Victimhood™: The New American Hustle: There’s No Business Like Woe Business

Prologue: The Monetization of Misery

There was a time when pain was private, suffering was sacred, and the phrase "working through it" meant something other than broadcasting your latest emotional unraveling to a monetized audience of strangers. Today? Misery has a business model, and victimhood is America’s fastest-growing personal brand — right up there with influencer, crypto bro, and emotionally unavailable podcast host.

You can thank the Pity Profiteers of the Outrage Economy — a sprawling, self-sustaining ecosystem of HR departments, trauma entrepreneurs, academic gatekeepers, nonprofit opportunists, and corporate cowards all racing to out-woke, out-weep, and out-virtue one another. We’ve commodified the complaint. Institutionalized the tantrum. And elevated the perpetually offended into our new aristocracy — the House of the Holy Hurt Feelings. Their crown jewels? Microaggressions, diagnosis codes, and a Patreon link.

There is no justice without suffering, we’re told — but in this new economy of pain, justice isn’t the endgame. Visibility is. Attention is. Monetization is. “Lived experience” has replaced evidence, and victim narratives trump competence, character, or contribution. Why build something when you can just perform pain and call it power? Why work when you can whimper — loudly — and someone will retweet it with a crying emoji and a GoFundMe link?

We didn’t get here overnight. It took years of ideological inbreeding between postmodern academia, Silicon Valley dopamine labs, and the HR-driven fragility economy to create this bloated, exquisitely sensitive monster. Add a dash of performative politics, a global pandemic, and a generation told that every bad feeling is both valid and monetizable — and presto: a nation where everyone is either triggered, trending, or in therapy. Often all three. And usually on Zoom.

Of course, actual pain still exists. Real victims deserve real justice. But they’re increasingly drowned out by grievance grifters, hurt-for-hire hustlers, and the elite class of emotional influencers who discovered that suffering — or something that looks like it — sells. And brother, it sells big. There are trauma coaches now. Crying courses. Healing summits. “Embodiment experts” who charge $2,500 to help you locate your inner child — presumably lost somewhere near the gift shop.

Here’s the kicker: you’re being taken advantage of. Every. Single. Day. And you’re drinking it down like a ’61 Petrus — savoring every note of curated victimhood while it slowly poisons your joy, your resilience, your children’s future, and the cultural soul of an entire nation. This isn’t self-care. It’s slow-acting, spiritually metastatic brain cancer. The kind you don't notice until your critical thinking flatlines and your moral compass gets outsourced to a hashtag.

You’re not just being manipulated. You’re subscribing to it. Sharing it. Wearing it like a badge of honor while the people cashing in on your compassion keep upping the dosage.

This week’s Vox Populi is not a call to be cruel. It’s a manifesto for clarity. Because we have blurred the line between struggle and strategy. Between trauma and theatrics. Between healing and hustle. The result? A culture where weakness is a weapon, and outrage is a commodity.

Welcome to Victimhood™: The New American Hustle. The pity profiteers are cashing in. And unless you wake up — you’re paying for it.

There’s no business like woe business.

Chapter I: Hurt for Hire — The Billion-Dollar Grief Machine

Welcome to the digital bazaar of emotional pain, where everyone’s wounded—and everyone’s watching. Where every teardrop has a price tag and every scar has a merch table. In this strange new economy, your trauma isn’t just yours—it’s a content pillar. Grief is a growth strategy. Anxiety is audience development. And suffering? It's scalable.

On TikTok, sob-stories come algorithm-optimized with sad piano music, mascara streaks, and pinned comments like “thank you for your bravery.” Instagram feeds look more like hospital admissions than highlight reels. And over on YouTube? Trauma confessionals now have brand sponsors and mid-roll ads. (“This panic attack brought to you by BetterHelp and a soothing turmeric latte blend!”).

You can now book a $500/hour “emotional consultant” to help you access your inner wounded child—usually while seated on a beanbag chair under an arch of eucalyptus garland. Want a discount? Use the promo code “TRIGGERED” at checkout.

Welcome to the influencer-industrial side of the pain economy, where we’ve confused sharing with selling, healing with hashtags, and introspection with TikTok choreography. This isn’t therapy – it’s theater – And the curtain never comes down.

At the center of it all is a new class of content creator: the trauma influencer. These are the high priests and priestesses of performative vulnerability—speaking in soft tones, rocking pastel cardigans, and wielding terms like “boundaries,” “narcissistic abuse,” and “unprocessed trauma” like gospel. Their sermons? Carousel posts with pastel infographics. Their sacraments? Moonstone crystals, bath bombs, and “reparenting yourself” meditation boxes.

Some of them mean well. Many are sincere. But sincerity doesn’t excuse the hustle. Because behind all the softness lies a sharpened hook: subscribe to their newsletter, attend their virtual retreat, buy their “Healing is a Journey” hoodie for $72. Grief is now a gateway to a lifestyle brand—and business is booming.

We now have “healing retreats” in Tulum with DJs and merch tables. “Trauma summits” with gold-tier ticketing and swag bags. Emotional consultants with rate cards that read like luxury interior designers. One influencer launched a seven-part course called Activate Your Wound Magnetism. Another sells $300 grief journaling kits wrapped in faux-velvet ribbon.

However, somewhere along the line, hurt became a hustle - And we all signed up for the affiliate program.

None of this is to dismiss real suffering. Quite the opposite. There are people out there experiencing raw, life-shattering pain—quietly, bravely, without a selfie stick. This chapter isn’t about them. It’s about the others. The ones who realized that in a society where identity is currency, the most valuable thing you can be is perpetually processing something.

So, we’ve created a tiered system of sympathy where:

• Entry-level pain gets you a couple hundred likes;
• Mid-tier dysfunction lands you speaking gigs on “resilience”; and
• Full-blown victimhood? That’s a verified badge, a TEDx slot, and a book deal about how you overcame… something.

And the rest of us? We’re the audience. We click, we clap, we Venmo. We reward the performance and call it “empowerment.”

But we’re not building strength. We’re subsidizing stagnation.

Because in this system, there’s no incentive to heal. There’s only incentive to stay wounded—publicly, loudly, and preferably with a discount code.

And if you think this economy of pain stops at TikTok therapy reels and $300 grief kits, think again. The grief machine doesn’t just run on ring lights and self-diagnosis—it runs on billions. Real, measurable, public and private money. Globally, it's estimated that over $1.2 trillion moves through social justice organizations, nonprofits, activist NGOs, cause-based marketing, and political PACs—with astonishingly little oversight.

Black Lives Matter raised over $90 million in a single year. Much of it evaporated into luxury homes, consultants, and silence. Communities burned while leadership went house shopping and bought themselves Bentleys while fanning the fires fueled by your bank accounts.

The “Free Palestine” movement rakes in tens of millions, most of which never reaches a child, a clinic, or a food truck. But someone’s publicist just signed a contract.

The climate change crusade? It has its own jet fleet. Davos-style eco-conferences at $3,000-a-night resorts. Panels about decarbonization between foie gras tastings and crystal healing demos. In 2023 alone, governments and private foundations spent over $880 billion on climate initiatives. Carbon emissions? Still rising.

Remember Greenpeace and “Save the Whales”? Turns out a few whales were saved, and a lot of six-figure consulting retainers were issued. Animal rights organizations rake in hundreds of millions annually—and spend most of it on mailers, not mammals.

The U.S. political outrage economy? North of $14 billion was spent on the 2020 election cycle alone. That’s more than the GDP of dozens of countries—spent on ads, fear, misinformation, and fundraising dinners. You didn’t donate to save democracy. You paid for a shrimp tower at The Four Seasons.

Want more? Look at ActBlue, the Democratic mega-fundraising platform, which raised over $1.3 billion in 2020 alone. Much of it was funneled to failed campaigns, bloated salaries, and digital ad agencies run by consultants who failed upward.

Or The Lincoln Project, a supposedly anti-Trump group that burned through tens of millions on stylish videos and self-congratulatory PR—then got caught in scandal after scandal while its founders cashed checks and booked cable news slots.

GoFundMe, once a haven for emergencies, is now where people go to “heal” their spiritual trauma, fund vague retreats, or crowdsource yet another book about their personal journey through seasonal depression and shadow work. The top 100 campaigns of 2023 raised nearly $400 million—many with zero vetting, no transparency, and no outcomes.

And who could forget Extinction Rebellion? The activist group that blocks traffic, glues themselves to art, and fundraises off it—hauling in over $11 million in donations while leaders sip organic smoothies at strategy retreats in the South of France.

Then there's the left, the right, the middle—all fundraising off your panic. Anti-Trump PACs. Anti-Biden think tanks. “Save democracy” telethons. “End capitalism” campaigns run on capitalist platforms with tiered subscriptions.

It’s not about fixing problems. It’s about feeling important while talking about them. It’s performance grief, professionally managed.

So where did the money go into?:

• Real estate portfolios.
• Salaries for people who write white papers on oppression.
• Media teams that brand your anxiety and sell it back to you with a quote card and a vinyl sticker.
• Influencer partnerships, curated speaker series, and $2,000-a-head wellness workshops designed to “unpack whiteness” while serving kombucha on tap.
• Range Rovers, rooftop panels, and private-label “healing crystals” sourced from the same child-labor mines that fund half these initiatives’ sob stories.

You thought you were helping. You were underwriting.

Welcome to Hurt for Hire — The Billion-Dollar Grief Machine. The tears are trending. The trauma is templated. And the con? It’s global, growing, and tax-deductible.

And the healing? Well… it’s in beta.

Chapter II: Safe Spaces, Dangerous Ideas - The University Playpen

Once upon a time, college was a place to get your worldview shattered, your ego bruised, and your ideas tested in fire. Now? It’s a padded cell with a diversity committee.

Welcome to modern academia, where intellectual discomfort is a hate crime, and curiosity is a microaggression. Safe spaces aren’t just rooms anymore—they’re ideologies. And their first principle is simple: feeling bad means someone else did something wrong.

This is the festering petri dish of the grievance economy. The Ivy League has become Silicon Valley for social hysteria—an incubator for weaponized identity and hyper-fragile discourse. Tuition now includes unlimited access to trauma-processing circles, bias reporting apps, lavender oil mindfulness tents, and artisanal coloring books in the campus wellness lounge.

Take Yale University, where a professor resigned after students demanded his head for suggesting that Halloween costumes might not require a university-wide moral panic. Nothing says elite education like being publicly flayed for defending The Cat in the Hat.

Or Stanford Law School, where students shouted down a federal judge in a full-blown tantrum. The university’s diversity dean—not only defended the disruption, but gave a speech during it. No word on whether she brought juice boxes and gold stars for the protestors afterward.

At Oberlin College, a jury awarded $36 million to a local bakery after the school falsely accused it of racism. Students tried to destroy a small business because they didn’t like being stopped for shoplifting. The administration backed them. Because, of course, feelings.

Then there’s UC Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement—now famous for canceling speakers, setting things on fire, and banning Ben Shapiro like he was radioactive waste. Irony died on that campus sometime around 2017.

Or Smith College, where a janitor was publicly accused of racial bias—only to be completely exonerated. The school still paid out settlements, ran mandatory bias training, and issued a campus-wide apology for a crime that didn’t happen.

At University of Michigan, they spent $10.6 million on DEI programming in a single year—including $400,000 for “inclusive language” seminars and $55,000 for a guest speaker who did a performative poetry reading about microaggressions while standing in a kiddie pool.

Harvard University, not to be outdone, has over 60 paid DEI administrators, including one “Assistant Dean for Identity Conscious Learning” whose sole job appears to be organizing listening sessions on emotional fragility.

Columbia University spent $50,000 on nap pods to combat “emotional exhaustion” during finals week—and then followed it with a campaign reminding students to hydrate between crying spells.

Professors tread like bomb disposal techs. Debates are downgraded to dialogue. “Opposing views” are filtered through a DEI consultant and neutered of anything spicy. And heaven forbid you cite an author with the wrong opinion on gender from 1987—because that’s cancelable by committee. Retroactive outrage is now a varsity sport.

The result? A generation allergic to challenge and addicted to affirmation. They don't want truth—they want trigger warnings. They don't want discussion—they want disclaimers. Their motto: “I disagree, therefore I am harmed.”

Student groups charge admission for “trauma panels.” Activists host “cry-ins” when speakers like Bari Weiss or Jordan Peterson dare show up with actual ideas. At Brown University, students demanded midterms be postponed due to the emotional impact of national politics. In one case, a college hired a therapy llama to help students cope with election results. That’s not resilience. That’s a satirical sketch that wrote itself.

Don’t forget the rise of “bias response teams”—yes, real university task forces where you can anonymously report your roommate for tone. These squads now have bigger budgets than some entire departments. They meet weekly. They wear lanyards. They call themselves “first responders”—and mean it.

Meanwhile, where do your tax dollars and $80,000-a-year tuition go? Into:

• DEI czars who make $300K a year to enforce ideological conformity.
• “Antiracist curriculum audits” that cost $1 million a pop.
• Required “identity reeducation modules” for freshmen—because Plato’s Republic is less important than your privilege score.
• Outdoor meditation yurts, rage rooms, and $75,000 “restorative justice” consultants.
• Watercolor trauma kits, bias bingo nights, and $30,000/year emotional support animal programs (with certified guinea pigs).
• $250K “healing gardens” that bloom in time for donor visits, then get paved over for the next protest site.

Backstage, the real mission of the university is survival through appeasement. Administrators no longer educate—they manage feelings, settle hashtags, and preempt lawsuits. Entire departments exist to soothe, not stimulate. Truth is not a goal; it’s a liability.

Employers are starting to notice. Graduates enter the workforce fluent in victim dialect but illiterate in feedback. They fold under pressure. They ghost team meetings. They demand “emotional labor” compensation for reading Slack messages. And when they quit, it’s not because they were bad at their jobs—it’s because they were “not supported emotionally.”

The academic-industrial complex has produced the ultimate consumer: fragile, offended, and wildly expensive to maintain. But profitable? Oh yes. DEI departments have exploded into seven-figure bureaucracies. Every syllabus is a risk management document. Every campus controversy generates clicks, grants, and speaking gigs.

Safe spaces were supposed to be a refuge. Now they’re the ruling regime. And their most dangerous idea? That safety is more important than truth.

Welcome to the playpen. Please remove your shoes and check your critical thinking at the door.

Chapter III: Crybaby Capitalism - Corporate America’s New KPI: Feelings

If you thought the campus playpen ended at the quad, think again. The graduates didn’t change—the workplace just installed a nap pod, hired a Chief Empathy Officer, and lit a $10,000 sage bundle to purify the onboarding room.

Welcome to Crybaby Capitalism—where earnings reports are trauma triggers, and QBRs begin with a healing circle. Forget quarterly performance—it’s all about quarterly vulnerability.

Today’s boardroom isn’t a battlefield—it’s a safe space with gluten-free snacks and an HR-certified “emotions consultant.” The sales pipeline has been replaced by the “healing journey,” and your productivity is only as good as your last inner child check-in.

You can thank the DEI industrial complex, which oozed out of academia and slipped right into the C-suite like a PowerPoint with a weighted blanket. It brought consultants, keynote shamans, and entire departments whose job is to ensure no one ever feels slightly off in a Zoom call.

Let’s talk case studies in corporate emotional delusion:

• Google paid $6 million to run “racial healing sessions,” which included prompts like “describe your whiteness using only fruit metaphors.”
• Salesforce built a Dreamforce “Wellness Zone” with intersectional reiki, sound baths, and chakra cleansing workshops—sponsored by Oracle.
• Amazon hosts “identity salons” where employees unpack childhood trauma over oat milk lattes while brainstorming shipping logistics.
• Nike gave employees a week off to recover from pandemic fatigue, then resumed full production in factories where kids assemble sneakers faster than their U.S. colleagues can type “burnout.”
• LinkedIn hosted a “Collective Grief Summit” featuring breakout sessions, a DJ, and swag bags that included affirmation stones and a sticker that said, “Empathy is a KPI.”

And the spending? Try $15 billion annually—and climbing like a triggered stock ticker.

McKinsey reports $7.5 billion was flushed into DEI programs in 2020 alone—with projections nearing $15 billion by 2026. Fast Company notes U.S. companies are now dropping over $8 billion annually on emotional bubble wrap for grown-ups. Most of it goes to consultants who give TED Talks titled “Healing as a Business Model” while quoting bell hooks in Comic Sans and billing $1,200/hour to explain why your logo is colonialist.

CEOs used to read spreadsheets. Now they read aura charts.

One firm hired a breathwork coach to help the CFO process missing an earnings target. Another brought in an “emotional ergonomics expert” to determine whether the open-office chairs were gaslighting people’s posture.

The new workplace playbook is simple:

• Say sorry first.
• Monetize emotion.
• Hydrate your chakras.

 Your average team meeting now includes:

• A “feelings forecast” presented in Canva.
• A group affirmation about abundance.
• A 10-minute sob sesh from Jason in Accounting about his Saturn return.

Want to know where this ends? With companies replacing bonuses with “emotional achievement tokens.” With Slack bots that remind you to breathe before answering an email. With mindfulness horses showing up at sales retreats.

This isn’t culture. This is compliance theater in yoga pants.

Welcome to Crybaby Capitalism: Where profits are fragile, the workforce is deeply hydrated, and the forecast is mostly cloudy with a 70% chance of tears.

The product? Emotionally affirmed. The team? Deeply exhausted. The vibe? Monetized.

And the mission? Just keep feeling things.

Chapter IV: DEI or DIE? - How Inclusion Got Hijacked

What began as a noble effort to expand opportunity and broaden perspectives ended with corporate boardrooms resembling cult retreats and Ivy League classrooms turned into reeducation camps. This was supposed to be about fairness. Instead, it became a joyless bureaucracy of buzzwords, quotas, and cultural contortion.

DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—was hijacked. Not subtly. Not slowly. But spectacularly. Somewhere between 2020 and “identify your privilege with this color-coded empathy wheel,” inclusion got outsourced to activists, branded consultants, and bureaucrats who couldn’t tell a mission from a marketing strategy.

By 2021, DEI wasn’t just a value—it was a mandate. A vibe. A multibillion-dollar performance piece with equity audits, white fragility seminars, and weekly “unconscious bias” recalibrations that felt like hostage negotiations with your soul.

Let’s talk receipts:

• Coca-Cola asked employees to “be less white” in mandatory diversity training—because apparently the fastest way to end racism is through corporate-sanctioned racial profiling.
• Wells Fargo pledged $50 million to DEI after getting caught not being equitable, then laid off thousands while hiring a “Head of Racial Justice Storytelling.”
• United Airlines proudly announced they’d fill half their pilot training slots with women and people of color. Great PR—until passengers started asking whether the cockpit was staffed by competence or quotas.
• Disney instructed employees to “decenter whiteness” while lobbying politicians for tax breaks, rolling out princesses by identity category, and selling $30 rainbow churros at Pride Month.
• Pinterest created a “Feelings Committee” tasked with screening content for tone, while their stock quietly tanked.
• Meta launched a “Responsible Innovation” team so diverse in optics that no one noticed they weren’t actually innovating.
• Levi’s dropped a top executive for expressing mild concerns about COVID school closures—because nothing says justice like firing a woman for speaking her mind in a movement based on equity.
• Nike, again, created an internal “sensitivity map” of all language approved by the company. One executive was reprimanded for describing a spreadsheet as “color-coded.”

And it wasn’t just corporations - government agencies and schools jumped in with both feet - and your tax dollars:

• The Department of Homeland Security gave $500,000 to a DEI initiative warning against “anti-government narratives,” including skepticism toward mask mandates.
• The US Army spent millions on “inclusion training,” including a module on the “gender unicorn,” while struggling to meet basic recruitment goals.
• A California elementary school required students as young as seven to participate in a “privilege walk.” First graders were asked to identify how their identities contributed to systemic oppression. Recess was not included.
• The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture posted a chart suggesting that traits like punctuality, rational thinking, and hard work were hallmarks of “whiteness.”
• Chicago Public Schools spent over $30 million on racial equity consultants and training programs, while simultaneously cutting arts, PE, and extracurriculars.
• New York City public schools hired “anti-bias facilitators” to teach middle schoolers that objectivity and individualism were tools of white supremacy.
• Oregon’s Department of Education recommended that math classes incorporate ethnic studies and avoid correct answers as “white supremacy culture.”
• A university in Wisconsin installed segregated dorms “to foster racial healing”—a euphemism so rich in irony it practically needs a history refresher.

Entire teams of middle managers became ideological traffic cops, memorizing acronyms, building land acknowledgments, and coordinating identity Olympics that left everyone exhausted and no one empowered. One tech CEO installed a “DEI mindfulness gong” that rang hourly to “realign vibrations.” He was later replaced by a spreadsheet.

DEI became the workplace religion: unquestionable, ritualized, and enforced by clerics in HR cardigans. Employees were asked to share their “positionality” in Slack threads, fill out privilege matrices, and open team meetings with emotional land acknowledgments. (And no, no one knew what that meant.)

And while most of this was happening with the usual suspects nodding along, something else happened quietly: people started laughing. Some of them—brace yourself—were actually people of color, LGBTQ, and members of the very groups DEI claimed to center.

They rolled their eyes at the endless panels. They groaned at “cultural competency cook-offs.” They privately mocked the training modules that tried to explain oppression using Pixar characters. They whispered that this wasn’t progress—it was parody. And it made them feel like props, not people.

Why did DEI have to go? Because it didn’t unify—it stratified. It didn’t solve injustice—it corporatized it. It was supposed to be about fairness, but it became a framework for fear, a liability buffer wrapped in inclusive language. It pushed good employees into silence, made bad ones untouchable, and weaponized every interaction through the lens of grievance performance.

And the irony? The ones who screamed the loudest were often the least qualified—hustlers with master's degrees in grievance studies who built entire careers off victim cosplay. They ran departments with no metrics, no deliverables, and no actual results—unless you count employee disengagement as a KPI. Meanwhile, underqualified ideologues gave lectures on lived experience while actual experts were told to shut up and listen.

When the firings began, when the DEI departments quietly “restructured,” when the empathy consultants were let go mid-moon cycle—you could almost hear the champagne corks pop. Behind closed doors, CEOs and COOs toasted to reclaimed productivity while interns burned inclusive vision boards in HR’s rooftop firepit. One exec was overheard whispering, “I can finally speak freely at work… and use the word ‘merit.’”

Even the true believers began to tap out. One former DEI lead admitted, “After my sixth mandatory workshop on micro-oppressions in the workplace microwave, I knew the dream had died.”

DEI didn’t just hijack inclusion. It hijacked time, logic, trust, camaraderie, and common sense. It wasn’t about lifting people up—it was about categorizing them into so many layers of perceived harm that actual relationships were impossible.

In the end, the thing meant to create unity built a new caste system—one based on hashtags, grievance points, and interpretive outrage.

Welcome to the rise and fall of DEI: where the intentions were pure, the execution was performance art, and the legacy is a Slack archive full of euphemisms no one misses.

The soul of America wasn’t just hijacked. - It was moodboarded to death.

Chapter V: The Culture Hustlers - Pain Merchants with Facebook Pages

Some people sell houses. Some sell insurance. And some sell pain.

Welcome to the era of identity entrepreneurship—where the most profitable thing you can be is aggrieved, and the best business card is a trauma résumé written in tears and hashtags.

The new success formula? Take one part marginalized identity, stir in a dash of outrage, wrap it in a branded social media presence, and boom: you’re a thought leader. Or better yet, a “healing facilitator.”

Forget solving problems—these folks monetize them. Every slight becomes a TED Talk. Every awkward interaction is a paid workshop. Every perceived microaggression is an episode in their personal docuseries, sponsored by Patreon and emotionally validated by a sea of LinkedIn claps.

Let’s spotlight the players:

• Kendi Kollective-style grievance consultants who turned minor HR spats into multi-year consulting gigs with six-figure keynote fees about "systemic silencing."
• Ibram X. Kendi himself, who accepted tens of millions in funding for his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University—and after producing few measurable results, watched it implode under internal backlash and layoffs.
• Tiffany Jana, who once ran a “de-biasing bootcamp” empire and authored Overcoming Bias, now offering corporate “restorative justice labs” that teach executives how to weep into talking sticks.
• The nonprofit founder who raised $5 million for “emotional justice programming” and spent most of it on kombucha-fueled retreats with matching hoodies.
• The Instagram therapist whose advice boils down to "block your mom" and “healing is a full-time job—mine, specifically.”

This is a generation raised on Eat, Pray, Monetize. They don’t write résumés. They write manifestos. Their entire life is content. Their followers are their currency. Their bios read like this:

“Decolonizing spaces | Emotional labor advocate | Pronouns: $$$/Cha-Ching”

They communicate in therapy-speak so watered down it makes Diet Coke seem like jet fuel. “Holding space,” “unpacking trauma,” “centering lived experience”—all delivered with the gravitas of someone who once cried during a Netflix documentary and decided to turn it into a career.

Case in point:

• One LinkedIn influencer got a book deal after documenting their “racial reckoning journey” that began with a barista spelling their name wrong.
• Another created a full curriculum on “eco-anxiety healing through interpretive dance.” Price tag: $1,995. Refund policy: lol.
• A popular Substack writer offers $300 “empathy audits” for corporate teams, promising to “gently eviscerate your fragility in three soothing Zoom calls.”
• A TikToker went viral for “grieving her identity as a Capricorn in a Sagittarius world” and now sells monthly horoscopes that include trauma forecasts.
• A Twitter guru charged $800 for a workshop titled: How to Weaponize Your Wounds Without Losing Your Wi-Fi Signal.

Meanwhile, actual problem-solvers—teachers, nurses, small business owners—are drowning in red tape created by the same people who just launched their own trauma-inspired NFT line.

And guess who funds it? - You do. Through grants, corporate sponsorships, foundation money, and government contracts. These grifters are cleverly and legally raping your wallet while smiling through self-care mantras. The “healing economy” is now a multibillion-dollar grief machine—with the receipts to prove it.

The Named Grifters:

• Barbara Furlow-Smiles, former DEI head at Facebook and Nike, who funneled over $5 million in fake vendor kickbacks to friends and family—now serving five years in federal prison.
• Rachel Dolezal, the queen of transracial fraud, who leveraged her false identity into a presidency at the Spokane NAACP and a book deal, all while pretending to be Black and peddling workshops on “authentic identity.”
• Alua Arthur, that self-proclaimed “racial grief doula” in NYC, billed over $750,000 to hold candlelit vigil circles in Fortune 500 offices—with essential oils and certified wailing.
• A Bay Area nonprofit blew $900,000 on a “Community Reclamation Drum Circle” complete with branded trauma ponchos and a vegan charcuterie board.
• Chicago Public Schools paid $32 million on DEI programs, including $55,000 for a single 90-minute Zoom session with the slide: Silence Is Violence, But So Is Emailing Me After 5 PM.
• A keynote speaker charged $12,000 for a “rest-as-resistance” speech—then literally slept onstage as part of the performance.

And looming behind it all? - Oprah. She didn’t start this conga line of catharsis—but she gave it rhythm. She handed America a microphone, a couch, and a tissue, and out came the prototype: televised trauma as transformation. What began as a platform for empathy slowly morphed into a franchised formula for fame. She launched a thousand sob-stories—each one hoping to become the next “aha moment” with merch.

And where is she now? Silent. As if watching her spiritual descendants light the house of reason on fire from a safe distance—on a vineyard.

And she’s not the only one. Where’s Jameela Jamil, once the patron saint of Instagram call-outs? Or Alyssa Milano, who once live-tweeted her every trauma epiphany? Where’s Shaun King, the social justice mogul whose GoFundMe empire raised more questions than solutions? Or Tarana Burke, whose original #MeToo message was quietly drowned in the influencer orgy that followed?

All of them, now oddly mute. Off-brand? Burned out? Or just cashing in from a safer, quieter distance?

Even people within the communities being exploited are fed up. Prominent voices in Black, LGBTQ+, and Indigenous circles are now openly calling out this carnival of clout—a spectacle where victimhood is currency and sincerity is optional. Comedian and commentator Zuby, himself Black, has called DEI a 'grift dressed in guilt.' Activist and former BLM chapter founder Rashad Turner publicly resigned, citing that the organization 'abandoned Black families.' Author and podcaster Coleman Hughes consistently criticizes the victimhood industry as infantilizing and divisive. Even Indigenous educator and writer Dr. Jacqueline Keeler has called out what she terms 'grievance-based activism' for prioritizing media attention over meaningful reform.

These aren’t trailblazers—they’re trauma influencers in sponsored griefwear. Less civil rights icons, more self-care mascots. Think Oprah meets MLM, but instead of selling you protein shakes, they’re hawking pain with a PayPal link.

And the more they capitalize on grievance, the more the public tunes out real injustice. Because when victimhood becomes performance, and activism becomes hustle, everyone loses—especially the truly marginalized.

In the stock market of social suffering, the only people cashing out are the ones who were never bankrupt to begin with (well, perhaps emotionally bankrupt and morally destitute).

Chapter VI: The Pipeline of Pain: Government Grants, Foundation Funds, and the Monetization of Marginalization

Welcome to the mothership.

If Chapter V was about the players, this one’s about the system—the billion-dollar scaffolding that keeps the whole Grievance Economy humming like a privately funded tuning fork.

While you're out there clipping coupons and paying taxes, a select few are siphoning billions through nonprofits, foundations, and "equity initiatives"—all in the name of justice, healing, and empowerment. Spoiler: empowerment usually involves a beachside mindfulness retreat, an $85 trauma journal, and someone else's AmEx.

Let’s name names:

• George Soros: If grievance had a godfather, it would be him. Through his Open Society Foundations, Soros has funneled billions into ideological pet projects under the guise of justice—projects that blur the line between philanthropy and social engineering. He bankrolls radical prosecutors who decriminalize chaos, erode borders, and let criminals off with a wink and a TED Talk. One grant funded a magazine about "anti-colonial mindfulness"—distributed at a Brooklyn co-op that sells $9 oat milk and hosts breathwork sessions for white guilt. Soros doesn't just fund the grievance machine—he fuels the whole damn engine, then disappears behind the curtain like a Bond villain stroking a white cat in his bunker.
• Jeff Bezos: His Earth Fund pledged $100 million to "climate justice" nonprofits. One group used the funds to sponsor a conference at a five-star resort in Morocco—with private jets and eco-anxiety sound baths.
• Al Gore: The high priest of carbon guilt, who preaches green austerity from the tarmac of his private jet hangar. Gore’s climate crusade helped build a billion-dollar carbon credit shell game—while his own energy use would make a Bitcoin miner blush.
• Leonardo DiCaprio: Climate warrior by day, yacht-hopper by night. DiCaprio has hosted climate galas so carbon-heavy they could warm a small village—then flown to Cannes to accept an award for sustainability. Irony apparently flies first class.
• Bono: Once the frontman for global poverty reduction, now quietly bankrolling NGOs that spend more on swag than solutions. One group spent half its budget producing branded wristbands reading “Empathy is Activism.”
• Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM: The foundation raised over $90 million. A lot went to "consultants." Millions were spent on luxury homes, a $6 million studio space in L.A., and production deals that never aired. Accountability? Still pending.
• The Ford Foundation: Once the crown jewel of philanthropic legacy, now a $16 billion endowment funding identity politics, curriculum rewrites, and DEI bureaucracies that make Orwell look subtle.
• The Rockefeller Foundation: Funded countless “equity in health” initiatives—many of which delivered fewer outcomes than a juice cleanse, but all with stunning logos and keynote galas.
• MacKenzie Scott: Gave away billions at lightning speed, often with zero oversight. Some recipients included activist collectives with more slogans than infrastructure. One group used her money to start a publishing house for “non-linear narratives of healing.”
• The Borealis Philanthropy: A shadowy conduit that launders donor-advised funds into identity-based organizing initiatives. Funded workshops on "white tears accountability" and "healing from capitalism"—held at resorts with infinity pools.
• Tides Foundation: Operates as a kind of philanthropic hedge fund for social activism. Helped funnel millions toward campaigns that pushed divisive education policies and defund-the-police rhetoric—then quietly rebranded after public backlash.
• NoVo Foundation: (created by Warren Buffett’s son Peter): Funded “gender justice” retreats and intersectional healing salons that burned through cash quicker than a Tesla battery at full throttle. One $300K grant went to a project exploring the spiritual intersection of menstruation and land ownership.

Meanwhile, your local schools are cutting art programs and your potholes are breeding mosquitoes.

This is The Pipeline of Pain. A Rube Goldberg machine of guilt laundering and emotional extortion—where the appearance of progress is more lucrative than progress itself.

The formula:

1. Identify an oppression vector (the vaguer the better).
2. Form a nonprofit.
3. Apply for a grant using buzzwords like “intersectional,” “decolonize,” or “resilience framework.”
4. Pay yourself six figures to host a retreat, publish a report, or film a mini-doc no one watches.
5. Repeat

And it works—because questioning it makes you a bigot. It’s like living inside a social Manchurian Candidate program: one day you wake up, look down at the metaphorical Vaseline on your thigh, then stare into the void and whisper, stunned, "I’ve been f***ed!" Not just financially. Not just emotionally. But existentially—by a bureaucracy of buzzwords and a cathedral of con artists who sold you shame as salvation - and you were foolish enough to buy it.

This chapter pulls back the curtain. It reveals the influencers turned grantees. The professors turned keynote predators. The bureaucrats who approve the spending but would rather gnaw off their own thumbs than defend it in public.

We’ve replaced performance with policy. Feelings with funding. Outrage with overhead.

And who's left holding the bag? - You are.

Chapter VII: Therapy as Theater - Self-Help for the Helplessly Self-Important

Welcome to the age of the monetized meltdown, where therapy is no longer a tool for healing—it’s a set design. The couch is now a stage, the tears are part of the lighting plan, and the therapist? More often an influencer than an expert, dressed in linen and trauma-informed smugness, ready to “hold space” while you Venmo them $400 an hour.

This is not your grandmother’s therapy. This is therapy-flavored content. It's healing as performance art. The emotional equivalent of miming a panic attack for TikTok likes.

We now live in a culture where people identify their trauma before they identify their hobbies. Boundaries are posted on Instagram. Grief is filtered through pastel Canva templates. And every breakup, bout of anxiety, or family squabble is an invitation to monetize misery.

Exhibit A: The Grieffluencers
They cry into the front-facing camera, then plug their affiliate link for organic lavender bath bombs. Their captions read like a DSM-V bingo card: “Trigger Warning: Boundaries, gaslighting, inner child abandonment, and gluten.”

Exhibit B: The Coaches Who Couldn't Coach a Dog
Certifications? Please. Today’s “emotional consultants” are credentialed by vibes. One influencer—formerly a wellness blogger, briefly a Reiki master—now offers "Somatic Wealth Reclamation Sessions" for $888 each. What do you get? A Zoom call, a guided meditation, and a playlist of sad indie folk.

Exhibit C: The Pathologizers
Feeling sad? You're depressed. Feeling unsure? That's trauma. Not getting enough likes? That's digital neglect. There's a diagnosis for every mood, and a monetized workbook to go with it. We’re raising a generation that can recite attachment theory, but can’t attach a PDF to an email.

Therapists as TikTok Stars
Some are legit. Many are not. They cry on camera. They dance to trauma stats. They post client anecdotes (anonymized, they swear) for engagement. A few now have merch: “It’s Not Me, It’s My Nervous System” is a top-seller.

Therapy as Status Symbol
The stigma is gone—but so is the sanctity. Now it's brunch banter: "My therapist says I need to reparent my inner saboteur." Translation: You ghosted your landlord and bought crystals instead. Because these days, if you're not in therapy, you're just not stylish. It’s less about healing and more about having something to humblebrag about between matcha lattes. Having a therapist used to mean you were working through something serious. Now? It’s a fashion accessory. It’s the new Birkin bag—just more expensive and slightly more emotionally manipulative.

The Hustle Beneath the Healing
Like everything else in the Pipeline of Pain, this is a business model. The pain is real. The exploitation is real-er. Trauma sells. Healing sells harder. And “healing in public” is just another way to turn private wounds into public revenue.

One therapist has over 3 million followers and charges $2,000 for a group retreat where participants roleplay their childhood trauma while eating vegan tacos. Another offers “nervous system regulation certification”—a 3-hour online course followed by a certificate you can print at home.

Even therapy apps have joined the circus. One raised $120 million in funding, only to be caught hiring uncertified staff who read from scripts like retail customer service reps. Your trauma, now brought to you by a gig worker with a headset.

Meanwhile, actual mental health crises are skyrocketing. Suicide rates are up. Psychiatric ERs are overwhelmed. And the therapists who don’t have TikTok followings are buried under 8-month waitlists and paperwork.

And, then there’s the punchline - Help for those who can’t help themselves (but somehow help themselves to your wallet).

This is the real black belt level grift: selling empowerment to people too paralyzed to return a text. They’ve convinced millions that saying “I’m doing the work” while posting teary selfies is a form of civic duty.

The worst offenders? The ones who believe it. Who treat their anxiety like a trust fund and trauma like a time share. One viral “trauma coach” recently crowd-funded $50K for a “healing sabbatical” in Tulum. She spent it on ayahuasca, shell bracelets, and a course called Unblock Your Inner Oracle. She then hosted a webinar from a hammock titled How to Monetize Being Stuck.

This is help for those who can’t help themselves—because they’ve branded helplessness into a lifestyle. They communicate in therapy-speak so diluted it makes LaCroix seem like espresso. Everything is “emotional labor.” Every disagreement is “harm.” Every attempt at accountability is “violence.”

You can’t argue with them. They’re too busy healing. Publicly. Expensively. Repeatedly.

And the worst part? It’s crushing the real ones.

The actual, licensed therapists—some of the most compassionate, overworked professionals on the planet—are watching this charade unfold like a Shakespearean tragedy on TikTok. Their field has been hijacked by charlatans with ring lights. Their expertise drowned out by influencers in cardigans who sell trauma as trend.

One clinician in New York summed it up best: “I spent 12 years getting my degrees. Some guy named Brad took an online course called ‘Empathpreneurship’ and now has a podcast called Cry With Me. Guess who’s making more money?”

We’ve turned therapy into entertainment. Healing into hustle. And mental illness into merchandise.

Chapter VIII: Cancel Culture's Cash Flow - Destroying People for Fun - and Profit

Welcome to the gladiator arena of the digital age, where the blood isn’t literal, but the reputational carnage is real. Careers ended. Contracts pulled. Apologies issued via Notes app. All served up with a side of hashtags and sponsored content. This is not justice. This is monetized vengeance. Call-out culture has become capitalism.

It starts with a tweet—out of context, 280 characters, two years old. Then comes the dogpile. A digital tar-and-feathering by self-appointed moral hall monitors who wield Wi-Fi like a guillotine. Brands panic. Boards flinch. HR departments huddle in fear. And just like that, a life—a career, a reputation, a legacy—is erased faster than you can say "due process."

Meet the Merchandisers of Moral Panic
Every movement needs merch. And cancel culture delivers. Influencers sell T-shirts reading "Accountability Advocate." Substack writers rake in six figures dissecting the latest cancellation. Even LinkedIn has become a coliseum of clapbacks, where people write essays titled "Why Firing That Guy Was Justice" and rack up likes like they're collecting pelts.

The Cancellation Economy
A whole industry has emerged around social scalping. There are consultants who specialize in "crisis response" when your tweet goes viral for all the wrong reasons. One charges $25,000 for a weekend of image rehab. (It includes a personalized apology script and a meditation bowl.)

And yes, there are speakers. Oh, the speakers. People whose sole qualification is that they were once canceled for something, now doing the TEDx circuit on "The Resilience of Being Misunderstood." One speaker landed a book deal called Burned, Branded, Reborn. A New York publisher paid high six figures for a memoir based entirely on a LinkedIn post about being fired over a Slack joke.

Ruin as Recreation
We watch it unfold like sport. There are entire TikTok accounts dedicated to catching people in "problematic" behavior. Instagram pages that exist solely to document someone’s downfall. YouTube reactors make money live-streaming takedowns. It's Schadenfreude with a subscriber count.

Real Casualties. Real Carnage. Real Clout.
Remember Justine Sacco? A PR exec who tweeted a poorly worded joke before boarding a plane to Africa. By the time she landed, she had been fired, globally shamed, and digitally exiled. The woke mob had tasted blood, and it wanted dessert.

Or how about David Shor, a liberal data analyst who got fired for tweeting an academic study about the potential electoral effects of protests. - Not his opinion—a f*&king study! - But it didn’t vibe with the mood. Canceled. Gone.

Then there’s the high schooler in Arizona who lost her college acceptance after a video from her freshman year resurfaced—dug up and posted by someone who admitted he held onto it for three years just in case.

Recently, “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams was unceremoniously dropped by hundreds of newspapers, not for a cartoon, but for a tone-deaf comment on a livestream. The result? A cartoonist canceled by woke culture, leftist media, and self-righteous mob mentality with the efficiency of a missile strike. And with him, tragically fell another innocent bystander—Bradley, the Evil Executive Compensation Consultant character from Dilbert. (Yes, Sports Fans, that was none other than yours truly…) KIA, collateral damage in the cultural crossfire. A beloved comic character read around the world falling victim to a cancel culture execution - for telling “an uncomfortable truth.”

Actress Gina Carano was dropped by Disney for social media posts deemed controversial. A change.org petition had over 85,000 signatures in days. Gone.

And let’s not forget James Gunn, also fired by Disney over decade-old tweets—only to be rehired once the outrage turned into outrage about the outrage. It's a carousel of carnage that spins so fast it makes you dizzy.

Celebrity Apologies, Inc.
Even the rich and famous aren't safe. Or maybe they are—if they pay enough. Publicists now outsource to apology consultants. There are ghostwriters who specialize in contrition. They’ll draft your grovel, choreograph your comeback, and time your donation to the exact news cycle.

One Hollywood fixer reportedly billed $100K to coach a celebrity through the art of crying in a makeup-free video. Another firm helps you navigate "emotional restitution optics." “Don't just be sorry—look sorry,” their site says.

Chrissy Teigen? Disappeared for cyberbullying, reappeared with a cookbook and a teary blog post. Kevin Hart? Canceled over decade-old tweets, then un-canceled for prime-time hosting gigs. Louis C.K.? Back touring. Cancel culture giveth, taketh away, and then monetizes both phases.

Twitter Mobs & Workplace Inquisitions
One tech employee was fired after coworkers discovered a private message where he said a joke was “not offensive.” Another was pressured to resign after liking a tweet that someone else didn’t like. In one workplace, an anonymous Slack channel became an inquisition chamber where employees accused others of "emotional microviolence" for disagreeing in meetings.

A middle school teacher in Oregon was placed on leave for displaying a U.S. flag in her Zoom background—labeled as a "potentially aggressive" symbol by her district. In San Francisco, a school board member was ousted for decades-old tweets, despite being a fierce advocate for equity.

And the merch drops? Oh, they come fast. One activist launched a line of hoodies an hour after calling out a beauty brand for "silencing Black voices." Sales topped $100K in a weekend. The takedown? Profitable.

Reputation Ransoms: The Web Cleanup Cartel
And then there’s the dark underbelly—the web scrubbers. The digital fixers who promise to “restore your reputation” for a tidy $10,000 to $100,000. They prey on fear, offering vague “reputation cleansing packages” that include burying articles, generating fake praise, and contacting journalists. Many take the money and run. One firm, ReputationDefender, has been repeatedly accused of overselling and under-delivering. Another was sued after promising a clean slate for $50K… then vanished with the cash.

It’s the mafia model: pay protection to keep your name off the hit list.

Collateral Damage? Considered Acceptable.
The truth? Most of these digital executions don’t target monsters. They target nobodies. Middle managers. Teachers. Scientists. Artists. People whose only crime was being clumsy, outdated, or insufficiently fluent in the moral dialect of the moment. And yet their erasure is treated like justice.

Meanwhile, actual abusers and exploiters often survive—sometimes thrive—because they know the system. They have PR teams. They own platforms. They rebrand. They vanish, then reappear with new contracts. The real predators don’t get canceled - They get consultants.

Cancel Culture isn’t Justice - It’s a Business Model.
And this toxic monster works because the machine feeds on your fear, and the fear of all around you. CEOs fire first and ask questions never. Organizations purge to protect their brand. It’s not about values. It’s about optics. About staying ahead of the mob before it turns on you.

And who benefits? Not the victims. Not society. The winners are the outrage merchants, the call-out influencers, the clickbait publishers, and the consultants who bottle fear and sell it back to companies under the guise of "proactive accountability."

Welcome to the only economy where destruction scales faster than creation. Where you can make a living tearing people down—and build a brand doing it.

Even Barry Glassner, part of the illustrious Glassner dynasty where bestselling authors are bred like literary thoroughbreds, warned us years ago in his prescient New York Times blockbuster “The Culture of Fear” that irrational panic would become a national pastime. That fear sells. That outrage clicks. That we’d someday wake up and realize the mob doesn’t build—it consumes.

The day of that nightmare is here, you’re in it – and you can’t wake up….

Chapter IX: Grief Chic™ and the Prestige of Pain - When Suffering Became a Status Symbol (and a Business Plan)

Welcome to the monetized misery marketplace—where pain is platinum, and emotional baggage is just high-end luggage for your brand. In today’s influencer economy, trauma is trending. And nothing says “book deal” quite like a nervous breakdown caught in portrait mode and filtered through Valencia.

The Suffering Gold Rush

Forget inner peace. The real goal is outer clout. On TikTok and Instagram, beauty is out and brokenness is in. A Gen Z influencer who filmed her anxiety attacks between dance challenges just landed a six-figure book deal. Another turned her CPTSD into a TEDx talk and branded merch: hoodies that read “Still Healing” in Comic Sans.

Want to show you’re in touch with your trauma? Subscribe to a grief-themed box service—just $75 a month for aromatherapy oils, affirmations written by ChatGPT, and “crying playlists” curated by someone who once wept during a dog food commercial.

Need extra flair? Try “painfluencing”—a cross between journaling and interpretive suffering. There are now online courses teaching you how to turn emotional instability into lucrative influence. Lesson one? Cry strategically. Lesson two? Never resolve anything. Mystery sells.

The Fashion of Fragility

Emotional distress has never looked so good. Sad-girl chic has gone haute couture. We’re talking oversized pastel sweatshirts that scream “Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Processing,” or crop tops that whimper “Anxious But Make It Cute.”

Retailers now sell full “depression-core” loungewear sets—clothing designed to help you wallow in style. And yes, it’s curated melancholy. Delivered with two-day shipping, lavender-scented tissue paper, and a handwritten note from someone named Sage, who spells it with an accent.

Some influencers even sell “breakup boxes” containing herbal tea, moonstone crystals, and coupons for Zoom therapy with unlicensed practitioners named Breeze. It’s sadness, packaged and sold in chic recyclable boxes.

The Victimhood Olympics

Here, identity is not just personal - it’s performative. The more intersectional your wounds, the higher your social stock. Think of it as the Hunger Games for attention, but everyone’s armed with a trauma narrative and a ring light.

One influencer’s viral moment? Being misgendered by a barista who couldn’t read handwriting. It became a full-blown “reckoning.” Because in this economy, a spelling error is a cash cow.

Another monetized her “eco-anxiety” through Etsy—hand-painted signs that read “The Earth Is Crying and So Am I.” $40 a pop. Limited edition.

Fake It and Make It

Enter the grifters—trauma tourists and emotional entrepreneurs who’ve figured out the real hustle.

One influencer faked a rare anxiety disorder, raked in donations, and promptly posted pics from Tulum. Another raised $20,000 for “healing expenses” that turned out to include a facial, a flight to Coachella, and a matching tattoo with her dog.

And the kicker? Real sufferers—those living with PTSD, chronic grief, or actual psychological trauma—can’t compete with the curated chaos. They’re not optimized for the algorithm.

Therapists Are Exhausted

Actual therapists? They’re done. One put it best: “If you’re not in therapy these days, you’re just not stylish.” But the trend has turned tragic. Clients now arrive quoting Instagram memes and diagnosing themselves with dissociative identity disorder after watching a 60-second reel narrated by someone with a ring light and a minor in psychology.

One therapist recently shared a session where her client refused to engage unless it was “in alignment with her inner child’s moon cycle.” Another had a client bring a “trauma doula” to their session. No one knows what that means—and we’re too afraid to ask.

It’s not therapy. It’s cabaret. And the ticket price is your sanity.

The Real Cost of Performance Pain

Behind every viral panic attack and #HealingJourney vlog is a reality we’ve abandoned: real pain is boring. It’s long, silent, ugly, and doesn’t trend. But we’ve built a system that rewards performative breakdowns over quiet breakthroughs.

We’ve created a culture where feeling better is less profitable than staying broken—and where your emotional wounds are only valid if they’re aesthetically pleasing and commercially viable.

And when trauma becomes theater, the audience forgets that some of us are actually bleeding.

The Closing Act

Suffering is not a lifestyle. It’s not a slogan. And it sure as hell isn’t a merch line. But in the age of Grief Chic™, we’ve confused being heard with being helped—and monetized fragility into fashion.

True healing? It's slow, private, deeply unmarketable. And that’s exactly why it never goes viral.

So, here’s your closing punchline:

In a world obsessed with selling scars, those who are actually healing are invisible. Because healing doesn’t post. Healing doesn’t pitch. Healing just gets on with it.

Chapter X: The Hustle Collapses - When the Curtain Falls on the Pain Parade

Welcome to the grand finale, where the Pity Profiteers finally run out of gaslight. The performance is over, the ring lights are dimming, and what’s left isn’t enlightenment—it’s a throbbing cultural hangover. We’ve woken up groggy, overdrawn, and soul-sucked by a machine that monetized misery, institutionalized victimhood, and convinced you that every stubbed toe was a TED Talk.

And what did you get in return? Maybe a branded hoodie. Maybe an “emotional audit.” But mostly? Empty slogans, burnt trust, and a nation with its collective head up its own ass. That’s not a metaphor. That’s “Rectal Myopia™”—a widespread cultural condition where your head is shoved so far up your own backside, you’ve gone blind to common sense and are sniffing your own delusions like they’re lavender oil. You can’t see the manipulation because it’s been focus-grouped, branded, and sold back to you in soothing tones by someone holding a healing crystal.

But let’s not pretend this all started with TikTok. No, no—this con has lineage. The pity hustle is older than sliced bread - Hell, it’s older than unsliced bread. It’s medieval. Literally. In the Dark Ages, peasants paid indulgences to the Church to “pray away” suffering while bishops bathed in wine. During the Renaissance, nobles wept over their guilt in gold-threaded robes before commissioning portraits titled Wounded Yet Wise. The French Revolution had guillotine influencers. The Civil War birthed memoirs titled My Pain, My Patriotism. During the Great Depression, pity campaigns sold more war bonds than courage ever did.

And who could forget those late-night iconic infomercials: “Little Johnny hasn’t eaten in a week—but for just 83 cents a day, you can feed him, clothe him, and probably bankroll his cousin’s documentary on economic injustice.”

Even Lance Armstrong got in on it. While America wept for his one remaining testicle and wore yellow Livestrong bracelets like talismans of collective grief, Lance was gaming the sympathy circuit, all the while doping like a Tour de France junkie, and raking in more than $500 million through fundraising and endorsements before crashing harder than a cyclist on the cobblestone.

Fast forward to today Sports Fans: That same impulse has been digitized, weaponized, and monetized on a global scale. We built a whole economy on curated collapses, TikTok trauma reels, and Slack apologies. Your coworkers diagnose each other via memes, your CEO hosts a podcast called Empathy Unicorns, and your former Chief DEI Officer turned the org chart into a bingo card of emotional triggers. Government grants were dispensed like Pez. Universities handed out $100k degrees to students too triggered to read a syllabus. Brands paid consultants $1,000 an hour to be told they had “emotional toxicity.” And all of it thrived—because the market loves a tearjerker.

But here’s the twist: even the trauma-preneurs are getting ghosted. DEI departments are vanishing faster than fax machines. Influencers are losing followers to golden retrievers wearing sunglasses. And woke executives? They’re quietly quitting their own moral crusades. Turns out, monetizing pain has a shelf life—and it expired right around the time we realized the therapists were crying harder than the patients.

And yet, in this glorious wreckage, something real begins. People are deleting their trauma feeds. Adults are sneaking out of safe spaces like teens from a slumber party. Real therapists—yes, the good ones—are booked with actual patients, not content creators offering inner child merch in 4 easy payments. Resilience is trending again. Not online, but in real life. People are remembering that vibes don’t pay rent, and you can’t Venmo your way out of grief.

Because when everyone is oppressed, no one is impressive. When everyone’s broadcasting pain, no one’s listening. And if your entire identity is an open wound, eventually you’ll bleed out.

So maybe this is it—the great cultural comedown. The end of the pity economy. The moment the grief gold rush fizzles. Maybe we finally realize that healing—real, slow, inconvenient healing—was never meant to be branded. And now that the pity profiteers have packed up their ring lights, maybe, just maybe, we can finally get back to purpose.

The gaslight’s out. The curtain’s down. The applause has stopped. And America? It’s time to yank our heads out of our collective keisters and rediscover the lost art of getting our shit together.

Lights off. Show’s over. Move along. Real life awaits.

Chapter XI: What Would Frank Do

The Panic Ends When the Grown-Ups Walk In

First things first: we don’t negotiate with emotional terrorists.

If Frank ran the circus, the tent would be torched, the elephants rehired as CFOs, and the clowns would be marched out with pink slips—and a mirror. The endless parade of weaponized fragility would be cut short by a four-word policy statement: Get. Over. Yourself. Now.

WWFD isn’t about cruelty—it’s about clarity. It’s about turning down the volume on performative victimhood and turning up the heat on accountability. It’s about recognizing that behind every “healing circle,” “empathy summit,” or “trauma-informed leadership bootcamp” is a six-figure invoice and a consultant who drives a Range Rover full of buzzwords.

So… what would Frank do?

• Audit your compassion budget. If your company is spending more on “emotional fluency” consultants than on actual healthcare, you’re being robbed by smiley-faced bandits in yoga pants.
• Burn the buzzwords. “Lived experience,” “toxic resilience,” “safe space facilitators”? These are not job functions. They are verbal graffiti. Frank would throw every jargon-stuffed resume into the shredder and hand out dictionaries.
• Defund the Feelings Mafia. Those $800-an-hour “woke whisperers” offering Zoom workshops on Intergenerational Grief Through Clay Sculpture? Frank’s new policy: Block. Delete. Never hire again.
• Promote logic. Demote lunacy. Replace the entire DEI playbook with one radical idea: meritocracy. Radical, right? It doesn’t matter whether you're white, Black, brown, Asian, LGBTQ+, two-spirit, neurodivergent, disabled, genderqueer, polyamorous, nonbinary, undocumented, chronically ill, formerly incarcerated, left-handed, or a Martian from Alpha Centauri. Just be yourself. Strive every day to be the best you can be. And shine like the star that you are—with fire in your belly and desire as the wind at your back.

Frank would say: “Don’t dazzle them with bullshit—just blind them with brilliance.”

• Replace training with truth. No more emotional audits. No more tears-for-clicks keynotes. No more equity-by-PowerPoint. Frank’s version of DEI? Don’t Enable Idiots.
• Clean house. Fire anyone whose job is to manage the feelings of grown adults. This includes “Belonging Officers,” “Director of Safe Narratives,” “Trauma Sherpas,” and that guy who brings his ukulele to meetings to help “set the tone.”
• Pull the pin on the empathy grenade. Let it blow up the pity pipelines, the virtue-signal vending machines, and the TEDx talks disguised as HR policies. Let what’s left be built from actual grit.

And above all?

Reclaim your spine.

Because this country wasn’t built by professional victims. It was built by people who got knocked down and got back up without needing a hashtag, a GoFundMe, or a curated Instagram meltdown.

What else would Frank do?

Exactly what he’s doing right now: shining a light so bright on the con artists, crybabies, and cultural kleptomaniacs that they either fix themselves—or crawl back into their influencer caves.

Let the healing begin—with a fire hose, not a flute.

Chapter XII: The Veritas Way™ - Truth. Grit. Results.

This is where the pity parade ends and the real work begins. Because while the Pity Profiteers were slinging hashtags and hawking trauma merch, some of us were actually fixing things. Quietly. Effectively. With spreadsheets, not sob stories.

The Veritas Way™ isn’t a slogan. It’s not a feeling. It’s not a sticker slapped on a Slack avatar. It’s a system—built on logic, lit by truth, and powered by accountability.

The Veritas Way™ Playbook:

• Truth without tantrums. Feelings are valid. Facts are vital. And if your data doesn’t match your drama, it gets deleted.
• Empathy without entitlement. Caring doesn’t mean coddling. You can be kind without being a doormat. Veritas teaches how to listen—and when to walk away.
• Accountability over applause. Performative progress is for influencers. Real leaders measure results, not retweets.
• Value creation over virtue signaling. Show us what you’ve built, not what you believe. No one ever solved a business crisis with a land acknowledgment and a box of empathy donuts.
• Merit over mood. We hire based on what you bring to the table, not how loudly you emote while sitting at it. Tears don’t substitute for talent.
• Growth over grievance. If you’re not evolving, you’re eroding. You don’t get promoted for staying hurt. You get promoted for getting up.
• Simplicity over spin. We don’t do ten-syllable mission statements or buzzword bingo. If your company culture needs a decoder ring, it’s already broken.

The Veritas Way™ is built for grown-ups. For leaders who care more about outcome than optics. For companies ready to trade clout for clarity. And for a generation that's sick of being patronized, pathologized, and padded with participation trophies.

So yes, it’s a little old-school. But it works.

Because when the smoke clears and the grifters vanish, all that remains is what actually performs.

And that, my Sports Fans, is Veritas.

Epilogue: Last Call at the Pity Pub

So here we are. The lights are up. The ring lights? Faded to black. The Sob Story Souvenir Stand? Folded and quietly wheeled offstage. And the last TEDx speaker has just slipped into a Prius, the ride subsidized by a well-intentioned but questionably allocated grant. Meanwhile, America? She’s stirring—bleary-eyed, disoriented, and nursing what can only be described as a compassion hangover.

You know the feeling. There’s a vague unease. A foggy memory of someone whispering “lived experience” while slipping your credit card from your wallet. It’s not just regret—it’s a kind of cultural vertigo. A condition we’ll politely call Rectal Myopia: a syndrome where, metaphorically speaking, we’ve spent so long facing inward, we’ve gone blind to the world around us. But no need to Google it—just lift your chin, clear your gaze, and take a long, honest look at what’s become of common sense.

We bought it all. Hook, line, and heartbreak. Grief repackaged as gospel. Pity turned into product. We outsourced our empathy to influencers with job titles like “Emotional Equity Consultant” and “Narrative Architect.” While they built castles out of buzzwords, the rest of us watched the real world—schools, workplaces, friendships—crumble beneath the weight of weaponized fragility.

And why? For clout. For moral currency. For a few likes on a post that promised healing but delivered hustle.

But maybe—just maybe—the con is running out of runway. Maybe the algorithms are finally choking on their own sentimentality. Maybe we’re ready to stop confusing attention with impact.

So here’s your final takeaway:

Yes, pain is real. But when it becomes a commodity, we all lose. Because nothing real ever needed a merch table.

And in a world where someone once made $75,000 livestreaming his tears under mood lighting, remember: there’s still one thing they can’t mass-produce or monetize:

Your spine.

So take it back. Stand tall. Laugh loudly. Because the joke’s been on us—and it’s time we turned the tables.

Curtain down. Lights up. We’re done here.

Exit stage left. No encore.

FBG (Dedicated to former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, comedian Dave Chappelle, Columbia’s John McWhorter, and my friend Bill Maher, for their collective bravery combating wokeisim, and to world famous author and intellectual Barry Glassner for his valiant efforts to make our family look good)

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PS: If this piece made you laugh, nod in agreement, or mutter “he’s talking about me behind my back, isn’t he?”—I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at fglassner@veritasecc.com. I personally read and reply to every message—no assistants, no AI, just me (usually with a strong espresso in hand). Whether you’re a board member, CEO, CFO, burned-out executive, investment banker, activist shareholder, client, consultant, lawyer, accountant, ex-wife, one of my beloved twin sons, AI Bot, or just a fellow traveler in the great corporate circus, I welcome the conversation.

Thanks!