

I’m getting there with my coworker although I wouldn’t quite call her conservative; she voted for the NDP in Canada where we live as we are both union members and that’s who we vote for, but she loves Trump, but in this crumbling hellscape of the last few months and the tariffs he’s hollering on about on Canada, she doesn’t like that because she can’t cross border shop. She says he’s gone rather loony although she still likes him.
However, she isn’t stupid, and she watches all sorts of news from all over and doesn’t just blindly believe in the cult. The last few days I have explained dark money to her, and how it fuels elections in the US for both parties and how basically the Koch brothers and all the Tanton network groups fund Trump. I gave her some articles to read, and she’s starting to get it. I didn’t put it from the perspective of hating trump, just that she should know how these things are funded for everyone (the Democrats are no stranger to dark money either and just because the groups they funnel it in under sound sunnier and less racist doesn’t make them any less sketchy), and how the political landscape is manipulated that way. I am finding she’s listening to this, and coming away with a better perspective, rather than trying to explain why he’s totally wrong. Dark money is a topic I recommend to everyone to learn about, because these elections in the US are being bought by dark money.
I used to volunteer at a nursing home when I was a teenager, and one of the residents was this spicy old demented lady named Florence. Florence had a real mouth on her, and I would try to charm her, and get nowhere. Once she looked at me and said “you look like you got a mouthful of hot shit”. I got over my intimidation and began to speak more freely, and once when she was trying to hit people with a flyswatter she found, I was trying to talk her into giving it to me, and I said “Florence, don’t you love me anymore?”. And she said “Well I love you, but from a distance”, and whacked me a good one.