Weddings if you’re lucky. They’ll also murder 150+ girls at school.

The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.

also for context this is a shorter version and represents well the situation https://www.inventati.org/who/collective

"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."

This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati#United_Sta...

there is a good interview with someone from the collective here: https://sabot.media/post/a-network-called-resistance

The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.

>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.

You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.

njal.la (no affiliate) exists for that purpose. It is a privacy focused domain service that is run by the people behind the pirate bay.

[1] https://njal.la/domains/

If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.

Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.

So free speech absolutists don't care about free speech, just free speech for americans on american soil? Not very absolutist then...

> Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do?

This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.

It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.

The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)

What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.

Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.

China, Egypt to do away with the use of the US dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555056 - September 2026

China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026

Remember this is the Trump administration. I think your expectations might be a bit high.

It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.

The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”

Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.

Hacker news engages in ideological vetting against users. For example, try posting content encouraging violence.

Ideologically vetting can mean a lot of things. Like, a sign on the door that says "NO TERFS" is a form of ideological vetting.

By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.

This is meant to chill domestic left-wing activism. Just like the person who got 30 years for delivering some zines (https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... https://portside.org/2026-06-25/injustice-how-leftist-zines-...)

I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.

> one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US?

always has been

e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0Ql0VfcRg

I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.

Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.

My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”

Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”

Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.

This is exactly the problem they ran into.

A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.

There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”

Why is this downvoted? The regime has openly declared that anti-fascist beliefs are now cause for surveillance, censorship, and persecution.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...

If you knowingly provide services to violent/terrorist groups you deserve to be shut down. The only reason anyone is upset by this is because they were left aligned and had they been providing services to the far right, neo-nazis, etc everyone would be rightfully cheering.

> Hizballah

Is that Hezbollah's little brother?

This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.

So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...

This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.

> https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems

All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.

> “That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large;”

Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.

Yeah, but there are degrees. I’d rather have a conversation about trans rights here in Oslo than in Afghanistan.

Good point, it's not a particularly new behavior. It's just depressing what kind of utterly horrible shitshow the US has become. I was pretty open to and almost planning to move to the US 25 years ago and now I'm so happy I didn't.