During my morning perusal of X, I came across a post from Chaya Raichik's "Libs of TikTok" account that I thought really summed up a change we didn't just feel, but saw. With the Biden administration out and the Trump administration in, a change of aesthetics occurred, and it began with the Trump family.

Melania Trump was, as always, the definition of beauty, grace, and poise, but so did Ivanka Trump, as usual. In fact, all the Trump women looked incredible, from Melania to Kai Trump. A really great moment from yesterday, that went under the radar, was when the Trump family was sitting on the stage at Capitol One stadium. Trump hadn't arrived yet, but the crowd was showering the family with praise. The camera displayed a family that looked clean, healthy, happy, and beautiful. //

It wasn't that long ago that we were being force-fed something entirely different and being told that it's good and beautiful.

The Biden family is corrupt. So corrupt that it apparently needed pardons, and with that corruption came people who displayed the opposite of beauty. In fact, it spit in the face of beauty in order to push non-conventional "beauty." //

Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok
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Class is back.
5:45 AM · Jan 21, 2025

Understand, this isn't just about a beauty standard, this is about a path America could take. This is literally a "which way, Western world" moment.

To further solidify my point, I want to show you how the degeneracy of the Biden family produced outward ugliness that was often a politically-based rejection of tradition and goodness.

Back in June, I compiled a list of deviants the Biden administration had attracted, some of whom it even employed. //

The outward aesthetic matched the inward state of the soul. The Biden administration chose ugliness in so many forms because its corruption and degenerate politics caused a physical display of resistance to traditional beauty.

To make myself clear here, beauty can come in many forms, but even a person who people would consider to be less than attractive can be beautiful thanks to an inner goodness that shines through. Class and morality go a long way in outward presentation.

Roald Dahl had a very interesting quote about this:

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

Random US Citizen bintexas
12 hours ago edited
Well, if you can turn a man into a woman just by saying it's true, certainly you can turn an unratified amendment into a ratified one...

One of the things that makes it clear that our society continues to deteriorate is the almost Medieval level of superstition we're seeing almost every day. Saying something makes it true (this amendment was ratified). Naming a thing allows you to control it (western medicine widely contains this superstition) A magical belief that behavior can effect nature (climate change). The belief that words can cause physical/spiritual harm (conservatives talking is the same a violence). Belief that a person is the incarnation of the devil (Trump)

Western civilization isn't dead yet, but it certainly is ill.

First, one (mis)attributed to Solzhenitsyn:

They are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Yet, they are still lying.

Next, one (correctly) attributed to Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels):

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Zman makes the interesting and controversial point that endemic lying is an inevitable feature of democracy:

In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions.
…
Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public.

Whether or not his thesis is correct, the trajectory is accurately delineated and the West appears to have arrived at the endpoint he describes.