Greg Hockaday

Husband & Dad. 🇨🇦🇺🇦

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Greenland is not “a poorly run piece of ice.”

Greenland is far more than ice — it is a democratic society with free elections, rule of law, and a people who determine their own future.

We are not a talking point in someone else’s rhetoric — we are a people with dignity, history, and self-government under the Kingdom of Denmark.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Every pastor who supports this president should have to read this from the pulpit to their congregation. This is the man Paula White compared to Jesus and said he’s the greatest champion of the Christian faith we’ve ever had in the White House. So read his words aloud.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein]

Someday we will find out what turned Trump into a Putin puppet. It will not be pretty.

[James Moore @honjamesmoore]

Shhhhhhhhhhhocked

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives,

I am a citizen of Greenland 🇬🇱

You must understand the gravity of the situation.

The people of Greenland are not for sale. The citizens of Greenland are not slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1865, and the idea that a people or their land can be acquired has no place in the modern world, under international law, or within democratic societies.

At this moment, the citizens of Greenland—from children to the elderly—are feeling unsafe and deeply unsettled by the current situation. No population should be made to feel fear or insecurity because of statements made by those in positions of power.

There are no Russian or Chinese naval forces operating in Greenlandic waters. Claims suggesting otherwise are false and misleading.

The United States already has a strong and long-standing defense agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark. This agreement has provided the United States with full military access to Greenland in support of American and allied security.

You, as members of Congress, have a responsibility to act. You must uphold international law, respect the sovereignty of allies, and ensure that no attempt is made to take control of Greenland🇬🇱

You took an oath to the Constitution, not to President Trump.

The world is watching. The people of Greenland are watching. Action is required now.

Sincerely,

[Alexander Verbeek 🌍 @Alex_Verbeek]

Christmas Eve in the Netherlands, where every year children light candles on the graves Canadian soldiers who liberated the Netherlands in '44-'45.

Thank you Canada! 🇨🇦

[Doug Landry @douglandry]

Our politics were not always so awful.

Please see how an earlier Republican President addressed the history of the moment:

[Marc Caputo @MarcACaputo]

“Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really.”

via @MikeGrunwald

https://t.co/N2gBnzu9sx

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

Powerful text from Bridget Brink:

I was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. I resigned because of Trump's foreign policy.

I have proudly served five presidents ― to make sure the United States is the strongest, greatest country that the world has ever known.

1/n

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

These are my hands.

My hands move because of science.
Without biotech, I’d be in pain every day.

One molecule researched, tested developed and synthesized by a genetically modified cell gave me back my life.

And it made me ask:
What other innovations have saved lives? 🧵1/

[Greg Hockaday @GregHockaday1]

@Badsmoke23 @saskaggrads Stellar career Mayson! You are one of the reasons the Ag industry is an authentic and special place.
Enjoy retirement….it’s a pretty good gig!

[Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff]

Today, I have a message for our Canadian neighbors.

[John Kowalchuk🧢 @kowalchukfarms1]

I always liked this guy!!

#IamCanadian🍁

[Greg Hockaday @GregHockaday1]

@WSOnlineNews

[Andrew Scheidl 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @AndrewScheidl]

It seems as good a time as any to say this.

I have American friends. I've served alongside Americans in various places overseas. I've been attached to their forces at times.

I always found my American comrades generous, friendly, reliable and impressively professional. On more than one multinational mission (NATO/UN), the backstop, just out of frame, was a US contingency force. So I have a lot of earned respect and deep gratitude for Americans as a whole.

Canada has long depended heavily on the US for our own national defence, whether the nuclear umbrella, the bulk of NORAD, patrol of our arctic waters, or military and law enforcement intelligence. It's worth noting that most of those arrangements were born of the Second World War and its aftermath, a war in which Canada pulled far more than its weight, for years before the US even joined. The spirit of shared security burden was warmer then, and stayed strong through the decades of the Cold War. It seems to have cooled.

There's no question we can and should take on more of our own security burdens and contribute more substantially to collective security. I expect the next Canadian government to do that.

That the United States has been flagging in various ways lately, and suffering extreme domestic polarization is a tragedy and a concern for all of the West. That's especially true as the West faces war challenges from China and Russia. We all secretly long for that stalwart America of old, the one that that led the winning of the Second World War and the defeat of the Soviet empire. But the world is different, and the comparative advantages of the US are not as great as they once were. They feel it. We need to recognize that the burdens and risks cannot fall so disproportionately on the US. We and all the allies need to do much more to relieve the US of secondary burdens and to contribute real force to the primary ones. That will take a strong two-way spirit of alliance and risk-sharing.

But this week, Canada and Denmark, NATO allies who, recently enough, fought with the US in Afghanistan, are receiving threats of annexation from the US President-elect.

Whether those threat are serious or just juvenile smack talk isn't clear. Whether this behaviour benefits the President-elect or the US in some way is similarly unknown. I don't believe the President-elect is playing 4D chess. Perhaps he's playing the madman to keep everyone guessing, a stratagem normally deployed against enemies, not allies. It's a risky enough strategy against enemies but it can destroy alliances before long. Our enemies are watching for such opportunities.

All that to say, it's deeply sad and just as worrying to see such corrosive behaviour, aggression, and recklessness from the office once called 'the leader of the free world'.

Hope is famously not a method, but I do hope. I hope there's a rekindling of alliances despite these outbursts. I hope more of the confident, professional Americans I knew come to the fore. The ones who know they're better off with allies, warts and all, than fighting them. And I hope that better days of reasoned judgement and statesmanship lie not too far ahead.

[Greg Hockaday @GregHockaday1]

@TrumpDailyPosts Canadian here. Sorry the 51st state thing won’t work. Our homicide rates are too low and literacy rates too high.
Besides it’s Jan 6, don’t you have a coup to organize? Oh right, that was last time.

[Greg Hockaday @GregHockaday1]

@robmakowsky @Bayer4CropsCA @FieldViewCanada Congratulations Rob. A significant milestone!

[Greg Hockaday @GregHockaday1]

@KekNative @CollinRugg How’d that work out for you in 1812?