This is a pretty weird move and I doubt it’ll stick, but FWIW O’Hickey’s really is a great little spot. Go on a weekend evening and enjoy some absolutely banging live music and a really great vibe. It’s the kind of classic East Coast hangout where someone will start a round of Barrett’s Privateers and everyone in the place will sing along.

It’s a lot easier when there’s nothing to be done, isn’t it? There’s no responsibility anymore. No call to action. Despair is simple. It doesn’t require you to do anything, it only requires that you feel bad.

You have literally no idea how terrifying it is to be us right now.

No one in Canada is asking to be your number one priority.

We just want you to get angry and do something about all of the problems being brought about the fascist dictator your country elected, instead of sitting around and wringing your hands about it.

If you guys can reign in Trump then Canada will be fine. But if you don’t then we’re all fucked, north and south of the border.

The difference is, you’re the ones in a position to stop him. We’re not.

Nah, the enemy of my enemy is the enemy of my enemy, nothing more, nothing less.

But as a great man once said, “Let them fight.”

Why would it matter what I answer? I could tell you 1, I could tell you 1000, you have no reason to believe me either way.

And more importantly, there’s no clear way to define “winning people over”. You’re not going to sit down, have a conversation with someone, and an hour later have them sign a full confession recanting all of their previous beliefs. People erode. They change slowly, a little at a time.

I can tell that by having these kinds of conversations, I have seen people change their views. I’ve watched people go from ride or die for their conservative vote to actually saying “Yeah, I don’t think this guy actually has our best interests at heart” or even just “OK, I don’t actually agree with everything he’s saying.” But a lot of the time you won’t even get that level of feedback. You’re planting seeds that you may not ever see grow. Sometimes you’re planting seeds for someone else to water, and for another someone else to harvest. It’s a process, it doesn’t have a clearly defined little victory marker. But I can tell you from personal experience that if you try, it does yield positive results.

Also, this is exactly why dismantling USAID was such a phenomenally stupid idea.

You want more plagues? This is how you get more plagues.

Help them out of their ignorance. Start by agreeing with their frustrations and then continue to explore common ground from there.

And when I say “agree with their frustrations” I mean the stuff that you can legitimately agree on. Start with this tax plan, which fucks over anyone making less than about $300,000 a year. Maybe let them know that Trump instituted similar tax cuts last time around; that this isn’t a one time mistake. Maybe help them to understand that a lot of the moves Trump and his team are making right now are straight out the Project 2025 playbook; studies showed that the more people learned about Project 2025 the more they hated it. Trump had to pretend he knew nothing about it, so showing them that he’s now following it to the letter might get you somewhere.

Find the places where you can agree, and work from there.

Genuine and serious question: Where does that get you?

As good as it may feel to call these people out for their ignorance and stupidity (and yes, they were very ignorant and very stupid), what is it actually doing to help stop Trump’s agenda right now?

Telling them off might feel good, and right, and incredibly justified, but it’s not going to win people over.

What America needs right now is a mass movement against Trump’s agenda, and a big part of building that movement is going to have to be reaching out to those people who are disgusted with the reality of Trump’s agenda and bringing them into the fold, even if they helped put it in motion in the first place.

This is part of the equation that they’ve proven themselves consistently awful at assessing properly.

There was this guy who did a bunch of interviews with super wealthy people about their apocalypse shelter plans, and he was like “What stops all the poors from killing you and taking your stuff?”

And they’re like “Oh, we have ex-Navy SEAL private security details, we’re good.”

So the guy asks them “What stops the SEALs from killing you and taking your stuff?”

They were stumped. Not a one of them had a good answer. Like, one guy floated having the only password to the vault where all the supplies are kept, as if Navy SEALs don’t know how to torture information out of someone. Waterboarding was that guy’s best case outcome.

They really, really don’t understand that they need us, but we don’t need them. And the only thing keeping them alive is that we haven’t really figured that out yet either.

At some point it probably becomes more valuable to offer jobs that barely keep people alive than it does to deal with the sheer number of unemployed people who are now ready to burn everything down.

Then again, capitalism has never been good at externalities.