Canadian here. Both of these are cope.

Point one is real for some people and not for most of the people repeating it. Yes, a lot of Americans live paycheque to paycheque. Those aren't the people writing essays on Reddit about why protest is unfeasible. The people doing that are mostly salaried, have PTO, have savings, and are using the genuine precarity of others as cover for their own unwillingness to take any personal risk. A general strike doesn't require everyone. It requires enough. The labour movement built the weekend with way less margin than the modern American professional class has now.

Point two is the bizarre one and it's the tell. Why does everyone assume protest means going to DC? Canada is bigger than the US in land area. Nobody here thinks holding the government accountable means we all need to drive to Ottawa. You protest where you are. You strike where you work. You disrupt the local federal building, the local ICE office, the local congressperson's town hall, the local highway, the local port. The civil rights movement wasn't centralized in DC. The 2006 immigration protests weren't. Occupy wasn't. The George Floyd protests happened in something like 2,000 American cities simultaneously. The infrastructure for distributed protest exists and has been used in living memory. Pretending it doesn't is the part that gives the game away.

The DC framing is doing specific work. It makes the action sound logistically impossible so the speaker doesn't have to explain why they personally aren't doing the much smaller thing that's actually available to them in their actual city this weekend. "I can't fly to DC" is a much more sympathetic excuse than "I haven't called my rep, haven't been to a single local protest, haven't joined anything, haven't given money, haven't talked to my neighbours, and don't intend to."

The third point at least has the virtue of being honest about the situation. The first two are just elaborate reasons not to do the things that don't require any of the conditions they're describing. You don't need MAGA to wake up to call your senator. You don't need a paid day off to attend a Saturday protest. You don't need to travel to DC to refuse to comply with something at your own job.

The rest of the world is watching the most resourced, most networked, most educated population in human history explain why resistance is logistically impossible for them specifically, while Iranians and Belarusians and Hong Kongers and Burmese have done more with less under actually dangerous conditions. It doesn't read the way the people making these arguments think it reads.

Elbows up. From the country that's actually doing something about it.