It’s the revenge of the uglies.
There is no gentle way to introduce this topic: The repellent, the dim-witted, and the untalented have been promoted far above their station, and America is suffering as a result.
The enormously fat, the face-metal-wearers, the lumbering transvestite men with Herman Munster jaws tottering on heels down the salad dressing aisle …
People who 100 years ago would have been actual circus freaks you needed to pay a nickel to peep at, today walk down the streets and the red carpet as if they were the platonic ideals of manhood and womanhood.
No, I am not trying for comic effect. I mean it.
Fat city
Last week in a Staples parking lot, I watched an SUV pull into an empty spot. In the back window was a bumper sticker that said, “Just doing b***h things,” in that girly-cutesy “handwriting” typeface, with pink swirls and cartoon butterflies surrounding the vulgar catchphrase. The rest of the bumper stickers were for Planned Parenthood and other girlboss causes.
The driver opened the door and began the deboarding process. At about 5’5”, she must have weighed close to 300 pounds.
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At that level of obesity, it is impossible to tell a person’s age. She may have been 28 or 45. She climbed down backward, holding onto a handrail, and the truck noticeably bounced on its suspension when her weight was removed. Wearing a baseball cap and an unfortunately tight T-shirt and shorts (all in what I think of as “poison tree frog” colors), she huffed her way across the parking lot.
Noticing’s not nasty
Now, I must pause and reassure some readers, because the grotesque has become so normal that noticing that it is grotesque is now taken as a sign that the author is a mean, nasty person who pokes fun at unfortunate people.
No. The description I wrote above was not mean, inaccurate, or cold-hearted. It is an accurate account of an unsightly and demoralizing everyday spectacle that all of us see in public.
America is full of morbidly obese men, women, and children. Young women walk the streets in ensembles formerly reserved for prostitutes. Young men won’t even wash the food particles or grease out of their hair and beards before wiling away the afternoon, spending their barista salary on comic books and toys, while sporting the kind of “Wheee! I’m a superhero!” garb even toddlers used to wear only beneath their clothes. (Who else remembers Underoos?)
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We have an “epidemic,” if you will, of substandard physical and mental health. But this epidemic is not being caused by capitalism or patriarchy or oligarchs or any other leftist bogeyman. This is something Americans are doing to themselves. Regardless of the real problems with our unhealthy food supply and over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, only individuals can change themselves.
Stunning and brave
But they don’t want to. The enormously fat, the face-metal-wearers, the lumbering transvestite men with Herman Munster jaws tottering on heels down the salad dressing aisle — these people don’t want to get better.
Worse, they demand that the rest of us call them beautiful, that we call them brave, that we call them authentic.
Beginning with the hippies in the 1960s, our values have slowly but surely taken a 180-degree turn. What may have seemed cheeky and cute in 1967 — young men rebelling by having long hair, young women burning their bras — has become monstrous. Members of the so-called “counterculture” look like they belong in the psychiatric hospitals and asylums that we decided we no longer needed.
Welcome to the cuckoo’s nest.
Opposite day
The leftist culture — which is mainstream culture — has pulled an inversion. It tells us that morbid obesity is healthy and beautiful, like this spread in Cosmopolitan magazine featuring a fat woman in a yoga pose with the caption, “This is healthy!”
It tells us that mortification of the flesh, which we call “gender-affirming care,” is “authentic” and “natural.” So possessed are we by this dark spirit that Americans will cry tears of apparent joy when they see a confused 14-year-old girl showing off her mastectomy scars.
It would be dishonest to strike a Christian pose, as I lack faith in God (I continue to try). But it’s getting impossible for me to see this societal sickness as anything but an enactment of what Isaiah 5:20 warns about:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
It’s getting harder not to see the truth inversions, the lying, the “compassion” that’s actually about loathing and control, as anything other than the devil himself ascendant among us.
Slop culture
If the fish rots from the head, then let us identify the head. In 21st-century America, it’s the media.
I almost wrote “Hollywood,” but in 2025, celebrity is delivered to us through a million refractions on our social media apps instead of from the silver screen. But it is the culture and “artistic” institutions that were first captured by woke insanity, and the sludge at the mountain peak has broken free and buried us all in the valley below.
RELATED: All in the family: Hollywood golden boy Pedro Pascal’s loony leftist pedigree
Photo by Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/WireImage
Take the “recording artist” Lizzo. Nominally a pop star, Lizzo is known for proudly displaying her morbidly obese body in see-through “clothing.” There’s no reason for it, either; she’s a genuinely talented flutist and musician.
Yes, she is now slimming down. Perhaps, she has realized that “body positivity,” our current euphemism for “never telling fat people that it’s bad for them or that it makes them unattractive,” will not bring her career or life longevity. But Lizzo is just one of countless celebrities, actors, musicians, and other tastemakers who have been parading their living decomposition before us and demanding that we call it “beautiful.”
D-list delusions
And if it’s not a call to pretend that people who deliberately ugly themselves up are actually beautiful, it’s a demand to worship the most meager talents as if they were once-in-a-century prodigies.
Actor Pedro Pascal is the male embodiment of this phenomenon. He originally rose to fame on the popular show “Game of Thrones.” Now that it’s over, this forgettable actor is everywhere. He’s all over social media declaiming about “Palestine” and haranguing the public for not sufficiently supporting trannies.
Notice how you know Pedro Pascal’s name, even if you haven’t seen him in any movie or show you can remember. Notice how he’s been mugging for the cameras for months, saying whatever leftist tomfoolery is most popular that day, while breathless online fan mags hyperventilate over his “vibe.”
Pascal comports himself as if he were a Henry Cavill, a Cary Grant. As if he were not only as classically handsome as the favorite leading men of Hollywood but also as charming and charismatic.
He is not. Pascal is middling at best in both looks and demeanor. But he carries himself in the world like the gorgeous quarterback hero or his stunning cheerleader wife.
I believe I can try
It’s all good fun to crack wise about lunatic celebrities, but this emotional and moral sickness has not stayed confined to the glitterati. Millions of American young people are forming their interests and personalities based on these broken, narcissistic people, and they’re doing it right out in stores, in schools, and on the streets of the towns we live in.
This isn’t just an aesthetic problem; it’s ruining the physical and mental health of too many American youth.
What they need to hear — and that means that actual adults like us have to start saying it out loud again — is that they cannot be anything or anyone they want to be and expect society to call them champions. That was a cruel lie that started with participation trophies and has ended with genital surgeries on children.
Mean season
Let’s start pulling mediocre and inadequate people down off the perch they had no right to climb onto in the first place. It doesn’t matter if this feels “mean.” It didn’t “feel mean” 20 years ago before adults were convinced that everything humanity knew about life, love, health, and the soul for thousands of years was “just like, their opinion, man.”
The world has always run, and always will run, on rules that favor beauty, skill, intelligence, and genuine accomplishment. It doesn’t matter if the unfortunate and the pushover enablers don’t like it. Feelings don’t change reality, and reality doesn’t give a darn what we think about it.
The Pedro Pascals of the world are running on credit that’s not even their own. They’re borrowing prestige they didn’t earn, and we’re all acting as if they’re entitled to it. We can break this spell by telling the truth: “You’re not handsome, you’re not charismatic, and you have no capital built up to say the things you say. Shut up.”
Lifestyle, Celebrity, Hollywood, Trans, Pop culture, Pedro pascal, Intervention