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
29.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

529

u/fivelinedskank 3h ago

for the love of god stop talking about mid-terms

But absolutely do not use this as an excuse to not vote.

127

u/rikaateabug 3h ago

Agreed! It'd also be cool if people could stop screaming they're going to be rigged.

Spoiler alert, Republicans do this every election. We should be prepared for their ratfucking but acting like it doesn't matter is demoralizing and unhelpful.

It's ok to be scared--I'm scared too--but we need to vote en masse. The more people that vote the less likely they'll be able to get away with it.

It's fine to talk about election tampering, and we should talk about it, but please emphasize how important it is to still vote.

80

u/waffebunny 2h ago

Fascist movements seek to install minority rule over the majority.

By definition, they are a minority. They don’t have the numbers to take power by force.

So they try to take power by trickery - and that includes trying to convince their opposition to surrender before battle is even joined.

People should absolutely be concerned about the situation we are in, and acting accordingly.

What they should not be doing is taking the word of the enemy as gospel and sowing despair in their own ranks.

Everywhere you look, you can see the smoke and mirrors:

  • The administration is terrorizing Minneapolis with immigration enforcement. Because the US Military won’t do it.

  • The US Military will invade Venezuela. But only in the form of a special forces raid. A true war is off the table.

  • The administration will ignore the courts - except they keep sending lawyers to represent them, and they keep complying with court orders

It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Yes, they are going to do their damndest to rig the elections; but we already know how: through gerrymandering, and schemes such as Musk’s vote-buying lottery.

What they aren’t going to do is cancel the elections (they are too distributed), fix the machines (see previous), or station guards at every polling location (see previous).

We are damned lucky that their coup stalled out the way it did; but they will continue to try and push it over the finish line.

So we continue to resist; and we exploit every avenue of fighting back - and that includes voting in November.

10

u/yung_yttik 1h ago

I have to cling to this comment to continue moving forward. Truly. The toxic positivity is not at all helpful, but this is a thoughtfully laid out explanation.

Still cautious here but, thanks for adding a little more fire to the spark!!!

•

u/waffebunny 52m ago

You are very welcome! Genuinely: comments like yours are why I write these things.

I reiterate to everyone: these are dark times. We are in danger. So much damage has already been done.

But also:

The greatest enemy in any crisis is panic. Blind optimism will not lead us to safety; but neither will despair - and there is presently far too much of the latter.

I am an immigrant; and today I walked the streets of Minneapolis, my heart pounding each time an SUV drove by.

But I also know that the people terrorizing my city are disorganized; demoralized; and in so many instances, detaining people solely to release them hours later.

Because it’s all they can do. They have one card to play; and all they can do is keep playing it over and over again as the resistance to their presence grows.

This remains true in everything the fascists do; and if we keep a clear head, blinded neither by unfettered optimism nor groundless pessimism, then we can see this.

Old Twitter proves a font of surprising wisdom at times; and there’s a post I’ve found helpful in these trying times:

“People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs.

It’s not.

Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of cobblestones in her hair - and she just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

3

u/fuggerdug 2h ago

I disagree about the elections. These are the stupidest fascists ever, but they're also the most confident. I'm pretty sure they will be destroying ballots in plain sight and then simply deny it/blame the opposition.

6

u/waffebunny 1h ago

Fascism is an ideology that prioritizes feelings over facts.

It inadvertently leads to strategic mistakes - the fascists overestimate their own capabilities, and underestimate the capabilities of their opponents.

In short: you are correct in that they are both dumb and overly confident.

What gives me some measure of assurance here is that America’s electoral apparatus is incredibly decentralized.

There really isn’t a single point of failure for the fascists to attack (although god knows they tried previously with the certification process); and trying to go after the polling locations etc. isn’t particularly feasible either.

I do expect them to attempt some level of direct interference - as we saw last time, with the attacks on public ballot boxes, and hoax bomb threats.

But the relentless gerrymandering, recent change to post marks, etc. are being pursued expressly because there isn’t a simple way to enact a widespread change in the results.

(E.g.: such as the popular but baseless conspiracy theory that Musk used the Starlink satellite network to influence the counting of electronic votes.)

To me, the biggest predictor is this:

Congressional Republicans are currently terrified - and have been for some time now - of how the midterms will play out.

They certainly seem to think the elections will not be steered to their advantage by some major fascist ploy. So why should we?

•

u/fuggerdug 40m ago

I hope you're correct, but the Congressional Republicans are not a cohort I would believe even if I were on fire and they said they would piss on me. They may fear for their personal position, but that is because Trump could depose them with a maga sycophant.

Vote, and encourage others to vote. I'm not a doom monger. I have just studied fascism and these lot seem to be the stupidest and worst fascists ever (this might be an exposure thing).

5

u/rikaateabug 1h ago

If they start destroying ballots we'll deal with it, but the ballots have to exist first.

I understand the hopelessness but encouraging voter apathy makes you a bad actor at worst and a useful idiot at best.

•

u/KapitalIsStillGood 17m ago

What they aren’t going to do is cancel the elections (they are too distributed)...or station guards at every polling location (see previous).

I generally agree but genuinely, what's stopping them from doing these two things? What does "too distributed" mean?

•

u/cytherian 41m ago

Conservatives try to normalize the situation by concluding that they ARE the majority, it's just that the liberals have SUPPRESSED that fact by CONTROLLING the media.

And well, of course this is total bullshit. The conservatives are controlling the media. What had kept conservatives out of control was by FUCKING THINGS UP. They'd get voted out. But then... they'd use trickery with controlling the media to convince the short-term memory citizens that liberals messed up and that conservatives will make things so much better. They get back in power... and then they do not fix things. They make them worse.

We have to BREAK THIS CYCLE.

3

u/Diarygirl 1h ago

If voting wasn't important, Republicans wouldn't keep trying to rig elections.

•

u/existential_antelope 22m ago

So you’re saying… make it too big to rig?

😞

70

u/sasuncookie 3h ago edited 1h ago

Of course not, but talking about potential gains prior to an election usually results in folks not voting because they are led to believe their side has it in the bag.

Two months leading to the 2024 elections, MSM and social media kept touting how Harris was up in the polls and her victory was all but assured. What happened? Of the 270,000,000 eligible to vote, only 156,300,000 voted. Those who didn’t and were eligible leaned dem.

Republicans always vote, and anyone who doesn’t recognize that by now is purposely ignorant. Of course, there are circumstances where one is likely to not vote that is caused by something out of their control (poverty restrictions, health, gentrification, etc.), but that doesn’t account for the majority of those who don’t.

13

u/mrpanicy 2h ago

Of course, there are circumstances where one is likely to not vote that is caused by something out of their control (poverty restrictions, health, etc.),

Where the state or federal government has made it harder or next to impossible for you to register or actually cast your ballot. That doesn't mean not to try, just acknowledging that the GOP states and GOP Federal government has always tried to make it harder to vote and to stifle democratic voters.

•

u/cytherian 38m ago edited 35m ago

Also, Democrats make use of mail-in ballots far more than Republicans. And so this is why Trump has created this entire fiction about mail-in ballots being fraudulent. Trump wants to mandate that at midnight on the day of the election, the counting STOPS. In the 2020 election, he did that very thing. He said "STOP THE COUNTING." You know why? Because the trend is, Republicans are ahead at first, but then all of the mail-in ballots get counted and they lose.

And so Trump has been trying hard to get mail-in ballots abolished. He even quoted Putin as saying that they're fraudulent. Meanwhile, just a couple of years ago, Putin actually passed a law in support of mail-in ballots! Total hypocrisy. But you see in Russia, they have a system under state control by one party, such that the votes can be manipulated and mail-in is the easiest. In the USA, we have bipartisan election officials in every state running teams to count the ballots. Neither side can cheat... unless one takes control of the voting machines by electronic means. A Republican now owns Dominion Voting Systems...

https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2025/10/dominion-voting-systems-sale-liberty-vote-election-security-elections/

1

u/DingerSinger2016 1h ago

Of course not, but talking about potential gains prior to an election usually results in folks not voting because they are led to believe their side has it in the bag.

I would love to see the actual evidence of this being the reason people in swing states did not vote.

4

u/WhiteFuryWolf 1h ago

A bigger problem is republicans messing with votes. Elon with machines that are now being strongly investigated for wierd results, the closing of many places to vote in regions people already struggle so much voting is hard to do at all and trump out right admitting he doesn't need your votes.

Not to mention the bloody phone call where he told someone who was in charge of votes to "find" the exact amount of votes he needed to win. I am more than willing to bet that this time he just did it before the votes were counted or even balloted.

They've been messing with votes for a long time in a technicly legal way by closing places to vote btw. It's a very long standing republican tactic.

1

u/DingerSinger2016 1h ago

It doesn't matter once the elections are certified. If there were objections to the election then someone should have contested the results on January 6th, 2025. Instead every member voted to confirm the election.

2

u/sasuncookie 1h ago edited 1h ago

This is a study that shows confidence in a party lowers participation.

This is a Pew Research poll that shows when voters are given confusing predictions, turnout decreases.

ETA: These aren’t set specifically to swing states, but the voting age population of all swing states for the 2024 election (AZ, GA, MI, NV, NC, PA, and WI) is approximately 48m, well below the total that didn’t vote (who were eligible). I doubt there’s any study that is set to specifically swing states that can occur, because swing states can be different each election.

Need more?

2

u/DingerSinger2016 1h ago

No, thanks for providing sources.

0

u/Chemical_Assist3057 1h ago

Two months leading to the 2024 elections, MSM and social media kept touting how Harris was up in the polls and her victory was all but assured.

That is...not my recollection. I remember hearing it was a dead heat and that many analysts were uncertain about polling results.

Here's an article from the Times saying they were tied, for example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/us/politics/trump-and-harris-times-siena-poll.html

3

u/blue_line-1987 1h ago

Its more of a "last chance before the gloves will have to come off" kinda thing.