It really really really could happen
Ah shit they're saying our days as the global hegemon are over. I was really materially benefiting from that. :(
Needless to say people are mad at us. And that's ok we had it coming. Today Nathan Munn writes from Canada about how it feels right now to live upstairs from the world's shittiest loudest neighbor.
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A while back I heard from a bunch of people around the world – mostly Canadians – about how they feel about the prospect of visiting the States any time soon.
Luke O’Neil
Oh by the way a bunch of people were asking about getting the Minneapolis school kids Los Bros' Icedozer design I shared in here the other day on t-shirts. Now you can order one here.
To be clear the t-shirt is sold at cost and is a separate transaction from donating to the kids' school (GiveButter | Venmo) which you are required to do on the honor system if you buy one. Thank you.
Read the most recent Hell World if you missed it. It was a good one.
When this is all over I hope every ICE agent’s life is an endless nightmare of tension and inconvenience.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T21:25:53.682Z
A Ticking Clock
by Nathan Munn
Last Sunday on Montreal’s North Shore it was a balmy five degrees and clear blue skies after a huge snowstorm. The marshmallow powder covered everything and people were out with their snowblowers and shovels, chatting across low fences. I was hanging out with my kids, cleaning the house with the windows open, listening to free jazz on the radio. Lovely.
That was a week before Donald Trump posted an image of the entire North American land mass and Greenland shrouded in the American stars and stripes. The morning after the post, it was reported that Canadian defense officials have prepared a conceptual plan for how we will respond to an American invasion. (Apparently we would mount a Taliban-style insurgency against occupying forces with the goal of inflicting “mass casualties.”) Related in the news that day, I read that the Vancouver-based social media company Hootsuite – my former employer – is doing all they can to get in bed with ICE and get their hands on that sweet, sweet fascist money.
Today, well aware of how the Russians operate in Ukraine, I spent my morning buying water purification tablets, butane for a camping stove, a first aid kit and other emergency gear in between Slack messages and Zoom calls for my day job, where no one talks about the elephant in the virtual room. Needing to work on marketing campaigns while buckling up for the end of the rules-based order is a disorienting limbo-state in which everyone is aware we are floating, but it wouldn’t be right to bring it up in the corporate environment. My close friend told me he’s “enraged” about the Trump post. I carefully danced around the topics of law enforcement and rogue states with my curious children, trying not to get them worked up. They need to know something about how the world works, need an awareness of the imperfection of humanity and our flawed systems, but they don’t need to know everything. Not yet.
Canada is creating a civil defense force of 300,000 volunteers to respond to any emergency, from flood to fire to foreign invasion. Folks will be trained to shoot, perform first aid, set up communications systems and fly drones, among other things. The force is inspired by the Swedish and Finnish “whole of society” territorial defense plans that are a defining feature of living in those countries, and will soon be a defining part of living here too.
I don’t post on social media, but I lurk. I’m watching Minneapolis, witnessing the annihilation of the rule of law and the overwhelming courage of the Minnesotans banding together to peacefully resist the war being waged on them by their federal government.
I’m watching the Danish military and troops from other European countries land in Greenland. A bunch of Canadians will probably arrive there shortly.
It’s strange to vacillate from damn near cheery to dread so quickly, but it feels like a healthy adaptation to an existential threat. There’s a word for when people see or experience things for which they have no precedent, no point of reference, and how this overwhelms their capacity to function, but I can’t remember it now.
Maybe I’m being cynical, but if it’s not the U.S. military that rolls in here it’ll be ICE or CBP or DEA or whoever the fuck. I treat the videos coming out of Minneapolis as psychic inoculation against what's likely coming. All around the world we’re learning from each other, fast, a process that’s especially visceral when the occupied people you're learning from look like you, live like you – snow and ice and resilience – and even sound like you. Minnesota reminds me of Canada, which is probably half the reason Trump hates the state. His band of idiot fascists has been clear they hate us too, and here’s why: for all our faults and failures and cruelties, Canadians still, overall, try to assemble a society that gives a shit about people, about kids, about the rule of law and cooperation and progress and health care and common sense policies that, God forbid, keep people from living in misery. The current American administration can’t stand for there to be a different possible future than the one they’re trying to cram down everyone’s throats. Our existence is an affront to their lunatic worldview.
That’s part of why we and the European countries have targets on us, but what worries me the most is that they don’t care about our cities or our people. They only want resources. In the ideal fascist future, there would be no Canadians to deal with at all.
Deep, falling snow, blowing sideways, grey sky and grey landscape and slag ice. I’m sitting in a warm 4x4, contemplating. In the cities are people I understand because I’m a city guy no matter how far away I get or how ridiculous I look in my unfashionable attire when I return to walk the narrow streets of Montreal. The strangers I pass may not know it, but they're my people. Out here where I live now it's different. I find myself in tow shops and repair bays and HVAC distributorships meeting contractors who speak their own language and keep to themselves and chill out to American country music. I spend too much time online, as we all do, so I can't help but wonder where these guys digitally marinate and how they would or will react if the day comes. Many Quebecois are not into being part of Canada, and separatist sentiment is back on the rise here, but there’s no telling which way the political winds blow in Quebec when things get interesting. I hope our government hurries up with that fucking civil defense force. Just by vibe I’d say getting three hundred thousand volunteers to defend Canada would be easy. They’ll probably get double that.
I've seen it said that the Trump administration leaked the video of Renee Good’s murder not to exonerate themselves, but to demonstrate who it is now acceptable to kill. Other people who know about this stuff concurred that with every video of lawless brutality, the regime is building the social permission structure needed to normalize mass violence at scale.
Tick tock.
In the meantime there's warm oatmeal with fresh apple in the mornings, and hot showers. Heating systems that hum and shudder and go quiet. Strong winds at night that push at brick and wood and make joists creak and hold fast. Electricity, water, grocery stores like you've never seen, rows and rows and rows of everything you could ever want in a lifetime.
Nathan Munn is a regular contributor to Flaming Hydra
You may also appreciated these pieces from the archives by Hell World's resident Canada Explainer Karen Geier on the fight over 15-minute cities, the Canadian trucker protests, mass graves found in the residential school system and the country’s allegiance to Nazi monuments and the country's response to covid.
Or this piece about the battle between social media companies and the Canadian government over sharing news online.
I shared this bit I did for the Culture Journo Podcast about my prediction for 2026 a while ago but now the podcast is live so you can listen to me speak it aloud as well if you like. In a neutral and normal accent by the way. I'm at the end of the episode. What a great lineup of guests.
Emilie Friedlander
It is going to happen this year. You know what I mean. God’s will. Naturally of course. No need to come knocking on my door. I’m chilling at home and I’ll be chilling at home when it happens. Before I go running out into the streets that is. Shaking the mailman’s hand. Kissing nurses and shit. All of a sudden there’s a drumline and a mariachi band and breakdancers and fuckin… David Guetta is DJing on a rooftop if David Guetta is still alive. Maybe we’ll even get to watch it live on TV. The first flicker that something is really wrong. Slowing it down and rewinding it after like when Lisa broke Ralph’s heart. The realization in his eyes. The first single moment of self awareness in 80 years. Like a flailing panicked deer you’ve crashed your car into on the side of a snowy mountain pass. The eyes fluttering back and forth. Surely this can’t have been it. Perhaps a brief bargaining with God. God saying he’s going to pass on the deal. I do not agree with your terms sir. It’s gonna be like the Will Smith Summertime video out there. Everywhere. We’re all going to get fired from our jobs for posting. 100% unemployment. One good day.
Every paper that you read
Says tomorrow's your lucky day
Well here's your lucky day...
It really, really, really could happen
Yes it really, really, really, could happen
Jack Shalom
You can also listen to Jack Shalom from Arts Express on WBAI 99.5 FM NYC read my We Had It Coming piece Something that was once potentially good here if you like.
How do you write fiction in a world that is perhaps post-fiction? When the horrors of the present world outstrip what our imaginations imagine? Arts Express favorite, Luke O’Neil, author of Welcome to Hell World and A Creature Wanting Form, writes stories that are full of the pain of men and women–but mostly men–who are trying to figure out how to deal with the helplessness and terror that make a mockery out of any John Wayne or Ernest Hemingway definition of manhood.
Now O’Neil has come out with his third collection of short stories called We Had It Coming, published by O/R Books. We’ve always resonated with his work, but in this new collection especially, O’Neil’s short pieces are to our time what Raymond Carver’s short stories were to his. Stories of the soul and body struggling to make sense of the senseless cages in which capitalism has trapped us.
Here are some other nice recent words about the book.
Euri Giles
My wife got me a copy of We Had It Coming and other fictions by Luke O’Neil and it already feels like the exact flavor of dread I reach for on purpose.
I read A Creature Wanting Form last year and loved how his stories sit in that uncomfortable overlap between tenderness and catastrophe, and somehow still manage to make me laugh out loud, a lot!
His character (I like to imagine that it's just him. He calls it fiction, but, I dunno) is just trying to live while everything around them is wired to grind them down and he somehow makes that feel both sickening and strangely humane at the same time. The syntax gets weird in ways that work for me too, like the sentences are pacing the room and wearing a groove in the floor.
His newsletter and site, Welcome To Hell World, run in the same emotional register. It’s part reporting, part diary, part scrap pile, all centered on what it means to live inside the American hyper capitalist disaster without pretending things are fine. The writing is angry, but the anger is pointed at power instead of at the people getting crushed which is rarer than it should be.
Goodbye.