Send in the clowns? They’re already here!

They say all the world is a stage. At the moment, however, it resembles a dystopian circus where people are standing in line to buy tickets.

Ever since COVID-19, I have felt that I’ve been just on the periphery of the world, watching it go mad. It began in March 2020 as I witnessed people scurry for toilet paper like rats in a quest for the last bite of cheese.

Next, I watched in confusion as much of America, and indeed the world — a large portion of whom were women — genuflected before a criminal with a history of violence against women, whose most heroic trait consisted of being black.

A glance at X (formerly Twitter) over the holidays — my first mistake — evinced a slew of posts that left my mouth agape and me saying out loud, “WTF?”

First up, the White House Christmas video. While it had the potential to be a tasteful twist on the classic “Nutcracker Suite,” the distorted camera angles, strange and disturbing use of make-up and costuming, and mediocre tap dancing seemed to mock and taunt the very sanctity and meaning of Christmas.

Then came a bloated Mariah Carey lip-syncing her cult classic Christmas tune in a Nutcracker soldier costume, practically comatose, swaying side to side like a mannequin about to topple over. The crowd cheered.

We are slowly but surely creating a fake world with false idols that betray our deepest longings and anesthetize our common sensibilities.

As someone who danced in “The Nutcracker” for a decade, I’m distraught at the efforts to reformulate some of my favorite childhood memories to fit some warped interpretation of the season. The dystopian circus wants nothing less than to sully the beautiful memories of tradition and replace them with its contorted vision of culture.

Speaking of sullied memories, Dylan Mulvaney popped up on my feed to celebrate the birth of Christ with due reverence. I endured his pathetic attempt at melancholy as he whined his way through “Blue Christmas” — only to be subject to him making out with a male model bartender against a wall. That was enough. I couldn’t take any more desecration of the holiday traditions that once bound our country together. Instead of images of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in a manger or visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, all I could think was, "Does that guy feel Dylan’s junk against his leg?" Merry Christmas.

One review called the video “sumptuous” and lauded Mulvaney’s voice, commenting that he has “a wicked set of pipes.” Nonsense! He can barely carry a note.

Addicted to toxic spectacle

This is what passes for entertainment these days, and people lap it up. The entertainment industry parades around corpses — Madonna’s latest tour comes to mind — and fans go wild. One video clip shows Santa receiving a lap dance by one of Madonna’s dancers only to have Santa topple lewdly onto the dancer to cheers from the audience.

The masses are sedated by a cocktail of opiates — poisonous food and drink, social media, too much cable news, and an overdose of identity politics. Like any good drug, these opiates numb the pain of life but also desensitize their hosts to reason, beauty, and truth. Like an addict, many are walking around unaware they are addicted.

We are slowly but surely creating a fake world with false idols that betray our deepest longings and anesthetize our common sensibilities. In this world, there is no discerning truth from fiction, reality from dystopia, or beauty from grotesque derivatives.

Consider the satanic statue in the Iowa State Capitol building. The quiet part is no longer quiet. People are declaring what they worship in broad daylight. It is death and destruction and, sadly, more and more people are choosing to stand with darkness. A darkness masked by the clowns, barbarians, and contortionists of the circus.

I take consolation in knowing I am not alone in feeling like an outsider, looking in on a world that doesn’t make sense, lamenting the desecration of everything once considered sacred.

Jonathan Pageau, best known for his Christian icon art and who has become better known as Jordan Peterson’s spiritual sidekick, has outlined the course of Western civilization’s demise and what’s next in a new series for the Daily Wire called “End of the World.”

“Our world has become a massive carnival and we have reached a place where the clown is ruling, the clown is king,” Pageau tells us.

In particular, Pageau discusses the contemporary obsession with altering body parts under the pretext of changing sex or becoming no sex at all. The notion of identifying as "gender fluid” or “furries,” he says, is not a bug within dystopian clown world, it is a feature of it. Once the absurd and bizarre were relegated to the fringes of society. Now, they are in the center.

Pageau comments on culture more broadly.

“The fact that we think entertainment is culture — that’s not the case in normal society,” he comments. “Culture is that which binds us together. Culture is the thing that we recognize. We sing our national anthem together, we go to church together, we dance together. We recognize [things such as] traditional dress that bind us together.”

Losing a common vocabulary

Forget dress. Americans can’t even agree on the definition of words anymore. We — or rather, the ring leaders of the circus — change the English language to alter reality, and worse, to justify the dystopia.

In the last few years, dictionaries have changed the definition of words like “woman” and “vaccine” in an attempt to turn lies into truth. Terms like “racism” and “violence” no longer describe actions. Rather, they are invoked to destroy someone who rejects the clown world. Titles like “Nazi” and “fascist” are not descriptors of people who participated in historical movements but words through which the opposition is canceled.

As Pageau observed, “People can’t hold on to even the facts anymore.” Facts are for the sober-minded, not the inebriated whose sensibilities have succumbed to sheer desire and feeling.

Maybe my disillusionment is merely a byproduct of getting older and losing touch with current trends. Or maybe the world is indeed sliding into a dark abyss at a rapidity no one could have predicted.

I never much liked the circus growing up. I certainly don’t like living in one as an adult, and I refuse to buy any more tickets to the freak show.

Jennifer Galardi is a politics, culture, and health writer with a master’s degree in public policy from Pepperdine University. Her work has also been published in the New York Sun, the Epoch Times, and Pepperdine Policy Review. You can find her on Instagram, Twitter, and her website.