I see yo privileged, lame @$$ woke up this morning and decided to play the victim while ppl are literally being deported and disappeared for supporting Palestinians, and promptly received a well-deserved ratio. Lol
Wrong app, buddy. You want the app owned by a nazi.
Remember that nyt piece about people not feeling politically welcome and the cons were like "they give me funny glances when I wear a shirt about wanting to lynch Obama" and the progs said things like "they keep shooting my house and car"
oh, poor michael, so sorry to hear the institutions deported you to a torture camp (oh wait, you just mean you were criticized for the positions you hold don't you)
Conservatives’ complete inability to distinguish between censorship and having people express their opinion that they disagree with what they believe is mind boggling.
I'm pretty sure that his version of "opinions weren't popular" is "I had professors ask me to explain the logical framework underpinning my opinions, and I didn't want to say the quiet part out loud."
The dude probably makes 6+ figures from that sweet AEI position (billionaire-funded welfare for mediocre white men like this dude) alone. And yet he can't help himself, running to social media to complain about how he's being oppressed (i.e., not liked).
No one made you live/work in DC and teach at a Jesuit school. You could have lived in Ohio and taught at the Ashbrook Center. Or lived in Texas and gone into oil instead of a think tank. There are conservative-friendly institutions all over.
People disagreeing with you is not actually being “actively hostile.” 🙄
This post, however, is a touch hostile. Not because you’re conservative, but because you’re playing pretend at oppression from a seat of incredible privilege.
When I was living in a deep red state as a queer progressive, my neighbor threatened to shoot me if "the left" ever got too much power. Is that enough for me to "get what it is like as a conservative"???
You clearly do not know what you are talking about, you whiny little child.
There are very few, if any, institutions actively hostile towards conservatives. What there are are institutions that promote scientific inquiry, advocate for policies in line with harm reduction, and protect marginalized groups.
That one is hard because you have to rigorously define conservatism first. Which gets tricky as you run into its origins in monarchism, something I thought would conflict with an identity as a USAian, but here we are. I probably should have specified American conservatism.
Having grown up in a GOP home, and gotten degrees in physics because my folks taught me to take on challenges, I can agree it's emotionally hard to be GOP in academia
Which is natural because you're hostile to well established physics, and academics don't famously respect demands to deny reality
Not to mention, it always seems to escape them that some hostility might be a natural reaction to the GOP-crowd constantly accusing Universities of being evil, woke, gay Communists that are ruining America.
In terms of how the GOP is hostile to physics I can attest from personal experience that many such voters strongly believe any claims the Earth is ~4billion years old is a direct attack on them. A small yet distressingly vocal group are also believers in things like Flat Earth.
Yeah deep time geology/geophysics/geochemistry and evolutionary biology are unpopular among a big chunk of GOP voters and pols, but I meant climate science
You just can't be a mainstream conservative in the US and forcefully acknowledge the disastrous effect of industrial emissions on climate
As someone who has interacted with you in real life, I am disappointed that you would run cover for a dictatorial project in this way. Universities have problems but Trumpism is no solution and is going to kill our country. You are better than this.
Strain is challenging MAGA more overtly than many conservatives, just read his past skeets. And I think there remains value in trying to get people to follow their better natures, even now.
If none of the despicable shit modern conservatives and Trump have done so far has inspired any of these people to "follow their better natures," then the obvious conclusion is that they don't actually HAVE "better natures." A conservative is a just a human without a conscience after all
Take a human being; now take away their empathy. Boom! You've got yourself an American conservative. IF they had "better natures" then at some point over the last ten fucking years that "better nature" would have kicked in by now
His post reeks of someone who’s never had less than $100,000 to their name. “I’m so poor I had to sell my emergency 3rd vehicle that I own specifically in case my 2nd AND 1st vehicle suddenly break down! I’m so downtrodden!”
It’s a good thing when neo-segregationists feel that the institutions of a pluralistic, multiracial democracy are hostile to them. If you want to make an argument that this shouldn’t be the case, do so! Otherwise shut the fuck up
That's the thing with this sort of joke/insinuation. It sounds prudish and judgmental. But console yourself with the knowledge that the only people who would actually condemn this type of behavior are those who shame others for it while engaging in it themselves.
Btw you are absolutely going to use this experience where nothing at all happened to you but you got some insults as proof of how hard it so for you while completely fucking missing that you are proving all our points
Posting some dumb shit like this here on Bluesky of all places is just going to confirm in his head that everyone hates conservatives, when the real problem is everyone hates dumbasses.
Why do they always do their whining in public instead of going to therapy? No one wants to hear their tone-deaf emo whining about how they can't treat other people like shit AND have friends.
Kyle has never suffered a hardship or difficulty in his absolutely useless life. Either of you would crumble into dust and urine if you had to spend a day as a member of any of the marginalized groups you pretend are so oppressive.
I’m about as liberal as they come and know Kyle personally—your statement is wrong. He grew up working class in Western Mass and joined the army to pay for college, for example. He’s a good guy, even if I disagree with his politics.
If I believed you, and I don't, I'd ask why he's lying about "having every major institution against you"? You'd have to either he very fragile and dumb to tell that lie, or be a very bad person who is telling the lie on purpose.
"my racist friends are good guys. anyone who calls me a racist for being friends with them is a bad guy. I am not going to do any reflection on the moral narcissism this implies."
What a good guy! I guess in your world someone can think women are some kind of inferior-brained separate species and still be considered a "good guy." What would he have to do, think, or say for you to think he wasn't a good guy?
Is this like one of those "the guy I knew was a good guy and not a mass shooter" posts? Because I don't think any of us ought to give a shit about how he treats people he knows personally if he treats everyone else like shit.
his politics are psychopath shit. The fact that you separate his politics from his character is the exact problem with liberals, you don't understand that your politics reflect your character because yours are insincere
His views, if championed by politicians and were to shape our country's legislation, would affect you zero percent. Same could not be said for millions of others. That's why "He's pretty nice when we hang out" is not an accurate barometer for someone's morality.
This Kyle person is loving being ignorant right here, like a hog in slop. Kyle's obviously intelligent enough to see the real reasons why things are the way they are, but instead prefers to look away from reality and pretend the bad shit is actually happening to Kyle.
I grew up working class four hours colder north than him and worked my way through college, yet am still capable of caring about people who don’t look like me while also understanding the effects of long-term systemic inequity caused by white guys thinking they deserve the MOST. FO with that crap.
I grew up working class in Western MA, and I didn't go to fucking Yale like your ivy-league prick of a friend. You misconstrue a lack of empathy and morality as "politics".
kyle stole more lunch money than any other bully in the history of franklin middle school and he's not gonna stand by and let you take his one accomplishment of note away
He’s currently claiming he’s a victim for being conservative at a time when “conservatives” are gassing the federal government and sending slaves to El Salvador, whatever good he was then seems to have been subsumed by Fux “News” and a desire to be a collaborator
Hey why'd you delete your responses to my post challenging me to a fight? I'm ready to meet up just as soon as I dislodge my fist from your dad's anus.
Good people do not think that people should be shipped off to concentration camps at all, let alone without due process. They do not believe in government censorship and dictatorship.
It must be so difficult, so terrifying, to be a white, straight, cis, Christian, financially-secure, able-bodied, politically influential, conservative man. I'll never know your trials.
Yeah institutions are so biased against you that you’re scraping by at a think tank and as a professor at Georgetown University. Rough life, man. My heart goes out to you.
I was just streaming the original record, a true piece of underground ephemera, and noted that Dot Wiggin actually made a record with a bunch of folks - The Dot Wiggan band -in 2013. Definitely not as utterly odd as the first record, but it's in the same ballpark of "on another planet" weirdness.
Institutions are hostile to conservatives because conservatives are aggressively and stubbornly wrong about everything. American conservatives are possibly the most incorrect people in history. Many have beliefs with exactly 0 connections to reality.
I think that’s an in general thing. I’ve learned recently that many democrat voters don’t understand history or politics.
I’ve seen a lot of “liberals” saying that Trump is communist for instance. Aggressively confidently wrong.
Yeah, of course being wrong is a universal phenomenon. We're all wrong about a lot of stuff. It's the "aggressively and stubbornly" bit that marks them apart. Liberals are wrong about so much (Gaza, capitalism etc) but, historically, almost no-one has believed as many untruths as a MAGA cultist.
"I chose a belief system rooted in innate hierarchy and the idea that some people are inherently more valuable than others-- conveniently, white men like me-- and that profit is more valuable than all of them. For some reason people don't like this. I am so persecuted"
"nearly all major institutions are hostile to me" (nearly all major institutions unnecessarily cater to me, but I still can't have a college student black-bagged for calling me an asshole)
"Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise institute" - you literally have a well-paid make-work job for conservatives who can put on a suit, and you still cry about being oppressed. Go work a job that involves actual labor for meager pay and then reflect on how good you had it
This is in bad faith (if you think progressives have influence in DC or [lol] New York you must be willfully blind) but I suspect you posted this here to get the left to yell at you and "prove your point" that you're allegedly ideologically oppressed. What kind of interaction are you getting on X?
This thread is where he hopes to trigger people to be mean to them so he can screenshot their reaction without the context. Twitter is where he will go to post those screenshots to prove to the cult how victimized they are.
This is why no one trusts academics who insist on their conservatism.
"It's just SO hard being wrong about literally everything and lying constantly, and when people push back and don't let me get away with it it really hurts ☹️"
How it 'feels' is right there - because it's not that institutions were actually against you as a conservative, but that you wanted to feel oppressed by them. It's quite different from what Trump is trying to impose now, but the reality doesn't matter to you.
“Why does everyone hate us so much” I ask, while I close down a homeless shelter to make room for a kitten-strangling factory while wearing a t-shirt that says “WE HATE LOVE, WE HATE JOY, WE LOVE MONEY”.
Just imagine how fucking stupid you have to be to think it's too hard. Like not being able to get past the very first goomba on Mario and claiming it's the most difficult game in the world.
Yes 😆 "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, at all major institutions, you're the asshole."
Cry me a river. I'm sooo sorry for you that it's so difficult for you to live in a world where thought centres prefer diverse thought. It must suck for you that the only way for you not to cry is to destroy the whole country. Fuck you.
Conservatives don't really want to be victims, they just want to see themselves and everybody else to treat them as the heroic underdog protagonists of reality. They're Bowser pretending to be Mario, Sauron cosplaying as Frodo, Palpatine LARPing as Luke, you get the picture.
Oh give me a break with this shit. There is no real viable "Left" party for us - by any standard of comparison to most developed societies there's a moderate/centrist party with the Democrats and a radical right wing party with the Republicans. You also get political DEI with the electoral college.
Surely this boycott should extend to America as a whole but certainly the Red states who consistently vote for people who are so casual with human rights.
K, Historically, when institutions are hostile to folks in any country , they get shot or jailed or starved or lose educational or employment or housing or health opportunities or their kids.
Any of that happen to conservatives?
No? Just mocking by highly educated people?
That WAS a strain, sir.
Oh, oh, I can answer that! Because the paleness of their skin, and sometimes their genitals, are ALL they've got in life. And improving themselves is too much like work.
You have trouble getting a loan? Buying a house? Gaining admission to a school? Joining a country club? What institutional prejudice do conservatives face? Honestly? Or is it individual dislike of political views?
It's not enough for you to have a comfortable job that pays you well and allows you to write freely about your wretched beliefs, you demand that we love you for it, and it makes you so angry that we won't all lick your boots and tell you how great you are. What a sad little existence you have.
If everyone everywhere treats you like you're an unlikeable asshole.... you're the common denominator, you know?
My dad used to say "if one guy calls you a pig, ignore him. If a second guy says it, start to wonder. And if a third guy says it, buy a slop bucket and start rolling around in the mud"
Hi Professor, how hostilely will I be treated by Georgetown before they give me a job? Is it like "rude comments from colleagues" hostile, or somewhere closer to "threatening voicemails" hostile? I am willing to put up with some abuse to work at this prestigious institution.
And while this country is literally sending legal residents to a dictator to be worked as slaves, people are being put out of work by the tens of thousands, and industries suppressed by fiat…and this guy is sitting here banging on about how hard his life has been?
Political disagreement with colleagues juxtaposed with the extremist destruction of the rule of law? You might be a snowflake. Correcting *real* institutional discrimination against nonwhites isn’t hostility. Shoving others’ heads down as rising tides elevates them is actual institutional hostility.
They have everything (corporations, government, media) in their pockets right now and can't stop whining about how badly they've been treated. Always playing the victim must pay well, I guess. Otherwise, it's just a pity party for the truly pathetic.
Maybe it’s bc the only jobs you’ve ever held were conservative think tank welfare and other real professors see your bad faith and unpopular stances for what they are? You could try some introspection, or you can keep filling your diaper and bitching ab “cancel culture.” We know what you’ll choose.
Yup! 100%. The rest of us actually have to earn a living and this guy spends his entire life sitting on his duff writing “thought” pieces about how lazy everyone else is. Wingnut Welfare isn’t enough for him, he wants to be worshipped for his incredibly bad faith arguments.
if you support trump and musk you deserve whatever hostility you experience. doesn't make progressives special arbiters of morality, it just means the universe is punishing depravity.
If it makes you feel any better, the president and attorney general of the United States are currently hinting that people who disagree with them (ie: liberals, progressives, Democrats, etc.) might get deported to El Salvadoran prisons.
Comments
You can try and “both sides” it all you want.
All your critics were saying if you were to get power you'd enact a dictatorship.
Everyone was right about you and you deserve so much worse than you get.
Wrong app, buddy. You want the app owned by a nazi.
That seems like it could be your first clue that your politics are dogshit.
Strong, the rectal-cranial inversion is with this one.
Out with the smug callousness, sexism, racism, bullying the downtrodden and white supremacy, and in with, I dunno, "empathy". 🤷♂️
(Maybe I should update my profile pic with a pride flag, as I am a proud faggot.)
And that's why, in the very long run, you will always lose even when you win.
This post, however, is a touch hostile. Not because you’re conservative, but because you’re playing pretend at oppression from a seat of incredible privilege.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about, you whiny little child.
Which is natural because you're hostile to well established physics, and academics don't famously respect demands to deny reality
You just can't be a mainstream conservative in the US and forcefully acknowledge the disastrous effect of industrial emissions on climate
And FWIW, insisting that you treat others with courtesy, and not whine when you lose an argument, are definitely NOT persecution.
(To be clear, this skeet and the one preceding it are sarcasm/joking. The Internet is crap at conveying tone.)
Stop being such a shriveled up little ballsack
Posting some dumb shit like this here on Bluesky of all places is just going to confirm in his head that everyone hates conservatives, when the real problem is everyone hates dumbasses.
a) in the company of other conservative men, and
b) getting shat on by someone they think is liberal.
You mean like that?
yeah we can tell
Conservatives are not marginalized, Kyle is insane for saying that.
you too
NO HE'S NOT
Bad guys do.
How are they preventing him from saying what he thinks
Be specific.
These are easy questions.
A good guy doesn’t write this stuff.
But also, how he is to his peers is not what makes a ‘good guy’. It’s how he treats those who are different. Look around.
Are you actively hostile to him just because you disagree with him? Judging on your well-written and balanced response, I’d guess no.
Do you not agree there’s a general victim complex possessed by these people?
Someone give the poor white man a fucking cookie
Always the victim
Wrong Side of History deserve to be marginalized.
A fabulous and long buried cultural reference that I'm sure most people won't get. I love it!
https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY?si=-uKHxYfSBwkompcj&t=1
Get wrekt poor weak wimp.
Your conservationism has made you wealth and powerful
Stop being a tool.
If you believe it stand for it and take the consequences.
However, a historical review might benefit you.
People die when things get like this.
https://www.aei.org/economics/michael-strain-on-inequality-in-america/
Kind of a crap shoot.
I will not however, there have been NO enduring Fascist states.
Pretty sure Franco did best in those terms... but.... Franco.
"I will NOTE"
I’ve seen a lot of “liberals” saying that Trump is communist for instance. Aggressively confidently wrong.
WHICH CONSERVATIVE VIEWS?!
So fucking accurate.
This is why no one trusts academics who insist on their conservatism.
https://bsky.app/profile/4thwallguide.bsky.social/post/3ll2xtvooxs2h
That's why it is rejected everywhere because it is a racist rot against our freedoms.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-ukraine-children-russia-war-kidnapping-evidence-b2717730.html
Fucking loser, try being nice.
People not wanting to put up with your bullshit anymore is not the existential struggle you desperately want it to be.
https://youtu.be/UH0obYbNRiM?si=4lDESit2AvXXbVoZ
If everyone around you seems to be an asshole it might not be them that's the asshole.
Did the university use its power to keep you from speaking, and about what?
Please, use this opportunity to say whatever it was they didn’t want you to.
If it wasn’t that, then it isn’t censorship, it’s social pressure. These are different things.
Any of that happen to conservatives?
No? Just mocking by highly educated people?
That WAS a strain, sir.
of all the racists in history, today’s crying nazis are the most unfairly maligned.
Perhaps consider being less hateful and see if that makes things easier for you? 🙏
Like weaker than a slow summer breeze. Weaker than a American beer. Weaker than The Weakest Thing Ever.
Wingnut Welfare is real
So no.
This adds up actually.
And when did a democratic President threaten to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from a University for permitting free speech?
as has "liberal"
My dad used to say "if one guy calls you a pig, ignore him. If a second guy says it, start to wonder. And if a third guy says it, buy a slop bucket and start rolling around in the mud"
Right wing fragility is insane, especially when they're the ones yelling "fuck your feelings".
Oh woe is the white, Christian straight man.
So maybe suck it up, buttercup.