping-Fediverse-Communities-1.pdf
fedimod.png
glowie.png
linkitylank.png
spread_anarchy.jpg
racialslurs.png
hellallyourfamily.jpg
fuckedupshit.jpg
newsmast-glowies.png
This admin is a damn joke
The #FBI Director Is MIA
#KashPatel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking & unexplained absences.
#Trump #law #NationalSecurity
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-director-drinking-absences/686839/?gift=guxsrl_dAdXUP9zqbQPWxRj40bt5Tcdpsjr9rTdgd3Q
NEW: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled
ProPublica and FRONTLINE found more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested on charges like assaulting an immigration agent or interfering with law enforcement.
Over and over, the accusations fell apart under scrutiny.
https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-ice-cbp-doj-trump-arrests-convictions
#news #trump #ice #cbp #LosAngeles #Minneapolis #doj #government
NEW on “Paper Trail”: Hundreds of immigration agents stormed a Chicago apartment complex overnight last year, some rappelling down from a helicopter.
Trump officials claimed they successfully arrested “terrorists.”
We uncovered a very different story. Listen to the full episode:
https://www.propublica.org/podcast/why-chicago-south-shore-apartment-immigration-raid?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#Immigration #ICE #Chicago #Venezuela #Immigrant #Trump #USPolitics #Podcast #Journalism
"Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, is leading U.S. diplomatic efforts with Iran while engaged in a lucrative, ongoing, multi-billion-dollar business relationship with the Saudi government. This brazenly corrupt arrangement is being completely ignored by most major media outlets."
~ Judd Legum
#JaredKushner #Trump #corruption #SaudiArabia #Iran #AffiinityPartners #media #ConflictofInterest
/1
Hard-right Israeli Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir launches an attack on the United States:
⭕ "We are not bound by any agreement between Trump and Iran."
⭕ "We are an independent, sovereign state, not a banana republic."
⭕ "We must not accept anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah. We must not withdraw from any area our fighters have seized and cleared of infrastructure."
⭕ "We must not return to a situation where thousands of armed militants sit along our northern border."
#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Iran #Trump #Hezbollah
Adrian Carrasquillo: #tRump Lost on #Birthright Citizenship. But He’s Winning the #Immigration Wars. #SCOTUS rejected his brazen constitutional gambit—but cleared the way for potentially the largest revocation of legal immigration status in #American history.
#law
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-lost-on-birthright-citizenship-but-winning-immigration-wars
"RFK Jr.'s "Re-Parenting" Brain Worm Strikes Again" https://www.blueamp.co/p/rfk-jr-really-thinks-he-can-re-parent I unloaded on RFK Jr's dipshittery and racism...I'm quite sure you'll like it. Check it out!
A TASTE: "There are bad ideas, worse ones seemingly produced by that monster truck filled with congealed-month-old-cheese-whiz #Trump calls an IQ, and then there’s RFK Jr. Here he goes again, he’s talking, so he’s saying something racist or stupid or ignorant or conspiratorial—usually all four!
I mean, JFC, has anyone not reached a point where they’d like to duct tape the guy’s mouth shut to just not hear the noise anymore? And, no, I’m not talking about the voice caused by inherited spasmodic dysphonia. I mean the idiocy exiting Jr.’s pie-hole"
#news #politics #usa #iran #health #ai #publichealh #tech #culture #us #media #press #donaldtrump #maga #science #fascism #israel #eu #tv #america #unitedstates #middleeast
The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan
---
Amid Trump’s war in Iran and an exodus of intelligence staffers, Sebastian Gorka has asserted that a blueprint for fighting terror threats is “imminent” — but has not released it. Iranian threats have refocused attention on the lack of a doctrine.
https://www.propublica.org/article/sebastian-gorka-trump-counterterrorism-czar-iran-terrorism?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
NEW: Amid Mounting War Casualties, Pete Hegseth “Defunded and Impeded” Efforts to Protect Civilians, Lawmakers Say
Ten members of Congress have warned the secretary of defense that the Trump administration’s gutting of a program focused on shielding noncombatants puts service members in peril, erodes the military’s moral standing and may violate federal law.
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-trump-war-civilian-casualties-elizabeth-warren-pentagon?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #PeteHegseth #Defense #Politics #Trump #Iran #War #Pentagon #Congress
NEW - A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes With Little Justification
ProPublica conducted a new analysis that shows the court is deciding more consequential rulings than ever before in largely unsigned orders with little to no explanation.
https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-shadow-docket-rulings-milestone?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #SCOTUS #Law #SupremeCourt #Legal #Trump #Data #Research
#Iran foreign minister left Islamabad without meeting #US envoys, Pakistan officials say. Can you blame him? The US “envoys” were Steve #Witkoff & Jared #Kushner ffs.
#IranWar #TrumpsWar #Trump #MafiaState #WarCrimes #RulesOfWar #law #Congress #WarPowers #geopolitics #NationalSecurity #MiddleEast #inflation #economy #oil #energy #EnergyCrisis
https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-04-25-2026
最新：特朗普發布槍手被捕照 槍手闖關一刻曝光
美國總統特朗普伉儷當地時間星期六晚在華府一間酒店出席白宮記者協會晚宴，其間傳出槍聲。特勤局特務護送特朗普與第一夫人梅拉尼婭等人離開。美聯社報導，特朗普沒有受傷。槍手為加州托倫斯31歲居民Cole Tomas Allen。特朗普在旗下社交平臺真相社交發布槍手被捕（見留言）照，以及閉路電視畫面。
閉路電視畫面顯示，槍手飛快地越過保安關卡，人員隨即拔槍追截。美聯社引述消息報導，一名執法人員避彈衣位置中彈，預料無大礙。當局相信槍手單獨犯案。
全文： https://www.tonytse.cloud/2026/04/white-house-correspondents-dinner-shooting-live.html
Edited 146d ago
WHCD Shooter’s Manifesto Showed Epstein-Related Stories Fueled Attempted Killing of ‘Pedophile, Rapist’ Trump
#TrumpStein #Trump #Epstein #WHCD #pedophiles #manifesto #rapists #MAGA #press #news
Seriously, if #Trump will #cheat at #football / #soccer, his #midterms shenanigans are a gonna be #criminal.
The #WhiteHouse called #FIFA’s #Infantino to review #TeamUSA’s #FolarinBalogun’s red card, AP source says
#SoreLoser #rules #accountability #WorldCup #US #MafiaState
https://apnews.com/article/falorin-balogun-suspension-world-cup-e5a5cab5731a916808601be93cb36832
Edited 76d ago
Trump Administration Abandons Deal With Northwest Tribes to Restore Salmon
—
The Trump administration canceled a deal, signed under President Joe Biden, that would have enabled the removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River that are considered harmful to salmon.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-salmon-columbia-river-tribes-deal?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #Trump #Native #Indigenous #Oregon #Environment #Sustainability #PNW
NEW: These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.
A first-of-its-kind ProPublica analysis found that children who entered the U.S. by themselves are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the final years of the first Trump presidency.
https://www.propublica.org/article/unaccompanied-minors-deportations-elder-chavez?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
#News #Immigration #ICE #Immigrants #Trump #Children #USPolitics #Law