The LaGuardia Meltdown-aissance Starring Leanna Perry as herself, corporate brands as unwitting accomplices, and air travel as the great equalizer of human awfulness. What we're seeing at 30,000 feet—and increasingly at ground level—isn't just individual breakdown. It's the inevitable result of a ruling class that has systematically dismantled the shared cultural norms and expectations that once made civil society possible. The Perry incident is a symptom, not the disease.
I was sitting in Terminal C at LaGuardia, watching a woman in athleisure argue with a gate agent about her "emotional support" Louis Vuitton bag, when I realized something profound: airports don't just move people from place to place. They're pressure cookers for the human id, stripping away all pretense until you're left with the raw, unfiltered essence of who someone really is.
Which brings us to Leanna Perry.
Because if you want to understand how deeply f*cked our influencer economy has become, you need look no further than Gate B6, where a 32-year-old Brooklyn illustrator with a brand partnership portfolio that reads like a who's who of fast fashion decided to have a very public, very racist, very recorded meltdown over airplane seating.
The Influence Game Gone Wrong
Let's set the scene: It's a Tuesday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to Kansas City. Coach class, because even brand ambassadors fly commercial. Leanna Perry—whose Instagram bio probably includes "creative" and "manifesting"—boards the plane with all the confidence of someone whose DMs are full of collaboration requests.
Then she sees her seatmate.
According to witnesses, Perry took one look at the woman assigned to sit next to her and decided this was her Rosa Parks moment. Except instead of fighting injustice, she was embodying it.
"She's fat," Perry reportedly announced, loud enough for half the cabin to hear. "I'm not sitting next to her."
Because nothing says "brand safe content creator" like public body shaming.
When Keeping It Real Goes Very Wrong
But Perry wasn't done. Oh no. This wasn't just your garden-variety airplane Karen behavior. This was a full-contact sport of human awfulness.
She grabbed the woman by the hair. She spat in her face. She unleashed a torrent of profanities and slurs that would make a Call of Duty lobby blush.
All while fellow passengers pulled out their phones, because this is 2025 and nothing says "you're fucked" quite like the soft glow of a dozen recording devices.
And here's the beautiful irony: Perry, whose entire livelihood depends on her public image, decided to torch that image at 30,000 feet over a middle seat in coach.
The Brand Partnership Reckoning
Let's talk about Perry's resume, shall we? Maybelline, Adidas, Steve Madden, MAC, Shein, Betsey Johnson, Nicole Miller. A greatest hits collection of brands that spend millions crafting inclusive, body-positive messaging.
Maybelline's recent campaigns are all about "brave together" and celebrating diversity. Adidas preaches "impossible is nothing" while partnering with athletes of all body types. MAC literally built their brand on "all ages, all races, all genders."
And they've all worked with someone who thinks airplane seating gives her the right to assault strangers.
Chef's kiss
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The Economics of Influence
This is what happens when we build an economy around "personal brand" without any actual standards for what that means. Perry wasn't just some random asshole having a bad day. She was a professional personality, someone whose job is literally to represent brands to consumers.
And for years, these companies happily cut checks to someone who, it turns out, thinks other humans are obstacles to her comfort.
The influencer industrial complex is built on a lie: that having a camera phone and decent lighting makes you qualified to be the face of anything. We've created a generation of people who think their aesthetic choices are moral statements, their lifestyle content is activism, and their personal comfort is a civil right.
Flying While Awful
Air travel has always been humanity's great humbler. Put anyone in a metal tube at 35,000 feet, take away their WiFi for five minutes, and watch them revert to their most primal selves. But there's something especially galling about watching someone whose entire career is built on projecting aspirational lifestyle content completely lose their shit over basic human decency.
Perry's meltdown wasn't just racism and body shaming. It was a masterclass in entitlement, a live demonstration of what happens when someone who's spent years having their every whim validated by brand partnerships encounters the radical concept that other people exist.
The Aftermath Olympics
By now, you know how this story ends. The videos go viral. The think pieces write themselves. The brands start scrubbing their partnerships faster than you can say "crisis management."
Perry will probably issue one of those Notes app apologies, the kind that mentions "personal growth" and "learning from mistakes" while somehow managing to center herself as the victim. Maybe she'll check into a wellness retreat or announce she's taking time to "educate herself."
The woman she assaulted? She'll probably get a few thousand Twitter followers and maybe a GoFundMe that raises enough to cover her therapy bills.
The Real Turbulence
But here's what really pisses me off about this whole clusterfuck: it's not an outlier. It's a symptom.
We've built a culture that confuses visibility with virtue, follower count with moral authority, and brand partnerships with actual accomplishment. We've created a class of people whose only qualification is that they look good holding products, and then we act shocked when they turn out to be garbage humans.
Perry didn't become a racist, body-shaming asshole on that airplane. She just stopped hiding it long enough for everyone to see.
Final Boarding Call
The influencer economy isn't going anywhere. Brands will keep cutting checks to people with pretty feeds and engagement rates, mostly hoping they don't end up in viral assault videos. Some will implement better vetting processes. Most won't.
Because here's the dirty secret: the brands probably knew exactly who Leanna Perry was. They just didn't care, as long as she could move product and looked good doing it.
The real question isn't whether Perry will recover from this—spoiler alert: she probably will, with a rebrand and some time in the desert. The real question is whether we'll ever admit that building an economy around people whose only skill is looking aspirational while hawking shit was always going to end badly.
Meanwhile, somewhere over Kansas, a coach passenger is probably arguing about armrest etiquette while someone else films it for TikTok.
The plane keeps flying.
The content keeps coming.
And the rest of us keep pretending this is all somehow normal.
Welcome to the influence economy, where everyone's a brand ambassador until they're not, and the only thing that crashes faster than the airplane is someone's reputation.
Fasten your seatbelts.
It's going to be a bumpy fucking flight.The Perry meltdown, captured in all its profane glory and shared across social media platforms, serves another function: it reinforces the narrative that the problem is individual behavior rather than systemic institutional failure. Focus on the crazy lady pulling hair, and you don't have to ask why American commercial aviation has devolved into a barely functional system that treats paying customers as potential threats.
What's truly revealing is how quickly the story disappeared from serious news coverage, relegated to tabloid entertainment. There's no investigation into how Perry was allowed to board while visibly intoxicated, no examination of Southwest's policies for dealing with problem passengers, and certainly no broader discussion of what this incident says about the state of American civil society
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Instead, we get viral videos and social media mockery—digital bread and circuses while the institutions responsible for maintaining order continue their long decline into incompetence and extraction.
The real question isn't why Leanna Perry grabbed another passenger's hair on a Southwest flight. It's why American institutions have become so dysfunctional that such incidents are now routine, and why the people running those institutions are more interested in managing public relations than addressing the underlying failures that make these meltdowns inevitable.
Until we start asking those questions, expect more viral videos from 30,000 feet—and fewer functional institutions on the ground
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