Pajama- and lingerie-wearing customers used to appear mostly at the lowest-end Walmarts and convenience stores. But this summer, it’s looking like the People of Walmart crowd has dramatically increased.
They’re at Target, at Sam’s Club, in the malls. They’re at Trader Joe’s, hip little trans-friendly burger shops, and the farmer’s market. To anyone hitting the beach this summer, have you noticed there, too, what seems like a dramatic increase in whole naked butt cheeks and antisocial narcissists blaring their music?
For Gen Z and others who didn’t catch the site years ago, the blog People of Walmart posts humorous pictures of people whose life choices clearly began going south many years before they ended up making a spectacle of themselves in public. The joke was that people would actually go out not just nearly naked — they do that everywhere now — but in the most unappealing states of near-nakedness, as well as otherwise visibly portraying inner disarray.
The People of Walmart vibe means shockingly overweight, slippers and pajamas 24/7, months of uncombed hair, congealing tattoos, clothes that can only be described as dumpster-fire skank or “nothing smaller than a bedsheet will cover me,” a muddy rainbow of hair shades, or combinations of the above plus other sartorial horrors.
Here are some examples from the blog. Trigger warning.
Of course, highly unattractive near-nakedness is the tip of a growing anti-beauty iceberg. Again, trigger warning: These yucky images may make you laugh too hard to continue reading this article.
One understands people down on their luck deserve some pity and discretion. Also, having been pregnant six times, I can certainly understand the rare need to visit Walmart or the drug store in a sickly state of mind and body.
But a state of constant hot messiness seems to be expanding well beyond the Walmarts that serve the Third World “refugees” federal and state governments have resettled into our communities against Americans’ consent. In my town, at least, it looks like public slovenliness and disarray have become more of a norm than a subculture.
Today, the average person is far fatter (and I’m not talking pleasantly plump). There are many more visible disfigurements such as piercings and tattoos. More people are dressing androgynously and even overtly cross-dressing, which is just plain ugly. To put it succinctly, suddenly lots of people don’t look very good. At all.
This is notable because there is indeed a correlation between one’s outward appearance and our inner state. I’m not talking about the things people can’t control, like being born with Grandpa’s large nose or a broader body frame than most women.
I’m talking about the things people can control, like wearing clothing that fits, not being dangerously overweight, washing regularly, deciding to stop eating corn syrup, and refusing to deface one’s body. All people have better and worse versions of themselves, and lately it seems a shockingly large number of people are descending into the latter.
Antisocial Policies
What could have happened in the last three years to produce such strikingly visible expressions of inner chaos and duress? It’s like there was a mass repression of human rights that stole people’s habits, routines, reasons to get up and get dressed in the morning, and connections to their communities.
As with many other issues, it seems that here lockdowns accelerated a preexisting trend. Even before lockdowns, obesity rates were at an all-time high. Nearly half of Americans were taking at least one prescription drug, and a quarter were taking three or more. Unprecedented numbers of people were being diagnosed with autism, autoimmune disorders, and allergies.
Family chaos as measured by broken or never-formed marriages was at historical highs. So was the number of American adults taking medication for mental illnesses. In fact, in 2020, nearly one-quarter of all Americans — including some babies — were taking psychiatric medications. In the late-aughts, the latest data available, American women were trending dramatically less happy than in the 1970s.
Of course, many factors go into making much higher proportions of Americans a hot, sad mess. But it’s obvious lockdowns accelerated, and likely amplified, terrible preexisting trends. It will take years to quantify the damage, but just go outside and look around. It’s visible in Americans’ bodies, in their clothing, in their behavior, and in their faces.
Deliberate Ugliness
What’s also different about this saturated ugliness is not only the lack of even a little embarrassment that might motivate change, but also the aggressive cultural messaging promoting it. Rather than being alarmed into productive action by so many Americans’ evident disarray, despair, and dishevelment, our culture controllers instead legitimize inner and outer chaos.
We’ve seen the pro-obesity campaigns. I can’t find new clothing now without being embarrassed for the models showing the options to me. Again, nobody minds realistically dappled skin or non-Barbie-shaped thighs. In fact, I support that and find such images encouraging.
But advertising and movies are now going far beyond showing realistic imperfections or the diversity of beauty to pushing truly repulsive images. We’re not being encouraged to find beauty in reality, but to believe that what’s ugly is in fact beautiful.
They’re Doing It on Purpose
This is not an accident, it’s cultural warfare. As Chris Rufo explained earlier this year, leftist academics have created an entire thoughtworld celebrating grotesqueness for ideological ends. They openly aim “to displace the old society with what might be called a ‘queer-normative society,’ a ‘fat-normative society,’ a ‘mental-illness-normative society.'” The ultimate goal is an “anti-normative society.”
The goal is to achieve an inversion and the hegemony of a non-normative ideal, which you see valorized in the academic literature on all these different axes — gender, sexuality, body type, or psychological health.
…We might categorize this new ideal as a “gender-neutral, non-binary, obese, mentally disturbed, ‘they/them’ pronoun user, operating as a radically autonomous individual that is totally disconnected from any of the traditional bonds, relationships, and constraints.”
I’m not saying the People of Walmart are activists aiming to bring about a non-normative society. While they certainly bear responsibility for their life choices just like the rest of us, they’ve also been victimized by our cultural leaders, who share significant blame for the obvious decay of our society.
Elites are leaders. They point their culture in certain directions. A pro-norms elite would celebrate beauty, health, and virtues that tend to result in a beautiful and healthy culture, such as self-discipline, sacrifice, restraint, patience, and courage.
Our elite instead celebrate self-indulgence, laziness, and degeneracy. They obliterate aspirational ideals and attack mental health-protecting, commitment-based associations such as marriage, the natural family, and church. They even attack reality itself, such as the existence of men and women, standards of beauty, life choices that promote health, and the obviously horrific outcomes of free-for-all sex.
So it’s no wonder that people subjected to decades of systematic dehumanization and de-naturalization would reflect their social architecture. Destroying norms damages people, and it damages the most vulnerable people the most. That’s why you can find so many of these sad and confused folks at Walmart.
Increasingly, though, it’s not just Walmart. It’s everywhere. The “let them eat cake” ruling class doing this to America doesn’t deserve to be in charge of anything, ever.
