Three positions answer this differently, and none is a straw man.
Kingdom character, now. On this reading the beatitudes describe the actual, livable curriculum of citizens already inside the kingdom, not a future reward schedule but a present apprenticeship under the King. Dallas Willard frames the whole Sermon this way: the kingdom of God is a comprehensive, present-and-future reality, and the Sermon on the Mount is its foundational curriculum for life now (The Divine Conspiracy, 1998, cite-only). This tracks JFB's "they already have: the kingdom" note above.
Eschatological reversal. On this reading the beatitudes are not virtues to cultivate but an announcement: God is reversing the world's verdict on the wretched, because the kingdom is breaking in. The poor in spirit are blessed not because poverty of spirit is achieved but because the King has arrived to overturn who counts as blessed at all. Luke's parallel sharpens this edge with matching woes: "blessed are ye poor… but woe unto you that are rich" (Luke 6:20, 24, ASV). It is a reversal Matthew's mountain scene doesn't include but doesn't contradict either.
Classical dispensational assignment. Older dispensational teaching, the Scofield Reference Bible notes (1909, PD) among its most-read expressions, tended to assign the Sermon's fullest, literal force to the coming kingdom age, read as kingdom law offered to Israel and deferred at the nation's rejection of the King. MannaFest's own tradition is premillennial dispensational, and this reading deserves to be named at strength, not caricatured as legalism: it takes "kingdom of heaven" with maximal seriousness as a real, future, earthly reign.
This site's tradition, consistent with the kingdom framework at Kingdom of Heaven: the kingdom is substantively present in some real sense now (the beatitudes are livable, not merely promissory) while the full, visible, earthly reign remains future and awaits Christ's return. That "already and not yet" is the honest tension. The strict-postponement reading above is a stricter register within the same dispensational family.