fascism is not an opinion - fascism is a crime!

Castle Hill: Man charged over alleged nazi swastika display at war memorial

A man who allegedly displayed a nazi swastika drawn on his chest while standing beside a war memorial has been arrested and charged. At around 7pm on Monday, police responded to reports of a man displaying a displaying a nazi symbol. Officers arrived at the Wrights Road memorial in Castle Hill, finding a 31-year-old man with a nazi swastika drawn on his chest. He was arrested and taken to Castel Hill Police Station where he was charged with knowingly display by public act nazi symbol without excuse. Offenders can face up to one year in jail or an $11,000 fine or both under the Crimes Amendment (Prohibition on Display of nazi symbols) passed three years ago in NSW.

via thenightly: Castle Hill: Man charged over alleged nazi swastika display at war memorial

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AfD in acht Saar-Kommunen stärkste Kraft

Die AfD gehört zu den großen Gewinnern dieser Bundestagswahl 2025. Im Saarland wurde sie gleich in acht Städten und Gemeinden stärkste Kraft. Generell holte sie überall zweistellige Ergebnisse und kratzte mitunter an der 30-Prozent-Marke. Seit die AfD im Saarland angetreten ist, zählten Friedrichsthal, Sulzbach und Neunkirchen zu den AfD-Hochburgen: Erstmals bei einer Bundestagswahl wurde die Partei in diesen Städten nun auch stärkste Kraft und landete jeweils nur knapp unter 30 Prozent. Auch in Bexbach, Völklingen, Spiesen-Elversberg, Schiffweiler und Großrosseln holte die Partei jeweils die meisten Stimmen. (…) Die AfD ist tendenziell dort mit am stärksten, wo die Wahlbeteiligung am geringsten ist. Die geringste Wahlbeteiligung etwa verzeichneten landesweit Neunkirchen, Dillingen, Völklingen und Sulzbach – in drei dieser vier Städte war die AfD stärkste Kraft.

via sr: AfD in acht Saar-Kommunen stärkste Kraft

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AfD wird in den Flächenländern im Osten die stärkste Kraft – #keinUrlaubsland

38,6 Prozent in Thüringen, rund 37,3 in Sachsen: In Ostdeutschland ist die AfD erfolgreicher denn je. Sie holt fast doppelt so viele Stimmen wie die zweitplatzierte CDU. Die AfD ist bei der Bundestagswahl in allen fünf ostdeutschen Flächenländern stärkste Kraft geworden. Das geht nach Auszählung aller Wahlbezirke aus Daten der Landeswahlleiter in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Sachsen und Thüringen hervor. In Brandenburg erhielt die AfD nach Auszählung aller Wahllokale 32,5 Prozent der Zweitstimmen, teilte der Landeswahlleiter mit. Der Verfassungsschutz Brandenburg stuft die AfD als rechtsextremistischen Verdachtsfall ein. Die zweitplatzierte CDU kommt auf 18,1 Prozent, die SPD nur noch auf 14,8 Prozent. Bei der Landtagswahl im September 2024 lagen die Sozialdemokraten noch knapp vor der AfD. In Thüringen kam die AfD nach Auszählung aller Wahlbezirke auf 38,6 Prozent. Die CDU landete dort mit 18,6 Prozent vor der Linken mit 15,2 Prozent. Aus der Bundestagswahl 2021 und der Landtagswahl 2024 war die AfD in Thüringen ebenfalls als stärkste Kraft hervorgegangen. Auch bei Europawahl lagen Rechtsextreme schon vorn Auch in Sachsen wurde die AfD mit Abstand die stärkste Partei und kam nach Auszählung aller Wahlbezirke auf 37,3 Prozent. Die zweitplatzierte CDU erreichte 19,7 Prozent. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern erreichte die AfD nach dem vorläufigen Ergebnis 35 Prozent der Stimmen und verdrängte die SPD vom Spitzenplatz. In Sachsen-Anhalt holte die AfD 37,1 Prozent der Stimmen und gewann damit ebenfalls mit Abstand vor der CDU, für die 19,2 Prozent der Wahlbeteiligten stimmten.

via zeit: AfD wird in den Flächenländern im Osten die stärkste Kraft

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Inside the Telegram Groups Doxing Women for Their Facebook

A WIRED investigation goes inside the Telegram groups targeting women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups on Facebook with doxing, harassment, and sharing of nonconsensual intimate images. In late January, a warning spread through the London-based Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy?—but this post wasn’t about a bad date or a cheating ex. A connected network of male-dominated Telegram groups had surfaced, sharing and circulating nonconsensual intimate images of women. Their justification? Retaliation. On January 23, users in the AWDTSG Facebook group began warning about hidden Telegram groups. Screenshots and TikTok videos surfaced, revealing public Telegram channels where users were sharing nonconsensual intimate images. Further investigation by WIRED identified additional channels linked to the network. By scraping thousands of messages from these groups, it became possible to analyze their content and the patterns of abuse. AWDTSG, a sprawling web of over 150 regional forums across Facebook alone, with roughly 3 million members worldwide, was designed by Paolo Sanchez in 2022 in New York as a space for women to share warnings about predatory men. But its rapid growth made it a target. Critics argue that the format allows unverified accusations to spiral. Some men have responded with at least three defamation lawsuits filed in recent years against members, administrators, and even Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Others took a different route: organized digital harassment. Primarily using Telegram group data made available through Telemetr.io, a Telegram analytics tool, WIRED analyzed more than 3,500 messages from a Telegram group linked to a larger misogynistic revenge network. Over 24 hours, WIRED observed users systematically tracking, doxing, and degrading women from AWDTSG, circulating nonconsensual images, phone numbers, usernames, and location data. From January 26 to 27, the chats became a breeding ground for misogynistic, racist, sexual digital abuse of women, with women of color bearing the brunt of the targeted harassment and abuse. Thousands of users encouraged each other to share nonconsensual intimate images, often referred to as “revenge porn,” and requested and circulated women’s phone numbers, usernames, locations, and other personal identifiers. As women from AWDTSG began infiltrating the Telegram group, at least one user grew suspicious: “These lot just tryna get back at us for exposing them.” When women on Facebook tried to alert others of the risk of doxing and leaks of their intimate content, AWDTSG moderators removed their posts. (The group’s moderators did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Meanwhile, men who had previously coordinated through their own Facebook groups like “Are We Dating the Same Girl” shifted their operations in late January to Telegram’s more permissive environment. Their message was clear: If they can do it, so can we.

via wired: Inside the Telegram Groups Doxing Women for Their Facebook

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The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers – #FakeNewsTrump

A “survey of our niche audience for our niche audience” was the source for the claim that only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices. The number isn’t true. Why do administration and elected officials keep relying on it? As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices. By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week. It’s also completely untrue. You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.” A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza. It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” (…) The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending. (…) I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office. The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.” The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.

via propublica: The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers

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More than 150,000 Canadians sign petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship – #KickHimOut

Parliamentary petition launched due to billionaire’s link to Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to conquer Canada. More than 150,000 people from Canada have signed a parliamentary petition calling for their country to strip Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship because of the tech billionaire’s alliance with Donald Trump, who has spent his second US presidency repeatedly threatening to conquer its independent neighbor to the north and turn it into its 51st state. The British Columbia author Qualia Reed launched the petition in Canada’s House of Commons, where it was sponsored by New Democrat parliamentary member and avowed Musk critic Charlie Angus, as the Canadian Press first reported over the weekend. Born in South Africa and owning US companies including electric vehicle-maker Tesla, aerospace company SpaceX and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk has Canadian citizenship through his mother: model and dietitian Maye Musk, who is from Saskatchewan’s capital, Regina. He has been crusading to slash the US federal government’s size at the behest of the US president, who has consistently challenged Canada’s sovereignty since returning to the White House for a second presidential term on 20 January. Elon Musk demand that federal workers document what they do causes chaos Read more Reed’s petition – filed on 20 February – accuses Musk of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada” by acting as an adviser to Trump. Trump has invited the scorn of Canada’s 40 million residents by making threats about imposing steep tariffs on Canadian products and openly boasting about having the US annex the country, including shortly before its national hockey team defeated a selection of American opponents in a politically charged 20 February tournament final.

via guardian: More than 150,000 Canadians sign petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship

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BEFORE OUR EYES – JD Vance’s Debacle in Germany Exposes MAGA’s Sinister Global Endgame

Did you know that the United States is joining an international fascist network? I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name. The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor. This is not remotely normal. True, it’s not as if the United States has never allied itself with fascist regimes. There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and some others. But those were all during the Cold War, and U.S. support was, though hardly defensible, merely defensive—that is, it was offered solely because these thugs were enthusiastically anti-communist. It was support based on one mutually shared interest. Vance’s meeting—and Elon Musk’s earlier one, since he, too, is a member of our government, however shadily—is something much different. It’s ideologically motivated. Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it. I never could have imagined, none of us could, that the government of the United States of America would openly ally itself with a fascist political party. In the heart of Europe. In Germany, for God’s sake. And while we’re imagining things, imagine this: Although the conservative Christian Democrats are ahead in the polling, with 29 percent, AfD is in second at 21 percent. Imagine that AfD somehow wins. The U.S. government will be openly cheering a fascist victory. Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine. The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in.

via newrepublic: BEFORE OUR EYES JD Vance’s Debacle in Germany Exposes MAGA’s Sinister Global Endgame

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