The viral video from LaGuardia Airport tells a familiar story: an intoxicated passenger named Leanna Perry grabbing another woman's hair, hurling profanities, and requiring restraint by zip-ties before being dragged off a Southwest Airlines flight. On the surface, it's just another example of the post-pandemic "unruly passenger" phenomenon that has plagued American aviation. But dig deeper, and the incident reveals something far more troubling about the state of American institutions and the social fabric they're supposed to protect.
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.
The Deeper Pattern
According to sources familiar with airline industry dynamics, incidents like Perry's have skyrocketed since 2020, but the increase began well before the pandemic mask mandates that airlines and their media allies like to blame. "The real inflection point was when airlines became purely extractive enterprises," a former airline executive told Tablet. "Once you treat passengers like cattle, some of them start acting like cattle."
That transformation didn't happen in a vacuum. It coincided with the broader financialization of American life, where every institution—from airlines to universities to intelligence agencies—became focused on extracting maximum value rather than serving their ostensible mission. The result is a society where basic social contracts have been shredded, leaving individual Americans to navigate increasingly hostile institutional environments with fewer and fewer guardrails.
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.
Southwest Airlines' response to the incident is instructive. "We commend our Team for their professionalism during the incident," a company spokesperson told the New York Post. But according to passengers interviewed off the record, the "professionalism" included a significant delay in addressing Perry's increasingly erratic behavior before it escalated to physical assault.
"She was clearly intoxicated and agitated from the moment she boarded," one passenger told confidential sources. "But the crew seemed more concerned about staying on schedule than dealing with an obvious problem passenger. It was only when she started grabbing hair that they acted."
This pattern—institutional inaction followed by damage control—mirrors the broader dysfunction plaguing American institutions. Whether it's the FBI's surveillance overreach, the intelligence community's politicization, or airlines' systematic degradation of service, the playbook is always the same: ignore problems until they explode, then blame individuals rather than systemic failures
The Real Story
The Perry incident didn't happen because one woman had too much to drink. It happened because American institutions have created an environment where basic civility and shared expectations have been systematically eroded. When airlines treat passengers like potential terrorists, when law enforcement operates with minimal accountability, and when media outlets profit from viral content regardless of its impact on social cohesion, incidents like this become inevitable.
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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