404 Media

2025-09-16 16:25:27

DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine.

“The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance,” reads a message on the page where the study was formerly hosted. “During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Shortly after Donald Trump took office he issued an executive order that forced government agencies to scrub their sites of any mention of “diversity,” “gender,” “DEI,” and other “forbidden words” and perceived notions of “wokeness.” The executive order impacted every government agency, including NASA, and was a huge waste of engineers’ time.

We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently, but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the “radical left.”

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech after Kirk’s death. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

Elon Musk, who owns X, recently tweeted that he was going to “fix” the platform’s AI assistant Grok after it cited research that showed right-wing violence was more common than left-wing violence: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, who guest hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday, also vowed to go after “growing and powerful minority on the far left.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study said. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Steven Chermak, one of the study’s co-authors, declined to comment.

'The Bigotry Is Astounding:' Engineers Waste Time and Money Scanning .Gov Sites for 'Transgender' and Other Terms

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wasting workers’ time and taxpayer dollars.

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We Distribute

2025-08-20 07:07:30

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

More developments are happening on the front to provide payment and monetization options for the Social Web. Over the past few years, there have been interesting experiments in making this possible. Mitra, notably, pioneered subscription payments by utilizing Monero. Bandwagon has also built on the concept by instead relying on integrations with traditional payment networks, starting with Stripe and PayPal. The short-lived SubClub implemented private feeds for paid access.

Introducing CrowdBucks

CrowdBucks is a new effort developed by Charles Iliya Krempeaux, better known by his online moniker, Reiver. It builds on some of the ideas previous implementations have tried, and aims to make the process as smooth and simple as possible.

“The long-term vision that CrowdBucks is a part of is to create a payments layer for the Fediverse,” Reiver explains, “obviously, it’s not the only part, there will be other projects later.”
Source: CrowdBucks

Signing Up

Instead of forcing users to create yet another account, CrowdBucks does something really smart: you can just sign in with an existing Fediverse account.

At the moment, sign-in is limited to just Mastodon, but the plan is to gradually support a number of different platforms. Since a lot of Fediverse software implements part of the Mastodon API, I attempted to log in with both Akkoma and WordPress, but neither one seems to work yet. We opted to use a tried-and-true community instance.

After doing the Authorization dance, CrowdBucks directs users to a simple dashboard, where they are prompted to do basic setup for their page. Fediverse integration automatically pulls in profile details, including the username, avatar, header, and handle, although most of the public-facing details can be customized.

Getting Set Up

The first thing to do with your account is to set fundraising goals and donation tiers. The flow feels reminiscent of something like Kickstarter or Patreon, where rewards can be spelled out as something symbolic, something digital, or even something tangible.
You can view our demo account here. Please, don’t actually donate to this.

Donations and Payments

Support tiers can be set up with any monthly denomination, and these get prominently displayed on your CrowdBucks page. Donors can use their CrowdBucks accounts to find a page, select a tier, and support creators and projects easily.

When a person pledges towards a Tier, they’re automatically taken to a checkout page. For the time being, the only supported Payment Processor is Stripe. Reiver has explained that this is because Stripe was easiest to implement, but the team intends to also add support for PayPal and other providers, as well as support for standards such as Web Monetization and OpenPayments.

Quick Demo

CrowdBucks was initially revealed in a brief demo at FediCon a few weeks ago, which was recorded and added alongside the FediCon Talks on PeerTube. It’s a useful insight into where Reiver is coming from, what’s being built, and ideas of what CrowdBucks could be used for.

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Open Source and Self-Hostable

“Anyone will be able to set up their own CrowdBucks server,” Reiver explains, “just like anyone can set up their own Mastodon server.”

The CrowdBucks project itself is licensed under the GNU AGPL, with source code readily available. The CrowdBucks.fund site is simply operated as a flagship instance, but the goal is to allow anyone to host their own version as part of their operational infrastructure.

“We want CrowdBucks to help pay server bills, to support developers building Fedi software, and to fund creators on the Fediverse. The whole thing is designed to be native to the Fediverse.”

Future Plans

While the project itself is still fairly young, the team is actively thinking about how to improve. One area CrowdBucks is already exploring involves the ability for the app to post to the Fediverse on the behalf of fundraisers, for example, to give credit to supporters. Another possibility might involve collaborating with Emissary to standardize pieces involving payments and private access.

This is an exciting endeavor, and might be one of the most polished attempts yet to make payments possible on the Social Web. Hopefully, existing projects will get involved, and hash out the details on how to make this as open and interoperable as possible.

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