Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at Washington University in St. Louis -- started as a Star Trek shitposting account but was subsumed into The Discourse
Joined February 2014
- Tweets 14,789
- Following 682
- Followers 456
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928 Photos and videos
Michael O'Bryan retweeted
The cops murdered a 1-year-old baby in Mississippi after someone falsely accused his mother of shoplifting from Walmart.
Even if the diapers were stolen that is no justification for cops to murder anyone let alone a child, but she had a receipt.
A baby is dead because of a shoot-first, murderous cop AND a racist person who profiled a Black mother and called the police over diapers that she didn’t even steal.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
They think they have the right to murder a baby and then brutalize the people who are rightfully protesting. These people have been allowed to get away with nonstop brutality and abuse of power for way too long.
Jun 17
Police in Senatobia, Mississippi, used tear gas on protesters outside a Walmart Tuesday night. Lauren Turman reports from outside the store, where people were protesting the shooting death by police of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.
Updates at: localmemphis.com/article/new…
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
One of the fascinating things this week was watching people in wanye’s replies pleading with a raging rightist freakazoid to be more like the reasonable wanye they made up in their head
I’m blocked because about 5 years ago he expressed one about race and I called him out lol.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
I get wby a lot of people are dunking on the latest round of 'who is really working class' talk on here. fwiw imho people who are really thinking through those issues shoud read the short entry on class in Raymond Williams's Keywords s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attac…
One of the points he
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He blocked me years ago, but he’s a perfect case study for what a warped sense of median opinion these guys have. “I’m not even super right wing on questions of suffrage.” As if women’s suffrage is a question in 2026, and being slightly skeptical of it is the center-right stance.
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There’s a generation of young men in this country who believe they’re enlightened centrists and are frustrated we’re not publicly debating legal disenfranchisement and gulags. They’ve been enabled by years of media framing any criticism of them as an insidious leftist assault.
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For years centrist pundits would scream about hecklers’ vetoes and guilt-by-association if you criticized them for taking certain people as worthy of engagement, and Wayne’s deranged mental map of public opinion is directly downstream of that.
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I think they should run Marie Gluesenkamp Perez for President. Surely legislation to make the existing mass extermination of seals even more efficient is the ticket to a left-right working class coalition.
After the DSA wins New York, Seattle, DC, and (potentially) the LA mayoral races, I think the center left needs to acknowledge that its infrastructure in major American cities is broken, that we are being flatly out-organized, and settling for uninspiring candidates.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which Moby Dick is not written in the vernacular of the 1850s United States
Jun 17
Reading moby dick and thinking about how this only 170 year old vernacular is now just completely indecipherable for anyone born after 2006.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
Jun 17
1. Europe has good cheese
2. America also has good cheese
3. The average quality of cheese consumed is probably higher in Europe
4. Despite this, America makes high-end cheese competitive with their best.
I've solved this argument for everyone. You can go home now.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
centrists’ and many liberals’ belief that city budgets must prioritize cops killing anything that moves and that’s just a hazard we must tolerate, is no different from Charlie Kirk accepting mass shootings as the cost of the right to bear arms. pick your poison
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The seemingly cynical belief that elites are pandering liars putting on an act is actually a defense mechanism protecting the hope that our destines are controlled by people who may be morally offensive, but are at least competent and rational.
I was never important, or close to actual power, but the most striking thing from my time in foreign policy is that there is no secret curtain behind which the kayfabe drops, there is no insider understanding that isn't for normies. It is deeply credulous all the way to the top.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
I was never important, or close to actual power, but the most striking thing from my time in foreign policy is that there is no secret curtain behind which the kayfabe drops, there is no insider understanding that isn't for normies. It is deeply credulous all the way to the top.
Jun 16
What Nathan Tankus says here about attending one of Peter Thiel's secret conferences rings true to me. The people who run the world are not super-geniuses lying to the proles. It's even more frightening: the ultra-rich believe what they say in public & are functionally insane.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
senatobia police find that tear gassing a crowd of grieving protesters in front of a walmart is the right move instead of understanding that these people want justice for the black baby their police force MURDERED and for the family they destroyed.
mississippi police shot and killed a 1yr black child and critically injured another family member because they *allegedly* stole DIAPERS.
you do not hate the police enough. you don't.
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
Jun 16
The Trump administration sends a great message of strength to the world: if you negotiate with us for 40 years we’ll just bomb you anyways, but if you fight back for a month we’ll give you everything you want
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
Jun 16
This is a canary in the coal mine ofr the rest of academia. Its going to be a hard decade. hpherald.com/evening_digest/…
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
The feds kidnapped 15 legal observers in Minneapolis and threw RICO charges at them. This is really really bad.
pbs.org/newshour/politics/fe…
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Michael O'Bryan retweeted
Jun 17
Police in Senatobia, Mississippi, used tear gas on protesters outside a Walmart Tuesday night. Lauren Turman reports from outside the store, where people were protesting the shooting death by police of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.
Updates at: localmemphis.com/article/new…
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Jun 17
This is an abject falsehood. Timothy Snyder, in the running for the most widely-known American historian of the 21st Century, made his career arguing that the Nazis and Soviets were echoes of each other, and he was far from the first academic to do so.
Jun 16
Communist regimes killed ~100 million people in the 20th century.
And they forced nearly half of the world population to live under the most brutal poverty and subjugation.
Yet academics have been loth to explicitly oppose communism. What gives?
Pincione & Teson offer a theory
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Jun 17
So if I write a “report” that claims without evidence that everyone at the AEI is a crypto-Nazi providing intellectual cover for a functionally illiterate president’s every brain fart, and if they refuse to “metabolize the critique,” whatever that means, it proves that I’m right?
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