America’s Big Strong Conservatives Are Terrified to Go Outside

By Jacob Weindling  |  August 12, 2025 | 12:03pm
Screenshot via CNN
Trump Administration Republican Party
America’s Big Strong Conservatives Are Terrified to Go Outside

Political conservatives like to project themselves as tough—men’s men—the only people who can protect America from the feared Other. Their elected leaders get on TV to puff their chests out and beat the drums of war at every turn. They write op-eds in the New York Times demanding the army be used against American citizens. They are the authors of the disastrous global war on terror that has now bled into every facet of their political project. American conservatives’ entire pitch to voters rests on the intellectual foundation of them supposedly being tough SOBs who will never run from a fight. Then Republican Senators like Josh Hawley are caught on video literally running from a fight, and the whole ruse is exposed for what it is: conservative virtue signaling.

One problem with this virtue signaling ideology is that it incentivizes conservatives to be big giant manbabies. As Dave Levitan has excellently detailed for Splinter, area man terrified of subway tasked to run a space agency, Sean Duffy, is actually quite open about how he turns into a small shivering chihuahua in Paris Hilton’s purse the moment he sees any form of public transportation, and he has plenty of company now. Trump’s invasion of Washington D.C. and the longstanding American hypocrisy it reveals has brought the conservative safe space enthusiasts to the forefront of our TV screens and Twitter feeds to tell us how abjectly horrified by the 20th century they are. GOP Rep. Tim Burchett is adamant that he is going to be the big brave legislator to finally break the deep state secrecy on UFOs, while also excitedly admitting on national TV that even the thought of going outside induces such sheer horror it paralyzes his central nervous system.

Tim Burchett says he lives in his office in DC because he’s scared of crime in the city

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 12, 2025 at 7:15 AM

Rep. Kevin Kiley, another brave virtue signaling patriot, also echoed Burchett’s ‘anywhere outside my safe space is paralyzingly intimidating’ worldview to dime store Fox News.

Rep. Kevin Kiley: “The president is absolutely on track … in LA for example, they tell you don’t even go outside wearing jewelry because, you know, you’re gonna get mugged if you do. It is absolutely a frightening situation in many of these places, and DC is definitely at the top of the list.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 12, 2025 at 7:34 AM

Senior Counsel at the Federalist Society Will Chamberlain wants to save the West with “jails and mental hospitals,” but also thinks that the cops are liars and crime is up because he allegedly saw a scary youth on an ATV.

bragging about being a giant pussy is integral to the conservative mindset

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— m (@keptsimple.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 4:35 AM

Coming on the heels of their hero Big Balls getting beat up by teenagers, Beltway conservatives are not exactly doing much to rebut the fake tough guy allegations. They want to tell you that crime is up, but according to the cops these virtue signalers spend all their time pretending to respect, crime is down in most major cities. The FBI’s crime statistics back these up, claiming that “National violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5 percent in 2024 compared to 2023 estimates,” and that “Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2024 estimated nationwide decrease of 14.9 percent compared to the previous year.” The Bureau of Justice statistics found that violent crime fell by 49 percent from 1993 to 2021, and the robberies that these conservatives hallucinate have decreased by 74 percent over that same period. Polls may show that Americans are more concerned about crime lately, but this is an invention in our heads that is at least partially a result of a mainstream media more concerned with sensationalist stories than accurate ones. This distortion between perception and reality is what the GOP is trying to exploit in their enthusiastic embrace of being big giant fraidy cats.

The only logical conclusion you can take from these statistics and people like Rep. Burchett’s all-encompassing fear of everything on the other side of the entryway to his safe space is that they are galactic sissies, and they’re proud of it! They want to go on every TV show in existence to tell the whole world how they can’t take three steps outside their office without urinating on their leg in sheer and utter terror at the unknown awaiting them around every corner. This virtue signaling bleeds down to the minnows on Twitter trying to emulate the mouth sounds their elites are making, and it results in a cacophony of bullshit emanating from a group of people proclaiming that they are afraid of basically everything that society developed after World War II.

Of course most of these guys don’t actually believe this babybrained nonsense. Sure, there are some who have no doubt overdosed on the Kool-aid and now constantly violate Biggie’s Fourth Crack Commandment by getting high on their own supply, but this is simply what Beltway Republicans think of their voters. They think conservatives are a bunch of rube yokels who live effectively a century behind the rest of us out in the sticks, and people like Kiley pretend to be an everyman on TV for them while selling access to secretive briefings to his donors. Any conservative buying this bullshit is getting scammed by elites into telling their friends and family that they’re a weak-kneed ninny who wouldn’t last a nanosecond in the trenches they claim to want to fight in.

The Republican Party is the premiere safe space in America for virtue signaling hucksters. It has created an entire ecosystem centered around grievance, and Fox News and such have traveled to its logical conclusion of constructing a completely different reality than the one the cops they supposedly love live in. Conservatives like Rep. Kelly and Burchett and Sean Duffy are extremely proud of the fact that they are terrified to leave their safe space, and it’s high time that liberals started branding these virtue signalers as what they clearly advertise themselves as: shambolically pathetic cowards who are afraid to go outside.

 
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