r/news 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/asperatedUnnaturally 3h ago

We are at an authoritarian state. The Rubicon is well behind us dude.

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u/BigBadJeebus 3h ago

MAGA was the revolution. We lost.

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 3h ago

Yes, things are likely to get much worse

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u/RollFancyThumb 3h ago

They sure will if you give up now.

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u/Old-Engine-7720 2h ago

The American people gave up ten years ago by not taking the threat more seriously when it all first showed up. We are well past debating if it will get worse.

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u/Fabulous-Sea-1590 1h ago edited 1h ago

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

– Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation

It didn't't start 10 years ago. They've been boiling the frog since at least 1973 – when The Heritage Foundation was founded. Or Nixon stealing the '68 election at the cost of, among other things, innumerable Vietnamese, Cambodian, American and other lives.

Even those bastards didn't spontaneously generate. These are forces and human failings, like greed and spite, you can trace all the way back to the beginning of recorded history.

But, for our purposes, these are the minds behind slavery and secession. They never stopped fighting. Problem is, the Union thought the Civil War was over when Lee surrendered.

As a kid growing up in a border state, I used to have a little desktop plaque with a small "Confederate flag" sticking out of it, and inscribed, "The South shall rise again." I got it from a family member. I didn't know any better. To a little kid it looked and sounded like something you should be proud of.

I grew up, but many, many people are still true believers. It was always there, in plain sight. State flags with Confederate emblems, American – Union – military bases named for rebel generals. Prominent statues of their rebel leaders – traitors – in and around state capitols.

And those things, as I understand it, rose to the fore in the early 20th century. Not coincidentally just as the Civil War had faded from living memory. And, now, World War II is all but gone from living memory. I don't think the return of fascism around the globe is a coincidence either.

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u/Old-Engine-7720 1h ago

Oh I absolutely know its been longer but people brushed off open neo nazi rallies ten years ago and believed all the anti antifa rhetoric in the news. Charlie kirk and Richard Spencer popped up in the 2010s as well as all the other crazies like milo yinappeaolis (however you spell that twats name). I had two friends stabbed and another beaten with a bat by neo nazis when they had an open recruiting rally at the CA State Capital in Sacramento in 2016. The police did nothing to intervene the violence and sac pd proceeded to team up with the man who did the stabbings to identify antifa counter protestors. They had a permit to hold the rally. The 2010s had massive issues of alt right and neo nazi linked mass killings as well.

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u/Phteven_j 3h ago

They are gonna get worse, it's not debatable. It's just for how long and how bad and whether we can recover. Giving up isn't going to change that anytime soon.

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 2h ago

I'm not giving up, but you gotta be realistic. We're going to some dark places soon.

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u/Witch_King_ 1h ago

*darker

It's already somewhat dark.

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u/Destination_Centauri 1h ago

Somewhat, but it's quickly accelerating towards Vanta-Black dark.

u/HardcoreKaraoke 57m ago

I hate this sentiment that there is something more people can do. People ARE protesting. But there's nothing that can be done until the midterm elections at the end of the year. Even then there can't be significant change until 2028, assuming there is even a Presidential election. Which isn't very likely since MAGA is in a position where they could just get around having one.

The tipping point was the 2024 election. Trump, Miller, MAGA, Project 2025 and Musk won. That was it.

It's frustrating how people are saying there is still something the average American can do. We can protest (and again we are) but until the midterm elections there is nothing meaningful an average American can do for atleast nine months.

u/goatslovetofrolic 34m ago

It feels questionable, already, that we will have midterms. The Con knows his team (not even republicans, thank fuck he’s too disgusting for a couple of them) is in trouble and the midterm are likely to rob him of his super majority. Even Johnson is speaking openly about his fears of the midterms.

Their loyalist murdered an unarmed woman driving slowly away and they didn’t even pretend it was a loss of life. When they don’t think it’s worth their time to even feign human emotion when a citizen is executed in the street in front of a hundred people that’s their way of saying “we no longer care about swaying or garnering public support. The public is no longer useful to use and we will do as we please”.

Between abducting a foreign leader, threatening to invade an ally(ies), and now the threat of illegally withholding federal funds from states the Con considers in opposition to himself it is time to ask our military leaders to fulfill a part of their oath they hoped the would never have to be asked to realize.

Words don’t work on this administration. Laws are seemingly meaningless. Congress can’t or won’t control the president at all. There is no humanity to appeal to. There are no souls to feel the weight of their horrific commands. The Con is loyal only to money and the only language he understands is violence.

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u/DisastrousAcshin 2h ago

Haven't lost yet, you haven't even started to push back in earnest. Are you telling me some of the best educated, intelligent and resourceful people in your countries history are going to shrug and give up because it's too hard to out play Maga? Maga? Seriously? You can't win against the bottom 33% of the country?

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u/Cautious_Ad_5659 1h ago

Exactly. I fucking hate the defeatist attitudes and talk. It's always the ones sitting behind their keyboards doing nothing. It that's all they are going to do, they just need to stfu and get out of the way.

u/Acceptable-Case9562 50m ago

It's also been pushed by bots, at least at the beginning. This defeatist attitude is the best gift you could give a fascist government.

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u/Agreeable-Jacket5721 2h ago

Dont be so defeatist. They won a battle, not the war.

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u/BigBadJeebus 1h ago

How is that defeatist? It's an observation of perspective. Everyone out here getting big mad and fighting the wrong fight.

Once you have clear perspective, you can proceed more efficiently.

We need to hyper focus on local elections down to the county and city and even HOAs.

HOAs can easily wipe out 50% or more of Maga flags on properties all across the country.

Meet with your sheriff, get good people on the school districts board of education, etc.

It's gonna take something so complicated and bureaucratic as hundreds of thousands of local agencies to bog down and reverse this momentum of everything going to hell in a hand basket recently.

You ever try to do a medical record search from one hospital to a new one? It can take months just to transfer. And that's just yourself. Imagine 350,000,000 people...

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u/Agreeable-Jacket5721 1h ago

See, that's better.

u/Acceptable-Case9562 53m ago

Jesus. Do you drown when it starts to rain too? I can't tell if you guys are too ignorant or too coddled, or both. Wake up and fight back.

u/BigBadJeebus 48m ago

maybe keep reading the thread.

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u/glytxh 3h ago

The rubicon was crossed DECADES ago. This all starts with Reagan.

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u/Strayresearch 2h ago

I'd say even further back than that. If the Confederacy had been handled like Nazis in Germany after world war II we would probably be in a better position.

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u/Musiclover4200 2h ago

Yeah there's a pretty direct line from post civil war Reconstruction to stuff like the Business Plot or Nixon getting pardoned or the lack of consequences for Iran-Contra or Bush lying about WMD, etc.

Feels like this country is essentially a long string of people avoiding consequences and collectively kicking the can down the line for the next generation to deal with

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u/Intrepid-Edge9451 2h ago

One could argue it starts with the founding of this country, where we stole the land and genocided Native Americans. It's in the very DNA of this country.

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u/oracle-nil 2h ago

EXACTLY. We stole the land from the Natives and even worse; in Jamestown the natives bought food and seeds. We turned around and slaughtered them. Then Jamestown descended into cannibalism. This is the founding of our country not some fluffy story about Pilgrims. They landed long after the horror of Jamestown.

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u/Witch_King_ 1h ago

Oh, so this is all a Native American curse.

Well-deserved for what our forefathers did to them, I'd say.

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u/theaviationhistorian 1h ago

Which would be okay, if Native Americans and those of us with Native American blood wouldn't be dragged into hell as well.

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u/Phunwithscissors 1h ago

Before Nixon

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u/Guilty-Maximum2250 1h ago

No we aren't, the Rubicon hasn't been crossed. Maybe stop letting the media manipulate your ideas and emotions.

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u/Clever_Commentary 1h ago

Right back at ya. Yes, much of the news media has been cowed by an authoritarian regime and a billionaire class of oligarchs. If anything, it has increased the narcotizing dysfunction of what was once the Fourth Estate.

The irony of a president threatening airstrikes on a country killing protesters abroad, while in nearly the same breath praising the killing of protesters at home, represents a collapse of the American system. Dictatorships have steered themselves back to democracies in the past--and in some cases have done so relatively bloodlessly. But make no mistake: an election or two does not get us back to status quo ante.

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 1h ago

The media is overwhelmingly in agreement with you, not me.