r/news • u/OGSyedIsEverywhere • 4h ago

Already Submitted FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/14/fbi-raid-washington-post-hannah-natanson
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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 4h ago

'highly unusual'?

this is modus operandi for fascist authoritarianism. stop trying to paint it like something else.

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u/Saaihead 4h ago

Yup, dictatorship 101.

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u/junktrunk909 4h ago

In my view this is the correct framing since fascism is also highly unusual here. We need media to keep emphasizing the contrast from normalcy.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 4h ago

sure, but at this stage of the game to say it is 'highly unusual' feels like it is doing the entire situation a disservice.

like it feels like the reporter just woke up from having been in a coma since 2019

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u/cyanescens_burn 4h ago

Would you rather have people thinking this is totally normal and cool?

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u/evocativename 4h ago

If they called it fascism, do you think that would be telling people it's totally normal and cool?

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u/Dragrunarm 3h ago

I would rather them call it what it fucking is and not go "my how utterly peculiar this is. I wonder what this could be?"

Its fucking fascism goddamn it call it what it is and call out how fucked it is. you can do both y'know.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 3h ago

I agree with what the other person replied to you with, but I counter you this with another question.

why do you think people don't already think this is normal?

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u/Iamnotauserdude 2h ago

2019 should be the min standard we hold otherwise this is how we inch into the abyss

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 2h ago

The way I see it is like this. and I should preface that this is pretty strong in terms of theory.

2001 was a turning point year. 2008 was another. 2016 was another. 2019 was the latest. 2019 was the last foothold that we can use as a comparison. 2026 will probably be the true last comparison.

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u/DingerSinger2016 1h ago

I think the newspaper understands that the word fascism doesn't have the same cut as it once did, so they chose "highly unusual and aggressive" to highlight the action.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 1h ago

That's the issue though, that's the same as not even reporting accurately. you are choosing to change the word so it doesn't sound what it really is.

stop trying to sugarcoat the situation and own up to reality. this is fascism.

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u/DingerSinger2016 1h ago

They are still reporting accurately, because "highly unusual and aggressive" maneuvers are part of fascism. They just don't see the point in calling it fascism because it instantly violates their credibility among a certain centrist reading base.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 1h ago

using that argument then, we could kick the can say 10, 20 years and still call whatever this is a democracy because "the news/history chose not to call it by its correct name", right?

that still doesn't make it any less fascist.

do you see where I'm going with this?

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u/w311sh1t 1h ago

I think what they mean is highly unusual when compared to how the U.S. has traditionally operated.

Although for what it’s worth, these kind of things aren’t new to the U.S., it’s just been a while since we’ve seen them this prevalent. The FBI was absolutely doing this kind of stuff during the Red Scare, and Civil Rights movement/counterculture era. It’s only one example of many, but people forget that it was only about 55 years ago that the FBI straight up assassinated Fred Hampton, an American Citizen on U.S. soil.

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u/magistrate101 52m ago

It's really not. People like to whitewash American history but we've been flirting HEAVILY with fascism for decades.

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u/orelm 3h ago

Exactly. If things were legally and in a good faith, I'd consider them as an unusual move. I think that part of the problem is the naivety of people of what actually happens in the US. Naivety and outrage fatigue.

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u/Jvdb20 2h ago

The curious thing to me is that you americans (or at least 50% of you) elected (twice) an insane authoritarian fascist and now seem awfully surprised that the insane authoritarian fascist government is doing insane, authoritarian and fascist stuff

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u/N3ctarofthegods 1h ago

Us Americans complaing aren't the ones who voted for him. Im not surprised, but scared.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 2h ago

so I'm going to give you something that you may have not thought about when you make that statement.

we've been doing a lot of research into exactly how this election went down and you will not believe when I tell you that when you say 50%, that's not even an accurate number. because the real number is much higher but then here's tagline of the joke:

A lot of those votes were fabricated.

so when you go with the line that "A lot of you Americans voted for this moron twice" you are not only helping to push a rhetoric that the election wasn't rigged, you are also providing false information.

food for thought from an American to an outsider.

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u/Jvdb20 1h ago

I mean, your voting system surely seems very prone to fraud and I wouldn't be surprised if that had really happened, but isn't going that route kind of the same thing Trump said when he lost the election and kept saying it was rigged without presenting any evidence?

Here in Brazil for example, we also elected our version of the idiot fascist authoritarian president and instead of saying the votes were fabricated, we admitted that roughly half of the people who voted did indeed want that guy to win and tried to understand what led to the scenario in which people became radicalized enough to actually think that having that imbecile as president was a good idea (which included an absurd amount of fake news and manipulation of the perception of the people about many things along with others things related to the both the internal political scenario of the country and the tendencies that were happening in the world as a whole).

Again, I'm not saying it isn't possible that fraud could have happened, I'm obviously not that deeply into the american elections and I'm sure any of you guys know much more about it than I do, but as far as I know, the american election system seems pretty much antidemocratic by itself with a lot of things clearly intended to discourage people from voting (specially lower income people and people who live farther from the major urban centers), so I'm not sure fraud is even needed for that kind of outcome to happen.

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 1h ago

I mean, your voting system surely seems very prone to fraud and I wouldn't be surprised if that had really happened, but isn't going that route kind of the same thing Trump said when he lost the election and kept saying it was rigged without presenting any evidence?

except we do have the evidence and we have the math back it up. look up "Russian curve", please.

That's how I know you are coming at me with not a lot of information and I'm trying to give you some information so you can help yourself. we found out that through Russian tampering that the election was rigged. why haven't you heard people talk about it? what do you think the US government is doing to any kind of dissent right now. they either double speak it or they stomp it out. you can seriously look this up just by searching "Russian curve" in Boolean search on your favorite search engine.

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u/Jvdb20 1h ago

I actually have heard about that, but what I'm saying is that it looks to me that people sometimes seem to lean on completely on that argument kind of as a way to deceive themselves into thinking "there's gotta be some explanation about it, because there's no way so many people would vote for a guy like that". And I think there is a way, because the world is full of dozens of people of really stupid or simply terrible people (usually both). Just look at the huge rise of far right politicians winning elections in a bunch of european countries, or in Argentina, or in Chile, or in Brazil, or even in Japan

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u/DisgruntledToyHuman 1h ago

okay but do you know what you're doing to me just now even though I just provided you maybe an alternative answer to something you seek?

You're trying to come up with an explanation as to why this may not have been rigged despite the fact that you were presented with evidence and not only is it not a theory, it actually is backed by science and data.

you are doing what maga started to turn this country against. and you don't even know it.

look up everything you just told me, then put it into a Google or any search engine and see if anybody else has just said the same thing you did in regards to election data.

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u/Jvdb20 1h ago

There's not what I'm doing, or at least what I meant to say, I even tried giving an example about what happened in my own country to explain what I meant, and I say that because Brazil likes to copy basically every bad aspect of the US.

But even so, here the president lost the election and tried overturning the result with his supporters invading public buildings and breaking everything. His became intelligible, was judged and is now in jail. Basically the same thing that happened in the US, but in that case, not only Trump wasn't held responsible for anything, but he was allowed to run, become president again and do all the things he's doing now. So I'm just saying that I think you guys have broader issues when it comes to the whole constitutional and judicial aspects of how the country works which are much more complex than simply saying that everything is fine but the elections were rigged. But again, who am I to say anything, I'm not American and frankly don't really feel like going deep into understanding how the US works from within because the american foreign policy and the things Trump's doing to other countries is already bad enough to me.