My Midwestern Irish-Catholic Midwestern grandmammy from County Monaghan instilled in me at an early age a maxim that has served my intuition well: celebrity multimillionaires are rarely victims of anything but their own success.
Such is true with Oprah Winfrey, who threw a pity party for herself recently on the previously announced Ozempic informercial disguised as a TV show, from which she surely made untold millions of dollars and a lifetime supply of weight loss injections.
Related: Oprah, ‘Experts’ Tapped to Produce Primetime Ozempic Propaganda
ABC News released a segment onto the internet.
It opens with Oprah playing the world’s smallest violin for herself as a tormented soul subjected to the cruel musings of the world regarding her decades-long obesity.Obviously, celebrities deserve only constant, fawning praise — never criticism — in addition to their hefty salaries. They are beyond reproach. They are our Lords, and the television is the modern-day Stone Tablet through which God’s edicts are dictated for we the peasants to absorb uncritically, in awe of our betters’ brilliance and magnanimity.
Via Healthline (emphasis added):
“For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport,” Oprah Winfrey said during the opening monologue for An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, which aired Monday on ABC and is now available to stream on Hulu.
Though out of the spotlight, millions of people living with obesity have been the subject of similar comments throughout their lives.
According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 8 adults worldwide have obesity. Additionally, more than 160 million children and adolescents worldwide have obesity.
“I come to this conversation with the hope that we can start releasing the stigma and the shame and the judgment, to stop shaming other people for being overweight or how they choose to lose – or not lose – weight and, most importantly, to stop shaming ourselves,” said Winfrey, who in late 2023 revealed she was taking anti-obesity medicine and received both support backlash. [Emphasis added]
First of all, demanding that people stop with the stigma or whatever over obesity is rich coming from the lady literally selling weight loss drugs on TV; if obesity weren’t worthy of stigma, why would anyone spend thousands of dollars a month on drugs to fix it?
Second of all, stigma and shame and judgment are absolutely vital and necessary tools that any society uses to encourage healthy behavior and discourage unhealthy behavior.
In that vein, I was around the tender age of ten years old when my uncle, unprompted, asked whether I had “heard.”
I asked what it was I was supposed to have heard, and he replied: “Oprah got caught with fifty pounds of crack at the airport,” then he laughed and laughed.
My liberal family members in the vicinity did not appreciate the joke because of racism or sexism or whatever and expressed their consternation.
Anyway, after her fake-crying routine, Oprah’s Ozempic Propaganda Power Hour then pivots to a montage of fat children and the alleged benefits they received from their weight loss prescriptions.
These people always, without fail, cloak their sales jobs in the philanthropic effort to “help” children, because they have no shame.
Bill Hicks had some excellent advice for marketers back in the day, which I endorse (language warning):
